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LECTURE SCHEDULE
Summer 1981 - February Freshman
Samuel Kutler
On Perfection
June 12
John White
Poetics (of Aristotle)
June 19
Douglas Allanbrook
Concert
Great Hall
June 26
Donald Conroy
Pindar
July
Mr. Lindemuth
Ethics of Aristotle
July 10
Elliott Zuckerman
On Major and Minor
July 17
N o
July 24
Joe Sachs
Metaphysics of Aristotle
July 31
Winfree Smith
The Wandering Moon
June
5
3
L e c t u r e
(essay week-end)
�
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The Wednesday Night Lecture Series, hosted during the summer term by the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College in Annapolis, is a less-formal version of the college’s formal Friday Night Lectures. The Wednesday Night lectures are an opportunity for tutors and for graduates of the college who are pursuing academic careers to present the first fruits of their thinking to an attentive and inquisitive audience. The lectures, held in the King William Room of the Barr-Buchanan Center at 7:30 p.m., with a question period afterward in a neighboring classroom, are free and open to the public.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a title="Summer lecture series" href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/lectures/summer-wednesday-night-lecture-series" target="_blank">St. John's College website</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=31">Items in the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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Lecture Schedule, Summer 1981 - February Freshman
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Kutler, Samuel
White, John
Allanbrook, Douglas
Conroy, Donald
Lindemuth, Donald
Zuckerman, Elliott
Sachs, Joe
Smith, J. Winfree
Graduate Institute
Lecture schedule
Summer lecture series
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 56.1 (Fall 2014)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Allison Tretina
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401-1687.
©2014 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
The St. John’s Communications Office
Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available online at
http://www.sjc.edu/blog/st-johns-review
��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Momentary Morality and Extended Ethics ..................................1
Eva Brann
Enriching Liberal Education’s Defense in Universities
and Colleges: Liberal Arts, Innovation, and Technē ......................14
J. Scott Lee
Definition and Diairesis in Plato and Aristotle .................................47
Jon Lenkowski
The Stranger as a Socratic Philosopher: The Socratic Nature
of the Stranger’s Investigation of the Sophist................................65
Corinne Painter
The Concept of Measure and the Criterion of Sustainability ...........74
John D. Pappas
Platonic Theōria................................................................................95
Mark Shiffman
Poems
Two Villanelles ...............................................................................124
Kemmer Anderson
Two Poems......................................................................................126
Elliott Zuckerman
��Momentary Morality
and Extended Ethics
Eva Brann
You have been reading and talking about virtue for quite a while
now; therefore, that is what your teachers asked me to talk about
to you. So I drew a hot bath (since the mind is freest when the body
is floating) and thought what might be most to the point, most helpful to you.
Should I review some theories about virtue, perhaps give you
my interpretation of Socrates’s or Aristotle's notions of virtue, perhaps dwell on whether from reading Platonic dialogues we can tell
if Socrates and Plato thought the same and if Aristotle responds to
either of them? Or should I introduce you to Kantian morality, a
world apart from the ancients? Should I distinguish for you a vision
of virtue that looks to an ideal heaven beyond and longs for perfection from one that pays regard to the world right here and goes
for moderation? Should I explain to you that the Greek philosophers tends toward ethics, toward developing personal qualities of
excellence, while the Judeo-Christian tradition tends toward morality, willingness to obey the laws of God and nature? Should I list
for you different doctrines of doing right, such as eudaemonism,
the teaching that happiness is the aim of virtue, or deontology, the
account of virtue as duty and the obligation to obey commands, of
which Kant is the most extreme representative? For while Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle, whatever their differences, think that ethics
involves some sort of rightness in our feelings, emotions, and passions, Kant is clear that morality at its purest is a matter of reason
alone. Reason is in its essence universal: to think rationally is to
think unexceptionably, comprehensively. So to obey the commands
of reason is to suppress all merely natural inclinations, all purely
Eva Brann is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was delivered at the “Windows on the Good Life”
Course at Carlton College on 16 April 2014.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
idiosyncratic desires, and to intend only such actions as we would
want to be intended by everyone—or even to be seen as commanded by a law of nature. This is the notorious “categorical imperative”: “imperative” means “command” and “categorical”
means “without ifs and buts” (as when someone says to you “that's
a categorical no!”). You'll see in a moment why I've brought Kantian morality into this talk.
One last thing I might be speaking about, and which in fact I
will talk of in a moment, is the word “virtue.” I'll argue that this
translation of the word the Greeks use, aretē, has its virtues, but
we should probably give it up, or at least use it with raised eyebrows.
I now want to say why none of the above, except the last, appealed to me. I will tell you what seems to me the biggest trouble
with academic study, and so with most of our eduction. I call it
the problem of lost immediacy. This is what I mean: There are
books—and if your teachers chose well, they will be great ones—
that are full of substance. Then there are books and articles and
lectures about books. The great books (or texts of any sort) contain
opinions. The next level of books and articles also contain opinions, but they are opinions about the original opinions, because
whoever interprets a primary text adds a perspective to it. Then
here we are, your teachers, and we’ve absorbed some of these
original opinions, as well as some of the opinions about them—
and we’ve acquired some opinions of our own on top of that. All
those levels of learning on our part can smother, drown out, your
immediate relation to the book. But even a powerful, first-rate
book—perhaps especially such a book—can also stand between
you and yourself. It intervenes in your thinking and can capture
it, so that you are content to think its thoughts and co-feel its feelings, rather than being immediately present to yourself. Or worse,
it can put you off its possibly life-changing content because you
see no direct entrance to it.
Now I hasten to say that I pity people who have never been
taken over by a book or even by a teacher in that way—if, that is,
the being-taken-over is the beginning of an effort, a struggle, that
issues in a gradual emergence or a tumultuous bursting out of a
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
discovery that is truly your own. And I pity even more students
who have been turned off by a life-enhancing text because no one
helped them to make a direct connection with it.
A witty outside observer of my college used to tell the world
that our students arrive knowing nothing and leave knowing that
they know nothing. I hope it’s true, provided you keep in mind that
to know that you know nothing is knowing a lot. What he meant,
though, was that they had absorbed so many contradictory opinions
from reading so many deep books that they were in a state of ultimate and utterconfusion. But in that he was surely mistaken. Such
riches may be oppressive and discombobulating for a while, but
that’s a state you work yourself out of into some clarity—clarity
about “who you are,” which is a formulaic way of saying “what
your thinking can accept and your feelings can embrace.”
Therefore I think that the second-best thing we teachers can
do for our students is to show how books can be, in a fancy term,
“appropriated,” made one’s own—and not just a few books of the
same sort, but many books of different sorts, different in genre,
different in opinion. The very best thing we can do, of course, is
to get students to read them well and talk about them to each other.
Doesn’t that broad appropriation, you might ask, imply eclecticism, which is a sort of intellectual cherry-picking that disregards
the generality of a well thought-out theory, and—especially if it’s
an ethical or moral theory—its integration into a comprehensive
view of the ways things are? Well, yes, if ecleticism means indiscriminately collecting low-hanging fruit from here and there, it will
be cherry-picking, extracting now contextless bits and pieces. But
no, if eclecticism has a basis in the very nature of things. In a moment I’ll explain this oracular pronouncement.
But first, there’s the word “virtue,” the supposed subject of my
talk. Let everyone talk as they wish, as long as they know what
they’re saying; but I wish we wouldn't use “virtue” as a translation
of that Greek word aretē—or at least that we would use it mostly
with raised eyebrows. To be sure, it has a nice argument in its
favor: “virtue” is related both to the Latin vis, force, and vir, man.
Virtue is the energy of a being that holds it together, and gives it
power, as when they say in stories: “All the virtue went out of
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
him.” Now as it happens, aretē is related to a Greek prefix ari-,
meaning “very much, forcefully so”; thus aretē is the potency in a
person or thing to be what it is supposed to be. (Some Greeks seem
to have seen a relation between aretē and Ares, the powerful warrior-god.) Moreover, the moral virtue most highly regarded by Aristotle, courage, is literally called “manliness” (andreia) in Greek.
So it all fits together. On the other hand, “virtue,” in a use that goes
back to Shakespearean times and into the nineteenth century, was
a woman’s particular kind of manliness, namely, well-girded
chastity, her bodily and psychic inviolability. We have nothing left
but a smile for such passionless purity. More recently, the adjective
“virtual,” in its meaning of “inactual,” has come front-and-center
as an attribute of cyberspace: “virtual reality,” that is to say, “unreal
reality.” We ought to have a background awareness of the sphere
of connotations of our words, including their history. But, as far as
the contemporary connotations of the adjectival form of “virtue”
is concerned, I don’t think we want to go there.
This means, however, that for the moment I’m left without a
word for my subject. And this lack raises two really interesting
questions: Can we have a thought without a name? and Can we
think without words? Powerful contemporary writers claim that it
is impossible for two reasons: There can be no external proof that
thinking is going on without someone saying something thoughtful: a furrowed brow is no evidence. In fact even our claim to be
thinking doesn’t prove that we are thinking. And more important,
to think is really to marshall meanings, and meanings are drifting
vapours unless they are attached to a word or given structure in a
sentence.
Here I beg to differ with these contemporary writers. I think
we all experience that sense of a disembodied meaning, of pre-verbal thinking, that moves in our mind, sometimes like a gentle aromatic breeze over the mental plain, sometimes like a powerful push
of air pressure against a mental wall, rousing us to seek the right
term to catch it, the accurate language to describe it, the suitable
words to embody it.
So then, what is this mental presence that is called virtue, effectiveness, excellence, dutifulness, goodness? I am supposing
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
here that to have too many words is equivalent to having no cogent
idea. But that may be a mistake. The reason why there are numerous translations for the Greek word you’ve thought about under
the term “virtue” may be that in fact it encompasses a number of
ways of being what is called broadly, and so a little bluntly, “good”;
there are many terms because there really are different ways of
being humanly good. This possibility of earthly variety kicks the
meaning they share, “goodness,” way upstairs, so to speak—up
into the highest reaches of thought. In the Republic, Socrates says
to the two very intelligent young men he is speaking with that he
can’t explain this Good to them in the brief space of one evening.
So I feel excused from even trying in this short hour.
On the other hand, I do want to make use of the notion that
there might be more than one way of being good—an idea that will
probably underwhelm you. It would not even have shocked people
who lived before the First World War, like your great-great-grand
parents—though for different reasons. Nowadays many people,
certainly among them the most articulate ones, believe that as long
as we are socially right-minded and we don’t discriminate among
our fellow humans for being what nature made them, we can be
fairly forgiving of a loose personal morality. So there is public and
private morality, one rigorous, the other relaxed. (Of course, these
are generalizations, which are never true of those in whose hearing
they are made.) Your ancestors, on the other hand, would have
tended to believe what Socrates sets out in the Republic, namely,
that members of different castes or classes belonging to one political community have different characteristic excellences. Moreover, they knew quite well that, even within their class,
people—especially well-off men—lived quite comfortably within
a double moral framework. For example, men could maintain a respectable but loveless marriage to one woman whom they publicly
honored, while at the same time engaging in a passionate but disreputable attachment to a mistress who had only private privileges.
My own uncle lived that way. When he and his wife fled Germany
from the Nazis in 1939, his mistress was on the same train in a separate compartment.
Here is what I want to do now, killing two birds with one stone
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
(though I’m not so much for killing birds, especially not en masse).
My first aim is to take off on my own, so that my primary point
will not be so much to explain a theory found in a book—though,
as you’ll see, I’ll have to do that too in order to achieve my second
purpose. And that second purpose is to show how one might be
eclectic without being incoherent, how we might engage in picking-out parts of theories of goodness without producing a mere
self-pleasing miscellany, a tasty thought-goulash.
This second purpose might be of real use to you if you’re feeling a little snowed by all the deep and sometimes difficult theories
you’ve studied this year. I mean to show that you can fashion an
opinion to live by through combining the most disparate conceptions. My first aim, however, is to think out something for myself
and articulate it before a sympathetic audience.
So now to it. One human being may indeed live with two
moralities, one public, one private, and this duplicity is not always
hypocritical; it may simply make life livable and prevent it from
becoming worse. Or, looking at it another way, there is a saying
that hypocrisy is the respect vice pays to virtue: I think it’s better
all around that there should be such respect, once humanly understandable and inevitable wrong-doing is on the scene. Again, coming to our day, some people quite comfortably cheat on their taxes
and tell you that it’s a form of civic virtue to short-change a wasteful government, but they observe strict correctness when it comes
to matters of social justice. They too live in a dual moral frame.
But I want to introduce another, I think more fundamental, duality: the pacing of time, or, more accurately, of psychic motion. If
you watch the stream of cars coming toward you on the opposite
side of a highway, and there is a good deal of traffic, you’ll notice
that the cars bunch up; they practically tailgate each other until the
density dissolves into long stretches of lighter flow. The world is
like that, and so are our lives; it and we are in sync. There’s an
earthquake, a tsunami, a storm, an eruption all at once after years
of nothing. A dreary winter has lasted for ever, suddenly it’s spring,
the forsythia is in bloom, the trees are bursting into leaf, and it’s
time for outdoor-idling, but there are summer jobs to be lined up,
final exams, parties, last-moment bonding, packing, all at once.
That’s outside, but it’s similar inside: There are undistinguished
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
times marked, very unremarkably, by routine and repetition; life
flows away and is canceled, collapses into one-and-any-day’s
schedule. Then suddenly time develops densities; all the momentous moments happen together, for better or for worse. When it
rains, it pours, as the saying goes.
I should remind you here that the exhilarating heights and tearful depths of time, or rather of eventfulness, separated by expanses
of flat dailiness—these closings-up and drawings-apart of happenings—are a Western way of seeing the world and living in it. There
are teachings of the East that make a virtue of unbunching time, of
letting life flow evenly—every moment as charged with presence
as any other. Thus when I called this talk “Momentary Morality
and Extended Ethics,” I was thinking only of our half of the world.
So now I’ll explain what I mean by momentary morality. I’ve
been describing an experience of time and events that includes moments of crisis, either imposed on us by nature or manufactured
by us from sheer cussed, willful Westernness. Although krisis is a
Greek word meaning “separation” or “decision,” and so might just
betoken any branching in the flow of events, we generally don’t
mean something good by it. A crisis, as we use the word, is not so
much a branching as a stanching of the flow of events that makes
its elements pile up and then burst out, often in a kind of relieving
demolition of the status quo. Certainly the living pace we share,
consisting of stretches of eventless, quiet desperation or contentment, as the case may be, which are interspersed with somewhat
frantic eventfulness, practically guarantees that every high will be
at the expense of a low, as a hill is paid for by a hollow. I think that
I’ve told things the way they really are, but that I’ve left two questions (at least) quite unanswered: Are the highs higher than the
lows are low, that is, are there more great moments than sorry
ones? and What is the logic, or better, the ontology of these eventpairings of high and low? Why is natural and human life subject
to these oppositions? By “ontology,” which signifies an “account
of being,” I mean the most fundamental explanation we can find
for the way things are, including psychology in the non-medical
sense: an account of the human soul.
But I want to use this notion of bunched time, of high moments
we may hope for and low ones we can expect, of events shaped in
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
time like wave packets connected by a flat line—unexamined
though the image be—to speak about the type of morality which I
call “momentary morality.” I mean those critical moments when
you’re up against the wall, when it’s too late to think things out,
when you need to be ready with an inner command to tell you what
to do—what you must do—at that very moment. The human condition being what it is, what you must do will tend to be something
you don’t want to do, or rather, something you will want with every
fiber of your feelings not to do. If at that moment you waffle about
what you ought to do, or if you fail to do as you ought, you’ll never
forget that you were unprepared in a moral emergency or unsteadfast in doing your duty. You will be diminished in your self-respect.
I’ve seen it written and heard it said that such moments of extremity reveal who a person really is. I don’t believe it. I think what
you do day-by-blessedly-ordinary-day is more apt to reveal, even
while it is shaping, who you are. But I do know that moral failure
in a crisis sticks with you: I know it from myself, I know it from a
tale one day told me, almost in passing, by a man I admired, and I
know it from fiction, especially Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim
and Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
There is a theory of morality that seems to me tailored for moments of crisis and, consequently, inept in daily use. It is the Kantian theory of the categorical imperative I mentioned earlier on. It
is, in the compass of my reading, the most powerful, coherent, ingenious and, not incidentally, the most earnestly extremist theory
of human goodness ever devised. Like all great specific theory it
is embedded in a grand grounding of human consciousness. Kant
would turn, nay, whirl in his grave to hear me assign it to so particular a use, so momentary an occasion. But since I am convinced
that it is not possible to live well through the flats of life on Kantian
morality (though I lack time in this talk to explain why) and find
that even his own applications sometimes have repellent results, I
feel less abashed at saving the pieces, so to speak. Let me explain
as simply and briefly as I can how this morality might work in an
emergency, and that explanation itself will go a little ways toward
showing why one can’t live that way through extended time.
We have, Kant says, a faculty for freedom, namely, our will,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
our free will. To be free means to take orders from no one but oneself. Thus the free will commands itself. It gives itself its own law.
There must be law, Kant thinks, because if the will were lawless it
would be the opposite of free—call it capricious, wanton. Now the
will, Kant also thinks, is an aspect of reason, which has two sides.
One side is theoretical reason. This reason gives nature its laws
and then recognizes them as necessary. I will set this activity of
reason aside here—it’s what I mean by ripping his moral theory
out of the grand whole. The other side is practical reason; it gives
itself its laws and so knows itself as free. You can see that it is identical with the free will. The will—really myself as a free person—
should, of course, obey the command of its self-given law, its
imperative. As I said earlier, this imperative permits no ifs and buts,
admits no special cases, allows no individual exceptions, because
it is addressed to reason, and reason does not contradict its own
universal judgment, for then it would be self-contradictory. Above
all, it avoids the necessities, the unfree determinism, of lawful nature. We human beings are in part natural, namely, in our inclinations and desires. Our free will, our practical reason, has no truck
with the emotions and feelings that drive us. It chooses a course
entirely because it is right and not in the least because we feel good
about it; in fact, the more it hurts the better we know we are doing
our duty, doing purely as we ought. And we have a test to tell us
whether our decision is right, a test that expresses the essence of
reason: If I can universalize my particular motive for choosing an
action so as to turn it into a general law of human action or a conceivable law of nature, then I am choosing as I ought. I am preserving the purity of reason, namely its universality and its
avoidance of self-contradiction by exception-making.
Let me give a famous example by Kant himself. Suppose a
persecutor comes to my door and asks if his intended victim is
within. All my inclination is to deny it, to protect the fugitive. But
if I generalize my motive it assumes this form: Under humanitarian
pressure anyone may tell a lie. And then all trust in anyone’s declarations collapses, for anyone can construe an exception. So you
must tell the truth, and you will have done your duty, come hell or
highwater or the murder of a fugitive. I’ve told this example be-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
cause it seems to me to show how Kantian purity can turn into
moral catastrophe when life is fraught with daily danger. Just imagine that you’re harboring a fugitive dissident in some totalitarian
state, and, as you well know they might, the secret police come
knocking at your door. Will you tell them the truth for the sake of
the self-consistency of reason? No, you will have recourse—if you
think you need it—to the very paralogical, paradoxical principle of
the white lie. And, in general, I think that this absolutist morality is
not only too inhumane, but also too joyless to be livable day by day.
But let there be that one life-changing moment when, torn from
the usually peaceful flux of ordinary life, you suddenly must decide. The occasion might be a temptation to commit a minor transgression in the world’s eyes, but one weighing heavily on your
conscience. Or it could be an unexpected call on your courage, unwelcome but unavoidable, perhaps never patent to the world but
well enough known to yourself.
These are, I think, Kantian moments, spots of time when a
morality is wanted that disparages our inclinations and prompts us
to duty, that provides an effective on-the-spot test of what ought
to be done, to wit: What if everyone did what it has just crossed
my mind to do? That decisive moment’s morality is the kind which
commands without hedging.
But for most of us in this country these excruciating moments
that, when they do come, tend, to be sure, to come in multiples,
are blessedly sparse. The rational points on a mathematical line are
said to be dense, meaning that they leave no empty interval and
yet do not form a continuum (since the irrational points are missing). Such is the incident-line, the event-time of our ordinary daily
life, in which every little station has its happening; but though they
are all discrete, they are so closely packed together that they are
scarcely discernible. Our day has 86,400 seconds and our week
604,800 seconds, and we can calculate the number of seconds in
our month, our year, our decade, our lifetime. This flattish life-line
of instants, with the peaks and troughs it occasionally develops,
surely requires a different notion of goodness from the one that is
marked by excruciating, disruptive moments. As I called the latter
“momentary morality,” so I will call the former “extended ethics.”
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
11
Morality, remember, requires command-issuing universal law;
ethics, on the other hand, demands natural and acquired personal
qualities. Of the possible English alternatives to the term “virtue,”
I think that “excellence” best expresses the connotations the ancient users of the word aretē seem to have had in mind, even before
the philosophers got to discerning a comprehensive meaning.
Let me list those connotations of aretē, understood as excellence, that I can think of: 1. effectiveness; 2. competition; 3. happiness; 4. enumerability; 5. habituation. They all have to do with
the long runs of life, the flat stretches that may buckle into peaks
and valleys of glory and misery; they have little or nothing to do
with the up-against-the-wall decisions of a life fractured by a moral
emergency.
I’ve spoken of the notion of aretē as an effective, potent way
of being that betokens a soul honed to a fine edge, just as a wellsharpened pruning knife is an efficient and perhaps somewhat dangerous object. There is a competitive tone to aretē, just as to be
excellent means literally “to rise above,” as we say, “to be outstanding.” The possessor of aretē glories in it, vaunts and flaunts
it, as do the Homeric heroes. A hero is high in self-esteem, in current language. Furthermore, the aretai, the excellences that everyone recognizes, can be counted off. Socrates regularly refers to
four cardinal ones: wisdom, justice, courage, and sound-mindedness. These excellences require the right sort of body and soul—
physical and psychic talent as we would say—but also practice,
habituation. It is in this last element that the difference between
Kantian morality and ethics, as I have delineated it, shows up most.
Personal qualities are confirmed in habituation, in being habitually
practiced, but the free will, the self-legislation of morality is essentially at odds with habituation. For habit puts the natural laws
of psychology to work, and these are deterministic mechanisms.
In fact, habit as a mechanism is an inhibition on spontaneousness,
on freedom. What’s more, for Kant the will’s intention trumps
practical execution.
Indeed, all the points of the ethics of individual qualities are
contrasted with law-morality. The categorical imperative has, to
be sure, several forms, but it is basically one, a super-command-
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ment that the free will issues and obeys, while the human excellences are enumerably multiple. For although excellence as excellence may be one super-quality, it needs to assume various
specifications, and these may even be at odds with each other. For
instance, courage and sound-mindedness (whose Greek term,
sophrosyne, is often translated as “moderation”) may pull in opposite directions. Certainly the competitive glorying of excellence
is unthinkable in a dutiful moralist, and the sharp-set potency and
effectiveness which goes with any excellence is absolutely out of
play for the moral mode. Once more, in Kant’s great works of
moral philosophy, the issue of execution, of how the passage from
decision to effective action is accomplished, which is so crucial a
juncture in ethics, is almost completely suppressed. Ethics is a way
of being objectively good in the world; the doing is almost everything. Kantian morality is primarily concerned with being right
with oneself, subjectively good; the intention is everything, though
hard actions may, indeed should, follow. As Kant famously says:
There is nothing unqualifiedly good except a good will. Note that
he does not say “a good deed.”
It is with respect to my middle point, happiness, that the difference is greatest and that ethics seems to me a far more livable,
day-by-day useful theory. It is essential to moral intention that no
hint of nature-bound desire should taint the purity of duty done for
its own sake, meaning for the sake of self-rule; no psychic pleasure-seeking mechanism should confuse the clarity of a command
obeyed for the sake of one's rational integrity, one’s rational consistency. Ethics, on the other hand, cooperates with nature; although it distinguishes between sound and corrupt pleasure,
between excess and moderation, it nevertheless regards pleasure,
in Aristotle’s words, as the bloom on our activity, and considers
happiness, whatever its definition, as the proper, indeed self-evident, human aim.
Recall that I have spoken about “extended ethics” as opposed
to “momentary morality” and distinguished the two theories of
human goodness by their relation to time, or rather, to eventuation.
Morality was for intense, abrupt, exigent, emergent moments of
up-against-the-wall decision making; ethics was for a looser,
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smoother, less urgent, more subdued tenor of life. And indeed,
everything I’ve observed about ethics seems to me to fit this latter
temporal mode better: our natural longing for accessible daily
pleasure and sustainable long-term happiness in the world; our innocent, or not-so-innocent, human-all-too-human eagerness for
admiration; our comfort in a being buoyed up by a tradition of
recognizably articulated excellencies; our time-consuming growth
into profitable habits and productive routines.
Above I calculated our line of life in myriads of instants almost too brief for detection (as distinct from discernible moments). Yet each had to be occupied and vacated, lived in and
through, for better or for worse. It seemed to me that this analogy
of life to a line, at once dense and pointillistic, recommended to
us a theory of goodness which allowed us to be all there as natural
beings, driven at every point of temporal existence by desire, fastening on some moments for fulfillment, developing excellence
and glorying in it, engaging with the world in action and with ourselves in thinking. But it also seemed that there were moments of
heightened urgency when we must oppose our pleasure-seeking
and happiness-enjoying nature and forget all the flourishing excellence promotes in order to obey the harsh self-command of
“you ought”—no ifs and buts.
My overarching purpose, however, was to persuade you that
your studies of ways to be humanly good can be appropriated
by you to fashion a way of your own, that they need not add up
to mutual canceling-out of theories and all-round confusion of
soul. In fact, I’m paying you a major compliment: I’m supposing
that you’re taking your learning seriously, not just, as the phrase
goes, “academically”—that you take your studies to heart as lifeshaping.
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Enriching Liberal Education’s
Defense in Universities and Colleges:
Liberal Arts, Innovation, and Technē
J. Scott Lee
For a number of years, it has struck me that people who write
about a “liberal-arts education” rarely write directly about the
arts. They write about political, religious, and moral dispositions;
they write about the rise of the sciences; they write about cultures; and recently, they write about the conditions of education.
Sometimes, they write about books and core texts within the tradition of the liberal arts, but these books and their associated arts
are written about as exemplars of politics, morals, science, and
culture—rarely as exemplars of arts.
A recent spate of writings defending the humanities and humanism, the college and the purpose of education—by Martha
Nussbaum, Tony Kronman, Andrew Delbanco, and Patrick Deneen—all mention liberal-arts education. They defend the fine
or liberal arts, but none of these authors ground their defenses
of liberal-arts education in art per se.1 All these writers sense an
J. Scott Lee is the Executive Director of the Association for Core Texts
and Courses. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Research University and Liberal Arts College Conference, held at Notre
Dame University in Notre Dame, Indiana, 9-11 June 2013.
1. Andrew Delbanco hardily approves of Anthony Kronman’s greatbooks curriculum for the ideas it raises, and he cites the artes liberales
ideal of education that Bruce Kimball has extensively documented as a
tradition of aristocratic European liberal learning that opens the mind.
But it is America’s “attempt to democratize” this tradition through its
collegiate educations that really interests him (College: What It Was,
Is, and Should Be [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012], 33.)
“Working to keep the ideal of democratic education alive,” Delbanco,
in an extensive analysis of the past and present social conditions of col-
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ebbing of liberal education correlated with the economic, scientific, and technological conditions under which we live. Nearly
leges as institutions, ultimately locates the “universal value of a liberal
education” in the belief, derived from the nineteenth-century religious
college, that “no outward mark—wealth or poverty, high or low social
position, credentials or lack thereof—tells anything about the inward
condition of the soul” (171). He transmutes this belief, today, into a
liberal education whose “saving power” (171) that allows students to
“ignite in one another a sense of the possibilities of democratic community” through “the intellectual and imaginative enlargement [college]
makes possible” (172). He concludes, “we owe it to posterity to preserve and protect this institution. Democracy depends on it.” (177).
Martha Nussbaum begins her “manifesto” in defense of the humanities
and arts with a crisis in which “the humanities and the arts are being
cut away in both primary/secondary and college/university education,
in virtually every nation in the world.” This entails “discarding of skills
that are needed to keep democracies alive.” In the survival of the humanities and arts within educational institutions “the future of the
world’s democracies” is said to “hang in the balance” (Not for Profit:
Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010], 1-2).
Notwithstanding a very serious concern with “ideals of freedom,”
Anthony Kronman is less focused on the links between democracy and
liberal education than on the links between the humanities and our culture (Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given
Up on the Meaning of Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
He stresses particularly the humanities’ abandonment, within colleges
and universities, of the search for meaning in our individual lives, and
he warns against our scientific culture’s way of aggrandizing our technical powers without setting them within the limitations of human finitude. The combination, he believes, yields a kind of spiritual desiccation.
Oddly similar to Kronman notwithstanding their published differences,
Patrick Deneen argues that since the Enlightenment, greatness seems
to rest in transformation, whereas before the rise of the New Sciences,
whose authors often belittled ancient books, greatness rested in a “predominant understanding” of cultivated endurance, and an acceptance
of the limits of human power, knowledge, and ambition. The modern
great books program contains many scientific, political and economic
works which support the idea of transformation. So Deneen asks, might
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all find that the present responses of our institutions to these conditions impede rather than aid the robust maintenance or development of something like a liberal education. Most of their
arguments rely on research, though their positions on whether research—scientific, bibliographic or otherwise—within a university favors or harms undergraduate liberal education tends to
range Nussbaum on one side and Delbanco, Kronman, and Deneen on the other. In contrast, each author attempts to revive traditions of the liberal arts by linking them to current conditions
of democracy, spiritual needs of cultures, or ethical understandings of faith. All believe that the souls of our students and our
citizens are at stake, though of course they disagree about the
constitution of the soul and the education designed to nurture it.
A common concern among these authors is whether our cultural assumption that we can transform almost anything, particularly through the technology of science, is good for our souls and
good for liberal education. For Nussbaum, technology appears as
the attractive image of students in a lab—instead of pictures of
students “thinking”—that administrators use to lure students to
universities.2 Delbanco notes the advantage that the sciences have
over the humanities in public evaluations: technological landmarks of progress, accompanied by an occasional historical or
philosophic “breakthrough.”3 For Kronman and Deneen, technology is the differential gear which imparts varying force to science,
culture, and education. Further, Kronman and Deneen come very
close to each other in noting the meretricious effects upon our
character and our sense of limits that technological achievement
unleashes in the form of pleonexia. The humanities currently fail
to oppose it (Kronman), or worse, education encourages it through
there be an alternative way to think about the core texts of the ancient
to medieval Western tradition, ultimately as a way of restraining our
scientifically released pleonexia for mastering and transforming our
world? He suggests great books might be justified by recovering this
earlier understanding’s humility (“Against Great Books,” in First
Things [January 2013], 35.)
2. Nussbaum, Not for Profit, 133.
3. Delbanco, College, 95. Apparently, literature does not rise to “breakthroughs.”
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a philosophy of transformation, of creating original knowledge
and innovations through research (Deneen).4
4. At one point, Kronman and Deneen come very close to saying—and
meaning—the same thing. Kronman’s case for the humanities in large
part rests on controlling technology through a recognition of human limits: “We have a desire for control that can never be satisfied by any degree of control we actually achieve. We always want more. . . . This is
the human condition, which is characterized by our subjection to fateful
limits that we can neither tolerate nor do without. . . . The most important
thing about technology is not what it does but what it aspires to do. . . .
Technology encourages us to believe that the abolition of fate should be
our goal. . . . Technology discourages the thought that our finitude is a
condition of the meaningfulness of our lives. . . . It makes the effort to
recall our limits and to reflect upon them seem less valuable and important” (Kronman, Education’s End, 230-233). For Kronman, the research
ideal is, of course, partly justified in the sciences by the “fruit”—both in
discovery and in technology—that it produces: “The research ideal is
today the organizing principle of work in every academic discipline. . . .
In the natural sciences, the research ideal has proved remarkably fruitful.
The new discoveries that pour from our college and university laboratories every year and the clear sense of progressive movement toward an
objective understanding of the structure and mechanisms of the natural
world testify to the productive fit between the natural sciences and the
modern research ideal.” Whereas in the humanities “understanding,” but
not a productive technology characterizes research results: “In the humanities . . . the benefits of research are less uniform or certain” (ibid.,
130-133). Nevertheless “research in the humanities has produced results
of lasting value. It has added importantly to our understanding of the
historical, literary, artistic, and philosophical subjects with which the humanities deal.” The demands for specialization and for teaching to that
specialization ought to be less insistently felt in the humanities: “What
must be resisted is the imperial sprawl of the research ideal, its expansive
tendency to fill every corner of each discipline in which it takes hold
and to color the expectations and judgments of teachers in these disciplines regarding what they do. Admittedly this is asking a lot. . . . But . . .
it is merely asking for a somewhat greater degree of humility on the
part of those in the humanities who first allegiance is to this ideal” (ibid.,
248-249).
For Deneen, the (current) point of a philosophy of education is not
to admire the world, or suffer its limits, but to change it, to transform it.
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Finally, while all these authors seem to be convinced that the
products of arts are essential to any revival, and while they are
skilled fashioners of argument in areas where no single discipline
can claim precedence, the discussion of fine or liberal arts and
their products is not in terms of art, but in the terms of the political, cultural, or religious end sought. For example, Nussbaum
devotes large portions of her book exploring arts and a whole
chapter to “Cultivating the Imagination: Literature and the Arts.”
To Deneen, it seems that since the Enlightenment, greatness seems to
rest in transformation. So he asks, might there be an alternative way to
think about and assign terms to the core texts of the Western tradition,
ultimately as a way of restraining our excesses in transforming our
world? He begins by accepting a stasis in the political, moral, religious,
and poetic inheritance of books that extends from the ancients through
the first stirrings of modernity: “Great books such as Paradise Lost
sought to inculcate a sense of limits, . . . we could look at a dominant
understanding of a long succession of great books from antiquity to the
Middle Ages . . . to conform human behavior and aspirations to the natural or created order” (“Against Great Books,” 35). By way of Baconian,
Cartesian, and Hobbesian repudiation of books, Deneen elaborates the argument the he feels undermines the “human limits” understanding by trying to discriminate two kinds of liberty. The first, associated with great
books, is a “liberty . . . of hard-won self-control through the discipline of
virtue,” which often animates defenses of great books as materials in
preparing for citizenship. The second is a liberty with “the stress . . .
upon the research, creative activity, scholarly inquiry and the development of new knowledge” (ibid., 37). The former constrains our desires,
the latter endlessly satisfies them through “the human project of mastery.” The latter pursuits were justified by the arguments of Bacon,
Descartes, and Hobbes, reinforced by Dewey, which depended on the
idea “that a larger number of natural forces and objects [could be or]
have been transformed into instrumentalities of action” in the West than
in cultures which did not exploit the natural resources available through
scientific technology (ibid., 36). Deneen concludes that we do need to
teach these two competing notions of liberty through the great books,
but defenders should exchange the notion of “greatness” for a notion
of “humility” derived from the earlier works of the intellectual tradition
represented in the West (ibid., 38). Humility might, then, restrain our
excesses in regard to transformation.
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19
In the latter, we learn that “in order to be stably linked to democratic values, [both the artistic cultivation of capacities for play
and empathy in a general way, and the treatment of particular cultural blind spots] require a normative view of how human beings
ought to relate to one another . . . and, both therefore require selectivity regarding the artworks used.”5 A catalog follows of the
failures of artworks, of “defective forms of ‘literature,” to cultivate the sympathy that Nussbaum desires. Undoubtedly, Kronman’s understanding of the search for meaning and his discussion
of civilizational “conversation” depends on art; Delbanco’s distinction between research and reading instances canonical works
from ancient to modern times; and Deneen’s argument is concerned with a residuum of teachings that earlier great books leave
us. Yet, in these social-moral defenses, an entire line of argument
concerning the arts is, for the most part, relegated to an instrumental, supporting, or ancillary role in a discussion that might be
titled: “Social Conditions, Educational Institutions, and Individual
Capacities: Wither Liberal Education?”
I wish to suggest now that the ecology of liberal education
defense could be enriched by also focusing on the arts of liberalarts education. Then we will see what liberal education’s relation
to research, democracy, or culture might be when looked at
through the lens of the arts. Please note that my preceding remarks are not meant to imply the absence of artistic works in liberal-arts programs, nor that some parts of those programs are not
structured by the arts. For example Yale’s Directed Studies program has courses explicitly divided into three groups: Literature,
Philosophy, and Historical and Political Thought. Clearly literature is art. Columbia’s Core’s program has the Literature/Humanities and the Contemporary Civilization sequences, not to
mention the Music offerings. Again, no one doubts that this program involves art. What I am interested in are the rationales and
justifications for programs using core texts that can be grounded
in the liberal arts.
Why is it important to develop a line of argument about arts
5. Nussbaum, Not for Profit, 108.
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to the point where we might see them in the guise of an end, not
just a means, to liberal-arts education? Do you remember, about
forty or fifty years ago, if you aspired to a bachelor degree, you
chose either a bachelor of science or a bachelor of arts? No one
today questions whether a student possesses a science if she or he
earns a B.S. What art or arts, however, do our students possess if
they have earned a B.A.? So, if we claim to offer a liberal-arts education in undergraduate bachelor programs, it might not be amiss
to ask what arts are our students learning and we are teaching.
And asking such a question can enrich our view of liberal-arts education using core texts—whether of the Western tradition or not.
When educators of any stripe are seeking renewal, they often
resort to an examination of the past, so I thought the best place
to begin a search for a renewal of liberal-arts education might be
in a book by Bruce Kimball first published in 1986: Orators and
Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education.6 The
book’s scholarship and judicious consideration of a vast number
of core texts, curricular materials, and the scholarly production
surrounding liberal education make this work a seminal contribution to the history of liberal education. Kimball has paid much
more explicit attention to the artes liberales educational ideal,
especially in relation to the research ideal—or, as he styles it, the
liberal-free ideal—than any current author we have examined.
For our purposes he also reaches more thoroughly into the past.
With the important exception of an unstable accommodation in
a very few universities and colleges between these two ideals—
Chicago, Columbia, St. John’s College being the primary examples—his extended history gives little comfort to the conviction
that liberal-arts education, particularly in relation to democracy,
has much of a chance of revival in most of today’s universities
or colleges, precisely because of the success of the ideal of research throughout academe, and its allied notion of freedom.
Kimball’s history, which extends from ancient Greece to late
6. Bruce Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of
Liberal Education (New York: Teachers College, 1986; rev. ed., New
York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1995).
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twentieth-century America, reflects a two-fold tradition in education. A rhetorical liberal tradition complains about disarray and
divisions of undergraduate education, while an epistemic, research quarrel among the fields of science, social science, and
the humanities over “definitions of knowledge and culture” influences undergraduate education.7 These two educational traditions—the artes liberales ideal for citizenship and the liberal-free
ideal for specialization—compete in public, graduate, and undergraduate contexts. To bring this competition down to earth at the
undergraduate level: Kimball finds “it is supremely difficult for
an undergraduate major . . . to coexist with a thorough [curricular]
commitment to citizenship, virtues, the republic, and the appropriation of the textual tradition of a community.”8 The reason is
that these two polarities, or ideals, are systematic: they entail different ends, characteristic qualities, and, ultimately, curricular expressions. Syntheses, accommodations, or blends of the two have
limited appeal and, typically, short lives. The artes liberales accommodation is unstable partly because it cannot readily convince
academics that classics are necessary to a critical intellect, and partly
because its insistence upon exploring ancient texts “conflicts with
the liberal-free mind” in its desire to range where it will.9
To varying degrees, then, Kimball anticipates the ambivalence that Kronman and Delbanco feel about reading great texts
at the undergraduate level with modern research in mind. Kimball
also anticipates Kronman and Deneen’s concern with the way in
which the rise of science has shaped our educational institutions
toward a research ideal and away from a reflective, characterbuilding liberal-arts education. And, in a strange twist of fate,
Kimball also recognizes the role of the liberal-free ideal in harnessing science and research to the democratic and market-based
national project of the United States. And in this he anticipates
Nussbaum’s and Delbanco’s attempts to have our educational institutions, committed as they are to the research ideal, serve the
7. Ibid., 286.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 223, 225, 226.
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national or international life of democracies—a role formerly reserved for the artes liberales ideal.
In sum, historically and philosophically, with research and
disciplines firmly entrenched by the rise of science in the modern
university, all of these authors find themselves in a very difficult
position. They sense a pervasive cultural and ethical emptiness
related to the very institution of education to which their lives
are committed. They resist this emptiness by offering an alternative end to liberal education—call it democracy, humanity, or
faith—something other than research. Yet all supporters of liberal
education are faced with an institutional history that is well documented and that holds out little hope (but let us not say no hope)
of successfully wooing the disciplines and departments that mark
universities and colleges to the ends of liberal education.
Since all of these authors are interested in liberal education
and in renewing its institutional life, it is not a fault that they
should closely examine institutional histories of liberal education.
But the origins of liberal-arts education were not entirely institutional. As I will argue shortly, before and even after the innovative congregating of lecturers into medieval universities,
education in the liberal arts was often done outside an institutional context. This “outside” development matters because in
one way or another almost all of our authors acknowledge institutional atrophy at various points in the history of liberal education. And if, today, liberal-arts education is institutionally
“strangled” rather than atrophied, that is all the more reason to
examine sources outside academe, or sources within academe
that are not currently predominant in models of education, for inspiration in renewing liberal-arts education. In particular, the
transition from Aquinas to Bacon has as its backdrop the rise of
universities—but the actual stage was filled with liberal artists
outside of academia who were actively developing new educations, arts, and sciences. The work of these liberal artists may
provide us with generative—perhaps even transformative—models, grounded in the classics, that can contribute appreciably to
institutional revival of the liberal arts.
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Through tracing the specific use of the words “liberal education” and “liberal arts,” Kimball concludes that, as a historical
fact, liberal education based in a normative curriculum of the
seven liberal arts simply didn’t exist until the late Roman
Empire.10 Thus, the seven liberal arts, which eventually became
the trivium and quadrivium, circumscribe what Kimball takes
historically to be the instantiation of a liberal-arts curriculum.
Under Roman development, the general artes liberales educational ideal becomes firmly tied to “the goal of training the good
citizen to lead society,” as well as to the “prescription of values
and standards for character and conduct,” through this normative
curriculum.11 To cut a very complicated story short: this ideal and
its primus-inter-pares art was rhetorical, and the situation remained so until the rise of the medieval university.12 That rise is
accompanied by the rise of philosophy as the organizing discipline of university education. Kimball finds that when medieval
universities began to concentrate on theoretical matters or systematic matters of philosophy, a “philosophic” curriculum replaced an oratorical one.
This “revolution” and “transformation” is traced to “the
rediscovery and translation of the lost philosophical learning
of Greek antiquity, especially the corpus of Aristotle . . . [as
well as] Arabic, Jewish and other Greek writings on mathematics and natural science.”13 But in Kimball’s analysis, the
philosophic takeover of the liberal-arts curriculum does not
give rise to a philosophic ideal associated with it that can be
described as a systematic ideal for liberal education. One
might have expected the liberal arts to have been strengthened
by four developments that occurred during this time: the new
relative importance of logic; the rise of “technical and
schematized artes”; the formation of “a curriculum of liberal
education dedicated to scientiae speculativae” within medieval universities; and the innovation of grammatica specu10. Ibid., 3, 25, 29.
11. Ibid., 37.
12. Ibid., 31-33.
13. Ibid., 58, and 61.
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lativa as an investigation of the universal grammar that “underlies the different grammars of all languages.” On the contrary, the septem artes diminished in importance, largely
owing to Aquinas’s dictum that “the seven liberal arts do not
sufficiently divide theoretical philosophy” and the emergence
of new studies in graduate programs. All of this led to a distinct separation of the seven arts from philosophy within the
curriculum of new medieval universities.14 All of this leads
Kimball’s argument to an unstated conclusion: the liberal arts
were not being led by philosophy; they were slowly being trivialized or supplanted by it. To push the unstated conclusion a
step further: despite many innovations in logic and grammar,
as well as in mathematics, the scientiae speculativae that supplanted the liberal arts were not really sciences in our modern
sense. So, to read backwards from Kimball’s Enlightenment
identification of the liberal-free ideal’s characteristics, the medieval rediscovery of the ancients seems not to have been an
exercise in “freedom from a-priori strictures and standards”
nor “a critical skepticism” linked to “scientific method.”15
On the other hand, the humanists’ interest in oratorical
skills allowed the liberal arts to flourish successfully outside
the universities during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Kimball finds, that beginning with Petrarch’s interest in Cicero and Quintilian, the artes liberales ideal leads to a revival
and spread of enthusiasm for literature among the general public, but a widespread revival of studying literary classics in
the curricula of universities did not take hold until the middle
of the fifteenth century.16
A similar historical development occurred in the emergence of modern science, notwithstanding Newton’s appointment at Cambridge, the pursuit of philosophy in the name of
the New Science of Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza
led to a blockade of natural philosophy from the curricula of
14. Ibid., 66 and 71.
15. Ibid., 120-121.
16. Ibid., 80.
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universities. The philosophically based liberal-free ideal
emerges outside of the universities, relying for its support on
widespread Enlightenment attachment to freedom and rationality. The ideal does not shape curricula until it combines with
the re-organization of German universities under the research
program in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
That re-organization, in turn, leads to the destruction, in the
U.S., of the more or less uniform liberal-arts curricula by the
nineteenth century’s end.17 These historical threads, Kimball
shows, are the roots of the two ideals that lay claim to the title
of liberal education. Infrequent and mostly unstable accommodations between these two ideals, Kimball says, with a few
precedents in the nineteenth century, only happened in the
twentieth.18
Since the rhetorical ideal and its foundational art, rhetoric,
was excluded from universities in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, while the philosophical, liberal-free ideal and its
new sciences were excluded from the sixteenth to nearly the
end of the eighteenth centuries, the faculties shaping university curricula for long periods in the West have excluded one
or another version—or, at least, significant portion—of what
could be termed “liberal education.” So then, we might ask, in
these periods where did liberal arts and liberal education go?
Kimball recognizes that humanists outside the universities
were concerned, beyond politics, with the “development of
personality.” 19 In Bruni’s fourteenth-century letter to Lady
Battista Malatesta of Montefeltro on “the Study of Literature,”
this shift has importance to the ideal, the curriculum, and the
goal of education. Bruni is addressing a woman who must, of
course, “leave the rough-and-tumble of the forum entirely to
men.” What, then, is she studying for? This turns out to be
“human excellence,” which transcends the historical circumstances of political life: “There is, indeed, no lack of examples
of women renowned for literary study and eloquence that I
17. Ibid., 146.
18. Ibid., 151, 153, 186, 221.
19. Ibid., 78.
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could mention to exhort you to excellence.” Here Bruni cites
Cornelia, Sappho, and Aspasia.20
The point of Bruni’s urging is to form a liberal education outside the university and the common expectations of men.21 In
consequence, Bruni does not recommend a technical study of
rhetoric, but rather a grammatical and broad “knowledge of sacred letters” (54), philosophy, and poetry. What Bruni is doing is
explicitly substituting for the Ciceronian, highly developed, technical elaboration of rhetorical distinctions and artifices (no “practice of the commonplaces” nor study of “knotty quaestiones to
be untied”) the broader literatures of history, philosophy, and poetry, which are exercised in writing.22 While his treatise’s intellectual roots lie in grammatical considerations of such authors as
Augustine and Isadore, Bruni is accomplishing a re-ordering of
liberal education that is new and innovative. It is neither directed
toward philosophy in the medieval sense, nor directed toward salvation in the Christian sense, nor directed toward statecraft and
citizenship in the Roman sense. The character one achieves is that
of a fine artist.
Invention is the principal organizing part of Ciceronian, and
indeed Roman, rhetoric. Invention is the discovery or devising
of things, arguments or signs, to render a case probable or true
(De Inventione, I, vi, 9). As such, invention is embedded in the
artes liberales ideal. Commonplaces or topoi are central to invention and (De Topica, I, ii 7; De Partitione Oratoria I, ii, 9;
xx, 68) one of principal technical features which dialectic shares
with rhetoric is the use of commonplaces or topoi.
These features of invention, discovery, and commonplaces,
ultimately, suggest ground of accommodation between Kimball’s two ideals. Three works beyond Bruni may serve as examples. Machiavelli’s Prince, in its operational concerns, its
20. Leonardo Bruni. “The Student of Literature To Lady Battista Malatesta of Montefeltro,” in Humanist Educational Treatises, trans. Craig W.
Kallendorf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 47-63.
21. Ibid., 47-48.
22. Ibid., 53, 55.
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focus on the problem of new states, and its topical organization
of how to analyze a state or ruler’s situation falls well within the
traditions of expedience and invention characteristic of the
rhetorical tradition. Galileo’s Starry Messenger is the application
of dialectical commonplaces derived from observation of nature.
The moon is examined first as whole, which is light, and then as
a whole which is dark; its parts are, then, divided into light and
dark, and its boundaries into continuous and discrete.23 The entire
treatise continues in similar fashion as it produces its four major
discoveries. Finally, Bacon, readily acknowledging in the New
Organon that current philosophy and arts are “use[ful] for supplying matters for disputations or ornaments for discourse,” distinguishes between “methods [of] cultivation” of those matters
and “invention of knowledge” which he is engaged in developing.24 The sciences should be “methods for invention or directions
for new works.”25 Yet, much of his analysis is directed less toward
the experimental manipulation of phenomena, than the re-ordering of the mind, or “intellectual operations” by frameworks properly adapted to nature.26 The analysis of the blocks to scientific
progress, occupying the first book of the New Organon, is presented as a series of “aphorisms,” a dialectical term indicating
definitions or important distinctions. These aphorisms either
move toward properly orienting the mind or showing that current
systems of disputation, philosophy, and experience distract the
mind. Indeed, Bacon sounds something like Bruni, for he says
that, “my purpose [is not to ‘found a new sect of philosophy’ but]
to try whether I cannot . . . extend more widely the limits, of the
power and greatness of man.”27
By converting the principal part of rhetoric, invention, into its
23. Galileo Galilei. “The Starry Messenger,” in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. and ed. by Stillman Drake (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 21-58, esp. 31.
24. Francis Bacon, “New Organon,” in Selected Philosophical Works,
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 63-206; 88, aphorism 8; 90.)
25. Ibid., 90, aphorism 8.
26. Ibid., 92, aphorism 18.
27. Ibid., 138, aphorism 118.
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end, the aphorisms take on the character, not of persuasion or eloquence, but discovery. The “Interpretation of Nature” in Book II,
which is either to increase man’s powers over natures or to discover
the form of a nature, is carried on in aphorisms. And, in illustrating
discovery which is subsumed under the invention of knowledge,
Bacon outlines a procedure of collecting physical instances, instead
of opinions, forming tables of instances (of the presence or absence
of the nature in question), and, then, applying “induction”—that
is, separation, inclusions, and exclusions of the sought for nature
from other natures—based on the table of instances.28
Bacon criticized the arts and philosophies of his day as useless
in the production of knowledge. Galileo tired of “long and windy
debates.” Machiavelli pitted imaginary constructions of polities
and ideal descriptions of human behavior against the usefulness of
his treatise based in “realities.” Bruni not only found scholastic
subjects to be useless, but also clearly tried to provide a liberal education for a woman while wondering whether the standard rhetorical arts educated men at all. I want to stress here that in the hands
of these authors the liberal arts were essential in challenging and
criticizing the learning that came before. Yet, however much all
these authors argued their separation from the past or their differences with current versions of education, none of their protests can
obscure the continuity of art that tied the past to the present. So the
transition from Aquinas to Bacon was actually a roadway paved
by innovation as individuals attempted to extend the liberal arts
into many different areas—including, apparently, areas universities
simply wouldn’t touch.
Now, Kimball acknowledges that the artes liberales ideal incorporates a critical skepticism, yet, in the end, he concludes that
this skepticism “misses the point of the scientific method: any conclusions inferred become new hypotheses and are always subject
to challenge and criticism.”29 So, let us ask: While the hypothesis
28. Ibid., 178, aphorism 21.
29. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 121, 172; see also 225-26. This
same objection is reformulated in Kimball’s characterization of the mutual misunderstanding of each other’s position over the phrase “criticism of life” that Huxley and Arnold both employed.
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may well be essential to the science of a liberal-free ideal, is it the
hypothesis or, on the contrary, the continuous growth of knowledge
that is essential to the liberal-free ideal as a whole? Kimball was
not the first to conclude that the German research university
changed American institutions toward something like the liberalfree ideal. And research—not hypotheses or laboratories per se—
is what changed higher education from within:
Visiting American graduate students and professors returned from German universities enamored of the specialized scholarship, the commitment to speculative
research, and, above all, the atmosphere of freedom
they had seen in their host institutions. Particularly this
latter aspect—Lehrfreiheit (freedom to teach what one
wishes) and Lernfreiheit (freedom to study what one
wishes)—impressed the Americans. [The atmosphere
of freedom] was seen “to follow from the searching
function, the presumption that knowledge was not
fixed or final,” a presumption underlying all aspects of
the idealized German university that the Americans
took to be “dedicated to a search to widen the bounds
of knowledge rather than merely to preserve the store
of knowledge undiminished.”30
Thus, the question of whether hypotheses or the growth of
knowledge is essential to the liberal-free ideal is not without significance. The former, representing science, tends to draw a firm
distinction between the humanities and the sciences; the latter,
representing the humanities, tends to admit that instances of significant mutual influence shape education. The former tends to
restrict criticism to specialists. The latter tends to make criticism
and critical thought dependent on broad views of knowledge.
If in their artistic inventions Bruni, Machiavelli, Galileo, and
Bacon were using the liberal arts, then, they were “proving opposites.” But they were not simply constructing arguments opposed to works of the past. They were constructing extensions of
30. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 161, quoting Carl Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship: 1770-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).
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the arts they knew, the liberal arts. They thought that they were
breaking with a past of instruction and knowledge in the liberal
arts; yet, because arts proceed by invention, not hypothesis, these
artists refashioned liberal-arts ends, principal parts, techniques,
and devices, and made them suitable for new discoveries of
knowledge, new feats of action, new methods of production, new
formations of character, and new explorations for expanding the
bounds of human inquiry. In other words, invention is the characteristic response of the liberal arts to the project of continuing
the quest for knowledge. In our context, invention provided the
bridge between old and new knowledge, while it simultaneously
constructed both the distinction between past and future, and also
the distinction between the sciences and the humanities. Thus, in
the transition between Aquinas and Bacon, liberal-arts invention
provided as much continuity as discontinuity. The foundation for
an accommodation between the liberal-free ideal and the artes
liberales ideal appears, therefore, to be inherent in the development of the New Philosophy or New Science, and, more deeply,
inherent in the liberal arts themselves.31
The complex interrelations among the liberal-arts projects
of Bruni, Machiavelli, Galileo, and Bacon suggest that the places
to look for liberal education not only include institutional curricula, but individual instances that evidence liberal learning or
31. In 2003, the Association of Core Texts and Courses began a threeyear NEH grant, “Bridging the Gap Between the Humanities and Sciences.” The grant had three summer syllabi on “Motion and Natural
Law in the Physical and Political World,” “Life, Origins, Purposivenesss, and Transformations,” and “Technology, Art, Values, and the
Problems of Technoscience.” All three syllabi began with ancient Greek
texts; the first ended with texts of the seventeenth century; the others
ended with later texts. Teams from ten institutions—each composed of
one humanist, one scientist, and one administrator drawn from any discipline—attended the sessions and to their home institutions to devise
curricula and even teaching teams that “bridged the gap.” The whole
effort was inconceivable without a liberal-arts orientation. See
http://www.coretexts.org/projects-and-grants/neh-grant-bridging-thegap-between-the-humanities-and-sciences.
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education. All of these authors were learning via the liberal arts;
only one of them was doing it in a university, and he found few
who embraced his extension of dialectical methods. No curriculum for women existed until Bruni devised one for Lady Battista.
No widespread method of science existed until Bacon articulated
one. These examples of individuals practicing and acquiring liberal education outside of an academic institution show that an
“artes liberales accommodation”—a synthesis of the artes liberales and liberal-free ideals of education— not only might have
occurred earlier than we usually think, but also might have been
more persistent and coherent in educational history than seems
apparent.
All of our authors demonstrate an acute awareness of the
work of predecessors. Galileo is, of course, the patron saint of
scientists; and though Bacon may or may not capture the essence
of science, no one doubts he was advocating for what is recognized as modern science by first reviewing works and knowledge from the past. Thus, it was the liberal arts that first brought
us research in its nascent form, before it reached the universities.
Is there, then, an illustration of humanities research requiring
liberal education by an individual after research reaches the universities? An example is depicted by Henry Adams in his book,
The Education of Henry Adams.32 Adams was a man groomed
by lineage and by a stale antebellum, Harvard liberal-arts education to become, later, one of America’s foremost specialized
historians of the nineteenth century at his alma mater, during the
very time that Harvard made the transition from a college to a
research university.33 Yet, the book’s first person narrative
shows that in the opening of his specialized historical study to
any source of knowledge or human achievement, an opening
which begins in the 1890’s well after his undergraduate education and his life as a professor had ended, Adams exhibits some
of the finer uses of liberal-arts, core-text study. His service in
32. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams in Adams: Democracy, Esther, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, The Education of Henry
Adams (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 715-1181.
33. Ibid., 777 and 993-997.
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Great Britain during the American Civil War, followed by
comic revelations, some thirty years after the fact, by principals of the British government about their real motives in considering entering the war on behalf of the South in 1862,
convinced Adams that private experience, or even, a research
career devoted to historical analysis of American Presidencies,
was too small a scale for adequate judgment of the motives of
men—or, what was the same, “a chart of history.”34 This conviction was augmented, in part, by his friendship with John
Hay, the Secretary of State, who quickened Adams’s interest
in the international scale of human relations—the true locus,
Adams ultimately decides, that determines the motives of
human beings. Only as Adams moved from the local to the remote, only as he took an interest in symbols, only as he began
to study seriously not only politics, but science, art, religious
thought, and their core monuments—at Chartres, in the theology of Aquinas, in the dynamo, in the discoveries of Curie, in
the art of LaFarge—and added these to his store of diplomatic
and governmental knowledge—only then did he discover the
Education of Henry Adams.35
The education Adams garnered at the end of his life was a
preparation for a new theory, a new art, a new science—in this
case a theory of history. But let us make a quick induction using
all of the authors we have discussed. The proper use of education, and particularly the liberal arts, is to render students capable of making available to themselves the world’s cultural
resources in order to construct a future. Adams’s employment
of cultural history as the means for his re-education suggests, as
do the works of our other authors, that no one should presuppose
education begins with firm, well-grounded disciplinary assumptions and then proceeds to the mastery of the discipline’s tools.
Actually, it seems to be quite the opposite: if we are to offer students real education, then we are obliged to abandon the presumption of given disciplines and construct a curriculum in
34. Ibid., 1105.
35. Ibid., 1066ff and 1109ff.
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which students may explore and conceive the foundations of disciplines for themselves.36
In constructing such curricula, there is an obvious need for liberal-arts education to select core texts. This brings us back to several arguments mentioned earlier: namely, that ancient, medieval,
and early modern moral teachings can be reduced to restraint; or
that a proper selection of texts can promote the correct democratic
values and skills; or that the limitlessness of technology is destroying our culture and character. Each of these serious arguments may
be true, but they simply don’t come close to expressing the fullness
that a liberal-arts education can offer. The liberal arts have never
been merely moral, ethical, political, and cultural. They are fundamentally inventive and transformative. We remember that Aeschylus disapproved so much of the blood-bath at the end of the
Odyssey that he devised a tragic trilogy, the Oresteia, to celebrate
the creation of the jury trial, in which justice, and not merely revenge, could be felt by all. I recall the attempt in Plato’s Republic
to replace Homer with philosophy, and rhetoric with dialectic as
the basis of education—and, perhaps, of society. We remember Aristotle writing—in a society that seemed unaware of human rights
in general, and of the right of expression in particular—a treatise
on art which defended its own governing principles. We recall that
the Aeneid not only artfully incorporates the two Homeric epics,
but also incorporates art into Aeneas’s education. In having Aeneas
gaze upon the artfully wrought wall of Carthage, and upon Vulcan’s artfully wrought shield, and upon the artfully wrought belt
of Turnus, Virgil incorporates art into the education of his hero—
36. I mean to suggest that by continuously returning to the principal parts
of liberal arts—poetic and rhetorical invention, as well as dialectical discovery—the liberal arts and their associated core texts played a significant
artistic role in developing the new philosophy or new science. In the same
way, they may continue to develop human innovation today. This argument
can be extended across civilizations backward in time, and forward toward
the present-day sciences, particularly in their use of the humanities and
liberal arts to explain themselves. Examples are: Darwin’s Origin of
Species; portions of Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity; Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity; Feynman’s QED; Wilson’s Consilience.
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an education into a vast enterprise beyond his ken—in a way that
neither Homer nor most of the Biblical writers employ. We recall
the importance of books—scriptures—to ancient Jews and Christians, not only in the canon that became the Bible, but in the remarkable synthesis of writers and texts that Ezra seems to have
read to the people of Jerusalem as he united them after their second
exile. We remember from the opening “archaeology” of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War the kind of works one
reads matters. And we recall the sharp contrast between the Athenian virtues of Pericles’s “Funeral Oration” and the Judeo-Christian
virtues of Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount”—the importance of the
soul in each, together with the enormous differences of those souls
and their purposes. And we remember Augustine’s struggle with
the uses of the liberal arts and the wealth of pagan works his society
possessed as he came to be not only one of the greatest expositors
of the Bible, but also one of the chief agents who synthesized
Athens and Jerusalem into a single educated culture.
And so I think we arrive at a justification for great books or
core texts which is, perhaps, essential if our moral, cultural, political, or religious perceptions of the past’s resources are to be made
available to us in a way that is promising and fruitful. Often we
read core texts from many disciplines to explore ideas as a way to
enlarge student experience. This is laudable, but in exploring great
ideas, it seems to me that we don’t want to lose the thread of our
own story—I mean the story of making books. This is the story
about writing books, about reading and contemplating them, and
about building educations around them. As I have suggested above,
the production of books is part of the larger story of made things,
the story of art, technē. Technē has been a chief source of change
in civilization almost since its inception, and if you want to learn
how and why culture, religion, literature, philosophy, morals, and
science change, you must read books of great depth and invention
across genres, disciplines, cultures, and eras.37 When we do present
37. By a book I mean any written work that comes down to us, and which,
of course, may be found in many different media—scrolls, velum, hypertext, and someday, I suspect, something like holographic-imaging ipods.
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the story of making books—and, more broadly, the story of developing arts—and when we build an education around them, it is not
only our students who gain a powerful resource for building the
future. We, the educators, do so as well.
Specific liberal arts are instantiations of technē, that intellectual
virtue concerned with making something out of the world of the
variable, bringing something into existence that otherwise might
not be. And the essence of a liberal-arts education is the development of artistry in relation to making—technē in relation to poiēsis.
Here we approach, at first, what are collectively known as the fine
arts. In a discussion of liberal education, literature has something
of a pride of place in any list of fine arts because of the early development of the education fashioned by Isocrates and Cicero. Yet neither Isocrates nor Cicero best capture what freedom of artistry is
about, as Aristotle did in the final chapters of the Poetics. Throughout the Poetics an argument builds that poetry is something more
philosophic—more general—than history, and that, indeed, its function is not to narrate or dramatize “the thing that has happened, but
a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible” [italics
mine] (1451a 36). The argument continues to the end with a defense
of poets and poetry against the challenges of philosophers, politicians, and technical disciplinarians who in their systems and educational plans always tie art to the truth. Aristotle reminds us that
the standard of correctness “is not the same . . . in poetry (poiētikēs)
as in politics or, indeed, in any other art (technē).” Indeed, if, an
“error” in any art object was useful, if the poet meant to “describe
[a thing] in some incorrect way . . . [so that] it serves the end of poetry itself,” then objections by other disciplines about the product
or the artistry are really to no avail. This is even the case in moral
questions, for in the Poetics Aristotle’s interest in poetry is not
whether an action or character conforms to a specific ethical or political system, or models or cultivates a specific character in the audience; his interest is in what to consider when answering whether
“something said or done in a poem is morally right or not.” That is,
he is concerned with “intrinsic qualities of the actual word or deed,”
as well as the agent, the purpose, the patient, the means, the time,
and the relations of the actions to greater or lesser goods or evils.
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More generally, then, Aristotle’s Poetics is far less concerned with
constructions that use rhythm, language, and harmony as matters
of truth, than as matters of what might be: “If the poet’s description
be criticized as not true to fact, one may urge perhaps that the object
ought to be as described—an answer like that of Sophocles, who
said that he drew men as they ought to be” (1460b33-35).
In the Poetics, Aristotle takes poetry’s side by constructing a
dialectical defense. The defense depends on a criticism which investigates poetry in its own terms, that is, in the internal functioning
of its products. In this sense, when we come to consider the construction of curricula of books, the Poetics, notwithstanding Aristotle’s statements about liberal education in his Politics, structures
a liberal-arts education and promotes the free character that it produces, for such an education is less a study of the truth, than of the
possibilities humans have invented and made for themselves.
The point is extendable to all books, as well as to literature and
artistry from any discipline. Thus, a similar point about the object
of a liberal education is suggested by Aristotle for “literary” constructions such as Bruni’s, Machiavelli’s, Galileo’s, and Bacon’s.
Aristotle makes a distinction in his Parts of Animals between “two
distinct kinds of proficiency”: “scientific knowledge” and “educational acquaintance” with any subject. Indeed, the mark of a “universal [i.e, general] education” is for the holder of such an education
to “to be able to form a fair offhand judgment as to the goodness or
badness of the method used by a professor in his exposition.” And
this acquired ability applies to “all or nearly all branches of knowledge” (639a1-10). Subsequently, Aristotle constructs a dialectical
set of questions pertaining to characteristics of animals and the
processes which lead to the formation of those characteristics, as
well as a review of how earlier authors had treated both characteristics and processes. And, indeed, he analogizes this treatment arising out of general education to analyses of art (640a25-33). In sum,
tracing the invention of fine arts or sciences or the characteristics
and foundations of such arts and sciences relies on a process of
“criticism” (kritikon) “quite independent of the question whether
the statements [in a work] be true or false” (639a14-15). What is at
stake educationally is knowledge of the available and variable
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means of construction for any given art or science. This is what
freedom in artistry is. Education needs institutions and curricula in
which students can acquire the arts that make such constructions
available.
I have used Bruce Kimball’s distinctions between the artes liberales and liberal-free ideals and traditions of education to suggest
that the accommodations in higher education during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries may have stronger, longer, more continuous historical foundations than seem apparent from educational
documents and curricula created during the same period.
So far we have seen that the principal parts of the liberal arts—
rhetorical invention and dialectical discovery—played a significant
artistic role in developing the new philosophy or new science ideal.
Furthermore, we have seen that the long tradition of the liberal arts
is concerned with transformative arts, ideas, and culture. And, finally, we have seen that the free character of a liberal artist is not
only a propaedeutic for research, but also a source of invention and
imagination for the future.
Each of these considerations seems to have implications for the
future of the liberal arts in research universities and colleges. If it is
plausible that the liberal-arts accommodation—that is, recognizable
liberal-arts curricula, innovation, and a productive, but not stifling,
link to research—has stronger, systematic ties to education than
might be suspected, then we should see these ties in histories of institutions, as well as in analyses of the place of liberal-arts education
up to the current time.38 Kimball focuses on the liberal-arts influ38. Certainly, Kimball’s analysis that a artes liberales accommodation
had real intellectual impetus and some institutional steam by the end of
the nineteenth century is right. Indeed, I think Adams is an individual
instance. But because faculties in the early modern era used to exclude
either the artes liberales ideal or the research ideal, educational historians should not expect to find many instantiations of institutional artes
liberales accommodations until sufficient “steam” develops. Nonetheless, there was some inherent intellectual “inertia” for an accommodation much further back in history than the nineteenth century, and that
inertia, while not a driving force, is still significant for institutions even
at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
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ences of a complex of three related universities and colleges—Columbia, Chicago, and St. John’s. Although he analyzes them quite
sympathetically and sensitively, he nevertheless regards them as
unsuccessful accommodations—not because their programs
foundered, but because their models failed to spread widely, and
when they did spread, they tended not to persist.
Let me take Chicago as my example in this regard, and discuss
the opinions of two key figures in its relation to core texts and liberal arts: Richard McKeon and Leo Strauss.
Strauss first. To cut very short his very complex analysis of
liberal education: the history of Western culture is the history of
solving the problems of governance in a democracy, ultimately
by creating a democratic aristocracy of citizens educated in their
country’s and culture’s intellectual traditions of political science
and freedom. The current problems of governance involve providing wisdom to guide the technological and dehumanizing influences of modern science and systematic tyranny. The great
books stand as a bulwark in this fight: through them, citizens can
discuss what they should value. For researchers like Strauss, the
historical investigation he outlines is education: “education is in
a sense the subject matter of my teaching and research.” Political
science is the science of liberal education.39
For McKeon, the Chicago approach to general eduction—
which is to say, the university approach—is grounded in disciplines and relates them through broadening and widening arts,
methods, ideas, and even sciences. The innovation at Chicago
was not that professors were to survey ever wider swaths of subjects. Nor was it that a professor was to give courses in highly
developed specialized methods that were then to be applied to
previously unsuspected areas of study. Rather, the innovation was
that, to broaden the context in faculty discussions of the so-called
humanities, “the methods employed and developed were the lib39. This admittedly truncated summary is derived from “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 9-25, and “What Is Liberal Education?”, ibid., 1-8.
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eral arts.” Those discussions, using different liberal arts, were
necessarily interdisciplinary. In other words, they related one liberal art to another, or one formulation of a discipline to another,
via the liberal arts. For McKeon, general education implied purposeful interdisciplinary attempt to unify the fractured humanistic
subjects and departments through methodical (which is to say,
artful) inquiry—even when disciplines disagreed on what was
said about their subjects.40 The point of McKeon’s discussion of
the Chicago new college was that the design of the college, implied by Hutchins’s stated design of the general education he outlined in the Higher Education in America, was to transform
graduate schools and the organization of their disciplines, even
their research, through general education.41 In these ways, McKeon’s education orders a free character, but the ordering is to
knowledge, not to wisdom, or prudence, or even citizenship. In
both cases, the liberal-free ideal was accommodated to the artes
liberales ideal in that the liberal arts were being used to invigorate research and curricula, not the other way around.
The varieties of Chicago curricula and programs, the conceptions of liberal education that arose out of the different divisions, and the faculty who met there and migrated elsewhere
created a pluralism of ideas about liberal-arts education through
great books or core texts. These different visions have generated
a plethora of liberal-arts developments in institutions around
the world. To point to just a few: Shimer College, Saint Mary’s
College of California, the University of Notre Dame’s Program
of Liberal Studies, Thomas Aquinas College, the University of
Dallas, the Erasmus Institute, the Liberal Arts College of Concordia University in Montreal, the Chinese University of Hong
40. Richard McKeon, “Criticism and the Liberal Arts: The Chicago
School of Criticism” in Profession 1982, ed. Phyllis P. Franklin and
Richard I. Brod, (New York: Modern Language Association, 1982), 2-4.
41. I have argued this more thoroughly, both in a speech given at Marroquín University (see note 44 below), and in a speech delivered in the Public Lecture Series at Shimer College: “Re-thinking Universities and
Hutchins: Faculty and Student Resistance to Core Text Curricula,” which
can be found on the web at http://j.mp/j-scott-lee-at-schimer-college.
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Kong, and Boya College of Sun-Yatsen University are all of
them in some way closely or distantly intellectually, educationally, and personally related to the three institutions mentioned
above. All of these institutions have had self-reflective faculty
who have published materials on some aspect of liberal-arts education. One of them, The University of Dallas, developed a
great books program in literature unrelated to Chicago/Columbia/St. John’s, and then welcomed Straussians to teach in their
core. All of them have different configurations of curricula, different internal organizations, different purposes for a baccalaureate, and different relations between general education and
research.42 The accommodationist ideal has, in fact, stimulated
42. Prior to arriving at Chicago, McKeon and Mortimer Adler were involved together at Columbia with the professors who developed the Contemporary Civilization core sequence and, later, the Literature-Humanities
core sequence. Ultimately, each of these sequences replaced the departmental offerings of general education courses that, in the early twentieth
century, had preceded the requirements for graduation from Columbia.
To this day, Columbia offers a bachelor’s degree without a major. Scott
Buchanan was involved in adult education spin-offs of Columbia in New
York City before he and Hutchins came to Chicago to develop liberal
education programs. Saint John’s College developed, partly, out of this
complex of institutions and personalities. St. John’s curriculum entirely
eschewed the departmental-disciplinary basis of the Chicago program,
while it retained the liberal arts, and it explicitly identified its program
with the great books and authors of the Western world. In 1953, Notre
Dame, in large part through the work of Otto Byrd, whose teachers included Adler, McKeon, and Etienne Gilson (Otto Byrd, My Life as A
Great Bookie, [San Francisco : Ignatius Press, 1991], 46 ff. and 66ff.)
organized a three-year major called the Program of Liberal Studies on
the basis of disciplinary courses that stretch across all the fields found
at Chicago; but Notre Dame retained the idea of interdisciplinary reading
seminars that characterized St. John’s program. A 1941 article by Adler,
delivered to the American Catholic Philosophical Association’s Western
Division, on “The Order of Learning” (in The Moraga Quarterly [Autumn 1941]: 3-25) sparked at first a short-lived attempt (1943-44) and
then the enduring establishment of classics-based liberal-arts education
programs at Saint Mary’s College of California; this ultimately resulted
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the invention of institutions and innovative programs that are
enormously different. Rhodes College’s “Search” courses (formerly “Man” courses) and Yale University’s Directed Studies
Program illustrate innovations not depending on personal conin a St. John’s-like program for a major, alongside a four-semester great
books program taken by those who majored in a discipline. (See What
Is It To Educate Liberally? Essays by Faculty and Friends of St. Mary’s
College [St. Mary’s College: Office of the President, 1996], 1-28).
Though modified, both programs are still running. Shimer College
adopted one version of the Chicago-Hutchins, or “new college,” curriculum, but it has no departments and, for the baccalaureate, only four general concentrations, including one in science; it has carefully staged
integrative courses and requirements in every year of its curriculum.
Straussians graduated from Chicago and went, in particular, to the
University of Dallas. There, in conjunction with literary specialists who
formed a core sequence of genre studies unrelated to political science
that was conceived by Louise and Donald Cowan (who were in turn influenced by southern critics at Vanderbilt), the university faculty formed
a disciplinary core leading to majors that had no interdisciplinary courses
but was founded on great books. This new curriculum transformed the
education at that institution. The University of Dallas founded the only
graduate program explicitly using the Western Great Books, which offers
three PhDs in political science, philosophy, and literature. Its graduates
not only have staffed institutions across America, but also have helped
to re-organize the New England Political Association so that there is a
“core text/political philosophy” section of the Association’s annual meeting that contributes more than a third of the papers at the meeting.
Meanwhile, at Columbia, William Theodore deBary rejected Adler’s
and Hutchin’s contention that great books education had to consist only
of books from the Western tradition. For over fifty years, and continuing
to this day, deBary has translated or collaborated in the translation of
Chinese texts, and has argued for the inclusion of these texts in some
courses of the Columbia core. Although his work took place during the
period when China has risen to threaten the U.S. while at the same time
destroying its own cultural traditions in the Great Leap Forward and the
Cultural Revolution, deBary’s work has no tinge of cultural superiority
about it, for it is not rooted in Greek education or Enlightenment political
philosophy as is Strauss’s. In so far as he is concerned with the core program at Columbia, deBary wishes to “liberate the powers of the indi-
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tact with the complex of institutions above, but emerging rather
from an awareness of problems and solutions in general education.43
vidual by disciplining them” (Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 4).
His work is part of a larger effort by the University Committee on Asia
and the Middle East to incorporate Chinese, Indian, and Islamic texts
into the core, as well as to develop sophisticated research programs. St.
John’s, motivated by its own experience in teaching great works, has
also developed at its Santa Fe campus a masters degree in Eastern Classics, reading and discussing Indian and Chinese texts. In 1978, Frederick
Kranz, a graduate of Columbia, along with Harvey Shulman and Geoff
Fidler, establish a three-year liberal-arts baccalaureate college founded
on the Western great books tradition at Concordia University in Montreal. In the Far East, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, under the
direction of Cheung Chan Fai and Mei Yee Leung, recently developed
a two-course sequence in the humanities and sciences based on great
texts of the West and East, which owes part of its development both to
Chicago and to Columbia. This program provides a selection of general
education courses to fulfill the Chinese government’s mandate that
higher education institutions convert from the European, specialist,
three-year baccalaureate to the American, mixed, four-year baccalaureate. This list of institutions shows almost all the related forms and affiliations of the accommodated liberal-arts ideal as it is beginning to spread
from North America into the wider world. And yet this list hardly enumerates the whole network of core text programs found worldwide, nor does
it describe the role of the liberal arts in actually shaping that network.
43.Michael Nelson, ed., Celebrating the Humanities: A Half-Century of
the Search Course at Rhodes College (Nashville: Vanderbilt University
Press, 1996), 3-31, begins with a post-World War I narrative of Charles
Diehl’s attempts to bring liberal education to Southwestern (now Rhodes)
College between the 1920s and 1950s. This program was based in Christian traditions, but with an awareness of the educational innovations at
Columbia, Chicago, and Vanderbilt. Justin Zaremby’s Directed Studies
and the Evolution of American General Education (New Haven: The
Whitney Humanities Center of Yale University, 2006), 32ff., says that
Maynard Mack, educated entirely at Yale, helped to devise and found the
program with Dean William Clyde DeVane. Mack was seeking to solve
the problems of “choice” that had arisen in general education, which were
the cause of the differences between Hutchins and Dewey.
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43
To a large extent, the Association of Core Texts and Courses
(ACTC) is a result of these accommodations and innovations.44
There have been two chief vehicles for ACTC’s growth, both related to the liberal arts. The annual Conference is the first vehicle,
the Liberal Arts Institute, the second. As a pluralist, my goal as
director of ACTC has been to maintain cross-disciplinary, general-education discussions notwithstanding higher education’s
habits of narrow disciplinarity. Part of what is at stake in having
such discussions is fairly obvious: faculty members get exposed
to ways of thought about their own disciplines that they will
44. A precursor to this paper was delivered as a speech entitled “Accommodating the Core Texts Tradition of Liberal Arts in Today’s Universities: History, ACTC, and Marroquín—An International Phenomenon,”
to the faculty of Marroquín University in Guatemala, in September of
2012. At this point in the text, the speech noted that “the Association
for Core Texts and Courses was co-founded by Stephen Zelnick and
myself in 1995 in order to bring together programs that used common
readings, taught in common courses, by shared faculty. The idea was
originally Zelnick’s, who was Director of Temple University’s Intellectual Heritage Program—a two course sequence of texts from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities stretching from ancient to
modern times required of every Temple undergraduate. He had discovered that the wide variety of professional associations at the time did
not really address educational issues of these kinds of programs. As the
organization grew, it encouraged faculty and institutions to develop and
use their own core text programs in their own fashion for their own institutional missions. . . .
After the first organizing conference, under my direction, ACTC
conferences took on the following structure: originally, paper proposals
were organized into panels over two days with each session exclusively
devoted to one of four categories: Interdisciplinary Questions, Science,
Social Science, or the Arts & Humanities, accordingly characterized by
texts, problems, or disciplines discussed—but not by faculty presenters.
That is, if you were a humanist and wished to address Newton’s Principia, that was fine. After about seven years, the membership voiced a
desire to have panels of the four categories appear in each session. Generally, this movement by the membership was an effort to allow conferees to attend the fields, perhaps the disciplines, which they were most
comfortable with.”
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rarely encounter at disciplinary conferences. Another part of what
is at stake is a little more subtle, though it can be found in almost
all the works I have discussed. Many core texts serve a dual role
in intellectual history: on the one hand, they help to found or articulate a discipline; on the other hand, their ideas, deep-seated
attitudes, or basic techniques migrate across disciplines. This is
true in regard both to Eastern and Western texts. So, for both of
these reasons, the determination to keep discussing great texts at
ACTC conferences plays an essential role in maintaining the liberal-arts orientation of the organization.
ACTC does not have a list of canonical texts that must be addressed in papers read at its conferences, though the “usual suspects” among ancient and modern authors frequently appear on
its panel sessions. There is an insistence that every paper address
a core text for at least three quarters of a page in a five-page
paper.45 The treatment of the text is up to the conferee. But what
is most important is whether a given text within a proposal, or a
set of texts within a collection of proposals, will spark an exchange of ideas about the ideas themselves, and about the programs, the texts, the teaching, or other matters of liberal-arts
concern. This is a matter of perception, not a matter of doctrine,
established argument, or disciplinary governance. It is frankly remarkable how many panels actually cohere quite well using texts
as the starting point for potential inquiry and discussion—
whether the panels are disciplinary or interdisciplinary in focus.
ACTC is filled with accomplished scholars and teachers, but
it exists to promote conversations about texts among faculty
members across institutions, programs, and disciplines. Here we
enter a fertile field deeply furrowed by a distinction Bruce Kimball discusses at the beginning of Orators and Philosophers: the
distinction between ratio and oratio. Disciplinary conferences
45. ACTC has published to date ten selected, peer-reviewed proceedings. Seven more are in various states of pre-publication. It also helped
to support the publication of Bruce Kimball’s The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Documentary History (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of
America, 2010), which made selections of core texts in the tradition
available to a wider public.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LEE
45
exist to offer extended versions of the ratio of a discipline—long
papers and complex panel sessions marked by highly specialized
arguments, and offering little actual time for serious questioning
and discussion. ACTC’s conferences exist for a quite different
reason. The first sentence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is, “Rhetoric is
the counterpart of dialectic.” The Greek word translated here as
“counterpart” is antistrophē—as in the return dance of the chorus
that leads to their exit from the stage. This, of course, makes dialectic into the strophe, and this has important implications for
the relation of these two verbal arts. First, one needs to know
which direction one is headed in. This is not always easy to figure
out, given the nature of language and the closeness of the two
arts. Because the intention of the conferences is to produce serious discussion around the seminar table, the brevity of the papers
leaves the direction of the conversation open. Second, even if a
presenter’s argument is either mainly rhetorical or mainly dialectical, the ensuing conversation will likely lead, at least, to reflections on what the argument would look like from the viewpoint
of the other art. Since there is no list of canonical works and no
standard set of disciplinary preconceptions that contain conversations within pre-set boundaries, ACTC presenters are asked at
least to consider a rationale for why their text should be considered a world classic or a text of major cultural significance. If
this defense were being made to a disciplinary audience, it might
well be entirely dialectical, since the audience already agrees on
the basic outlines of what belongs within the discipline’s boundaries. But because the audience at ACTC’s conferences are interdisciplinary, such defenses must be at least partly rhetorical,
insofar as it is aimed at persuading listeners from many disciplines to consider a text for inclusion in a liberal-arts program.
Even here, however, such a defense would become dialectical if
it focuses on what the liberal arts, a discipline, a text, or an idea
contributes to our understanding of education.
At the close of Orators and Philosophers, Kimball makes a
well pointed observation: In the academy “there is rarely a recognition that the means to accomplish the resuscitation of the community of learning lie in elevating and emphasizing the study of
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expression, rhetoric, and the textual tradition of the community.
Yet the means are self-evident. A community is, after all, a group
of people who talk to each other and do it well. This view of community was dear to Socrates, no less than to Cicero.”46 This is
what ACTC promotes: the opportunity for faculty members,
through the liberal arts and its traditions across all disciplines, to
co-operate in discussing, planning, and implementing general-education curricula. It is very much interested in oratio, in the expression of thought, communicated to others, that concerns itself
with the available resources of intellectual traditions across disciplines and cultures, and with the invention of educational programs that transmit the arts of absorbing and using those
resources. Its continuing mission is to join with all those who share
these aims to promote the invention, enrichment, and development
of more core text, liberal-arts programs in universities and colleges
of the future.
46. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 240.
�47
Definition and Diairesis
in Plato and Aristotle
Jon Lenkowski
The understanding of the essential definition that has come down
to us in modern times is traceable to Aristotle’s account of horismos in Book II of the Posterior Analytics. That is, we understand,
as Aristotle did, that by defining something, we “capture” it in
such a way that the definition completely “encloses” what is defined and delimits it from other things.
But common opinion—everyday understanding—makes a
much bolder claim, namely, that we only know something when
we have defined it and that, correspondingly, to define something
is to specify its nature, its essence, its whatness—to say, in other
words, what it is. Is this claim legitimate?
We know this question, “What is something?” to be peculiar
to Socrates; in fact we call it the Socratic question. To ask my
question about the legitimacy of common opinion’s claim, then,
in a somewhat different way: Was Socrates, in asking just this
very specific question, looking for a definition? Does the question “What is something?” seek a definition? And, conversely,
does definition give us the “what is” of something, the “what is”
of the thing defined?
In Book II of the Posterior Analytics Aristotle says, “definition is thought to be [italics mine] of the ‘what is’.” (“Horismos
tou ti estin einai dokei.” [90b4]). And again: “Since definition is
said to be an account of the ‘what is’. . . .” (“Horismos d’epeidē
Jon Lenkowski is a tutor emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
This essay was presented as a lecture at St. John’s College and elsewhere. The author is especially indebted to Seth Benardete, Stewart
Umphrey, Peter Widulski, and Robert Williamson who were kind
enough to read one or another version of the essay over the years and
offer helpful advice.
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legetai einai logos tou ti esti. . . ” [93b29]. Italics in translation
from the Greek are the author’s.) But if definition is not only
thought to give the “what is” of something, but also really does
give it, then there ought to be no difficulty at all in answering the
“what is” question. Yet finding an adequate answer to this question
particularly is just what the dialogues present as the most difficult
of tasks. And this may indicate that a “definition” is not, after all,
what the question is asking for.
What exactly is it that definition attempts and what does it
actually accomplish? What exactly is it that definition gains for
us? What exactly is it that we do when we “define” something?
Precisely what is it that we know (or think we know) when we
possess the definition of something? An examination of this cluster of questions ought to show that “definition” must fail to meet
whatever demand the “what is” question is making upon us.
A horismos is the result of a horizein, a “bounding” or limiting. A horismos is thus that within which the defined is contained;
it is the outline of the thing. But in so limiting, the horismos “delimits,” or sets off, the defined from other things. Thus it is that
horismos is translated by “definition” (Latin definitio): a “de-fining” is literally a de-limiting. Does delimiting give us the “what
is”? To answer this question we must first turn from Aristotle to
Plato; for horismos understood as a delimiting derives directly
from the Platonic “division” (diairesis). Diairesis is a dividing
with begins with some rather comprehensive class (genos) and
ends in a horismos, which is also a class, though a very limited
one. Sophist 219a-221c provides an example of such a division:
Here Theaetetus and the Eleatic Stranger are preparing to hunt
down the sophist, to discover what the sophist is. The Stranger
has a “method” for the hunt (namely, division), but he thinks that,
before hunting something as difficult as the sophist (they have
him only in name at the outset [218c]), they ought to practice this
method by first hunting something “easier”; and he proposes “the
angler” as their practice quarry. Fig. 1 is a schematic presentation
of the steps that hunt and capture the angler by division.
As the scheme shows, it takes nine divisions to capture the
quarry. It should also be noticed that in the fourth division there is
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49
Art (Techne)
1
Productive
Acquisitive
2
By Exchange
By Capture or
Coercion
3
(Openly)
Disputation/Fighting
(In secret)
Hunting
4
Of Lifeless
Things
Of Living Things
(specifically
animals)
5
Of Land
Animals
Of Fluid
Animals
6
Of Winged Animals
(Fowling)
Of Water-bound
Animals (Fishing)
7
By Enclosures
By Striking
8
At Night
(Fire-hunting)
Daytime
(Barbhunting)
9
With Spears: Proceeding
Downward from Above
(Tridentry)
Fig. 1: Division of the Angler
With Hooks: Proceeding
Upward from Below
(Angling)
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an abrupt shift from procedure to object sought, and that in the
seventh division there is an abrupt shift back to procedure.
Should we be troubled by the fact that no justification at all is
given for these two shifts? There may indeed be other peculiarities about this and the other examples of presented by the dialogues. We will return to some of these peculiarities in a short
while.
It is the diairesis that progressively tightens the enclosure;
the horismos is the final enclosure, the enclosure brought to its
tightest possible state—this being determined both by the starting
point and by the manner in which the division was executed.
Four dialogues give accounts of diairesis: 1. Phaedrus 264e266b; 2. Sophist 219a-221c (id. 221d, ff. and 264c ff.); 3. Statesman 258b, ff.; 4. Philebus 16c-17a. Sophist and Statesman
provide by far the lengthiest illustrations, but Phaedrus and
Philebus give the most succinct generalized accounts.1 There are,
in the dialogues, two prescriptions for division: 1. to divide according to eide, according to the “natural joints” (kat’arthra), try1. There are numerous studies of diaresis. The following have been consulted in writing this essay: A.C.Lloyd, “Plato’s Description of Division” in Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics, ed. R.E.Allen (New York:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 219-230. Seth Benardete, “Plato
Sophist 223bl-7” in Phronesis 5 (1960): 129-139. Seth Benardete,
“Eidos and Diaeresis in Plato’s Statesman” in Philologus 107: 3/4
(1963) 193-226. Jakob Klein, “On Precision” in Lectures and Essays,
ed. Robert Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis: St. John’s
College Press, 1985), 289-308. Jakob Klein, Plato’s Trilogy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1977), Parts 2 and 4. Julius Stenzel, Studien zur Entwicklung der platonischen Dialektik (Leipzig: Teubner,
1931), especially ch. 4-8. Julius Stenzel, Zahl und Gestalt bei Platon
und Aristoteles (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959),
especially ch. 2-4, 6. J. B. Skemp, Plato’s Statesman (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), 66-82. G.E.R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 148-161. Francis M.
Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1957), 184-187. Reginald Hackforth, Plato’s Phaedrus (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, n.d.), 131-137. Reginald Hackforth, Plato’s Examination
of Pleasure (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970, repr.) 20-24.
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51
ing not to break any part (Phaedrus 265e1-3); 2. to cut “through
the middle” (dia meson), which is the safest way, and the way
more likely to find ideai (Statesman 262b6-7, e3; 265a4-5).
In the Prior Analytics (46a-b) and in the Posterior Analytics
(91b ff.), Aristotle presents an objection to the use of diairesis in
demonstration, on the grounds that diairesis does not give the ti
ēn einai of something, but really gives two exclusive alternatives
(that is, an exclusive disjunction); those who use it as a method
of proof, however, do not treat this as a disjunction but, discarding one side of the division, they really assume already what they
think they are in the process of proving. But, though he criticizes
diairesis as a method of proof or demonstration, he nevertheless
allows that it can be useful in reaching a horismos—as long as
the division is made, at each stage, into opposites which have no
intermediates (an ēi antikeimena hōn mē esti metaxu [Posterior
Analytics 97a21-22]), for this would be the only way to assure
the exhaustion of the genus. The divisions as actually carried out
by example in the dialogues, however, do not remain true to these
prescriptions. This not only suggests a disparity between the prescriptions as “ideals” and the concrete application of this
“method,” but, even more important, it calls into question the
prescriptions themselves.2
As for Phaedrus’s prescriptions, where are the “natural
joints”? Would it be possible to determine these with any certainty? Or would such a determination of these “natural joints”
be itself already a dividing? Would it be itself already having performed the division? And then what would be the prescription
for this division? To begin with some genus and divide it into its
“natural joints” would, moreover, seem to presuppose a prior
knowledge of the genus and of its internal differentiation. But
then what would the division itself accomplish?
2. See Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy, 149-150. On the impreciseness of
the divisions in the Statesman, see Skemp, Plato’s Statesman, 71-72
and Benardete, “Eidos and Diaeresis in Plato’s Statesman,” 196 ff. On
the impreciseness of the division in the Sophist, see Benardete, “Plato
Sophist 223bl-7.” On the impreciseness of diairesis in general, see
Klein, “On precision,” 295-302.
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As for Statesman’s prescription, how could you ever be certain that you had “cut through the middle”? At Sophist 220a6-8,
for example, is the division of animal into land-animal and fluidanimal (neustikon) made “through the middle” of animal? How
indeed could we be sure that we had cut through the middle? Can
we be certain that such a cut would not be into a “greater” and a
“lesser”? How could we know where the “middle” is? There are
innumerable ways of dividing the class animal into two. What
bearings do we have for determining which—if any—of these
cuts through the middle? Of all the possible ways of dividing animal into two, what tells us to divide according to the particular
division between land-animal and fluid-animal? Would this division even be possible, unless we were directed to do so by the
very object of our search—that is, unless our procedure were
guided already from the outset by the object we are seeking? But
if we already know this, then what does the division accomplish?
Furthermore—supposing one could do it—why should division
cut through the middle in the first place? Is it so certain that this
is the most advisable and the safest procedure?
As for Aristotle’s prescription, how could we be certain that
we had made an exhaustive and exclusive dichotomy at each step
in the division? In order to do this, wouldn’t we have to know already the genus and its inner differentiation? And then what
would the division accomplish?
In the Sophist something curious happens. In hunting down
the sophist, the initial division had been made in terms of hunting—and yet this category comes to be abandoned completely,
for the sophist comes to be understood ultimately in terms of
image-making (eikastikē), and not at all in terms of hunting. In
the Statesman too, one of the divisions is made in terms of nurturing herds—yet this is abandoned, and the statesman comes to
be understood in terms of weaving. But why doesn’t where we
end up reflect where we began? What has happened to the rigor
of method here? Why are we being led so unambiguously to see
3. Skemp, Plato’s Statesman, 67 ff., claims (correctly, I believe) that
Statesman’s account of diairesis is really the Platonic criticism of it as
a “method.” Klein, “On Precision,” 301-302, suggests that the excesses
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | LENKOWSKI
53
the defects in this “method” called diairesis?3
All of these questions remain unanswered, both in the prescriptive and in the illustrative accounts of diairesis. This makes
the procedure questionable, even suspect. And it makes us ask
exactly what it is that diairesis does do. And if this “ procedure”
starts to look like a spurious one, then we have to ask why it is
put forth in the dialogues at all.
In an attempt to answer this question, let me rehearse what
happens in the early divisions made by the Stranger and Theaetetus in the Sophist.
In tracking the sophist-as-salesman (223b9-224e5), the
sophist suddenly shows up as a “maker of soul-goods” (224d7),
thereby collapsing the original distinction (219a8-c9) between
acquisition and making—between those arts which gather and
those which make.4 Earlier, in tracking the sophist-as-hunter
(221c5-223b7), the sophist suddenly shows up as a “hunter-forpay” (222d7), whereby he has slid over into the class of salesman,
from which hunting had been originally distinguished. Thus the
sophist constantly switches classes, indicating that the divisions
made by this so-called “method” were not precisely made.
In thus sliding over into the class of salesman, moreover, he
is not forced completely out of the class of hunting; he is now in
two classes previously distinguished as exclusive of one another,
but is not completely either of them. The Stranger says that the
sophist’s art is a “many-sided” one (223cl-2). And within the selling art itself, he turns up in three distinct classes: 1. as a merchandiser of soul-goods; 2. as a retailer of soul-goods made by
others; and 3. as a retailer of soul-goods made by himself
(224d11-e3). The sophist subsequently shows up in three more
divisions, in terms of 1. the art of contesting or disputing (agōnistikē [225a-226a]), 2. the art of discriminating or distinguishing
(diakritikē [226c-231b]), and 3. the art of image-making (eikastikē
and deficiencies of diairesis in Statesman are possibly correctible by
appeal to and reliance on paradeigmata, “examples.” Cf. Benardete,
“Eidos and Diaeresis,” 194 ff.
4. Cf. the schematic presentation in Fig. 1 above.
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[235b ff.]), and he is accordingly given three more definitions,
none of which encloses him fully.
From the outset, the Stranger and Theaetetus are in search of
the sophist, though they don’t even know what kind of being he is.
It turns out, of course, that he is many kinds—but this they only
come to learn during their search. At the very beginning (218b8
ff.) they had the sophist in name only—that is, he was contentless.
This would suggest that the “what” of the sophist is the product of
the method used in pursuing him. Is it possible that what he is is
generated by the Stranger’s procedure?5 Thus at 221c4-5 the
Stranger is fully confident that the very same procedure used in
defining the angler is applicable to the pursuit of the sophist as
well.6 But how can he be so sure of this in advance—unless he
holds the grand belief that his method is an absolutely comprehensive and universal one, applicable to, and yet completely independent of, every possible subject matter?
Such a claim is a rather extraordinary one. It is also a claim to
which we are all too easily drawn. The immediate attraction it holds
for us is natural enough, for it is a claim that appears to us to rescue
us from our own finitude—a claim that holds out to us the promise
of omniscience. Everything is knowable; we have only to take
whatever happens to come along and plug it into our “method,”
our “operation,” our “machine.” To possess this method is to possess a magical shortcut that relieves us of the tiresome task of having to make judgments, in each instance, about what mode of
investigation is most suitable to the object in question. It is the denial that differences among objects matter at all; and it is, correlatively, the claim that knowledge is utterly uniform, that all things
whatsoever are knowable in exactly the same way. It is a magical
shortcut that allows us to forget such troublesome questions and
5. See Philebus 16d1 ff. Socrates begins his account of diairesis by saying: “aei mian idean peri pantos hekastotē themenous zētein—heurēsein gar enousan” (“we must always suppose that there is for
everything one idea and must look for it—for we will find it”). What
guarantees its being there? Does the procedure itself guarantee this?
6. See Benardete’s account of this in “Plato Sophist 223bl-7,” passim.
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55
gives us a certain command over anything and everything—a sort
of technologization of knowledge. It appeals to a certain hubris
within us. In a rather different context of speaking, it might be said
that it is the temptation to sin—that it appeals to a lust of the spirit,
a lust for knowledge which is at once a lust for power.
To the extent, then, that diairesis is being put forward as such
a claim to universal method, its presentation in the dialogues could
be viewed as an attempt to exhibit the defects of any such pretension to a “method” that is independent of, and yet applicable to,
every possible subject matter. This would go some distance toward
explaining why our attention is being continually drawn to ways
in which the diairesis fails.
But this is only one side of the story. It has to be true to say
that it is the Stranger’s procedure that generates the “what” of the
sophist, for the particular classes he shows up in—the particular
designations he takes on—are the results of the ways in which the
Stranger carries out the divisions. But this can’t be the whole truth,
because the sophist is continually collapsing the class-distinctions
they make, and he is constantly defying their attempt to enclose
him in a single horismos. So, in some important sense, what the
sophist is, is independent of their activity upon him. From this point
of view it could still be said that the procedure produces the “what,”
but only in the sense that, as a result of it, the sophist now for the
first time explicitly acquires determinations he has always had implicitly. Correlatively, it would mean that we are now for the first
time making explicit, as a series of articulate determinations of the
object, our own pre-thematic familiarity with that object. And this
pre-thematic familiarity is something we must have—else we could
never have made this an object of our interest and investigation in
the first place. If we continue to think in this direction, we might
be inclined to revise somewhat our view of what diairesis is supposed to accomplish: Perhaps it’s not (or not completely) the grand
pretension to a universal method that generates its own objects, but
rather a procedure of explication that articulates explicitly what we
already—however dimly—“know.” It might be called a procedure
of “unfolding”—an explicit unfolding of what we already “know”
about the object in a quite pre-thematic way.
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This view of diairesis is supported by a further consideration:
The first division in the Sophist begins with the entire class of art
(technē [219a]). The first division in the Statesman starts one step
higher than that, namely, with the entire class of knowledge (epistemē [258e]). Why, in each case, does the dividing begin just
here? That is, what determines the initial comprehensive class
from which the dividing will take its start—unless it is that we
already know in some sense the object of our search, and unless
this object itself guides the division which is supposed to discover
it? Why, in the pursuit of the sophist, is the sophist placed at the
outset into the limited—albeit large—class of technē—unless this
were so? If diairesis were to be genuinely a process of discovery,
wouldn’t it be necessary for it to begin, not with technē, but with
the most comprehensive class—“the All” (to pan) or “Being” (to
on)? But, after all, no diairesis begins in that way; it is in fact
doubtful that from such a beginning any dividing could ever
begin.7 How could one begin to divide to on or to pan? But even
if it could be done, the very first step one would take from that
beginning would surely betray the guidance given already beforehand by the object sought.
Does diairesis, understood in this way, give us the “what is”
of the sophist? Certainly not in the sense of acquiring for us
something we didn’t have before. Here the procedure called “division” does not produce the “what is”; rather it is thoroughly
guided and directed, both at the very outset and at every single
step of the way, by a knowledge of the “what is” that we already
do—and must—possess. But then the activity of dividing until
one reaches a “definition” can no longer have any significance
as a more or less technical “method” of inquiry designed to give
us new information, to make us knowers where we were not
knowers before. But isn’t this why we always held definition in
such high regard?
7. On the impossibility of doing this, see Klein, “On Precision,” 297298. Aristotle gives the reason in Posterior Analytics II, 92b14: “ou gar
genos to on” (“for being is not a genus.”) Helpful on this point is Martin
Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1963), 3.
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There is something more. At 241b9-c4 the Stranger and
Theaetetus are wondering why they’re having such difficulty capturing their quarry and are now facing up to the possibility that
the “what” of the sophist might be infinite (aperantōn [241c1]).
If the sophist is infinite, then he is indifferently anything. But this
is at odds with how the activity of dividing operates upon him:
the diairesis cannot help but articulate him into specific, de-limited classes; the determinations he takes on are de-limitations,
de-finitions. In other words, the division is imposing limits on a
being whose own nature is to be unlimited. This explains why
the Stranger and Theaetetus are baffled at 241b9-c4: whatever
they say about the sophist can never be wholly false, and yet it
must always fail to enclose him completely. So the “what is” of
something and the procedure that is supposed to reveal it look
incommensurate. And wouldn’t this be the case with any object
one sets out to define? That is, any such object first comes to
sight as some unity—though with certain determinations, a certain number of them. But to speak of the object in terms of just
one or another of these determinations—as diairesis does—limits
the object to just that—delimiting it from those other determinations. It also fails to tell us precisely how the various determinations are related to one another in the object—and really related
in the very being of the object itself, rather than related by our
logical scheme. Even an exhaustive list of these determinations,
by the way, does the very same thing: it must remain forever
merely a list, merely a piecemeal representation of what first
came to sight as a unitary “what.”
So here we seem to be left with the possibility that even if
diairesis were a means of articulation, guided beforehand by the
object sought, even then it would always be essentially defective;
for its piecemeal, limited result would always be disproportionate
with its object.
Can we not, then, rehabilitate diairesis? We can, but only by
moving away from the view that it is intended to be a formal technique which must be learned and practiced according to a set of
rules, a formal technique (not unlike a logical organon) that we
ought to employ in order to actually acquire knowledge. Indeed
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such “rules”—the “prescriptions” given in the dialogues and by
Aristotle—look inexact, spurious, unlearnable, impossible to follow with any sort of precision. Could this be why our attention
is being constantly drawn to arbitrary moves, to gaps, breakdowns and failures in the actual practice of diairesis? That the
dialogues lead us in this way, then, could very well mean that
they are actually attempting to warn us, to show us that if diairesis is understood to be such a formal technique that is both learnable and teachable, that in and of itself transforms us into
knowers, then it is fools’ gold.
What, then, is diairesis? Here it seems to me that, of the four
accounts provided by the dialogues, that given at Phaedrus 265d266 b is the most helpful.8 Socrates speaks there of a pair of activities, “bringing together” and “dividing” (sunagōgē and
diairesis [266b5]), characterized in the following way: 1. “Bringing a scattered many into a single idea, seeing it all together [italics mine], that, defining, one might make clear each thing he
wishes to teach about” (eis mian te idean sunorōnta agein ta pollachē diesparmena, hin hekaston horizomenos dēlon poiēi, peri
hou anaei didaskein ethelēi); 2. “Dividing [these ‘ones’] once
again, according to eidē, according to natural joints” (to palin
kat’ eidē dunasthai temnein, kat’ arthra [265el-2]).
What, then, are these two related procedures? There is a passage in Book VII of the Republic which, I believe, suggests an
answer to this question:
In the context of a discussion of that higher education which
would produce philosopher-kings, calculation (logistikē, logis8. To center on the Phaedrus as the key account depends, of course, on
the interpretation that follows. It is not a position taken by all commentators. I have no quarrel with those whose particular interests lead them
to emphasize one of the other accounts. A.C. Lloyd, for instance, in
“Plato’s Description of Division”, centers on the Philebus because he
thinks he can explain, by appealing to the geometrical practice of dividing a continuous line, why the account in the Philebus is given in
terms of the opposition between the One and the Infinite. I would only
quarrel with those who view diairesis as a bona fide logical-zetetic
organon along the lines indicated above.
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mos)—that art which ostensibly operates on number—is introduced as something that leads directly to intellection and—since
it would be the art of “turning the soul around” (psuchēs periagōgē [521c6])—as something that prepares one for philosophy. But calculation is said not to appear at first as an “art” at all,
but rather as a “trivial” or “lowly” thing (phaulon [522c4]) that
simply distinguishes the “one” and the “two” (522c5 and 524b5).
More particularly it is said that calculation is originally “summoned” (parakalein), called into operation, along with noēsis
and dianoia, by the presence of contradictory sensations (524ab). This explains why calculation is called something “trivial” or
“lowly”: it is the original, most rudimentary, appearance of
human thinking. In other words, what shows up at a higher level
as an “art” is really present already as a most rudimentary feature
of human thought, viz., the activity of bringing together, comparing and distinguishing. Calculation brings together and distinguishes, brings together and separates; the logistical “arts” of
addition and subtraction are higher-level expressions of these utterly natural activities of thought and have their origins in them.9
I would I suggest, then, that the two related “procedures” of
sunagōgē and diairesis are originarily “summoned” in just the
same way, and that the presentation of them in the Phaedrus is
essentially and primarily an account of this originary summoning.
Sunagōgē and diairesis are, I suggest, the account of what we in
fact do—what thinking does—in thematizing something, in isolating it and making it thematic. That is, these “procedures” are
simply ways of talking about what we’ve already done—what
our understanding does—automatically, simply by nature, to get
its bearings, namely, 1. recognize the “sameness” of a many, and
2. recognize the differences inherent in that sameness. The first
moment is a “seeing all together”(the word is sunorōnta)—that
9. This relationship between theoretical acts and conceptual objects, on
the one hand, and certain features of pre-theoretical, pre-conceptual experience, on the other hand, has been studied and worked out extensively by Edmund Husserl. See especially his Erfahrung und Urteil
(Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1972) and Formale und Transzendentale Logik (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1929).
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is, the recognizing of a single “looks” (idea); the second moment
is a “dividing according to eidē, according to the ‘natural
joints’”—that is, the recognizing of essential differences within
that single “looks.” The first moment is said to “bring a many
into a one”, to “see it all together”, to “make it clear”, to “define”
it. Here the “defining” has to mean “de-fining” it from other such
single “looks.” It de-fines it, isolates it, constitutes it as a single
determinate “whole.” The second moment differentiates this single whole internally. The sunagōge is probably not simply reversed in the diairesis. The differences ignored or sublated in
bringing together the many into a one are probably not those “natural joints” at which the diairetic divisions are subsequently
made—which would mean that the two activities do not correspond exactly. That is, the sunagōge might very well be understood to bring the infinitely many particulars into a unitary whole;
but the diairesis must be understood as the differentiation of this
unitary whole into finite eidetic parts. At Phaedrus 238a3 ff., for
instance, it is said of hubris that it is “many-membered and manysorted” (polumeles kai polueides), and that the name of any particular hubris is taken from whatever (sub-)idea predominates.
And wouldn’t this also be true, for example, of virtue as a whole?
The horismos, then, must be understood as a “de-fining,” a
“de-limiting,” an isolating. In the mere recognition of what is to
be defined, moreover, the thing is already isolated. Thus the explicit activity of defining simply duplicates our initial recognition; it doesn’t essentially add anything, but only shows us what
we’ve already done in recognizing the thing. The explicit activity
of defining does not, in any essential way, give us a “what is” as
an answer that we didn’t have before; it only makes our pre-thematic familiarity with the thing for the first time explicit for us.
Furthermore, insofar as a definition only de-limits, it only isolates
something from other things. And that means: it does not tell us
what the thing is “by itself” (kath’auto), in its own innerness—
but isn’t that precisely what the “what is” question asks for?10
10. As Sophist 248-255 shows, the “what is” of any being is, of course,
both kath’ auto and pros heteron at the same time, and is perhaps both
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In still another way “definition” shows itself to fall short of
giving us the “what is” of what is being defined. At Statesman
267c the Stranger states the result of the first division: Statesmanship is said to be the “art of herding human beings” (anthrōponomikē [cf. 266e]). This definition might be said to be a
fine example of further dividing a genus by the addition of a specific difference: here the genus would be nomeutikē—the art of
herding; and the specific difference would be anthrōpōn—of humans specifically. But—apart from the word—is there really such
an art? This “art” has come about (or has been conjured up) simply by combining the two words anthrōpos and nomeutikē—an
easy enough task. But we shouldn’t be fooled by the word. To
make verbal “wholes” by just putting words together does not affect by one jot whether or not there are such wholes really. Actual
wholes cannot be generated by simply combining words to form
verbal “wholes.”
The flip-side of this problem would be the problem of
whether, and to what extent, it is possible to reflect accurately in
an account of a whole, the “wholeness” of that whole. This problem is mentioned very briefly by Aristotle in Metaphysics Z
(1037b12-14; 25-28). Some being (a “this,” a tode ti ) first appears to us as a unity, a whole, and yet its formulation in speech
has parts. The difficulty then is to determine whether the formulational parts correspond to the real parts in the being itself. While
Aristotle seems to treat this matter merely aporetically, and thus
to leave it an open question, the rhetoric of the passage suggests
otherwise.
The “what is” question, as it comes up in the dialogues, always asks about wholes such as virtue, knowledge, and so forth.
And at first glance it may look as though definition in terms of
genus and specific difference solves the problem of grasping a
whole. But it does not reflect the “wholeness” of a whole, for it
only adds the specific difference to the genus. That is, it might
look like an attempt to integrate the comprehensive character of
inseparably, even in thought; it does seem a formidable difficulty to
isolate the kath’auto aspect in speech.
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the genus with its precise manifestation (namely, the specific difference). But the relation of Part to Whole is not one of addition.
Aristotle’s understanding of definition in terms of genus-plusspecific difference (Posterior Analytics B 96b27-97b13) exhibits
unambiguously its roots in diairesis. And even if we were to construe this in a somewhat softer way as an articulation or explication rather than an addition in the literal sense, there would still
remain the problem of exactly how this articulation is related to
the unity, the wholeness, of what is being defined. Definition in
terms of genus plus specific difference does not adequately address this problem of how to reflect the wholeness of a whole in
speech (and perhaps in thought as well); it does, however, reveal
this problem to us in a quite vivid way.
Throughout the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle’s treatment of
horismos is always addressed to particulars: 1. to events and attributes (92a33-96a19); and 2. to beings (96a24 ff.). And to focus
on these as the primary objects of definition accords with common sense: we encounter something for the first time and, because we don’t have a precise understanding of it, we ask what it
is. But to define such a particular would be simply to specify the
class to which it belongs—and this must already presuppose our
understanding of those class-concepts. This would not, in any
case, give us the “what is” of that particular, not in the sense of
giving us that precise understanding that we didn’t previously
have. If we begin by asking it what it is, and then go on to define
it in the way I’ve just described, we have not answered the “what
is” question, but have simply pushed the question back a step;
for, in referring it to a certain class, we’d then have to pose the
very same question to that class-concept.
But what about these class-concepts themselves, as eidetic
wholes? Couldn’t we just as easily give definitions of these?
These are, after all, the “whatnesses” of things—and so the
thought of defining them might seem to hold out the promise of
finally being able to unify definition and the “what is” question.
But what would such a definition look like? Wouldn’t it too have
to refer this eidetic whole to yet others? The definition of eidē
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then, would seem to presuppose yet other eidē as “tools” or “principles” in the procedure of defining. And this means that, through
definition alone, we’d never get the “what is”—not even of these
eidetic wholes.
At the end of the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle addresses
himself to the question of how we know first principles (archai
or prōtai archai), and he shows that knowledge of these comes,
not through definition or demonstration, but only—and in an
originary way—through intellection (nous). The reason, of
course, is that both demonstration and definition have to start
somewhere, need starting points (archai). Or, stated otherwise,
all discursive, dianoetic activity of thought presupposes and rests
on nous, on an original noēsis, since thinking discourses from
something and about something. At 93b23 he had established that
the “ what is”—the ti esti—is itself an archē; and at 92b37-40
he had established that knowledge of the “what is” cannot be acquired through definition. In other words, to define something is
not to answer the “what is” question; rather, the “what is” must
itself be presupposed as an archē by any act of defining. The ability to define as such presupposes these whatnesses, these eidetic
wholes, as its archai—its starting points or first principles.
There is something further. To have defined is to have de-limited and enclosed something in such a way that it is now presented
to us in marked relief. What we are presented with as the result of
definition is what, from the point of view of a “properly” executed
process of division, came to be called the infima species, or, to
use a more Greek expression, the atomic eidos, the “indivisible
looks.” This would be the horismos, the definition, the enclosure
brought to its tightest possible state. Would this be the ti esti, the
“what is”? No. But it would be that of which we could now for
the first time ask this question: What is its “what is”?
This requires some elaboration: Definition does indeed give
us the “what is,” but not in the sense we had anticipated: to arrive,
through definition, at to ti esti—the “what is”—is to arrive, not
at an answer, but at a question. The substantivized form of that
question—to ti esti—should not for an instant lead us to think
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that it has ceased to be a question: to treat the “what is” as a substantive—to ti esti11—means that the question as a question is
being substantivized. The implication of this is far-reaching, for
it means that the “what is” of something is a question, is a problem; and therefore to know the “what is” of something—to know
an eidetic whole—is to know aporetically, to be in possession,
not of an answer, but of a problem.
The result of definition is the ti esti—not as an answer, but
as a question. More forcefully stated: The “what is” question, as
a question, is what stands at the end of the entire activity of defining. It is the proper telos of definition. The ti esti is the archē of
definition in the most profound sense: it is the archē-archōn; it
stands at the beginning of definition as its necessary startingpoint; it shows up as the end-result of definition; and it rules over
and guides the activity of defining throughout, from beginning
to end. This means that to have defined something is not itself an
end, is not to have reached one’s natural goal. To have defined is
to be brought face to face with the “what is” question and, as
such, has been barely a start. Rather than being an end, definition
is merely the condition for a new and quite different beginning:
To define is to provide oneself with the possibility of philosophy.
11. Cf. inter alia Posterior Analytics II, 92a35, 92b39.
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The Stranger as a Socratic Philosopher:
The Socratic Nature of the Stranger’s
Investigation of the Sophist1
Corinne Painter
Much of the secondary literature on Plato’s Sophist considers the
Stranger to be a non-Socratic philosopher, and regards his appearance in the dialogues as a sign that Plato had moved on from his
fascination with Socrates to develop a more “mature” way of philosophizing.2 This essay will argue, on the contrary, that the investigation led by the Stranger in the Sophist demonstrates an
essentially Socratic philosophical stance. In order to do this, I will
consider carefully some dramatic evidence in the Sophist that allows us to notice a philosophical “transformation” in the Stranger.
My consideration focuses upon the Stranger’s rejection of the Parmenidean way of philosophizing followed by his acceptance of the
Socratic way of practicing philosophy. This is revealed most decisively by the Stranger’s willingness to pursue truth and justice at
the expense of overturning the practices of his philosophical training, and, secondarily, by his genuine concern with showing that
Socrates is not guilty of sophistry.
Corinne Painter is a Professor in the Humanities Department at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
1. I would like to thank Joe Sachs for his generous communications with
me about Plato’s Sophist and other Platonic works. His insights have
added greatly to my interpretation and understanding of Plato’s thought.
2. There are far too many accounts to list here; but see, for example, Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Sophist: The Drama of the Original and Image (South
Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999). Just as Rosen argues in his
text, most of the accounts in the literature that treat this issue view the
Stranger as non-Socratic and advance the position that he represents at
least a change, or perhaps even a progression, in Plato’s thinking away
from, for instance, emphasis on the Socratic elenchus, to a more developed, mature philosophical practice that emphasizes dialectic.
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Surprisingly, although there has been almost no discussion
in the literature about the Stranger’s philosophical development
in the course of his examination of the Sophist, it is neither difficult to notice nor unimportant to acknowledge the Stranger’s
philosophical “movement” away from Parmenides’s way of philosophy towards a different way. Indeed, on several occasions,
the Stranger doffs his Parmenidean cloak and dons Socratic clothing, a transformation that converts him into a “true” philosopher,
understood as one who attempts to make images in speech of that
which is authentically compelling—that is, the good—which is
therefore of ethical significance.
It is not incidental to the dialogue that Socrates instigates the
discussion by asking the Stranger to “do the favor” (217c) of accounting for the sophist, nor that the Stranger agrees only at
Socrates’s request, after having previously turned down a similar
request made by Theodorus. This shows that the Stranger is more
concerned with satisfying Socrates’s desire to account for the
sophist than Theodorus’s. And this suggests, in turn, that something
about Socrates’s request is more compelling than Theodorus’s.
What is urgent about Socrates’s request would seem to be his present circumstance, namely, his having been accused of crimes
against the polis that include practicing sophistry. Socrates’s own
life situation gives rise to his concern to account properly for
sophistry and distinguish it from philosophy; it is almost certain
that this personal involvement confers on his request an urgency
that simply is not present in Theodorus’s merely theoretical interest. Importantly, the urgency is an ethical one, inasmuch as it is
one that is “related to what truly and ultimately matters,”3 which
in this case arises from Socrates’s “specific human predicament.”4
Since Parmenides’s “style” of philosophizing “requires a stud3. Adriaan Peperzak, System and History in Philosophy: On the Unity of
Thought and Time, Text and Explanation, Solitude and Dialogue, Rhetoric
and Truth in the Practice of Philosophy and its History, (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1986), 13.
4. Drew Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 176.
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ied indifference to its topics,”5 there are hints to be found as early
as the dialogue’s beginning that the Stranger might be willing to
reject his Parmenidean training in order to do the favor of accounting properly for the sophist. Indeed, if we believe that “indifference
seems to be the only reaction one cannot have to a philosophic
question, if one is aware of it at all,”6 then the Stranger’s willingness to undergo the difficult and complicated investigation of the
sophist only at Socrates’s request indicates that he takes Socrates’s
question to be one that is asked philosophically. For, because
Socrates’s question originates in a desire to know about something
that is at stake in his life, it therefore deserves serious and sustained
philosophical attention and energy.
Nevertheless, the Stranger does not begin his investigation as
Socrates usually does, namely, with an elenchus. This is probably
why very few scholars see a close connection between the Stranger’s
way of philosophizing and Socrates’s way. Except for the emphasis
that the Stranger places on agreement among the interlocutors—
which mirrors Socrates’s insistence on mutual agreement in the
course of dialectical investigations—he initially conducts his investigation after the fashion of his philosophical father, Parmenides, who claims, in marked contrast to Socrates, that the
“philosophic discipline requires purging ourselves of any motive
to care about any one thing more than another.”7 Before he gets to
his sixth attempt to account for the sophist, the Stranger tries to
track the sophist by employing the method of division by kinds,
according to which a given hunting ground must be cut always into
two and only two opposing divisions, until, at last, a long and logically descriptive title of the intended prey results. Prior to his sixth
division, then, the Stranger proceeds as Parmenides taught him: by
proposing further and further opposing, and thus exhaustive, divisions that allow him eventually to uncover the sophist in as many
different guises as there are different starting points. As the
5. Joe Sachs, “What is a What-is Question?” The St. John’s Review 44.1
(1993): 46.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 43.
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Stranger explicitly states, in practicing this logical method there is
no room for caring any more or less for the divisions that are made,
since the method “honors all equally” (227b2), nor is there room
for evaluating the divisions in any “extra-logical sense”—for instance, by an appeal to one’s sense of justice or honor. For, as long
as the divisions are made properly—exhaustively and beginning
from appropriate starting points—the accounts ultimately obtained
will be logically infallible.
With his sixth attempt at finding the sophist, however, the
Stranger employs the method of division in a significantly modified manner, namely, by no longer insisting on pure logic that does
not “care” for its results and does not “trust” the desire to do justice
to the matter under examination. The point of departure for the
sixth division is peculiar in that it begins with what might be called
an “unauthorized division” of expertise into a third subclass, which
goes beyond the authorized two divisions of division by kinds.
Since the sixth account of the sophist is spurred by the Stranger’s
assessment that the first five accounts failed to capture adequately
the sophist’s essence, and since it is impossible to judge the differing accounts critically on the basis of logic alone, the Stranger’s
unauthorized beginning seems to be grounded in his extra-logical
sense that, even though the various accounts hold up to logical
scrutiny, they fail to do true justice to the sophist’s complex nature.
This indicates that the Stranger genuinely cares about keeping the
philosopher and the sophist distinct; for “someone who does not
care about the thing in question cannot see the point of suspending
his prejudices.”8 In this case, the prejudices that need to be suspended are the Stranger’s initial commitment to proceed purely
logically, without any special concern for his divisions, and his
Parmenidean philosophical training.
The Stranger’s decision to go against the rule of his own
method arises from two causes. First, his efforts so far have made
him think that the sophist is so complex and slippery a character
that he evaded the first five attempts to capture him—a judgment,
as we can see, that can be attained only after appealing to an extralogical standard. Second, he genuinely desires to understand how
8. Sachs, 46.
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the philosopher can be misperceived as a sophist, and thus, more
specifically, how it is possible for Socrates to be falsely accused
of being a sophist. Once the Stranger sees that the first five guises
of the sophist do not present engaging images of the philosopher,
and consequently, that they do not address the possibility of confusing the sophist and the philosopher, he is compelled to divide
expertise into an unorthodox third part, so that he can construct an
account that may be sufficient to deal with the apparent proximity
between philosopher and sophist. Put very simply, insofar as the
division of expertise introduced in the sixth account of sophistry,
namely, soul-cleansing refutation (230d-e),9 turns out to be an account of what Socrates does, it provides the necessary link between
Socrates and sophistry that accounts for his being falsely accused
of sophistry. In this way, it provides the Stranger with the opportunity to scrutinize the proposed association between Socrates and
sophistry that seems to be responsible for driving the discussion.
It is at this point in the dialogue that the Stranger gives a critical evaluation of the sixth account that goes beyond revealing his
motivations and intentions, and tells us about the role he plays in
the dialogue. As the three translators of a fine edition of the Sophist
say in the introduction to their translation, the sixth account “curiously reveals the sophist as a cross-examiner of empty sham wisdom and therefore as entangled with the philosophic nature.
Sophist and philosopher appear to be interwoven.”10 This, I think,
compels us to think of Socrates rather than of a sophist, especially
since the Stranger says “he’s afraid to say” that the men he’s described in this way are “sophists” since he does not want “to confer
on them too great an honor” (231a1-3). So I believe, unlike many,
perhaps even most, scholarly commentators, including Rosen, that
the Stranger’s critical assessment of the sixth account points ultimately to his likely desire to want to defend Socrates from the
9. The sixth account of the sophist, like all the others, contains much more
detail than needs to be addressed here. For a helpful discussion see:
Corinne Painter, “In Defense of Socrates,” Epoche 9.2 (2005): 317-333.
10. Plato’s Sophist: The Professor of Wisdom, translated, with introduction and glossary, by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 1996), 10.
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charges of sophistry that have been brought against him. I admit
that this remark only explicitly states that the sixth account does
not accurately describe sophists because the activity it elucidates
is too honorable to be one in which sophists engage. But at the
same time, it at least implicitly points us in the direction of
Socrates, since the activity it describes is characteristic of him.
Hence, the Stranger’s implicit association of Socrates with an
honorable activity, together with his willingness to investigate the
sophist only at Socrates’s request appear to point in the direction
of a desire to defend Socrates against the charges leveled at him.
If we add to this the Stranger’s agreement with Socrates that the
philosopher often appears to be something he is not, including a
sophist (216c4-d5), the inference is even stronger. Moreover, if the
contrary motive were to be put forth—that the Stranger really
wants to prosecute Socrates on behalf of the youth of Athens,
whom he supposedly corrupted—this motive too would reflect a
concern with a matter of great political and ethical import. Thus,
even in this case, the Stranger turns out to be a philosopher in the
following Socratic sense: he understands his philosophical inquiry
into the nature of the sophist to be intimately bound up with a matter of practical, ethical significance.
This conviction can be reinforced in several ways. First, the
Stranger eventually rejects his earlier claim that the interlocutors
are not allowed to pass judgment on their accounts by assessing
any of the arts they describe as more honorable or worthy than any
others (227a10-b8). The evidence for this is his willingness to go
against this “rule” of his own method and his related willingness
to discard the wholly “neutral,” Parmenidean attitude. For when
he admits his distaste for describing the sophist as one who engages
in soul-cleansing refutation (231a1-3), the Stranger gives up his
commitment to honor the generals’ art of hunting and the art of
louse-catching equally (227b8-11). In this way, he abandons his
Parmenidean neutrality and recognizes that he will have to take a
new path: if he is to keep sophistry and philosophy distinct, he
must let his genuine, ethical concern over the sixth account of the
sophist guide the rest of his investigation. Indeed, at this point in
the discussion the Stranger realizes that his “technical” procedure
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for hunting down the sophist will not allow him to fulfill his promise of accounting for the sophist in such a way that the philosopher
can no longer be mistaken for him, and the Stranger’s expression
of dismay at having discovered five different accounts of the
sophist shows this:
[I]sn’t it clear that when a person experiences this with
respect to some expertise, he’s not able to see what all
these studies have in view—and that’s why he calls
their possessor by many names instead of one? . . . So
let us avoid experiencing this in our own search because of laziness (232a1-b2).
Accordingly, we have reason to believe that the Stranger no longer
trusts his initially preferred method of division by kinds to complete the investigation. Moreover, this strengthens the impression
that he is prepared to proceed differently, which, again, suggests
that he genuinely cares about the matter at issue—namely, keeping
the philosopher and the sophist distinct.
In fact, the Stranger seems to care so much about distinguishing the philosopher and the sophist that he is willing to suspend all
of his “safe opinions,” all of his “previous prejudices,”11 in order
to do the favor that he promised. Indeed, the Stranger’s worry, particularly over the sixth definition, indicates his recognition that division by kinds, although it may be well suited to mapping out
relationships of subordination between genera and species, is not
well suited for the task of distinguishing the sophist from the
philosopher. In acknowledging that this task cannot be completed
on the basis of division by kinds alone, the Stranger lets his “outrage . . . as a human being”12 compel him to conduct the remainder
of his search for the sophist in another way. This new way, while
still rigorous and careful, seems to the Stranger to be more compatible with the important political and ethical nature of the task,
and at the same time, it allows him to “trust his own desire to do
justice.”13 In allowing the investigation to follow another path, as
11. Sachs, 46.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
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Joe Sachs claims, the Stranger abandons the safe and familiar Parmenidean philosophizing, with its indifferent, dispassionate, and
entirely logical modus operandi,14 and “crosses over from the safe
domain of logic to something called philosophy.”15
Later in the dialogue, the Stranger even makes an explicitly
critical remark about the technique of division by kinds that is quite
scornful: “to attempt to separate off everything from everything is
in other respects discordant, and what’s more, it belongs to a man
who is altogether unmusical and unphilosophical” (259d8-e1, emphasis mine). If we add to this his claim that the one who knows
how to practice the art of division and collection properly is the
one “who philosophizes purely and justly” (253e4-5, emphases
mine), as well as his rather Socratic words of encouragement to
Theaetetus, asking him, for example, to be brave and not to lose
heart (261b5-6), it is quite clear that the Stranger now comports
himself Socratically. All in all, this not only strengthens the notion
that the Stranger’s motivation in the Sophist is more likely connected to a desire to defend Socrates than to a desire to prosecute
him, but it also suggests that he has become “like”—perhaps even
a good image of—a Socratic philosopher.
Finally, there is yet another way in which the Stranger shows
the mark of a Socratic—which is to say, genuine—philosopher,
namely, his eagerness not to assume that he knows what he does
not know. Indeed, the Stranger seems to appreciate very well that
while all of his accounts of the sophist, including the seventh and
final one, capture some significant aspects of the sophist’s deceptive nature, none of them can say the final word about this slippery
creature (268d5). Like Socrates, the Stranger is very careful not to
conflate the images he makes in speech with the originals to which
they point. In other words, the Stranger’s humble acknowledgment
that his logos about the sophist necessarily points beyond itself towards an eidos that it cannot articulate adequately seems to mirror
Socrates’s repeated admonitions that all our words are at once both
themselves and not themselves, insofar as they always point be14. Sachs, 41.
15. Sachs, 43.
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yond themselves to the eide, that is, to the invisible looks that make
them intelligible.
In sum, the investigation led by the Stranger in the Sophist
demonstrates a specifically Socratic philosophical character, and
in the course of attempting to define the sophist, the Stranger shows
that Socrates is not guilty of sophistry. The philosophical conversion undergone by the Stranger—from Parmenides’s way of philosophizing to Socrates’s way—indicates that he recognizes the
superiority of “extra-logical” philosophizing that is rooted in a
sense of ethics. This is revealed by the Stranger’s admission that
the sixth definition of sophistry as “soul cleansing refutation” is
disturbing because it describes an activity that is too honorable to
be connected with sophistry. Since this definition was arrived at
by a non-Parmenidean, Socratic way of philosophizing, it identifies
the Socratic way with virtue, and defends Socrates against the dishonorable charges associated with sophistry. In this way, the
Stranger vindicates Socrates while at the same time he becomes
very much “like” him.
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The Concept of Measure and the
Criterion of Sustainability
John D. Pappas
The classical concept of measure, which is akin to moderation
and balance, has been specified arithmetically in architecture and
the arts. But in law, politics, the social sciences, and the behavioral sciences, measure is a fuzzy concept. A rational definition
of measure in human behavior would curb the impulsive human
tendency to excess, and might thus hedge humanity against the
effects of hubris, which has historically led societies, states, and
even empires to disaster.
When people lose a sense of measure, they also lose touch
with reality. And because there is no settled definition of measure
in practical matters, it is difficult for leaders and policymakers to
see limits begin transgressed in time to avert danger.
The purpose of this essay is to suggest that, in the absence
of a definition of measure, we may instead apply the criterion of
sustainability to detect hubristic aberrations from measure early
enough to curb their ill effects.
1. The universal concept of measure
The concept of measure or mean was the cornerstone of classical
civilization. Measure (metron in Greek1) is akin to the Confucian
Middle Way (zhōng yōng) and the Buddhist Middle Path (majjhimā
paṭipadā). It pertains to aesthetic symmetry and functional harmony
in human interaction with the social and natural environment.
John D. Pappas is legal and economic adviser at AGM Law Firm. He
studied law at Athens University and economics at Columbia University.
1. The English word measure derives from the Latin mensura, which in
turn derives from verb metiri, which is related to the Greek word metron.
This is the etymological root of meter, metro–, –metric, etc., and a component of symmetry and its derivatives (symmetric, asymmetry, and so on.)
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In the arts and particularly in architecture, measure has been
expressed in particular mathematical forms. For example, the
golden ratio, φ (=1.6180339…),2 which Euclid called extreme
and mean ratio, is a well-known mathematical definition of geometric measure:
A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme
and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the
greater segment, so is the greater to the less. (Akron
kai meson logon eutheia tetmēsthai legetai, hotan
ēi hōs hē holē pros to meizon tmēma, houtōs to
meizon pros to helatton.) (Euclid, Elements, Book
6, Definition 3.)
Even before Euclid showed how to calculate the φ-ratio,
Phidias (c. 480–430 BC) had created a diachronic manifestation
of aesthetic measure in geometry and architecture by “curving”
Fig.1: The Golden Section in the Facade of the Parthenon
2. φ, the asymptotic limit of the Fibonacci sequence Fn+1 / Fn , “has inspired
thinkers of all disciplines like no other number in the history of mathematics.” Mario Livio, The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World’s Most
Astonishing Number (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 6.
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that ratio into marble (Fig. 1).3 The Parthenon seems to be circumscribed conceptually by a Fibonacci-type sequence of golden
rectangles: each rectangle has a length that is the product of its
width and φ, while its width is the length of its predecessor rectangle. The aesthetic effect of the golden rectangle is summarized
by Joe Sachs in this way:
What are the right proportions for the entrance to a temple? . . . The rectangle formed by the columns is wider
than it is high. How much wider? Enough so that it will
not look squashed together, but not so much that it would
become stringy looking. Let your imagination squeeze
and stretch it to see what goes wrong, and then notice
that to get it right again you have to bring it back to a
certain very definite shape. This is the golden rectangle.
It has been produced spontaneously by artists, architects,
and carpenters of any and every time and place.4
But long before Phidias and Euclid, the concept of measure
had been a focal theme in ancient Greek civilization, as is shown
by the frequent recurrence of that concept in Homer’s Odyssey
(for instance, in Bk. 2, l. 230, Bk. 5, l. 9, Bk. 7, l. 310, Bk. 14, l.
434, Bk. 15, l. 68, Bk. 17, l. 321, Bk. 21, l. 294, and Bk. 22, l.
46)—although Homer uses the word aisima rather than metron.
For example, in Bk. 7, l. 310, Alcinous addresses Odysseus with
the same phrase that Menelaus uses in Bk. 15, l. 71 when speaking to Telemachus: “measure is always optimal” (ameinō d’
aisima panta).
In Homeric vocabulary, aisima is related to Aisa, the Greek
3. In 1909, the American mathematician Mark Barr gave the golden
ratio the lower-case Greek letter phi (φ), the first letter in Phidias’s
name, to honor the classical sculptor and architect. (Theodore Andrea
Cook, The Curves of Life [London: Constable, 1914; reprinted inNew
York: Dover Publications, 1979], 420). The capital letter Φ is often used
to symbolize the inverse of φ, i.e. Φ = 1 / φ = Ο.6180339. . . .
4. Joe Sachs, “Measure, Moderation, and the Mean,” The St. John’s Review 46.2 (2002): 7. This article is available on the web here:
http://www.sjc.edu/files/1713/9657/8097/sjc_review_vol46_no2.pdf
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goddess who personifies human destiny. So Homer’s idea of
measure implicitly includes the notions of allotted share, portion,
lot, or term of life, in accordance with the subject’s destiny—that
is, in line with his idiosyncrasies, social constraints, and natural
limits. Moreover, Homer was probably the first to try to describe
measure in human social interaction. In 15.68-74, he suggested
a subjectivist view of social measure by metaphorically depicting
social relations among people as interactions between hosts and
their guests:
Telemachus, I will not keep you here for long when you
are eager to depart:I would even blame another man who,
as host, is either too fond of his guest or too rude to him:
measure is always optimal. Being too quick to send a
guest on his way when he doesn’t want to leave is just as
bad as holding him back when he wants to depart. One
must treat a guest well as long as he is in the house and
let him go promptly when he wants to leave.
(Tēlemach’, ou ti s’ egō ge polun chronon enthad’ eruxō
iemenon nostoio: nemessōmai de kai allōi
andri xeinodokōi, hos k’ exocha men phileēisin,
exocha d’ echthairēisin· ameinō d’ aisima panta.
Ison toi kakon esth’, hos t’ ouk ehtelonta neesthai
xeinon epotrunei kai hos essumenon katerukei.
chrē xeinon paeonta philein, ethelonta de pempein.)
To a considerable degree, Homer’s masterpiece is a poetic
account of four intertwined concepts: 1. human measure; 2.
hubris, that is, extreme aberration away from measure, like the
Massacre at Troy, or like Odysseus’s defiance of nature in the
form of his defiance of the gods, or like the abusive behavior of
Penelope’s suitors during Odysseus’s absence; 3. atē, the goddess
that personifies mischief, delusion and folly, which are states of
mind that accelerate the decline of a hubristic subject; and 4.
nemesis, the goddess that personifies justice and reinstitutes the
balance of social order.
Long before Homer, these concepts were symbolized in the
myth of Icarus. Icarus attempted to escape Minoan Crete by flying in the air on waxed and feathered wings, but he overrated his
capabilities and underrated the forces of nature. He ignored the
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advice of his father Daedalus to “fly the middle course” between
the foam of the sea and the heat of the sun, so that his wings
would neither be soaked nor burned. Icarus soared hubristically
upward toward the sun, which soon melted the wax off his wings,
so that he fell into the sea to his death.
But Homer was the true philosophical pioneer in regard to
the notion of measure. Through his poetic imagery, he laid out a
solid philosophical base concerning the delicate relations between measure, hubris, folly, and justice. This became the foundation for the elaborate work of the philosophers and the
tragedians of the pre-classical and classical periods. For instance,
Homer’s concept of measure was later picked up by Cleobulus
of Rhodes (died ca. 560 BC), one of the Seven Sages of ancient
Greece, in his most celebrated maxim “measure is best” (metron
ariston). And a later philosopher, Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-420
BC), understood measure in Homer’s subjectivist terms, as is shown
by a quotation that appears in Plato’s Theaetetus (170d–e):
Man [is] the measure of all useful things.
(Pantōn chrēmatōn metron anthrōpos.)
This statement was later quoted, almost ipsissima verba, by
Sextus Empiricus in his Adversus Mathematicos (7.60)]:
[Protagoras said that] man is the measure of all useful
things, that is, in regard to things that exist, how they are,
and in regard to things that do not exist, how they are not.
([Protagoras eipe] pantōn chrēmatōn metron anthrōpon
einai, tōn men ontōn hōs estin, tōn de ouk ontōn hōs ouk
estin.)
Protagoras’s statement is gender-neutral because he refers
to human beings in general rather than men in particular (anthrōpos means “human being” in Greek). Moreover the exact
meaning of the statement (which is as much utilitarian as it is
subjectivist) has been lost in both English and Modern Greek
translations. In all translations I am aware of, chrēmatōn has
been erroneously translated as things (in English) or pragmatōn (in Modern Greek). As result, an overly anthropocentric
sense has been imputed to Protagoras’s statement, as though it
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meant “man is the measure of everything in the universe.” But
in ancient Greek, chrēmata did not signify everything in the
universe, but only things needed or used by humans on earth:
the noun is related to the verb chrēsthai, meaning “to need” or
“to use.” As an example of the sense, Aristotle gives the following definition in his Nichomachean Ethics (1119b26): “By
chrēmata we mean all things whose value is measured by
money.” (Chrēmata legomen panta hosōn hē axia nomismati
metreitai.)
So in the Protagorean subjectivist context, measure is understood as a concept related to human attributes. But somewhat earlier, Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC) had proceeded a step further.
He understood measure as a natural phenomenon, or even as the
foundational principle of the universe.
Heraclitus theorized that hubris5 entails inexorable divine
retribution, which is personified by the remorseless goddess
Nemesis. The name of that goddess is related to the Greek verb
nemein, meaning “to distribute appropriately,” which also gives
us the Greek word nomos, meaning “custom” or “law” (as in the
words economy and astronomy). Infractions by mortals against
other mortals (that is, hubris) disturb the “naturally right” proportion that is due to them according to each one’s destiny or
moira. In this context, hubris is either a human activity or a natural phenomenon that takes place beyond or without measure (as
5. The concept of hubris or hybris was introduced into academic literature by Friedrich Nietzsche in his incomplete treatise Philosophy in
the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873). He explicitly connects it with Heraclitus. “That dangerous word hybris is indeed the touchstone for every
Heraclitan. Here he must show whether he has understood or failed to
recognize his master.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic
Age of the Greeks, trans. Mariann Cowan (Washington, D.C.: Regnery
Publishing, 1962), 61. In English, the term hubris means excessive
pride, or insolent self-confidence, or haughtiness. However few modern
English speakers are aware that authors of the Greek classical period
apply the term in a much more restrictive way. The popular English
saying “the sky is the limit” would seem quite hubristic to classical
Greek authors.
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in hybrid, hybridize, hybridization). Such events thus divergefrom the primary or teleological course of nature; then vengeful
Nemesis intervenes as the just balancer who reinstitutes the natural order. establishing a new state of equilibrium. Consequently,
from a Heraclitian perspective of the world, nature tends toward
biodiverse harmony through a dynamic equilibrium process that
hinders any single creature or species from growing to such an
extent that it eventually crowds out all other creatures or species
in nature.
[Heraclitus’s] unified, ordered world of balanced change
is also a world in which the “laws” or norms of justice
prevail. . . . “Justice [Nemesis] will catch up with fabricators of falsehoods and those who bear witness to them”
(fragment 28b). More generally, such norms can be described as “divine law” in nature, a law that is “common”
or universal in its accessibility and applicability: “those
who [would] speak with insight must base themselves
firmly on that which is common to all, as city does upon
its law—and much more firmly! For all human laws are
nourished by one [law], the divine [law]” fragment 114).
But the justice that is cosmic law is the justice of disruption and revolution, of war and violence, not that of balm
and healing. “One must realize,” he says, “that war is
common and justice strife, and that all things come to be
through strife and are [so] ordained.” . . . [A]ll change,
however violent, be it the macrochanges of nature and
the outer cosmos or war among states, or civic strife, or
the battles that rage in the human heart, can be seen as
integral parts of the law or [divine] “plan” that “steers all
things” producing, through change, that higher unity
which is the cosmos.6
Such a cosmic perspective of measure is a recurring theme
in the Koran, where measure is presented as the prime attribute
6. T. M. Robinson, Heraclitus: Fragments, trans. and ed. T. M. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 185. Note also that
in fragment 43 Heraclitus says, “there is a greater need to extinguish
hybris than there is a blazing fire” (ibid., 33).
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of God’s wisdom and omnipotence:7
HE to Whom belongs the Kingdom of the heavens and
the earth. And HE has taken unto Himself no son, and
has no partner in the Kingdom, and HE has created
everything, and has ordained for it its proper measure
(Al-Furqan, 25:3).
And Who sent down out of heaven water in measure; and
We revived thereby a land that was dead; even so you
shall be brought forth (Az-Zukhruf, 43:11).
And whosoever puts his trust in God, He shall suffice
him. God attains his purpose. God has appointed a measure for everything (At-Talaq, 65:3).
Obviously, the Koran’s reference to rainfall as a manifestation of divine measure is in line with the diachronic Heraclitian
concept of cosmic measure: Rainfall may vary in space-time, as
regards to intensity and duration, but is neither too much (to the
extent that all life on earth is flooded off to total extinction) nor
too little (to the extent that no life on earth can be sustained).
Nevertheless, local floods or droughts may occasionally “steer
things” in a local natural environment toward a new dynamic balance of “that higher unity which is the cosmos.”
A historical example of the applicability of the Heraclitian
perspective of measure is the attempt of Artabanus to avert the
Persians from expanding their empire to Europe. Specifically, he
gave the following strategic advice to Xerxes, who was preparing
to invade Greece:8
Do you see how God does not allow the bigger animals
to become insolently visible, as it is them that He strikes
7. In the following translations, italics are mine. The first example is
from The Holy Qur’an: Arabic Text and English Translation, ed. and
trans. Maulawi Sher Ali (Islamabad: Islam International, 2004), 412.
The second and third examples are from A. J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted: A Translation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 199
and 284.
8. Herodotus, Histories, 7.10e.
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with his lightning rather than the smaller ones that never
insult Him? Do you also see how He throws his bolts always against the tallest buildings and the tallest trees?
Because God likes to draw back anything that stands out.
Likewise even a mighty army may be discomfited by a
small army, whenever God in His wrath exposes the former to fear[feelings of terror] or storm [natural disasters]
through which they perish in a way unworthy of them.
Because God allows no one to consider himself great,
except Himself.
(Horais ta huperechonta zōia hōs keraunoi ho theos oude
eai phantazesthai, ta de smikra ouden min knizei· horais
de hōs es oikēmata ta megista aiei kai dendrea ta toiauta
aposkēptei ta belea· phileei gar ho theos ta huperechonta
panta kolouein. houtō de kai stratos pollos hypo oligou
diaphtheiretai kata toionde· epean sphi ho theos phthonēsas phobon embalēi ē brontēn, di’ ōn ephtharēsan
anaxiōs heōutōn. ou gar eai phroneein mega ho theos
allon ē heōuton.)
Xerxes made the devastating hubristic mistake of ignoring
Artabanus’s Heraclitean advice, because he was under the spell
of Atē. The typical pairing of hubris and nemesis, which appears
in many tragedies such as Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Aeschylus’s
Agamemnon, and Euripides’s Hippolytus, is almost always associated with the Homeric goddess Atē, as epitomized in Sophocles’s choral passage from Antigone, 621–625):
Evil seems good, sooner than later, to him whose mind
God leads on to [mischief under the control of] Atē. And
so he manages only for the briefest time without Atē.
(To kakon dokein pot’ esthlon
tōid’ emmen hotōi phrenas
theos agei pros atan.
prassei d’ oligiston chronon ektos atas.)
In sum, Atē instills confusion in the mind of every subject
of hubristic behavior, and she thus personifies self-destructive
syndromes like defensive avoidance, overvigilance, reactivity,
and denial. These are ruinous states of mind that have led many
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economies, armies, states, and empires to disaster or even to collapse.
2. The Aristotelian mean
In light of the grave consequences of hubris, the critical importance
of defining measure comes to the fore. If measure is not defined
conclusively, then humans may not be able to detect and avoid catastrophic hubristic aberrations from it. The future of every state
would then be precarious, because its leaders would be ignorant
of, or confused about, effective and sustainable policies, which are
conditional on measured behavior and balanced organization.
These considerations haunted Aristotle, who lived during the
decline of classical Greece and the rise of Macedonian hegemony.
Plato, the teacher of Aristotle, had witnessed the collapse of Athenian democracy in the hubristic Peloponnesian war (431–404 BC).
This war among Greek city-states demonstrated that, although the
Greeks had prevailed militarily during the Persian invasions of
490-479BC, the Persians prevailed culturally. During the Persian
wars, the Greeks had been exposed to, and became well acquainted
with, Asian materialistic values and hegemonic aspirations. To the
extent that these values infected Greek society, they ultimately ruined most of Greece. To a great extent, the Persians made up for
their losses on the battlefield by defeating Homer, Heraclitus, and
the tragedians in the political arena of vanity and ambition. After
the Persian wars, victorious Athenians lost their post-Homeric
sense of measure, and consequently lost their touch with reality.
One indication of this is that the Athenians considered their massacre of the inhabitants of Melos in 416 BC as a justifiable act of
strategic pragmatism;9 they had become incapable of viewing their
horrendous, hubristic crime as the act of genocidal barbarism it
was—for which crime they would ultimately suffer the retribution
required by cosmic Justice (Nemesis), as prescribed by Heraclitus.
9. Thucydides, Histories, 5.84–111, which recounts the dialogue between the Athenians and the besieged Melians. The Athenians asserted
the so-called right of the strongest, which they associated with pragmatism as follows (5.89):
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At the time, it must have been obvious to Aristotle that Greece
started its self-destructive decline of going beyond measure as soon
as the independent city-states formed interdependentt confederations and expansionary alliances that battled one another over a
hubristic and unrealistic prize—politico-economic dominance over
all of Greece and even beyond. This was clearly an emulation of
the Asian paradigm. It is quite characteristic of the classical period
that the Parthenon was built with the worst of intentions: Pericles
wanted to project the cultural and material power of a hegemonic
Athens. It was only through the artistic genius of Phidias that
Athens erected a wonderous, diachronic manifestation of measure
(that is, of beauty, balance and harmony) instead of a monstrous
monument to vanity and ambition.
In an attempt to check the demise of classical Greek civilzation, Aristotle tried to make clear philosophically the basic attributes, the moral qualities, and the political principles that are
symbolized by the architecture and sculpture of the Parthenon. He
was actually trying to revive the Apollonian spirit of the Battle of
Marathon, where two opposite value systems collided for the first
time in history—the materialistic value system of Asia and the idealistic value system of pre-classical Greece, the former aiming at
power, the latter at virtue. This conflict of values is in the epigram
at the battlefield of Marathon, said to be by Simonides of Ceos (ca.
556–468 BC):10
The Athenians, fighting as the vanguard of all Greece,
deprived the gold-bearing Persians of their power.
(Hellēnōn promachountes Athēnaioi Marathōni, chrusophorōn Mēdōn estoresan dunamin.)
Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in
power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer
what they must.
(Dikaia men en to anthrōpeiōi logōi apo tēs isēs anankēs krinetai, dunata de hoi prouchontes prassousi kai hoi astheneis
xunchōrousin.)
10. John H. Molyneux, Simonides: A Historical Study (Wauconda, Illinois: Bolchazy–Caducci, 1992), 150.
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Aristotle’s difficulty pertained to the materialism of his time.
The Greeks, corrupted by Asian influences, had lost their sense
of measure, and were carried away by the desire for affluence
and power. The loss of an intuitive sense cannot be easily restituted. So Aristotle attempted to call the Greeks back to measure
and hubris by appealing to the mind rather than the soul, through
reasoning rather than intuition—that is, through logic rather than
aesthetics. More specifically, Aristotle did not approach measure
merely as a self-evident condition that presents itself openly in
natural beauty. For example, he did not argue that the massacre
at Melos was a hubristic act because it was savagely messy and
unnaturally ugly. Instead he tried to define measure and hubris
explicitly and thus demonstrate to the Greeks that every act of
barbarism is hubristic because it is extremely beyond measure.
To Aristotle, extreme actions are temporary and self-destructive,
while measured activities are sustainable and constructive. In that
context, Aristotle’s rational approach to measure tried to appeal
to the Greeks’ instinct of self-preservation, rather than to their
degraded sense of aesthetics.
Aristotle’s logical approach to measure was ingenious and
realistic in the post-Socratic era of cultural decline, when Greeks
were increasingly flirting with extremes like ostentatious consumption, abusive power, and the persecution—or even execution—of men of virtue. But Aristotle faced a conceptual problem.
A non-controversial, logically defined concept of measure in
human affairs may well be an impossibility. One indication of
this is the fact that the golden ratio φ is an irrational number that
defies mathematical precision:
What is the ratio of [the temple’s] width to its height? I
can tell you exactly what it is, but not in numbers. I can
also tell it to you in numbers, but not exactly. It is approximately 61.8 units wide and 38.2 units high. That
will get you in the ballpark and your eye will then adjust
it to make the ratio exact, but it can be proven that no
pair of numbers, to any finite precision, can accurately
express this ratio, which is that formed by cutting a line
so that the whole has to its larger part the same ratio that
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the larger part has to the smaller. We know many things
by measuring, and our usual way of measuring is with
numbers, but in this case numbers are too crude an instrument by which to know something our eyes know at
a glance.11
And if measure in quantitative geometric dimensions defies
mathematical precision, then how much more difficult is the task
of devising an accurate definition of measure in qualitative
human affairs?
Aristotle wisely did not conceive of a comprehensive definition of measure, nor did he attempt to define measured behavior
in human affairs, because an imprecise definition would be controversial, and thus of limited practical use in policy making. In
contrast to Plato’s idealistic quest for an absolute value system, Aristotle formulated a pragmatic and relative definition of measure.
He approached the concept of measure through successive logical
approximations that involved real-life examples, metaphors, and
implicit analogies.
Aristotle conceived of measure as a subjective mean between
two opposite extremes, one of deficiency (elleipsis) and the other
of excess (hyperbolē) with respect to a desired goal. For example,
courage (andreia) holds a mean position between one’s own feelings of fear (phobos) and overconfidence (tharsos). Such a mean
is usually closer to one extreme than the other, depending on internal trend (idiosyncrasy) and external circumstances (environment), and consequently is not one and the same for everyone:12
Therefore of everything that is continuous and divisible,
it is possible to take the larger part, or the smaller part,
or an equal part, and these parts may be larger, smaller,
and equal either with respect to the object itself or relative to us; the equal part being a mean between excess
and deficiency. By the mean of the object I denote a point
11. Sachs, “Measure, Moderation, and the Mean,” 7-8.
12. Nicomachean Ethics 1106a25–35. Translations of the Ethics are by
W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908) and H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934) and edited by the author.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PAPPAS
87
equally distant from either extreme, which is one and the
same for everybody; by the mean relative to us, that
amount which is neither too much nor too little, and this
is not one and the same for everybody. For example, if
10 is considered many and 2 few, then 6 is considered
the mean with respect to the object, because it exceeds
and is exceeded by an equal amount and is the intermediate according to arithmetical proportion. But we cannot
derive the mean relative to us by this [arithmetical]
method.
(En panti dē sunechei kai diairetōi esti labein to men
pleion to d’ elatton to d’ ison, kai tauta ē kat’ auto to
pragma ē pros hēmas:to d’ ison meson ti huperbolēs kai
elleipseōs. Legō de tou men pragmatos meson to ison
apechon aph’ hekaterou tōn akrōn, hoper estin hen kai
to auto pasin, pros hēmas de ho mēte pleonaei mēte
elleipei: touto d’ ouch hen, oude tauton pasin. Hoion ei
ta deka polla ta de duo oliga, ta hex mesa lambanousi
kata to pragma: isōi gar huperechei te kai huperchetai:
touto de meson esti kata tēn arithmētikēn analogian. To
de pros hēmas ouch houtō lēpteon.)
Aristotle here sets out two distinct types of mean, a lesser
and a greater. The lesser type, the mean with respect to the object,
is like a mere arithmetic average, static and objective. The greater
type, the mean relative to us, which is really the sort of measure
that applies to human thought and action, is dynamic and fluctuating. It is rarely midway between opposing extremes. Nor is it
the same for different people, because it is perceived subjectively.
Nor does it remain the same, because it can evolve with changes
of interal states and external conditions.
One example of this fluctuation might be the changing measure of courage required by the Greeks in the Persian and Peloponnesian wars. The Greeks needed an exceptionally high degree
of courage—that is, extreme fearlessness—when they were fighting for their very existence against the Persian invaders. In the
Peloponnesian War, however, a less intense degree of courage—
much closer to fearfulness—might have served them better, because it might have prevented them from waging that civil war
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in the first place, or, at least, might have induced them to put an
end to the madness of that war earlier than they finally did. This
shows that an adequate definition of measure in human affairs
must be subjective at an individual level, cultural at a macro-social level, and always relative to changing external circumstances. Such a definition would have to be dynamic rather than
static, as Aristotle himself hinted by the reference to continuity
and divisibility at the opening of the above passage.
3. Sustainability
According to Aristotle, policies that are effective at present,
and thus seem to be implemented according to measure, should
still be considered hubristic if their desired effects are unsustainable in the foreseeable future. In this context, Aristotle uses the
metaphor of the lifetime of a single individual, as shown in the
following passages from the Ethics:
For [happiness] requires, as we said, not only complete
virtue but also a complete lifetime. Indeed, many
changes and vicissitudes of all sorts occur in one’s lifetime, and the most prosperous man may fall into great
misfortunes in old age, as is told of Priam in the Trojan
epic; and no one calls happy a man who has experienced
such misfortunes and has passed away miserably
(1100a4-9).
(Dei gar, hōsper eipomen, kai aretēs teleias kai biou
teleiou. Pollai gar metabolai ginontai kai pantoiai tuchai
kata ton bion, kai endechetai ton malist’ euthēnounta
megalais sumphorais peripesein epi gērōs, kathaper en
tois Trōikois peri Priamou mutheuetai: ton de toiautais
chrēsamenon tuchais kai teleutēsanta athliōs oudeis eudaimonizei.)
Therefore what would prohibit us from saying that he is
happy who is active in accordance with complete virtue
and is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for
some chance period but throughout his complete lifetime? Or must we add “and who is destined to live thus
and die accordingly”? Because the future is hidden from
us, and we consider happiness as a teleological goal,
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89
something utterly and absolutely complete. And if this is
so, we shall pronounce happy those among the living in
whom these conditions are, and are to be, fulfilled—and
[we’ll call them] happy human beings (1101a14-20).
(Ti oun kōluei legein eudaimona ton kat’ aretēn teleian
energounta kai tois ektos agathois hikanōs kechorēgēmenon mē ton tuchonta chronon alla teleion bion; ē prostheteon kai biōsomenon houtō kai teleutēsonta kata
logon; epeidē to mellon aphanes hēmis estin, tēn eudaimonian de telos kai teleion tithemen pantēi pantōs. ei d’
houtō, makarious eroumen tōn zōntōn hios huparchei kai
huparxei ta lechthenta, makarious d’ anthrōpous.)
The implied analogy is obvious: The lifetime of an individual
may span three to four generations (say, 60–80 years), while the
historical course of a city-state normally spans many more generations (say, several centuries). A man should be considered
happy only if he lives a measured life during his entire lifetime,
away from the pitfalls of extreme misfortune and misery. Likewise a city-state should be considered successful only if it applies
measured policies with effects that are sustainable in an intergenerational historical period.
On the basis of this analogy, a definition of measure in individual behavior and political organization must satisfy the axiom
of sustainability, which is the criterion for discerning between
actual measure, which is sustainable, and illusory measure,
which is unsustainable. For example, the shared confusion of
Fig. 2: Unsustainable Aesthetic Mess in Contemporary Athens
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contemporary Greeks about the difference between real development and illusory development is manifested by the city they
have built all around the Parthenon in the post-WWII era: Athens
is one of the ugliest and most polluted capital cities in Europe
(Fig. 2). Of course, there are many terribly polluted cities in the
world, but Athens is unique. The city surrounds the Parthenon
chaotically, as if the surrealistic pandemonium of the former
threatens to engulf the Apollonian harmony of the latter. For six
consecutive decades (1949–2009), while the contemporary
Greeks were building their grotesque city, they thought they were
developing their economy in accordance with measure. After all,
they did provide work and housing for millions of Greek peasants
who emigrated from their villages to the new, “modern” Athens.
During that period, under the spell of Atē, most Greeks were incapable of seeing what was obvious to sight—namely, the visual
actuality that their city is a heap of aesthetic hubris lying all
around the Parthenon. As a consequence, they were unable to
take corrective action in time. Only recently, under the specter
of Nemesis, did the Greeks start to re-evaluate their perception
of progress. Now at last, Athenians can see that their city, and the
hubristic model of economic development that underlies it, have
been unsustainable all along.13
This manifestation of Athenian hubris around the Parthenon
is symptomatic of the world’s industrial hubris in regard to planet
earth. Contemporary Athens was built as a gargantuan labor city
that would allegedly provide an ample supply of cheap labor to
heavy industry nearby, at Eleusis, the former site of the Eleusinian Mysteries. At a global level, unbounded materialistic expansion has crowded out the Apollonian tradition. The echo of the
idealistic values of the victors in the Battle of Marathon is becoming increasingly attenuated in the era of so-called globalization. Unlimited economic growth on a planet with limited
13. Nicos Souliotis, “Cultural Economy, Sovereign Debt Crisis and the Importance of Local Contexts: The Case of Athens,” CITIES: The International
Journal of Urban Policy and Planning 33 (2013): 61–68.
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91
resources is not merely unsustainable. It is irrational.
It is too late for the Athenians, because their aesthetic blindness has already brought upon them the current retribution of
socio-economic Nemesis. The pressing question now is whether
it is too late for humanity as well, in view of the climatic Nemesis
that seems is appearing on the horizon. Aberrations from measure
cannot survive the forces of nature for long. Nemesis always intervenes, sooner or later, to restore beauty, harmony and balance,
which are all associated with sustainability.14
Even in judicial practice and strategic analysis, the concepts
of measure and justice are sometimes associated with the notion
of sustainability.15 For example, akin to the concept of measure
is the legal principle of reciprocity or lex talionis (legal equivalence, as in “equivalent retaliation”), as well as the popular saying “tit for tat.” They trace their origins to the Biblical scripture
“an eye for an eye”16 and the Babylonian legal code, enacted in
1772 BC by Hammurabi, the sixth king of Babylon. Hammurabi’s code included no provision for extenuating circumstances to modify a prescribed punishment. According to
Aristotle though, proportionate reciprocity with qualification that
takes account of circumstances, that is, retribution with measure,
14. Patricia Grant, “An Aristotelian Approach to Sustainable Business,”
Corporate Governance 11.1 (2008): 4–14.
15. Stefan Baumgärtner and Martin Quaas, “What is Sustainability Economics?” University of Lüneburg Working Paper Series in Economics,
138 (2009): 3, available at http://hdl.handle.net/10419/30222: “The vision of sustainability aims at justice in the domain of human-nature relationships and in view of the long-term and inherently uncertain future.
This includes three specific relationships . . . : (i) justice between humans of different generations (intergenerational justice), (ii) justice between different humans of the present generation (intragenerational”
justice), and (iii) justice between humans and nature (physiocentric
ethics).”
16. The Biblical commandment “an eye for an eye” is literally “an eye
under an eye” (Leviticus 24:19–21; Exodus 21:22–25; Deuteronomy
19:16–21).
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is the sort of justice that safeguards the sustainability of the citystate (Ethics, 1132b33-35):
this sort of justice does hold men together: reciprocity in
accordance with a proportion and not on the basis of precisely equal return. For it is by proportionate requital that
the city-state holds together.
(Sunechei to toiouton dikaion, to antipeponthos kat’
analogian kai mē kat’ hisotēta. Tōi antipoiein gar analogon summenei hē polis.)
The principle of just retribution is the conceptual basis of
measured response, which is a highly effective strategy in game
theory in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma.17 But under extraordinary circumstances, a policy of reciprocity may be too rigid and
ineffective if it does not satisfy the axiom of sustainability. For
instance, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 imposed war reparations
beyond measure upon Germany after World War I. Those retributive payments were unsustainable. As consequence, the German
economy was soon ruined, and ultimately its political system collapsed in 1933. After the war, during the military occupation of
Germany (1945-1949), retaliative justice was of little use to the
Allies when they had to decide how to respond sustainably to the
Holocaust. The proper response could not be to visit another
Holocaust on the Germans. Instead, sustainability took center
stage in shaping U.S. policies with respect to Germany, as shown
in the fifth paragraph of the Joint Chiefs of Staff directive 1067,
issued to General Eisenhower in April 1945: “The principal Allied objective is to prevent Germany from ever again becoming
a threat to the peace of the world [italics mine].”
In particular, German reparations to the Allies were rather
moderate and non-monetary, such as technology transfers from
Germany to the U.S. and Russia,18 or capital equipment transfers
17. Anatol Rappoport and Albert M. Chammah, Prisoner’s Dilemma
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965).
18. John Gimbel, Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation
and Plunder in Postwar Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1990), 171.
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93
to France and Russia—primarily from dismantled German military factories and heavy industry.19 Aiming at sustainability, the
Western Allies implemented an imaginative mix of policies, including: immediate apprehension of war criminals for punishment, control over German education, disarmament and
demilitarization, a federal form of government for post-WWII
Germany, now to be called the Federal Republic of Germany
(FRG), participation of the FRG in supranational organizations,
like OEEC and later OECD, integration of the German economy
into an orderly and prosperous Europe, generous restructuring of
the foreign debt of the FRG by about 50% in 1953,20 a reparations
agreement between the FRG and Israel with respect to the Holocaust, internationalization of the FRG’s entire Armed Forces
under NATO command, and ever-continuing stationing of units
of the U.S. Armed Forces in Germany as forward enablers.
With respect to sustainability, the treatment of defeated Germany by the Allies was a measured policy, and because of this it
has endured and has served the cause of peace in Europe for
many decades. In the wake of the tragedy of World War II, the
greatest war in human history, moderation and sustainability
were the two principles that guided Europe safely, in measure,
on the path of Aristotelian catharsis.21
4. Conclusion
For millennia, from the age of Homer to the present, philosophy
has failed to provide a comprehensive definition of measure with
19. Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A history of the
Soviet Zone of occupation 1945-1949. (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1995), 206.
20. Timothy W. Guinnane, “Financial Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung: The
1953 London Debt Agreement,” Yale University Economic Growth
Center Research Paper Series 880 (New Haven: Yale University, 2004),
22 and 24–25. Available at http://ssrn.com/ abstract=493802
21. As first noted by Aristotle (Poetics, 1449b28), the characteristic attribute of tragedy in the theater is that “through pity and fear it effects
relief (catharsis) to these and similar emotions” (di’ eleou kai phobou
perainousa tēn tōn toioutōn pathēmatōn katharsin).
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respect to human behavior. If measure is “due proportion,” then
what exactly is “due”? And if it is a “subjective mean” between
two extremes, one of deficiency and the other of excess, closer
to one extreme than the other, then how much closer? So far, no
magic number (like φ) or undisputed formula has been conceived
for defining measure in human behavior and economics .
This indeterminacy in the concept of measure, coupled with
the human impulsive tendency to excess, has made many individuals, societies, and states prone to hubristic aberrations from
measure. And as soon as people lose their sense of measure, they
also lose their touch with reality.22 But even if they lose that
sense, they might still be able to detect such aberrations by using
the criterion of sustainability.
In this respect, rational analysis of sustainability is a secondbest and time-consuming methodological tool when compared to
instantaneous aesthetic appraisal of human activity with respect
to beauty, balance, and harmony. The Nazis would not have
needed a rational analysis of their genocidal hubris if they only
could have seen the ugliness, the monstrosity, and the barbarity
of their concentration camps. They might then have returned to
their senses by themselves, in time. Similarly, open-minded residents of Athens, Detroit, or Shanghai, might not have needed an
elaborate analysis of sustainability if they could have seen for
themselves what is instantly clear to the eye, namely, the dead
end of hubristic economic development.
But for those who are short-sighted or blind with regard to
measure, the Aristotelian criterion of sustainability might well be
enlightening.23
22. Do humans really have a sense of measure? The answer to this question is a part of a discussion that includes the question of the best human
life. This inquiry demands philosophic reflection, but such reflection
would not be possible if one could not, in the first place, simply see its
form (Sachs, “Measure, Moderation, and the Mean,” 22).
23. Indicators and measures of sustainability derived from the Canadian
Report of the Alberta Round Table on Environment and Economy (1993)
are listed at www.iisd.org/educate/learn/measures.htm.
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Platonic Theōria
Mark Shiffman
Plato’s dialogues incite us to think about both the words we use
and the phenomena we are trying to understand by means of
those words. In some cases the relationship between word and
phenomena provides the explicit theme of the dialogue, as in the
case of justice (dikaiosunē) in the Republic or knowledge
(epistēmē) in the Theaetetus. There are other themes, however,
that remain implicit and revolve around words that require us to
think more generally about the relationship of words and phenomena—for example, speech (logos) or wonder (thaumazein).
The latter class would include theōria, which we tend to translate
as “contemplation” and which seems to suggest a more direct,
less word-bound relationship to the phenomena, a kind of insight
the dialogues seek to foster but cannot encapsulate in words.
But of course theōria is a word, and a peculiar one. Do we
understand this word, and do we understand the phenomena it
bespeaks? Let us ask a question the dialogues never directly raise:
What is theōria? To what does the word refer, or toward what
does it gesture? To reflect on this question, we must reflect on
how the word theōria is used in the dialogues. When we do, we
will notice several things: 1) the language of theōria (including
the related verb theōrein and noun theōros) has meanings in
Greek before Plato, and the dialogues use these words in ways
related to but departing from their previous uses; 2) there is no
simply identifiable single meaning of theōria in the dialogues;
3) outside of the Laws, in which Socrates does not appear, the
only character who uses “theoric” language in these innovatively
varied ways is (with a single exception) Socrates; and 4) his use
of this language varies in relation to the demands of the particular
Mark Shiffman is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities
at Villanova University.
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interlocutor and conversation. The question then becomes: How
should we understand what Plato depicts Socrates as doing by
means of the language of theōria?
I: The Range of “Theoric” Terms
In a century in which the meanings of theōria and theōrein become quite flexible, they reach their maximum flexibility in the
Platonic dialogues. In the attested uses we have from the 540’s
to the 420’s (from Theognis, Aeschylus, and Herodotus to Aristophanes, Euripides, and Lysias) we find a group of meanings for
words of the theōr- root which we may call “traditional,” in the
sense that they are clearly distinguishable in the early authors and
continue in a relatively ossified use through later ones:
1. theōros: a delegate to consult the Oracle
(later: theōria as a delegation and theōrein as
participating in a delegation)
2. theōria: a sacred festival involving games or performances
theōrein: attending or being a spectator at such festivals
(later: theōros as festival-delegate, theōria as festival-delegation)
3. theōros: observer of an unusual spectacle
theōria: the spectacle or its observation (usually as “sightseeing”)
theōrein: observing such a spectacle
These ordinary denotations of the words share certain characteristics: the viewer travels away from his customary setting and
enters into an attentiveness that differs from his everyday attitude
toward familiar beings.
From the 420s to the 320s, in Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato,
Isocrates, and Aristotle, these words receive metaphorical extensions of meaning that differ with each author, but share a common
character.1 By evoking physical and psychic displacement and
1. Thucydides 3.23.4.4 and 4.93.1.5. Xenophon, Anabasis 1.2.16 and
2.4.25–6; Hellenica 4.5.6; Cyropaideia 4.3.3; Memorabilia 4.8.7; Symposium 7.3. Isocrates Busiris 46, To Nicocles 35.6, Antidosis 277.1–4, Evagoras
29.3, 73.9, 76.5, and Epistle 6.12.10, On the Peace 74.5, Nicocles or the
Cyprians 17.5–7, and Panathenaicus 21.7, 39.2–40.4 and 222.6.
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97
the absorbing spectacles constitutive of traditional theōria, each
author highlights experiences in which we are drawn out of our
everyday mode of attentiveness into the presence of something
exceptional. The story of Aristotle’s innovations in theoric language (besides requiring a prior account of Plato’s) is vast and
complex. Whereas the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae gives roughly
125 instances up to the fourth century of words with the theōrroot in authors other than Aristotle (54 of which occur in Plato),
in the Aristotelian corpus it locates nearly 700, only a handful of
which bear traditional senses. What we can say is that theōria in
the sense of attention to noetic objects and Aristotle’s coinage of
the adjective theōrētikos (especially as used to describe a way of
life) achieved remarkable success in subsequent philosophical
usage and became new ossified terms. After Aristotle, innovation
in theoric language effectively comes to an end.2
Plato exhibits the greatest variety of innovative denotations
of theoric terms. 22 instances bear traditional senses. In the other
32 cases we find extensions beyond the traditional circle of meanings that we may classify according to the following benchmarks:
1. Adaptation of traditional sense to imagined social/political
context (Laws 12, 950d–952d)
2. Traditional theoric settings, nontraditional acts of attention
(Laws 650a7, 815b4; Lysis 206e9)
3. Observation of other persons for the sake of judging them (Laws
772a1, 781c4; Gorgias 523e4)
4. Observation of nonhuman entities for the sake of judging them
(Laws 663c4; Philebus 42b3; Theaetetus 177e2)
5. Observation of particulars for the sake of recognizing a general
pattern (Laws 695c6; Philebus 53d9; Phaedo 99d6)
6. Beholding beautiful/noble things without (apparent) ulterior end
(Symposium 210d4; Gorgias 474d8–9; Phaedrus 276b4, 276d5;
2. Subtle and interesting changes take place in the Greek Church
Fathers’ writings about the relationship between prayer and knowledge, but these are best understood as modifications of the specifically Aristotelian sense of the words.
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Republic 529b3, 601a2 and a7, 606b1, 607d1)
7. Beholding transcendent beings or forms
(Phaedrus 247c1, d4; Republic 486a8, 511c6, 517d5;
Phaedo 65e2, 109e8 [ambiguously])
All these varied extensions of the range of theoric language in
Plato involve attention to particular beings, whether identified as
specifically as certain individual persons or as generically as “just
things,” “beautiful/noble things,” or “pleasures and pains.” The
beholding of transcendent beings that comes to be associated with
the philosophic sense of the words constitutes a quite deliberate
extension of meaning, always used in relation to other senses of
the words theōria and theōrein in the same dialogues.
This “contemplative” sense, then, is only one of a broad
spectrum of senses in Plato, by no means more common than others (6 or 7 instances out of 54), and not the only distinctly Platonic extension of the meaning of these words (since headings 4
through 6 above are distinctly Platonic innovations as well). With
this in mind, let us examine the three dialogues–Phaedrus,
Phaedo, and Republic–in which these words seem to denote or
suggest transcendent vision of eternal truth, which is both the
maximum metaphorical extension of their traditional sense and
the sense of the word most distinctively associated with Plato and
his characterization of the philosophic experience.
II: The Phaedrus
In Phaedrus, a dialogue which concerns artful composition, innovative senses of the verb theōrein appear in two nearly symmetric pairs (247c1, d4 and 276b4, d5). The first two cases occur
within the Palinode’s description of the soul’s journey to the outer
cosmos and the region of the true beings. The word theōrein is
not, however, predicated of human souls, but only of those of the
gods. Since the horses of their chariots are well-behaved, the gods
(or their souls) can stand erect at the edge of the heavens and
gaze untroubled at the truth beyond (247b6–d4). The soul of the
man capable of following the gods to the limit is troubled by its
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horses and at best only able to scarcely have a look (248a4).3 This
whole festive procession of the gods going to a remarkable spectacle with their clients in train recalls the festival-going type of
traditional theōrein.4 Socrates appropriately applies this word to
the gods in contradistinction to the human souls because of their
focused attention given to the thing seen, a dimension of traditional theōrein carried over into all the innovative uses. The gods
gaze steadily, while the human souls look only with a divided attention, most of it elsewhere.5 Transcendent theōrein is beyond
the power of the human soul even in the proximity to eternal beings imagined in the Palinode, and thus a fortiori to the embodied
soul in this life.
The other two instances of theōrein in this dialogue, by contrast, have as their objects beautiful but ephemeral products of
human artifice. In discussing the appropriate way to engage in
writing, Socrates likens the author to a farmer. The latter is serious about the crop from which he derives sustenance and profit;
he would not plant these seeds in a forcing garden for the pleasure
of ephemeral gazing, but would only engage in such planting in
play or for the sake of a festival (276b1–5). So too, the writer
who is serious about the just, beautiful, and good will write only
as a recreation, delightedly gazing on his delicate productions
without expecting anything else to come of them, unless a spur
to memory in old age, and perhaps an aid to those pursuing the
same paths of inquiry (276d1–5).
3. While 247d2-4 seems to leave open the possibility that a human soul,
“insofar as it has a care for receiving what befits it,” can also experience
theōria, the strong contrast of gods and humans at 248a1 appears to minimize if not eliminate this possibility.
4. At the City Dionysia, for example, Athenians were divided into tribes
while proceeding to and sitting in the theater, and each tribe was represented by one general pouring libations and one judge of the competitions (see Sara Monoson Plato’s Democratic Entanglements: Athenian
Politics and the Practice of Philosophy [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000], 92–96).
5. Accordingly, at 278c Socrates insists that only a god could be wise,
while men can at best be lovers of wisdom.
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The key to understanding the relationship between these two
pairs of instances lies in the character of Phaedrus, whose world
is bounded by his love of speeches. At the outset of the dialogue,
Socrates finds Phaedrus on his way out of the city to commit to
memory a speech of Lysias that has particularly impressed him.
The lewd insinuation of Socrates’s reference to the scroll of
Lysias’s speech Phaedrus clutches in his left hand under his cloak
(228d6–7) suggests the fruitlessness of his love of the written
word. This suggestion associates him both with the farmer who
puts his efforts into non-nourishing hothouse plants and with the
intemperate lovers of the Palinode, whose bodily gratification of
eros prevents the nourishing stream of beauty from flowing to
the wings of the soul that, if grown, would lift them up to their
true heavenly nourishment (251a–b).
The implicit critique of Phaedrus as one distracted from true
nourishment by love of speeches receives its most pointed expression immediately after the Palinode. In the face of Socrates’s
lyrical account of true beauty and its benefits to the soul, Phaedrus distinctly manifests his fixation on artificial beauty by professing his admiration for the beauty of the speech only insofar
as it raises a formidable challenge to the skills of Lysias (257c2);
he is impervious to the inspiration of its imaginative content as
it applies to his own soul. Socrates responds to Phaedrus’s impassibility by implicitly comparing him to the cicadas, who were
once men who became so mad for music that they ceased to care
about food and drink. Plato has Socrates warn Phaedrus (and the
reader) not to be bewitched by literary artistry into a self-oblivious aestheticism that would distract us from caring about our own
souls in relation to the truth–or in Socrates’s words, about where
we are coming from and where we are going (227a1) and whether
our soul is monstrous or not (230a).6
Socrates, by contrast, professes himself a lover of the living
speech of dialectic (266b3–4). Thus, in the agricultural analogy,
6. The initial indication of Phaedrus’ self–oblivion is that, entranced by
the prospect of conning Lysias’s speech, he in fact does not know where
he is coming from or going to. He claims to be coming from Lysias, when
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he stands parallel to the farmer who plants a serious crop. In the
same breath, he claims that when he finds a man naturally able
to make dialectical divisions and groupings, he follows him like
a god (266b5–7). Thus, in the realm of speeches, he is the equivalent of the Palinode’s true lover, whose reverence for the godlike
beloved enables him to follow in the train of the god in the circuits of the heavens (251a1–7) and thus to attain in small measure
the true nourishment of the soul. Like the vision of the beautiful
beloved chastely endured, the practice of dialectic helps the soul
regain something of the nourishing vision of the intelligibles.
It seems then that in each half of the dialogue Socrates uses
theōrein to denote the highest kind of delight: in the cosmos of
the Palinode, this is the delight of unperturbed gazing on the fullness of truth and being; in Phaedrus’s world, the same place is
occupied by the undisturbed delight in masterful speeches. The
reversal of its valence from the first pair of instances to the second–from lyrically celebrated height of the soul’s destiny to critically exposed squandering of the soul’s best labors–emphasizes
the opposite tendencies of Phaedrus’s hedonistic and effete love
of speeches and Socrates’s love of dialectic. Socrates first uses
theōrein to express the ideal, however unreachable by humans,
that may be imagined as polestar and spur to the philosophic enterprise. He then uses it to express the idle and fruitless delight
in beautiful speeches that makes an idol of man’s power to produce beauty, and so obscures the natural connection between
beauty and truth.
At the same time, Plato also dramatizes the problematic character of dialectic, which occupies an ambiguous status between
these two poles of theōrein. If dialectic is a process of grouping
and dividing according to classes, and these classes are necessarily delineated by man, what can guarantee that they bring us in
the direction of the divine theōrein, if the reference point of that
divine experience itself, as a steady vision of all truth, is beyond
he is in fact being spiritually drawn to him by his love for his speechwriting prowess; and the countryside walk he is heading toward on the advice
of his physician friend is in fact a flight from the threat of ill health (227a).
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the sure reach of man? May these delineations not turn into bewitching and calcified products of our speech? That is a phenomenon dialectic must continually confront and seek to overcome,
supported by partial intuitions of the natural and intelligible
whole but without sure and final knowledge of it.
III: The Phaedo
In Plato’s Phaedo, we find theoric language again associated with
the aims and practice of dialectic and the problem of self-oblivion. The words theōria and theōrein occur in the dialogue three
times each: theōria thrice in the traditional sense of an official
delegation to Delos (in the conversation between Phaedo and
Echecrates that frames the narrated dialogue), and theōrein in untraditional senses within the dialogue itself, in response to the
unfolding of the philosophical drama.
Socrates’s interlocutors, Simmias and Cebes, are associates
of the Pythagorean Philolaus (61d), who prioritizes the mathematical, musical and cosmological aspects of Pythagorean teaching over its “religious” (cultic and ritual) aspects.7 Accordingly,
Simmias and Cebes are devoted to investigation of nature, and
treat the question of the soul’s immortality with skepticism, professing uncertainty regarding the rationale for the Pythagorean
prohibition of suicide.
Socrates develops his explanation of philosophy as preparation for death by conversing with the two Pythagoreans in the
cultic idiom underemphasized in their branch of the tradition. He
speaks of philosophy as a kind of purification of the soul from
the influence of the body, thus suggesting a strong dualism of the
kind necessarily implied by the Pythagorean claim that bodies
and souls are two different things that can be sundered and rejoined in reincarnation.
In the context of this explanation the verb theōrein first occurs, when Socrates introduces the question of the “just itself,”
7. See Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp.176–208, 277,
298, 480.
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(along with the beautiful and good, greatness, health and
strength). He asks:
Is that which is truest in them seen [theōreitai]
through the body, or is it like this: whoever of us best
and most precisely prepares himself to think about
each thing he investigates will come closest to knowing each thing? (65e1-4)
At first reading, the question might seem to be, “Do we theōrein
these things through the body, or rather through thinking?”
Strictly speaking, however, the verb theōrein applies only (and
interrogatively) to the hypothetical sense-activity of the body.
The weight of Pythagorean doctrine might however lead one to
construe it as applying also to the activity of the intellect in which
the purifying preparation culminates–especially as Socrates invokes the language of purification characteristic of the Orphic
mysteries, with their revelations of extraordinary knowledge to
the initiates (65e6, 69d).8 Socrates’s grammatical ellipsis thus
suggests (without itself necessarily reproducing) the Pythagorean
tendency to understand soul and its phenomena by analogy to
body, as a body-like, localizable and separable thing. It is left for
the reader to wonder whether the proper cognition of what is
truest is best characterized as theōrein.
The Pythagorean and Orphic cultic mysteries explicitly profess that the purification of the soul is accompanied by a privileged and salvific knowledge. Soul is understood above all as
pure intellect, while passions, which perturb the purity of the intellect, are understood as bodily. This perspective governs the entire first half of the dialogue; the first three “proofs” of
immortality depend upon the identification of soul with pure intellect. Only in the second half of the dialogue does the soul as
principle of life enter into the reasoning.
This implicit cultic-Pythagorean identification of soul as pure
intellect, unrelated to but entangled with body, is reproduced in
an obscured form in rationalist Pythagoreanism, insofar as the
latter is wholly devoted to pure intellectual attainments. Thus
while the older Pythagorean tradition occupies its adherents with
8. “Orphism and Pythagoreanism were almost inextricably intertwined
in the fifth century” (Burkert 1972, 39).
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transformation of the soul in a self-attentive discipline of life, the
newer strand, devoted to scientific knowledge, leaves in obscurity
the concrete interplay of soul and body in the passions, engendering forgetfulness of the soul and lack of self-knowledge.
Socrates’s turn to the discussion of misology that occupies
the second half of the dialogue seems incited (at least in part) by
his recognition that Cebes is afflicted by this self-oblivion. When
Socrates addresses the relationship between types of soul and the
lives and destinies belonging to them (81e–84b), Cebes, hitherto
so quick to follow Socrates’s meaning, has difficulty understanding at almost every turn. His hesitations suggest the following
deficiencies of awareness: he has not thought about the variety
of kinds of soul (81e); he has no sense of the relative happiness
of virtuous, nonintellectual citizens (82b); he has no definite conception of that from which philosophy offers the soul liberation
(82d); he has paid little attention to the drama of the soul’s passions in response to the freedom offered by philosophy, especially
the influence passions have on the intellect (83c); and he has no
concrete notion of the dynamics by which the soul becomes riveted to the influence of the body (83d). In short, he understands
soul only in schematic terms of the opposition of body and intellect, and not through firsthand attentiveness to the complexity of
its real possibilities for order and disorder.
After some silent reflections (perhaps on these shortcomings
of Cebes), Socrates brings into the foreground the influence of
passions on thought, in three ways.
First, in rejecting the common interpretation of the swan’s
song as a lament, Socrates appeals to the regularity of natural
phenomena–observing that no other bird sings when it is anxious
or fearful–in a way that is surely welcome to his hearers. But he
also points out that the intellectual failure of humans to note this
regularity and apply it to the swan is due to a passion, namely
fear of death, which they mistakenly project onto the swan (84e–
85a).
Second, sensing the depressing effect on the hearers of the
objections by Simmias and Cebes to the immortality thesis,
Socrates warns against misology (89d–90d). Misology arises
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when one has the repeated experience of accepting the truth of
arguments uncritically and then seeing them fall prey to criticism—probably an experience familiar to these rationalist
Pythagoreans, especially with regard to the school’s doctrines regarding the soul, and especially to Cebes, the more obstinate
critic.9 Socrates warns that we are prone to grow disillusioned
with argument as such, rather than blame our own weakness as
arguers. He shows himself a keen observer of souls, one who understands their aspirations and disappointments and how these
influence their interpretation of reason itself.
Third, Socrates offers himself as an example of the influence
of passion on the soul’s engagement in reasoning (91a). He
claims to be worried that, under the influence of fear of death, he
is approaching the argument about immortality in the spirit of
those who merely want to win a case. He confesses to pleonexia
and philonikia, grasping after more than his due and infatuation
with victory, and thus exhibits the critical self-knowledge he
seeks to engender.
By articulating these pitfalls of the intellect brought about by
passions, Socrates makes manifest a middle ground upon which
the two influence one another, the true ground on which purification of the soul must take place. What he exemplifies is not an
objectivity of pure intellection insulating itself from all that is
foreign to its purity, but rather a self-critical awareness of the mutual influence of reason and passion that will allow a proper vigilance of the soul’s activity in pursuit of understanding, both in
oneself and in others. In this understanding, passion does not belong entirely to the body or to the soul; but the understanding of
passion and its relationship to thought belongs integrally to the
soul’s self-understanding. Soul is not a being like other beings of
9. Simmias shows himself willing to be convinced of doctrines he already
believes by the first argument that offers itself, though he is always happy to
hear more (73b). The suicide prohibition, which is connected with the whole
complex of Pythagorean doctrines about the soul, had been communicated
to Simmias and Cebes by Philolaus and others (presumably Pythagoreans),
but apparently without sufficient supporting argumentation (61e).
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which we render account, first because it is the soul that must
render that account, and second because we can only render account of soul itself by means of self-knowledge. This difference
is not dualistic, like that between two comparable beings we
might account for in the world known by soul, but is a difference
that keeps the relationship between such different modes of being
as puzzling as it ought to be.
As a result of his inattention to the phenomena of soul, Cebes
fails both to attain self-knowledge and to distinguish the soul
from other kinds of being. His last argument against immortality
compares body and soul to a man and a cloak (88a-b). Even if a
soul outlasts a body, might it not eventually wear down through
successive incarnations? Thus soul appears as something affected
the way bodies are in its dealings with bodies. Beings are all on
one level; what appears as a body-soul dualism is really a kind
of monism of the ontological imagination. The attempt to account
for all beings in the same terms (in the case of Pythagoreans,
through number) leads to the overzealous hopes that end in misology.
Thus, in his attempt to counter the threat of misology,
Socrates proposes what he calls his “second sailing,” a discipline
of conversation that allows the eidetic determination of a thing
to appear in its distinctness.10 As eidetic, it is distinct in status
from its embodiments; as a determination, it is distinct from other
eidetic determinations. In this context Socrates uses the verb
theōrein (99d6) once again in relation to those things he “never
stops saying, both at other times and in the earlier speech”
10. To be precise, the second sailing seems to refer to one or more of several things. The first, on the procedural level, is the so–called “method of
hypothesis.” The second is the result of Socrates’s applying that procedure
to the problem of the aitios, namely the resort to “participation in forms”
as the best explanation for why things are as they are. Cebes and Simmias
assent to this result (102a1), and it, rather than the procedural principle,
informs the subsequent discussion. It may also refer to the implied turn to
“the human things,” to the soul’s self–understanding as the necessary starting point for all philosophizing. It is beyond the scope of this essay to attempt to clarify the relationship among these three meanings.
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(100b1–2), namely that the beautiful and good and great themselves with respect to themselves “are something.”11 That is, he
refers explicitly back to the very discussion in which he previously used the verb theōrein.
In that earlier discussion, it seemed that, in keeping with the
mystery-structure, the process of purification by “looking at each
thing with thought alone” served as preparation for seeing the
“itself with respect to itself” as a culmination. Here, however, the
reverse is clearly the case. Socrates finds it safest to begin from
these things (100b5) if he is to think properly about them so as
to make progress toward the truth. It is the identification of what
belongs to the thing discussed wholly with respect to its own determination that provides Socrates and his interlocutor with an
initial clarity of communication, upon which basis they can proceed to further clarification of the question at hand.12 They are
not likely to arrive at a grand cosmic vision as Socrates had once
hoped, and as the earlier discussion of the “in-itself,” also pursued in the spirit of the “first sailing,” may have suggested.
Accordingly, Socrates here uses theōrein to refer, not to the
culmination of the soul’s journey of inquiry, but rather to a wholly
natural, though out of the ordinary, kind of seeing. He speaks of
those “looking at (theōrountes) and investigating (skopoumenoi)
the eclipsing sun,” which he compares to investigating the causes
of natural things by looking at the natural things themselves. The
result of both is a kind of blindness. By contrast, when he speaks
of seeking the truth of beings in speeches, he talks only of “investigating” (skopein, 99e5–6); and to reinforce this implicit con11. Ti einai, here as also at 65d5.
12. This, for Gadamer, is the crucial difference between the Socratic approach to philosophizing and what is typically desired by the interlocutors
(including the readers): “In the final analysis, our wanting to think of the
participation of existent things in being as a relationship of existent things
to each other always involves us in a false concretion. Instead we would
do better to acknowledge from the start that this participation is the point
of departure for all meaningful talk of the idea and of the universal” (“The
Proofs of Immortality in Plato’s Phaedo,” in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight
hermeneutical Studies of Plato, tr. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986), pp.124-5 (emphasis mine).
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trast, he immediately and emphatically rejects a too strict analogy
between his visual image and the phenomena of investigation in
speeches (99e6–100a3). Theōrein here names an activity of the
bodily senses that quite clearly should not serve as a model for
the activity of the inquiring mind.
Socrates delivers this account, which rejects understanding
natural things in terms of generation, in response to Cebes’s naturalistic notion of the dissolution of soul—a problem which, according to Socrates, would require “a thorough examination of
the cause of generation and destruction” (95e9). Socrates implicitly warns Cebes that his mode of inquiry will produce only blindness and disappointment. By means of the second sailing,
Socrates and Cebes make some progress in clarifying the question starting out from agreement about what is strictly proper to
soul. Ultimately, however, Cebes fails to adhere to this discipline.
He makes the mistake, which Socrates does not explicitly correct,
of deducing the soul’s inability to suffer corruption from its
deathlessness (106d).
As Socrates implies in his somewhat evasive response to
Cebes’s confident assertion, one might properly say that soul is
deathless by virtue of its eidetic determination, since the presence
of soul in a thing necessarily entails the presence of life. Soul as
an object of the intellect can also be strictly considered not liable
to corruption by virtue of its eidetic status as such, to which the
question of corruption would be simply irrelevant. Neither premise enables us to conclude anything about the perdurance of actual living souls.
In applying a determination of the eidos of soul as such to
the level of instantiation (i.e. equating deathlessness of soul as
soul with incorruptibility of any given soul), Cebes exhibits what
Aristotle will later identify as a characteristic flaw of Pythagorean
metaphysics: By making number the being of things, Pythagoreanism fails to distinguish numbers, as intelligibles without qualities, from the sensible entities they are supposed to compose.13
13. Metaphysics 1090a31–b2. Compare Gadamer, p.112: “Plato . . . is not
simply Pythagorean. On the contrary, he explicitly distinguishes the noetic
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Thus, even within the structure of the cosmos apprehended by
soul, Pythagoreanism fails to discern the eidetic determinations
through which alone the soul can attempt an adequate grasp of
beings.14
In the face of the recalcitrance of this basic Pythagorean principle, Socrates turns to a myth, in which he uses theōrein for the
last time. He acknowledges the argument’s inconclusiveness and
encourages Simmias and Cebes to push the dialectical inquiry
further back, to examine more clearly the primary hypotheses in
spite of their inclination to trust in them. Only if they do this sufficiently will they follow the logos as much as humanly possible
(107b). The myth, that is to say, enters on the heels of an acknowledgment that the dialectic has been inadequately achieved
because of the ultimate hypotheses from which Simmias and
Cebes seem unable to break free, and it seems intended to address
this state of affairs.
In this most thoroughly corporeal of Socrates’s eschatological myths, the “higher world” is not an eidetic world or a place
of souls, but a literally higher and more perfect region of the
earth, whose stones are less liable to corruption and whose people
live longer (by both of which Cebes has characterized soul).15
These purer and higher regions are imaginable precisely through
world of numbers and mathematical relationships from what is given in the
reality of concrete appearances.” (Thus also Burkert, pp. 31 and 480.) Moreover, the Pythagoreans load numbers with all sorts of noetic determinations, without recognizing that the noetic forms must provide the
ontological ground for these distinctions, such that number cannot be
the most fundamental determination of beings (unless they are seen as
more fundamental determinants of the ideas themselves, as may be the
case in the Platonic “unwritten doctrines”). Thus the Pythagoreans occlude the distinction between the aesthetic and the noetic.
14. If the question remains open whether the soul’s requirement of eidetic determinations for understanding the world is to be attributed to
the soul or to the world, this is only to say that the Socratic approach
keeps the relationship of soul to world as puzzling as it ought to be as
well.
15. Stones: 110e2–5. People: 111b1–3.
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proportionality: as air is to water in visual clarity and purity, so
the ether in the upper regions is to air (if not more so), and the
senses and wisdom of the inhabitants exceed ours in the same
ratio (111b). There the geometrically structured beauties of nature, the precious stones, are in plain sight, not hidden under the
rough ground as here (11a1–2). This higher world seems to body
forth the main features of the Pythagorean ontological imagination of reality.
In this context Socrates speaks of the hypothetical case of
someone from our impure part of the earth rising up to catch sight
of the outer, purer surface. If his nature were up to the task of
holding himself aloft gazing (theōrousa), he would see the true
heaven and light and earth (109e5–8). Here theōrein (in a fairly
traditional sense of traveling afar to see extraordinary sights) does
express an image of the goal of Pythagorean inquiry, namely the
vision of the purified natural and visible things. The suggestion
that one might achieve this by growing wings (109e3) reminds
us of the Palinode of the Phaedrus, but thereby reinforces the
contrast that here we are speaking emphatically of an imagined
bodily journey. That the geographical context of the image suggests flight above the Mediterranean (especially in light of the
pervasive imagery of the Theseus story in the dialogue16) also
calls to mind Icarus, a fitting image of the calamitous misology
attendant upon the excessive hopes of Pythagorean rationalism.
The crucial detail for understanding the role of the myth in
relation to the underlying concerns of the dialogue would seem
to be the remark that among those dead vouchsafed transport to
the higher regions (who seem to meet their fates in their bodily
condition), only the ones purified by philosophy go on to live
without bodies in even higher dwelling places whose beauty it is
“not easy to make manifest” (114c5). The true philosophical purification, the art of dialectic conducted in light of the soul’s pursuit of self-knowledge, is not visible or discernible through
proportion; it can only be distinctly known from the inside. The
intermediately higher world seems to translate the dangers of the
Pythagorean aspiration into spatial terms and to put it into perspective in relation to the indescribable fate of the philosopher.
16. Cf. Jacob Klein, “Plato’s Phaedo,” in Lectures and Essays (Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1985), 375-393
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It is not those who make their dwelling in the land of mathematical purity who ascend to fundamental philosophical insight, but
rather the dialectical philosopher who starts out on the rough
ground of our world and aims beyond the vision of a mathematized nature to the eidetic principles of being.
The three instances of theōrein are thus associated with three
kinds of purification. The dualistic approach to philosophy seeks
to purify the mind by ignoring the body, thinking it will culminate
in theōrein of the true beings; but this hypothetical theōrein is
conceived as belonging to a body-like soul on the analogy of bodily perception. The second sailing seeks to purify the logos by
means of fidelity to the eidos in the light of the pursuit of selfknowledge; it distinguishes itself from the blindness-inducing
theōrein of natural phenomena. The monistic myth imagines a
purification of the visible things themselves by placing them in
higher, purer physical conditions, and depicts theōrein of these
perfected natural beings as the inevitably frustrating, misologyinducing goal of Pythagorean thought.
This consistent emphasis on purification harks back to the
uses of theōria in the initial conversation that frames the dialogue.17 In three consecutive sentences (58b2, b5, c1), Phaedo
says the following about the theōria to Delos that delays
Socrates’s execution:
1. It has been performed annually by the Athenians since they
vowed it to Apollo if he should save Theseus.
2. They must remain pure from executions while it is gone, and uncooperative winds sometimes considerably delay its sailing.
3. It begins when the priest of Apollo lays the wreath on the prow
of the ship.
Perhaps the mentions of Apollo in the first and third sentences
about the theōria to Delos provide a key to the parallel. Apollo
is a god of ritual purification and of vision, which correspond re17. As Burkert (p.474) notes, the “significance of 3 in purification ritual
was emphasized by Aristotle” in On the Heavens 268a14.
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spectively to the dualistic and monistic aspects of Pythagoreanism. Moreover, Pythagoras himself seems to have been identified by his early followers with the “Hyperborean Apollo.”18
Whatever we make of these two instances, the central use
here presents a clearer parallel to the central use of theōrein: the
theōria to Delos is delayed by the sort of conditions that might
(but in this case apparently do not) lead one to resort to a “second
sailing.” We learn at the beginning of the narrated conversation
that Socrates, during the period of his confinement that corresponds to this lag, practices his own different kind of devotion
to Apollo, one that combines the soul’s self-knowledge with the
pursuit of communication through eidetic precision: He is not
sure he clearly understood the injunction in his dreams to make
music, fearing that his own passion for philosophy may have led
him to construe the class of “music” too narrowly (60e–61b).
Though superficially an abandonment of philosophy, the purification he carries out through poetry reflects the purification of
the second sailing and of Socratic self-knowledge: it too is chosen
as the “safer” course (61a8, 100d8).
IV: The Republic
In the Phaedrus, theōrein denotes, first, a steady attention to the
vision of complete and eternal truth available to gods alone and,
second, a non-serious delight in products of man’s art. In the
Phaedo, it flirts with expressing a human vision of eternal truth,
but then suggests that this excessive expectation is characteristic
of a false philosophy. It becomes all the more striking, then, to
find theōria used twice in the Republic to refer explicitly to a
kind of intellectual vision of eternal and divine truth available to
human beings. In Book VI, Socrates describes the philosopher
as enjoying theōria “of all time and all being” (486a8).19 In the
allegory of ascent from the cave to the sunlit regions, he remarks
that it should be no surprise if the philosopher, coming into the
darkness from “divine contemplations” (apo theiōn theōriōn,
517d4–5), cuts a ridiculous figure when forced to deal with shad18. Alternatively, he was thought to be the son of Apollo (Burkert,
pp.141–146, 149, 168).
19. Quotations are from Allan Bloom’s translation of The Republic
(New York: Basic Books, 1968), unless otherwise noted.
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owy human affairs.
If we look to Socrates’s relationship to his interlocutors to
explain this anomaly, we note that, of the twelve instances of theoric language in the Republic, all but one appear in conversation
with Glaucon, even though he is Socrates’s explicit interlocutor
in only a little over half the conversation.20 We note as well that
Glaucon exhibits the single use of theōrein in the whole corpus
by any character other than Socrates or the Athenian Stranger
(517d5).
The association of theoric language with Glaucon begins, in
fact, in the opening scene: he and Socrates go together to the Piraeus to see the festival of Bendis, and when they have attended
and watched (theōrēsantes), they start back to town (327b1). Although Socrates applies the participle to both himself and Glaucon, the motives he identifies are only his own: he wanted to see
how they would conduct the novel festival (327a2–3). Socrates’s
judgment, that both Athenians and Thracians conducted themselves with equal propriety (a4–5), reveals a philosophic motivation of his theōrein that will be a central facet of his discussion
of the best city: a desire to see how different peoples with different laws and educations conduct themselves, especially toward
the gods. The motives of Glaucon remain a question for us. Plato
thus invites us to pay attention to two phenomena in relation to
one another: the motives of theōrein and the psychology of Glaucon.
The dramatic intervention of Glaucon also provokes the first
instance of theōrein within the conversation. Mocking the city of
rustic simplicity Socrates has described to Adeimantus as a city
fit only for pigs, Glaucon insists that a city fit for men requires
refinements, adornments and relishes. Socrates responds: “Now
the true city is in my opinion the one we just described–a healthy
city, as it were. But, if you want to, let’s look at [theōrēsōmen] a
feverish city, too” (372e8). The feverish city becomes an object
20. The exception is in the discussion of regimes in Book Eight
(556c10), where Socrates speaks of rich and poor citizens of an oligarchy mixing together at festivals (kata theōrias) or on campaigns.
This sole use of theoric language in speech addressed to Adeimantus is
a strictly traditional use, which underscores the nontraditional uses in
Socrates’s exchanges with Glaucon.
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of attention when Glaucon’s unexamined passions introduce a
new dimension of motivation into the inquiry. The question of
justice began with Socrates’s perplexity about what exactly it is,
a perplexity arising from a specific contradiction: according to
Cephalus’s conception of justice, certain actions appear to be
both just and not just (331c). With the intervention of Thrasymachus, the focus shifts from the resolution of perplexity to controversy over the choiceworthiness of justice and of different
ways of life. The theōrein of the feverish city must satisfy not
only the practical need to choose a way of life and the intellectual
need to resolve perplexity, but also the demands of certain unquestioned appetites.
The subsequent instances of theoric language fall into three
types, corresponding to these intertwined dimensions of the motivation of the inquiry. In the discussion of the auxiliaries’ early
education, theōrein is used within the framework of pursuing a
chosen way of life. In the discussion of the philosophical nature
and its education, Socrates gradually disentangles the philosopher’s motive to resolve perplexity from the ruler’s motive to
maintain a certain way of life for himself and his city. In the discussion of imitation and dramatic poetry in Book Ten, Socrates
reveals the hidden action of unacknowledged appetites in the
theōrein of the spectator of dramatic poetry. This gradual process
of disentanglement reveals both the advantages and limitations
of Glaucon as an interlocutor in this inquiry.
1. Practical/Productive Theōrein. The next two instances of
theōrein occur within the discussion of whether the children of
the city destined for the warrior class should watch the older warriors conducting battle. Socrates, arguing that they should, speaks
of an analogous need of potters’ apprenticed sons to learn the art
by watching their fathers at work (467a4, c2).
This kind of theōrein has four moments: 1) the projection of
a possibility for oneself of being and doing; 2) the desire to appropriate a characteristic (power, skill, virtue) needed to fulfill
that possibility; 3) observation of that characteristic in action in
order to grasp its archē; 4) the emergence into view of the archē.
The watching for and seeing the emergence of the archē that is
theōrein proper is guided by a projection of one’s potential self
toward which one’s aspirations are directed, which is to say by
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the desirability of a way of life. The paradigm to which one’s attention is directed is an acting human being.21
2. Theōria and Philosophical Perplexity. When the noun theōria
appears for the first time (486a8), in the context of the fitness of
the philosopher for rule, it too, like practical/productive theōrein,
results in a principle that informs action. Because of the philosopher’s contemplation of all time and being, he will think little of
human life and not fear death: he will be neither petty nor cowardly. Again, an activity of attention leads to the attainment of a
virtue.
In the philosopher’s case, however, the principle of action is
not the thing looked for in the contemplation, but an incidental
result of it. His theōria leads to virtue not as a result of emulating
another philosopher, but because all his love is directed to the
objects of his attention rather than to objects that incite vice (cf.
500b-c). The education of the philosopher-king requires such absence of emulation, since he will only be fit to rule if he does not
aspire to rule. The more detailed discussion of this education,
however, brings to light a divergence between the motivational
structure of the philosopher as king and of the philosopher as
philosopher.
The philosopher’s desire to know is initially aroused by a
perplexity arising from contradictory appearances (523a–524d).
He is drawn toward theōria for the sake of resolving this perplexity. As the allegory of the cave dramatizes, however, the prisoner
released from the power of opinion does not know where he is
going; only as he progresses stage by stage can he have any notion of the condition into which he is being drawn (515c–516b).
Perplexity comes upon us, and we do not know where it will lead
us, or whether its resolution will provide us with anything of instrumental or edifying use. Perplexity of the sort that motivated
Socrates’s initial question about justice in Book One is brought
to light in Book Seven as a motivation internally distinct from
that of practical/productive appropriation, and as distinctly philosophical.
The city attempts to bring it about, by means of planned perplexity, that the philosopher approaches the “true forms” as an
21. This, incidentally, is the case for every use of theōrein by Isocrates.
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appropriating artist, so as to return to the city to reproduce images
of them. The preference for “divine theōria” over human affairs,
however, initially the philosopher’s qualification for office, soon
appears as a source of his awkwardness in dealing with the phantoms of the shadowy world to which other men’s attention is confined (517d5). This shift of theōria from a source of harmony
between the philosopher-king’s two roles to a source of conflict
is highlighted by Glaucon’s dramatic objection to the requirement
that the philosophers, for whom “a better life is possible” (519d),
leave their divine theōria and return to the cave to rule. A closer
look at his understanding of why this contemplative life is better
(and his singular use of the verb theōrein) reveals his promise
and limitations as interlocutor.
3. The Ascent and Peripeteia of Glaucon. The course of the discussion of poetic censorship reveals that Glaucon is much more
sensitive than Adeimantus to the subtle effects on the soul of the
productions of the Muses. Adeimantus treats poetry as a source
of overt lessons and maxims, questioning what effect the opinions about justice enunciated by characters or narrators will have
on the opinions of those who hear them and are persuaded of their
truth; he is thus a fitting interlocutor while Socrates focuses on
explicit opinions communicated about gods (377e–383c). When
the focus shifts to effects of the less conscious process of imitation, Adeimantus is out of his depth (392d), and even more when
it comes to the influence of music on the soul. At this point Glaucon, who has had a musical education (398e) and shows a clear
understanding of how different musical modes communicate different dispositions of soul (399a–b) and can insinuate grace into
it (401b–d), takes over as interlocutor.22
Theōrein, in both its earlier practical/productive and its later
dramatic/poetic uses in the dialogue, expresses just the sort of
aesthetic internalization to which Glaucon is especially attuned.
One observes attractive features of another soul or its artful products, so as to incorporate them into one’s own soul and make it
similarly fine. Accordingly, Glaucon understands all lovers of
spectacles—that is, all who engage in theōrein in the traditional
sense in which it is used in the opening scene of the dialogue—
22. As Socrates remarks, Glaucon remembers this discussion quite precisely much later in the dialogue (522a).
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to be lovers of learning (475d). If he expresses some contempt
for those who show themselves especially eager for such learning, it is not because of their understanding of what learning is,
but because of their lack of discrimination in the objects of their
attention and internalization. It is in response to this understanding of observing-as-learning that Socrates first introduces the visual characterization of philosophical learning (475e), and not
long after that he begins to speak of philosophical theōria (486a).
Socrates thus begins where Glaucon begins: with a conception of learning as internalization of the finest things through observation, so as to produce a soul as fine as a fine statue.23 By
supposing that the philosopher actually achieves theōria of things
finer than any Glaucon had imagined in his feverish city, Socrates
is able to use theoric language as a stepping stone from aesthetic
education to the understanding of philosophy as knowledge of
ignorance. By presenting the motivational structure of philosophical theōria as different from that of the theōrein of appropriation,
Socrates opens a path toward a distinctly philosophical understanding of education as dialectical questioning, determined by
the relationship of perplexity between the philosopher and the
thing to be known, and modest about the possibility of attaining
definitive knowledge. In the course of following that path, Glaucon the lover of dramatic poetry is caught in a classic plot of illusion of good fortune followed by reversal of fortune.
Glaucon’s recapitulation of the Divided Line at the end of
Book Six (511c–d), which Socrates pronounces “most adequate”
(511d), appears to represent one of the great successes of Socratic
teaching in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates has apparently succeeded
in communicating to a non-philosopher the structure of being and
intelligibility that orients the philosophical pursuit of knowledge.
Following in the footsteps of Socrates’s use of theōria to describe
the philosopher’s apprehension of the objects of his attention,
Glaucon sums up:
23. Glaucon imagines the fine soul on the analogy of a finely sculpted
statue (540c). When Socrates wants him to imagine the superior excellence of the philosophic soul, he claims that the soul as we experience it is as disfigured by foreign accretions as Glaucus–statues
(611d–612a). To “see” it in its purity requires engaging in philosophy
and experiencing in oneself the soul’s attempt to liken itself to the
knowable (611e).
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I understand . . . that you wish to distinguish that part of
what is and is intelligible contemplated by the knowledge
of dialectic [tēs tou dialegesthai epistēmēs . . . theōroumenon] as being clearer than that part contemplated by
what are called the arts. (511c)
In the educational drama, Glaucon here and in the Allegory of
the Cave seems to have reached the high point of his fortunes. In
Book Seven, however, Glaucon and the language of theōrein suffer a revealing fall.
After the explanation of the Cave allegory and the recognition by Glaucon that the life of the liberated philosopher is a better one than the political life, the remainder of Book Seven is
devoted to the discussion between Socrates and Glaucon about
how such philosophers “will come into being and how one will
lead them up to the light” (521c). The would-be philosopher must
be assigned studies that “summon the intellect to the activity of
investigation” (523b). Since, however, these philosophers are
also warriors, their studies must also be useful for the conduct of
war (521d). The mathematical disciplines are chosen to fulfill
this double imperative of practical utility and intellectual awakening; but as the argument progresses, the tension within this duality brings to light an impediment to Glaucon’s grasp of the
activity of the philosopher.
Through the discussion of several branches of mathematics,
Glaucon remains intent on detailing their practical benefits for
the warrior (526d). After Socrates several times insists on their
importance for turning the soul toward “what is always” (526d–
527b), Glaucon tries to make amends:
And on the basis of the reproach you just made me
for my vulgar praise of astronomy, Socrates, now I
shall praise it in the way that you approach it. In my
opinion it’s plain to everyone that astronomy compels
the soul to see [horān] what’s above and leads it there
away from the things here. (528e6–529a2)
This time, Socrates responds with obvious sarcasm:
In my opinion . . . it’s no ignoble [ouk agennōs] conception you have for yourself of what the study of the things
above is. Even if a man were to learn something by tilting
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119
his head back and looking [theōmenos] at decorations on
a ceiling, you would probably believe he contemplates
[theōrein] with his intellect and not his eyes. . . . I, for
my part, am unable to hold that any study makes a soul
look upward other than the one that concerns what is and
is invisible. (529a9–b5)
The implication that Glaucon fails to distinguish properly between visual and intellectual attentiveness seems odd given that
Glaucon admitted and followed the initial distinction in the divided line between visible and intelligible objects (507b11), and
affirmed Socrates’s inclusion of the heavens in the visible
(509d5), and thus casts doubt on how well he understood what
he was saying. Socrates’s response suggests further that Glaucon
mistakenly thinks that his standard of praise is the same as that
of Socrates. For Socrates, the contrast between higher and lower
is one between what unchangingly and invisibly is and what partakes of change and is sensible; this corresponds to the difference
between perfect and imperfect intelligibility. The dignity of the
object of attention (and hence the act of contemplation corresponding to it) depends on how intelligible it is.
For Glaucon, on the other hand, the dignity of the object of
attention seems to depend on the magnificence it imparts to the
soul. Glaucon seems to want above all to hold Socrates to his
original promise that the philosophic preoccupation will produce
virtues. The consideration of the stars, like Socrates’s “theōria
of all time and being,” may suggest to him a noble unconcern
for the petty cares that consume men, revealing an aristocratic
dimension of Glaucon’s understanding of paideia as the cultivation of a soul superior to vulgar and frivolous concerns. He
can only appreciate from the outside the excellent soul of the
virtuous philosopher-king, or the superior existence of the
philosopher freed from vulgar opinion and ignorance because
he has taken possession of the most exalted objects of sight.
Thus the irony in Socrates’s rebuke is complex: when he says
Glaucon’s conception is “not ignoble” (ouk agennōs, literally
“not non-wellborn” [529a9]), he is backhandedly pointing to its
aristocratic weakness. The aristocrat may have contempt for the
ethics of the marketplace, but he still expects a payoff from his
leisurely pursuits in some acquisition recognizable by and valuable to others of his kind.
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Glaucon accepts the justice of Socrates’s rebuke, but now
finds himself somewhat at a loss to specify what their study aims
at; he asks vaguely how astronomy should be studied “in a way
that’s helpful for what we are talking about” (ōphelimōs pros ha
legomen) (529c). He has to acknowledge that he needs to be led
by Socrates to alter his understanding of education to encompass
what Socrates means by “the invisible and intelligible” (530b).
He is no longer the passionate hero fulfilling his ambition to encompass all the best and highest things in his theōrein. Emblematic of this change in fortune is the immediately ensuing
discussion of music, in which the study so dear to Glaucon,
whose highest task had been engendering the graceful soul, now
serves to lead the student up to problems and inquiry into causes
(531c). The pursuit of the perfectly formed soul has unobtrusively
given way to the cultivation of a dialectical way of being; but at
the end of the discussion of dialectic, when Socrates lays down
the need for a synoptic integration of earlier studies, to Glaucon’s
mind the benefit of this is still that they will stick fast as an acquisition, whereas Socrates is primarily concerned with revealing
who is dialectical (537c).
Having revealed the impediments in Glaucon’s soul to the
achievement of this philosophical transformation, and after an
extensive elucidation of the varieties of disordered souls in Books
Eight and Nine, Socrates returns to the dangers of poetry in Book
Ten. There he brings to light certain harmful effects of poetic internalization that Glaucon needs to understand if he is to attend
adequately to his own soul.
4. Dramatic/Poetic Theōrein. While the practical/productive
theōrein in Book Five involves a conscious self-projection, in
Book Ten the theōrein that belongs to the enjoyment of poetry
seems at first to be something engaged in simply for its own sake.
Socrates, however, reveals that it involves an unconscious selfprojection, one that may be at odds with one’s conscious choice
of proper objects of imitation and aspiration.
In this discussion, Socrates uses theōrein four times. In each
case it refers to an attentiveness to works of art that constitutes a
distraction from true knowledge. Socrates first assaults the traditional aura of grandeur belonging to the poet by arguing his impotence to lead men to truth, and then argues that the poet tends
to corrupt the soul precisely through his power to fascinate us.
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The poet claims to be an interpreter of the divine, but
Socrates places a middleman between the poet and the god,
namely, the craftsman who makes imitations of the god-made
form, which are in turn imitated by the poet. If we look to the
idea that governed the craftsman’s production, we can look in the
direction of the idea produced by the god. The poet, on the other
hand, enchants us with words. Just as absorption (theōrein) in
colors and shapes leads to being easily fooled by paintings
(601a1–2), so an analogous absorption (theōrein) in words and
speech leads to taking the poet’s falsehoods for truth (601a7–9).
The contemplation the poet offers us is not a theophany but a
screen between us and the divine.
Next, Socrates exposes the danger of a seemingly innocent
absorption in the passions of others that poetry represents:
What is by nature best in us . . . relaxes its guard over
this mournful part because it sees [theōroun] another’s
sufferings, and it isn’t shameful for it, if some other
man who claims to be good laments out of season, to
praise and pity him; rather it believes that it gains the
pleasure and wouldn’t permit itself to be deprived of
it by despising the whole poem. (606a7–b5)
The theōrein encouraged by the poets is not merely deceptive; it
generates disorder in the soul, along with a deceptive self-oblivion on the part of the one disordered by them. Insofar as it leads
to this unrecognized dissonance, poetry is the foe of philosophy,
which seeks self-knowledge and preservation of the right order
in oneself.
In the final instance of theōrein in the dialogue, Socrates invites Glaucon to admit that he himself is subject to the witchcraft
of the poets:
“Aren’t you too, my friend, charmed by [poetry], especially when you contemplate [theōrēs] it through
the medium of Homer?”
“Very much so.”(607c8–d2)
Glaucon depends on images for understanding.24 His unnecessary
desires for fine living are responsible for introducing the poets
24. 533a; cf. 440d, 506d.
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into the city in speech (372a–373c). His narrative of Gyges
(359d–360d), his tragic description of the terrible fate of the just
man who seems unjust (361e–362a), and his epic threat of the attack Socrates will be liable to for insisting on the rule of philosophers (473e–474a) all reveal a dramatic imagination, and suggest
that the poets have insinuated their magic into his soul—a magic
that smuggles into the soul a subconscious proto-tyrannical selfprojection by reinforcing and legitimating the unlawful desires
normally repressed in pursuit of one’s conscious self-projection.
Socrates reveals that the contest between the tyrant and the
philosopher, which Glaucon judged as an external question in
Book Nine, exists within Glaucon’s own soul, and the souls of
all who enjoy poetry. He has revealed hidden motives in Glaucon’s love of poetry and spectacle, culminating a process that
began with the first use of theōrein in the dialogue’s opening
scene, and may thereby have opened for Glaucon a much-needed
path to self-knowledge.
In the Republic, then, theōrein in its “nonphilosophical” uses
refers primarily to two ways in which we form our souls through
observation of others and imitation of them. While we consciously imitate the conduct of those who exhibit characteristics
we would like to possess, we often unconsciously allow poets to
lodge within our souls the desire to imitate the figures presented
to us in poetry. In both cases we internalize models of conduct
and understandings of what it is to be human that shape our souls.
In order to make the “examined life” available and attractive
as an alternative, Socrates has to compete with the images of man
fostered by the city and the poets by presenting a fictional image
of man, the philosopher king, who fulfills the dearest ambitions
of both civic action and education in the finest things. He is, as
it were, the theoric conduit that channels civic and aesthetic aspirations into the philosophic desire to understand. But he and
his theōria are only capable of engendering the more humble activity of dialectical inquiry if they are recognized as an exaggerated version of it.
V: Theōria, Self-knowledge, and Dialectic
In each of these three dialogues, Socrates at some point uses theoric
language to put forward a fantasy version of the telos of philosophy
tailored to the shortcomings of his interlocutors with respect to their
capacity to practice philosophy as Socrates understands it. This prac-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | SHIFFMAN
123
tice involves: 1) a sense of dissatisfaction with ignorance, 2) a desire
to transcend it and reach for truth, and 3) a moderation of one’s expectations of success. Phaedrus, absorbed in the beauty of human
verbal artifice, requires a vision that, while promising benefits to the
practice of rhetoric, points him beyond his satisfaction with beautiful
speeches to a need for truth. Glaucon, in his quest for beauty and
grace of soul, already harbors potential seeds of dissatisfaction, but
the objects with which he seeks to furnish his soul do not lead him
to adequate knowledge of his ignorance; Socrates has to offer him
higher objects for internalization and deeper self-knowledge in order
to direct his longings toward philosophy. Simmias and Cebes already
long for wisdom of a mathematical-naturalistic sort, but their excessive hopes for attaining it lead to despair and misology, and must be
moderated by the “second sailing” and the exposure of their erroneous notion of knowledge.
Finally, though it is unclear to what extent Socrates succeeds
in moving any of these characters in the direction of philosophy as
he understands it, the more important thing is that the reader see the
direction he is trying to go. When we compare the three dialogues,
we see that the direction is substantially the same. Dialectical inquiry presupposes a certain background trust in a natural eidetic
distinctness of things that it can neither demonstrate nor definitively
grasp. The ambition for such a definitive grasp in theōria is quite
human, but its complete fulfillment is beyond human power. At the
same time, it would be rash to reject the intimation that there is some
natural eidetic structure to things which orients our efforts to understand, draw proper distinctions, come to agreement, and uncover
first principles. Dialectic, whether understood as classing and distinguishing, as examining the cogency of ideas and hypotheses, or
as penetrating to more fundamental levels of hypothesis, is always
incomplete and on the way, but also always (and ever anew) making
headway. The closer Socrates comes in the dialogue to forthrightly
presenting his philosophical practice in this modest way, the less
heavily he relies on the language of theōria to express the achievement of philosophy.
Theōria and theōrein, then, are not technical, precise or static
terms for Plato, but words addressed to the various conditions of
specific interlocutors. If they offer a key to his understanding of the
philosophical experience and the fruits of philosophy, it is only by
marking moments in a dialectical transcendence of false starts in that
direction.
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Two Villanelles
Kemmer Anderson
The Socratic Dilemma
What is the news? Has the ship come from Delos,
at the arrival of which I am to die?—Socrates to Crito
The ship from Delos will always arrive
with news from the gods that juggle your fate.
Who decides if you are dead or alive?
When the sailors land, how can you survive
the execution prepared on this date?
Cargo ships from Delos sometimes arrive
with prophecies from Apollo to drive
away the judgment of a court’s mandate
whose law decides who is dead or alive.
From what source do politicians derive
their hate to turn the truth that guides our state?
You think the ship from Delos will arrive
on time? But let us through reason revive
your legal case and find a delegate
to sway the city to leave you alive
for now and permit our learning to thrive,
though your words make some citizens irate.
The ship from Delos will always arrive
With that grave choice to be dead or alive.
R. Kemmer Anderson has taught at the McCallie School in Chattenooga, Tennesee for over three decades.
�POEMS | ANDERSON
125
Palamedes’s Ghost
Then I suppose that you have only heard of the rhetoric of Nestor and
Odysseus, which they composed in their leisure hours when at Troy,
and never of the rhetoric of Palamedes?—Socrates to Phaedrus
I would teach Andromache how to write
Her flesh, a record of her eyes and ears
To leave behind a mirror of this sight.
The alphabet of blood seen in signs might
Cut a path through the mind stained by her tears
After Andromache learns how to write.
The vowel screams from these war wounds would bite
Like flames and burn the heart with countless biers
Of piled dead through mirrors from this sight.
Consonants of bruised sounds, broken bones right
In front of a reader’s eyes print our fears
When I teach Andromache how to write
Lettered memories of her city’s fright.
When armies rip through lines of sons with spears
Leaving mirrors of grief strewn on site,
Words remain, picked clean from decaying light
That casts nations into long rotting years
Of death when women have not learned to write
A breathing mirror loomed and thread from sight.
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Two Poems
Elliott Zuckerman
Not Twins
We’ll never have enough rehearsal time.
Someone who looks a little bit like me
and I are playing twins. We’re asked to shout
some words, one to the other, but
no one will tell us which one shouts which words.
No doubt the overseer, who seems distracted,
is thinking of something else, perhaps
another pair of twins.
We sit at matching windows while the players,
tolerably in time, proceed from door
to door. Nearby the Playhouse is
already showing posters of the play.
People are lining up.
The stagehands are preparing.
I’m glad it isn’t to be called
The Shouting Twins.
I wish they’d chosen someone else
to play my counterpart. It’s hard for him
to look like me, for me to look
like him. His ears lack lobes.
Nor is there kinship in our eyes
or in our souls. We hardly
think alike. Perhaps we could succeed
if there were more rehearsal time.
Elliott Zuckerman is tutor emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
�POEMS | ZUCKERMAN
Carrying Cordelia
I am assigned to carry in Cordelia.
The old and mobled king
is weakened by the recent incidents.
I have the arms and gravitas for what they call
a gracious act.
Right now we’re covered in heavy sheets
of thunder, wind and rain.
There’s ranting and expostulation.
The lightning doesn’t seem to work, but it is
silent anyway. A lactic hiss
now drowns out any other sound.
Hey, ho.
I still have time, but I must rush
to dip my paddle in the flood
and get to the king in my hurra-canoe.
127
�
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The St. John's Review, Fall 2014
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Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Trentina, Allison
Sachs, Joe
Lee, J. Scott
Lenkowski, Jon
Painter, Corinne
Pappas, John D.
Shiffman, Mark
Anderson, Kemmer
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Volume 56, Number 1 of the The St. John's Review. Published in Fall 2014.
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 56.2 (Spring 2015)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Allison Tretina
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401-1687.
©2015 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
The St. John’s Communications Office
Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available online at
http://www.sjc.edu/blog/st-johns-review
��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Momentary Morality and Extended Ethics ..................................1
Eva Brann
Reinventing Love: An Introduction to Plato’s Phaedrus..................14
John F. Cornell
In the Heaven of Knowing: Dante’s Paradiso..................................36
Peter Kalkavage
Knowing and Ground:
A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit ...............................57
Matthew Linck
Poem
Tercet ................................................................................................75
Elliott Zuckerman
Review
Liberalism and Tragedy
A Review of Jonathan N. Badger’s Sophocles and
the Politics of Tragedy: Cities and Transcendence....................76
Paul Ludwig
��Momentary Morality
and Extended Ethics
Eva Brann
You have been reading and talking about virtue for quite a while
now; therefore, that is what your teachers asked me to talk about
to you. So I drew a hot bath (since the mind is freest when the body
is floating) and thought what might be most to the point, most helpful to you.
Should I review some theories about virtue, perhaps give you
my interpretation of Socrates’s or Aristotle's notions of virtue, perhaps dwell on whether from reading Platonic dialogues we can tell
if Socrates and Plato thought the same and if Aristotle responds to
either of them? Or should I introduce you to Kantian morality, a
world apart from the ancients? Should I distinguish for you a vision
of virtue that looks to an ideal heaven beyond and longs for perfection from one that pays regard to the world right here and goes
for moderation? Should I explain to you that the Greek philosophers tends toward ethics, toward developing personal qualities of
excellence, while the Judeo-Christian tradition tends toward morality, willingness to obey the laws of God and nature? Should I list
for you different doctrines of doing right, such as eudaemonism,
the teaching that happiness is the aim of virtue, or deontology, the
account of virtue as duty and the obligation to obey commands, of
which Kant is the most extreme representative? For while Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle, whatever their differences, think that ethics
involves some sort of rightness in our feelings, emotions, and passions, Kant is clear that morality at its purest is a matter of reason
alone. Reason is in its essence universal: to think rationally is to
think unexceptionably, comprehensively. So to obey the commands
of reason is to suppress all merely natural inclinations, all purely
Eva Brann is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was delivered at the “Windows on the Good Life”
Course at Carlton College on 16 April 2014.
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idiosyncratic desires, and to intend only such actions as we would
want to be intended by everyone—or even to be seen as commanded by a law of nature. This is the notorious “categorical imperative”: “imperative” means “command” and “categorical”
means “without ifs and buts” (as when someone says to you “that's
a categorical no!”). You'll see in a moment why I've brought Kantian morality into this talk.
One last thing I might be speaking about, and which in fact I
will talk of in a moment, is the word “virtue.” I'll argue that this
translation of the word the Greeks use, aretē, has its virtues, but
we should probably give it up, or at least use it with raised eyebrows.
I now want to say why none of the above, except the last, appealed to me. I will tell you what seems to me the biggest trouble
with academic study, and so with most of our eduction. I call it
the problem of lost immediacy. This is what I mean: There are
books—and if your teachers chose well, they will be great ones—
that are full of substance. Then there are books and articles and
lectures about books. The great books (or texts of any sort) contain
opinions. The next level of books and articles also contain opinions, but they are opinions about the original opinions, because
whoever interprets a primary text adds a perspective to it. Then
here we are, your teachers, and we’ve absorbed some of these
original opinions, as well as some of the opinions about them—
and we’ve acquired some opinions of our own on top of that. All
those levels of learning on our part can smother, drown out, your
immediate relation to the book. But even a powerful, first-rate
book—perhaps especially such a book—can also stand between
you and yourself. It intervenes in your thinking and can capture
it, so that you are content to think its thoughts and co-feel its feelings, rather than being immediately present to yourself. Or worse,
it can put you off its possibly life-changing content because you
see no direct entrance to it.
Now I hasten to say that I pity people who have never been
taken over by a book or even by a teacher in that way—if, that is,
the being-taken-over is the beginning of an effort, a struggle, that
issues in a gradual emergence or a tumultuous bursting out of a
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
discovery that is truly your own. And I pity even more students
who have been turned off by a life-enhancing text because no one
helped them to make a direct connection with it.
A witty outside observer of my college used to tell the world
that our students arrive knowing nothing and leave knowing that
they know nothing. I hope it’s true, provided you keep in mind that
to know that you know nothing is knowing a lot. What he meant,
though, was that they had absorbed so many contradictory opinions
from reading so many deep books that they were in a state of ultimate and utterconfusion. But in that he was surely mistaken. Such
riches may be oppressive and discombobulating for a while, but
that’s a state you work yourself out of into some clarity—clarity
about “who you are,” which is a formulaic way of saying “what
your thinking can accept and your feelings can embrace.”
Therefore I think that the second-best thing we teachers can
do for our students is to show how books can be, in a fancy term,
“appropriated,” made one’s own—and not just a few books of the
same sort, but many books of different sorts, different in genre,
different in opinion. The very best thing we can do, of course, is
to get students to read them well and talk about them to each other.
Doesn’t that broad appropriation, you might ask, imply eclecticism, which is a sort of intellectual cherry-picking that disregards
the generality of a well thought-out theory, and—especially if it’s
an ethical or moral theory—its integration into a comprehensive
view of the ways things are? Well, yes, if ecleticism means indiscriminately collecting low-hanging fruit from here and there, it will
be cherry-picking, extracting now contextless bits and pieces. But
no, if eclecticism has a basis in the very nature of things. In a moment I’ll explain this oracular pronouncement.
But first, there’s the word “virtue,” the supposed subject of my
talk. Let everyone talk as they wish, as long as they know what
they’re saying; but I wish we wouldn't use “virtue” as a translation
of that Greek word aretē—or at least that we would use it mostly
with raised eyebrows. To be sure, it has a nice argument in its
favor: “virtue” is related both to the Latin vis, force, and vir, man.
Virtue is the energy of a being that holds it together, and gives it
power, as when they say in stories: “All the virtue went out of
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him.” Now as it happens, aretē is related to a Greek prefix ari-,
meaning “very much, forcefully so”; thus aretē is the potency in a
person or thing to be what it is supposed to be. (Some Greeks seem
to have seen a relation between aretē and Ares, the powerful warrior-god.) Moreover, the moral virtue most highly regarded by Aristotle, courage, is literally called “manliness” (andreia) in Greek.
So it all fits together. On the other hand, “virtue,” in a use that goes
back to Shakespearean times and into the nineteenth century, was
a woman’s particular kind of manliness, namely, well-girded
chastity, her bodily and psychic inviolability. We have nothing left
but a smile for such passionless purity. More recently, the adjective
“virtual,” in its meaning of “inactual,” has come front-and-center
as an attribute of cyberspace: “virtual reality,” that is to say, “unreal
reality.” We ought to have a background awareness of the sphere
of connotations of our words, including their history. But, as far as
the contemporary connotations of the adjectival form of “virtue”
is concerned, I don’t think we want to go there.
This means, however, that for the moment I’m left without a
word for my subject. And this lack raises two really interesting
questions: Can we have a thought without a name? and Can we
think without words? Powerful contemporary writers claim that it
is impossible for two reasons: There can be no external proof that
thinking is going on without someone saying something thoughtful: a furrowed brow is no evidence. In fact even our claim to be
thinking doesn’t prove that we are thinking. And more important,
to think is really to marshall meanings, and meanings are drifting
vapours unless they are attached to a word or given structure in a
sentence.
Here I beg to differ with these contemporary writers. I think
we all experience that sense of a disembodied meaning, of pre-verbal thinking, that moves in our mind, sometimes like a gentle aromatic breeze over the mental plain, sometimes like a powerful push
of air pressure against a mental wall, rousing us to seek the right
term to catch it, the accurate language to describe it, the suitable
words to embody it.
So then, what is this mental presence that is called virtue, effectiveness, excellence, dutifulness, goodness? I am supposing
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
here that to have too many words is equivalent to having no cogent
idea. But that may be a mistake. The reason why there are numerous translations for the Greek word you’ve thought about under
the term “virtue” may be that in fact it encompasses a number of
ways of being what is called broadly, and so a little bluntly, “good”;
there are many terms because there really are different ways of
being humanly good. This possibility of earthly variety kicks the
meaning they share, “goodness,” way upstairs, so to speak—up
into the highest reaches of thought. In the Republic, Socrates says
to the two very intelligent young men he is speaking with that he
can’t explain this Good to them in the brief space of one evening.
So I feel excused from even trying in this short hour.
On the other hand, I do want to make use of the notion that
there might be more than one way of being good—an idea that will
probably underwhelm you. It would not even have shocked people
who lived before the First World War, like your great-great-grand
parents—though for different reasons. Nowadays many people,
certainly among them the most articulate ones, believe that as long
as we are socially right-minded and we don’t discriminate among
our fellow humans for being what nature made them, we can be
fairly forgiving of a loose personal morality. So there is public and
private morality, one rigorous, the other relaxed. (Of course, these
are generalizations, which are never true of those in whose hearing
they are made.) Your ancestors, on the other hand, would have
tended to believe what Socrates sets out in the Republic, namely,
that members of different castes or classes belonging to one political community have different characteristic excellences. Moreover, they knew quite well that, even within their class,
people—especially well-off men—lived quite comfortably within
a double moral framework. For example, men could maintain a respectable but loveless marriage to one woman whom they publicly
honored, while at the same time engaging in a passionate but disreputable attachment to a mistress who had only private privileges.
My own uncle lived that way. When he and his wife fled Germany
from the Nazis in 1939, his mistress was on the same train in a separate compartment.
Here is what I want to do now, killing two birds with one stone
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(though I’m not so much for killing birds, especially not en masse).
My first aim is to take off on my own, so that my primary point
will not be so much to explain a theory found in a book—though,
as you’ll see, I’ll have to do that too in order to achieve my second
purpose. And that second purpose is to show how one might be
eclectic without being incoherent, how we might engage in picking-out parts of theories of goodness without producing a mere
self-pleasing miscellany, a tasty thought-goulash.
This second purpose might be of real use to you if you’re feeling a little snowed by all the deep and sometimes difficult theories
you’ve studied this year. I mean to show that you can fashion an
opinion to live by through combining the most disparate conceptions. My first aim, however, is to think out something for myself
and articulate it before a sympathetic audience.
So now to it. One human being may indeed live with two
moralities, one public, one private, and this duplicity is not always
hypocritical; it may simply make life livable and prevent it from
becoming worse. Or, looking at it another way, there is a saying
that hypocrisy is the respect vice pays to virtue: I think it’s better
all around that there should be such respect, once humanly understandable and inevitable wrong-doing is on the scene. Again, coming to our day, some people quite comfortably cheat on their taxes
and tell you that it’s a form of civic virtue to short-change a wasteful government, but they observe strict correctness when it comes
to matters of social justice. They too live in a dual moral frame.
But I want to introduce another, I think more fundamental, duality: the pacing of time, or, more accurately, of psychic motion. If
you watch the stream of cars coming toward you on the opposite
side of a highway, and there is a good deal of traffic, you’ll notice
that the cars bunch up; they practically tailgate each other until the
density dissolves into long stretches of lighter flow. The world is
like that, and so are our lives; it and we are in sync. There’s an
earthquake, a tsunami, a storm, an eruption all at once after years
of nothing. A dreary winter has lasted for ever, suddenly it’s spring,
the forsythia is in bloom, the trees are bursting into leaf, and it’s
time for outdoor-idling, but there are summer jobs to be lined up,
final exams, parties, last-moment bonding, packing, all at once.
That’s outside, but it’s similar inside: There are undistinguished
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
times marked, very unremarkably, by routine and repetition; life
flows away and is canceled, collapses into one-and-any-day’s
schedule. Then suddenly time develops densities; all the momentous moments happen together, for better or for worse. When it
rains, it pours, as the saying goes.
I should remind you here that the exhilarating heights and tearful depths of time, or rather of eventfulness, separated by expanses
of flat dailiness—these closings-up and drawings-apart of happenings—are a Western way of seeing the world and living in it. There
are teachings of the East that make a virtue of unbunching time, of
letting life flow evenly—every moment as charged with presence
as any other. Thus when I called this talk “Momentary Morality
and Extended Ethics,” I was thinking only of our half of the world.
So now I’ll explain what I mean by momentary morality. I’ve
been describing an experience of time and events that includes moments of crisis, either imposed on us by nature or manufactured
by us from sheer cussed, willful Westernness. Although krisis is a
Greek word meaning “separation” or “decision,” and so might just
betoken any branching in the flow of events, we generally don’t
mean something good by it. A crisis, as we use the word, is not so
much a branching as a stanching of the flow of events that makes
its elements pile up and then burst out, often in a kind of relieving
demolition of the status quo. Certainly the living pace we share,
consisting of stretches of eventless, quiet desperation or contentment, as the case may be, which are interspersed with somewhat
frantic eventfulness, practically guarantees that every high will be
at the expense of a low, as a hill is paid for by a hollow. I think that
I’ve told things the way they really are, but that I’ve left two questions (at least) quite unanswered: Are the highs higher than the
lows are low, that is, are there more great moments than sorry
ones? and What is the logic, or better, the ontology of these eventpairings of high and low? Why is natural and human life subject
to these oppositions? By “ontology,” which signifies an “account
of being,” I mean the most fundamental explanation we can find
for the way things are, including psychology in the non-medical
sense: an account of the human soul.
But I want to use this notion of bunched time, of high moments
we may hope for and low ones we can expect, of events shaped in
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time like wave packets connected by a flat line—unexamined
though the image be—to speak about the type of morality which I
call “momentary morality.” I mean those critical moments when
you’re up against the wall, when it’s too late to think things out,
when you need to be ready with an inner command to tell you what
to do—what you must do—at that very moment. The human condition being what it is, what you must do will tend to be something
you don’t want to do, or rather, something you will want with every
fiber of your feelings not to do. If at that moment you waffle about
what you ought to do, or if you fail to do as you ought, you’ll never
forget that you were unprepared in a moral emergency or unsteadfast in doing your duty. You will be diminished in your self-respect.
I’ve seen it written and heard it said that such moments of extremity reveal who a person really is. I don’t believe it. I think what
you do day-by-blessedly-ordinary-day is more apt to reveal, even
while it is shaping, who you are. But I do know that moral failure
in a crisis sticks with you: I know it from myself, I know it from a
tale one day told me, almost in passing, by a man I admired, and I
know it from fiction, especially Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim
and Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
There is a theory of morality that seems to me tailored for moments of crisis and, consequently, inept in daily use. It is the Kantian theory of the categorical imperative I mentioned earlier on. It
is, in the compass of my reading, the most powerful, coherent, ingenious and, not incidentally, the most earnestly extremist theory
of human goodness ever devised. Like all great specific theory it
is embedded in a grand grounding of human consciousness. Kant
would turn, nay, whirl in his grave to hear me assign it to so particular a use, so momentary an occasion. But since I am convinced
that it is not possible to live well through the flats of life on Kantian
morality (though I lack time in this talk to explain why) and find
that even his own applications sometimes have repellent results, I
feel less abashed at saving the pieces, so to speak. Let me explain
as simply and briefly as I can how this morality might work in an
emergency, and that explanation itself will go a little ways toward
showing why one can’t live that way through extended time.
We have, Kant says, a faculty for freedom, namely, our will,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
our free will. To be free means to take orders from no one but oneself. Thus the free will commands itself. It gives itself its own law.
There must be law, Kant thinks, because if the will were lawless it
would be the opposite of free—call it capricious, wanton. Now the
will, Kant also thinks, is an aspect of reason, which has two sides.
One side is theoretical reason. This reason gives nature its laws
and then recognizes them as necessary. I will set this activity of
reason aside here—it’s what I mean by ripping his moral theory
out of the grand whole. The other side is practical reason; it gives
itself its laws and so knows itself as free. You can see that it is identical with the free will. The will—really myself as a free person—
should, of course, obey the command of its self-given law, its
imperative. As I said earlier, this imperative permits no ifs and buts,
admits no special cases, allows no individual exceptions, because
it is addressed to reason, and reason does not contradict its own
universal judgment, for then it would be self-contradictory. Above
all, it avoids the necessities, the unfree determinism, of lawful nature. We human beings are in part natural, namely, in our inclinations and desires. Our free will, our practical reason, has no truck
with the emotions and feelings that drive us. It chooses a course
entirely because it is right and not in the least because we feel good
about it; in fact, the more it hurts the better we know we are doing
our duty, doing purely as we ought. And we have a test to tell us
whether our decision is right, a test that expresses the essence of
reason: If I can universalize my particular motive for choosing an
action so as to turn it into a general law of human action or a conceivable law of nature, then I am choosing as I ought. I am preserving the purity of reason, namely its universality and its
avoidance of self-contradiction by exception-making.
Let me give a famous example by Kant himself. Suppose a
persecutor comes to my door and asks if his intended victim is
within. All my inclination is to deny it, to protect the fugitive. But
if I generalize my motive it assumes this form: Under humanitarian
pressure anyone may tell a lie. And then all trust in anyone’s declarations collapses, for anyone can construe an exception. So you
must tell the truth, and you will have done your duty, come hell or
highwater or the murder of a fugitive. I’ve told this example be-
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cause it seems to me to show how Kantian purity can turn into
moral catastrophe when life is fraught with daily danger. Just imagine that you’re harboring a fugitive dissident in some totalitarian
state, and, as you well know they might, the secret police come
knocking at your door. Will you tell them the truth for the sake of
the self-consistency of reason? No, you will have recourse—if you
think you need it—to the very paralogical, paradoxical principle of
the white lie. And, in general, I think that this absolutist morality is
not only too inhumane, but also too joyless to be livable day by day.
But let there be that one life-changing moment when, torn from
the usually peaceful flux of ordinary life, you suddenly must decide. The occasion might be a temptation to commit a minor transgression in the world’s eyes, but one weighing heavily on your
conscience. Or it could be an unexpected call on your courage, unwelcome but unavoidable, perhaps never patent to the world but
well enough known to yourself.
These are, I think, Kantian moments, spots of time when a
morality is wanted that disparages our inclinations and prompts us
to duty, that provides an effective on-the-spot test of what ought
to be done, to wit: What if everyone did what it has just crossed
my mind to do? That decisive moment’s morality is the kind which
commands without hedging.
But for most of us in this country these excruciating moments
that, when they do come, tend, to be sure, to come in multiples,
are blessedly sparse. The rational points on a mathematical line are
said to be dense, meaning that they leave no empty interval and
yet do not form a continuum (since the irrational points are missing). Such is the incident-line, the event-time of our ordinary daily
life, in which every little station has its happening; but though they
are all discrete, they are so closely packed together that they are
scarcely discernible. Our day has 86,400 seconds and our week
604,800 seconds, and we can calculate the number of seconds in
our month, our year, our decade, our lifetime. This flattish life-line
of instants, with the peaks and troughs it occasionally develops,
surely requires a different notion of goodness from the one that is
marked by excruciating, disruptive moments. As I called the latter
“momentary morality,” so I will call the former “extended ethics.”
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
11
Morality, remember, requires command-issuing universal law;
ethics, on the other hand, demands natural and acquired personal
qualities. Of the possible English alternatives to the term “virtue,”
I think that “excellence” best expresses the connotations the ancient users of the word aretē seem to have had in mind, even before
the philosophers got to discerning a comprehensive meaning.
Let me list those connotations of aretē, understood as excellence, that I can think of: 1. effectiveness; 2. competition; 3. happiness; 4. enumerability; 5. habituation. They all have to do with
the long runs of life, the flat stretches that may buckle into peaks
and valleys of glory and misery; they have little or nothing to do
with the up-against-the-wall decisions of a life fractured by a moral
emergency.
I’ve spoken of the notion of aretē as an effective, potent way
of being that betokens a soul honed to a fine edge, just as a wellsharpened pruning knife is an efficient and perhaps somewhat dangerous object. There is a competitive tone to aretē, just as to be
excellent means literally “to rise above,” as we say, “to be outstanding.” The possessor of aretē glories in it, vaunts and flaunts
it, as do the Homeric heroes. A hero is high in self-esteem, in current language. Furthermore, the aretai, the excellences that everyone recognizes, can be counted off. Socrates regularly refers to
four cardinal ones: wisdom, justice, courage, and sound-mindedness. These excellences require the right sort of body and soul—
physical and psychic talent as we would say—but also practice,
habituation. It is in this last element that the difference between
Kantian morality and ethics, as I have delineated it, shows up most.
Personal qualities are confirmed in habituation, in being habitually
practiced, but the free will, the self-legislation of morality is essentially at odds with habituation. For habit puts the natural laws
of psychology to work, and these are deterministic mechanisms.
In fact, habit as a mechanism is an inhibition on spontaneousness,
on freedom. What’s more, for Kant the will’s intention trumps
practical execution.
Indeed, all the points of the ethics of individual qualities are
contrasted with law-morality. The categorical imperative has, to
be sure, several forms, but it is basically one, a super-command-
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ment that the free will issues and obeys, while the human excellences are enumerably multiple. For although excellence as excellence may be one super-quality, it needs to assume various
specifications, and these may even be at odds with each other. For
instance, courage and sound-mindedness (whose Greek term,
sophrosyne, is often translated as “moderation”) may pull in opposite directions. Certainly the competitive glorying of excellence
is unthinkable in a dutiful moralist, and the sharp-set potency and
effectiveness which goes with any excellence is absolutely out of
play for the moral mode. Once more, in Kant’s great works of
moral philosophy, the issue of execution, of how the passage from
decision to effective action is accomplished, which is so crucial a
juncture in ethics, is almost completely suppressed. Ethics is a way
of being objectively good in the world; the doing is almost everything. Kantian morality is primarily concerned with being right
with oneself, subjectively good; the intention is everything, though
hard actions may, indeed should, follow. As Kant famously says:
There is nothing unqualifiedly good except a good will. Note that
he does not say “a good deed.”
It is with respect to my middle point, happiness, that the difference is greatest and that ethics seems to me a far more livable,
day-by-day useful theory. It is essential to moral intention that no
hint of nature-bound desire should taint the purity of duty done for
its own sake, meaning for the sake of self-rule; no psychic pleasure-seeking mechanism should confuse the clarity of a command
obeyed for the sake of one's rational integrity, one’s rational consistency. Ethics, on the other hand, cooperates with nature; although it distinguishes between sound and corrupt pleasure,
between excess and moderation, it nevertheless regards pleasure,
in Aristotle’s words, as the bloom on our activity, and considers
happiness, whatever its definition, as the proper, indeed self-evident, human aim.
Recall that I have spoken about “extended ethics” as opposed
to “momentary morality” and distinguished the two theories of
human goodness by their relation to time, or rather, to eventuation.
Morality was for intense, abrupt, exigent, emergent moments of
up-against-the-wall decision making; ethics was for a looser,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
13
smoother, less urgent, more subdued tenor of life. And indeed,
everything I’ve observed about ethics seems to me to fit this latter
temporal mode better: our natural longing for accessible daily
pleasure and sustainable long-term happiness in the world; our innocent, or not-so-innocent, human-all-too-human eagerness for
admiration; our comfort in a being buoyed up by a tradition of
recognizably articulated excellencies; our time-consuming growth
into profitable habits and productive routines.
Above I calculated our line of life in myriads of instants almost too brief for detection (as distinct from discernible moments). Yet each had to be occupied and vacated, lived in and
through, for better or for worse. It seemed to me that this analogy
of life to a line, at once dense and pointillistic, recommended to
us a theory of goodness which allowed us to be all there as natural
beings, driven at every point of temporal existence by desire, fastening on some moments for fulfillment, developing excellence
and glorying in it, engaging with the world in action and with ourselves in thinking. But it also seemed that there were moments of
heightened urgency when we must oppose our pleasure-seeking
and happiness-enjoying nature and forget all the flourishing excellence promotes in order to obey the harsh self-command of
“you ought”—no ifs and buts.
My overarching purpose, however, was to persuade you that
your studies of ways to be humanly good can be appropriated
by you to fashion a way of your own, that they need not add up
to mutual canceling-out of theories and all-round confusion of
soul. In fact, I’m paying you a major compliment: I’m supposing
that you’re taking your learning seriously, not just, as the phrase
goes, “academically”—that you take your studies to heart as lifeshaping.
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Reinventing Love:
An Introduction to Plato’s Phaedrus
John F. Cornell
The English playwright Tom Stoppard has a dazzlingly erudite
play called “The Invention of Love.” It is not one of his more
popular works for the stage, partly because of its arcane references to classical philology, including substantial quotations from
the ancient poets in Greek and Latin and some stunning observations on the critical role of the comma. The play centers on the
nineteenth-century Oxford classicist and poet A. E. Housman as
he dramatically reviews his life in the Underworld among the
ghosts from his past. The title “Invention of Love” seems to derive from the debate, recalled in passing, about which Roman
poet invented the love elegy: Housman wittily decides it in favor
of Gallus, on the basis of his one surviving line. Yet the title turns
out to be less academic when the drama takes up the hero’s alleged homosexuality. Housman invokes the shade of his contemporary, the flamboyant Oscar Wilde, who enters reading – or
rather mocking – Housman’s poem about a youth who took his
life for sexual shame.
Shot? So quick, so clean an ending?
Oh, that was right, lad, that was brave:
Yours was not an ill for mending,
T’was best to take it to the grave.
To Wilde, Housman had tried to make art out of a newspaper
stereotype, a cliché. But art – like love – is always personal,
imaginative, and drastically original. Referring to his notorious
John F. Cornell is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
where an earlier version of this essay was delivered as a lecture on April
2011. The author wishes to express his gratitude to Maryanne HoeffnerCornell, Keven Schnadig, and Joshua Renfro for the responses and discussions that contributed to the development of the present essay.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | CORNELL
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affair with Lord Alfred Douglas (nicknamed Bosie), Wilde declares:
Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to
be invented. We would never love anyone if we could
see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem.
In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.
By which he seems to mean that all love is a species of art, and
that neither love nor love poetry would exist if people inquired
too critically into these ferments of imagination. Thus Stoppard
presents Housman the ascetic and Wilde the aesthete: the emotionally conflicted scholar, whose life was “not short enough for
[him] not to do the things [he] wanted not to do”; and the creator
of modern gay identity, whose “blaze of immolation threw its light
into every corner where uncounted young men sat each in his own
darkness”1 – now freed, presumably, from thoughts of suicide.
I cite this provocative drama because its two themes, homoeroticism and the invention of love, would certainly have intrigued Plato. For to “describe love” (Wilde’s understatement) Plato
places Socrates in a similar theatrical dialogue and shows him, like
Housman, curious about the poets’ innovation. Though neither
Wilde nor Housman seem aware of it, in the Phaedrus Socrates identifies the poets as the cultural promulgators of pederasty – Greek
man-boy love – and he undertakes to reinvent it. He reinvents it as
initiation into the love of wisdom. Perpendicular to the modern
polarity that Stoppard stages, of dejected self-repression versus
exuberant self-assertion, Plato stages the polarity of common versus philosophic love of the beautiful. His hypothesis sounds at
least as preposterous in our time as it must have sounded in his:
the higher meaning of homoeroticism is companionship in the
quest for being.
Plato’s reinvention of love turns on a central question in his writings, namely, how philosophy is erotic. Philosophy is erotic not just
in the sense that wisdom is someone’s all-consuming passion. It is
1. Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love (New York: Grove Press, 1997),
92-96.
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erotic in that the pursuit of wisdom draws on the excess of sexual
desire felt in the intimate relation between lover and beloved,
which in the Greek polis centers on the courtship of a youth by
an adult citizen. The philosopher is master of his desire for his
beloved because he understands their attachment as a joint path
of enlightenment. His love of wisdom puts his physical desire at
the disposal of a dialogical friendship, reversing the usual tendency of love to subjugate the soul to the body. From this lover’s
abstention derives the popular term “Platonic love,” used nowadays to describe any friendship that is sexless and might have
been otherwise. But this popular idea of Platonic love misrepresents Plato’s idea insofar as its original source – the Phaedrus –
is concerned with a particular, sexually charged bond, that of an
older guide and his follower.
No one can deny that there is a great deal to learn about romantic love from Plato’s great dialogue. However, the modern reader’s
impression that Plato must disapprove of physical relations between all couples confuses the issue.2 For Plato there is indeed in
love a theme that overreaches bodily passion; eros is a broader
and more powerful force than the sexual drive. But the original
aporia concerned how this overreach expressed itself in pederasty.
Though it may appear to moderns as a settled institution,3 the
Greek sexual relationship between men and boys was actually
controversial in the polis because of its asymmetry. If we take sexual pederasty simply to be an ancient norm, and then universalize
Plato’s sublimation of this desire, we run the risk of missing his
2. E.g., Glenn W. Most, “Six Remarks on Platonic Eros,” in Erotikon:
Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern, ed. Shadi Bartsch and Thomas
Bartscherer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 42. “Plato
does not downplay, neglect, or minimize the bodily erotic drive but instead evokes, intensifies, and even demonizes it – only to then explain
it away as a misunderstanding or as a metaphor and to turn it against
the body itself. In all this one is struck by a kind of Puritanism.”
3. Cf. James Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love (New York: Random House, 2007), xxvi,; and Andrew Lear and Eva Cantarella, Images
of Ancient Greek Pederasty (New York: Routledge, 2008), 18.
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point. It is the questionable naturalness of pederasty, the transgressive character of this relationship that is at issue in the Phaedrus (251a). If we ignore the possibility that this sexual liaison is
existential pedagogy manqué, we obscure the dialogue’s insight
into the connection between eros and philosophy. For Socrates the
same-sex eros that sidelines procreation points dramatically to
philosophy.4 He would bring this immoderate desire to its proper
climax. It is as if there is a hidden purpose in the havoc it wreaks,
as if it is only deceptively about friction of flesh. This explains
the peculiar intensity in the original Platonic relationship, which
the philosopher further intensifies through restraint – quite the opposite of repression. Mistrusting this drive toward his sexual like,
the philosophic lover heightens his conscious urge toward being.
How he does so is what the Phaedrus is about.
I shall attempt here to look at how the dialogue prepares us to
appreciate the new, philosophical pederasty (249a). I shall focus
on the exchanges and speeches that come before Socrates’s famous speech, the great palinode where he describes the divine
madness and the soul as charioteer driving mismatched steeds
with broken wings. Now for many readers the parts of the dialogue that precede the palinode have two strikes against them.
First, they are confusing. Second, they are not the palinode. That
is, we tend to take them as “preliminary material,” not worth much
trouble compared to Socrates’s spectacular discourse on love.
After all, doesn’t Socrates himself repudiate the speeches that precede the palinode? While we may find the first parts of the dialogue hard to take seriously, we should be surprised if every joke
and gesture of Socrates does not conceal some deeper meaning. I
propose that the first sections of the Phaedrus dramatize an essential part of Socrates’s wisdom about eros and that the only way
to glean this wisdom is to interrogate his dialogical tactics.
To start with the question I have already raised about invention:
invention is a topic in rhetoric. The Greek term euresis refers to
4. Cf. Leo Strauss, On Plato’s Symposium, ed. Seth Benardete (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001), 50.
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the originality of the argument or rhetorical strategy in a speech.
It can also mean “discovery.” (My quotation of Stoppard’s Wilde
also invoked this duality.) Socrates uses the term when discussing
his approach in his first speech, building on Lysias’s thesis of the
superiority of the non-lover to the lover. As usual, Socrates is
ironic: in discussing “invention” he leads us to believe that he
could say nothing very original, except perhaps on inessential
points. (236a). Thus under the cover of a rhetorical contest he
conceals his bold innovation in Greek love.
Socrates’s radical views are – as is to be expected in Plato –
set in contrast to the teaching of the poets who had long shaped
the Greek experience of love. Indeed the English term “invention” (as a translation of euresis) may apply more to the poets,
while the term “discovery” may better suit the philosopher who
inquires into the nature of things. The poets (according to the
term poiēsis) are makers and creators. They are not primarily interested in the truth about human affairs, nor about the cosmic
order on which Socrates, by contrast, would ground the subject
of eros. The poets, he says, have not sung nor will they ever sing
adequately about the place beyond the heavens. They may presume to mediate between gods and men; but the philosopher gets
nearer to the “essence of being itself.” (247c).5 The poets could
therefore only give us love as an artifice – they helped and help
us invent it. The philosopher tries to reveal love as it is by nature,
as it might be discovered by the reflective mind.
Now this difference comes up near the beginning of the dialogue in a striking way. Before beginning his speech in the match
with Lysias, Socrates makes a point of saying how shallow the
rhetorician is on the topic of love (235b). He prefers the original
writers, like the poets Sappho and Anacreon, who at least knew
5. Translations from Greek are adapted, literally and sometimes loosely,
from Plato in Twelve Volumes, Greek text of Phaedrus, Harold N.
Fowler translation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982),
vol. 1; and Plato’s Phaedrus, translation, notes, appendices, introduction, and interpretive essay by Stephen Scully (Newburyport, Mass.:
Focus Publishing, 2003).
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what needed to be said on the subject. He does not mean that the
poets spoke or knew the whole truth; he brings them into this
conversation because of their cultural influence. He says he could
never have invented the original talk about love (ouden autōn ennenoēka, 235c). The poets poured it into his ears like a foreign
stream – “foreign” (allotriōn) implying that this current was not
native to him or perhaps to anybody else. Lysias may be the occasion of this impromptu contest of speeches, but for Socrates the
real challengers are the poets.
Notice Phaedrus’s reaction to Socrates’s genealogy of Greek
love. “Don’t tell me, Socrates, even if I beg you, how or from
whom you heard such talk” (235d). I suspect that here Plato is
underscoring the antipathy between a shallow type of aesthetic
experience and philosophy. Phaedrus is expressing resistance to
having knowledge about the psychology of his pleasure. Pleasure
is immediacy and knowledge would interfere with his passive
enjoyment, supplanting it with the beginnings of self-consciousness about his response. Just as Oscar Wilde argues in Stoppard’s
play, a certain self-deception facilitates both erotic attachment and
poetic invention. So the question of origins carries a disturbing
potential from which Phaedrus protects himself. It might force
upon his attention the arbitrariness of cultural forms, and the
power poets have over us beyond our own immediate experience.
Subjection to love may be one with subjection to the rhetoric of
its poetry insofar as our feelings may have capricious causes.
Obviously in our interpersonal experience, love and rhetoric
are intertwined. The passions that engage us intimately also induce us to wear masks or play rhetorical games in order to give
safe expression to our feelings. At the beginning of the dialogue
both Socrates and Phaedrus profess to be lovers of speeches, susceptible to the beauties of language. But they don’t mean quite
the same thing by this pleasure, and they engage in a good deal
of horsing around before they settle on their shared business.
Each conceals his desire in a different way. Phaedrus hides his
need to recite Lysias’s speech, to impersonate him before another,
as if he could make Lysias’s powers his own (228a). He is even
concealing the scroll of Lysias’s discourse, which he has with
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him. Socrates will quickly expose the deception. By contrast,
Socrates pretends weakness. He pretends to be sick with the love
of hearing discourses, when (as we shall see) he is angling for a
chance to expound his own views. So the difference is that Phaedrus is deceiving himself when he tries to hide his desire, whereas
Socrates hides his desire with full awareness by pretending to be
susceptible to a more common appetite. He pretends to be dependent on Phaedrus to hear any speeches, such that Phaedrus
could easily lead him all around Attica. Though Phaedrus senses
that Socrates is teasing him on this score, he does not appreciate
how the quest for wisdom motivates Socrates. Thus Plato introduces us immediately to the difference that self-knowledge
makes in desire’s need to be concealed and sustained. Ordinary
desire conceals itself out of emotional self-interest. Philosophical
desire, the interest in philosophy, conceals itself by imitating ordinary desire (cf. 227c-d). This is the irony of Socrates’s seduction in the Phaedrus. He has his own Lysian strategy but in
reverse: the philosophical non-lover posing as common lover.
Keenly aware of the role-playing, Socrates calls attention to
it. He hopes that they might drop their masks and that Phaedrus
might just recite or read Lysias’s speech. To shatter the fiction,
he describes their encounter as third persons.
O Phaedrus! If I don’t know Phaedrus, I have forgotten myself. But since neither of these things is true, I know very
well that when listening to Lysias he did not hear once only,
but often urged him to repeat; and he gladly obeyed. Yet even
that was not enough for Phaedrus, but at last he borrowed
the book and read what he especially wished. Then . . . he
went for a walk with the speech, as I believe, . . . learned [it]
by heart. . . . And he was going outside the wall to practice
it. And meeting the man who is sick with the love of discourse, he was glad when he saw him, because he would
have someone to share his revel, and told him to lead on. But
when the lover of discourse asked him to speak, he feigned
coyness, as if he did not yearn to speak; at last, however,
even if no one would listen willingly, he was bound to speak
whether or no. So, Phaedrus, ask him to do now what he will
presently do anyway (228a-c).
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Unfortunately, it is not so easy to dispense with the disguises.
When Phaedrus proves excessively enamored of Lysias’s speech,
Socrates dons a mask even more ironic than that of the speechlover: he covers himself with his cloak. Expected to denounce
the lover in behalf of the non-lover (according to Lysias’s model),
he lets Phaedrus believe that he hides out of embarrassment for
seeking Phaedrus’s admiration (237a). This misleads not only
Phaedrus but also many readers. In fact, Socrates is speaking for
himself as a philosopher, but is concealing it while he performs
as Lysias’s rival. His concern for Phaedrus requires him to give
counsel under cover, philosophical advice (237b-c). Now philosophical advice presupposes inquiry into the nature of things. He
will define the nature of love, based on the inner workings of the
soul, as clarification of these principles fosters unanimity of mind
and whole-hearted decision. Similarly, his speech will denounce
the bad lover for keeping his beloved from “divine philosophy,”
lest the beloved become wise to him (239b). In short, Socrates is
not representing a lecherous non-lover unfettered by love in the
manner of Lysias. He is performing his own species of dispassion, the non-love of the philosopher who is nonetheless interested in his listener’s welfare. In his view, the irrational lovers
are Lysias and all his kind, whatever they may pretend. A complex irony: while Socrates prevented Phaedrus from speaking as
Lysias, with “Lysias” concealed in the scroll under his cloak
(228e), Socrates contrives to speak as if he were a new Lysias,
except under his cloak he has concealed himself and philosophy.
In scripting Lysias and Socrates as protrusions under cloaks,
Plato suggests the symbolism of the talking phallus – each man’s
desire determining his speech. In this contest of rhetoric we witness not Socrates’s shame but his satyr play mocking Phaedrus’s
infatuation.
In keeping with his exposé of Lysias, Socrates’s account reduces eros to force. Eros tops a sequence of exorbitant desires.
First he mentions the overmastering passion for food called gluttony, then the tyrannizing passion for wine; we seek a name for
the amorous desire akin to these.
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It’s relatively clear already, I suppose, why all this has
been said, but things are altogether clearer if the reason
is spelled out rather than left unstated: when passion
without reason [overcomes] straight-minded opinion and
is itself driven toward the pleasure of beauty, and further,
when this passion is violently moved by kindred desires
toward the beauty of the body and is victorious, it takes
its name from that very force (rhōmē) and is called love
(erōs). (238b-c; italics added.)
Socrates’s definition of eros here is a picture of transgression
and excess. Passion overcomes opinion concerning what is correct, epi to orthon, or (as Scully’s translation has it) it overcomes
“straight-minded” opinion. The joke about pederasty seems to
work in Greek as it does in English. In any event it underscores
the rupture of conventional boundaries. But what are we to make
of eros concluding a list of nutritional excesses? Gluttony, drunkenness, and . . . love! The implication is that what most people
call “love” comes down to sexual appetite, the desire, as they say,
to devour or snack on somebody. (Socrates would probably see
the modern literature of vampires as suggesting our ambivalence
about a sexuality enacted on the nutritional model.) All this seems
a comic way of depicting an eros whose “naturalness” consists
mainly of predation. He brings his whole speech to a close with
the ditty: “Just as the wolf loves the lamb, so the lover adores his
beloved!” (241d.)
But the talk of erotic rapacity conceals a psychological theme,
the theme of master and slave. We saw earlier how the passions
Socrates and Phaedrus have for speeches made them vulnerable
to each other’s manipulations; it is so much more the case with
the desire to possess the idealized beloved, especially outside
marriage or the friendship of equals. Here is where force
emerges, in the disordered soul as well as between the lovers who
vie for control. How does one get what one wants from another
who is himself a free center of desire? The paradoxes of this
struggle, which Hegel’s analysis of Spirit described as the master-slave dialectics, are hardly foreign to Plato. In fact, I would
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propose that the struggle to be the master is what makes Lysias’s
speech of genuine interest. What draws Phaedrus to this speech,
whereby a man recommends himself as a non-lover in order to
seduce a youth? Readers of the dialogue often take the speaker
of Lysias’s speech (whom I call Lysias for short) for a clever
scoundrel – a seducer whose only distinction is a weird strategy
that touts his lack of passion. This cannot be the whole story. If
Lysias has merely devised a new way to secure some recreational
sex, then Phaedrus is a fool and Plato is giving Socrates a slight
pretext for expounding his thinking about eros. The problem is
to understand what makes Lysias’s position significant both for
Phaedrus as candidate of his solicitations and, in a different way,
for Socrates.
First of all, one should note how Lysias has attempted to create
legitimacy and respectability for a controversial liaison. He has
made the love of boys into something sensible that will pass
under public gaze without criticism. Thanks to his professed lack
of passion, the older friend will provide the youth with reliable
social benefits and meanwhile not be tempted to make any careless disclosures. The flaw in this solution to the problem of illicit
love is not simply its deceitfulness or even its self-deception. The
flaw is that, while Lysias has removed one of the obstacles to this
passion, he has simultaneously removed one of its hidden motivations. He cannot remove the defiance of respectability – the
pose of superiority to decent opinion – without removing some
of the allure of the liaison.
Thus Lysias has to inject it with a new power, the unconventional idea of the attraction of non-love. What Lysias’s novel seduction brings to the fore is the power of indifference and
impassivity. The obstacles to Greek love that he removed in a social sense he recreates in a more seductive psychological one.
Anyone who has ever played or watched the game of “hard-toget” might wonder if it doesn’t touch on something paradoxical
in desire itself. In Lysias’s case, it is easy to see how the older
person might capitalize on the youth’s attraction to him. As nonlover, he makes the youth into the lover and himself the prize.
He is no slave of love; he need not surrender any ego-pride. He
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simply denies love, denies his capacity to be captivated in that
way. We are speaking, after all, about the orator whose interest
is his superior ability to move others – someone whose erotic victory is inseparable from the rhetorical one. Meanwhile, Lysias’s
listener, the younger person like Phaedrus, will have an idol to
worship. For there can be little doubt about Phaedrus’s need for
a hero. Why else would he insist three times on the definitiveness
of Lysias’s speech? (236b.) And why offer, even in jest, to erect
a statue of the winner of the speech competition? (236b.) It is
Lysias’s turning of the tables on the beloved that supplies the special element of fascination. For Phaedrus, Lysias functions as the
erotic unmoved mover.
Socrates cannot fail to be struck by the distorted semblance
of the philosopher in Lysias’s idea, the sublime aloofness of one
who keeps his head in love. Even his criticism of the orator’s
harping on this theme might indicate his interest (235a). And
notice: when Phaedrus asks Socrates to give his own speech, a
better and “quite different” one (mē elattō hetera, 235d),
Socrates craftily avoids doing so. Let me make this clear:
Socrates could easily now give, after Phaedrus’s recitation and
at his request, what many take to be the “true” speech about
eros as Divine Madness, the renowned palinode. But at this
point he resists the invitation. To paraphrase, he tells Phaedrus:
We needn’t go there. Lysias has not failed in every respect. Plus,
you mustn’t imagine that feeble-minded Socrates could compose a discourse with brand new arguments! (235e.) Socrates
pretends that he is required to adopt Lysias’s topic of non-love,
and he distracts attention from this pretense with a questionbegging maneuver. “Take the subject of Lysias’s speech,” he
says. “What person arguing that the non-lover ought to be more
favored than the lover, could omit praise of the non-lover’s calm
sense and blame of the lover’s unreason? These are necessary
points.” (235e-236a.) Thus, while indicating what might be attractive about non-love, and using Lysias’s thesis as his alibi,
Socrates submits to a non-existent rule of adopting the anti-love
theme for his first speech. For his own reasons, the philosopher
is intent on delivering a discourse against Greek love. He sim-
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ply wants it to appear as if he adopts the topic from Lysias at
Phaedrus’s behest (236bB).
Of course, Socrates has to unpack what’s going on in Lysias’s
head to bring out the fraud in his rhetorical game. Lysias wants
the beloved’s sexual favors as much as any lover; he only manifests in an exceptional way the lover’s desire to keep control.
Thus, one of the things that Socrates’s counter-speech will do is
to make explicit how an older lover (like Lysias) feels compelled
to master the beloved, master his soul quite as much as his body.
The bad lover seeks a boy who will bear witness to the lover’s
superiority, who can be kept dependent and will never surpass
him. This master denies the beloved’s needs as he excels in pursuing his own. His denial of the beloved’s individual humanity –
Lysias’s speech purports to cover all cases – ensures that the
beloved will pay all the psychological costs. Socrates, speaking
as the true and wise non-lover, would protect his youthful addressee from such abuse. In fact, the wisdom in his speech is
aimed at the real-life Phaedrus. There is a moment when he interrupts himself, “seeming” (so he says) to have lost control of
his mind to the nymphs or Muses; he wishes to avert the attack
(238d). But the immediate context gives Socrates’s wish another
sense, too; for he insists that Phaedrus, the object of his enthusiasm, pay special attention. One attack that Socrates means to
avert is that of an orator like Lysias.
Thus Socrates continues his speech, pursuing his counter-attack not only on the bad lover, the “slave to pleasure” (238e) who
preys on youth, but also on any professed non-lover (again like
Lysias) with sexual designs. He proposes to describe the “advantage or harm coming from the lover or the non-lover to the youth
who grants him his favors” (238e). Phaedrus misses the innuendo. When Socrates has finished his speech retailing the repulsive features of such seducers, Phaedrus expects to hear the other
half of the declamation, the praise of the non-lover. Socrates pretends such an elaboration is superfluous: one could simply reverse the situation and attribute to the non-lover the advantages
that parallel the disadvantages of the lover. But he hints that such
a positive speech would be grand. He is already speaking in hexa-
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meter! “If I begin to praise the non-lover, what kind of hymn do
you suppose I shall raise?” (241e.) If we suspect that Socrates
has his second speech up his sleeve, the palinode praising the divine madness, we might wonder if it might not be the very praise
of the non-lover that Phaedrus is missing. It is significant (though
it is rarely noticed) that, to introduce his second speech, Socrates
continues to speak as the chaste critic of Greek love. He continues his stance as the advisor of the unwary youth. “Where’s the
boy with whom I was just speaking?” he begins. “He must hear
this speech, too, and not be in a rush to grant favors to the nonlover before he has heard me out” (243e;, italics added). In other
words, Phaedrus must hear Socrates’s second speech, the palinode, in order to learn not to grant favors even to a non-lover. For
the palinode will celebrate the true non-lover, who resists Greek
love as a sexual practice; but it will also celebrate the true lover,
who reinvents this love as an art of higher inspiration. The contraries love / non-love are reconciled in the superior idea of
courtship expressed in philosophy.
What I am proposing – as the upshot of these machinations –
is that Socrates is committed to the first speech no less than to
the second, and that the two are artfully connected. They have
striking internal consistencies. Socrates is always Socrates. He
says what he thinks is true, but his irony both hides and hints at
his meaning. It is up to the reader to work out the implications
and resolve the ambiguities. Such interpretive demands make the
Phaedrus a confusing experience for the inexperienced reader,
who runs for shelter in the palinode. But the idea that only the
palinode represents Socrates’s essential teaching – an error made
even by scholarly interpreters – is not compatible with his maneuvering both speeches into place. Socrates himself suggests
the idea that the two speeches are intended to form a whole in
the analytical discussion that follows them. (265a-266a). He proposes, for instance, that they are like right and left in an object
with mirror-symmetry. Love and non-love harmonize in the two
speeches because they are two sides of one thing. It would not
be hard to show that the ideas of madness (265a), the accounts
of the desire for beauty (238a), the sense of the mind’s rightful
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rule (237e-238a), even the design to “capture” a boy (253c) – all
agree in the two speeches as well. It is as if Socrates describes a
single, expansive and indifferent force – called eros – only from
two opposite points of view (cf. 263d). The difficulty is to understand why he dramatizes the movement from one perspective
to the other as a personal religious crisis.
Let us see how Socrates has plotted his rhetorical performance.
If his two speeches are intended to form a whole (265c), then we
have to entertain the notion that he planned them from some point
early on in the dialogue – perhaps when he heard Phaedrus’s vehement defense of Lysias. If Socrates has taken up the guidance
of his young friend from the start (cf. 261c, 265c), then certain
confusing moments in his behavior are clarified. A couple of examples will suffice.
First, is Socrates’s resistance to entering into competition with
Lysias at all convincing? It is not just that Socrates wants to
speak; he wants to make Phaedrus make him speak (cf. 237a10).
Socrates has baited Phaedrus with the idea that he, Socrates,
could give a better speech than Lysias, but then turns around and
acts surprised when Phaedrus takes his jest in earnest and presses
him to make good on his boast. How could anyone compete with
the ingenious Lysias? (236b-c.) Phaedrus rises to the bait. He
imagines that he now has a “fair hold” on Socrates and can also
get him back for exposing his (Phaedrus’s) wish to impersonate
Lysias. Phaedrus will use the tactic Socrates used on him: “if I
don’t know Socrates I have forgotten myself,” “he yearned to
speak, but feigned coyness,” and so on (236b). Phaedrus is enjoying his game of one-upmanship over Socrates. The real joke
is that Socrates provoked Phaedrus’s entreaty so that he can
blame him later for the first speech criticizing lovers and love.
This, as we’ll see, allows him to include Phaedrus in the theological drama of its recantation.
He sets up his second speech, the palinode, in an even more
elaborate way.
Phaedrus has bought Socrates’s excuse that there is no need
for him to praise the non-lover; he also buys Socrates’s threat to
go away before Phaedrus can exert any more power over him.
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Phaedrus, however, wants him to stay, specifically to talk over
what’s already been said. In other words, once again Phaedrus
would have accepted skipping the next part of the actual conversation, the palinode in this case, in favor of pursuing the dialogue
that follows the speeches. It is Phaedrus, not Socrates, who uses
the verb dialegō here (242a). What? Engage Socrates in dialogue? No way! To prevent his oratorical plan from going off
course, Socrates pretends to misunderstand Phaedrus’s request:
“Phaedrus, you are something divine when it comes to speeches.
Who has been the source of more discourses than you, either
speaking them yourself or compelling others to do so? There you
go again, twisting my arm! Now another speech is coming upon
me, all because of you!” (242a-b, paraphrased.) Notice that Phaedrus is surprised at this unasked-for event. He says, using a Greek
idiom, that “this is good news” (ou polemon ge angelleis).
That’s just the beginning of the intrigue. For Socrates’s announcement of the new discourse that Phaedrus is extorting from
him precedes his declaration of another motivation for it.
Socrates now declares that his daimonion prevented him from
going away in order to correct his sin against the god of love. A
sin against Eros? Socrates has now given Phaedrus one too many
justifications for the palinode to come. We know the one justification is suspect, why should the other be legitimate? Phaedrus’s
interest in more talk might have been enough of a “sign” for
Socrates to conclude that he now has his attention.6 Of course,
that does not explain Socrates’s confession and need to atone.
How are we to take Socrates’s guilt over a sin (the critique of
love) that we observed him commit with malice aforethought?
We observed him cleverly preserve the impious topic in his first
speech. No daimonion troubled him then! Now Socrates has a
scapegoat for his sin, too. At the same time that he beats his
breast, he moans how it was all Phaedrus’s fault (the move we
saw him prepare earlier). “That was a dreadful speech you made
me give, Phaedrus! That first speech was your speech. You spoke
6. Catherine Zuckert, Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 311, n. 65.
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it through my mouth, as you bewitched me!” (242e.) More
Socrates theatre. Where Phaedrus had wanted to deliver Lysias’s
speech as if it were his own, now he is made the speaker behind
Socrates’s speech! Again Plato piles up the ironies; for Socrates’s
first speech was Phaedrus’s in the sense that it was perfectly
adapted to the younger man’s frame of mind. But why does
Socrates assign it to his friend as a sort of accusation? Is he mimicking the dishonest recriminations found in the unsatisfying love
that that speech just described? Socrates knows how to make
Phaedrus’s identification with the boldest orator work to his advantage. Phaedrus is now both implicated in and fascinated by
Socrates’s dramatic religious turn.
But what is his conversion driving at? Surely Plato intends that
we the readers see through Socrates’s ruse of repentance. I count
six references to sin when he describes the crime of his first
speech. These, however, fall into two distinct classes: a rhetorical
error on the one hand, and an offense to the god Eros on the other.
He will correct his rhetorical error by recanting the speech, as he
admits to having “sinned with respect to mythology” (243a), i.e.,
speech about the god. But though he dwells on the personal offense to Eros (242c, d, e), he never exactly acknowledges committing it. So to repeat: why the theological melodrama? Why
does Socrates put on a redemption play starring himself, a play
within the play – let us call it “Appeasing the God Eros” – to discredit the first speech and distract us from the contrivance that
makes him responsible for it? Why sever his first speech from
the palinode in such an artificial way?
As mentioned earlier, Socrates hints in the conversation following the oratory that his two speeches are linked in his mind
(262d, 263d, 265c, 266a). These hints come purposely too late.
From the point of view of Phaedrus, and of most readers,7 the
two speeches are to appear incompatible. One speech argued that
eros is harmful to both the lover and the beloved, and the other
showed that eros is the greatest of good things. This is how Phaedrus describes them in retrospect, likening Socrates to a sophist
7. Cf. Scully, Plato’s Phaedrus, 95.
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who has demonstrated contradictory theses (263c). From a philosophical point of view, however, the contradiction represented
by the two speeches may lie deeper. It may lie at the heart of
erotic existence, in every soul’s conflict with itself, which comes
to light especially in the passion for youths. Such conflict can be
finally resolved only by philosophy in its direct confrontation
with eros.
Remember, part of the fascination of Lysias’s speech was its
hypocritical motive: the experienced adult might dissemble his
own love and thus intensify a youth’s devotion to him. It is as if
in every lover the non-lover is always lurking and in desire a desire for something beyond itself. When Socrates thus gives his
“Lysian” (first) speech, he exploits the conflict hidden in sexual
pederasty. He plays up the potential repulsiveness of the sexual
lover in order to elicit not the youth’s preference for the non-lover
(that was Lysias’s strategy) but his mistrust of sexual advances
from older men altogether. But further, he plays up the adult
lover’s alienation from his own passion too. In Lysias’s speech
the inevitable decline in the lover’s interest was merely incidental, an eventual disappointment to the boy. Socrates makes a long
excursus on the lover’s discomfort, describing his emotional turn
away from his beloved when, sooner or later, the lover finds himself a “different person” (241b). Beyond warning the boys against
licentious lovers, Socrates is reminding the amorous men of their
own internal division. The argument of his first speech, its critique of the pursuit of bodies, thus prepares for the vision to come
in the palinode. Ordinarily, lovers ascribe their eventual turn
against their love to the inadequacy of a particular partner.
Socrates is showing that the inadequacy inheres in the desire for
what only apparently extinguishes it. The dissatisfactions of boy
loving, when it is reduced to a merely sexual condition, point to
a realization that this passion is groping beyond sexual pleasure,
groping for something ungraspable in the experience of beauty.
So my explanation of Socrates’s theatrical conversion is that
it prepares Phaedrus for a possible spiritual revolution in terms
that he can comprehend now – the terms of pious reform.
Socrates’s first speech and his dramatic repulsion from bad love
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actually represent an essential phase in erotic self-knowledge.
That is why he only pretends to reject it. This love’s moral “badness” is not the problem. The real problem with the sexual conduct of pederasty is that it constitutes a human aspiration
unfulfilled (cf. 250e-251a). Similarly, if we only heard the edifying palinode, we might entertain a moral opinion about the
goodness of its object, the “spiritual” lovers that who shun mutual
sexual use. But only when the perspectives of both speeches are
held together, like two horses in a double harness, held together
under the rule of mind, can there be erotic self-knowledge. Only
when the psychic energy of repulsion from the “bad” carries one
toward the “good” love does the lover come to know his soul’s
order as a whole, that is, attain the inner certainty of its comingto-be in freedom. This psychic self-generation is advanced, according to the last pages of the dialogue, when the lover-turnedphilosopher learns the practice of “writing on his soul” (276a,
278a).
But Phaedrus is in no position to understand this mystery, how
the good might be the beneficiary of the bad. The transformation
of the negative into the positive eros – of the Lysian will-topower into the Socratic power of self-motion (245c) – is an interior development incomprehensible to the novice. Socrates can
denounce his first speech as expressing “nothing sound or true”
(mēden hugies legonte mēde alēthes, 242e); but even that judgment is grounded in experience beyond Phaedrus’s ken. For the
time being, Socrates has to appeal to Phaedrus’s passions and
imagination to advance his learning in erotics to the next stage.
Socrates receives rhetorical assistance from the imagery of theology. If Love is a god, he says, then he cannot be evil. But that
is what his first speech and Lysias’s supposed (242d-e). Is the
god to authorize the un-health and un-truth of common lust? No,
the god should serve to overcome this error of the mind and ailment of the body. The first two speeches took no account of how
the lover’s banal thinking was determining his erotic experience.
Such discourses are really only good to impress “manikins” – undeveloped and thoughtless people, anthrōpiskoi (243a). Thus,
while the Lysian speeches tell us something about the dark side
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of eros, which Socrates manages by the reins of awareness, he
knows that most people never attain the defining experience of
love, where care for the genuinely beautiful reigns in the soul. If
we are not to remain undeveloped people (anthrōpiskoi), education has to make the difference. Recall the case of Stesichorus,
who slandered Helen, attributing responsibility for the Trojan
War to her rather than to men’s self-deception. He was “inspired
by the Muses” (243a). That is, he was educated 8 so that even
blinded he could see that recanting would retrieve his sight.
Socrates follows suit with a recantation for the sake of Phaedrus’s
instruction.
Earlier in the dialogue Socrates admitted the dividedness of his
own soul. He wondered about whether he was “a monster more
complicated and more furious than Typhon, or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine lot is given as our share in nature”
(230a). Notice that he did not refer to two lots or two fates, between which a soul might choose. Rather he called only the gentle
and simple condition of the soul a destiny, moira. It is ours, potentially, as “our share in nature (phusei metechon).” Ultimately,
the Socratic type of lover does not choose the good over the evil
in his soul as an act of will. Neither is dialectics, the examination
of the truth about souls in general, effective on its own, not as a
first approach. (This is symbolically reserved for the last part of
the Phaedrus.) It is rather a matter of this lover’s being educated
into his contemplative part in the whole, which means engaging
his radical desire, his desire of body and soul as a unity. The passion for youths is an unruly, even mad expression of mind in an
animal that seeks a free relationship with the beautiful. The inner
principle of this freedom and unity is typically submerged in a
confusion of feelings. Socrates’s initial definition of love in fact
described the youth-lover’s typical, if unwitting, mistake. “When
passion without reason . . . is driven toward the pleasure of
beauty, and further, when it is violently moved by kindred desires
toward the beauty of the body . . . , this is called love” (italics
added.). Only an education “inspired by the Muses” (243a) might
8. The Greek term here, mousikos, designates anyone cultured or educated.
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reverse the effects of this error and liberate the passion for beauty
as such from the instinct for sexual pleasure. The art of love in
the palinode can be understood as the method of this reversal.
Phaedrus’s sentimental education will have to liberate his desire from an aestheticism that enflames his fantasies. Only a poetry or rhetoric directed to self-knowledge will serve this end.
Unlike Socrates, Phaedrus cannot rationally manage the tension
between a tyrannical and a liberating eros; at this point he is
barely acquainted with the power of his own mind. His imagination must first be set upon the path to his mind’s realization. This
is the reason for Socrates’s pious performance. He must first free
Phaedrus’s erotic excess from the irrational sexual plane, where
it will never be satisfied, by enlisting his belief in a higher life
yet unknown to him and by associating his eros with some kind
of divine goodness. “My first speech,” Socrates declares, “was
foolish and somewhat impious. What could be more dreadful than
that? . . . Do you not believe that Love is the son of Aphrodite and
is a god? . . . If Love is, as indeed he is, a god or something divine,
he can be nothing evil. . . . I will try to atone by recantation.”
(242d-e, 243b; italics added.)
Socrates would also avoid the fate of being blinded by the god
Eros, who punishes those who speak ill of him (243b). Phaedrus
might take this threat of divine retribution at face value, but
surely Socrates interprets the oracle in a non-physical way: whoever thinks the god simply evil forfeits their capacity for higher
sight (cf. 257a).
But the god has positive sanctions too. By imagining the god’s
benevolence Phaedrus might imagine himself as a finer lover,
happier in love.
If any man of noble and gentle character,9 one who was himself
in love with another of the same sort . . . had happened to hear us
saying that lovers take up violent enmity because of small matters
and are jealously disposed and harmful to the beloved, don’t you
think he would imagine he was listening to people brought up
9. Like Socrates, for example? Notice the kinship of this expression to
that in his earlier puzzle about what kind of creature he was (230a).
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among low sailors, who had never seen a generous love? Would
he not refuse utterly to assent to our censure of the god Love?
(243cC-d; italics added.)
Socrates lets Phaedrus draw his own conclusion. He declines
to specify which way the causal influence might go, between
showing respect for the god and finding a satisfying relationship.
Perhaps it goes both ways: pursuing a noble love may reinforce
belief in the philanthropy of Eros and vice versa. In any case, the
lover of youth will have to make an uncommon effort to partake
in this heavenward dialectic. The god’s help is essential.
The god, of course, is the sublime but still latent power in
Phaedrus’s own psyche. The soul of the lover of youths does not
acquire its higher faculties of perception and guidance without
first participating imaginatively in their development. Participation, metechō, is the word Socrates uses for realizing one’s true
nature, becoming part of the whole (230a). If the passion for
youths is not educated in a way that carries it “up” toward being
as a whole,10 then it is deprived of its raison d’être – the teleological or vital significance that enables such a lover to come into
his own. Socrates knows the instinctual (emphytos, 237d) force
of the drive for pleasure, the impulse that threatens to overwhelm
what’s best in a person’s mind. In behalf of Phaedrus’s development he discourages squandering this force in routines of compulsive gratification by revealing its propulsive potential. To
picture the pederast according to his commonplace appearance
(as in the first speeches), to reduce him to the vulgar images of a
licentious animal: that would be the “sin against mythology”
(243a). As philosopher and teacher, as rhetorician and true poet,
indeed as the lead and “leader of souls” in his own psychagogic
play (261a, 271d), Socrates tips the balance in favor of his pupil’s
highest possibilities.
The new mythos, the palinode preparatory for philosophy, attempts a revolution in Phaedrus’s sensibility. It attempts to initiate
10. Thus the “proof” mounted in the palinode that true love-madness is
divine must be grounded in a myth about soul and self-motion in the
cosmos at large (245c).
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him, first imaginatively, into a liberating experience of love.
Should this effort meet with success, should Phaedrus take up the
practice of philosophic pederasty, he may someday find himself
questioning the myth that commends the god Eros without qualification. Yet even if he comes to regard the god as less gracious
than he once imagined, he will look back upon the erotic path to
self-knowledge as a substantiated good.
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In the Heaven of Knowing:
Dante’s Paradiso
Peter Kalkavage
“For we shall see him as he is.” 1 John 3:2
The focus of my talk this evening is the Paradiso, the culminating and most beautiful part of Dante’s Comedy. The Paradiso has
much to tell us about happiness, the perfection of the intellect,
the nature of true freedom, the flourishing of community, the role
of love in education, and the profound connection that the good
and the true have to beauty.
The Comedy is one of the greatest works on education. It is
the story of Dante’s awakening to the highest and deepest things.
The story begins in a dark wood and ends with a vision of God.
Dante makes a journey to the three regions of the spiritual world:
Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each region is defined in terms of
the intellect, the part of us that most reveals what it means to be
made in God’s image. Hell is the place of those “who have lost
the good of intellect” (Inf. 3.18).1 They have distorted God’s
image beyond repair. Purgatory is the mountain “where reason
searches us” (Purg. 3.3). It is the place where repentant souls –
through purifying torment, reflection, and prayer – undo the distortions of sin. In Paradise souls rejoice in the intellectual vision
of God. They see with their most God-like part the Original
whose image they are.
Dante’s poem has special relevance for those who have devoted their lives to teaching. Throughout the poem Dante stresses
the importance of teachers and guides. Indeed, the Comedy may
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
This lecture was first delivered as the O’Donovan Humanities Lecture
at Oakcrest School in McClean, Virginia on 25 April 2014.
1. All translations of the Comedy are from the edition by John D. Sinclair
(Oxford, 1939).
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be regarded as an extended song of gratitude on Dante’s part – a
tribute to all his guides and to guidance itself as the work of
grace. The poem invites us to commemorate those who have
played a guiding role in our own lives: our teachers, friends, and
family members, and in addition the authors, poets, philosophers,
founders, and heroes who hold a special place in our hearts and
nourish us with their wisdom, their beauty, and their example.
Dante gives these personal guides theological meaning. As St.
Augustine knew better than anyone, grace – the central theme of
his Confessions – does not work in a merely general way. It
works at particular times in particular ways through particular
people and events. This is the miraculous particularity that Dante
too confesses.
When we first meet the pilgrim Dante, he is lost in a dark
wood. This no doubt refers to the turbulent period in Dante’s life
shortly before his exile from his native Florence. But it refers
more deeply to his having fallen away from Beatrice, whom he
meets again at the top of Mount Purgatory and who becomes his
guide through Paradise. Beatrice was Dante’s childhood beloved
and personal angel, his link to God. In his first great work, the
New Life, Dante recalls how he fell in love with Beatrice when
she was nine and he was almost ten. After Beatrice died, Dante
came to lose sight of everything she represented. He allowed his
love for her to be eclipsed by other, lesser loves. Beatrice is the
central figure of the Comedy. She is both a real person and a symbol. She is the beautiful appearance of the Good and the True,
and the embodiment of God’s grace. As symbol, she embodies
the City of God or the community of the blessed, the providential
plan of world-history, the perfection of poetry and rhetoric (beautiful speech that moves the soul from darkness to light), theological wisdom, especially as we find it in the writings of St. Thomas
Aquinas, and intellectual perfection as the vision of God. All this
is what the pilgrim Dante has lost sight of by the time we see him
at the beginning of the Comedy.
Heaven responds to Dante’s dark wood. Moved by compassion
for the lost poet, Mary turns to Lucy, the figure of Lux, Light.
Lucy in turn implores Beatrice to take pity on her former lover
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and save him from his impending death. Beatrice responds. She
descends into Hell – into Limbo, the place of virtuous pagans –
to plead with Vergil, the poet of the Aeneid, to serve as Dante’s
teacher and guide (Inf. 2.58 ff.). Thanks to this chain of feminine
mediators, grace reaches down to Hell itself in order to turn the
pilgrim back to the “straight way,” as Dante calls it, the way of
Beatrice.
The journey begins. We follow Dante as he descends into
Hell, climbs Mount Purgatory, and ascends through the heavenly
spheres. And yet the poem is more than the story of an individual’s redemption. Dante is saved from his personal dark wood.
But he also rises to become the author of the Comedy, which he
boldly calls “the sacred poem” (Par. 23.62, 25.1). He is commissioned by Heaven to reveal the whole of Time and Eternity.
Hence the note of Roman triumph that resounds throughout the
poem, especially in its third and most glorious part. Under the
guidance of Vergil and Beatrice, both vehicles of grace, Dante
himself becomes a vehicle, a means of transport for humanity
as a whole. In being saved as a man, he finds his true vocation
as a poet. He becomes – Dante, Poet of the Kingdom.
The hero, or rather heroine, of my talk is the first soul Dante
meets on his entrance into Paradise. It is the soul of Piccarda
Donati, whose family Dante knew very well. One of her brothers, Forese Donati, appears in the Comedy—among the gluttons in Puragtory (23). Piccarda had taken vows as a Poor
Clare but was forced by her brother, Corso, to leave the convent and enter into a marriage that would advance her family’s
political prospects. She died soon after the wedding. For her
broken vows she is relegated to the least degree of Heaven,
symbolized, as we shall see, by the Moon. As we inquire into
Piccarda and her heavenly rank, we must bear in mind that she
is as much a part of Paradise as any other soul there. When
Dante meets Forese in Purgatory and asks him where Piccarda
is, the brother responds with glowing words fit for a goddess:
“My sister, of whom I know not if she was more fair or good,
already triumphs in high Olympus, rejoicing in her crown”
(Purg. 24.13-15).
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I have chosen to focus on Piccarda for several reasons. One is
that she is Dante’s first example of a soul in glory and therefore
functions as the herald of Heaven. Another is that from the wisdom of her relatively low condition she introduces us to the fact
of levels in Paradise. This is a stumbling block for readers who
believe that here in the fullness of bliss we should be beyond all
levels and that God’s grace should shine upon all in equal measure. What would it mean, after all, for souls in Paradise to experience more or less of perfect happiness or, to use one of Dante’s
invented words, for some souls to be more “imparadised” than
others? Finally, I have chosen Piccarda because I stand in her
debt and am fond of her. For many years she has been one of the
most helpful guides in my effort to understand the Paradiso. She
will give us an opportunity to address several key questions. Why
does Paradise have levels? Why does Piccarda merit the lowest
degree of bliss? And what does this level of Paradise reveal about
the condition of the blessed and the community they form?
Let us begin at the beginning, with the opening lines of the
Paradiso. They are appropriately grand and set the tone for
everything that follows:
The glory of Him who moves all things penetrates the
universe and shines in one part more and in another less.
I was in the heaven that most receives His light and I saw
things which he that descends from it has not the knowledge or the power to tell again; for our intellect, drawing
near to its desire, sinks so deep that memory cannot follow. Nevertheless, so much of the holy kingdom as I was
able to treasure in my mind shall now be matter of my
song (1.1-12).
The opening image is that of God as the prime mover of the
universe, an idea Dante gets from Aristotle. God’s glory, symbolized by light, permeates the whole though not in equal measure. Glory shines forth as hierarchy, an order of higher and lower.
This is the first indication in the Paradiso that Heaven, like Hell
and Purgatory, has levels.
Hierarchy has a basis in the New Testament. In a passage perfectly suited to Dante’s fusion of Christian teaching and pagan
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cosmology, St. Paul writes in reference to our resurrected bodies:
“There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon,
and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory”
(1 Corinthians 15:41). Aquinas cites this very passage to support
the view that among the blessed, who see the essence of God, “one
sees more perfectly than another” (Summa Theologiae 1, Q. 12,
art. 6). Jesus too signals the presence of heavenly degrees when
he tells the disciples: “Whoever humbles himself like this child,
he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:4).
To follow the Paradiso we must know a little about Dante’s
scheme of the visible universe. For Dante, the world is not an infinite expanse but an ordered whole in the shape of a sphere –
what the ancient Greeks called a kosmos or adornment. Dante
follows the Ptolemaic astronomy of his day. For Ptolemy, the
Earth sits motionless at the center of a rotating celestial sphere
that makes a complete turn on its axis every twenty-four hours.
The Moon, Sun, and planets move in their respective orbits in
the opposite direction at much lesser speeds. The Moon is the
lowest sphere because it is closest to Earth. Beyond it are Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, in orbits of increasing circumference. Next there is the sphere of the Fixed
Stars, and finally the outer shell of the visible whole. This is the
so-called Crystalline, the first bodily sphere to be touched and
moved by God’s love. Beyond it is the Empyrean or true Heaven.
This is the home of spirits, the non-extended “place” of God, the
angels, and all the blessed. It is the ultimate point to which
Dante ascends and the heaven that most receives God’s light
(28.40-45).
Dante aligns these nine levels of the visible heavens with the
nine grades of bliss contained in the Empyrean. As we discover
along with Dante, the souls among the blessed appear in the visible bodies suited to their rank within the invisible Heaven. The
souls do not live there, as Beatrice hastens to point out, but rather
condescend for Dante’s sake and accommodate themselves to his
as yet imperfect faculties (4.37-60). As Dante rises from sphere
to sphere, Beatrice reveals herself with increasing intensity; she
becomes more and more resplendent, that is, more and more who
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she really is. With every step upward Dante too is changed: he
comes to shed his human imperfections, as his mind is increasingly
imparadised. He approaches the divine and comes to be divine
himself, as all souls do who love God with all their might. Dante
invents a word to capture his transition from earthly to heavenly
experience: trasumanar, to pass beyond the human (1.70). This
passing beyond the human is what we witness, and are invited to
share in through imagination, as we read the Paradiso.
Having sketched the astronomical image of Paradise, I now
proceed to “who goes where,” which spiritual ranks appear at
which corporeal levels. Throughout the Comedy, Dante may be
said to spiritualize place. Place functions as an index and sign of
what a thing is. Where a soul is, is the sign of what it is, the sign
of that soul’s condition or quality. Dante’s spiritualization of place
fits with how we speak. “I’m in a good place right now,” we sometimes say, or “I just don’t know where he is these days,” meaning
“I don’t know what condition his mind or his soul is in.”
As Dante rises from sphere to sphere, he comes to realize more
clearly why Heaven is a hierarchy, why it is a kingdom and not
a commune. The first three spheres – the Moon, Mercury, and
Venus – form a group. They represent three forms of qualified
blessedness. The Moon is the image of faithfulness marred by inconstancy, Mercury of service marred by ambition, and Venus of
love marred by wantonness. How Heaven, the place of perfection, can have any imperfection at all is a problem we shall return
to later.
The next four spheres represent the four cardinal virtues: the
Sun stands for Wisdom, Mars for Courage, Jupiter for Justice,
and Saturn for Temperance. The Sun divides the lower from the
upper spheres. It is the home, in image form, of theologians,
prominent among whom is Aquinas. Mars is the realm of the warrior saints who fought on behalf of their faith, especially in the
Crusades. Dante calls this level “higher blessedness” (14.84) because the warrior saint sacrifices his very life and blood. Here
Dante meets his ancestor, Cacciaguida, who tells Dante of his
coming exile from his beloved Florence. Jupiter is the imagerealm of just rulers. It contains, among other souls, that of King
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David, whose sins of adultery and murder have not apparently
kept him from occupying this exalted place. Saturn is the realm
of contemplatives and mystics. They appear momentarily in this
outermost planet in sign of their “cold” distance from all earthly
attachment and their burning desire to focus their minds exclusively on God. The sphere of the fixed stars comes next. Here
Dante experiences a ravishing image of the Church Triumphant.
He sees Mary, the Archangel Gabriel, and the glorified person of
Christ. He also undergoes an examination of his faith by St. Peter,
his hope by St. James, and his love by St. John. In the next higher
sphere, the Crystalline, Dante sees the angels arranged in a hierarchy consisting of nine levels – three sets of three, in imitation
of the Trinity. Finally, Dante rises to the Empyrean. Here he sees
the company of the blessed gathered into one glorious image –
the Celestial Rose. Ultimately, he sees God as the unity of the
human and the divine.
Order is everywhere in the Comedy. It is the permeation of the
universe by divine intelligence and love. It is why the poem is a
comedy. In the tragic view of life, we are not placed in the world
but “thrown.” There is no order, no divine guidance, no proper
place of things, no hope. There is only happening, suffering, and
death. Dante’s poem seeks to defeat this tragic view by fiercely
championing world-order grounded in divine goodness and wisdom. His term for this order is monarchia – monarchy or rule of
the One. Order is precise. It must be so in order to be order. This
precision is a source of joy. World-order, for Dante, is like a beautiful piece of music, a work by Palestrina or Bach, in which everything has been so perfectly adjusted that it is impossible to change
a single note without ruining the whole. The comic victory over
the tragic view of life – the triumph, one might say, of music – is
signaled in all sorts of ways as we reach higher regions of Paradise. At one point the universe itself appears to smile (27.4-5).
Dante’s faith in world-order is not blind to the disasters that
would tempt anyone to doubt the workings of divine providence.
At crucial moments in his ascent, Dante hears from heavenly
souls how the realms of Church and State have gone horribly
astray. He hears from St. Peter, for example, how the Church on
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earth suffers under a corrupt Pope, Boniface VIII, who meddled
in the politics of Florence to the neglect of his spiritual obligations. In the face of many discouragements, notably his own
exile, Dante continues to hope for a deliverer, a guide who will
bring the Kingdom on Earth into greater alignment with the
Kingdom of Heaven.
Let us now return to the opening cantos and Dante’s entrance
into Paradise. Dante is disoriented in the extreme as he leaves the
earth (the top of Mount Purgatory, to be exact) and flies off into
the sky with Beatrice. His confusion is understandable since
everything is now inverted. Effort is now non-effort, natural tendency to go down has become natural tendency to go up, and
opaque body has become diaphanous. Another reason for Dante’s
confusion is that the Moon, Sun, and planets are not solid earthlike masses but a refined, heavenly matter that is receptive rather
than resistant. Dante does not set foot on the Moon but rather enters its permeable substance. The Moon, like all the other spheres,
receives and incorporates Dante. This is a playful imitation of the
joyous receptivity of Heaven to newcomers. Dante marvels at his
extraordinary entrance into the Moon, which he calls l’etterna
margarita, “the eternal pearl” (2.34). His wonder at the interpenetration of substance with substance fills him with the desire to
see “how our nature was joined to God.” His desire will be gratified at the end of the poem.
Vergil is Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory, Beatrice
through Heaven. How, then, does Beatrice guide? Clearly she
guides, as Vergil did, by her enlightened speech. But she also
guides because Dante is in love with her. She guides by her
adorable aspect. This aspect has its focal point in Beatrice’s eyes.
Throughout the Paradiso Dante lays special emphasis on the eyes
of Beatrice. Her eyes are an image of the intellect in its highest
capacity. They represent insight or the immediate apprehension
of truth. This is the intuitive knowledge that angels have. We are
not told what the eyes physically look like – their color, shape,
and so forth. What is important is that they are firmly fixed, like
the eye of an eagle, on God and on that point of the highest
Heaven from which Beatrice has descended. Her gaze leads her
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lover not by a return gaze but by directing his gaze upward and
beyond Beatrice herself. The ray of his vision must coalesce with
hers. As Beatrice at one point tells Dante: “Not only in my eyes
is Paradise” (18.21). The eyes of Beatrice are a corrective to the
potentially obsessive character of romantic love. Such love can
lead its devotees to seek Heaven in themselves, to make a heaven
of their private passion. The sad fruit of this kind of love is evident in the second circle of Hell, the circle of lust, where the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca are whipped around in an
eternal storm. The eyes of Beatrice lead Dante away from this
fate. They give his mind its proper focus and open him up to the
whole of things and to the good of that whole. The eyes of Beatrice are the image of love as education. The image teaches us that
to be “in love” is to be aroused by the presence of God in another
human being, and that the whole point of love is to see more
clearly the source and principle that is the cause of that love.
As we come to discover, Piccarda dwells in the least degree of
Heaven for her broken religious vows. The Moon fits this lowest
degree because it is the heavenly body with the slowest speed
and smallest orbit. Moreover, the Moon is not pure light but has
dark spots or blemishes – a feature well suited to faithfulness
marred by inconstancy. When Dante first enters the Moon, he is
perplexed at the faces that meet his gaze. They appear so pure
and ghostly that “a pearl on a white brow does not come less
quickly to our eyes” (3.14-15). Dante mistakenly thinks that these
are images or mere reflections and turns to see who is casting
them. Beatrice smiles at his “childish thought” and tells him:
“these are real beings that thou seest, assigned here for failure in
their vows” (29-30). Eager to speak with Dante, the souls long
to share their personal stories, condition, and knowledge of Paradise. Dante sees this eagerness and is aroused by it. He is bursting to know the identity of the soul that appears “most desirous
of speech” and addresses her in the most gracious terms: “O spirit
made for bliss, who in the beams of eternal life knowest the
sweetness which, not tasted, never is conceived, it will be a kindness to me if thou satisfy me with thy name and with your lot”
(37-41) – where “your” refers to all who occupy this level.
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Piccarda, “with smiling eyes,” tells Dante that in the world
she was “a virgin sister” and that if he searched his memory he
would remember who she was. She then takes up the second part
of his question:
Our affections, which are kindled only in the pleasure of
the Holy Spirit, rejoice in being conformed to His order,
and this lot which seems so low is given us because our
vows were neglected and in some part void (52-7).
The language of being conformed to an order fits Piccarda’s
vocation as a nun. But it also points out the larger theme of
human affetti, which have been altered in this conformity and in
the ascent to Paradise. So long as we are in mortal bodies and in
a mortal condition, there is a tension between our will and God’s.
In Paradise this tension is gone, not because souls no longer have
a will of their own but because their will is perfectly attuned to
the will of God. Conformity here is not submission to a tyrant or
a matter of mere duty. It is more like the sympathetic vibration
between two plucked strings, or better, like letting God lead while
one is dancing with him. Conformity in Heaven is the joyous
yielding of one’s will to the Being who wills only what is good
and who, to continue my comic simile, knows how to dance with
impeccable grace. In this joyous conformity, the will finds its
freedom of movement. It learns at last how to be eternally unerring and never trip over its own feet.
Dante is at first unable to identify Piccarda because she is suffused by divine light and no longer resembles her former self.
This too has a more general meaning. Dante is learning by direct
experience that Paradise does not preserve us just as we are, or
rather were. On the contrary, to be imparadised is to be transfigured. Heaven preserves but at the same time heightens our personality. In Heaven Piccarda is most herself, and one must learn
to see her as she really is.
Dante then poses a question most of us would no doubt ask if
we were in his place: “But tell me, do you who are happy here
desire a higher place, that you may see more and become more
dear?” (64-6.) The question is a logical one. If a soul loves God,
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shouldn’t that soul desire to see God and be loved in return as
much as possible? But the question also betrays Dante’s all-toohuman perspective and comes close to being an implied criticism
of God’s order. If Piccarda and the other souls in this region did
in fact desire more, they would be unhappy, and Paradise would
be Heaven for some but not for others. Souls lower down in the
hierarchy might even envy the souls in higher ranks who see
more and are closer to God. If that were the case, Paradise would
be like a corrupt city or nation, where those who have less honor
and privilege resent and hate those who deservedly have more,
and where the lust for an equally high place regardless of merit
displaces the love of justice and the common good.
Here we touch on one of the main functions of Dante’s Paradise for us who still live on earth. Paradise is the place of individuals who had faith in Christ and are purged of sin. But it is
also the model of an ideal city, a community that has been purged
of covetousness, envy, partisan strife, and the indiscriminate desire for more. As Dante rises through the heavenly ranks, he experiences that ideal of perfected fellowship so dismally absent in
his native Italy and in the world at large. Later in his journey, he
remarks, not without a touch of bitterness, that he has come “to
the divine from the human, to the eternal from time, and from
Florence to a people sane and just” (31.37-9).
In response to Dante’s question about the desire for more, Piccarda and the other souls “smiled a little.” The phrase “a little,”
un po, highlights Dante’s concision, humor, and lightness of
touch. It points not so much to the degree of the smile as to its
affect. The little smile is a knowing, cat-that-ate-the-canary smile.
Piccarda and company must surely find Dante’s question so unthreatening as to be amusing. They smile no doubt at his touching
innocence when it comes to the heavenly things they know so
well. Piccarda answers the question “with such gladness that she
seemed to burn in the first fire of love.” Dante’s question, in other
words, gives her an occasion to recollect the earthly beginning
of her eternal bliss, the moment she fell in love with God.
Piccarda’s answer is one of the most beautiful moments in the
Comedy. I shall cite it in full:
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Brother, the power of charity quiets our will and makes
us will only what we have and thirst for nothing else. Did
we desire to be more exalted, our desire would be in discord with His will who appoints us here, which thou wilt
see cannot hold in these circles if to be in charity is here
necesse [necessary] and if thou consider well its nature.
Nay, it is the very quality of this blessed state that we keep
ourselves within the divine will, so that our wills are
themselves made one; therefore our rank from height to
height through this kingdom is pleasing to the whole kingdom, as to our King who wills us to His will. And in His
will is our peace. It is that sea to which all things move,
both what it creates and what nature makes (70-87).
The opening “Frate,” “Brother,” is a gesture both affectionate
and gracious. It makes Dante one of the blessed, at least for the
moment. Piccarda’s great theme is will, as we hear in her litany
of will-related words. The repetition is like a musical refrain that
runs through her speech. Charity, she tells Dante, “quiets” the
will of all here by resolving the human dissonance between wanting and having. It is the power (virtù) that by conforming all wills
to the will of the one God also unites them with one another. Piccarda here articulates the very basis of order as monarchia, where
all created wills are united by a common desire and love of the
whole. Dante invents a word to describe this harmonization of
souls: invoglia, “in-wills.” The King “in-wills us to His will.”
The neologism fits what Piccarda is trying to convey to Dante –
that the mixed or tainted submission to God’s will that these souls
experienced in their earthly lives is now gone. Past weakness has
been remedied by an infusion of divine power that purges the will
of all wavering. Piccarda’s reflection on how charity produces a
One-in-Many leads her to the most fondly remembered sentence
in the whole Comedy: “In His will is our peace.” It is a variation
on what Augustine wrote at the beginning of his Confessions:
“Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.”
Piccarda’s speech combines ardor and intellectual clarity, heat
and light. Piccarda stresses, somewhat comically, the rational aspect of her answer to Dante by using the scholastic Latin term
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necesse, which means logically necessary. Beatrice too often assumes this professorial tone with Dante, when for example she
gives a scientific explanation for the dark spots on the Moon
(2.64 ff.). The marriage of ardor and clarity is characteristic of
the souls in Paradise. Without clarity, ardor would be mere feeling with no anchor in the truth. It would be blind, or at least confused, with respect to the intellectual vision that gives the soul
its reason for being on fire. Without ardor, clarity would be joyless – mind without heart. It would also falsify the truth that is
seen by the mind, since what is seen is in its nature something
meant to arouse love. Clarity without ardor would be like getting
the point of a really good joke but not finding it funny.
Piccarda is suffused with heavenly light, the light of knowledge. We must observe that the knowledge she possesses is not
confined to her level but extends to all of Paradise. This is made
evident when she says that the hierarchical scheme of Heaven “is
pleasing to the whole kingdom.” Piccarda speaks on behalf of
the entire heavenly community, which is made one and harmonious by the will of the one God. Some souls may be limited in
their degree of bliss, but they all have access to God, one another,
and the whole of Paradise. Souls at every level, even the lowest,
enjoy the unity and happiness of the entire kingdom. They are
not spatially confined to their own levels but spiritually connected to all of them. God wills each soul into its proper place,
and each rejoices in being where it is because it sees that where
it is is pleasing to the whole community and to God. This knowledge sweetened by charity lifts the burden of selfish desire and
makes the soul free to love the good of another and of the whole
as one’s own good. Piccarda not only rejoices to be where she is;
she also rejoices that souls higher up are where they are. For this
reason she is not almost but fully imparadised.
Dante gets the point. “It was clear to me then,” he says, “that
everywhere in heaven is Paradise, although the grace of the
Supreme Good does not rain there in one measure” (88-90). Satisfied by one food, as Dante puts it, he is hungry for another. He has
already been told that this level is reserved for those who were
inconstant in their vows and now wants to know how this applies
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to Piccarda. She replies with a reference to St. Clare, founder of
the Franciscan order that Piccarda had entered:
Perfect life and high desert . . . place in a higher heaven a
lady by whose rule in your world below they take the robe
and veil, so that till death they may wake and sleep with
that Bridegroom who accepts every vow that charity conforms to His pleasure. To follow her I fled, a young girl,
from the world and wrapped me in her habit and promised
myself to the way of her order. Then men more used to
evil than to good snatched me away from the sweet cloister. God knows what my life was then (97-108).
The reference to Christ as Bridegroom makes Piccarda’s story
all the more poignant. She had every intention of leaving the
world for the sake of “waking” and “sleeping” with Christ but
was forced to break her vow and enter into an ordinary worldly
marriage. Piccarda discretely covers over the details of her subsequent misery and early death. As if to draw Dante’s attention
back to the high note of eternal bliss she points to “this other
splendor that appears to thee on my right and is kindled with all
the light of our sphere” (3.109-111). It is the imparadised soul of
“the great Constance,” mother of Frederick II – the last head of
the Holy Roman Empire who is punished in Hell for his promulgation of the heretical view that the souls dies with the body (Inferno 10). Like Piccarda, Constance was taken from the convent
against her will, although “she was never loosed from the veil on
the heart” – a fact engraved, as it were, in her very name. With
this deference to the glory of another, a gesture repeated throughout Paradise, Piccarda vanishes while singing the Ave Maria. She
is said to sink rather than ascend, “like a weight through deep
water.” She returns to the source of her joy and her being. The
striking image reminds us that Heaven is a depth as well as a
height, and that souls here are not so much soberly placed as passionately immersed. They are eternally drunk on the wine of their
happiness.
Dante eventually loses sight of Piccarda and turns his gaze
back to Beatrice, “the mark of its greater desire” (126). He is baffled by the story he has just heard, and so are we. If Piccarda was
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forced to leave the convent, how can she be held responsible for
her broken vow? How can she justly appear, in Dante’s poetic
analogy, at the level of the Moon? Beatrice gives Dante a complex, scholastic explanation that has to do with the nature of the
will. According to Beatrice, Piccarda went with the flow of forceful circumstance. Her will, though not sinful, seconded the violence that was being done against her will. She did not freely will
to leave the convent after having taken a vow. But she did nothing
to oppose the violence against her good will. She remained passive.
Beatrice takes a tough stance on this point and argues that Piccarda
and those like her “might have fled back to the holy place” (4.81):
If their will had been unbroken, like that which kept
Lawrence on the grid and made Mucius stern to his own
hand, then, as soon as they were free, it would have
driven them back on the path from which they had been
dragged; but will so firm is rare indeed (4.82-7).
Lawrence suffered on behalf of the Christian Church and Mucius for the sake of pagan Rome. Lawrence famously mocked his
tormentors (“Turn me over, I’m done on this side!”), and Mucius,
in defiance, thrust his own right hand into the fire that his enemies
had prepared for him. As Beatrice poetically observes, an unwavering will is itself like fire, which, no matter how much a strong
wind may wrench this way and that, always affirms its natural
tendency to go up toward the heavens. That is what those who
succumbed to external force failed to do: they failed to fight the
buffeting winds of life with the heavenly fire that was their faith.
It is not sinful under these circumstances to fail in one’s vows. It
is, however, a lack of spiritual strength, a weakness of will.
Weakness of will in the Paradiso is related to the broader
theme of spiritual capacity. Souls were not made equal with respect to any of their capacities. No one human being excels at all
things. Excellence itself in any one thing varies among its possessors in both degree and kind. Among the greatest composers,
for example, one stands out for his beautiful counterpoint, the
musical interweaving of individual vocal lines, another for his
divinely inspired melodies. Creation is fine-tuned: “star differs
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from star in glory.” To insist on egalitarian leveling is to wish
that Creation be undone. Deficiency in the lowest three degrees
of Paradise is therefore different from the deficiency caused by
sin. Sin is a distortion of our nature, whereas grades in Heaven
manifest nature, that is, the specific nature of each individual
among the blessed. Piccarda had only so much lungpower. She
could take in only so much of the Holy Spirit – God’s spiritus or
breath. So it is with each of us. If you offered Piccarda the chance
to be higher up, she would be the first to tell you that this would
destroy rather than increase her happiness. In Heaven she has
perfect self-knowledge. Her very humility is a form of knowledge. She does not merely believe that she is limited but rather
knows and celebrates her limit. She knows, furthermore, that this
limit is bound up with the person God made Piccarda to be. If
there were no limits, there would be no individual natures, no
personality. To want Piccarda to want more is to wish that she
did not exist.
The limits of spiritual lungpower lead us to Beatrice’s disquisition on vows. Her main point is that taking vows is perilous.
The danger is rooted in our tendency to overestimate what we
are capable of. We tend, in the words of Jesus, not to count the
cost before building the tower. Another danger is that of unforeseen consequences. In the heat of the moment we vow to do
something and learn only later that to be true to this vow results
in great evil. Beatrice cites as examples Jephtha and Agamemnon
(5.65-72). In the Book of Judges Jephtha vowed to sacrifice to
the Lord the first person that walked through his doors. This person turned out to be his daughter. Agamemnon was true to his
vow to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia so that the Greek ships
could sail against Troy. Piccarda is imperfect in her faith because
she was passive and inconsistent. Jephtha shows the opposite
problem, that of being stubbornly faithful to a foolish vow. According to Beatrice, he “ought rather to have said ‘I did ill’ than,
keeping faith, to do worse” (5.67-68).
The problem of vows is rooted in the nature of free will. To
take a vow is freely to sacrifice one’s free will, which Beatrice
calls “the greatest gift that God in His bounty made in creation,
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the most conformable to His goodness and the one He accounts
the most precious . . . with which the creatures with intelligence,
and only these, were and are endowed” (5.19-24). Once a vow is
made, this greatest of gifts is given away and cannot be taken
back. Beatrice’s lesson is clear: “Let not mortals take vows
lightly” (64). The lesson is aimed especially at those of Christian
faith: “Be graver, Christians, in your undertakings. Be not like
feathers in every wind, and think not that every water will wash
you clean” (73-75).
Having learned from Piccarda that Paradise is the perfected
community of wills under a good King, Dante moves up to the
next two levels. Here he meets more souls who occupy the lower
triad of Heaven. At the level of service marred by ambition –
symbolized by the planet Mercury – he meets Justinian, the
Roman emperor who codified Roman law and made it simpler
and more unified. It is something of a shock to move from the
gentle unassuming Piccarda to this exalted world-historical figure, although the soul of Constance serves as a sort of transition
and a reminder of the realm of political history. Justinian recapitulates the wisdom of Piccarda regarding the whole in which
all souls rejoice. He uses a musical image to convey why Heaven
needs souls of every level and every kind: “Diverse voices make
sweet music” (6.124). The line itself is music: Diverse voci fanno
dolci note, literally “Diverse voices make sweet notes.” At the
next higher level, that of love marred by wantonness, Dante
meets various souls, among them Folco, the famous Provençal
troubadour and poet who later in life became a Cistercian monk,
and Rahab, the harlot in the Book of Joshua who concealed and
gave aid to the two men Joshua had sent into Jericho as spies.
Folco’s enraptured soul is described as “a fine ruby on which the
sun is striking” (9.69), and Rahab’s as “a sunbeam in clear water”
(114). The wantonness to which these souls yielded in life is of
course no longer present in Paradise. But surely we are meant to
imagine that something of their former temperament remains.
This temperament adds a certain intensity of feeling, an ardor,
which, though certainly different in character from that of Piccarda, is equally necessary to the ensemble of diverse voices in
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Paradise. Heaven welcomes the hot-blooded, just as it shuns the
lukewarm.
Earlier I observed that the three spiritual regions of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise are defined with respect to the intellect. I
also emphasized in my discussion of Piccarda that her being in
accord with God’s will and her contentment with her “place” in
Paradise are firmly grounded in her intellectual vision of the
whole and her clear self-knowledge. The eyes of Beatrice, the
image of love as education, further support the primacy of intellect in the Paradiso and in the entire Comedy. As Dante moves
higher up the heavenly hierarchy and closer to God, the role of
intellect and vision becomes increasingly intense. It is especially
prominent when Dante enters the Crystalline and sees the hierarchy of angels. It is fitting that he begins this canto on angelic
intelligence by calling Beatrice, his personal angel, “she who imparadises my mind” (28.1).
Later in the canto Beatrice utters one of the central teachings
of the whole poem:
And thou must know that all have delight in the measure
of the depth to which their sight penetrates the truth in
which every intellect finds rest; from which it may be
seen that the state of blessedness rests on the act of vision, not on that of love, which follows after, and the
measure of their vision is merit, which grace begets and
right will (109-113).
The immediate context has to do with the angels, who are identified with their keenness of intellectual vision, but the teaching
applies to all the blessed. The “truth in which every intellect finds
rest” is God himself as the First Truth, and it is our highest end
to know this Truth. Beatrice emphasizes that love follows rather
than leads. The reason is that love is both aroused and directed
by the thing seen, the Beloved. If love were primary, it would be
cut off from the truth. It would degenerate into mere feeling and
cease to be educative. The primacy of intellect came home to
Dante in the moment when, a mere boy, he fell in love with a girl
on the streets of Florence. He loved her because he caught sight
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of her and was struck by the light that shone in her person. Even
then, as Dante reports in the New Life, Beatrice was “the Lady
of my mind” (2).
The Comedy ends with Dante’s vision of God, the source of
all Light. As he ascends to the Empyrean, Dante leaves behind
the astronomical image of Heaven and sees Heaven anew in a
River of Light and the Celestial Rose. Dante’s salvation began
with a chain of heavenly women who interceded for him. The
links in this chain now appear in reverse order. Beatrice returns
to her heavenly seat and to her true self. And though she is at this
point far beyond Dante’s mortal gaze, her image reaches her lover
with undiminished clarity (31.70-8). Now under the guidance of
St. Bernard, who replaces Beatrice as Dante’s guide, Dante sees
Lucy, “who sent thy Lady when thou didst bend thy brow downward to destruction” (32.137-8). Then he sees Mary, the ray of
whose eyes leads him to the threshold of his final vision. Bernard
of Clairvaux was the great medieval saint known for his devotion
to Mary. His presence serves to enhance rather than qualify the
distinctly feminine operation of grace. Bernard prays fervently
to Mary that Dante be allowed to see God: “I, who never burned
for my own vision more than do I for his, offer to thee all my
prayers.” He adds: “This too I pray of thee, Queen, who canst
what thou wilt, that thou keep his affections pure after so great a
vision” (33.28-36). Bernard’s reference to affetti recalls Piccarda’s use of the word in answer to Dante’s question about contentment with one’s heavenly lot.
The twofold aspect of Bernard’s prayer is worth noting.
Bernard prays that Dante be granted the highest bliss, the vision
of God. This vision is “the end of all desires” (46). But Bernard
also acknowledges that Dante will not be out of danger when he
returns to his mortal life. He must remain true to the unity of
which Mary is the figure, the unity of clear vision and purity of
heart, which is the precondition for the vision of God (Matthew
5:8). Dante sees the effect of Bernard’s prayer in Mary’s eyes,
which are “beloved and reverenced by God” (40). Her eyes, like
those of Beatrice before her, provide the ray that will direct the
eye of Dante’s mind to the ultimate vision. As the eyes of Mary
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turn to God, Dante’s eyes follow. The poet is now lifted into the
region where sight outstrips speech. Nevertheless he soldiers on,
praying that the power of his tongue “may leave but a gleam of
thy glory to the people yet to come” (71-2).
The final moments of the Comedy are rich in images, as Dante
describes the transformation of his sight and his very being – the
final stage of his “passing beyond the human.” He sees “three
circles of three colors,” a geometric symbol of the Trinity (115
ff.). Each circle, each divine Person, reflects the others, “as rainbow by rainbow.” Dante focuses on the circle that appears to be
“painted with our likeness.” He is drawn to the second Person of
the Trinity, to the human face of God. He strains to see more
clearly how this human aspect is united to the divine and compares himself to a geometer who is trying with all his might to
square the circle. This famous problem, which has haunted
mankind for ages, is that of constructing a square with the same
area as a given circle. It is in effect the problem of grasping the
unity of the straight and the curved – two opposed geometric natures that defy unification. Squaring the circle is more than a geometric problem. It is the symbol and summation of all intellectual
desire. According to Aristotle, all human beings by nature desire
to know. This is true for each individual. But as Dante affirms in
his Monarchia, it is also true of the human species, which in the
course of history seeks the full realization of its intellectual potential (1.3). In comparing himself to one who wants to square
the circle, Dante personifies the whole human race in its relentless desire to know – ultimately to know and experience the nature of God.
In the end Dante’s longing to know is satisfied, but not through
his own efforts. His wings “were not sufficient for that.” Grace
intervenes, this time violently, as Dante’s mind is struck (percossa), as if by a lightning bolt: “Here power failed the high
phantasy, but now my desire and will, like a wheel that spins with
even motion, were revolved by the Love that moves the sun and
the other stars” (142-5). With these lines the Paradiso, and with
it the “sacred poem” as a whole, reaches its end.
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Dante’s vision of God is a flash of insight that cannot be put
into words. But there is something the poet can tell us. He can
report that he reached his longed-for end, and that the fruit of
his vision was a desire and will that were conformed to the
graceful movements of Love. These movements find their image
in the visible heavens, whose quick circular motion resembles
rest. Through the conformity of desire and will, Dante experiences first-hand the truth of what someone told him when he
first entered Paradise: “In His will is our peace.”
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Knowing and Ground: A Reading of
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Matthew Linck
For this is action, this not being sure, this careless
Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,
Making ready to forget, and always coming back
To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.
- John Ashbery, from “Soonest Mended”
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a difficult book. Sometimes
this seems true in the way that we might say that someone is a
difficult person – unaccommodating, needlessly obscure. Many
aspects of Hegel’s book give the appearance of this kind of difficulty – the unusual structure, the strangeness of the method, the
alien vocabulary, and the sheer density of the writing. While I do
not think reading the Phenomenology can simply be made easy,
I do think that one can make sense of some of these difficulties.
In what follows I will endeavor to show that the structure, method
and principal vocabulary of the book all spring from a single aim,
namely, to understand what it means for us to claim to know
something. As the title of my lecture suggests, this effort will concern itself principally with the grounds of knowing as such. For
Hegel, there is no claim to knowing that does not, at least implicitly, have certain grounds in view.
While it is my goal to give a synoptic view of the Phenomenology, both in terms of its structure and the nature of its parts,
it turns out that doing so from the front of the book to the back is
hard to do in a short space. Instead, we will orient ourselves from
somewhere in the middle, specifically, the section from the chapter on Spirit called “Absolute Freedom and Terror.” Why I have
chosen this as the vantage point to look out over the Phenomenology as a whole can only become clear as we move through
the lecture. But a few questions could be raised already. These
Matthew Linck is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
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questions will serve as the guiding threads for what follows. The
questions are: (1) Why is there an analysis concerning the French
Revolution and Terror in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at all?
(2) Why is this analysis placed at the end of the second of three
main sections in a chapter called Spirit? (3) Why is the chapter
on Spirit preceded by chapters on Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason and followed by chapters on Religion
and Absolute Knowing? These questions might be generalized
in the following way: why does the Phenomenology contain the
kind of content that it does; why does the book have the structure
it has; how do the content and structure go together? By answering these questions, I hope to provide a sense of the whole of the
Phenomenology and how it attempts to fulfill its principal goal
as an account of knowing. But before attending to these questions
more needs to be said about what this goal is.
The principal goal of the Phenomenology of Spirit as an inquiry about knowing is to find the grounds that will grant truth
to the certainty of our claims of knowing. This goal takes its starting point from what seems to be a rather ordinary human experience. Claiming to know something is always accompanied by
a conviction of certainty about what we are claiming. For if not,
we would not call it knowing. But being certain and having good
grounds for our certainty are two different matters. Hegel’s project is to see which claims of certainty are in fact well grounded.
As an inquiry into knowing, the aim of the Phenomenology is a
traditional one; Hegel’s book stands in a long line of philosophical accounts of knowledge. We can obtain a better initial understanding of the aim of the book by contrasting it with two other
texts about knowledge: Plato’s Theaetetus and Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason. I will briefly consider some questions and conclusions from these texts and compare them to Hegel’s.
In the Theaetetus, Socrates and Theaetetus endeavor to answer
the question “What is knowledge?” The way in which they do
this is to propose various answers to the question and then scrutinize those answers. In the course of the dialogue, Theaetetus
ventures a few definitions of knowledge and then he and Socrates
think through the implications and coherence of these definitions.
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Two aspects of their conversation are worth noting for our purposes. The first is that, while it is not articulated as such, the investigation carried out by Theaetetus and Socrates cannot help
but ask about the grounds of knowing in asking what knowledge
is. For instance, in testing the idea that knowledge is perception,
perception is tested as a sufficient ground for knowing. In this
way, their search has something in common with the Phenomenology. However, I want to suggest that the way the principal
questions are articulated makes a difference. By asking what the
sufficient grounds for knowing are rather than asking what
knowledge is, Hegel is able to frame a different method for asking about knowledge. This is related to the other notable feature
of Socrates’ conversation with Theaetetus. At a certain point in
the dialogue, Theaetetus remarks upon a troubling feature of the
discussion. In the course of testing the various possible answers
to what knowledge is, he and Socrates have attested to knowing
certain things along the way. In the midst of their inquiry about
the very thing knowledge is, they have availed themselves of
claims of knowing. It seems to Theaetetus that something is out
of place here, but he cannot see how to set it right, for how might
one investigate the what-it-is of something in conversation without laying down some things as known along the way? This problem indicates that there is something uniquely difficult in the
inquiry into what knowledge is. The method of Hegel’s book is
meant to address this difficulty.
Kant attempts to answer fundamental questions about knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason, and he, too, provides answers to what knowledge is and what the grounds of knowing
are. But here again the specific articulation of the principal question is different. Kant’s question is neither that of the Theaetetus
nor that of the Phenomenology, but is “What can I know?” Kant’s
main goal is to trace out the proper limits of human knowledge.
The method here is not the dialogical testing of answers, but an
inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of experience. Kant
creates a new form of philosophical inquiry with his notion of
the transcendental, and through this inquiry he claims to find
grounds for limiting our knowledge to knowledge of appear-
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ances. Hence, Kant, too, discerns the proper grounds of knowing,
but not directly. His concern with grounds is subordinated to the
critical task of tracing boundaries. One way in which the Kantian
project might be seen as insufficient with respect to the investigation of grounds is the bundle of problems concerning the thingin-itself. In a fundamental but unknowable way, the thing-in-itself
lays at the ground of what is known in experience.
Putting these considerations about the Theaetetus and the Critique of Pure Reason together we can see something important
about Hegel’s book. By focusing directly on the grounds of
knowing Hegel is able to avoid the problem of making knowledge claims in advance of answering the question about its
grounds, and he is also able to avoid having to construct a complex apparatus as Kant has done. How does he avoid these
things? The answer to this question tells us something about why
the book is called a phenomenology. For instead of trying directly
to frame and test answers about the grounds of knowing, Hegel
displays for us a gallery of various knowledge claims and the
(often implicit) grounds that underlie those claims. Hegel’s wager
is this: such claims have been made, and hence have made their
appearance in the world; our work is to discern the internal structure of these claims. We do not have to venture answers to the
question about the grounds of knowing but only observe and
think about the answers that have already been given. In this way,
Hegel proposes to discern the ultimate grounds of knowing without making an argument in the typical sense. The Phenomenology
is not a book that argues on the basis of principles, transcendental
or otherwise; instead, it is a book that orchestrates a certain kind
of experience. The success of the book hinges on whether we are
able to undergo the experience Hegel intends. We will return later
to these issues. Let us now begin to consider the first question
from earlier: Why does Hegel write about the French Revolution
at the close of the middle section of the chapter on Spirit?
The smaller section we will take up is called “Absolute Freedom and Terror,” and it comes at the end of a larger section called
“Spirit alienated from itself: [or] culture.” The larger section presents views onto the late Roman Empire, the courtly world of the
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French monarchies, and the Enlightenment as a struggle with religious faith. “Absolute Freedom and Terror” is the last of these
views onto a historical scene and the form of thought which it
embodies. In one sense, this section of the book can be read as a
description of a historical event. We read here about the political
assertion of the people and their insistence upon recognition as
equals. We also read about the political vacuum created by the
Revolution and its inability to establish a stable locus of authority,
a failure which leads to the actions of the Terror. But there is nothing essentially important about this section of the text as a description of factual events. The focus of Hegel’s writing here is
not on a historical narrative but rather on the cognitive and normative aspects of these events. The most compact way of expressing what Hegel has in view is to say that he is displaying a
particular shape of Spirit. This phrasing, however, is not helpful
for us since it is only by understanding more about the Phenomenology itself that we can understand what “shape” and “Spirit”
mean here.
“Shape of Spirit” is a more particular version of the phrase
“shape of consciousness.” The majority of the text of the Phenomenology of Spirit is devoted to laying bare the structure of
these shapes of consciousness. The smallest subsections of the
book each contain such a presentation. A very general way of
characterizing a shape of consciousness is to say that it is a way
of thinking. If we connect this to what was said earlier about the
aim of Hegel’s book, we can add to this and say that a shape of
consciousness is a way of thinking that is committed to certain
grounds to justify its knowledge claims. Still speaking generally,
we could say that as one reads the Phenomenology one encounters a series of paired commitments: on the one hand each shape
of consciousness attests to knowing something, and on the other
hand it is, at least implicitly, committed to certain reasons for
claiming to know that thing.
The first shape of consciousness encountered in the Phenomenology of Spirit is called Sense-Certainty. Why is this shape
called Sense-Certainty and why does it fall under the heading of
Consciousness? Consciousness as used here has a particular
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meaning for Hegel. He means by it any mode of cognition which
is fully directed at an object other than itself. To be conscious on
these terms is to have some kind regard for things “out there”
while not at the same time regarding one’s own activity of thinking. Furthermore, since Hegel thinks such regard is never a passive awareness but always entails the formation of judgments,
consciousness is always in the business of claiming to know that
there are things out there. Indeed, all knowing for Consciousness
just is knowledge of what is out there.
Sense-Certainty claims to know something because there are
things present to it, right here, right now. Knowing is not complicated for Sense-Certainty: look around, it says, if nothing else
you know that what’s here right now is here right now. SenseCertainty sees every moment of its life in this way, and thinks
that the apparent richness of its sensory experience is made possible by the great variety of the things present to it. No one lives
a life of Sense-Certainty exclusively. But it is an intelligible,
maybe even common, ground upon which to plant one’s feet
when saying, “I know this because …” It is common, perhaps,
because what it appeals to is common, the sense that the spatial
and temporal arrangement of objects in the world is the touchstone for what is true. Is it true that it is raining? Look outside
and live the life of Sense-Certainty.
If this is the case, then what is wrong with such a stance for
justifying knowledge claims? Here we encounter a powerful
force at work in Hegel’s book, one which perhaps looks strange
at first. This force is language and the implicit demand that each
shape of consciousness articulate from its own standpoint why it
is justified in claiming to know something. Sense-Certainty will
fail this test. Sense-Certainty is certain of what is present in the
here and now. It might even feel that the immediate sensuous
richness of the present world is the fullest kind of experience possible. Hegel thinks otherwise, and he thinks so because SenseCertainty is limited to saying, “This, here, now.” And this
restriction on the vocabulary available to Sense-Certainty seems
appropriate since it is because of the thises here and now that
Sense-Certainty thinks it can know. It should not have to say
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more. The ground of its knowing is out there. It is not what it
says that makes the things known. There is a mismatch between
what Sense-Certainty intends to say about its experience and
what it is able to say about it. Sense-Certainty thinks it can account for a particular experience by saying “This here now”; but
what it says is true of any experience and hence cannot be an account of the grounds of what is known in this one.
Absolute Freedom is in some respects just like Sense-Certainty. It is a particular shape of consciousness with its unique
claim of knowing and the text devoted to it is meant to both trace
the contours of this way of thinking as well as expose the contradictions inherent in it.
The initial knowledge claim made by Absolute Freedom is that
the will of every particular self-conscious agent is identical with
the universal will of all like-minded self-conscious agents. That
is to say, the cognitive stance of universal human freedom is one
in which all particular members of the political community see
the truth of their own selves through the mutual recognition of
the equality of all. Furthermore, this cognitive stance is not principally a theoretical view of politics but is a practical stance; willing is a form of cognition. This moment is a high-point of sorts
in the Phenomenology and seeing why will get us some way toward grasping the Phenomenology as a whole. The reason this is
a high-point is because consciousness has, after many other attempts, found a shape in which it has achieved a genuine identity
between the particular and the universal, and does so self-consciously, that is, it knows it has achieved this, and, furthermore,
it does so in a way where its communal life is an essential component of this achievement. Taking these three features in turn
we can get a view of what falls between Sense-Certainty and Absolute Freedom and Terror in the Phenomenology.
We saw already that the relationship between the particular
and the universal was what undid the knowledge claims made by
Sense-Certainty. Sense-Certainty wanted to point to the vast array
of particulars in the world as the solid ground upon which it
would make its knowledge claims. But it was unable in speech
to place those particulars under universal categories without ef-
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facing their particularity. And in so doing Sense-Certainty erased
the very thing that was meant to serve as the index of truth for its
claims. This announces a general problem encountered by the
shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit: the challenge of universalizing particulars without having the particulars
dissolve into the universal. One principal lesson of the sections
on Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason is that most
particulars simply cannot withstand the dissolving force of the
universal. Any attempt to assert such particulars as themselves
the ground of knowing leads to contradictions and hence to failure. What kinds of particulars are these and why do they fail to
hold together when brought together with the universal? There
are three basic types of such particulars: external things, self-conscious things, and rational individuals. These types of particulars
coincide with the sections on Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason.
We noted when looking at Sense-Certainty that it based its
knowledge claims on the fact that there are things “out there.”
This continues with the other shapes of Consciousness: Perception and Understanding. Both of these shapes fall under the heading of Consciousness because they too point to something “out
there” to justify their claims of knowing. Perception points to the
properties possessed by ordinary objects and Understanding
points to forces underlying physical phenomena. We cannot retrace here the increasingly intricate contours of these shapes of
consciousness, but might dwell briefly with Understanding to see
what we learn about Consciousness as a whole.
It might strike your ear already as odd to speak of forces as
things that are simply out there in the external world. Rather than
being simply out there, forces are posited by us as being out there,
and then we go about testing whether the forces as posited match
up with the measurable features of observable phenomena. So
while it is important in this process of thought and experiment to
maintain that there is really something out there – that the forces
are not just fictions we have invented – their being out there is
not a simple, immediate presence but is mediated by our own
mindful activity. In a rather elaborate teasing out of the various
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aspects of this mindful relationship to the external world, Hegel
shows how Understanding cannot account for its claims about
force on its own terms. Consciousness is committed to the
grounds of knowing being completely independent of its own activity. It turns out that this is not the case – the grounds of knowing are not simply out there in the world. Understanding pushes
this demand so far that eventually the situation inverts itself and,
as Hegel says at the end of “Force and the Understanding,” when
Consciousness finally tears away the veil separating appearances
from essence, it sees only itself.
The next main section of the book explores the position opposite to Consciousness, namely, Self-Consciousness. Self-Consciousness is opposite in that its basic stance is that it itself is the
whole and sufficient ground of truth. Self-Consciousness is desirous, and what Self-Consciousness desires is to affirm that it is
independent of the things around it. Only through affirming its
total independence can Self-Consciousness make good on its assertion that it is the sole and sufficient ground of knowing. Each
shape of Self-Consciousness fails to be the sole ground of its own
certainty, and we the readers see again and again that Self-Consciousness is dependent on its interactions with the external world
to affirm itself. As with Consciousness, we come to see that SelfConsciousness cannot account for itself on its own terms. We the
readers come to see that only Consciousness and Self-Consciousness together make a whole. To be self-conscious a thing must
be engaged with a world outside of itself; and to be conscious of
an outside world is to be a thing whose own activity is involved
in the conscious presence of that world. Hence there is both identity and difference between the moments of Consciousness and
Self-Consciousness.
So, it turns out that neither external objects nor self-conscious
beings are things that have a universally abiding character. That
is, whatever standing they have in the world is shown to be partial
and dependent. But since there does seem to be some abiding
character to the whole movement of Consciousness and SelfConsciousness taken together, perhaps this whole movement is
the universal ground we have been searching for. This brings us
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to the third type of particular, the rational individual.
What does Hegel mean by a rational individual? Each shape
of consciousness explored in the chapter on Reason shares a basic
stance, one which implicitly takes into itself what the reader
comes to understand about Consciousness and Self-Consciousness, namely that there is an identity between the self and its
world. The shapes of Reason have, Hegel says, an instinct for affirming this identity through some kind of engagement with the
world. These modes of engagement range from observationbased science to the making and testing of laws. And while there
is a gradual emergence of self-awareness on the part of the rational individual in the progression of these shapes, a common
feature throughout is the implicit assertion that the rational individual is able, on its own, to carry through the explicit revelation
of the identity of self and world. In what strikes me as the most
despairing stretch of the book, Reason is seen to fail repeatedly
in this project. While Reason is successful in finding reasonableness in many features of the world, some of its own making, it is
never quite able to achieve a complete identity between itself as
rational and the world as a whole. The complete rationality of the
world turns out to be an ever-vanishing fantasy for the rational
individual. In a moment we will see the meaning of this as it pertains to particulars and universals.
But first let’s note that we are now in a position to understand
why there is a chapter called “Spirit” in the Phenomenology and
why Absolute Freedom and Terror is located in this chapter. In
one respect we can see that if there are no other shapes of consciousness, then the project of finding adequate grounds for our
knowledge must be a failure since none of the shapes observed
thus far have been up to the challenge. Hegel’s implicit assertion
is that there are more shapes of consciousness and that their general character is different from those of Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason. The shapes of Spirit are those that
address the principal failings of Reason. A few remarks about the
final shapes of Reason will help make sense of what emerges at
the beginning of the chapter on Spirit.
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After failing to directly observe the reasonableness of the
world in nature or the human mind and body, Reason attempts to
make its own activity in the world the source of rationality in the
world. In various ways, these shapes of Reason find that the presence of other rational individuals in the world gets in the way of
their own projects of establishing a reasonable world. Each of
these failures in some way gets parsed out as a failure to reconcile
particularity and universality. The final two shapes of Reason
turn to law as a possible means for establishing a rational world.
It turns out, however, that while Reason can make rational laws
and test the rationality of laws, it cannot through these endeavors
establish a definitive set of laws that adequately ground and guide
the particular actions of individuals. That is, the need of individuals to act cannot be sufficiently determined by any set of rational
ordinances.
Nevertheless, we do act and we do so aware that we are subjected to norms of some kind or another. An initial stab at defining what Hegel means by Spirit might be just this, that rational
human life always finds itself within some set of shared, communal norms and that these norms provide both the structure and
coherence of the community and the principal self-understanding
of the members of the community. In this sense, the realm of
Spirit is prior to that of Reason. Or, as Hegel puts it, Spirit is the
substantial ground that is the real being of human consciousness.
The modes of cognition that fall under the headings of Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason are abstractions
from this ground. I take this to be the most important claim of
Hegel’s book.
The first shape of Spirit that Hegel presents he calls the “Ethical World,” a vision of the Greek polis seen through the lens of
Sophocles’ Antigone. This vision of the polis depicts a community in which each member has a place and a communal role, and
these places and roles are essentially and immediately identified
with certain normative injunctions. The two fundamental axes
around which the city and its members are organized are the
human and divine laws and the corresponding domains of the
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state and the family. As Hegel sees it, the characters in Sophocles’
play exemplify this immediate identity with the norms that define
their places and roles, Antigone most of all. The Antigone we see
portrayed in the Phenomenology has no reflective distance on her
role as sister and keeper of the unwritten laws. It is simply who
she is. The immediacy that marks Antigone’s ethical stance does
not prevent her from being a conscious, self-conscious, and rational individual; but those modes are not the definitive ones in
her case. In this way we can see how the shapes of Spirit follow
upon those of Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason
in the dialectical unfolding of the book, even if they possess this
other kind of priority. Antigone exemplifies the fact that there are
shapes of consciousness that do not attempt to ground ethical life
in the rational capacities of the individual, but simply live primarily from within some set of ethical norms.
As is always the case in the Phenomenology, however, the immediacy of Antigone’s selfhood shows itself as unstable, contradictory, and unsustainable. Indeed, I think the force of Hegel’s
presentation is that the apparent repose of the polis as presented
in the first section on the Ethical World is a fiction. The truth of
the beautiful distribution of norms between the gods and man,
and between the home and state, is that it cannot but result in a
conflict that tears the city apart. This is unavoidable because of
action. The initial static view of the city shows everyone parceled
out into their respective domains. But as essentially normative
domains, the individuals that fall within them must be agents.
Ethical life is a life of actions, not of contemplation. The problem
is that as soon as one acts in Antigone’s city, one must transgress
the boundaries that were supposed to define and confine one’s
actions. Antigone’s burial of her brother is at once an upholding
of the divine law and a transgression of the human law. Likewise,
her action, which finds its justification in the duty to family, is a
violation of a state decree.
The instability of this first shape of ethical life announces the
singular challenge for Consciousness in the realm of Spirit: Consciousness must inhabit a way of life in which the normative
structure of self and community can sustain both simultaneously.
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We will have to forgo looking at any of the shapes of Spirit which
fall between Ethical Action and Absolute Freedom, but it should
be roughly apparent how the stance of Absolute Freedom addresses this challenge. The ethical stance taken by the revolutionary consciousness of Absolute Freedom is one that immediately
identifies its own will with the will of all. The division of the
spiritual world into particular and partial domains has been obliterated and replaced with one in which the selfhood of all individuals is to be realized in the common project of a universal
will. We are almost ready to see the dark side of the this shape of
Spirit, but let’s pause to pull together some threads of what we
have seen so far.
The twin goals of grounding knowledge and reconciling the
universal and the particular, and the failures of the attempts at
reconciliation, have been present in all of the shapes of consciousness we have considered. For Sense-Certainty, the possibility of knowing is grounded in the immediate presence of an
external world, but Sense-Certainty fails to find universals that
allow for the preservation of particulars. The shapes of Self-Consciousness all posit the self as the universal ground of knowledge
but are not able to recognize the role of external particularity in
its own self-regard. The rational individual at the end of the chapter on Reason sees its own rational capacities as sufficient
grounds for determining the normative structure of communal
life, but produces nothing but empty tautologies or equally rational but contradictory laws. The individuals who populate the
Ethical World know what their duties are, their selves are
grounded in an immediate identification with these duties, and
in this way their particularity is identical to a universal; but the
need to act on those duties brings them into conflict with the dutiful actions of others and thus the identity of particular and universal is only partial.
We might now want to consider what it means that these individual, largely self-contained shapes of consciousness make up
some kind of whole, come in a particular order, and are grouped
under different headings. In one sense, the phenomenological observer adds nothing to the progression of shapes of conscious-
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ness. The internal shifting, unrest, and development within each
shape always results in a form of consciousness that is in itself
what the next shape of consciousness is for itself. In this way,
there are no gaps between the various shapes of consciousness.
However, each new shape of consciousness takes itself to be immediately what it is. It has no knowledge of being related to prior
shapes. We might say that each new shape is a new start. But this
means that the phenomenologist is not just an observer, but also
an arranger. The putting-in-order of the shapes is done by the
philosopher and is not the work of natural consciousness. Hence
part of our work as readers is to discern not only that the shapes
come in this order, but also to decide whether we agree that they
are properly ordered. This returns us to the first moment, however. Deciding whether the shapes are properly ordered amounts
to deciding whether there are any gaps between the shapes. These
considerations are true not only with respect to the individual
shapes of consciousness, but also to the various kinds that they fall
under: Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, and so on.
Finally it is time to see what comes after Absolute Freedom.
What comes right on the heels of Absolute Freedom is Terror.
I would be tempted to say that the “and” in “Absolute Freedom
and Terror” should be read as an “is.” Absolute Freedom is Terror. I believe Hegel offers here, in his typically obscure fashion, both a historical/political interpretation and a cognitive/
philosophical one. The historical interpretation, in short, is that
the project of instituting universal human freedom and equality
cannot be achieved simply at the level of the universal will.
That is, if one makes the universal will of the people the immediate ground upon which political freedom rests one must
regard all institutional and procedural aspects of governance
as inessential and distortive. The reality is that institutions and
procedures must be in place for actual governance, but when
viewed from the perspective of Absolute Freedom they cannot
but take on the look of something sinister, retrograde, and evil.
The terminus of this suspicion, the very logic of the Revolution, Hegel suggests, is the pure negating force of the Terror.
Only through the continual erasure of partial and contingent
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actions and positions can the purity of Absolute Freedom be
maintained.
But since the shapes of Spirit are not just collective frames of
mind but always also those of individuals, the Terror lurking in
Absolute Freedom can be viewed at the level of the individual
mind as well. Hegel here seems to suggest that for the individual
Absolute Freedom is terrifying because, for the first time in the
Phenomenology, consciousness has taken on a shape that sees itself explicitly and exclusively as a space of pure negativity. To
be absolutely free is to be determined by nothing outside of oneself. And while this independence of determination was true of
the shapes of Self-Consciousness, only Absolute Freedom sees
itself in the world, with others, in this way. Absolute Freedom
sees itself as radically self-determining without seeing itself as
independent.
The implicit political injunction of these considerations is that
the spiritual community must move past revolution and stake out
some determining and limiting boundaries that will make actual
and sustainable the universal freedom aimed at in the Revolution.
Hegel, however, does not pursue the political side of the story
within the Phenomenology. The fittingness of what comes in the
final section of Spirit is, nevertheless, explicable within the
framework of what I have sketched out so far.
If the dead end reached both by the revolutionary community
and the cognitive shape of Absolute Freedom is that self-determination is without content, then somehow self-determination
must be shown to implicitly contain within itself some kind of
determinate content. From this perspective it makes sense that
the final section of Spirit begins with a shape of consciousness
that resembles Kant’s moral subject. The positioning of this
shape after Absolute Freedom and Terror suggests that the key
to overcoming the terrifying negativity of Absolute Freedom (or
autonomy) is to see that this freedom is also, at the same time,
subjection to a law. If revolutionary consciousness is the first to
posit its own freedom with others as the essential content of itself,
then the Kantian moral subject carries out the recognition that that
freedom is identical to a certain self-legislation. We can perhaps
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make sense of the retreat from the political realm inasmuch as the
moral subject need go no further than himself to find the contours
of this self-legislation.
The advance from Absolute Freedom is clear: the pure negativity of that freedom finds a determining limitation in itself. The
universal moral law is identical with who I essentially am. The
remainder of the chapter on Spirit plays out in the usual way. The
identity of the self and the moral law is too immediate, and once
again the need to act in the world is the grit that irritates what at
first appears to be a beautiful achievement: the universal self
within each of us providing the determining ground for all human
action. In Hegel’s hands, the moral subject is exposed as finite,
partial, and always acting on insufficient grounds. To be a genuine member of a human community, and hence to be a genuine
self, one must risk the inevitable transgression of action. One
must act from within oneself without having all the information
one needs and without knowing all of the ramifications of one’s
action. More crucially, one must act in one’s own interest. Action
is irredeemably selfish. The final pages of the chapter on Spirit
are meant to address this bind that we find ourselves in. Hegel
suggests that only through the mutual recognition of this bind, of
our finitude, and of the inevitably transgressive character of
human action can we finally plant our feet in the world and orient
our minds in such a way that we can both be certain of what we
know and also be justified of this certainty. For only here is the
particular both reconciled with and preserved within the universal. The universal recognition of the necessary partiality of
human existence makes possible the free flourishing of human
action and also makes possible genuine and sustainable human
community. This is the I that is We and the We that is I that was
announced in the chapter on Self-Consciousness.
We might also see that the distinction between thought and action, mind and world, is overcome here. Both are only moments
of a fluid whole. No moment of the field of human action –
whether the deed itself, the conviction of duty that accompanies
the deed, the determination of means to fulfill our ends, or the
judgment of either our own actions or those of others in their par-
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ticularity – what Hegel calls “evil” – none of these has ultimacy.
Only the whole movement is truly actual. I think this is what
Hegel must mean when he says that “The deed is not imperishable; it is taken back by Spirit into itself, and the aspect of individuality present in it . . . straightaway vanishes (§669).”
To borrow a phrase from the American philosopher Wilfred
Sellars, we might say that the ultimate ground of our knowledge
is just the “space of reasons” itself. There are no criteria for
knowledge – moral or otherwise – outside of the space in which
we hold each other and ourselves to account. But this also means
that this is a ground that is self-grounding. Only we ourselves
can constitute this ground by making fully actual the space of
reasons. Hence, the final moments of the chapter on Spirit cannot
be construed as something that has simply come to pass. Rather,
the mutual confession of finitude is the self-given ground of the
ongoing, living present, a present for which we are perpetually
and inescapably responsible. Only in this sense is Spirit Absolute.
The main goal of the Phenomenology as an account of knowing has thus almost been achieved with the appearance of forgiveness and reconciliation. But only almost. The agents of
mutual recognition that end the chapter on Spirit do what they
do knowingly, but they do not know the philosophical significance of their mutual regard. Only we see it, and complete comprehension of its significance requires two more steps. The first
is taken in the chapter on Religion. Two aspects of the role of the
chapter on Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit seem clear
to me. First, Hegel seems to suggest that the shapes of Spirit as
ways of being in the world are always supplemented by a common and shared discourse. The highest level of this shared discourse, and one that is crucial in knitting the community together,
is the way in which the community talks about the highest things,
or what is absolute. The religion chapter provides a taxonomy of
the historical variants on such discourses regarding the absolute.
Secondly, we phenomenologists need to trace the logical ordering
of these ways of understanding the absolute so as to see that the
terminus of that logical sequence coincides with the relationship
of self and other at the end of Spirit. Only by tracing this out and
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seeing this coincidence are we positioned to take the stance of
Absolute Knowing.
What then is this grand-sounding thing called Absolute Knowing? I think it can best be captured in past participle constructions. Absolute Knowing is having traversed and despaired of the
knowledge claims of all of the shapes of consciousness; it is having worked up to a comprehension of the proper fit between these
shapes and the way in which they make a whole; it is having
come to recognize that only such a traversal and comprehension
is adequate to the philosophical question about what the grounds
of our knowing are. There is no Absolute Knowing outside of the
experience of struggling to and achieving an adequate vision of
the book as a whole. If there is a present tense formulation of Absolute Knowing it seems that is must be progressive. We must
hold the movement of despair of the book in mind in order to
enjoy the satisfaction of the redemption of that despair. But this
means that there is no thing called the Absolute that we can walk
away from the book with. The Absolute is not a thing at all but a
way of knowing and this way of knowing just is the full experience of reading the Phenomenology of Spirit.
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Tercet
Elliott Zuckerman
No one is going anywhere,
this is a pure farewell. The men
are due to return within the hour,
expecting never to be surprised.
Sooner or later the women will
surprise themselves.
That is why this ghostly embarcation
this hush and stir of zephyrs
repudiates all kinship
with the enthralled Addios
sung with a catch in the throat
by ardent diva and exalted tenor.
Nor is this death-in-love
for this is not the sound
of real water.
No drowning in these undulating waves
no more than in the regular ebbing
of a Hiroshige print.
The rare rococo masters knew
that fare thee well are words
and music of arrival.
Elliott Zuckerman is tutor emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland.
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Liberalism and Tragedy
A Review of Jonathan N. Badger’s Sophocles and the
Politics of Tragedy: Cities and Transcendence. New
York: Routledge, 2013. 252 pages, $140; paper, $42.95.
Paul Ludwig
Jonathan Badger’s Sophocles and the Politics of Tragedy begins
a dialogue between Greek tragedy and modern political thought.
Sophocles best diagnosed a predicament that continues to haunt
us today: human nature has two drives, one that aims at bodily
security and another that aims at transcendence. The two are forever in tension. Tragic protagonists often attempt to realize one
of the two aims, to the detriment of the other. For example, Creon
in the Antigone attempts to base politics on one of the two drives,
bodily security. Badger finds comparably one-sided attempts in
the history of political thought. Christian medieval thought attempted to create a politics of transcendence. Francis Bacon’s
modern project based its new politics on bodily security. Both
were attempts to move beyond, and thus to deny, tragedy. A truly
tragic consciousness lives with the tension rather than trying to
negate one of the poles. In a surprise, John Locke emerges as the
hero of the book for inaugurating liberalism, a politics that holds
these two drives in tension, and thus qualifies as tragic politics
in the best sense.
Tragedy begins with an insight into the transitory nature of all
things, including politics and human relations. Time and change
rule all (8). Unpredictably and unaccountably, everything dissolves (cf. Ajax 646-92). Two opposed responses to this tragic
insight attempt to fix or remedy the situation. One response is the
drive for transcendence. A hero looks beyond the living world to
a world of divine beauty. The other response is the drive for bodily security. Statesmen, especially, use institutions and laws to
Paul Ludwig is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
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ensure safety and survival, hoping to shield us from death and
decay. Since perfect justice is one vision of transcendent beauty,
heroes are on a collision course with existing political institutions.
Security entails stability, which is threatened by heroic visions.
This conception of tragedy draws on and subsumes parts of
Aristotle’s, Hegel’s, and Nietzsche’s understandings, among others. Hegel’s clash of right actions, for example, fits together with
the tragic insight that the two drives are equally right (and wrong).
Hegel would like to see the two theses sublate into a higher synthesis. But such a solution, insofar as it disarms the tragic tension,
denies that our predicament is really tragic. According to Badger,
Aristotle’s Poetics places mimesis at the heart of ethical action.
To act ethically is to play a role—an interpretation that sounds
surprisingly postmodern. Philosophy itself emerges from creating
narratives, poetry (26-31). The poeticizing capacity of soul renders our experiences to us as a world of wholes. In place of the
usual “purgation of pity and fear” as a translation of Aristotle’s
account of the effect of tragedy, Badger makes a case for “purification of ruth and horror.” Whereas pity has been overtaken by
democratization, “pure ruth should hold us spellbound, transfixed
in utter sorrow on behalf of another” (28). Whereas fear is overly
broad, dread unspecific, and terror too urgent, horror best captures the threat of destroying the story of one’s life, not merely
ending one’s life. “[O]ne’s life work is destroyed or useless.”
Rather than getting rid of these passions because they cloud
thought, catharsis purifies them into versions serviceable for
learning and understanding. The meaning of this purification
seems to slide from purified passions to pure exemplars of the
characters who feel them, like Antigone and Creon—incarnations
of the drives for transcendence and security, respectively (30-31).
The understandings of tragedy proposed by the major thinkers
fit together only uneasily, as Badger is quick to point out. Solon’s
homely wisdom of the Greeks seems to agree with Nietzsche’s.
To “show how much better it is for a human being to die than to
live” (Herodotus 1) sounds a lot like “best . . . not to be born, not
to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon”
(Birth of Tragedy 17-18, 31). And yet, the Solon story emphasizes
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successes and failures at the end of life: the sons who hitched
themselves to their mother’s cart and Croesus’s ruin. Going out
on top or at one’s peak (perhaps even hastening the end to coincide with the peak) is different from finding individuation itself
to be an illusion, as Nietzsche does. To have a peak, it is necessary to be an individual, and Herodotus does not say that the
sons’ triumph was illusory; he surely knew of despots more fortunate than Croesus. The still greater distance between Nietzsche
and Aristotle does not render the comparison useless; the two are
“compatible” (34; cf. 37-38, Hegel “entirely compatible”), if we
abstract sufficiently. Nietzsche gives us a “vocabulary” for talking about tragedy, though he and Aristotle are using “different
terms.” “Antigone and Creon are in a ‘Hegelian’ collision over
how to respond to the ‘Nietszchean’ insight” (38). But again, if
individuation is an illusion, then the Ajax’s “all things change”
is necessarily a consequence. But if “all things change,” that does
not necessarily mean individuation is an illusion. At any rate,
there is an assumption here that would have to be made evident—
namely, that only eternal things really exist. Does Philoctetes really turn to savagery because the “falseness of the Apollonian
(rational, expedient) community is intolerable” (35)?
Crucial to interpreting both the Philoctetes and the Ajax is the
ambiguous role (or roles) of Odysseus. For Badger, Odysseus is
the Lockean before Locke, the one man at Troy who can fully
appreciate the tragic insight (into the mutability of all things)
without succumbing to either of the two drives—security or transcendence—that attempt to solve it. Instead, Odysseus is strong
and humane enough to hold the two drives in tension. Contrary
to appearances, Odysseus’s role is civic-minded, even self-sacrificing, in the two plays. Friendship is the theme of the Philoctetes,
and Odysseus is instrumental in drawing the exiled hero into a
friendship with young Neoptolemus, a friendship based on their
shared heroic morality. Only their newfound friendship can bring
Philoctetes back to Troy to save the Greek cause. Friendship is
the middle term between the community and the individual;
friendship moderates heroic individualism and provides a reason
to help the community. Odysseus orchestrates this friendship, in
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part by presenting himself as worse than he is, in order to provide
an unheroic contrast (cf. Philoctetes 64-67). “A foiled and hapless
Odysseus in ignoble flight . . . is a queer image. It is not consistent
with the Homeric presentation or with Sophocles’ presentation
of him in the Ajax” (118). Hence the interpretation that Odysseus
probably expected or counted on Neoptolemus’s rebellion against
his plan (120). This is a parting of the ways for interpreters: few
classicists would assume that Odysseus is consistently the same
character in two plays not performed together, nor that Sophocles
felt bound to make either Odysseus consistent with Homer’s. For
instance, Sophocles’s Odysseus would have been more likely to
kill the suitors and serving maids out of cold expedience rather
than suffering the anger and resentment that Homer’s undergoes.
Badger’s Sophocles by contrast provides in each play a further
meditation on the Homeric protagonist. In part, the heroic friendship could only be manipulated into existence because it is not
fully rational (117). Reason and experience do not naturally reveal this “whole” that binds the heroes to the community; to see
it requires a divine perspective or poeticizing. This perspective
is provided by the deus ex machina—the voice or appearance of
Heracles at the end. Badger flirts with but ultimately does not
embrace the thesis that Heracles is Odysseus in disguise (because
the same actor probably played both roles) or that Heracles is in
some other way a final, fiendishly clever piece of the plan
Odysseus was hatching all along.
More telling than being chased off-stage is the scene that reverses Odysseus’s and Neoptolemus’s tutor-student relationship.
When the young man is about to return the bow, Odysseus threatens that the whole host of Greeks, and himself among them, will
stop Neoptolemus. But this claim is laughable since the Greeks
are far away, and the restitution of the bow is imminent. A
spokesman for an army is not the same as an army. Where are
his divisions? In brushing the suggestion aside, Neoptolemus
says: “You were born wise, but what you’re saying is not wise”
(1244). When Odysseus retorts that neither Neoptolemus’s
speech nor his deeds are wise, the issue come to a head. Neoptolemus addresses it forthrightly: “No, but if my [speeches and
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deeds] are just, they are better than wise” (1246). The hero
chooses justice over wisdom, heart over mind. He does so selfconsciously. When Odysseus threatens him with retribution from
the Greek host, Neoptolemus moves to a further claim. With justice on his side, he has nothing to fear from Odysseus (1251). A
just man has nothing to fear. For once, Odysseus resorts to force,
beginning to draw his sword—but he puts it back with farcical
speed when Neoptolemus begins to respond in kind. Neoptolemus now delivers the cutting line that reverses their earlier tutorial relationship. “You have done the prudent thing. And if you
remain thoughtful this way in the future, perhaps you will keep
out of trouble” (1259-60). He is now speaking like an older man
admonishing a younger. Odysseus’s wisdom now looks like immaturity, while Neoptolemus’s justice has conferred upon him a
certain augustness ordinarily reserved for age.
If real (as opposed to feigned) friendship was part of Odysseus’
plan, he apparently failed to anticipate that friendship could draw
the pair away from the community. Philoctetes originally persuades Neoptolemus that the two of them should retire into private
life; he is willing to live with his wound if it spites the Atreidai,
preferring to harm his enemies rather than help himself (cf. 139197). A cure, a new life, the highest fame: his new friend is a crutch
that enables him to avoid all of these goods. Similarly, Neoptolemus is willing to give up his glorious future in order to remain
true to a friend. Back home, Neoptolemus will take care of
Philoctetes and his wound, looking out for him especially during
his seizures. Philoctetes and his invincible bow will prevent
reprisals against the disgraced young man and his land (1404-7).
It is important to note that friendship is now standing in the way
of either friend’s achieving his highest good. All they have is each
other. Intriguingly, the same friendship that contributes to this vicious spiral downwards into privacy also contributes—after a
boost from the gods—to a virtuous spiral upwards. Badger is eloquent on the excellence of friendship and its political use: friendship “has a portion of the intimacy and warmth of family without
the concomitant murkiness and stultification, and it can partake
of worldly action and incentive without the crassness and imper-
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sonality of the larger, public community” (116). It is their friendship which decisively draws the two heroes back to the community where their ambitions may be fulfilled. But the divine
intervention does not change the truth about friendship as revealed in the play up to that point. Friendship can be an aid to
public endeavor, but it can also be a hindrance. Perhaps generally,
or more commonly, it is a hindrance. The play shows that true
friendships have a privatizing propensity as well as a public, civic
propensity. One might be tempted go further: the potentially civic
character of the heroes’ friendship is due more to the ground of
their friendship—admiration of heroic virtue—than to the friendship itself. Only in the larger society can heroic virtue receive the
honors it is due. One can imagine other grounds of friendship
(and other virtues) in which the privatizing propensity predominates. Can the privatized friendship of today contribute to liberal
societies?
The reading of the Ajax delves deeper into Odysseus’s ambiguity, and the reading of the Antigone shows the polarization he
avoids. By permitting the burial of the disgraced hero Ajax,
Odysseus in a sense corrects Creon’s refusal to permit Antigone
to bury her traitorous brother. Odysseus pities his enemy’s insanity because Odysseus sees in Ajax both “himself and the rest of
us” (64, on lines 122-26 of Ajax). Odysseus responds to the tragic
insight that all things are mutable in a way that neither remedies
the fact nor simply resigns itself to it. Instead, he finds a way the
community might abide within the tension (65). Friendship and
civic piety are his ways of abiding: he uses his friendship with
Agamemnon to secure burial and to incorporate the dead hero
(and his drive for transcendence) into the community. Odysseus
consistently claims to act not altruistically but for himself (Ajax
123-24, 1363-67). Badger believes that he overcomes his natural
self, substituting for it a universal self. “Odysseus’s ‘self’ is an
expanded self: the individual and the community are inside
Odysseus” (68). Self-interest and civic responsibility merge.
Odysseus is conscious of tragedy, and his action points toward a
political order that could also be conscious of tragedy—a worldly
life that could nevertheless hold in mind the excellence of the
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hero, whose unrestrained activity would threaten to overturn that
order. He beautifies the city by cultifying the hero (69). One wonders if anything similar to a hero cult, in which transcendence
can be both recognized and tamed, exists in liberal society.
Antigone is heroic because she desires an other-worldly
beauty, a desire that can achieve its aim only in Hades (73). Only
in the underworld can she achieve her perfect love. Hers is a
philia that becomes an eros. This is nicely observed. She seeks
to impose her transcendence on the community by burying
Polyneices. But the latter hardly seems an imposition: here the
modern, civil-disobedience readings would seem in line with
Badger’s. In Lockean liberalism, Antigone would of course have
been allowed to bury her brother. So is her “imposition” of transcendence dependent on the assumptions of the regime in Sophocles’s Thebes? Badger prefers to see Antigone as a danger
analogous to later Christian impositions of transcendent longings.
Antigone is like a philosopher in the way she finds meaning by
poeticizing: she beautifies the contingent parts around her into
wholes, thereby making them meaningful (75). Beauty orders experience. But the philosophical analogy is debatable: philosophers like Epicurus denied the existence of a beautiful cosmos.
Would not philosophers want to know the truth about anything
“naturally ambiguous and imperfect” (76)? Philosophy relies on
poetry only for its first principles (89). But does this ‘first’ mean
‘first’ in the sense of beginnings that govern the conclusions, or
‘first’ in the sense of opinions from which to ascend? Creon, for
his part, reduces philia to civic friendship (86; cf. Antigone 18290). His and her mistakes are equal and opposite: “In looking to
a poeticized Hades, Antigone fails to see any viable wholeness
in bodily life. In seeking bodily security and failing to see the
universal power of erōs and chance, Creon fails to imagine the
human soul” (93). But this makes the desire for transcendence
sound like a mad pursuit we would be better off without—which
can hardly be said of the desire for security. On this view, what
would be wrong with Creon’s position, other than the fact that
he did not provide for anaesthetizing or otherwise dealing with
Antigone’s psychological problem? To say the drive or desire for
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transcendence is innate is not yet to say that it is a good thing.
Until yesterday, it was possible to say that human nature cannot
be changed. Badger confronts the problem in a section entitled
“Life beyond the Human.” Our striving for medical technology
that would ensure immortality (defeating the tragic through fixing
the transitory) raises questions such as “What would it mean to
be a daughter to a living father forever (a father, moreover, who
was in the same stage of life with the daughter?)” (145). He concludes modestly that if Sophocles is correct, the tension between
transcendence and material security will never be eliminated
from human life (147). But will it never be eliminated because
doing so is impossible, or will it never be eliminated from humanity because, when it is eliminated, we will be inhuman, “beyond the human”? The answer seems to be the latter, as the
tension now becomes constitutive: “human beings qua human
beings are what they are owing to this tension.” The tension is at
least required for “soulful life” (195). This opens up the possibility of a post-human future—provided by the technology that
flourishes in liberal polities that, as we have seen, were created
by Locke.
The Christian visions, in which Augustine, Aquinas, and Giles
of Rome impose transcendence on politics, are dealt with somewhat scantily. In four paragraphs, Badger treats these authors and
others, adducing citations in which some of them subordinate
secular power to ecclesiastical power. None of the passages is
explicated. Perhaps their imposition of transcendence is simply
a well known fact? To place Dante in this company, because he
was allegedly Thomas’s student and saw the world as a divine
comedy instead of a tragedy (132-33), is a step too far. Dante’s
Monarchia, for example, argues against subordinating the secular
power to the ecclesiastical.
If the book is uninformative about the Christians, it is wonderfully informative about Bacon’s New Atlantis and a selection of
Bacon’s essays. Bacon explicitly demotes friendship, which
Badger places in the company of transcendence (140). Bacon’s
project is ultimately Creonic because it denies the soul in favor
of the body, which is no different from other non-human “bodies
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in motion” (143-44). Especially noteworthy are “the more violent
instruments that Bacon views as necessary for his humanitarian
goal,” including imperialism and militarism backed by technology (141). The persecution of heretics under Church rule is
reprised in the rational-authoritarian state, this time as the persecution of all transcendence.
“The Tragic Politics of John Locke” serves as a “basis for a
rejuvenated discussion of the status and aims of contemporary
liberalism” (148). Does John Locke’s liberalism permit enough
transcendence to satisfy this polarity of the soul’s craving? As a
supreme court justice vacuously but accurately put it, “At the
heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human
life.” Doing so is protected, so long as it does not prevent anyone
else from doing so, too, and causes no bodily harm to another.
(The continuing debate over abortion tests the limits of the latter
clause.) Increasingly in our times, one’s view of the universe cannot be protected if it causes anyone mental pain, either. This
could seem like no transcendence at all. Badger contributes to
contemporary discussions of liberalism by proposing a reason
why liberalism should not progress too far from of its Lockean
roots. While trying to twist free of the fundamental tension, recent liberalism actually pivots back and forth within a formal
arrangement designed to maintain the tension (172). Dissatisfied
with this formal arrangement, recent liberalism pushes for
“equality as a norm (as opposed to equality as an observation or
postulate)” (171-73). Another of its goals, the eradication of suffering, cannot be the highest human good. Striving to eliminate
suffering that comes from tyranny is fine, but “to strive to eliminate the suffering that comes from erōs and the gods is a symptom of a lack of understanding” (165, 191). Such goals begin to
overwhelm the transcendence side of the polarity in favor of the
material security side.
In Lockean liberalism, the drive for transcendence is privatized: do it yourself. Freedom of religion contrasts with both
Christian imposition and with the institutionalized civil religions
of Bacon and Hobbes. Lockean liberalism does not even promise
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justice but rather the pursuit of and struggle for justice (157, 160).
Badger appears to believe there is something naturally private
about transcendence anyway: heroic principles “have their source
in merely private relations” (99). The hero (or budding hero)
Neoptolemus, for example, has a nature “unalloyed with politics,” and it is this nature that hates the deceit in Odysseus’s plan
(105). “Patriotism is an effect of conditioning,” whereas “heroic
honor may be natural” (111). This seems odd, because if honor
is natural, it comes into its own only in community. Badger relegates saving the Greek “city” besieging Troy to the bodily-security side of the polarity. But surely the Greeks are there for
glory, not security. And glory is a transcendent goal, isn’t it? The
Greeks could always have given up that goal and sailed away, if
they wished to spare their bodies. Perhaps Badger would say
glory is possible only, or mainly, for those who “fight in the front
ranks” to ensure bodily security for weaker members of a community (Iliad, 12.310-328). Certainly the Trojan War begins due
to considerations of honor that are ultimately traceable to household integrity and security. Liberalism offers some real protections for the latter while walking everyone back from, or talking
everyone down from, our high dudgeon about the former.
Badger wrestles with Locke’s notion of self-ownership, but
finds firmer grounding in Locke’s Hobbesian right to life, which
he extends to the right to pursue happiness (154). If we cannot
do otherwise than strive for life and pursue happiness, then we
must have natural rights to do both. The right to practice religion
freely follows from the natural right to pursue happiness (155).
Hence transcendence is built in. A regime that sets itself against
this natural right is irrational and will be unstable. Badger concedes that the liberal regime is morally and spiritually empty—
this is its strength. Lockean liberalism must limit itself to the
procedural; it can never make a judgment about what is good.
When it comes to the most intriguing comparison between
Sophocles’s Odysseus and Locke, Badger recurs to his reading
of Locke’s transcendent “I” that owns its “me.” The “I” is the
same for all men, whereas the “me” is “the contents of consciousness,” the embedded, social, cultural, and bodily self (162, 149-
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54). Odysseus, too, unites the two drives on the basis of a recognition of a transcendent self—a self that includes all men (162;
cf. 182). Sometimes this view of the self seems an ethical direction in which liberalism could go, elsewhere it seems constitutive
for liberalism (194, 198).
Perhaps the biggest difficulty with this vision of liberalism is
that proponents of “transcendence” see it as more than just transcendence. They think their own version not only transcends everyone else’s, but is also true. Does not Locke or Odysseus have to
disagree? Could they ever recognize, or could a society built on
their assumptions recognize, the one true transcendence when it
arrives? Or would it, too, have to join the cacophony of competing
visions? The implication that all transcendences are created equal
is unsatisfying. Asserting transcendent values is difficult to do in
a vacuum. A community is required. The erotic and the divine “are
protected and revered to the degree that they do not become public” (167). Could this lockbox not be a kind of slow strangulation,
placing the erotic and the religious in the path to eventual extinction? Religion in the United States indeed flourishes compared to
the established churches of European nations. But individualism
trickles down from the larger society to the smaller communities.
One pressing problem is that, increasingly, the larger society believes it has an interest in and a right to impose congruence between itself and each club or bowling league: the Jaycees have to
accept women members. Badger gives liberals a reason to think
twice about enforcing this congruence, at least through legal channels: many smaller groups within the liberal state have their own
views of the transcendent. Even when their views seem ugly, forcing them into congruence effectually reduces Locke to Bacon, or
reduces liberal democracy to the rational-authoritarian state. One
might add that the new breed of laws that delve too deeply into
what people think (thought-crime) are equally illiberal. Making
hate a crime, as though it added anything to the murder or harm
to body or property intended in its name, interferes with the transcendent side of the polarity.
Badger’s fear is that tragedy may go the way of the gargoyle,
may be relegated to a status no higher than that of a lawn orna-
�REVIEW | LUDWIG
87
ment. To evaluate post-tragic visions that he regards as post-liberal too, Badger closely examines the thought of Karl Jaspers.
The loss of tragedy would ultimately be the loss of humanity. In
the shorter term, tragedy can help our politics both abroad and
domestically. Recognizing the degree to which China or Iran is
Creonic or Antigonean might enable us to reject their alternatives
with less righteous indignation (195). At home, a similar humanity might inform our visions of our own, and the opposite, political party. Badger says little about the market basis of liberalism,
or about the shocking triumph of capitalism over all other economic alternatives. All progressives now espouse market mechanisms even in their recommendations for developing countries.
Since Locke’s notion of property is so all-inclusive, one wonders
whether the drive for transcendence might not also find expression in some forms of acquisition.
Jonathan Badger has opened up a window on Sophocles
through which we can see the tragedies as both deep and relevant.
The book is full of wonderful insights and new ways of viewing
our politics and ourselves.
�
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Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Trentina, Allison
Sachs, Joe
Cornell, John F.
Kalkavage, Peter
Linck, Matthew
Ludwig, Paul
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 57.1 (Fall 2015)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Allison Tretina
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
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Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s
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ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
World Without Time ..............................................................1
Eva Brann
Dwelling in the Land of the Confessions..........................................15
Michael Brogan
“In Want of a Wife”—or a Husband—in Pride and Prejudice.........33
Susan Paalman
“Please, Don’t Eat the Swans”: My Revolution in Romania............56
Louis Petrich
Dante’s Beatrice: Between Idolatry and Iconoclasm........................84
Gabriel Pihas
Poem
THE EXTINCTION of SPECIES...................................................117
Marlene Benjamin
Reviews
Education and the Art of Writing
Book Review of Christopher Bruell’s Aristotle as Teacher:
His Introduction to a Philosophic Science ..............................120
James Carey
Book Review of Eva Brann’s Unwilling: An Inquiry into the Rise
of the Will’s Power and an Attempt to Undo It ............................149
Matthew Linck
��ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
1
World Without Time
Eva Brann
Here is a theory of time. It is neither new to me nor new in the
world. I formulated it for publication in 1999* and had it
formulated for me, so I could make it my own, sixteen hundred
years ago by Augustine in 399 C.E. and some three quarters of a
millennium before that by Aristotle, post-335 B.C.E. There is a
certain advantage in revisiting old thoughts, although they have
become second-nature and have lost the footloose feel of thinking
that is yet on the path to discovery: these long-held notions have
also sloughed off some of their complexity and are more
amenable to summary.
The theory is, first, that time is not a being, a thing, or a
substance in the world, nor does it operate as a power, a force,
or a destiny in our life. It has no external existence, and all speech
attributing reality to it is unwittingly metonymic, meaning that
the word “time” is used by a sort of obtuse poetry for processes
that have better names of their own.
The theory has a second element, namely that it would be a
better world, and we would be better off, if more people thought
that time was unreal and spoke accordingly.
Before closing in on the gist of this theory, I want to
acknowledge an intelligent resistance that a listener might feel
arising within. If you have a notion proposed to you as true and
are immediately told that it is also beneficial, shouldn’t you rear
up and resist as a matter of principle? Don’t we keep ourselves
honest by tinting our glasses grey? Isn’t a truth that comes
Eva Brann is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was delivered at the Symposium on Time held
at Belmont University in Nashville, TN on September 23, 2014.
*Eva Brann, What Then Is Time? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1999.
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
embellished with utility very suspect? Of course it is, because it
might be nothing but a Pollyannaish optimism, a self-pleasing
thoughtless this-is-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds” optimism.
What I’ll be proposing has behind it a sense that demands more
reflection. I call it “ontological optimism.” Ontology is the
account of being. The very notion of Being requires a
complement: Appearance. The true Being of which true
philosophers strive to give an account comes to our attention as
opposed to what only appears or is merely incidental. The two
greatest philosophers of classical antiquity, Plato and Aristotle,
were ontological optimists. They do not in the least think that
everything within this world is always for the best, but they do
think that its sources, be they at work from beyond or within, are
wonderfully good and therefore attractive to our knowledgehungry souls.
I’ve briefly set out a reason for not foreclosing on a proposed
truth because it is beneficial to believe it – although in the later
history of inquiry into the nature of things there will be those who
make pessimism – a sense that things are as bad as possible – the
test of truthfulness, because the way things are is in truth ugly.
To deal with this split in the human sense of the world requires a
lifetime’s conversation. For now, I’ll posit a guarded optimism.
There is a second misgiving that a canny listener might have:
Does every truth want announcing? Shouldn’t prudent people
suppress some parts of what they feel compelled to believe? I’ll
give an example with major consequences. Our Declaration of
Independence claims that “all men are created equal” in respect
to “certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.” Just read Lincoln’s speech on the Dred
Scott Decision (1857) for his sense – a true believer’s sense – of
the vulnerability of the document’s basic assertions, assumptions
that have by now become even more questionable for us. For the
Declaration grounds our equality in a common divine Creation,
and that is no longer a faith to be taken for granted. Is the
questionableness of the ultimate equality of human beings, then,
a proper subject for public inquiry? Not on your life – not in
principle and surely even less in fact. Some topics have to be left
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
alone if we’re to live together. When you hear some of my claims
about time you might wonder if time isn’t such a topic.
Of course, I’m speaking tongue-in-cheek, precisely because
I think that a public reflection on the reality of time might lead
to a revision of some current mantras which seem to me humanly
deleterious, whereas the doctrine of equality seems to me
humanly beneficial. And also, in all candor, because the kind of
ontological reflection I mean to put before you is in fact very
unlikely to be of major consequence to the world – though I share
with all speakers at academic symposia a secret desire to be
dangerous.
So I’ll barge on, telling first what time is not, and then what
it is insofar as it is anything, and finally why an affirmation of
its unreality, of a world without time, is advantageous to life.
First, What time is not: Look into the world and try to detect
time. Our environment is full of time-telling, but the thing told
is never in evidence. David Hume’s consequence-laden
observation was that we never actually see a cause, only a
constant conjunction of events. So also with time: We never
observe it, only changes in space. Time is told either by location
in space or by counting in . . . what? Wouldn’t the natural
completion of that phrase be “counting in time?” That’s circular,
to be sure, though in fundamental thinking circularities are often
revealing, because they display ultimate involvements. In this
case how we catch something bears on what it is.
Second, then, What time is: Basically time-instruments are
in the analogue mode. Timaeus, in the Platonic dialogue named
after him, says that what we call time is “a certain movable image
of eternity . . . an eternal image going according to number” (37d
ff.). Time is an “image of,” or is analogous to, eternity because it
is everlasting and has neither beginning nor end. It is a mere
image because it appears as change, and so it doesn’t achieve the
undifferentiated nowness of eternity; it is movable as traversing
circular distances. Its generating and telling instruments are the
visible heavenly bodies. In other words, the heavens both are and
tell the time of the world; they are both cosmic time that goes on
forever and a heavenly clock that needs no rewinding. The
�4
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
watches most of us wear on our wrists are in turn made in the
heavens’ image; they are analogues of the circular motion of the
sun (as it appears to us) or of the earth (as Copernican theory
persuades us). Whether the time-piece is cosmic or miniscule, it
tells time by an indicator, sometimes a heavenly body, sometimes
“a hand” moving over a portion of a circle’s circumference. So
even a little ladies’ watch is an analogue of the cosmos. There
are also in our day digital time-pieces that involve counting and
will open a can of worms. I will speak of them later. One
difference between analogue and digital clocks comes across in
a preference for the round watchface as expressed by a friend of
mine who said: “I want to know what time it is, but I also like to
see what time it isn’t.” Analogue watches tell time in terms of
the everlasting revolutions of the heavens together with the
conventional divisions of the human day.
Aristotle picks up on the “going” of the image “according to
number” – or so it seems, when we read Book 4 (chaps. 10-14)
of his Physics (which contains his account of time) in
juxtaposition with the Timaeus. Probably he clued it out himself.
In any case, he puts motion together with number to spectacular
effect – the first instance I know of in any writing of time being
effectively undone as a something. He doesn’t say: “I’m first; this
is a conceptual revolution.” He would much rather make his
thinking persuasive by presenting it as a tweaking of thoughtful
predecessors. Yet, in brief, he has discovered that time is
incidental to change. And since he thinks that all change is at
bottom locomotion (chap. 7.7), this means that time is attendant
on motion from place to place. Moreover, this motion is
numerable. For although it is continuous, it is divisible into even
measures at any of the points of the trajectory of a mobile object.
Every motion, of course, implies a moving object which
generates, one might say, a path, whose diagram is an open or
closed orbital trajectory. Then time is the counted collection of
all the measured linear units: 12 (EST), for example, is the
counted number of dial-measures in which the sun reaches high
noon, the zenith of its orbit, from a fixed starting point opposite.
Or 13 (years) is the number of the sun’s yearly circuits on the
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
ecliptic, the day after which a young Jew is said to be a man. For
motion to be thus countable, it needs to have a recognizable
“before and after”: here before, here now, here thereafter. Thus
Aristotle defines time in this way: “Time is the number of motion
with respect to before and after.”
Here, we might think, Aristotle has gotten himself into deep
trouble. “Before and after” are, after all, primarily time-words:
past and future divided by a non-time, a span-less, point-like
“now.” Thus rewritten, “Time is the number of motion counted
according to the progress of time” doesn’t sound very helpful.
But Aristotle has a perfect defense: For him every motion that is
not violently unnatural is a development of potentiality from
implicitness to fulfillment. Therefore every motion – sublunar
ones that begin and end and heavenly motions that never cease –
every single motion has discernible phases even before time is
brought in. So “before and after” can indeed be pre-temporal, as
are the implicit stages of a development.
But there is a more serious stumbling block, and I will make
a gift of my book on time to anyone who removes it for me in
Aristotle’s terms. He emphasizes that time is the counted number,
not the counting number (4.2). So if I say “twelve o’clock high”
I mean the twelve counted path-segments of the sun’s motion,
not my counting thereof. But Aristotle is also quite clear about
the fact that there can be no counted number without a counting
consciousness. (Aristotle, of course, says “soul,” and so should
I, though the word is at present proscribed, and “consciousness”
is de rigueur, I think principally because it is from Latin and has
three syllables and seems less naïve than “soul,” which is from
good Old English and has but one.)
So the counted motion, which is time, requires a counting
soul. Here is the problem: The counting soul does not just beat
with a steady pulse: one, one, one. . . . That’s what the digital
watch does, thereby electronically causing a prescribed series of
numbers to appear on a spatially moving dial. The soul actually
recalls the pulses accumulated. Its numbering is ordinal: first,
second, third. It saves bygone pulses in their order and projects
future ones, and it is present, here now, at each moment of
�6
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
counting. But if it is counted motion that is time, then the
counting soul is pre-temporal. What then is the substrate of its
serially ordered activity? Aristotle, in making time external and
incidental, something that is found in nature only as a mere
measure, has also made human counting an enigma. What name
shall we give the psychic development that directs ordered,
ordinal, counting?
One reason why Aristotle has effectively reduced time to
nothing in itself is that it is in its conceptual structure dramatically
unlike its representational analogue, the linear path, the
visualizable trace, of a mobile object. The time-line segment
before the now, called “the past,” is gone, erased; the future time
path is not yet and invisible; the now is analogous to a point
which has, as Euclid says, no parts and “in” which nothing can
exist. If you cast yourself into time, you’re done for; there is no
time span in which to exist – though plenty of spatial extension
in which to move.
Here’s an interesting addendum to the Aristotelian difficulty.
It is taken up and solved more than two millennia later in his own
terms by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (1787) – not the
enigma of existence, namely, what span time’s “no-longer” and
“not-yet” leave for us to be in – but time’s particular relation to
counting. Recall that Kant thinks that all our experiences, whatever
appears to us in an eventually apprehensible way, already comes
directly formatted temporally and spatially. But this forming frame
is, so to speak, amorphous and beneath awareness. It needs to be
brought together (in Greek, “synthesized”) with thinking, with the
understanding. Kant assigns to the imagination the mysterious
work of joining intuition and understanding, distinctionless time
and a determinating concept. Kant thinks that this latter is the
concept of quantity, and that when intuited time is made
determinate by quantity, counting is the result. The way I put it to
myself is this: Time makes its appearance in consciousness by a
kind of pulsing that is a now-counting: now1, now2, now3 . . . , or
one, two, three. . . . This analysis seems to me true to experience.
Sheer temporal awareness seems to be a kind of pure enumeration
of beats – it may actually be our heart-beat felt as a pulse, the
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
throbbing of our arteries following the pumping of the heart. What
makes a span of time, time lived through, is having laid up that
cardinal count in memory, where it becomes ordinal: first beat,
second beat, third beat. Thus the mere beating turns into a first,
second, third moment of remembered past.
So Kant solves the problem by bringing time totally within
the consciousness of a “subject,” that is, a thinking I. Time is not
soul-numbered motion entering into the world from outside, but
number itself arises as a conceptualizing of intuitional time
within the subject. But then, so does everything within the reach
of our comprehension arise within me, the subject; this
elucidation of time is bought at the price of near-total subjectivity.
Moreover, the deep origin of time as a form of our sensibility,
though in us as subjects, is not for us as knower: The grounds of
the possibility of our experiential knowledge are not within our
experience. Thus one might say that for Kant, too, aboriginal time
is a non-being, not a knowable something – that inferred ghost
which he calls a noumenon.
Third, What time is insofar as it is anything: So I’ll leap back
through the ages to Augustine, who seems to me the greatest
phenomenologist of time, that is, the finest observer of the
internal experience we have of it, and the first analyst of its
elements.
That is not just my opinion. The most comprehensive and
acute work on time in modernity that I know of, Husserl’s On the
Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1893-1917), is
essentially an acknowledged elaboration of Augustine’s own
answer in the Confessions to his famous phrasing of the enigma
of time: “What, then, is time? If nobody asks me, I know; if I
want to explain it to someone who asks, I don’t know” (10.14).
Augustine allows that we all know time as an experience,
sometimes an acutely and deliciously painful one: Here’s
Shakespeare, Augustine’s rival in time-consciousness:
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do till you require.
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu. (Sonnet 57)
Who among us has not spent a world-without-end hour sitting
by the telephone? Who is not acquainted with the swift “time’s up”
of dense experience, short in felt duration, long in remembrance,
or the dragging “are we done yet?” of bored disengagement, endless
as a happening but miniscule in memory? Or the brute standing still
of time in pain? Or the relative pace of experienced time that
Rosalind describes in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I’ll tell
you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal,
who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal.
(3.2, 299-302).
That’s the experience described – but now to the experience
explained. How does it arise? Here is Augustine’s answer, which
I’ll frame as a diagram for you to envision.
Imagine a horizontal line of indefinite length. It represents
all the world’s simultaneous motions, its goings-on, from the
stars’ revolutions to the mosquitos’ dartings. For Augustine, the
Christian, the line must have a beginning, Creation, and an end,
Judgment Day. In God’s omnisciently comprehensive sight it is
all there at once. But human beings experience it as an extension.
Imagine a second vertical line, best drawn orthogonal to the world
line, and moving along with it. The moving point of crossing is
an “origin.” It represents our mind, existing now, in contact with
the world and borne along by its motion. So it is not really a
mathematical point but a living moment in a moving world. Later
writers, beguiled by Aristotle’s analogy of the temporal now to
the spatial point of no extent, will see the need to call it the
“specious present.” But it is not a specious – that is, pretend –
present, at all, but a real psychic event, albeit a mystery.
Where then in this diagram is past and future? The vertical
line represents, as I said, the mind. And the mind has, as Augustine
puts it, distentio – its lengthening, its existence, its longitude, we
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
might say. Diagrammatically, it extends above and below its
origin, its moment of existence, its contact with the world. The
part of the vertical below the moment of existence in the present
world represents a build-up of memory-moments, deeper and
deeper in the soul, lower and lower on the upright.
Next, all the moments of memory are connectible by parallel
oblique lines to the world line that the mind has traversed. If we
imagine the forward motion of world and human being
progressing toward the right, then the world line to the left of the
origin represents motions and events left behind in the past, and
each of our true memories down on the “distention” of mind
connects to, projects on, a receding point to the left part of the
world’s motion line. Of course, scrambled connections (crossed
projections) and false memories (wandering projections) can
occur. That is how we have a past; the past is a stack of nows
now in our distended minds – and all one now in God’s collected
mind.
Likewise with the future: Think of it as all the plans and
expectations, further and further away from the present, rising
upward on the upper half of the mind’s line and projectible by
parallel-oblique lines onto the future motions of the world.
That there is in fact a past, though for us only partially and
only indirectly recoverable and real only in memory, is common
belief; whether there is in fact a real future and how our plans
and expectations bear on it is a great theological problem – in
fact, the problem of free will. But this much Augustine shows
clearly and, I think, truly. He says that we must speak of “a
present of bygones, a present of presences, a presence of future
things” (11.2), and continues: “For some such there are in the
soul, and I do not see them elsewhere. The present of things gone
is memory, the present of things present is sight, the present of
things future is expectation” (11.20, 28). In my words, time is
entirely the effect of memory and expectation. Insofar as time is
anything, it is a so-called epiphenomenon, an idle, ineffective
affect supervening on the real operations of memory and
expectation.
But no – “idle” is an inadequate word for our potent sense of
�10
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
time, which is to be understood as our sense of our mind’s
longitude, its present lengthening into the before and after of the
now of our existence – and of course that fact underwrites,
overwrites, potently affects our life.
So now I can zero in on a sense of time that seems to me both
spurious and deleterious. It is time not as an internal enlargement
of existence but as an external being or force. Continuous time,
thought of as being in the world, may be conceived as a
continuous stream bearing things along, an absolutely primal,
equable flow (of what? we may ask) that is unaffected by
anything else in the world; this is Newton’s absolute time
(Principia [1686], First Scholium). You may even hear it, as
Shakespeare (once again) makes Hamlet speak of one who “only
got the tune of time,” a hum conveying its “most fond and
winnowed opinions” (5.2, 183). You may figure it as a linear,
open-ended, unbounded mere going-on, or as a closed, everrepetitive, bounded cycle. In these metaphors, the laws of motion
apply indifferently whether time is run forwards or backwards.
Or you may imagine the continuous temporal substrate as
directed by a forward arrow, a principle of unidirectional change
or development that prohibits reversal. This sort of time is not,
one might say, “when-neutral”; you might call it change in the
abstract, or the substrate of embodied change. In all these forms,
some sort of quasi-event or pseudo-motion is imagined as
continuous.
The other metaphor, the second figurative way of imagining
time is, on the other hand, continual: The now, the present,
continually divides the stream of time into gone-by and not-yetarrived, into past and future. Thus time breaks into a lost past and
a not-yet-gained future around a continually new-event-now. This
new-now nullifies the past as living; it leaves the passed-away
past, so to speak, set in stone. It is, quixotically, both hard-andfast and intangible: You can’t change it – or so they say. It is
indeed, often literally, set in stone; for instance, epigraphy is the
discipline of deciphering inscriptions, often found on marbles.
Its watchword is saxa loquuntur, “the stones speak.” But does
that really mean you can’t change it?
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For consider that these testimonials are not past, not in the
past. They are in the present, and we must make of them what
we can – or will. This curious circumstance, that the past is real
only in the present, might be thought of as the incarnation of the
memory that Augustine calls “the present of things gone.” You
can see that a thoughtful consideration of the past opens a can of
worms. What is memory, the storage house of time-expired
presences? How invulnerable to change is the memorial past?
What about that secondary, often public, memory that is built up
from present testimonials of past events? What is more
changeable than the past – perhaps even transformable into the
present?
But this can of worms is replaced by a bucket of serpents
when it comes to the future. For who would doubt that except for
a God-inspired prophet, no one can have the future in mind? The
future, by the very meaning we attach to it, cannot provide us
with any testimonials; it hasn’t happened. All we have are our
hopeful or fearful expectations, dim intimations of blessings or
harms to come, and uncertain conjectures, projections of our past
experiences embellished with change-vectors, their rates and
directions of change, and, above all, an impetenetrability made
less or more pliable by our weak or resolute will. The will is the
human force whose very name announces future-directedness,
by means of which we take hold in our minds of the yet-to-be
and try to bring it about in the world to our satisfaction. To be
sure, we may make vivid pictures of the future, but closer
examinations will show that they are, depending on our mood,
imaginary recollections from a golden age, or over-the-top
distortions of present trends. But they are not images of originals
that reside over there in the future – for there’s no there there.
Fourth, and finally: World without time: You can probably
tell from my tone, that my desire to cancel time has much to do
with the damage that can be done to us by the notion of a real
future. Let me now enumerate three elements of a theory that
presents time as unreal in the world, as not thing-like, not forcelike – a theory by now surely exposed as part of a program of
resistance to certain ways of life. Then I will complete my talk
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by fleshing out briefly these refusals to cooperate with “time.”
So then, my three recalcitrances: (a) to the past as passed away,
bygone; (b) to the present as mere passage, transition; (c) to the
future as an imperative power.
(a) Insofar as the past is the span of time behind us, if time is
something real, those spans are really dead, and their relics are
mummies, either to be carefully prepared, with ointments of
honey or baths of vinegar, to live the museum life of the
embalmed departed, or to be discarded upon that notorious
rubbish heap of history as no longer “relevant” to our time, the
present. Thus, for those of a venerating temperament, the past
becomes a silent tomb near which they sit rigidly in worship. For
others, whose dispositions long for change, the past is a spent
force, a deadweight on their innovative energy. To neither party
is the past, if it is anything, the time-proof treasury that houses
all our inheritance of thought and imagination, once human
memory has reluctantly let go of what is too delicate, or
cheerfully chucked out what is too trashy, for prolonged life. But
how the past is properly present to us is a tricky and timely
subject for another day. So much can be said in a sentence:
Unless we want to cut ourselves out of humanity’s will and
remove ourselves as beneficiaries of its estate, we had better give
up thinking of the past as having a date of expiration.
(b) Those who feel the past as a march of obsolescence are
in fact consigning their personal present to mere transition. For
the life-principle of obsolescence is innovation, and innovation
is not the heart-stopping or mind-boggling perpetual newness of
an imagination-arousing work or a truth-revealing theory or a
potent device. Newness is ever-fresh and invulnerable to obsolescence, because it is not a mere time-marker, a mere date-stamp,
on the work of art or on the discovery of an explanation, or on
the invention of a contrivance. Newness is rather inherent to these
wonders insofar as they break into the ordinary course of ongoing life and enhance or redirect it. Time cannot stale its infinite
variety.
Innovation, on the other hand, is systematic, intentional novelty,
willful newness. In the innovative mindset (this is a derogatory
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term: fully alive people don’t have mind-sets), small novel
differences often trump great solid worth. People succumb to the
persuasion that “we live in a time of change,” giving to time an
independent power, as if it were an accelerator that puts life in
overdrive without the need of my foot on the figurative pedal –
a vehicle racing through each present to the next, a car in need
of a factory recall. Otherwise put: People accept that they live in
“a time of . . .” and that it is prudent to “get with it,” to clue out
what this time-tyrant commands and to do it – in our case, to
treat each moment of life as just a bridge to the next novelty. But
there is no such time-potentate. There are only people willing to
go along – not, to be sure, with the non-existent times, but with
what each person thinks the others think, or whither his or her
option-dissipated likes weakly tend. What a humanly actual
present – I am tempted to say, a time-less present – might be,
what, in short, it means actually to exist, is, once again, worth a
long conversation.
(c) So then, finally, the future, the chief and least existent
venue of real time. You all know the vocabulary of futurepossessed people. Some say: “The future is here” – really absurd
speech; if it’s here it’s too late. They might have meant: Be
proactive! Clue out what is coming and preempt or prevent it.
The original meaning of “prevent” was “go before,” as in the
Psalm 18, in which David is fearfully imagining: “The sorrows
of death compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me.”
He means “came before me, confronted, me” (18, 5). In that
sense, the anticipation of the future, in literally “foregoing” it,
also “prevents” it; it forecloses the future. Human beings are
surely entitled, even required, to prevent the future in the sense
that by anticipating their version of it they’ll bring it about or
keep it from happening – as long as they understand that they are
going towards something, an “it,” that is not there to meet them.
How we think about our plans makes a great difference: whether
we justify our intentions as accepting, managing, and yes,
serving, what is coming at us in the false, even craven, belief
that there is a real future; or whether we, believing the Future
(capital F) to be a false reification, a confusion between an
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abstraction and a reality, make ourselves think now, in our
present, about what is best and most desirable and also humanly
possible – and then do that.
And, once again, there is endlessly more to say about the
future. But instead of pursuing it, I will end with this observation:
Being future-recalcitrant is the very opposite of being reactionary,
for the non-existence of the future – or at least our ineradicable
ignorance of it – is the very condition of our practical freedom.
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Dwelling in the Land
of the Confessions
Michael Brogan
It’s surprising that a lover of wisdom should lavish as much attention on the particulars of his own life as Augustine does in the
Confessions. While any number of philosophers before him had
sought to live by the maxim inscribed in Apollo’s temple at Delphi—gnōthi seauton, know thyself—none known to me had
taken this as a directive to reflect on the contingencies of his own
biography, let alone publish his thoughts on such intimate matters
as a vexed relationship with his mother, a childish loathing of
school, a troubled sexual history, or an enduring tendency to
overindulge at the dinner table. In the Phaedo, Plato does have
Socrates recount how he lost his youthful enthusiasm for the
study of nature (96a-100a), but in their exclusive attention to the
evolution of his philosophical orientation, these autobiographical
remarks hardly compare with the astonishingly inclusive narrative of a sinner’s wandering path to God that Augustine gives us
in the Confessions. Socrates, his account of his “second sailing”
notwithstanding, lives out the Delphic command not by brooding
over his individual history or unique identity but by enlisting dialogue partners in a collaborative search for the truth of those experiences potentially shared by us all in virtue of our common
humanity. To oversimplify a bit, he’s interested not so much in
who he is as in what he is, not in this individual man called
Socrates but in what it means to be a human being in general.
Even more pronounced is the contrast between Augustine
and Plotinus, the thinker who perhaps exercised a greater influence on him than any other pagan writer. The Neoplatonist’s disregard for merely individual selfhood is memorably captured in
the testimony of his disciple Porphyry, who writes that “Plotinus,
Michael Brogan is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
This lecture was first delivered on November 22, 2013.
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the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in
the body. So deeply rooted was this feeling that he could never
be induced to tell of his ancestry, his parentage, or his birthplace.”1 No mere quirk of temperament, this reticence is governed by Plotinus’s overriding ambition to identify completely
with the incorporeal intellect in its capacity for timeless contemplation of the divine One. It’s this aspiration that motivates his
refusal to share even the bare facts surrounding his origins as an
embodied self.
For all that he owes to the self-effacing Platonic sage, however, Augustine himself has no qualms about directing his gaze
and ours to the particular circumstances and events of his unique,
unrepeatable, and still-unfolding life. Quite to the contrary, he
writes in the confident hope, reiterated at several key points in the
Confessions, that by reflecting on that life, seeking out the narrative threads that bind it into a unity, he and his readers might be
drawn ever closer to the eternal, divine truth. But how does a lover
of wisdom—one, moreover, as indebted to Neoplatonism as Augustine acknowledges himself to be—arrive at a hope like this
one? How is it that he comes to see his embodied, time-bound existence as no mere image to be forgotten as quickly as possible in
the ascent to its divine original but as something worthy of the
most serious and sustained attention?
Now, one approach to the question immediately comes to
mind. As an orthodox Christian believer, the author of the Confessions fully accepts the doctrine of the Word made flesh. God
himself, on this account, took on all the characteristic features of
human finitude: he was born of a particular woman at a particular
time and place, spoke a particular language, practiced a particular
religion, lived in relationship to particular human others—we
could extend forever this list of “accidents” that individuate the
incarnate beings that we ourselves are and that Christians believe
God in Jesus became. While some of these properties and rela1. Porphyry, “On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His
Work,” in Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (New York:
Penguin, 1991), cii.
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tionships are undoubtedly less important than others, who are we
to scorn the whole lot of them if God himself has deigned to take
them on? Who are we to be “ashamed of being in the body” if the
Creator of all things, of corporeal substances no less than of the
spiritual, saw nothing shameful in becoming incarnate? If the humanity of Jesus Christ, indeed his very flesh and blood, is indispensable to our salvation, shouldn’t we at least have second
thoughts about renouncing our own humanity, or attempting to locate it exclusively in a disembodied intellect that manages to shed
the burdens of finitude?
But of course these are very big “ifs”— too big, I think, for a
community like ours whose conversation appeals to no higher authority than natural reason. While Augustine believes he can find
in the writings of the Neoplatonists themselves the doctrine of the
Word that was with God and that was God, not even he claims to
apprehend the incarnation of that Word on any basis other than
faith. My ambition tonight is to see how far we can go toward
making sense of the intensely personal approach of the Confessions without appealing to postulates drawn from sacred doctrine.
While I suspect that Augustine’s unprecedented way of applying
the Delphic maxim becomes fully intelligible only against the
background of his specifically Christian commitments, we might
nevertheless begin to understand the peculiar strategy he employs
in the Confessions by considering the deficiencies that come to
light there of a philosophy conducted in a wholly impersonal key.
However dazzling a glimpse it may afford of the eternal truth,
Neoplatonic introspection, we shall see, fails to open out onto
what Augustine calls “the way that leads not only to beholding
our blessed fatherland but also to dwelling therein” (7.20.26).2
PART I
Before examining their limitations, however, I want to begin by
briefly considering why the “books of the Platonists” (7.9.13)
2. All Augustine quotations are from The Confessions of St. Augustine,
trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Doubleday, 1960).
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were attractive to Augustine in the first place. His study of them
comes directly on the heels of his disillusionment with the
Manicheism he had been espousing for the better part of a
decade. Disheartened by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy
he has found even among the elite members of that sect, he has
also come to reject their sharply dualistic vision of good and evil
as coeternal principles locked in cosmic combat. Such a view, he
concludes, is irreconcilable with his dawning certainty that God
must be beyond all change, corruption, or violation. Nothing can
harm a divinity worthy of the name, and this means that God
could have no compelling reason to engage in battle with eternal
forces of darkness. In fact, such forces are no more than the figments of an overheated mythic imagination: for together with
being immutable, God is by nature infinite; it makes no sense,
therefore, to posit a reality that would constrain in any way his
power to implement his perfectly good will.
With his Manichean convictions thus in tatters, Augustine
finds himself not so much freed as unmoored, drifting toward a
radical skepticism that, for all its philosophical plausibility, can’t
possibly quiet the clamor of his restless heart. It is in this state
that he becomes newly open to the possibility of reconciling with
the Catholic Christianity in which his mother attempted to raise
him, an orthodox faith which, largely due to Bishop Ambrose’s
brilliant preaching on the allegorical sense of the Old Testament,
he has ceased to disdain as the bastion of simple-minded literalism. He realizes, for example, that our being in God’s image need
not entail that he be confined to a body like ours, as the Manichees
had mocked the Catholics for allegedly believing. At this stage,
however, Augustine finds he can do no better than replace such
anthropomorphism with a less crude but no less materialist notion
of God, now imagined as a subtle body extended throughout infinite space, permeating and exceeding a created world conceived
on the analogy of a sponge submerged in a vast sea (7.5.7). To
think in this way, he realizes, commits him to the absurd view
that an elephant, for example, must contain more of the divine
presence than a sparrow, yet he remains frustratingly unable to
understand God or anything else in nonmaterial terms. He writes:
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“Whatever was not extended over, or diffused throughout, or
compacted into, or projected up to definite measures of space, or
did not or could not receive something of this kind, I thought to
be completely non-existent” (7.1.2).
It’s this crucial error that the books of the Platonists enable
him to overcome, not simply by introducing him to an impressive
theory of incorporeal being but by showing him a path leading
to nothing less than a direct experience of the purely spiritual,
first within his own soul and ultimately in the divine being itself.
Taught to shun the external and direct his gaze inward, he eventually catches sight of what he calls the “unchangeable light”
above the mind. After ascending beyond bodies and the power
to perceive them and onto the soul’s rational faculty of judgment,
he says that in realizing its own mutability, this reasoning power
raised itself up to its own understanding. It removed its
thought from the tyranny of habit, and withdrew itself
from the throngs of contradictory phantasms. In this way
it might find that light by which it was sprinkled, when
it cried out, that beyond all doubt the immutable must be
preferred to the mutable. Hence it might come to know
this immutable being, for unless it could know it in some
way, it could no wise have set it with certainty above the
mutable. Thus in a flash of its trembling sight it came to
that which is. Then indeed I clearly saw your “invisible
things, understood by the things which are made” (7.17.23).
Many of you will no doubt recognize the final sentence here
as a citation from Paul’s Letter to the Romans (1:20). By quoting
Scripture, however, Augustine does not mean to imply any essential difference between the experience he is recounting and
the one described by Plotinus and his disciples. As in the writings
of those philosophers, the inward turn of Confessions 7 corresponds to a movement away from absorbed attention to the particularities of the material world and toward the timeless,
intellectual contemplation of the “unchangeable light” at the
source of all finite things. That eternal light is one and the same
for Plotinus as for Paul, for Augustine as for you or me. If our
highest good is indeed to gaze upon it, it’s understandable that a
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thinker like Plotinus would regard attending to those things that
differentiate us individuals, the temporal accidents of birth and
biography, as at best a distraction from our true calling. In the famous treatise known as “On Beauty,” Plotinus insists that what
we ought to be doing is chipping away like sculptors at everything exterior to the eternal light within us. “Do you see yourself,
abiding within yourself, in pure solitude?” he asks.
Does nothing now remain to shatter that interior unity, nor
anything external cling to your authentic self? Are you entirely that sole true light which is not contained by space,
not confined to any circumscribed form . . . ? Do you see
yourself in this state? Then you have become vision itself.
Be of good heart. Remaining here you have ascended aloft.
You need a guide no longer. Strain and see.3
But what if “straining” isn’t enough? What if “remaining
here” proves too difficult? For all the serene confidence that
marks Plotinus’s writings, even he and his disciples sometimes
seem to acknowledge the impossibility of simply willing the soul
to arrive at and persist in its transcendent vision. Porphyry, for
instance, claims to have had the experience just once, in his sixtyeighth year,4 and while Plotinus says that for him “it has happened often,”5 he also characterizes it as something that comes
“suddenly” (exaiphnēs)6 upon a soul that is all too quickly sent
back down into the comparative dullness of mere discursive reason.7 Now, I suppose it’s possible (thought personally I doubt it)
that if Augustine had experienced nothing worse than this inevitable slide from nous to dianoia, from pure contemplating to
the difficult labor of thinking things through, and if, moreover,
he had found some way to reconcile the suddenness of the introspective vision with Plotinus’s confidence in the sufficiency of
3. Enneads 1.6.9, in The Essential Plotinus, trans. Elmer O’Brien (Indianapolis: Hackett , 1964 ), 43-44.
4. Porphyry, “On the Life of Plotinus,” cxxii.
5. Enneads 4.8.1.
6. Enneads 6.7.34.
7. Enneads 4.8.6.
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effort (“straining”) to bring it about, he just might have remained
content with what the books of the Platonists were able teach
him. But as he recounts in such compelling detail in the Confessions, his rapturous and reassuring vision of the unchangeable
light is followed almost immediately by a plunge back into currents of temptation that prove to be just as irresistible as they had
been before. No transformation of his life ensues, no conversion
or reorientation of his misbegotten aims and ambitions follows
upon the ecstatic experience that liberates his mind. “I was borne
up to you by your beauty,” he confesses, “but soon I was borne
down from you by my own weight, and with groaning, I plunged
into the midst of lower things” (7.17.23). In other words, the
tyranny of habit reasserts itself immediately, and he succumbs to
old patterns of feeling and acting despite seeing them more
clearly than ever as obstacles in the way of his deepest desire.
The good he approves unreservedly in his mind he fails to pursue
with an undivided heart; unable to do what he wants, he does the
very things he hates.
How depressing! Wouldn’t we like to think that even a pale
approximation of a vision like the one Augustine reports would
have a profound effect on the way we live our lives? Wouldn’t it
be easy to love the truth and to do it if we were only certain what
the truth was? But this is just the sort of comforting illusion that
Augustine indulged in until his ecstatic vision deprived him of
what he calls “that former excuse, in which I used to look upon
myself as unable to despise the world and to serve you because
knowledge of the truth was still uncertain to me” (8.5.11). Now,
approaching thirty years of age, he has attained the certainty he’s
long been seeking, and yet he discovers that he is just as enthralled
to his old, enervating habits as he ever was. Able to see the truth,
he still cannot draw near enough to bask in its radiance.
If we are at all persuaded of the authenticity of his testimony—influenced, perhaps, by an uncomfortable awareness of
our own failures to translate insight into action, to do the truth
we know—we have reason to wonder whether any mere vision,
however dazzling, can set us on the sure path to the good. Understanding alone is perhaps not enough to overturn long-settled
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habits of self-indulgence, indolence, and despair, no matter how
irrefutable the evidence becomes that these are precisely what
keeps us from the happiness we seek. To use one of Augustine’s
favorite images, it’s as if we can become enchained to ways of
life we know to be toxic to our souls. He writes:
For in truth lust is made out of a perverse will, and when
lust is served, it becomes habit, and when habit is not
resisted, it becomes necessity. By such links, joined one
to another, as it were—for this reason I have called it a
chain—a harsh bondage held me fast. A new will, which
had begun within me, to wish freely to worship you and
find joy in you, O God, the sole sure delight, was not
yet able to overcome that prior will, grown strong with
age (8.5.10).
Now, we call “habits” those dispositions to feeling and action
that come to be in us as a result of repetition. What we do habitually we do not because nature compels us or reason convinces
us but simply because we have done likewise in similar situations
time and again in the past. Here’s a trivial example. I’m in the
habit of drinking a cup of coffee first thing every morning. I don’t
remember making a deliberate choice to start doing this, but if
ever I did, it must have been a long time ago: at this point in my
life, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that deliberate choice
of any kind becomes possible for me only after I’ve had that first
cup. I suppose if I were to summon my inner resources I could
manage to break a chain now thousands of links long by choosing
to have tea tomorrow instead. After all, it’s not my nature that
determines me to drink coffee, as it is, say, the stone’s nature that
causes it to fall or the fire’s that makes it rise, but merely my
long-settled habit—a practice become second nature, so to speak.
But might there be situations in which this is a distinction
without any practical difference, occasions when second nature
constrains no less than first and habit takes on the character of
compulsion? For Augustine there were, and we need not have
suffered from any of the conventionally recognized “addictions,”
I think, to identify with his experience of habit as an iron chain
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holding him back from goods he has to come to perceive with
incontestable clarity.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle observes that, unlike
those powers that are in us by nature (e.g., sense perception), the
potencies for which precede our exercise of them, the virtues of
character are like physical or technical abilities in that they come
to be in us only after we have been engaged in the activities associated with them (1103a25f). We become capable of courage,
for example, only by repeatedly doing courageous things, meaning those things the already courageous person does, just as we
become harpists by repeatedly practicing the harp under the tutelage of an accomplished player. As we grow more accustomed
to being at work in them, these activities become easier for us,
more pleasant, we could even say, more “natural” to us.
Unfortunately, though, this is at least as true, and probably
more so, of bad actions as it is of good: as Augustine knew all
too well, a past defined by repeated indulgence in any kind of
excess or deficiency can make a future characterized by strength
of will or self-control, let alone full-fledged virtue, appear entirely out of reach. How I conduct myself today seems largely
determined by what I did yesterday, even when the memory of
this recent past fills me with shame and regret over having acted
otherwise than I knew I should.
I want to turn now to Augustine’s analysis of time to see what
light it might shed on this indebtedness or even enslavement of
the present to the past, and also on the shape that a rehabilitated
future might ultimately take. My hope is that doing this will bring
us a step closer to our goal of understanding the significance of
Augustine’s autobiographical turn in the Confessions.
PART II
Though it would take all night (at least) to do justice to his fascinating and intricate meditation, the basic paradox of time Augustine identifies in Book 11 can be expressed in a few words. It
seems, he observes, that the present is the only time that actually
exists, since whatever the future is, it is not yet, and the past is
no longer. Upon scrutiny, however, the present itself turns out to
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look like nothing more than an extension-less boundary between
those two nonentities, the past and the future. “It flies with such
speed from the future into the past,” Augustine says, “that it cannot
be extended by even a trifling amount” (11.15.20). Hemmed in as
it is on both sides by nonbeing, the reality of the duration-less present itself falls under serious suspicion. Here is Augustine again:
[I]f the present were always present, and would not
pass into the past, it would no longer be time, but eternity. Therefore, if the present, so as to be time, must
be so constituted that it passes into the past, how can
we say that it is, since the cause of its being is the fact
that it will cease to be? (1.14.17, emphasis added.)
Thus it appears that neither the future, nor the past, nor even,
now, the present has a sure hold on being: future and past are not,
and the present is only in so far as it ceases to be. But Augustine
is unwilling to conclude from this that time is mere illusion.
Should we decide that it exists only in a secondary or derivative
sense—a kind of moving image of eternity, as the Timaeus has
it—it nevertheless remains too fundamental to our lived experience, and our ways of talking about that experience, simply to
deny its reality altogether. The task is to try to understand what
time is, if not in itself then at least as it is for us. What we can
say for sure, Augustine thinks, is that the past and future depend
for their being on the present; they “do not exist except as present
things” (11.18.23), he says. It seems no less true, however, that
the present itself cannot be apart from the past and the future, for
what else could provide the present the “space” it needs to extend
beyond the length-less and breadth-less instant that exists, if it
exists at all, only by rushing headlong into non-being?
Characteristically, Augustine looks within himself for a way
beyond the impasse. It’s there, in the soul or the mind, that future
and past things acquire a kind of presence (and therefore being),
as correlates of the mind’s acts of expectation and memory, respectively. It’s also there that present things achieve stability by
being held in attention, an act of the mind that articulates itself
beyond the point-like instant by looking back to a beginning and
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forward to an anticipated end. Whereas on initial reflection time
had seemed to vanish into the nothingness of a not-yet-existent
future, a no-longer-existent past, and a perpetually self-destructing
present, its claim to at least relative being can now be redeemed
so long as we’re willing to pay the price of acknowledging its dependence on the mind’s own activity. The three times, Augustine
says, “are in the soul . . . the present of things past is in memory;
the present of things present is in intuition; the present of things
future is in expectation” (11.20.26). Taken as a whole, time can
thus be described as a “distention of the mind” (distentio animi)
(11.26.33), a stretching or swelling of present consciousness
backward into a remembered past and forward into an anticipated future.
While it’s certainly possible to distinguish memory, expectation, and intuition or attention as three separate acts of the mind,
Augustine’s analysis makes clear that to do this would be to engage in a kind of abstraction. For in our lived experience of
things, memory, expectation, and attention form a single, continuous whole. The mind, he says, “looks forward, it considers, it
remembers, so the reality to which it looks forward passes
through what it considers into what it remembers” (11.28.37). To
illustrate this dynamic, he reflects on the experience of reciting
a psalm he knows by heart. Once he’s formed the intention to recite and is about to carry it out, the psalm, or rather, his recitation
of it, is one of the “things future,” which is to say, it exists for
the mind in the mode of expectation. The ray of consciousness is
pointed forward, so to speak, casting its light over the whole
psalm as something to be brought out into the open as an audible
presence. As the recitation proceeds, the stock of expectation decreases in proportion to memory’s increase, until, having reached
his proposed end, the speaker falls silent and the psalm in its entirety exists by way of its resonance in the recollecting minds of
its hearers.
What happens between the beginning and the end of this
process, namely, the ongoing transferal of expectation’s funds
into the account of memory, corresponds to present time in its
more expansive, non-instantaneous conception. The act of the
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mind responsible for this making present Augustine variously
calls “intuition” (contuitus), “attention” (attentio), and “intention” (intentio). Present consciousness, we come to understand,
doesn’t just passively register a now that arises only to perish (or,
more accurately, arises only by perishing); on the contrary, the
attending or, better, the intending mind plays an active part in the
unfolding of temporal events, as both Augustine’s heavy reliance
on words with tendo—stretch out—at their root, as well as his
pregnant choice of the recitation example powerfully suggest.
About that recitation, Augustine writes:
The life of this action of mine is distended into memory
by reason of the part I have spoken and into forethought
(expectatio) by reason of the part I am about to speak. But
attention (attentio) is actually present and that which was
to be is borne along by it so as to become past (11.28.37,
emphasis added).
It’s worth hearing that again: what was to be is “borne along”
by attention into the past. The Latin verb here is traicitur, a passive
form of traicio, which could also be rendered as “transports” or “conveys.” It combines the preposition trans—“across” or “along”—with
the root verb iacio, meaning “throw,” so we might think of attention as the act of throwing an expected future into a recalled past.
The sense of this would be to emphasize how time for Augustine
is not merely something that we suffer but is also, perhaps even
primarily, something that we ourselves do. It’s hard to know how
to say this: the mind constitutes, enacts, unfolds, or perhaps lives
time, in the transitive sense of an expression like “living one’s
life.” But whatever verb we finally settle on, the crucial thing to
grasp is that the soul itself makes an indispensable contribution
to the experience or even the very being of time in shouldering
an expected future and bearing it along into a recalled past.
If the full significance of this activity does not come entirely
to light in Augustine’s psalm example, what he says toward the
end of Book 11 leaves no doubt about the ultimately moral horizon of his analysis. After describing the temporal process by
which the action of reciting the psalm reaches completion, he as-
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serts that “[t]he same thing holds for a man’s entire life, the parts
of which are all the man’s actions” (11.28.38). (In fact, the scope
can be widened even further to take in all of history, the “whole
age of the sons of men,” though I’ll keep our focus for now on
the life of the individual.) Just as I look ahead in expectation to
the psalm I am about to recite, so too do I project a practical or
moral future for myself, setting about in the present on the task
of converting into a happy memory what is now only an aspiration to act in accordance with my conception of the good. In this
way, “that which was to be is borne along” into the past.
Of course, there are many ways for our moral intentions to
misfire. However completely he comes to rely on God’s grace,
Augustine remains sensitive to the constant vigilance, the intense daily effort required of him if he is to fulfill his divinely
reordered aims. Readers of Book 10 of the Confessions know
that his baptism did not render him immune to the temptation of
taking it easy, of allowing himself to be swept up by the rushing
current of the merely instantaneous now instead of rising to the
challenge of actively living time, that is, of anticipating a virtuous future and then undertaking the arduous task of carrying it
through the present and into the past. “I am a burden to myself”
(10.28.39), he writes, vividly evoking his sense of this labor, the
obligation imposed on us imperfect, temporal creatures not to
while away the time but to strive, with God’s help, to close the
gap between what we are now and what we are called to be.
The difficulty of that task, as our discussion of habit has prepared us to see, seems to be directly proportional to the distance
separating what we will to become from what we have already
been. In other words, the more radically the future we project
for ourselves departs from the past we recall, the harder it is to
bear that future successfully into the present. In the hopes of
deepening our understanding of this phenomenon, let’s return
once more to Augustine’s recitation example. Forming the intention to say the whole psalm from beginning to end involves
calling it up to the forefront of his mind from out of what in
Book 10 he had called “the great cave of memory” (10.8.13).
Only because he has already learned it by heart at some point in
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the past can he now look forward to reciting it in the present.
And this suggests, if the example is as paradigmatic of all temporal experience as I believe Augustine means it to be, that anticipation is itself grounded in recollection, in other words, that
the projected future “borne along” by a present intention is first
assembled by the soul from materials drawn from its past. Augustine makes the point more explicitly in Book 10. Within the
memory, he says,
I encounter myself and recall myself, and what, and
when, and where I did some deed, and how I was affected when I did it. There are all those things which I
remember either as experienced by me or as taken on
trust from others. From that same abundant stock, also,
I combine one and another of the likenesses of things,
whether things actually known by experience or those
believed in from those I have experienced, with things
past, and from them I meditate upon future actions,
events, and hopes, and all these again as though they
were actually present. “I will do this or that,” I say to
myself within that vast recess of my mind, filled with
images, so many and so great, and this deed or that then
follows (10.8.14, emphasis added).
What this passage allows us to see, I think, is that temporal
life, or the activity of living time, is marked by a kind of circularity. In proposing a course of action to myself, I cannot but
rely upon the “abundant stock” of past experiences, either my
own or those attested by others and found credible to the extent
that they are consistent with my own. In other words, before the
anticipated future can be borne along into the remembered past,
the past must first be launched forward into the future as the indispensable material out of which the soul shapes its expectation. Now, this is not to say that in acting in the world we only
ever repeat ourselves, or that the wheel of lived time rotates
around a fixed point. Augustine mentions here that as he deliberates he “combine[s] . . . the likenesses of things” drawn up
from memory, thereby suggesting that the soul enjoys at least
some degree of creative freedom in its activity of conceiving for
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itself a future as something other than an exact replica of its past.
But it’s still no use pretending that a path of total novelty is ever
open to us; the future is inescapably indebted to the past, expectation inevitably takes its stand on the ground of memory.
It’s not hard to grasp that this poses a grave threat to the possibility of the deep and abiding transformation the young Augustine came to recognize as his only hope for happiness. For if
my memory teems with images of a life fundamentally inimical
to the good; if the virtuous examples of others seem too remote
from my experience to be plausible or even attractive models
for me; and if the claims of the philosophers to offer an escape
from time and all its woes have proved too good to be true, then
my desire for the happy life, no matter how firmly rooted in a
clear vision of its reality and goodness, seems fated to go unfulfilled. In their essentially timeless character, transcendent moments of insight, like those Augustine attains by way of
Neoplatonic introspection, are essentially cut off from memory
and expectation, mere interruptions of the circuit of lived temporality. As such, they remain no more than isolated points of
light, like individual stars in a vast night sky—beautiful, to be
sure, but virtually powerless to illuminate the ground beneath
our feet as we stumble along in search of the way that leads not
only to beholding but to dwelling in the land of our desire
(7.20.26; 7.21.27).
Augustine opens a window onto the potentially ruinous dependence of expectation on memory in recounting a conversation he had with himself a few years before his final decision to
seek baptism. Approaching the age of thirty, he looks back with
chagrin at all the time that has passed since his teenage reading
of Cicero’s Hortensius first set him on fire with the love of wisdom. The bitter anxieties and disappointments of those dozen
years have left him more convinced than ever of the futility of a
life given over to worldly ambition. His disillusionment with the
rationalist pretensions of the Manichees and his deepening admiration for the philosophically sophisticated preaching of Ambrose have inclined him, as he puts it, to “fix my feet on that
step where my parents placed me as a child” (6.11.18). He’s
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going to do it, he really means it this time, he’s going to put away
what he calls his “vain and empty concerns” by committing himself fully once and for all to the Catholic Church. Just not yet.
“[T]ime passed,” he says,
and still I delayed to be converted to the Lord . . . I loved
the happy life, but I feared to find it in your abode, and I
fled from it, even as I sought it. I thought that I would be
too wretched, if I were kept from a woman’s arms. I did
not believe that the cure for this disease lay in your
mercy, for I had had no experience with that cure. I believed that continence lay within a man’s own powers,
and such powers I was not conscious of within myself
(6.11.20).
Notice what’s holding him back. Though he has long suspected that the cares imposed by married life are for him incompatible with the spiritual freedom he desperately desires, he also
knows himself well enough to realize that he lacks the strength
to live without the comforts afforded by sexual intimacy. In the
terms of his metaphor, he suffers from a “disease” whose symptoms he knows how to treat but whose cure, he has learned, lies
completely outside his own power to effect. Whether or not we
think it makes sense to diagnose as an illness his inability to commit to celibacy, with a little imagination most of us will be able
relate to Augustine’s predicament here. He knows exactly what
it would take for him to be happy, but bitter experience has convinced him that he’s just not up to the task. Nothing he finds in
the spacious caverns of his memory allows him to envision for
himself a life of genuine health, and without the means to palliate
the symptoms of his disease, he fears that taking up residence in
“God’s abode” would serve only to increase his misery. Thus he
shrinks back from the decisive step, without, however, being able
to resign himself to a future as fatalistically determined by the
past as his own seems certain to be.
Perhaps there is little we can reasonably say about the causes
of Augustine’s ultimate escape from this desperate situation, at
least if we want to keep open the possibility that it was indeed
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God’s grace that finally set him free. I think we can conclude,
though, that whatever it was that finally lifted the terrible burden
from his soul in that Milan garden, the experience he describes
as “a peaceful light streaming into my heart” (8.12.29) would
have been every bit as isolated and ineffectual as his Plotinian
visions of the eternal truth turned out to be had it not become
possible for him to discern the underlying continuity of his past
life of unhappy wandering with the baptized future he was finally
empowered to project for himself. For as his analysis of time has
shown us, to the extent that the present remains divorced from
the past that precedes it, it cannot but have the character of the
instant that is only by ceasing to be, the point-like now that suddenly—exaiphnēs—emerges out of nothingness only to vanish
again just as suddenly. From such an instant, however charged
with divine presence it might be, nothing of lasting, practical significance is likely to follow—nothing more consequential, at any
rate, than the sort of wistful memory and infinite, impotent yearning that threatened to consume Augustine in the wake of his disappointing experiments in Neoplatonic ascent.
In concluding, then, I want to suggest that Augustine’s passionately personal reflection on the events leading up to his final
conversion is intended to recall and thereby reinforce the vital
links between the future opened up to him on that momentous
day in Milan and even the darkest periods of his youthful estrangement from himself and from his God. Though his conversion undoubtedly marks a new beginning, even a kind of rebirth,
it succeeds in doing what impersonal introspection had failed to
do because Augustine is enabled to see it as the culmination of a
process that had begun in him long before. The call he finally answers in deciding to seek baptism is the very same call that had
never ceased resounding in his heart, even when he was desperately trying to drown it out in the frantic pursuit of sensual pleasure, emotional and intellectual titillation, and worldly success. In
looking back on his past, he comes to see that in the anxiety, disappointment, and doubt that marred his life of secular striving,
God himself had been calling him home:
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You were always present to aid me, merciful in your
anger, and charging with the greatest bitterness and disgust all my unlawful pleasures, so that I might seek after
pleasure that was free from disgust, to the end that, when
I could find it, it would be in none but you, Lord, in none
but you. For you fashion sorrow into a lesson to us. You
smite so that you may heal. You slay us, so that we may
not die apart from you (2.2.4).
Augustine meditates on his past in the Confessions to learn
again this lesson of sorrow, which is also, paradoxically, a lesson
of great hope. From out of the caves of his memory he no longer
draws up the despair-inducing confirmation of his own weakness
that had paralyzed him as a young man, but the liberating assurance that God had always been with him, even in the depths of
his sin. Recollections of events in which that divine presence now
seems unmistakable nourish his expectations of future assistance,
giving him the strength to stand firm against present temptation
in the confidence that his conversion will turn out to have been
the decisive event of his life, and not a mere prelude to another
aborted attempt or humiliating failure to change his ways.
But as his unsparing assessment of his present condition
vividly demonstrates, he knows that nothing is guaranteed. To be
sure, conversion to the truth for him comes as a gift, but that
gift—perhaps like all gifts—is profoundly difficult for a creature
with a long history of proud self-assertion to receive. Ever present
is the temptation to refuse or return it in the fatal conviction, born
of pride and despair, that there is no genuine good beyond what
we can obtain for ourselves. The books of the Platonists did nothing to disabuse Augustine of this error. “Strain and see,” they told
him, at once puffing him up by preaching the sufficiency of effort, and casting him down by showing him no more than the way
to behold the blessed country when his heart’s desire was to dwell
therein. The way beyond beholding is a way of humility, and Augustine’s searingly honest examination of his life is his attempt
to walk it.
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“In Want of a Wife”—or a Husband—
in Pride and Prejudice
Susan Paalman
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” (51) This
witty opening sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is
justly well known. The high minded tone of “a truth universally
acknowledged” at the beginning sets up the reader for the prosaic
punchline “must be in want of a wife.” The wit lies in the author’s
tacit acceptance of the universality of human self interest and the
power of that interest to skew what people see to fit their own
desires. People take an interest in another person’s fortune, the
implication seems to be, and in trying to get a piece of it for themselves, in this case through marriage. But rather than acknowledging openly this universal desire for wealth, the world seems
determined to reinterpret its own greed as the fulfilling of the rich
man’s need. The single man of fortune thus becomes the putative
prey for some unmarried woman and her family under the guise
of supplying him with that which he lacks: a wife.
The general implications of the opening sentence are made
particular in the rest of chapter one, which introduces us to Mr.
and Mrs. Bennet. The business of Mrs. Bennet’s life, we are told,
is to get her five daughters married. (7) She is unrelentingly determined in this goal, in large part, as we later learn, because her
daughters will inherit very little from their father, due to an entailed will. As the Bennets discuss Mr. Bingley, newly arrived in
the neighborhood and the “single man” in question, it becomes
clear that Mrs. Bennet cares little for whether Mr. Bingley feels
Susan Paalman is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
This lecture was first delivered on 17 April 2015.
1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations and page numbers are taken from
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Penguin Books, 1996).
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he lacks a wife, and cares much about securing him and his fortune for one of her daughters. She is not the only mother to partake in this type of self interested plotting. We are told that she
and the other mothers in the neighborhood consider Bingley the
“rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.” (5)
Bingley, single and possessing a fortune, is seen as someone
else’s property himself, as the means to the end of worldly prosperity for some daughter or other. Bingley’s money is to be in
large part the source of happiness for the prospective wife.
Witty as the first sentence of the novel is, there is another way
to read it. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man
in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” (5) If
we take this sentence at face value, it says that everyone understands that the single man’s life is incomplete, that once he has
met his material needs, he must then be looking to meet some
other kind of need, one that can only be filled by a wife. What
sort of a need this might be is left unsaid. In fact, from one perspective, the rest of the novel is an exploration of what the individual lacks, and what each character is looking for in a mate.
We are offered a parade of couples throughout the novel, each
couple having a different basis for formation. They fare better or
worse depending on the wisdom and affections of the people involved.
Both the witty and the direct reading of the opening sentence
fit with the tone of the novel as a whole. On the one hand, Austen
relishes exposing the small-minded follies that often underlie our
lofty aspirations. The humor and economy of word that begin the
novel reappear on every page, often highlighting the ways in
which characters deceive themselves or try to pretend they are
better than they are. On the other hand, Austen gives us some
deeply moving scenes, from Elizabeth’s horrified response to the
knowledge that she has misjudged Darcy and Wickham both, to
Mr. Bennet’s heartfelt plea to Elizabeth not to repeat his own mistake in marrying without esteem, to Darcy’s pure delight when
Elizabeth finally accepts him. The wit and the seriousness succeed one another effortlessly. Perhaps, addressing the question
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of what the individual lacks and what one may desire or need
from a marriage requires both attitudes: both the skewering of
the conceits and follies of human nature and the sincere acknowledgment of our best instincts and our need for one another.
In the main couple of the story, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr.
Bingley’s friend, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Austen depicts characters
who come to know their own weaknesses and find strength
through each other. They endure misunderstanding, miscommunication, and doubt, before finally marrying at the end of the
novel. We are meant to believe that their marriage will be one of
lasting happiness; one in which the needs of each are met, and
met well. Furthermore, we are meant to take joy and pleasure in
the reading of Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s story. But before examining Elizabeth and Darcy any further, let’s take a quick inventory
of some of the other couples in the novel.
The Bennets
Our first view of marriage comes from the Bennets, parents to
Elizabeth Bennet as well as four other girls, including Jane, Elizabeth’s older sister and confidante. The Bennets came to be married, we are told, because of Mr. Bennet’s love of Mrs. Bennet’s
beauty. His desire to live in the presence of physical beauty was
of the first importance to him, and he made the error as a young
man of assuming that her beauty came with a good nature and a
good temper. He was sadly mistaken. Once he realized his mistake, “all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown.”
(198) He was left in a marriage with a foolish and irritable
woman he could not respect, and she was left with a man who
does not love her. Unlike many, Mr. Bennet is wise enough to
avoid the many vices available to unhappy people, but takes
pleasure in his books, in the countryside, and, as depicted in
many scenes in the novel, by teasing his wife almost without
mercy. The more amusement he derives from her gullibility and
lack of understanding, the sillier she gets, until he eventually
grows tired of the game and retreats to his study. The reader too
is amused by their interactions; Austen writes their dialogue with
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a fine ear for the drily comic. As the novel progresses, though, it
becomes clear that there is something perverse about the pleasure
Mr. Bennet takes in his wife’s weakness of mind, and something
frustrating about Mrs. Bennet’s complete inability to understand
him. As a couple, they bring out the worst in each other. Still,
they have five daughters whom both seem to care for. The Bennets have at least found themselves in a stable home with a family, something neither could have produced alone.
The Collinses
The first new marriage in the novel comes after Elizabeth’s closest friend, Charlotte Lucas, becomes engaged to Elizabeth’s
cousin, Mr. Collins, within three days of his having proposed
marriage to, and been rejected by, Elizabeth herself. Elizabeth’s
shock when she learns of Charlotte’s engagement is only exceeded by her dismay at the match. Mr. Collins is a man of the
cloth with a vicarage that is supported by a weathy noble woman,
Lady Catherine. In some ways, he would be considered a very
eligible man. Elizabeth’s rejection of him is based on his character, which is not vicious, but is marked by self serving foolishness. Mr. Collins is “not a sensible man,” (60) we are told, but a
“mixture of pride and obsequiousness, self importance and humility.” (61) Austen plays up his character, detailing a number of
long, pompous, and silly speeches he makes on various occasions, including during his unsuccessful proposal to Elizabeth.
After suffering through and laughing at Mr. Collins and his
speeches, the reader is tempted to agree with Elizabeth that for
Charlotte to link herself to such a man is disgraceful. Elizabeth
is convinced that Charlotte will not be happy in the marriage.
(109) Charlotte, though, sees it differently. She desires “only a
comfortable home,” (108) she says to Elizabeth. Charlotte is
older and less attractive than Elizabeth; her options for a decent
life are limited, she believes. Marriage is the “only honorable
provision for well educated women of small fortune,” and Charlotte sees it as the “pleasantest preservation from want.” (106)
Mr. Collins, as painfully foolish as he is, will give her sustenance
and power in the world, as a man of consequence.
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For his part, Mr. Collins is responding mostly to duty. As a
clergyman with a wealthy and aristocratic patroness, he wishes
to set a good example for his flock, as well as find happiness in
a mate. His rhapsodes on Lady Catherine’s virtues leave no
doubt, though, that his main motive in marrying is to please his
patroness.
In the Collinses, we have a marriage made on social and
worldly grounds: on Charlotte’s side out of her desire for financial independence and on Collins’ out of his duty to his provider.
After their marriage, Elizabeth is forced to admit that both husband and wife are tolerably happy. Collins has married “one of
the very few sensible women who would have accepted him, or
have made him happy if they had,” (152) she says. Charlotte is
intelligent enough to blush at her husband’s foolishness at times,
but knows how to manage him. We are told, “[Charlotte’s] home
and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry, and all their
dependent concerns, had not yet lost their charms.” (182) Those
are ominous words, perhaps, leading the reader to imagine the
time when the charms have worn off and she is left with such a
husband. We can only hope Charlotte’s children will favor her
more than him, and that she will find whatever companionship
she desires with them.
The Wickhams
The marriage of Mr. George Wickham and Elizabeth’s youngest
sister, Miss Lydia Bennet, comes towards the end of the novel,
after a great deal of suspense. The two had run off together as an
unmarried couple, and taken a lodging together in London. The
crisis of the novel comes when their elopement is discovered and
the Bennets are left to worry while others search out the couple
and persuade them to marry. The persuasion comes in the form
of money and a bought commission in the army for Wickham.
Later, it is revealed that the bribe was financed by Mr. Darcy, out
of several motives, including his own guilt in having covered up
Wickham’s nefarious past. It is interesting that nearly everyone
involved in the matter assumes, on the one hand, that Wickham
and Lydia, once they run off together, must marry; and on the
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other hand, that the marriage will not be a happy one. It was socially unacceptable for a young woman to engage in sexual activity outside the bounds of marriage, and reprehensible for a
young man to seduce such a woman. Once Lydia and Wickham
are assumed to have so engaged, the only course that would retain
their social standing is marriage.
Darcy and Elizabeth, separately, are the only ones to doubt
the wisdom of having Lydia and Wickham marry. Darcy, in fact,
first tries to persuade Lydia not to marry Wickham, and only
works towards their marriage once Lydia convinces him that she
will not leave Wickham. (268) Elizabeth, for her part, expresses
grave misgivings about the match. It is clear to Elizabeth that a
marriage founded upon undisciplined passion will not be a happy
one. Later, the narrator confirms her misgivings by noting the
disarray with which the Wickhams live their lives and the indifference to each other that soon pervades their marriage.
Each of these three marriages was formed with the intention
of addressing some kind of human need or desire: The Bennets’
marriage was formed out of the desire for beauty and fulfilled
the need to procreate; the Collinses looked for financial stability
and social standing and fulfilled social obligations; and the Wickhams married to further Lydia’s desire for importance and to facilitate socially sanctioned sex. With these marriages in mind, let
us turn now to the main drama and involving Mr. Darcy and Miss
Elizabeth Bennet.
Part I: First Encounters and First Impressions
Elizabeth and Darcy do not start off as a likely couple. Their first
encounter is at a neighborhood ball when Darcy, speaking to his
friend Bingley within Elizabeth’s hearing, rejects Elizabeth as a
dance partner, with the stinging and memorable line, “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.” (12) Elizabeth
laughs at Darcy to her friends afterwards, repeating the story with
gusto and resolving never to dance with him. Over the next few
weeks, her umbrage at the insult hardens into a profound dislike
based on his proud demeanor. The dislike later turns to something
closer to disgust and hatred when she is told, by the charming
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and attractive Mr. Wickham, that Darcy had denied Wickham his
rightful inheritance from Darcy’s father, out of the ignoble motive
of jealousy.
Darcy, after a brief time of studying Elizabeth for the petty
exercise of emphasizing her imperfections to his friends, soon
begins to find her intriguing. He notices her intelligent expression, graceful and energetic figure, and playful manners. (21-22)
Erotic desire has been ignited: he cannot keep his eyes off her
without an effort. (63) Darcy is not a man to let his passions run
away with him, though. He begins a systematic investigation into
Elizabeth’s character that goes on for several weeks. He starts by
listening in on her conversations with others and continues with
a series of conversations with Elizabeth herself on matters that
range from love poetry, to the duties of friendship, to what it
means for a woman to be accomplished. Darcy, we are told, “had
never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her.” (46)
Nonetheless, Darcy does not entertain seriously the thought of
marrying Elizabeth at first, because of her relatively low family
connections.
In the response of each to the other, we can discover something of their characters. In Elizabeth’s laughter at Darcy’s insult
to her, we see the value she places on a person’s character above
his worldly status, since she is by no means overawed by Darcy’s
wealth and high social standing. We also, though, see her readiness to laugh at the ridiculous in people, a trait she shares with
her father and one that leads her to have a sharp tongue and something of a sarcastic wit. In her concern for Wickham’s claims
against Darcy, we see her spirited allegiance to justice and kindness. On the other hand, her easy willingness to believe Wickham
without evidence comes from her excessive pride in her ability
to read people: her initial dislike of Darcy is confirmed by Wickham’s accusations and Elizabeth never really doubts that they are
true. We learn later, of course, that Wickham is a liar.
In Darcy, we first see his lack of natural amiability. His refusal to dance when attending a ball and his insulting speech
about Elizabeth, made to Bingley, but clearly within her hearing
and just after he had caught her eye, reveal both a clumsy shyness
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and a prideful disdain for the opinions of others. In his investigation into Elizabeth’s character, though, we see the importance
he places on her substance. Her looks attract him only after he
notices her intelligence and liveliness. The manner and content
of her conversation are what bewitch him. He is very willing to
revise his initial disdainful opinion of her upon further observation. We see Darcy’s pride at work also in his refusal to consider
the possibility of marrying Elizabeth because of her lack of high
social connections. Darcy, as we find out later, was orphaned at
the age of twenty three, and left in charge of fulfilling the Darcy
family’s duties, which are substantial indeed. He takes pride in
his role as the provider of livelihoods, order, and moral example
to the people of Derbyshire.
Darcy reveals his commitment to his family pride in a conversation with Elizabeth, early in the novel. When she comments,
with tongue in cheek, that Darcy must be without any of the usual
follies and nonsense that she is used to laughing at in others,
Darcy responds:
“Perhaps that is not possible for anyone. But it has
been the study of my life to avoid those weaknesses
which often expose a strong understanding to ridicule.”
[Elizabeth replied,] “Such as vanity and pride.”
“Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride – where
there is real superiority of mind, pride will be always
under good regulation.”
Elizabeth turned away to hide a smile. (50)
Darcy, as we see, has “made it the study of [his] life” to eradicate any weakness of character that would make him appear
ridiculous in the eyes of others. His statement indicates the seriousness of his commitment to upholding the honor of the family
name. It also reveals his focus on maintaining the appearance of
strength in the eyes of the world. The difference between avoiding weakness of character for the sake of living a good life and
avoiding it in order that one does not appear ridiculous might not
sound substantial, but it is this same mistake in understanding
that leads Darcy to deny that pride might be a weakness. Darcy,
in pursuing strength of character for the sake of his pride, has
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blinded himself to the potential pitfalls of that same pride. In his
blindness, he has allowed his pride free rein, so that it has outgrown the bounds of a healthy regard for self and family and become excessive to the point that, as the narrator tells us, he “was
continually giving offense,” wherever he appeared. (16) Elizabeth, with her clear sight for the folly of others, immediately sees
and smiles at Darcy’s own self deception that has fostered his excessive pride.
Later in that same conversation, Darcy confesses that he tends
to be resentful of the faults of others, saying, “My good opinion,
once lost, is lost forever.” Elizabeth agrees, with perhaps too
much enthusiasm, that, “Implacable resentment is a shade in a
character.” Darcy responds:
“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency
to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even
the best education can overcome.”
“And your defect is a propensity to hate everyone.”
“And yours,” he replied with a smile, “is willfully to
misunderstand them.” (51)
Here we have, in a nutshell, Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s analysis
of each others’ faults. Darcy’s self described resentful temper
grates against Elizabeth’s amiability. Her severe irritation at his
complacency about such a fault comes out in her hyperbole: he
has a propensity to hate everyone, she says. Darcy then immediately identifies Elizabeth’s own characteristic fault: that of willfully misunderstanding people.
Darcy and Elizabeth both are under the illusion that their understanding and intellect have led them to lives of rationality and
virtue. Both are deceiving themselves. Darcy is committed to a
path of upholding the family name, but foolishly allows his pride
to bloat into a sense of superiority, telling himself that he has it
under good “regulation”. Elizabeth sees his mistake clearly, but
doesn’t see properly where his pride comes from. She trusts her
ability to analyze people too completely, and comes to believe
her own hyperbolic statement that Darcy is a hateful man, even
while Darcy is falling in love with her. Darcy sees that Elizabeth
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has misunderstood him, but completely misses the extent of her
dislike for him. He seems incapable of seeing the effect his disdainful manners have on others. Their pride and their prejudice
deceive both characters into forming partly true, partly false images of the other that are dependent on their partly true, partly
false images of their own characters.
Neither Elizabeth nor Darcy has the perspective to see clearly
the extent of his or her own faults and mistakes in judgment. Because their own faults are so tied to their image of each other, the
key to knowledge of their defects of character thus lies in each
seeing the truth about the other. But they will never see each other
more clearly without a closer acquaintance than has yet been possible. Darcy’s passion for Elizabeth provides the means for mutual revelation when he finally proposes marriage to Elizabeth.
Part II: The Proposal
By coincidence, on the day Darcy finally proposes, Elizabeth had
just learned from Darcy’s cousin that Darcy had been the primary
force for separating his friend Mr. Bingley, the single man of
good fortune mentioned in the first chapter of the novel, from
Elizabeth’s sister Jane, who loves Bingley. Elizabeth, who has
been in some anguish over Jane’s loss of her beau, is overcome
with anger and distress that Darcy could have had the temerity
to separate the couple, and the coldness of heart to brag about it
to his cousin. Darcy picks this unhappy moment to visit her and
at last tell her plainly what he thinks of her and propose marriage.
In the struggle between his commitment to his family pride and
his attraction to Elizabeth, attraction has won. Pride has not been
completely defeated, though. He proposes with the clear expectation that Elizabeth will accept him, and amid his protestations
of love, Darcy explains also his sense of the degradation it would
be for him to marry someone with such poor connections as Elizabeth. His sense of his superiority is alive and well.
To Darcy’s shock, Elizabeth rejects his proposal. In the following conversation, charged with the barely controlled anger of
both parties, Elizabeth articulates her dislike of Darcy. She levels
two charges at him, her reasons for rejecting his offer. First, he
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has been the means of separating her beloved sister Jane from
the man Jane loves, Mr. Bingley. Second, Elizabeth repeats the
story she had heard from Mr. Wickham, that Darcy had mistreated Wickham by withholding from him the legacy of Darcy’s
father.
Finally, when Darcy continues to press the matter, Elizabeth
articulates her feelings, and in doing so, levels her third charge
at him: “from the first moment, I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain for
the feelings of others, were such as to form that groundwork of
disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immoveable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I
felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever
be prevailed upon to marry.” (164) Darcy, finally understanding
fully her feelings towards him, can only retreat in haste.
Elizabeth cannot tolerate the sort of pride that would consider another human being degraded, simply because of that
person’s station in life. So far, Elizabeth has heard nothing to
change her opinion that Mr. Darcy suffers from this, the “worst
kind of pride.” (159) She still believes that she is right in her
characterization of him and so is ignorant of her own self deception until Mr. Darcy gives her a letter, the next morning,
containing all the things he could not manage to say to Elizabeth in the moment of her rejection of him the day before. It
provides a defense against the charges that he improperly separated Jane and Bingley and that he mistreated Wickham.
(Darcy makes no mention of the third charge Elizabeth leveled
at him, of his chronic disdain for others that laid the groundwork for her dislike of him.) As Elizabeth reads the sordid truth
about Wickham’s mistreatment of Darcy and his attempted seduction of Darcy’s sister, she cannot at first believe it. Eventually, after weighing the evidence, she must admit that Wickham
has lied to her. “Astonishment, apprehension, and even horror
oppressed her,” (173) we are told. The horror must be from
learning how easily Wickham manipulated her, as well as how
thoroughly she has misjudged Darcy. Her extreme reaction re-
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veals just how wedded she is to living a virtuous life. “Till this
moment I never knew myself,” (176) she cries.
Though we don’t hear from the narrator about Darcy’s response to his encounter with Elizabeth and the disastrous proposal, the letter itself gives us a clue. It starts bitterly enough, but
once he starts to write of Wickham, the love Darcy’s father had
for him, Wickham’s profligacy, and his attempted seduction of
Darcy’s sister Georgiana, the writing changes tone to become
more confiding and at times almost tender. Darcy has never revealed this story to anyone who was not involved in the mess already. He shows his bedrock trust of Elizabeth’s character in
giving her this explosive information, but he also shows his continuing care for her. “Here again I shall give you pain,” he writes,
“to what degree only you can tell. But whatever can be the sentiments which Mr. Wickham has created, a suspicion of their nature
shall not prevent me from unfolding his real character. It adds even
another motive.” (169) Darcy believes that Wickham has won
Elizabeth’s heart, at least to some degree. Aside from any jealousy
he may feel, he really does not want her to be taken in by Wickham, as his beloved sister was, almost to her ruin, and as his father
was, until the day of his death. Towards the end of the letter, he
justifies Elizabeth, writing that as she knew neither he nor Wickham before, and as she has a trusting nature, it is understandable
that she would believe Wickham rather than himself. Finally,
Darcy ends the letter with what Elizabeth later calls “charity itself”
(307): “I will only add, God bless you.” (172) Darcy, less than a
day after being humiliated by Elizabeth, is already moving towards forgiveness of her for her unjust accusations. Whether he
is moving towards better self-knowledge remains to be seen.
For Elizabeth, once she comes to terms with the contents of
the letter, she too has changed in her analysis of Darcy. She still
does not approve of Darcy; he has not at all answered her third
charge of his selfish disdain for others. She thinks that he cannot
answer this charge, that his coldness is ingrained in his temperament, and she cannot have any affection for such a man. Still, she
can no longer hate him, and can feel the compliment he has given
her in his love for her.
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Thus, the proposal scene and the letter that follows contain a
strange kind of antagonistic intimacy, as both characters reveal
themselves to the other and experience the shock of encountering
the truth about the other, and thus the truth about their own weaknesses and mistakes. In the context of the spectacular mismatch
of their feelings for each other, they are presented with the choice
of whether to hold on to their incorrect assumptions or to learn
from the encounter.
Darcy, does not simply discount Elizabeth’s rejection as a
sign of her own smallness of mind (as another character, Mr.
Collins, does earlier in the novel, when rejected by Elizabeth).
Rather, he accepts it as the result of a rational woman’s account
of how his character appears to her. Elizabeth, rather than disbelieve Darcy’s account of the Wickham affair in favor of continuing to believe in her judgment of Wickham and Darcy both,
weighs the evidence rationally and comes to decide that Darcy
must have told her the truth. Both Elizabeth and Darcy are at root
honest people; the truth holds more power for them than their
self-regard. Had this been the end of the novel, they would both
have been better off in the increase of their own self-knowledge.
In other words, the solution to the problem of how to see one’s
own faults clearly, while it may require another human being to
interact with, does not seem to require marriage to that person.
Only, in this case at least, a botched proposal.
One can imagine, under other circumstances perhaps, a philosophical friendship developing between Darcy and Elizabeth,
in the way Socrates describes to Callicles in the Gorgias. As
Socrates says, “the person who intends to put his soul to an adequate test, to see whether it lives rightly or not,” must have
“knowledge, good will, and frankness.”2 Socrates expresses
the luck he feels in having found an interlocutor in Callicles
who exhibits these three qualities, since he, Socrates, thinks
Callicles will help him to discover when he has hit upon something true, specifically regarding the best way of life. Though
it is not clear from the dialogue whether Callicles does, in fact,
2. Donald J. Zeyl, Gorgias (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 58.
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have these attributes, it makes some sense that a couple who did
exhibit knowledge, good will, and frankness towards each other
in the pursuit of a better way of life would be in a position to help
each other. As we have seen, both Elizabeth and Darcy have
shown an interest in living rightly. Both have some knowledge
and have proved themselves to be frank with each other. What
would remain is for each to develop good will towards the other.
Such a friendship could be very productive for them. It would
not require marriage, but one could do worse than to marry such
a friend. One could argue that the Bennets, Collinses, and Wickhams all made worse choices than this in their own marriages.
Elizabeth and Darcy do not go this route, though. In fact, it is not
clear at this point in the story whether it would be possible for
them to have such a relationship of knowledge, good will, and
frankness with each other. In the proposal scene, at least, their
frankness was blunt enough to make good will towards each
other difficult to maintain.
Section III: Pemberly
Both Darcy and Elizabeth leave Darcy’s disastrous proposal assuming they will never see each other again. It is not too many
weeks later, though, that Elizabeth finds herself vacationing with
her aunt and uncle in Derbyshire, and touring Darcy’s estate of
Pemberly. As they tour the house, Elizabeth is surprised to hear
the housekeeper’s enthusiastic account of Darcy as sweet tempered and generous hearted since childhood. (206) Elizabeth’s
firmest opinion of Darcy as cold and disdainful is rocked. “Some
people call him proud; but I am sure I never saw anything of it,”
says the servant. “To my fancy, it is only because he doesn’t rattle
away like other young men.” (207)
Elizabeth finds Mr. Darcy’s portrait in the gallery: “she stood
before the canvas on which he was represented, and fixed his
eyes upon herself.” (208) This moment is a turning point for Elizabeth, as she puts herself under the regard of the painted Darcy
with “earnest contemplation.” As his image on the wall smiles
down at her, a smile she remembers its owner to have bestowed
on her more than once, the housekeeper tells her the painting was
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done at the time when his father was still alive. Elizabeth thinks
more clearly about Darcy’s position as master of Pemberly.
Rather than the wealth, beauty, and elegance, she thinks of the
people. She realizes how much power Darcy has to give pleasure
or pain to the many who are dependent upon him, and therefore
how valuable the praise of one of those dependent people is. Elizabeth, with all of her spirited allegiance to justice and kindness,
cannot help but admire someone who does so much good for
those who depend upon him.
The reminder that he was orphaned and given full responsibility of the estate at such a young age, must also give her another
way to account for his previous insulting behavior. Rather than a
man lacking all feeling for others, he is transformed in her mind
into a young man full of feeling, but who has been given all the
weight of Pemberly and the responsibilities of the family name
to bear. Such a man might well fall into the error of excessive
family pride. But such an error can be forgiven, and Elizabeth finally does begin to forgive Darcy his insults to her: “she thought
of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever
raised before; she remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression.” (208)
Further surprises come as Elizabeth and her relatives happen
upon Darcy himself, who has returned from town unexpectedly.
Darcy now has his chance to respond, in action, to Elizabeth’s
third charge against him, the charge that he is full of disdain for
others. He responds well, astonishing her again and again with
his civil behavior, his kind attention to her aunt and uncle, some
of the lowly relatives he spoke so insultingly of in his proposal
to her, and most of all, his lack of pretension towards or grievance against her, after her unfair treatment of him and rejection
of his offer.
Thus begins the renewal of Darcy’s and Elizabeth’s acquaintance, with friendly civility on his side, and astonishment on hers.
Each character has transformed in attitude toward the other. Elizabeth’s state of mind is easier to determine, since we have the
benefit of her point of view in the narrative. She has gone from
hating Darcy towards the beginning of the novel to a cold kind
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of respect since receiving his letter after the proposal. His friendliness towards her at Pemberly leads to something new. “But
above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within
her of goodwill that could not be overlooked. It was gratitude.
Gratitude not merely for once having loved her, but for loving
her still well enough to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of
her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection.” (220)
Elizabeth’s gratitude and esteem are the beginning of affection,
as the narrator tells us. (231) This feeling is explicitly distinguished
from the captivation she felt for Wickham at the beginning of the
novel and is marked both by rational accounts to herself of how
well she and Darcy suit each other and by irrational and confused
feelings of repentance and jealousy. (259)
We are given less information about Darcy’s state of mind at
this point. Certainly he has lost his expectation that Elizabeth will
return his feelings, and much of the pride that went along with that
expectation. Whatever he feels for her at this point, it is no longer
opposed to his family pride, but seems to be rooted, as Elizabeth’s
feelings for him are, in gratitude. Later in the novel, Darcy exclaims to Elizabeth, “What do I not owe you!” (308) referring to
the lesson of humiliation she taught him by rejecting his initial
marriage proposal to her. If nothing else, it seems that rather than
looking down on Elizabeth and suffering the pain of his attraction
to her, as he was at the beginning of the novel, he feels in her debt
and is hoping for some return of his affection. This change in perspective must go along with some kind of change in how his desire
for her is oriented.
Esteem, forgiveness, and gratitude are different qualities than
they were starting to possess before their reacquaintance at Pemberly, when their knowledge of virtue and their frankness towards
each other led me to speculate about philosophical friendship. At
this point in the story, their self knowledge has greatly improved,
as has their good will. Their frankness suffers, however: from the
time Elizabeth leaves Pemberly after news of Lydia’s scandalous
elopement reaches her, until nearly the end of the novel, Elizabeth
and Darcy think of each other and wonder about the other’s feel-
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ings, but they do not speak more than a few polite superficialities
to each other. The transformation that leaves Elizabeth wanting
Darcy and leaves Darcy hoping for Elizabeth somehow leaves
them unable to speak to each other.
Section IV: Beyond Education
Let’s go back to Darcy’s comment on temperament from early
in the novel. “There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency
to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best
education can overcome.” (51) We see evidence of defects that
are not overcome throughout the novel: Mr. Bennet’s lack of
moral energy, Mrs. Bennet’s nervousness, Mr. Collins’s servile
pomposity, Mr. Wickham’s deceitful smarminess, Lydia Bennet’s imprudence. When Darcy and Elizabeth encountered the
truth about their own misjudgments, it looked like an improvement for them. At least two of the characters just mentioned,
however, seem to have a good level of self-knowledge. Mr. Bennet comments explicitly and with self conscious irony on his
own ability to avoid facing his obligations, for instance, (249)
and Mr. Wickham is portrayed as wondering how much Elizabeth has been told of his bad behavior. It looks like self-knowledge may not be sufficient to bring about self-improvement.
Darcy’s and Elizabeth’s typical faults, on the other hand,
are nowhere to be seen in the latter part of the novel. Elizabeth,
who suffered from a too quick judgment of others in the service
of her pride and of her enjoyment of laughing at human folly,
does attempt to judge whether Darcy still loves her or not after
she leaves Pemberly. She cannot believe that Darcy, whatever
his feelings, will overcome his scorn of Lydia and his resentment of Wickham enough to engage himself to Elizabeth and
join such a family. She cannot quite stop hoping that her judgment is wrong, though, especially once she hears of his involvement in Lydia’s marriage. (271-272) Her relationship (or lack
of one) to Darcy has become her focus, rather than her ability
to judge people. Her habits of quick decision in the service of
her own pride recede in the face of her care for Darcy and her
pride in him. (272)
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It turns out that Elizabeth’s judgment is wrong in this case. Mr.
Darcy does overcome his admitted resentful nature to the point that
he still wants to marry Elizabeth, though he will become in the
process brother-in-law to Wickham, a man he despises. Wickham’s
outrageous behavior against Darcy and others is apparently no
longer the central focus of Darcy’s attention. Though his opinion
of Wickham has not changed, his attention is rather on how to manage Wickham’s vice in a way that will cause the least amount of
trouble for Elizabeth and her family. Darcy’s transformation is
complete enough that he goes to much trouble, embarrassment,
and expense to find Lydia and Wickham after they elope and persuade them to marry. In other words, Elizabeth’s welfare becomes
central to Darcy and his personal resentment of Wickham is beside
the point.
If Darcy is correct, that “not even the best education” can
overcome temperamental flaws, then something else is at work
in these two characters, something beyond education and more
effective than self-knowledge alone. Whatever is at work, it gives
them a different perspective on what is important, changing their
focus away from their own concerns and towards the welfare of
each other. Though it is clear to the reader that both Elizabeth
and Darcy are willing to commit to a life together after Elizabeth
leaves Pemberly, they are unable or unwilling speak to each other
until almost the very end of the novel. It appears that even when
each character has identified the person who can help him or her
to live a better life they still cannot come together.
Their silence towards each other regarding any issue of importance lasts for several weeks, through the drama of Lydia Bennet’s elopement and engagement to Wickham and through several
visits Darcy makes to Elizabeth’s house once Lydia and Wickham
are safely married and out of town. It is only broken after Darcy’s
aunt, Lady Catherine, interferes by trying to disrupt an engagement that she had mistakenly believed was about to be formed
between them. In attempting to forbid the engagement, she unwittingly gives the two reason to hope that marriage might be
possible. Once hope is kindled, communication and engagement
to marry soon follow.
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In one of the conversations they have after they are finally
engaged to be married, Elizabeth asks Darcy directly why he did
not speak to her when he visited her before their engagement.
“Because you were grave and silent, and gave me no encouragement,” he says. “But I was embarrassed,” she replies. “And so
was I.” (318) At the beginning of the novel, each character suffered from pride to the point that each thought the other was
lower in some way: Elizabeth thought Darcy was devoid of
proper feeling for his fellow man, and Darcy focused on Elizabeth’s socially lower and often foolish family relations. It is one
thing to be playful, angry, or frank with someone who is beneath
you in some way, but quite another to speak plainly to one who
has humbled you, as each does to the other in the proposal scene
and the following letter. The knowledge of their own faults that
they gained from their angry interaction during Darcy’s proposal,
taught them both that they had misjudged and injured the other.
Given the desire each has for the other’s good opinion after their
encounter at Pemberly, neither has the courage to risk the other’s
scorn by speaking openly of his or her feelings. Only once they
have some rational evidence to support their hope for the other’s
regard, via Lady Catherine, do they drum up the courage to speak
plainly to each other.
Once they do reveal their feelings for each other, after Darcy
again asks Elizabeth to marry him and she agrees, their conversation takes an interesting turn. Each of them expresses gratitude
towards the other, confesses having mistreated the other in some
way, and receives forgiveness. Darcy, full of self-recrimination,
declares that he cannot think of his behavior in his first proposal
to Elizabeth “without abhorrence.” “The recollection of . . . my
manners, my expressions during the whole of it is now, and has
been many months, inexpressibly painful to me.” (306) Elizabeth
assures him that she has “long been most heartily ashamed” of
her former words to him. Later, it is Elizabeth’s turn to admit
guilt. “How you must have hated me after that evening?” (308),
that is, after her rejection of his first proposal. The expression is
grammatically worded as an exclamation, but ends with a question mark. Elizabeth is both expressing her conviction of Darcy’s
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justified hatred of her, however short lived, and at the same time
is asking him to reassure her, which he does. In this mutual confession and forgiveness, each accepts the other fully and the past
is oriented and explained in terms of their present relationship.
Once they become engaged to marry, we get a glimpse of
how their relationship will continue to strengthen the virtue of
each. In their final conversation of the novel, Elizabeth playfully
tries to account for why it is that Darcy was ever attracted to her,
and has decided that he loved her for her impertinence, her near
rudeness, to him in their early acquaintance. She says, “Had you
not been really amiable you would have hated me for [my impertinence]; but in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself,
your feelings were always noble and just.” (317) He made plain
to her in his previous discussions with her that his “abhorrence”
of his own behavior towards Elizabeth weighs on him. In the turn
of one phrase,—“in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself”—Elizabeth has recast Darcy’s pride and disdain as an attempt at camouflage, as if he were too modest to express his true
noble and generous self. In contrast with this gentle, playful manner of helping him to reconcile himself to his own past, recall her
angry frankness in referring, during his first proposal to her, to
his “arrogance, . . . conceit, and . . . selfish disdain.” (164) She
and he both know that he was prideful to the point of offense,
but now, because of their mutual acceptance, she can use her
own playful manner to show him the way to forgive himself,
through humor, as she has already forgiven him. Unlike her father, who teases Mrs. Bennet almost without mercy, Elizabeth
is using her wit not to undercut Darcy, but to help him let go of
his past mistakes.
In that same conversation, their talk turns to Darcy’s aunt,
Lady Catherine, who had so steadfastly opposed their marriage.
“Shall you ever have the courage to announce to Lady Catherine
what is to befall her?” asks Elizabeth. “I am more likely to want
time than courage, Elizabeth. But it ought to be done, and if you
will give me a sheet of paper, it shall be done directly,” he replies.
(318) In this exchange, Darcy gently refuses to laugh either at
the prospect of Lady Catherine’s dismay over the news of their
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marriage or at the possibility of him lacking the courage to give
her the news. He exhibits the kind of straightforward moral goodness that Elizabeth must have seen so little of in her own parents
and he draws her in to help him by asking her to hand him the
paper he needs to begin. Elizabeth, so used to being the amused
observer of others’ folly is now a partner in the exercise of virtue
in the world. This exercise continues after their marriage, when,
as we are told, they provide better society for Elizabeth’s sister
Kitty, relieve some of the habitual debt that Lydia and Wickham
accrue, educate Darcy’s sister in human relationships, and continue the work of improving the lot of those who depend on the
residents of Pemberly. (321-323)
Like the marriages of the Bennets, Collinses, and Wickhams,
Darcy and Elizabeth’s marriage is formed with social and sexual
union in mind. Unlike for the other marriages, though, Darcy and
Elizabeth do not have a primary motivation, such as social standing or financial stability, for joining with each other. Rather, the
Darcys are re-forming themselves to be better human beings
through their marriage. The self-knowledge they gained after
Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth has been joined by the gratitude
and forgiveness felt by each and proclaimed to each other. Within
this relationship of acknowledged acceptance and esteem, they
are able to give each other a new view of how to live well.
What started off bearing some resemblance to a philosophical friendship has turned into something else. As Socrates knew
well, for a relationship of knowledge, good will, and frankness
to exist, each party must be devoted to finding the truth about
the question at hand. As we see depicted in Pride and Prejudice,
though, (and as Socrates doubtless also knew well) people are
rarely if ever fully devoted to finding out the truth on the question of how to live rightly. Pride, passion, and worldly concerns
all get in the way.
In the scene just described, in which Elizabeth playfully recasts Darcy’s former disdainful nature and Darcy invites Elizabeth to help him write to Lady Catherine, each provides the
perspective that the other needs. Rather than frankly declare what
the other ought to be thinking or doing, they demonstrate to each
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other a different way of looking at themselves and the world, simply by being who they are. At the same time, each tacitly invites
the other to join in. In the process, each gains the perspective that
will allow their character defects not to disappear, but to recede
into the background. The gratitude each feels and the forgiveness
each gives make this relationship possible because each values
the perspective of the other more than his or her own pride. Austen
gives us a picture of what marriage can lead to at its best: a transformation of the self into something more and better than what is
possible alone, the result of what “not even the best education”
can give. Elizabeth and Darcy have this sort of marriage.
The Bennets probably could not have reached this kind of intimacy and mutual acceptance, due to the degree of difference in
their temperaments. They might have come closer to it, though,
if Mr. Bennet had not given up on the marriage once he realized
how mistaken he had been in his evaluation of Mrs. Bennet’s
character. The Collinses never desired this kind of relationship:
Mr. Collins is too self important to ever admit anyone else fully
into his thoughts, and Mrs. Collins, Charlotte, is satisfied with
managing him, in return for her social standing as his wife. Their
happiness lies in her ability to manage him without rancor, and
will last as long as Charlotte can continue to tolerate his foolishness with grace. The Wickhams, with their mutual inability
to control their passions, never had a chance at such mutual acceptance, though they were happy for a time with the physical
version of intimacy.
I began this lecture by quoting the sentence that starts the
novel, and considering two interpretations of it: one that rested on
the witty acknowledgement of human greed and self deception
and one that rested on a straightforward recognition of our need
for each other, specifically with respect to marriage. Something
like a synthesis of these two attitudes occurs in the marriage of
Elizabeth and Darcy. Elizabeth, having grown up with Mr. Bennet
as her favorite parent, likes to laugh at human weakness, but has
had little authoritative example in her life of straightforward moral
goodness. Elizabeth benefits from her marriage in having a living
example of steadfast and straightforward goodness in her life.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PAALMAN
55
Darcy doesn’t laugh at human folly: he shuns it. This became a
problem for him when he himself, because of the folly of his overweening pride, treated the woman he loves with contempt, as he
did in his initial proposal to Elizabeth. He cannot forgive himself
for this behavior without Elizabeth’s example of teaching him to
“be laughed at.” (p. 310) Wit comes in handy when a straightforward understanding of our own failings is overwhelming.
Pride and Prejudice is not a pure social critique, nor a romance, nor a morality tale. It has some resemblance to all of these
genres, though. As we have seen, wit and playfulness, passion,
folly, reason, love of virtue, gratitude and forgiveness are all
deftly woven into the story of Elizabeth and Darcy. In the
process, we are given a glimpse of how one might transcend the
universal faults of self interest, greed, pride, and prejudice, not
by banishing or losing them, which is surely impossible, but by
allowing them to lose their hold over us through intimacy with
another human being who suits us; one we can love, work with,
laugh at and laugh with. It is no surprise that such a possibility,
presented with Austen’s consummate skill and grace, leaves the
reader full of pleasure and joy.
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“Please, Don’t Eat the Swans”:
My Revolution in Romania
Louis Petrich
Even from a simple realistic point of view,
the countries we long for occupy a far larger
place in our actual life, at any given moment, than the country in which we happen
to be. . . . And besides, even from this point
of view, of mere quantity, in our lives the
days are not all equal.
—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
In late December of 1989, I attended my first Modern Language
Conference in Washington, D.C. I was a graduate student at the
University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, taking my
time trying not to be impertinent in my dissertation on Shakespeare. If I had my doubts of becoming the sort of scholar that
the members of the MLA would want to make an English professor, I had even more doubts that life could be any better than
I knew it as a student. The authors occupying me in Chicago I
thought contained the world. I went to the MLA Conference to
meet the guardians of English letters and to settle my doubts
about my place in their world one way or another.
I spent one free evening not with the literary scholars in the
hosting hotel, but with my good friend, Mark, who possessed no
knowledge of literature. As a journalist, however, he kept himself
well-informed. At that time, the American invasion of Panama
and the bloody revolution in Romania kept Mark busily flipping
the channels of his television set to catch the latest world events.
Meanwhile, during the days, I was performing a similar ritual at
the conference, traversing from room to room to hear the latest
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
57
scholarly developments in my field. That evening, to bring our
two worlds of interest together, I ventured to compare the overthrow of dictatorships happening before his eyes in Panama and
Romania to the overthrow of ethno-phallocentrism taking place
before mine in the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Mark shook his head and
replied that he much preferred to see images of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife shot to death by firing squad than to hear my
reports about the death of the white male author. Then he grew
more serious: “Perhaps you should look for your colleagues and
career where you won’t have to make things like that up.”
Six months later, in June of 1990, I picked up the phone to
hear Mark’s voice triumphantly announce, “You have just gotten
a Fulbright Scholar Award.” This struck me as very strange, since
I had not applied for one. He, however, had just before called the
United States Information Agency to ask if any “Fulbrights” were
presently available for someone with my credentials. The USIA
told him that all positions had been competitively filled months
earlier from applications duly submitted a year in advance—except one, which remained defiantly empty: a lectureship in American literature at the Alexandru I. Cuza University in Iasi,
Romania, supposed to start that autumn.
“But I don’t do American literature,” I protested, “I do
Shakespeare. And where on earth is Iasi, anyway? Did you say
‘Romania’”?
I shuddered to recall that only a week earlier the Romanian
coal miners were reported by the Chicago Tribune to be storming
the streets of Bucharest, chasing down students, journalists, opposition figures, and all those whose trimmed beards made them
look intellectual, to club them into submission or death. Such images were very dreadful and nauseating to consider that summer
as I turned my mind towards Romania and assembled my Fulbright application for quick processing. Quite unprepared for my
destiny—for so this turn became—I would have to learn by trial
and error whether American literature had any power to free Romanian students from the oppression of having lived their lives
pinned under the weight of a rock, mined for that purpose, toppled
only yesterday, but still hard and cruel in its slowly disintegrating
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character. You can be pretty sure, reader, that I am not making
these things up, which were quotidian for millions of people (who
cares to remember them now?), and which, to all my present days
have left a longing and a pattern.
I set foot in Romania one night in September 1990, at the
Otopeni International Airport in Bucharest, where I was greeted
by several fatigued soldiers below our aircraft, their assault rifles
pointing hospitably down at the ground. These “most fierce descendants of Rome” (an epithet still to be heard) had one arm free
to beg for western cigarettes as they conducted me into the dreary
terminal. The first words I spoke in Romania, to the passport control officer, sitting in his compact wooden booth lit by the standard
forty watt bulb, were to inform him that I had come to teach American literature at the University of Iasi. I recoiled slightly at my
own words, realizing that if he knew I possessed no credentials
to teach this subject, he could have me deported as an imposter.
But the controller, not understanding a syllable of English,
stamped my passport perfunctorily and slid it back to me silently.
I had advisedly placed a carton of Kent cigarettes where it would
be the first item encountered upon opening each piece of my luggage to the customs inspectors. They played their parts perfectly,
and I went on, lightened in load, to award myself to that taxi driver
whose face appeared the least unshaven and sooty. He dropped
me at the stately residence of the American Cultural Affairs Officer, Agatha Kuperman, an attractive, red-haired woman of Hungarian descent, whom even the Romanians (long hostile to
Hungarians) considered highly. She embraced me warmly on the
black street, her little white poodle in constant danger of being
trodden by my uncertain feet, and then she chided me for paying
the driver four dollars: “That’s a week’s salary for most Romanians, my boy.” I slept that night in the spare room of her diplomat’s
mansion, listening to the barking of wild dogs that roamed the
dark streets of Bucharest.
Aggie briefed me the following morning at the consulate section of the U.S. Embassy, whose first floor looked like a nursery.
Dozens of Romanian babies were here undergoing the lengthy
process of adoption by their would-be American parents. Some,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
59
darker skinned, probable offspring of gypsies (suspected of selling
them), and others, physically handicapped or distressed by their
own cries, were all on offer to be wrapped in American arms, carried away in love, and saved. Aggie, who had only two minutes
to put me on guard against two especial dangers I would face,
seized me by the arm to describe how the Chairman of the English
Department once grabbed my predecessor to draw his ear close
and whisper, “You know I can crush you, Sam, I can destroy you.”
He would not have the nerve to manhandle me, she explained,
since he could no longer assume the backing of the Securitate (Romanian secret police). More likely, he would now try to engage
me to his daughter. “I must warn you, particularly, to stay away
from Romanian women.” She sensed my hesitation, and added,
“They are all become whores.” Then she let me go, suitably impressed, to Iasi.
Horia Holban, an English professor from the Alexandru I.
Cuza University, spotted my searching flashlight on the dark platform of the train station on that rainy September evening I arrived
in Iasi, a city of 265,000 people within a goodly jogging distance
of Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, our better tailored, but still great
enemy. Horia had been sent by the Chairman of the English Department to welcome me, just as he had welcomed my Fulbright
predecessors since 1970, equipped for this purpose by being one
of the ten percent of Romanians who owned a car. His windshield
wipers came unhinged as he drove us to my apartment. “How can
you see the road through all the murk and rain?” I asked, hoping
he would pull over to fix the wipers. “I have driven this way many
times before,” he replied. I made a nervous reference to Bernard
Shaw, whom I had heard from my informants was his specialty.
“Yes, I am the Romanian expert on Shaw,” he stated, as he continued to navigate the darkness. Then he asked me to contribute
an article to a literary quarterly he had just founded, called Ethos.
“This will help you to get recognition in America,” he said, evidently made aware of my unpublished status by his informants.
“Perhaps I can come up with something,” I replied, conscious of
the usefulness of his car. As it turned out, his quarterly went defunct after one issue because the price of printing quadrupled. His
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car, however, he kept on running.
My apartment was located on the eighth floor in a block of
flats that looked, like every other block, orphaned from the earth.
Nothing had changed since Horia escorted the first American lecturer to this apartment twenty years earlier. The elevator still
broke down two or three times a week. “Why repair something
permanently when you can employ a man full-time to fix it regularly?” he commented, as we climbed eight flights of unlit stairs
with luggage. “The people steal the bulbs,” he said, “but you will
memorize your steps everywhere, and then you, too, won’t need
a flashlight.”
My apartment comprised two bedrooms, a living room,
kitchen, bath, and like every apartment in the Workers’ Utopia, a
balcony, where the population retired to smoke and dream. “You
can see for yourself that every article has been stamped and inventoried by the University,” Horia announced, as he began the
tour. The same rusty trash can, missing its lid, stood under the
kitchen sink. The same two plates and cracked pot occupied a cabinet, and the same pair of cutlery lay in a drawer, to serve each
generation of American lecturer. My bedroom—a room with a
double bed—felt forbidden but to drafts. “Most of our lecturers
brought along their wives, who helped them to make this more of
a home,” he said, “but I can ask the Chairman to provide you an
extra blanket.”
The water, he explained, as we entered the bathroom, was supposed to appear for a few hours in the mornings and evenings, hot
only every other day. “But it may not always make it up to the
eighth floor. They give us a bathtub so that we can always have
water.” Thus I kept my bathtub filled, with a bucket nearby for
flushing the toilet, and I boiled water in pots for transfer to the
sink. This gave me the ritual satisfaction of reliving an early triumph of civilization—keeping clean on the outskirts of the
Roman Empire. In February, the hot water did not appear for three
weeks. When it finally came back, like a shooting star, the people
left whatever they were doing to take quick advantage. They
seemed to accept chronic deprivations and momentary windfalls
as among the mysteries of life, whereas I attributed human pur-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
61
poses to them, and I talked to myself a lot in anger, pacing from
room to room, hoping that the listening devices were still in operation for the Securitate to hear my accusations of evil.
“A woman named Luminitsa will clean your apartment once a
week,” Horia said, “paid by the university, but you can pay her
more to do extra chores.” Luminitsa was a sweet and sturdy old
woman, who managed to locate an ancient washing machine, missing several pieces, which she employed to make my clothes clean,
but increasingly misshapen. She proved especially helpful in obtaining milk, sold to lines of people as the sun rose. (I never could
abide the practice of standing in lines as if mortality did not matter,
and I would have paid her to stand forever, for me.) In the winter,
Luminitsa stood before my open lit oven, preferring to hold, rather
than to drink the hot tea I offered her. She happened to be present
the morning that the bombing of Iraq began in January of 1991,
and she kept making the sign of the cross three times and mumbling prayers as she went about her lifelong, inalienable work.
His tour finished, Horia handed me a roll of toilet paper, warning me that I would find this item missing from public places and
only sporadically available in the shops. “So carry some around
with you, eat lightly, and use the paper sparingly.” With these
words and a wan smile to indicate he would have liked to be joking, the Romanian expert on Shaw bid me goodnight. I sat at the
table gone crooked on the concrete floor of the living room. I felt
alone, ignorant, hungry, cold, and I was beginning to sense across
the table the company of failure. I thought about supplicating God,
Orthodox fashion, to help me survive in this dark, backstage world
deprived of props, but the Romanians had been doing that for
years. I felt tired, too, and so I let my body take precedence over
the soul’s fears and carry me clothed to bed, where I discovered,
to my surprise, that I slid quickly into a good, long sleep.
Late next morning, after bread and tea, I took a taxi to the
Alexandru I. Cuza University1 to meet with the redoubtable
1. Founded in 1861, the University offered bachelor degrees and doctorates in the natural sciences, mathematics, history, philosophy, geography,
economics, law, and philology. The schools of engineering, medicine,
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Chairman of my department. He looked tussled in his grey suit
and tie, not formidable, not brutish, as his grey eyes, on the lookout everywhere, probed intermittently into mine. He liked to finish my sentences in perfect British English, as if to show that he
knew my thoughts and how to speak them properly. He conducted me to the American reading room, where I would teach
five classes a week of American literature, lasting two hours
each, to first or second-year students in groups of ten to twelve.
I would also supervise the growing collection of books that the
Americans and British had donated or loaned to the department
over the years. “You must be sure to restrict the use of the reading room to students in our department and the English teachers
of Iasi,” he emphasized several times, as if this were the crux of
my assignment. A cubicle adjacent to the reading room would
become my little office. The Securitate used to keep equipment
there to monitor the foreign teachers and students throughout
the building. He gave me the key to a locked cabinet, where I
would store the precious Norton Anthologies of American Literature, the television and video player, and some British and
American movies on video tape. “I keep the majority of video
tapes at home,” he explained, “so that you will not be tempted
to loan them to people who will copy them illegally to sell.” I
was often to discover that Romanian homes secretly contained
little pieces of public property that made their possessors feel a
little less poor, a little less equal.
The Chairman then invited me to his office, where he poured
us some plum brandy and began to drink. He had a story to tell
me, and it would take some time and some help. He spoke of his
imprisonment in the 1950’s for an anti-Soviet remark, and of the
Romanian prejudice against him for being half-Hungarian. He
overcame these adversities to master the English language by
reading Dickens, whose linguistic varieties he knew as an expert,
and Conrad, whose sociological studies of character helped him
and agronomy had separate locations in the city. 20,000 students were
enrolled overall, making Iasi one of the four centers of higher education
in Romania, along with Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, and Timisoara.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
63
to achieve his present position. He had a twenty-three year old
daughter who studied medicine and loved to speak English. He
felt joy when the revolution finally came, freeing him from the
harassments of the Securitate and bringing hope to everyone for
reconcilement with the West. He wanted me to know that he was
a decent man, whose membership in the Romanian Communist
Party had been a necessary concession to his persecutors, and
whose true self, finding it safe to appear only recently, should be
allowed broad margins of deformity. “The worst thing about
communism,” he confessed, “is that it brings out the evil in people.” He poured me some more brandy, but it spilled over my full
glass, for I had not learned to drink at midday with relish. I knew
to be very firm with this man, so I declared my intent to open the
American reading room to the public. The Chairman straightened
his back, narrowed his grey eyes, and said, “If you do that you
will become my enemy. Don’t you know that even the quality of
paper in there is enough to make the people steal the books!” “I
would prefer not to become your enemy,” I said, “but the books
and videos and magazines will be recalled by the American Embassy if you insist.” This was a bluff, but its tone of conviction
succeeded, and he changed the subject by extending an invitation
to dine with him and his wife and daughter some evening at his
home. I accepted the invitation several months later, curious to
find out if Aggie was right about him and his engaging daughter.
She was, alas, right. Wisely, I was prepared to persuade them that
my loneliness was not so dire as they interpreted.
The American reading room had the misfortune to overlook
an athletic field. The steady thuds of soccer balls and the shouts
of all-weathered players made the English of my students sound
as timid as the communists might have wished from the mouths
of their English enemy. Once in a while, the errant ball came
crashing through a window, causing my students, almost all of
them women, to duck and scream, though only for a second or
two. I insisted that the windows be fixed to keep the temperature
of the room above freezing. Nevertheless, during the winter I had
to teach in my overcoat to students shivering in theirs. They
smiled at my wishful handling of the radiators each morning, like
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a witch doctor trying to summon up a ghost. At various times in
the day, a crew of carpenters operated terrifically roaring power
saws in their workshop directly beneath us, and the millions of
powdery shavings that they generated got sucked up into air ducts
that blew them right outside our apt-to-be-broken windows. Our
classes then came to a halt, as a kind of reminder to everyone of
the rights of real work to fill consciousness with its sound and
fury. “All our priorities thus come to dust,” I thought, indulging
a poetic melancholy that seemed better than this grim reality.
The dimness of light in the reading room, to which I also objected, caused the students to marvel again at my notions of normalcy. “Fluorescent bulbs for the ceilings are not to be found
anywhere in the country,” they said, but still I made an official,
stamped request. Two weeks later, someone knocked on the reading room door, timidly stuck her head in, and seeing the students
beckon, approached my side and silently produced from her
apron pocket an incandescent light bulb of the once maximum
forty watts. “But this is not the type I ordered!” I exclaimed. The
students laughed as the poor woman made her noiseless escape,
and I stared at the economical bulb, ever more grateful for those
windows that let in the light and all the world outside not made
to order by man.
It surprised me to learn later that my remark to the cleaning
woman was adopted by the students as a new motto. Henceforth,
whenever life handed them another revolutionary dose of futility,
they would laughingly say, “But this is not the type I ordered.” I
counted this my first success as a teacher of American values, or
rather, my first achievement in an impossible environment of a
common ground of enlightened foolishness.
I asked a student named Dana to act as my assistant in managing the reading room. Industrious, trustworthy, and book-loving, Dana put the shelves in order and maintained the old pretense
of keeping up-to-date records. She was not good-looking, but I
did not want beauty in a woman whose company I hoped would
keep me from becoming lonely. To that end she possessed irrepressible good spirits, which had earned her the nicknames of
“giggles” and “chatterbox.” She somehow got me to join her in
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
65
frequently singing the refrain from a Bob Marley song: “Woman
no cry—everything’s gonna be all right.” Her colleagues generously approved of our unmusical duet, perhaps thinking that a
professor from a society one hundred years ahead must know
whether everything was going to be all right or not.
Dana helped me to decorate the walls of the reading room
with black and white photographs of British contributions to civilization and color pictures of American getaways suitable for a
travel agency. The impression these created reinforced the common Romanian prejudice that the British have culture while the
Americans have fun. The students all acquired a British accent,
while convinced that the Americans were the ones who would
acquire the world, once the Soviets were finished. Why else did
the American flags that we hung on the door of the reading room
keep disappearing? At first I thought that the Arab students tore
them down in hatred (for this was during the first Gulf War), until
several of my students shyly confessed: “We steal them for home
display, to feel less lonely under the weight of liberty.” And so I
obtained more flags from the U.S. Embassy to present to my
thieving learners of the Queen’s English
Thus did I learn to permit some ridiculous activities to occur.
One man, named Serban, visited the reading room every Thursday
to inspect the magazines that the Embassy saw fit to send me:
Time, Newsweek, Cosmopolitan, and Vanity Fair. He had a speech
impediment and wore thick glasses that made him look oafish, yet
he manifested the concentration of a surgeon as he turned the
pages from cover to cover, pausing to copy the addresses he found
for subscriptions, books, merchandise, and especially Caribbean
travel destinations. Some students wanted me to inform Serban
that these advertisements were not meant for someone without
hard currency and a visa. But it struck me that these students were
like this man in being poor and stranded. They, too, visited the
American reading room and turned the pages of books not intended for them in order to find some hope and relief from the
calamity of their birth. He dreamt alone over glossy and scented
photo spreads, and they dreamt with me over the extravagances
of poetry and plays. Besides, among the authors we read there
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were debunkers enough and shipwrecked characters aplenty, but
I shall come to our reading of them soon enough.
Another frequent visitor to the reading room, Nick, age forty,
had somehow earned a black belt in karate in defiance of Ceausescu’s prohibition of the martial arts. He sought books on antiquity. “Your presence here is a sign that Rome has returned to
Romania at last, “ he said, “for America is the one country today
like Rome, the pacifier and lawgiver of nations.” Nick named his
son “Romulus” and chose his middle name to begin with “A,”
so that he would identify himself with the founder of Rome and
the Egyptian sun god, “RA.” By such means he sought to counteract the degrading forces that enslaved people from an early
age by dictating: “You like flowers, don’t you? So dig.”
The American reading room, now supplied with posters of
art and travel, songs and laughter, fragrant fashion magazines,
and impossible dreams, did become an exceptional place. But I
did not realize how original my students must have found it until
I visited a typical Romanian high school, at the invitation of an
English teacher named Nicoleta.
Her pupils rose in unison and saluted me in well-rehearsed
English when I entered their classroom. Then they sat down on
stools beside shared wooden desks whose lowness kept them
hunched over all day, while the blank walls made looking to the
right or left an impertinence. They questioned me about how I
had spent my high school years. “Did you get paid for doing
homework?” a boy asked. I paused at his sincerity, then replied
that I did expect to get paid “in the long run.” They looked at
Nicoleta with satisfaction, as if to say, “We told you so.” “Will
jobs be available for us in America?” another boy asked. Again,
I paused at this candid disclosure of their everyday despair, before answering that jobs of some kind were usually available, but
getting to America would be the difficult part. They nodded their
heads knowingly. They asked me for English books, and I invited
them to the reading room, where they could borrow some. “Our
books are still poisonous,” they said. Nicoleta showed me a textbook of English which included quotations from Hobbes, Locke,
Mill, Dickens, Shaw, and other greats, each followed by Ceaus-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
67
escu’s words of interpretation. “Same ink, same font, same paper,
and therefore,” she said, grimacing, “same genius.” The frontispiece to the book showed Ceausescu’s smiling portrait and his
message to the pupil:
To be a patriot means to spare nothing in order to carry
out the policy of the Communist Party which fully corresponds to the vital interests of the whole nation. This
is amply demonstrated by the economic and social development programme of the Romanian Communist
Party, which derives from a philosophy governed by constant concern for the welfare of man.
His message went on and on in the same pitch—all lies possessing no interest or meaning whatsoever. A physical education instructor cut short my stupefaction by inviting me to a volleyball
exhibition that she had organized on the spur of the moment to
honor my presence in the school. (I felt like a rock star or movie
actor, fawned upon for deeds of nothing.) She put her best boys on
the court, while the rest of the pupils, mostly girls, lined the perimeter of the small gym to watch the match and my reactions to it. The
boys pounded the ball so hard that it flew repeatedly into the girls,
who had no choice but to duck and scream. I recognized, with a
kind of dismay, that my students were once those girls. I clapped
anyway and thanked everyone for a fine performance, at which they
all cheered and looked elated.
As I was about to leave the high school, Nicoleta drew me aside
to an empty room where she unburdened her soul of much worry:
All my pupils know of life is that it gets worse, and all
they have been told of death is that it brings no rewards
or punishments. They will not work for future goods,
since they believe there are none, or for the sake of work
itself, since that would make them the dupes of communism. They want to be happy now, so they dream about
going to America, where they believe happiness is possible. But to get to America they must have dollars, and
the dollar is worth more than our Romanian lei every day.
Where will all this end? Already some of them believe
that they can buy their own souls.
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I tried to recall some brave words that might allay her fears,
yet I was afraid to sound hypocritical, with a pocket full of dollars, backed by God and the United States, in which to trust. I
thought about that Bob Marley song, whose refrain has a distinguished pedigree that includes some lines by a grumpy poet who
knew a lot about souls caught between hope and despair. So I recited them to this sorrowing teacher of English, offering no interpretation, just the citation:
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
—T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets
For the present, however, my students had many reasons to
duck and scream. They were not the children of glorious Rome,
of whose ruins on the Black Sea they boasted, but of Nicolae
Ceausescu, communist tyrant from before they were born. They
attended thirty-six hours of class per week. (A gap in the schedule
would teach them to skip classes and take to the streets, it was
feared.) The margins had disappeared from their essays (paper
was that precious) as surely as the breadth had gone from their
daily lives. Five of them occupied a dormitory room that would
have housed one or two in America. They put boards across their
laps to serve there as desks. Bread was served them days old.
They slept fitfully to the splattering of bottles tossed from dormitory windows by the disdainful foreign students, and to the
fugitive laughter of Romanian girls who prostituted themselves
to these students to obtain colorful African beads or Arabian
scarves. No residence staff stood on call to help them; no professional counselors guided their development; no student organizations received funding to entertain them. Gypsy fortune tellers
were always on hand for many dubious purposes, but their layers
of colorful dress stank from going unwashed. Students marching
for better conditions on the first anniversary of the revolution
were jeered by envious workers for their “dissipation” and told
to get back to classes. For it was considered a great honor to be
accepted to the Alexandru I. Cuza University. Some students had
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | PETRICH
69
taken the entrance exam for English five years in a row before
passing. They had worked in factories in the meantime.
What could I expect students, suffering these conditions, to
achieve intellectually? When I asked them the meaning of a literary passage, a few whispered to each other in Romanian about
the meaninglessness of so bare a question (devoid of the familiar
theoretical cues that implied the correct theoretical answer), while
most stared down in their laps. Who knows what spiritual
changes gradually occur from looking down all the time? I encouraged them to leap over themselves in boldness of thought,
but they had no practice overcoming themselves, only their conditions. Perhaps I could get them to look up, at least, with the
help of America’s most upward-looking authors, the ones who in
fact had inspired me to study literature for a living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson would provide a logical starting point,
I thought, for the reformation of the neck and spinal posture. But
when I assigned them their first essay on the question, “Why trust
yourself?” I received in writing an apology signed by the whole
class:
We are frightened because it is the first time when an
American teacher hears words spoken by ourselves. This
note is a kind of message we want to send to you, because it has been clearly revealed that we have different
ideas about literature, America, the world, and life. We
should want you to understand our low level of comprehension, concerning various aspects of these things.
Please tell us again, if you don’t mind, what you want us
to write.
I decided at once to read Emerson aloud with them, to manifest the felt meanings of his words, before pressing them again
to write what they felt. I modeled his inspiration vocally, and then
I let them try to partake similarly of it. I heard in their voices,
however, not the tone of empowerment, but alien sounds of discontinuity. These sounds were not, I had to admit, unrelated to
Emerson’s style. Contrary to the spirit of this aphoristic sage, I
condescended to offer them a similar apology about my own low
level of comprehension concerning all aspects of Romanian so-
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ciety, which I found altogether different and a little frightening.
Interpreting my apology in material terms, they offered me their
assistance in performing the ordinary tasks of life, and I gratefully
accepted the offer. Thereafter, I never lacked for help in meeting
the necessities of the body. As for the soul, I made them promise
never to accept in our classes the old pedagogical procedure,
whereby students pretended to learn, professors pretended to
teach, and neither side dared to expose the other as a fraud. “We
shall dare to be true to each other,” we pledged, “taking that as
our way to seek truth.” So once a week, in keeping with the promise, someone in class would summon the courage to ask me,
“What do you think of us, honestly, Mr. Petrich?” And I would
tell them, whatever struck me most at the time. I, in turn, would
ask them what they thought of the American writers I offered
them. And they, in turn, told me what struck them most about
these writers, America, and me.
They told me that Walt Whitman, whom I had hoped would
lengthen their spines with a feeling of democratic power more
pleasingly articulated than Emerson’s, reminded them of their
former communist leaders, who loudly gesticulated on behalf of
the people, listing their accomplishments in fields and factories,
on and on and on.
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the
reading of a book,” I quoted from Henry Thoreau. “I am one such
man,” I professed to them. Perhaps my students, in the aftermath
of their revolution and by my example, would find in Walden additional incentives to loosen their ties to collective dejection. But
the first chapter, “Economy,” did not overwhelm the Romanians
as it once did me. They did not know what to make of an American author who had solved the problem of life by reducing it to
its lowest terms and living very simply, like a Spartan. “Isn’t that
how we live now, meanly and miserably?” They did, however,
find much to admire in a man who lived alone and wrote such
things as this: “Society is commonly too cheap. We live thick and
are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think
that we thus lose some respect for one another.” They expected
the chapter called “Brute Neighbors” to develop this favorite,
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anti-social theme, but were disappointed to discover that in it
Thoreau lauds the heroic self-sacrifices of warring red and black
ants. A writer who cultivates poverty and extols the most communistic of animals made them suspicious of his American credentials and economic wisdom.
Surely, I thought, Thoreau’s great essay, “Civil Disobedience,” would inspire their esteem for the power of a propertyless
individual to take on the slaveholding and war-making collective.
But they were not impressed with Thoreau’s leonine showdown
with the bullying American state. On the contrary, they were impressed by the limits of the American state in punishing him. For
upon his release after one night in jail for not paying his tax,
Thoreau went “giddily to pick huckleberries…and then the State
was nowhere to be seen.” A student named Alina, with silky
blond hair and deep, dark eyes, pointed out that some Romanians
had also spent a short time in prison for political reasons, but after
their release they developed terminal cancer. I learned later that
her brother was among those who thus died, and that only then
was the state nowhere to be seen. “We believe they were irradiated there,” she said. “That way Romania kept fewer political
prisoners in the eyes of the world.” Alina invited me to her home
to meet her father, a poet, and mother, who operated a small bar.
Their son also wrote poetry, which apparently had gotten him in
trouble with the Party. The father read some of their poetry to me
in Romanian and Alina translated, her moist eyes locked to mine
for confirmation of her act of translation in me. They carried their
heavy burden of love with the intoxicating help of verse and
drink. On this occasion, they also had me to help, as I felt my
life’s course dip into their well. How many a man, unburdened
of years or grief, an easy sleeper, has let himself fall into the watery eyes of disconsolate poetry, there to see and embrace an ancient, bitter truth about life. Tragedy, as I now saw it enacted
before me, would have to be given its finest American say to
Alina and her colleagues, in keeping of our promise to be true to
each other.
Among the excerpts from approved American authors that
my students had read in high school were bits of dialogue from
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Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. These excerpts were supposed to demonstrate, of course, the cruelties of capitalism. We
read the whole play. The students were surprised to discover that
the young Willy Loman could have escaped from his unnatural
conditions by following his brother Ben to Alaska in search of
diamonds. “People in America move and start over all the time,”
I told them. “So why doesn’t Willy Loman move to Alaska and
start over?” A serious silence ensued, followed by a few whispers.
Then one of my quietest students from across the hated Soviet
border, a Bessarabian boy of stout physique, deep intonation, and
rudimentary English named Dragos, cited a song then popular in
the Soviet Union. I later witnessed the patrons of a Leningrad
restaurant dance triumphantly to its refrain: “Don’t be foolish
America! Return to us Alaska now!” “Russians believe Alaska
belong to them,” said Dragos, “because true Russians never sell
Motherland.” He asked his colleagues for help with English, who
explained that Alaska cannot be part of the American dream because it is geographically and culturally part of Siberia—rich in
oil and minerals, very beautiful, but awfully hard and far away.
“That why Stalin put Gulag there,” Dragos added. The better part
of the class agreed with him: “Better to die like an American in
an automobile [as Willy does] than like a Russian in the Gulag.”
“So what claims of truth does tragedy have among a mobile
and escapist people?” I asked. “Salesmen and their customers are
mobile and escapist by definition.” I had to explain this because
they did not know what salesmen and customers were. Shopkeepers in Romania, working for the State, did not care whether they
sold anything, and their “customers,” having no choice, had no
care over what to buy. True salesmen, I explained, offer their customers a steady supply of newer and finer objects and projects
as the means to live always better than before. But death will not
find it any more difficult than before to rip from the world people
who secure themselves to more and more new things. So true
peace and happiness are not to be found in the economic activities
of the American nation—at least according to Arthur Miller and
Eugene O’Neill (whose tragedy, The Iceman Cometh, that of a
salesman, we also read)—only a kind of continual distraction
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ending in death of the soul and body. “But do they let you do serious work in America, in the midst of all that buying and selling?” asked a handsome student named Constantine. “They hate
people with brains or talents here. I don’t know how much longer
we can hold out.” He, and others whose ambitions resembled his,
had long been smugglers of their own interdicted souls. (The
black market, as I came to understand, dealt not in cigarettes primarily.) “If only there were real salesmen in Romania,” said Constantine, “to distract us from wanting to jump off a cliff. For forty
years we secretly depended on the West for our vision of the future. And now we are supposed to believe these playwrights that
suicide is better than buying and selling?”
A student named Olivia, whose candid, harmonious face
made me look her way many a time, asked me if I really believed
in the truth of tragedy. I evaded the question, not the face, by saying that the text, whether tragic or comic, creates conviction in
itself. She had long ceased to believe the rhetoric of a professor,
and she knew the power of her face to compel confessions from
a man, so she asked me another question: “Why did you come to
Romania, or was it just a stroke of bad luck?” My grandparents,
I told her and the rest, had come to America from Eastern Europe
at the turn of the twentieth-century. They saw the Statue of Liberty upon arrival, whose picture faced us fixedly in the reading
room. I did not have to explain why they had left their homelands.
But as to why I had come back to live in their country, I said that
the people of Bucharest, in the name of liberty, had recently toppled a seventy foot statue of Lenin, who still exists in storage,
and I wanted to study him there, in safety, and to learn to blow
his mass all to pieces.
The students begged me to suspend the lessons of fine American tragedy. While there was still time to learn from each other,
they wanted me to show them how ordinary Americans, like my
own middle class, mid-western family, experienced the culture
of a proud, free country. Movies, television shows, pop music,
and grocery store magazines would become, apropos of their request, subject to study and discussion in class. This approach felt
like an abomination to a reader of the great books from the Uni-
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versity of Chicago, but I owed it to them to give the most popular
products of American culture a showing and hearing. They were
part of the truth. So to this stage of our learning, I let enter our
presence, comedy—not of the literary kind.
I showed to public audiences in the reading room John
Belushi and Dan Ackroyd in The Blues Brothers. This movie contains the longest car chases on record through the streets of
Chicago and the nine, acne-faced, marching Nazis of the Village
of Skokie (where I grew up). The audience enjoyed the leaps of
dance and musical soul-power, but wondered aloud whether evil
could be laughed and sung away. My first real job, I explained,
was with the traffic engineering department of the Village. It was
my task to help devise a traffic plan that would allow those Nazis
to march on certain public streets, according to their First Amendment right, while minimizing civic disruption and the pain to
Skokie’s many Jews and Holocaust survivors. “My own nextdoor neighbor bore a tattoo on his arm from Auschwitz,” I mentioned. “Did you support their right to march?” they asked.2
“Yes,” I answered, simply. We began a discussion about the comedian’s faith in the power of ridicule, for which exposure is required. “These young men were exposed as idiots by their very
right to public access, and they quickly disappeared afterward,”
I said. “Does that mean that rights and comedy go together?”
someone asked. I had not thought about rights in that way before,
but with premature enthusiasm, I said, “Yes, they do.” Then I
added, more cautiously, “So long as the public audience has the
clear-eyed intelligence to recognize the ridiculous and the strong
hearts to laugh it all the way to scorn.”
I showed the Romanians a “Dirty Harry” detective movie
with introductory remarks by a former American cop. He was
2. Romania had been an enthusiastic ally of Hitler, at first. A serious
pogrom occurred in Iasi in 1941, without German assistance. The Romanian Communist Party always insisted that the persecutions of the
Jews were entirely the responsibility of the previous regime. So my students did not grow up with any kind of Holocaust study beyond the
mere blaming of others.
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75
then a Fulbright Scholar doing research on the fifteenth-century
Wallachian Prince, Vlad II Dracul, heroic impaler of infidel
Turks.3 “Police in America are not like yours in Romania,” he
said, “because we go after the bad guys—like Prince Vlad II did.”
One woman asked me if I could hear the guns firing away in
Chicago. I showed them Dracula in one of the modern film versions, because “this is all most Americans know about Romania.” The women in the audience felt puzzled to find Count
Dracula, a vampire, portrayed as preferable to the normal men
in the film as a mate. (Their puzzlement was a clue to something
that I should have paid more attention to, as we shall see shortly.)
The movie Reds made the audience feel uneasy by its soft treatment of Bolshevism. Corinna, one of my most sarcastic students,
asked: “So is that what intelligent and hearty Americans in 1920
did with their lives—they ran off to Russia to fight for communism?” Rain Man, however, gave them back the typical Hollywood version of their beloved American dream: sexy women,
fast cars, easy money, and to make them feel warm inside, love
for autistic savants.
The movie Glory, with its stirring depiction of the first black
regiment to fight in the American Civil War, made a deep impression on the Romanians. One man thanked me in tears for
showing it, saying, “You are a lucky country to win that war. The
good side does not have to win, you know.” A doctor in the audience found the movie flawed because the black soldiers were
“on the other side already, too much like the white soldiers.” I
prodded her to say more on this subject. “The movie assumes
what it is supposed to prove, that blacks and whites are equal,”
she said. “Maybe they are equal, but I would like more proof.”
Others in the audience agreed with her. “600,000 Americans died
in the American Civil War over the question of equality,” I
replied. “President Lincoln seemed to think that the magnitude
of carnage in our great civil war was proof—and penance—
enough.” I then summoned the courage to ask them something
3. “Dracul” means “Order of the Dragon.” Vlad II has become known
to us as the vampire, “Dracula.”
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that had been nagging me for a long time. “Why do you think
that 1200 dead on behalf of your own liberation is too much?
Maybe, to prove that you deserve freedom, it is not enough. What
does it take for slaves, black or white, to get to the other side?”
Someone replied that the death toll would have been higher in
Romania had the revolution not been stolen by apparatchiks. “It
is a pity,” I said, “that the suspicion that adheres to former slaves
requires extreme measures to be overcome.” I marveled that they
agreed without reluctance to this terrible conclusion.
The selections from current American television that my parents sent me appeared to my students like scenes from a distant
galaxy. We watched Oprah Winfrey interview fat people who
complained they were victims of size discrimination. My students
memorized the patterns in Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair, so they
were very discriminating themselves, and having stood for hours
in milk and egg lines, they were not sympathetic to “size oppression.” I also showed them Joan Rivers interviewing the fourteen
personalities of a schizophrenic, all sitting still in one chair, followed by a man who believed he was a woman but had not yet
undergone the operation to make him one. “How do you feel
when you look at yourself naked in the mirror?” asked Joan.
“Very uneasy and distracted,” said the man. Thus did my students
glimpse what ordinary Americans, my own dear family, watched
on TV or at the movies to fulfill their comic destinies.
Since my students wanted to know all about my native city,
which I felt all too eager to show off, I decided to direct them in
a comedy by David Mamet, a favorite Chicago playwright, called
Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974). I chose this play because,
like most people in theatre, I felt tempted to challenge (what I
perceived to be) the unsatisfactory status quo in Romanian society. Though Mamet’s play is physically innocent (not even a kiss
is exchanged), its language admirably fulfills the promise of the
title. I hoped that the racy words, substituting for romantic and
sexual action, would retain their original picturesqueness to a Romanian audience and teach them something about the powers of
language. I wanted to expand for them the possibilities of their
own becoming human under the new dispensation of freedom.
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On such grounds as the above, suitably rendered in academic
jargon, I defended the merits of the play before my up-to-datemongering colleagues. “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” I said,
“is about the construction of society by self-referential language,
the gender-determining parameters of language, and the circulation of diverse social energies through language.” Thus I got the
better portion of my colleagues to overlook the titular theme of
the play, for a while.
One morning the Chairman of the English Department interrupted my class, escorted me into the hall (my students left staring), and began to address me. “Louis, our university is a place
for free inquiry and discussion, and I would support your efforts
to do anything to these purposes, but I read the play and, well,
let me say that we expected something more elevating from a
person as serious as yourself. I can’t agree that this play is worth
doing.” I explained my serious intentions, but he continued to
address me thus: “Between men like us bedroom relations are
normal to discuss, but you have women to think about and your
reputation among the students, who I’m afraid might misconstrue
your purposes.” I admitted that this was a concern of mine, but
that the nature of theatre is self-exposure and risk, and I promised
to conduct myself in a professional manner at all times. Still, he
continued: “I expect that sometime in the future this play could
be done here successfully, for we are not a puritanical people, but
the sexual content is . . . well . . . we’ve only recently had a revolution, and we are not like Americans with sex, we prefer to
keep it private.” I said that my purpose was to show people a certain comic face of America, not to recommend imitation. The
play discourages that. Nonetheless, he continued: “I will not
stand in your way, as you are free to do as you please on your
own time, but I expected you to consult with me as Chairman.
Students are hesitant to offend you, but my position authorizes
me to say that this play is not appropriate for Romania at this
time. Have you thought of other worthy options?” I promised that
I would distribute a program preparing the audience for the content. Then they would be free not to attend or to leave at any time
during the performance—for I was determined to direct the play
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unless my actors proved unable. With that declaration firmly understood, he left me, and I returned to my anxious students to test
whether or not they were ready to undertake Sexual Perversity
in Chicago.
I asked them first what they thought of the pornographic photos that had begun to appear on the front pages of their daily
newspapers. Someone said that as a newly free society, Romania
was obliged to include images of naked women in its newspapers.
Others joked that this phenomena was not pornography, but a
new style of photo-impressionism, since the quality of print was
so poor that the female parts could be discerned only with a
trained eye. The abolition of human distinctions and standards of
taste under communism made me ask them next how the two
sexes in Romania managed to pair off. What were the criteria of
choice? They assured me that although it was very difficult to
conduct a romance without the benefits of leisure and privacy,
the job of mating did get done more romantically than not. The
ugly uniformity of things made female beauty seem a heroic
achievement, all the more alluring and satisfying to possess for
oneself alone. Naturally, I asked them what they thought of the
condoms appearing for the first time in stores. (Ceausescu had
forbidden birth control and abortion, because it was claimed he
wanted more workers.) They replied that a free people should
have condoms available for purchase, but they did not think that
they needed to use them as urgently as the generous donations
from the West implied. Unless referring to gypsies, the students
saw no reason to join the two concepts, “unwed” and “mother.”
Nor did they expect to practice cohabitation before marriage.
There was simply no room for shacking up, and there were no
Romanian role models to exhibit all the smiling ways to sexual
liberation. How, then, would I audition these students to find four
who possessed the colorful vocabularies and wild imaginations
necessary to impersonate sexually liberated, sophisticated, urban
Americans? The Fulbright Scholar who was formerly a cop and
becoming an expert on Romania’s infamous impaler, suggested
that I show a pornographic film to my potential actors: whoever
could provide a voice-over for the action belonged in the play.
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79
My best female candidate, Sandina, who possessed the kind
of looks appropriate for motorcycles, dropped into a ten second
coma upon reading the title. So I took back the script and handed
it to Carmen. Always a game girl in discussion, she read the first
three short scenes and stated peremptorily: “There are three
scenes I cannot do.” “But there’s no doing involved, just talking,”
I replied. “That’s what I meant,” she said. Roxana, whose tall
boots and angularity made me offer her the part of a brittle feminist, bravely spit out the scripted words—“premature ejaculation”—as an example of the unspeakable. The play was like a
gun filled with blanks to me, but to her the words were real bullets. These women seemed in tacit agreement with Plato’s notion
that the consent to hear or say vulgar words creates an aptitude
to witness or perform vulgar deeds. I began to feel ashamed to
tamper with modesty so deeply felt. I saw that against a background of officially sponsored animality, discrete romantic love
seemed the only civilizing agent left in Romania. To abandon it,
even in play, was to offer universal sway to barbarism, and these
women knew instinctively not to do that. Their innocence appeared a precious achievement in that corrupt and filthy world.
But their unequivocal rejection of the play bothered me all the
same, for what cannot be said also would not be thought, and this
seemed to me a formula for the disappearance of the life of the
mind. To be the virtuous allies of intellectual dullness was to put
themselves in league with my chief enemies.
What finally killed the production was the combination of the
modesty of women with the politics of men. Mihai, my irreplaceable lead actor, withdrew from the play because his father, once
an important figure in the Party, did not want him acting “decadent.” So I decided to direct the students in scenes from Othello
and Romeo and Juliet instead. Shakespeare’s elevated poetry and
aspiring thoughts made even the most prurient and immoral sentiments seem highly delectable to the students, the Chairman, my
colleagues, and the public.
Of all the writers we studied, the students liked Tennessee
Williams the best. Like Shakespeare, he is poetic with his perversities. Moreover, they easily recognized in him their own in-
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herited sense of defeat, along with a perilous attraction to the
victors. I gave them a brief account of Williams’s life, which included the fact of his homosexuality. This caught their attention.
“We were taught that homosexuals sprung up in the decadent
West, like weeds, but that they did not exist in socialist Romania.
Of course we don’t believe much of anything we were taught.”
They were amazed to read Broadway plays written by Williams
forty years earlier that were sympathetic to homosexuality,
fetishism, masturbation, and rape, when only a year ago a Romanian author would have been put in prison for writing one
such play.
We read A Streetcar Named Desire and watched the movie
version starring Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski. Some
women let themselves go in appreciation of Brando’s naked,
sweaty torso: “Would that someone with arms like his might
carry us away, sickness and all, master of this thing called ‘life.’”
Most were disgusted by Stanley’s crudeness, for in Romania
men still greeted women with a bow and a kiss on the hand.
“Why couldn’t Stella have married both a true gentleman and a
one-hundred percent American?” they asked. I tried to explain
that these were incompatible categories to Williams. He believed
in the predestined defeat in America of poetry, refinement, and
old world breeding by the forces of prosaic realism, animal
strength, and new world technology. On this belief his tragicomic vision depended.
Still, some of the women thought they had found their ideal
man, a combination of old and new world types, in Jim O’Conner, the Gentleman Caller from The Glass Menagerie. He is the
long awaited “something,” says Williams, which defeated people
must hope for to go on living. At the same time, and in contrast
with his fantastical role, he is “an emissary from the world of
reality” who brings news of modernity to Laura Wingfield, crippled and deeply secluded in her past. Let me remind the reader
of what happens to Jim and Laura, for as my year in Romania
drew to a close, and the students and I drew ever closer to each
other, I saw in the relationship of these characters a true image
of our own.
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Jim approaches Laura carrying a lit candelabrum and wine, superficially romantic but quite unaware of being the “climax of her
secret life.” She has always loved her image of him, and now she
faces the insupportable reality. Jim wonders what Laura has done
over the years, not knowing the depth of forlorn hope that could keep
her occupied waiting for him. Her problem, he concludes, is an “inferiority complex,” and to effect her cure he offers himself as a
model. This believer in self-improvement, determined to find some
way to get everyone looking up and going somewhere up, prepares
Laura for the future of capitalist democracy by teaching her to dance.
In the process they topple and break her favorite ornament, a unicorn,
but for the moment she accepts the loss as a “blessing in disguise,”
a sign of her return to normalcy. Then he kisses her on the lips to
demonstrate that her attractive powers are real. This startles him. He
realizes that to save Laura from her inferiority complex, he would
have to husband her away from her present circumstances. (For the
paranoia surrounding her nostalgic mother has sealed Laura inside
herself.) Luckily, he is already engaged, so he escapes the love he
evoked in her and the new life he promised. She gives him the hornless unicorn as a symbolic souvenir. It is the consequence of his
clumsy efforts—like those of a tourist—to separate her unique attractions from her hobbling infirmity.
Several of my Romanian “Lauras,” after a year of intense conversations about “literature, America, the world, and life,” bravely
took to telling me how exceptional a man I was to prefer their imperfect English to the pleading beauty of their perfectly painted eyes.
I owed them a return for the love they kept for me all those years,
and in final desperation they let me know how much.
Christiana, a woman of half-looks and whispers in class, invited
me to a student party at her sister’s apartment in May. I attended and
danced with her and the other women, felt her cling to me, let myself
enjoy their uplifted hearts differently, and smelt the residue of a thousand cigarettes in the proximity of their lips. The next day I discovered in a letter that I was Christiana’s only hope of happiness:
I feel more and more that I can’t breathe. Anytime a “decree” can appear in order to destroy, to put off my life.
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Sometimes, when I free myself from this asphyxia, I understand that I have the right to live and to experience
the mystery—the first source of superiority—that I can
breathe stealthily a kind of hidden air. You breathed that
air into me. A bird who flies smack into concrete whenever she tries to rise—that is me, I fear, when you leave.
Others are just under vain illusions, for there’s no laughter at the end of our slope, but stupid death, and there’s
no triumph and no understanding. All is weird, but also
dull and senseless here. It is the season of Goths and lunatics, that’s all. I ask you for help as I shout my love
without fear or shame, my soul defeated and caressed.
I gave Christiana some of my books when I left for home that
summer. She was supposed to become a teacher of English, but
I do not know if that came to pass, or if she is doing well, yet.
She has preferred only my books to keep the contact, I may suppose. A book, as we all should say of the good ones, is a fine
thing to keep in the space between two people who are inclining
to be engaged as one. A book makes it possible to cross that space
and that time in which two people diverge along their courses of
life. I always prefer to keep a good book between us.
Stopping in Vienna on my way back to America, I visited the
Schönbrunn Palace, once the summer residence of the Hapsburg
monarchs. While walking among the splendid gardens and fountains, I encountered a bold sign that read: “Please, Don’t Eat the
Swans.” The words were in Romanian. I remembered the previous summer, as I prepared my Fulbright application while reading
news reports about the Romanian miners sacking the capital.
“Yes,” I thought, “I did have to drag a cane behind me on the
streets at night to puzzle the abandoned dogs who were forming
packs again, learning to act like wolves.” But that is not the main
thing I felt as I beheld those swans and the sign. That year I spent
in Iasi felt even then like an oasis in my mind, and I have often
gone there since to refresh myself. There, in my mind’s eye, I
wonder long at how strangely happy I was to be teaching so awkwardly, freely, bravely even, with the wolves still close at heel
and all my familiar props far distant, to students just learning to
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fly, who let me see into the beauty of their fledgling souls, and
who made me see into mine. My old friend, Mark, the newsman
to whom, in a way, I owe my oasis, is trying to get me to go
abroad again—this time without leaving America—to teach the
poor masses by internet technology all at once, filling their empty
heads with information, entertaining and useful items, and getting
for my pains multitudinous fees. Something in me wants to erect
for us a sign. For the sake of the wonder at living human faces,
composed of the love of the infinite, the profound, beheld in those
faces, I would raise a sign in bold English, the language of America and nearly all the world on the make, to say: “Please, Let Us
Not Eat the Swans Again.”
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Dante’s Beatrice: Between Idolatry
and Iconoclasm
Gabriel Pihas
1. A Response to Two Objections to Beatrice1
Some readers have taken issue with Dante’s bringing together
eros and agape in the character of Beatrice. I will try to show
how concern about the erotic element in his poetry is connected
to other worries about iconoclasm that take shape in the centuries
after Dante. I will first outline the connection between these issues, and then try to defend Dante on both points.
Famously, the protestant theologian Anders Nygren attacked
Medieval Catholicism and formulated a deep separation between
eros and Christian love.2 His reservation about eros has to do with
its self-interested character. That is, his separation of eros from
agape is motivated by a desire to separate our self-love from
agape, and our human nature from God’s nature. According to
Nygren, the new, unique love that Christ taught had nothing to
do with any other love that lets human beings ascend to God; it
had nothing to do, for example with Socrates’s eros in the Symposium. For Nygren, the uniqueness of Christianity lies in the insight that we are not justified by the law and deserve nothing for
Gabriel Pihas teaches at St. Mary’s College of California. This essay
was first given as a lecture at St. John’s College in Annapolis on 2
December 2011.
1. I want to express my gratitude for what this article owes to an NEH
study group on agape and philia in which I participated in 2009 at St.
John’s College, Annapolis. I am indebted both to the group’s discussions
and to the lecture “Agape” that Paul Ludwig delivered at Annapolis
after leading that group, on 9 April 2010.
2. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip Watson (London:
SPCK, 1953). The word agape is commonly translated as “charity” and
I will use the words charity and agape interchangeably.
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our own virtue. 3 We are wretched sinners infinitely distant from
God, and no effort of our own can explain God’s condescension
to us. On our side there is only selfish eros, while agape is an incomprehensible miracle. For Nygren, this unmotivated condescension is the whole of Christian love.4 Some have raised
reasonable difficulties with this position. First, its excessive
harshness makes election too irrational. It leaves an enormous
gap between an unbelievably unmotivated agape and what we
clearly and fundamentally are, namely, desiring beings seeking
happiness.5 His view makes it difficult to understand the many
passages in the bible that seem to suggest our involvement in salvation, like “as many as received him, He gave them power”
(John 1:12). And second, equally importantly, one might add that
this doctrine leaves us swallowed up by God.6 We clearly lose
the dignity of our person at least in this condescension, and perhaps lose our person altogether.
I would like to draw a parallel to this separation of our eros
and agape in what at first might seem a distant sphere, namely,
iconoclasm, or the rejection of sacred art as idolatry. From the
idolatry issue arises a second, and related, objection to Beatrice.
Let me first explain what iconoclasm is, and then come back to
drawing the parallel with eros and agape. Fundamentally, there
are two very reasonable theological concerns behind iconoclasm.7
3. Nygren, 67-9.
4. Ibid., 75-6.
5. In “Agape,” Paul Ludwig argued that over-emphasis on the purely
miraculous nature of agape is one of the major problems with postLutheran accounts of it. Through a reading of New Testament uses of
agape, he argues that Nygren’s claim of a radical divide between classical philosophical strands in medieval caritas and New Testament
agape is exaggerated.
6. For some of these objections see D’Arcy, M.C. The Mind and the
Heart of Love (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 352-5.
7. There are, of course, also political motivations in iconoclasm. For
example, destruction of religious art can express opposition to the political institution of the Church through the objects it claims to safeguard and which are understood to maintain its power and its special
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First, it implies an intention to protect God from our theoretical
misconstruals of his ineffable nature and his unity, and to enhance
our inward respect for God by keeping him above anything down
here that might represent him. Second, it implies a desire to defend popular religion from superstitious religious practice. Interest in images is often connected to popular belief in magic
powers, even those latent in the very materials of the image, the
wood, paint, and stone. So there is something very thoughtful
and pious in iconoclasm. Also, there are certainly many scriptural
authorities for iconoclasm, above all, the second commandment
against graven images. But there is often also a risk of incoherence in iconoclasm. It suggests separating religion from any particular religious practice or institution. This is emphatically the
case for Christian iconoclasm, which is what I want to focus on
in this essay. For Christians, there is more latitude with images
than in other forms of monotheism. The Incarnation itself—the
idea that God became a particular human being in the womb of
a particular human woman, that He suffered and died and is
risen—almost naturally suggests making images of God. The
continual retelling of Christ’s story in pictures for the illiterate is
fundamental to the possibility of transmitting the story. This, in
fact, was part of the very earliest Christian defense of images.
But there is even more than such practical necessity to recommend images. The theology around the Incarnation suggests
a terrestrial reality preserved in transcendence. In the Incarnation
God became flesh, visible flesh. We can draw pictures of the God
who became flesh even if we can’t draw the invisible God. Part
of what is at stake in Christian iconoclastic debates is a concern
stature. The holiness of the icon is a kind of symbol for the holiness of
the Church itself, hence doubts about the sacred nature of the one takes
away political power from the other. This thesis was explored by David
Freeberg in Iconoclasts and their Motives (Montclair, N.J.: A. Schram,
1985). Similar claims about the political significance of iconoclasm in
ancient Israel were made by Joseph Guttman, “Deuteronomy: Religious
Reformation or Iconoclastic Revolution?” in The Image and the Word:
Confrontations in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York: Scholars
Press for the American Academy of Religion, 1977), 5-10.
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about representing human nature in the image of God. A picture
of Christ presents our humanity to us. It places God’s uncircumscribed nature in the visible, circumscribed human image. Most
importantly, the image is essential to Christianity because it is an
image in the depths of God himself, since Christ is an image of
God the Father.
Some Christians, like John of Damascus, who defended art
during the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth century, saw the artistic image as a sacramentally valuable, low-level
emanation from God. He suggested a chain or ladder of images
of God. On this ladder of emanations we find, at the top, Christ
the image of the Father; then the image of Christ in the Virgin
Mary, then in the saints, and then in man, who is made in the
image of God. Finally, at the bottom are painted images.8 He argued that we should revere the image of Christ as if it were Christ
himself because we mean by the word “image” not the physical
materials of which an art object is made, but rather the original
that the image depicts and participates in—namely, in this case,
Christ’s humanity, something worthy of the highest kind of worship.9 This argument was used many times the Middle Ages, as,
for example, by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica.
Images were an important element in the early Christian debates about Christ’s human nature. With the very first Christians,
Christ was only ever represented symbolically (for example, as
a fish or a lamb), and never in sculptures, but only in paintings.
These early Christians had reservations about images, even
though objects like the Eucharist and the relic already suggest
8. John Damascene, Apologia of St. John Damascene Against Those
Who Decry Holy Images, trans. Mary H. Allies (London: Thomas
Baker, 1898). This ladder of images is described at length in the final
chapter of the trestise, “How Many Kinds of Images There Are.”
9. John compares the question about the image of God to the ordinary
use of images of the king, and to the importance accorded a king’s representatives. The representatives and the images get the same respect
the king gets. This argument was frequently reused in later debates to
defend the “iconodule,” or anti-iconoclast, position.
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Incarnational alternatives to the magic powers of pagan idols that
pave the way for later defenses of Christian art.10 I suggest that
the initial reservations about images might derive from a hostile
social context, and were not expressions of the mature faith: some
of its reservations derived from inherited Jewish practices, some
from a desire to distinguish Christianity from the pagan practice
surrounding them in Rome. Many reservations about images of
Christ derived merely from a need to maintain secrecy so as to
avoid persecution.11 Slightly later, when the persecution of Christians was no longer an issue, images of Christ most often appeared in group scenes telling stories from the New Testament
for the illiterate. But images of Christ appearing by himself, and
not symbolically, begin to become more common after paganism
vanished in Rome in the middle of the fifth century. These images
were often produced to affirm the doctrinal importance of the Incarnation against other heretical understandings of Christ’s nature. At that time a number of heresies circulated, such as the
claim that Christ’s human nature was erased in his divine nature,
or the opposed claim that Christ was merely a human instrument
of God. According to such views, it would not make any sense
to venerate the human image. In contrast, the act of veneration
10. I take this point from Marc Fumaroli, “The Christian Critique of
Idolatry” in Idol Anxiety, ed. Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft,
trans. Benjamin Storey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 3241. As he points out, in the Eucharist and the relic we find the real presence, not just reminders of God. These new objects will oppose the
pagan demons previously thought to be present within statues and
amulets.
11. My suggestion implies that the way the apostles worshipped was
not always the best way. The iconoclastic Calvin took offense at such a
suggestion (Institutes 1.2.13) . But we see such limitations attributed to
the apostles explicitly in the gospels themselves, especially with regard
to this issue of seeing the image of the invisible God. For example,
when Phillip asks Christ to show him the Father (John 14:8), he is still
in the mode of waiting for the fulfillment of the prophets, and unaware
of what he has before him. (I owe this point to a private conversation
with Marsaura Shukla.)
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of the images of Christ as a man emphasizes that all of his divinity is present along with his visible humanity. Such veneration of
images is thus a way of affirming both natures. This non-symbolic human image was thought to be so important that the symbolic presentation of Christ as a lamb was even expressly banned
in the 600s, and the representation of Christ as a man became not
a possibility but a requirement.12 Opposition to the images was
never simply about the limits of art, or even about religious practice. It involved much more fundamental questions about the nature of the divine. Hence iconoclasm in all of its historical
appearances always involved opposition not merely to the depiction of Christ, but to the adoration of Mary and the saints, in or
out of pictures. Just as Byzantine and Protestant iconoclasts were
suspicious of images, they were also suspicious, for similar reasons, of the adoration of the saints and Mary. This broader context of communion with Mary and the saints is, as we shall see,
directly relevant to Beatrice.
Now I can finally establish the parallel I want to draw with
eros and agape. Unease about an image of Christ’s humanity
and Christ’s humanity itself is similar to the unease felt by the
separators of eros and agape, who don’t want to find self-regard
mixed up with agape. The fear of contaminating agape with eros
is another form of the fear of contaminating the infinite God with
our finite humanity in the images we make. The fear that our
own ascent through eros diminishes God’s condescension in
agape is similar to the fear that any work of our hands diminishes the honor we give to God. Both fears are understandable,
but are generally problematic attempts to eliminate our self-regard in finding our good. Both imply an idea of the supernatural
12. See Edward James Martin, A History of the Iconoclast Controversy
(London: Church Historical Society, 1930; reprinted 1978), 20-21. The
prohibition on the image of the lamb appears in the Quinsext Council,
Canon #82. The claim in that canon is that the human image reminded
us better than the lamb image of the “humiliation of the word of God”
and “his conversation in the flesh, passion…death…and redemption.”
This document is from 692 A.D.
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that wholly effaces our human nature. Both can verge on hatred
of our humanity. Dante offers an alternative Christian view that
does not eliminate self-regard, but attempts to include it, and
that does not simply efface our human nature. According to Nygren’s view, Dante is one of the most representative of all offenders in confusing eros and agape.13 For Dante, the ascent of
eros can complement the descent of agape. Both movements
may even be united in the same soul at the same time, and transformed eros can proportionately reflect agape. So, I will try to
show how different Dante’s literary works are from the more
modern view in respect to the way he brings eros and agape together.
Dante’s writing is also provocative in the context of the
idolatry issue. Like the seventh-century prohibition on the
merely symbolic images of Christ, his work demands a new
level of realism and historical detail. His inclusion of Virgil and
the classical world in combination with his rehabilitation of the
city of man suggest a new dignity in our humanity, unthinkable
in many earlier Christian writers. In fact, one of Dante’s central
aims in writing the Commedia is to take temporal power away
from the Church and establish the dignity of worldly government. But this political innovation is merely the flip side of
Dante’s theological-erotic innovation. The great novelty of
Dante’s political doctrines went hand in hand with the novelty
of making the beloved lady of courtly love poetry into a figure
of religious awe. The beautiful image of Beatrice pointed Dante
toward God, both during her life and after her death. Remarkably, her earthly reality is always preserved in her transcen13. For Nygren’s attack on Dante, see Agape and Eros, 616-620. His
claim is simply that Dante has too many Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian
philosophical elements for him to be Christian. Nygren tries to make
his argument against Dante merely by identifying such elements in
Dante’s thought. Here is not the place to discuss in detail the parts of
Nygren’s book unrelated to Dante, but the radical and problematic contention that Christianity cannot involve any such classical philosophical
elements is central to his broader argument.
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dence, as Christ’s is in the Incarnation.14 This paradox distinguishes Dante’s ideal woman from much more common symbolic or allegorical ideal women. As he himself said, by placing
Beatrice in heaven gazing upon God, he praised her in a way that
no poet had ever praised any woman.15
In fact, no one had ever done it before because it is a very
odd thing to do. With what right could Dante make a beautiful
woman a mediatrix to God? Is he worshipping her as an idol?
Some have said Yes. In the wake of Reformation, Protestant
iconoclasm, and the Index of Forbidden Books, we find a
Catholic editor in Italy, Bartolomeo Sermartelli, who worried
that Dante’s love was simply theologically offensive. In 1576,
about two hundred and fifty years after Dante’s death, in the
first printed edition of his early book, the Vita Nuova, the love
theology was heavily censored.16 All Dante’s scriptural citations
were removed. Passages attributing divine qualities to Beatrice
were deleted or cleaned up. For example, where the text said
that Beatrice offers him salute (salvation), we find instead the
more banal word saluto (salutation). And where Dante says she
generates beatitudine (blessedness), we find the word changed
to felicitá (happiness). The chapter where she is most explicitly
identified with Christ (Chapter 24) was simply deleted. This
censorship was founded on the separation between eros and
agape. This separation underlies the whole history of the ideal
woman in Renaissance literature in this period, from Ariosto’s
14. This well-worn point is familiar to most through Erich Auerbach’s
writings on Dante. See Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular
World, trans.,Ralph Manheim (New York: New York Review of
Books, 2007 and Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature (Princeton: Princton University Press, 2003). The idea originated, for Auerbach and his generation at least, with Hegel. See Auerbach, Mimesis, 191.
15. Dante, Vita Nuova, chap. 42.
16. See Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20040, 173.
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Angelica, to Cervantes’s Dulcinea, and later to Milton’s Eve.
Although some of these authors would not see themselves as
fundamentally motivated by theological concerns, nonetheless
they were all impressed by the idea that the beloved of the
chivalric tradition was idolatrous. Just as the iconoclast reformers sought to destroy the sacred images, so also certain poets
and novelists at the same time attacked the chivalric view of
love. But they did not limit themselves to this renunciation of
erotic idolatry. They attacked the chivalric view of both love
and arms, that is, they attacked both the ideal women and the
ideals of worldly honor. While we have become used to thinking of such attacks as obvious, Dante opposed them. He affirmed both the transcendence of the ideal woman as well as
the integrity of honor and the worldly political order, when part
of a Christian life. Hence Dante’s adapatation of literary realism
was not a reaction against theology, but an extension of his theological bent.
Unlike Dante’s literary realism, the new literary realism that
some of these later authors pursued, and which became the
foundation for modern realism, was founded on the incompatibility of our terrestrial reality and the manifestation of God.17
These authors begin from the hiddenness of God and of his
providence, rather than with the sacramental idea of nature.
Hence the theological issues that are involved in my defense of
Dante and his challenge to iconoclasm have a relevance that extends to modern literature as well as political and aesthetic theory. I will now present Beatrice as an alternative to this early
modern theology.
2. Beatrice as Christ in Vita Nuova
In the thirteenth century, poets explored the conflict between
17. The other element that distinguishes the two camps is their differing
attitude to pagan poetry. The new realism attempts to end the ancient
epic, which it regards as an ongoing tradition, while Dante is attempting
to revive an epic tradition that per lunga silenzio parea fioco (from long
silence seemed hoarse. (Inferno 1.63.)
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courtly love and religion from a few different angles.18 Guittone
d’Arezzo renounced love poetry and became a monk, writing religious poems against the courtly tradition. He stressed the moral opposition between divine love and the poet’s human lust. Two other
poets who were extremely close to Dante, Guido Cavalcanti and
Guido Guinizelli, although less ascetic and less pious than Guittone,
expressed similar concerns. Cavalcanti worried about the excessive
focus on one’s own, and on the private possession of the beloved,
which were obstacles to the universality of philosophical truth, and
to our good according to reason. He thought that being overwhelmed
by the passion of love divides the soul and implies forgetting that at
which reason aims. Guido Guinizelli’s poetry playfully suggested
that the earthly lady who was object of love and praise was more
than metaphorically divine, and hence was in sinful competition with
God. He saw that the implicit religious elements in the courtly love
tradition, and in poetry itself, were clearly idolatrous. But he never
took the problem very seriously and never sought a resolution to this
problem. In the story of Paolo and Francesca in Inferno 5, Dante
gives his own account of Guinizelli’s problem. But long before writing that canto, the young Dante already writes the Vita Nuova, a book
dedicated to Guido Cavalcanti that addresses all these various objections. As we will see, the Vita Nuova is a miniature of the major
action of the Divine Comedy.
Dante’s love for Beatrice in the Vita Nuova is unusual in that it
is not at all libidinal. Beatrice’s beauty is inseparably bound up with
her moral virtue, and beyond any lust that might make Dante forget
about his highest aims.
“It happened that her image, which was always with me,
gave boldness to Love to rule over [me], but was of such noble
virtue that it never let Love rule me without the faithful counsel
of reason.”19
18. For a thoughtful account of the tradition of vernacular love poetry and
the question of heresy, see Pamela Williams Through Human Love to God
(Leicester: Troubadour Publishing, 2007), especially 9-11, and 76-77.
19. Vita Nuova, chapter 2. E avvenga che la sua imagine, la quale continuatamente meco stave, fosse baldanza d’Amore a segnoreggiare me,
tuttavia era di sì nobilissima vertù, che nulla volta sofferse che Amore
mi reggesse sanza lo fedele consiglio de la ragione.
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So, contrary to Cavalcanti’s objection, Dante is never
blinded or even distracted by physical passion, and never ceases
thinking about God when looking on Beatrice. Dante’s experience of eros begins from the already religiously-infused courtly
love tradition. It is this tradition that explains part of Dante’s simultaneous interest in Beatrice as a beautiful woman and the
non-libidinal character of that interest. From the beginning Beatrice is the courtly domina, his “lady” in the sense of the feminine
form of “lord.” But as we will see, Dante goes further. Exactly
insofar as her image causes Love to overcome his faculties, he
becomes free of libido. Dante addresses Guinizelli’s concerns
by taking the religious element in the courtly tradition and radicalizing it in a most daring way.20 Beatrice is introduced as the
“glorious lady of my mind” (gloriosa donna de la mia mente)
and a young angel. The title of the book, New Life, recalls Paul’s
phrase (Romans 6:3-4) about giving up the old life of sin and
entering into the new life of grace. His meeting with Beatrice is
nothing less than the experience of God’s grace, now in the intimate world of his memory that the book records. Her beauty
is miraculous, and is rooted in the Trinity. The Vita Nuova is frequently compared to contemporary accounts of saint’s lives.
That is the genre to which it belongs. Beatrice’s appearance on
earth is a unique and miraculous event that Dante claims to have
witnessed, and he transcribes it from the book of his memory to
share with those who never saw her.
At the opening of the Vita Nuova, Dante describes his vision
of Beatrice as a beatific vision: “As she passed through a street,
she turned her eyes to where I stood very fearful, and with her
ineffable courtesy, which is today rewarded in eternal life, she
greeted me with great virtue, so much that I seemed to see all the
limits of blessedness.”21
20. For the uniqueness of Dante’s gesture, see John A. Scott, Understanding Dante (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2004) 16-17.
21. Vita Nuova, chapter 3. [P]assando per una via, volse li occhi verso
quella parte ov’io era molto pauroso, e per la sua ineffabile cortesia, la
quale è oggi meritata nel grande secolo, mi salutoe molto virtuosamente,
tanto che me parve allora vedere tutti li termini de la beatitudine.
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It is difficult to imagine passing a woman in the street and
taking it for beatitude. Dante must have seen the inner meaning
of her beauty as an effect of the Creator, not merely as the beauty
of the creature for its own sake. The beauty appears as an emanation of God much as Neo-Platonic thinkers like Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus might have suggested. Scholars have
focused on a number of more historically proximate potential
sources who followed exactly such theological theories about the
vision of beauty, including Bernard of Clairvaux, Richard of St.
Victor, and Bonaventure.22
Beatrice makes others who see her more like herself, just as
in greeting Dante she will transform him into Love itself. Beatrice has this effect on all who are noble enough to be able to see
her. This is the most unusual thing about Dante’s love for Beatrice. It is the aspect of courtly love that is most obvious from its
name, but least often taken seriously because it is so distant from
us: Dante’s love is shared, public erotic love, not private love.
Dante is the beloved for all Florentine gentlemen. His act of charity lies in his sharing of Beatrice through his poetry with those
non-Florentines, and non-contemporaries, who never saw her
when she was alive. Love of Beatrice becomes universal.
Dante’s love blends eros and charity. In one passage he focuses on the effect on himself of Beatrice’s greeting in the street.
Much of the experience of love in the Vita Nuova is condensed
in this rightly famous passage. In this greeting she presumably
22. See Francesco Mazzoni, Il canto XXXI del Purgatorio (Florence: F.
Le Monnier, 1965). Of course, Aquinas, among many others, also took
up the widespread Neoplatonic doctrines that described creatures as
preexisting in a higher form in God. Other traditional theological avenues for explaining the role of Beatrice might be analogy (see Warren
Ginsberg, Dante’s Aesthetics of Being [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999] 8-13), deificatio (Rosetta Migliorini-Fissi, “La nozione
di ‘deificatio’ nel Paradiso.” Letture classensi. 9-10 [1982]: 39-72), or
we might simply see her as a special revelation, like the phantasms and
sensibles offered to prophets. (See Aquinas, Summa Theologica, q. 12,
a.13: “sometimes phantasms in the imagination . . . and sometimes sensible things are divinely formed.”)
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said salve, which in Italian is the same as the now outmoded English phrase, “save you,” short for “May God save you.” It is a
blessing, it “makes blessed,” just as Beatrice’s name means “she
who makes blessed.” Here is Dante’s description in Chapter 11
of the Vita Nuova of the effect on himself of this greeting or
blessing:
Whenever she appeared anywhere, because of the hope
of her miraculous greeting [mirabile salute] I had no
enemy in the world, instead a flame of charity came to
me that made me pardon whoever had offended me. If
anyone had asked me anything, my answer would be
only, “Love,” with a face dressed in humility. And whenever she was about to greet me, a spirit of love, destroying all the other sensitive spirits, drove out the feeble
spirits of vision, telling them “Go and honor your lady,”
and it remained in their place. And anyone who wanted
to know love could have done so by looking at the trembling of my eyes. And when this most gentle one greeted
me with this greeting, not only was Love not a mediator
that could obscure from me the overwhelming blessedness, but through an excess of sweetness, he became such
that my body which was wholly under Love’s control,
moved like an inanimate mass. So that it appears manifestly that in her greeting dwelt my beatitude, which
greatly exceeded and surpassed my capacities.23
In this important passage, Beatrice’s beauty promises beatitude for Dante in her miraculous greeting. But the charity he
feels is not for her, but for anyone. This is mysterious. In this
23. Vita Nuova, Chapter 11: Dico che quando ella apparia da parte alcuna, per la speranza de la mirabile salute nullo nemico mi rimanea,
anzi mi giugnea una fiamma di caritade, la quale mi facea perdonare
a chiunque m’avesse offeso; e chi allora m’avesse domandato di cosa
alcuna, la mia risponsione sarebbe stata solamente —Amore—, con
viso vestito d’umilitade. E quando ella fosse alquanto propinqua al salutare, uno spirito d’amore, distruggendo tutti li altri spririti sensitive,
pingea fuori li deboletti spiriti del viso, e dicea loro: “Andate a onorare
la donna vostra”; ed elli si rimanea nel luogo loro. E chi avesse voluto
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way Dante makes an implicit distinction between eros for
Beatrice and charity for others. The key to the passage is to understand the relation between hope and charity in the first sentence. The promise of the salute (“greeting”/”salvation”) from
the beautiful creates a hope that is so strong it generates charity. To understand it we have to think that Beatrice’s greeting,
in which she said “be saved,” is so overwhelmingly pleasant
that Dante focuses completely on her and forgets himself. The
self-forgetting is represented as love destroying and expelling
his spirits, here understood as the Galenic spirits that make his
body function. The confidence of this hope elicits generosity
for others. When his hope is this great, he exists beyond himself and can afford to become all charity and humility. He runs
no risk of loss in his charity, because it grows naturally from
his desire for his own good. As Aquinas puts it, charity, or love
of God for His own sake, is the perfection of the imperfect love
that begins in hope for one’s own good.24 This imperfect love
that becomes charity we would call eros. We might also make
this point theologically rather than psychologically, by recalling Virgil’s comment in Purgatorio that love is a good that one
has more of when one shares it (Purgatorio 15.55-7). Dante
wishes to give to others, while also getting for himself. Both
occur when he is taken over by love, becoming more than himself, even at the level of his eyes and his body. It makes his
body and libido wholly inactive, with all his activity focused
in the eyes.
conoscere Amore, fare lo potea, mirando lo tremare de li occhi miei. E
quando questa gentilissima salute salutava, non che Amore fosse tal
mezzo che potesse obumbrare a me la intollerabile beatitudine, ma elli
quasi per soverchio di dolcezza divenia tale, che lo mio corpo, lo quale
era tutto allora sotto lo suo reggimento, molte volte si movea come cosa
grave inanimata. Sì che appare manifestamente che ne le sue salute
abitava la mia beatitudine, la quale molte volte passava e redundava
la mia capacitade.
24. Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II q. 17, a.8: “[Charity] adheres to
God for His own sake; . . . he that hopes [on the other hand], intends to
obtain possession of something for himself.”
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Note in this passage that he becomes charitable toward others
in a way that repeats or extends Beatrice’s charity for him. She
blesses him with this greeting not out of eros, but out of charity.
In contrast, he erotically and selfishly desires her greeting, while
loving others charitably. The charity and the eros operate together
in him without conflict. They have different objects. Eros is for
something he yearns after and contemplates that is above him.
Charity is an effect of his hope for that same object of contemplation, but it is aimed at people at his level or below.25 At this
point we have given an incomplete description of Dante’s account of eros and agape. So far we only have the two loves in
the same soul, provoked by one object, but aimed at different
people. We still have to come to see how the two loves are not
merely non-contradictory, but also more closely intertwined. I
will complete this articulation of eros and agape at the end of
this essay, in connection with Dante’s definition of agape in Paradiso.
Dante’s great discovery in the middle of the Vita Nuova,
which he arrives at with the help of Guido Gunizelli, is that he
must praise Beatrice, not merely describe her effect on him. His
poetry must be about her, not about himself. His blessedness is
no longer in her greeting as it was in the previous passage. His
poetic apprenticeship takes him beyond this. Instead his salvation
is now in his own charitable poetry, in praise of his lady. This
new direction generates the middle section of the Vita Nuova,
which contains many of the greatest poems of the collection. And
yet, it is important that Dante himself saw this apparently selfeffacing attitude of praise as actually self-regarding in a positive
sense. Dante says elsewhere that praising someone who is far
25. Compare Gregory the Great’s account of Jacob’s ladder in the Pastoral Rule, Book 2, Chapter 5. We both ascend and descend on this ladder, ascending in contemplation, and descending to those we minister
to through charity. This division between upward and downward loves
is implicit in the Vita Nuova passage, and frames the treatment of the
contemplative ladder in Paradiso 21-22. Canto 21 deals with upward
movement on the ladder, Canto 22, with downward movement on the
ladder.
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greater than yourself is always a self-interested act, since praise
implies friendship, and friendship implies likeness. Hence to
praise the great is to assert that you are like the great in some
way. (Convivio 3.1.4) The same goes, he suggests, for friendship
with God.
After Beatrice dies, years pass, and he begins to forget her
for a new noblewoman, whom he identifies in the Convivio as a
symbol for philosophy. At the end of the Vita Nuova he repents
this philosophical betrayal, and turns again to the memory of
Beatrice in the final chapters, rising up to heaven where Beatrice
dwells. The sequence in the final few paragraphs of the Vita
Nuova about repenting his abandonment of Beatrice, followed
by ascent to God—this is a tiny draft to be rewritten and expanded in the Commedia. At the end of the Vita Nuova, Beatrice
is described as the object of his soul’s pilgrimage, like the shroud
on which Christ left his features, which pilgrims visit in Rome,
known as the Veronica or True Icon. Dante suggests that the pilgrimage to Rome and his local pilgrimage to Beatrice are ultimately the same. The famous shroud in Rome has power, but,
actually, the local miracle of Beatrice, a woman who is a mirror
of God for the Florentines, is just as good as the shroud. “Christ
comes alive for Dante in Beatrice.”26 Her image transports him
to the good that can fulfill him. As a creature gone to her Creator,
her beauty is an exemplar that is more perfect in God, just as the
features in the shroud are more perfect in the seemingly absent
original face that they let us see. But further, Dante’s poetry itself
has the power to make others feel Beatrice’s beauty without ever
seeing her. His words are as good as sacred relics, like the shroud
with Christ’s features. His poem, like Beatrice, is mediator to
God, not a competitor. At the same time, his writings about her
are in fact even better than the historical Beatrice and even better
than the famous shroud at Rome, in that the writings can be
shared with all who read them anywhere and forever.
26. Christopher Ryan, “The Theology of Dante” in The Cambridge
Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jackoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 146.
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3. Beatrice as Mirror of God in Purgatorio
In the Commedia, Dante gives an account of how all of
human life should be understood in the light of eternal reality and
revelation. How could so much have come out of a vision of
Beatrice? Again, why isn’t this idolatry? On a number of occasions, Dante distinguishes what he is doing from idolatry. I will
mention only one.27 In Purgatorio 19, Dante has a dream of the
Siren, who Virgil will later tell him is the symbol for excessive
desire for earthly pleasures:
When geomancers see their Fortuna Major rise in the east
before dawn, rising by a way that stays dark for little
time, a stuttering woman came to me in a dream, crosseyed, and crooked on her feet, with her hands deformed
and pallid in color. I gazed at her; and as the sun comforts
the cold members that the night weighs down, so my
glance made ready her speech, and quickly straightened
her, and the distorted face it colored as love would want
it. Then with her speaking unshackled, she began to sing,
so that with difficulty might I turn my attention away
from her. “I am” she sang, “I am the sweet siren that misleads sailors in the middle of the sea, so pleasant is it to
hear me! I turned Ulysses, eager for his road, to my song.
And whoever gets used to staying with me rarely departs;
so completely do I fulfill him!” 28
The time is indicated by reference to a gnostic astrological
tradition called geomancy. This practice involved connecting pat27. Other prominent treatments of idolatry in the Commedia are Paolo
and Francesca’s idolatry of Amor (Inferno 5), the idolatry of Federick
II by the poet Pier delle Vigne (Inferno 13), and the idolatry of the simoniac popes (Inferno 19). Canto 19 in all three canticles is dedicated
to the idolatry issue in connection with the Church and the pope.
28. Purgatorio 19.1-24. [Q]uando i geomanti lor Maggior Fortuna /
veggiono in orïente, innanzi all’ alba, / surger per via che poco le sta
bruna: / mi venne in sogno una femmina balba, / ne li occhi guercia, e
sovra i piè distorta, / con le man monche, e di colore scialba. / Io la
mirava; e come ’l sol confortale / fredde membra che la notte aggrava,
/ così lo sguardo mio le facea scorta / la lingua, e poscia tutta la driz-
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terns drawn on the earth to constellations in the heavens. So the
setting suggests a kind of superstitious mistaking of earthly and
heavenly. At first the siren is ugly and stuttering, but then Dante’s
gaze makes her articulate and beautiful. We are invited to hear
her initial stuttering in line 19, as well as the balanced fluidity he
projects on her by line 21 (Io son . . . io son, dolce serena / che
marinari in mezzo mar dismago/ tanto son di piacer’ a sentir
piena!). As others have suggested, the power of his gaze to reshape her is an allegory for the power of his imagination to reshape the earthly and make it heavenly, that is, it is an allegory
for the act of idol-making.29 The parallel with Inferno 19 suggests
that the Siren is another development of the whore with seven
heads (lines 108-109), a conflation of images in Revelations that
suggests Rome. Here, as in Inferno 19, the idolatry of the pope
is of special interest. Later in Purgatorio 19, we encounter a concrete historical example of the damage the allegorical Siren can
do in pope Adrian V, who is now purging his own avarice. He
tells Dante that he had at first made the earthly political power
of Church offices the aim of his ascent (19.103-108). Then, when
he rose to its peak and became pope, he finally came to recognize
that no earthly position, no ambition, would satisfy him (109-11).
zava / in poco d’ora, e lo smarrito volto, / com’ amor vuol, così le colorava. / Poi ch’ell’ avea ’l parlar così disciolto, / cominciava a cantar
sì, che con pena / da lei avrei mio intento rivolto. / “Io son”, cantava,
“io son dolce serena, / che i marinari in mezzo mar dismago; / tanto
son di piacere a sentir piena! / Io volsi Ulisse del suo cammin vago / al
canto mio; e qual meco s’ausa, / rado sen parte; sì tutto l’appago!
29. See Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 140-41. The allegory is
a precise response to Virgil’s account of the soul’s perception of and inclination to desirable objects in the previous canto (18. 43ff.). In his account, the imagination takes in outer experience and presents it to us.
Our role in the imaginative presentation of objects in the soul is what
Dante has allegorized with the Siren in Canto 19. The doctrine on counsel and consent that Dante is following here is that of Summa Theologica I-II, qq. 14-15. Aquinas in turn takes it from Augustine’s account of
the imagination in On the Trinity, Books 11-12.
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His mistaken attempt to ascend to the earthly, as if the earth were
above him rather than below, resembles the geomancer’s identification of his earthly image with the heavenly reality at the beginning of the canto. Realizing his error, he quits his post. He is
finally saved, though he must spend time in purgatory weeping
over his attachment to the earth. With his face and body stuck in
earthly mire, he suffers while longing for heaven. Adrian’s tears,
which “mature” his soul in preparation for ascent, atone for his
fascination with the earth, which prevented him from ascending.
His fascination with the earth parallels the hypnosis of the Siren’s
song, which paralyzes sailors in the sea. The hymn Adrian sings
together with the others in this part of purgatory also expresses
this hypnosis as being stuck or adhering, but now with a new
sense: Adhaesit pavimento anima mea! I will suggest at the end
of this essay that, although Dante’s poetry often brings into relief
the transcendent possibilities for terrestrial beauty, Adrian’s tears
for heaven and his hatred for the stasis of purely earthly pursuits
are intended by Dante as emblems of how we should live on earth.
Although in passages like Canto 19 Dante reflects on the dangers of idolatry, in the Purgatorio, rather than backing away from
the Vita Nuova, he explicitly reaffirms it. Dante’s encounter with
Beatrice at the top of purgatory is a clear parallel with the idolatry
of the Siren and raises all of Nygren’s questions about Dante’s
mix of eros and agape. The preparation for Beatrice’s arrival is
perhaps the most daring of all of Dante’s gestures of praise. When
Dante arrives at the Garden of Eden in Purgatorio 28 he sees a
variety of mystical symbols paraded before his eyes. Seven candlesticks lead a procession (the seven gifts of the spirit that illuminate human life). Following these are the books of the Old
Testament, represented by twenty-four elders. Then comes a
Chariot (the Church) pulled by Christ as the Griffin.30 On either
30. I follow the traditional reading of the Griffin, against recent attempts
to interpret it otherwise. For such attempts see Peter Armour, “Dante’s
Processional Vision” in Lectura Dantis: Purgatorio, A Canto-by-Canto
Commentary, ed. Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn, and Charles
Ross. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 336-340.
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side of the chariot are virtues represented as nymphs, while behind the chariot are various men representing the books of the
New Testament. More concisely then, the procession means that
the spirit of God illuminates revelation and the history of scripture, all of which centers on the transcendent moment of Christ’s
coming to earth and leading his Church, uniting the books in the
epochs before and after him. The whole procession is in the form
of a cross, with the two-natured symbol of Christ at the center.
This elaborate procession contains a set of images mostly from
Revelation, which refers the whole scene to the last judgment.
As Charles Singleton emphasized, Dante is witnessing a last
judgment. Even fairly uneducated medieval readers would be immediately aware of this.31
Singleton argued that what makes Dante’s procession different
from the ordinary medieval understanding of the last judgment is
the person who appears in the chariot when the procession stops.
Dante introduces this person as Christ, but it will be someone else.
One of the representatives of the Old Testament sings the phrase
Veni sponsa de Libano (Come, bride of Lebanon), from the Song
of Songs, three times. Then everyone in the procession sings in
31. Many medieval churches decorated with exactly such images of the
last judgment, would have taught Dante’s ordinary readers about the last
judgment in terms of these symbols, and perhaps inspired Dante’s canto.
Most iconographically similar of all to Dante’s procession are the mosaics
in the churches of Santi Cosma e Damiano and the identical ones in the
church of Santa Prassede, both in Rome, where in each case a series of successive arches in the church contain these symbols (the heavenly Jerusalem,
the twenty four elders, the seven candlesticks, the evangelists, etc.). To one
who traverses the space, even merely with one’s glance, the succession of
arches creates the visual effect of a procession in motion towards the end
of the church, where Christ appears in the vault descending to the judgment
seat. Coincidentally, the mosaics of S. Prassede are of particular relevance
for the question of iconoclasm in medieval art. They were done at the end
of the 700s by artists fleeing iconoclast persecution in Byzantium and commemorate the relocation of the remains of martyrs and saints from the catacombs. Byzantine iconoclasts were opposed to the devotion to martyrs as
well as to images. Like Dante’s Purgatorio, the mosaics stress the value of
human beings as mediators.
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response Benedictus qui venit! (Blessed is He who comes!). In its
original context, this phrase “Blessed is He who comes” describes
Christ entering Jerusalem. The Old Testament erotic longing for
the Bride of Lebanon is now to be satisfied with the phrase announcing Christ from the New Testament. Since his readers know
this New Testament verse, and know the iconography of the procession, then it is very clear that these angels are welcoming the
returning Christ, who is arriving at his judgment seat so as to decide who can be received into the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of
God. If we attune ourselves to the force of the scriptural citations
as the last century of scholarship has helped us to do, then we recognize that nothing could have prepared a Medieval reader for
what happened next. The angels quote a verse from Virgil’s
Aeneid, Manibus o date lilia plenis (Give hands full of lilies).32
Anchises voices this phrase at one of the most melancholy moments of Vergil’s poem, “even though it is of no use, let me throw
these lilies over the shade of the dead soul.” All this is overturned
in Purgatorio 30 when angels shower the chariot with lilies, and
in the midst of a delicate rain of flowers, Beatrice appears. Of
course Christ, the “He” in “Blessed is He who comes,” it turns
out, is a she.
Now, including a line from Virgil as a part of the last Judgment is already stretching the bounds of theological propriety,
and it embraces the pagan world in a new way. It transforms and
completes our worldly dignity and our wholly natural desires
rather than effacing them in the moment of revelation. But surprising as it is, this is not the most striking thing about the scene.
If we accept the idea that the ancient inability to redeem death
has been overcome by Christ’s sacrifice, and that it is natural for
Dante to use a bit of pagan poetry to express this thought, then
Virgil’s melancholy has itself been uplifted and transformed into
a moment of grace. His conversation with Statius about his role
in the conversion in Purgatorio 22 might have already prepared
us for that. Rather, it is the appearance of Beatrice that makes
this passage so complicated.
32. Aeneid 6.883-86; Purgatorio 30.21.
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As I said, the procession suggests that the figure who emerges
should be Christ coming down to the judgment seat. Dante has
done everything to make us think this. And of course, only
Christ’s grace could surpass the ancient melancholy and redeem
us from death. But in Singleton’s words, we witness here the Advent of Beatrice.33 In Dante’s case, the person who pronounces
the decision about whether he is received in the heavenly city is
Beatrice. She is at the center of this heavenly procession; she is
the representative of the Judge in this personal last judgment. She
will make Dante confess his sin, and she will be an instrument
of his forgiveness. She appears to him in Christ’s place.34 While
Purgatory was structured by three-part examples from an ancient
source, from the Old Testament, and from the New Testament,
Beatrice’s appearance takes us into a realm beyond the three citations that announce her. She is the revelation at the center of
history.
The Griffin that pulls the chariot is a symbolic presentation
of Christ that leaves Christ a mystery. A similar tactic is found in
33. See Singleton, “The Advent of Beatrice” in Journey to Beatrice.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 72-85. In the preceding couple of pages I have been trying to re-enact Singleton’s understanding of Beatrice as a Christ figure in such a way as to
represent the theological boldness of the gesture.
34. There is a traditional model for the procession that Dante may
have had in mind. The translator John Sinclair saw Beatrice of the
chariot in purgatory as an image of the Eucharist (for which see the
commentary accompanying his translation of Purgatorio 30 in
Dante: The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio [New York: Oxford University Press, 1939]). In the middle ages, the Eucharist was paraded
through the streets in a chariot in the feast of Corpus Christi at Modena, and Dante might be expecting his readers to think of that. If
Sinclair was right, the poem can be seen as a public procession of
his private vision with a Eucharistic value. The living Beatrice, as I
said earlier, was a public love, a miracle for all the Florentines. And
the Beatrice of Dante’s writings is less private still. The aim of
Dante’s work is to make Beatrice a universal figure available to all
his readers.
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iconoclastic Hebrew illuminated manuscripts in Germany in the
1200s. By making holy people into mythical animals or giving
them animal heads, artists avoided giving a false impression with
a non-fictional, non-arbitrary representation.35 So the use of the
Griffin can be understood as a careful, humble avoidance of idolatry here. But unfortunately Dante doesn’t leave it at that, but
looks at the Griffin in Beatrice’s eyes. Again, Christ appears to
Dante, comes to life for Dante, in the beautiful eyes of Beatrice.
The two natures of the Griffin are mysteriously fused, but in her
eyes he sees alternately one or the other. He says:
Mille disiri piú che fiamma caldi
strinsermi li occhi alli occhi rilucenti,
che pur sopra ’l grifone stavan saldi.
Come in lo specchio il sol, non altrimenti
la doppia fiera dentro vi raggiava,
or con altri, or con altri reggimenti.
Pensa, lettor, s’io mi maravigliava,
quando vedea la cosa in sé star queta,
e ne l’idolo suo si trasmutava.36
In the soul of Beatrice, Dante can see an image either of
Christ’s humanity or of his divinity, but never both at once. Why
does Dante see the Griffin through the eyes of a woman at all?
We might try to evade the problem—as many critics do—and
make Beatrice herself a mere symbol. But our knowledge of the
details of Beatrice’s real existence as a contemporary of Dante
in the Vita Nuova (for instance, her life and death, her family relations) makes such a reading inadequate. Even when she is dead,
35. See Bezalel Narkiss and Evelyn Cohen, “Illuminated Manuscripts,
Hebrew” in Encyclopedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred
Skolnik, 2nd ed., Vol. 9. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007), 726-735.
36. Purgatorio 31.124-6, “A thousand desires hotter than flame bound
my eyes to the eyes reflecting, that upon the Griffin stayed firm. As in a
mirror the sun, not otherwise the double beast within rayed out, now with
one now with the other nature. Think, reader, if I marveled when I saw
that the thing in itself remained unchanged but in its image changed.”
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her eyes have the flash that distinguishes living, conscious human
beings from dead ones and from statues. In Beatrice the eternal
meaning is reflected in the eyes of a contemporary human being.
She is not just a beautiful object or a symbol, because she is a
subject who loves the Beautiful Itself, just as Dante does. He falls
in love with God through his beloved, who is herself in love with
God. In fact, he falls in love with her precisely insofar as she is
a lover. In being moved by love she reflects the love that moves
her. The reflection of Christ in her loving eyes makes others, like
Dante, into lovers of Christ. (Compare Plato’s Phaedrus, especially 255c-d, where the beloved is seduced by his own deified
reflection in the eyes of the lover.) Beatrice’s role as a lover removes the idolatry from Dante’s love of her. And the reader is
supposed to participate in this same reflection between lover and
beloved by looking at Dante’s love for Beatrice.
To understand why the mirroring of Christ in Beatrice’s eyes
is not idolatrous, we must recall the tradition of the speculum
Dei, the mirror of God. To see God in a mirror is to see God in
an imperfect and limited way, not as he is. The alternation between the two natures of Christ in the appearance of Beatrice emphasizes her limited ability to reflect him. It is all we on earth
can do, as the King James translation of St. Paul puts it, to “see
through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). This passage from
Paul was cited as an explanation for the vision of Christ in Beatrice’s eyes by the earliest commentators.37 This idea had been
previously deployed in a number of debates. This phrase “mirror
of God” was sometimes applied to the martyrs and saints. Saint
Francis, for example, visibly reflected Christ in the stigmata, and
mirrored his suffering in the sorrow within his soul as well.38
Beatrice’s soul is in the same category with such saints. Her
beauty, but also her charity and her humility, reflects God’s, al37. For example, Dante’s son Pietro Alighieri cites it in his commentary
(1359-64) on these lines.
38. See Bonaventure’s “Life of Saint Francis” in Bonaventure: The
Soul’s Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of St. Francis, trans.
Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 305-306.
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though she cannot perfectly express the paradox of the two natures. More generally, any reformed soul is a mirror of God, even
beyond the way in which any human being is made in God’s
image. The importance for Dante’s Commedia of the tradition of
the mirror of God cannot be overstated. As the opening tercet of
the Paradiso puts it, the entire universe is a mirror reflecting
God’s light.
La gloria di colui che tutto move
per l’universo penetra, e risplende
in una parte piú, e meno altrove.39
Moreover, the idea of seeing God through a mirror was part
of the defense of art in the early iconoclastic debates.40 As mentioned earlier, those who staked out positions against images implied opposition to the adoration of saints and martyrs as well as
the Virgin Mary. The idea of the mirror of God that was used to
defend images in the eighth century iconoclastic dispute supplies
a traditional account that explains Beatrice’s role as a saint, and
clarifies how her beauty points to its own pre-existence in God.
And although her reflection of the Divine essence must be qualified, it is nevertheless surpassingly glorious—so much so that
Dante cannot end this canto with a description of her unveiled
reflection of God, but ends instead with the claim that her image
is indescribable (Purgatorio 31.139-145). Beatrice is at the same
time both a defense of images, and a limit to images.
Something similar to Dante’s treatment of Beatrice can be
understood to explain the style of his book as a whole, and it undergirds its literary realism. The eternal meaning of the characters
is presented through attention to personal and historical details,
especially, but not exclusively, in the presentation of Dante’s contemporaries. Rather than provide sterile lexical or philosophical
39. Paradiso 1.1-3: “The glory of him who moves everything penetrates
through all the universe, and reflects in one part more, and less in another.”
40. For the medieval artistic tradition and the speculum Dei, see Emile
Male, “One Hundred Years of Iconoclasm” in Early Churches of Rome,
trans. David Buxton (London: Ernest Bendt, 1960).
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definitions of the sins or virtues of each group of souls, he presents the living stories of souls in their places.41 The concreteness
of such stories challenges the reader with the ambiguities of experience, but they are fruitful ambiguities. The stories suggest
that readers take what is valid in ordinary experience and purify
it, rather than simplifying or disregarding it. We start from where
we are, and ascend dialectically, just as Aristotle does in his
Ethics, arguing his points starting from common opinions and
from experience.
4. Beatrice as Prophet in Paradiso
I will now focus on the limits Dante sets to the vision of God he
can produce through the image of Beatrice and through his poem.
The Paradiso opens with a disclaimer about the limits of Dante’s
poetic powers. Dante says that he cannot express or even recall
much of what he saw in heaven. He alerts the reader that he must
end his journey with a concession to some aspects of the iconoclast’s demands. Although Beatrice’s beauty pre-exists in God,
as an individual she is ultimately merely one part of the Incarnate
God. Only Christ is perfectly “the image of the unseen God”.42
Similarly, Dante’s poem could never perfectly mirror the Incarnation or the Trinity. The sobering distance between Dante and
God in the Paradiso gives the canticle a prophetic character. By
41. It is worth comparing Brunetto Latini’s encyclopedia, the Livres
dou tresor, and his poem, the Tesoretto. Both are extremely similar to
Dante’s work in that they separate out vices and virtues and define them.
Both are works of exile, and both involve narrative accounts of Aristotelian morality and metaphysics. The profound difference is that
Brunetto’s works are purely abstract and allegorical. Their narrative
form is superfluous. They merely offer a lively version of a bird’s eye
view. Nor does Brunetto’s account suffer a genuine transcendent element. The abstract and mundane aspects of Brunetto’s works prompt
Dante to relegate Brunetto to the stale and unfruitful atmosphere surrounding the sodomites of Inferno 15. The key to interpreting most of
the images in that canto is the biblical injunction not to store up one’s
“treasure” on earth, but in heaven (Matthew 6:19-21).
42. Colossians 1:15.
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prophetic I mean looking forward to the fulfillment of justice,
and living in anticipation of contact with a God who is not yet
fully present on earth—that is to say, living in exile.
In order to take on the role of the prophet, Dante must put on
a severity that comports very oddly with love poetry. A prophet
has to live in the desert with nothing more than hope. As Emmanuel Levinas argued, prophecy does not coincide with feminine gentleness in the Old Testament.43 But in the Commedia
Beatrice, a woman, is the source of Dante’s prophecies, beginning in Purgatorio 33 with the chilling condemnation of ecclesiastical corruption in their times. Beatrice is stern and harsh
throughout the Paradiso. Such moments suggest that Beatrice is
not simply an emblem of gentle, generous beauty. Rather, she is
also a figure of anger. She is loved in and for her anger, and her
anger is a sign of her love. For Dante at least, she is, paradoxically, both Church Triumphant and Church Militant at the same
time.
The Paradiso emphasizes the prophetic vein more explicitly
than the other cantiche, and presents us with a number of austere
figures as role models for human life. So, for example, the
paragons of human virtue in Paradiso are monastics like Francis,
whose erotic love of poverty is itself a form of vision.44 Others
are the ascetic contemplatives Peter Damien, Benedict, and the
white-haired Bernard. The non-monastic figures of greatest importance in heaven are either soldiers or kings who sacrificed
themselves for heavenly justice. It may be easy to miss it while
reading the Paradiso, which is filled with beautiful images of
light, refined talk of love, and angelic harmonies, but two of the
highest values in heaven are poverty and spiritual war. Though
the Paradiso rises through the ethereal reaches of heaven, the
Church Militant and the expression of hostility to the earth receive continually greater emphasis. The contemplatives at the
43. See Emmanual Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism.
trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997),
30-38.
44. I take this account of Francis from Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision, 240.
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very top of Dante’s celestial hierarchy are defined as those who
love and minister to their fellow men, and, at the same time,
those who least esteemed the earth. From their height they can
look down on earth, as Benedict did from the dizzying heights
of his monastery atop Monte Cassino. So the starkness of the
Paradiso might not seem in accord with the choice of a beautiful
woman as a guide. But, mysteriously, Dante sees the erotic attraction to God in Beatrice’s eyes as implying a severe and unbending focus on the ugly and bad in the world, and on the need
for correction. As Dante’s vision becomes clearer, he and Beatrice ascend farther and farther above the world, and become angrier and angrier about its corruption. Why should erotic desire
be so at one with the austerity and anger of the prophet? Isn’t
anger thumos, not eros?
The answers to these questions lie in recalling Dante’s situation on earth after Beatrice died. In the Vita Nuova, following
Beatrice’s death, Dante initially reacted properly. He began to
despise the earthly life because it had lost its salute (chs. 32-34).
Beatrice, from heaven, offered him consolation. But a year or so
after she died, Dante turned to the Siren. As Beatrice expresses
it in her description of this episode in Purgatorio (31.44-54), love
should have generated anger against the earthly Siren, against
self-induced hypnosis that creates indifference to ascent. Recall
the image of Pope Adrian V with his face in the dirt in Purgatorio
19, tearfully longing for what is beyond the earth. Dante, like
Adrian, should have recognized all earthly things as lesser pleasures than Beatrice’s grace. He should have risen up to heaven in
pursuit of her after her death, when she had become a purer heavenly creature. Like Adrian, Dante must yearn for what has left
him in permanent mourning. Unworldliness is the proper way of
seeking consolation in the more distant but truly higher good,
rather than finding substitutes in the sirens of the here and now.
Anger at the corruption of the earth, and even indignant disgust
with the earth, becomes then a way of maintaining eros for what
is now absent. Eros and thumos work together. They are not two
separate parts of the soul, but two aspects of a single activity of
the soul. Adrian’s face is pressed into the dirt not only as punish-
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ment, but as therapy. Anger and sorrow imply a love of something
toward which earthly things cannot point him. While Beatrice,
before her death, was an earthly beauty pointing beyond the earth,
after her death she is a creature who has reached her Creator. Although she leaves Dante in mourning, she becomes an even more
effective mediatrix for him. Of course, she does not renounce her
earlier function as the earthly miracle who greeted him. But in
heaven she can complete that work.
The other aspect of the role of the prophet that can only with
difficulty be connected to love of a woman is its public nature.
The prophet is a leader of men and a master of rhetoric, as the
Ulysses canto in the Inferno suggests.45 This issue of public
prophecy and private love complete the picture of agape and eros
in the Paradiso, the true finale of the Vita Nuova. In his meeting
with John the Evangelist, Dante presents the paradox of a private
love for something public and universal that can help us understand his love for Beatrice as a young man.
John, like Beatrice, is a complex case. In his gospel, John’s
status as private friend of Christ is contrasted with the universality
of Christ’s relation to humanity. His gospel portrays a number of
scenes that emphasize how, as a particular human being, even
Christ had a special love for certain people, like his mother, and
like his close friend John.46 But the gospel writer suggests that this
in no way interfered with or reduced Christ’s universal charity.
Because of the complexity of this portrayal, a myth arose that John
had special immortality and was taken to heaven bodily. In Par45. Inferno 26 is structured around the division between the true and
the false prophet. Dante suggests that he mistakes Ulysses for Elijah
initially, and verges on becoming a sort of false prophet himself. From
Ulysses’s story he must learn Paul’s well-known dictum in Corinthians
13 that the power of prophecy without love is nothing. See Giuseppe
Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine
Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 66-106.
46. Above all, the comments about John’s special status in relation to
Christ, and the play with Peter about philia (personal love) and agape
(impersonal love) at the end of the gospel (John 21:15-23) raise questions about the role of the ordinary private individual.
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adiso 25, Dante looks for this body and goes blind. In Canto 26,
John questions the blind Dante about love, asking him why he
loves. Dante replies first with a universal argument. He loves because of the authority of scripture and because of philosophical
arguments. But the apostle seems to ask him the same question
again: Are there other cords that pull you to God, or other teeth of
love that bite you? And Dante replies:
Tutti quei morsi
che posson far lo cor volgere a Dio,
a la mia caritate son concorsi:
ché l’essere del mondo e l’esser mio,
la morte ch’el sostenne perch’ io viva,
e quel che spera ogne fedel com’ io,
con la predetta coscenza viva,
tratto m’hanno del mar de l’amor torto,
e del diritto m’han posto a la riva.
Le fronde onde s’infronda tutto l’orto
de l’ortolano etterno, am’ io cotanto
quanto da lui a lor di bene è porto.47
Immediately after receiving this answer, Dante regains his
sight, now made even stronger. Dante has brought the universal
love of God (agape) into harmony with his own individual love
(eros), transforming his love into the universal one. He is moved
by God’s gift of creation as a whole, by God’s gift of salvation,
and forgiveness, as well as by the hope that these imply for him.
He is erotically concerned with his own good, and with the entire
story of his that he presents in the Commedia, as this passage
47. Paradiso 26.55-66, “All those bites that can make the heart turn to
God are in concord in my love. That the being of the world, and my
being, the death that he underwent so that I might live, and that which
every faithful person hopes, as I, together with the aforementioned living knowledge, they have drawn me from the sea of perverse love and
has put me on the shore of the right [love]. The leaves with which are
leafed all the garden of the eternal Gardener, I love as much as the good
given to them by Him.”
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suggests by returning to the beginning, when he was shipwrecked
like Ulysses on the shoals of the mar de l’amor torto in Inferno
1, and then bringing us right up to the present, when he finds himself on the shore of right love in purgatory. The reference to
leaves is an allusion to a passage in John’s gospel in which Christ
describes himself as an eternal vine:
Abide in me, and I in you. . . . I am the vine, you are
the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it
is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do
nothing. . . . If you abide in me, and my words abide in
you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for
you.48
As part of the vine, Dante is now able to love the garden of
the whole creation and all the leaves, that is, all creatures to
which God has granted the gift of the good. This gift from God
is agape. Dante’s individual love is now perfected in becoming
agape for the other parts of the vine, and his love is now proportionate to the agape that comes down into all the leaves from
God. Dante’s love for himself has now somehow cast a wider net
of love around all creatures that partake in God’s grace. He loves
all the blessed he will meet in the celestial rose, and all those who
are yet to arrive there. Christ’s two commands—love God and
love your neihbor as yourself (Mark 12:30-31)—are now one act
for Dante, an act that springs from what was initially his selflove. For the source of all other loves is rightly directed self-love,
as Dante remarked in the Convivio: lo proprio amore di me medesimo . . . è principio di tutti li altri, sì come vede ciascuno.49
We can now see how the public and universal qualities of
Dante’s love in fact have room for his private and erotic love of
Beatrice. Note how very similar this passage is to Dante’s description of the effect of Beatrice’s greeting on him in Chapter 11 of the
Vita Nuova. In both cases, universal charity comes from hope. Dante
48. John 15.4-7.
49. Convivio 3.5. “[P]roper love of myself . . . is the root of all other loves,
as everyone knows”.
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is exhilarated by promise of God’s creation and God’s sacrifice,
which offers him great expectations. This confident private hope
for his own happiness is transformed into charity for all of God’s
garden. And the more secure he feels in his expectation of happiness, the more he is able to give of himself. The same is true of
Dante’s relation with the beauty of Beatrice in the Vita Nuova. His
self-regarding hope for the promise of her greeting brought the
flame of charity to him, and he became Love. Her beauty humbled
him and effaced his self, even if at the same time, on another level,
his self was actively at work achieving the goal of its own self-love.
In this humility before the Good, the human soul transcends the
merely private.
Dante turns to find Beatrice in Paradiso 31, and is surprised to
see her replaced by the third and final guide, a white-haired old
man. The anti-sensual element is emphatic. St. Bernard might be
beautiful, but he could never be called pretty. And yet, Dante emphasizes the continuity: the severity of Beatrice’s prophetic character is succeeded by the austerity of Bernard. Dante will compare
his vision of the old monk to the Veronica, the same shroud bearing
Christ’s features that he once compared to Beatrice at the end of the
Vita Nuova. This reference also recalls the “idolo” of Christ in the
eyes of Beatrice from Purgatorio 31, which was discussed earlier.
In Dante’s final speech to Beatrice (Paradiso 31.79-90) she has
fully transcended herself; she has become a universal figure for the
blessed. In the Vita Nuova, he made an attempt to love the innermost
meaning of her beauty, that is, the meaning of her beauty in God.
This transcendent element in her beauty now reveals itself to be her
place in the celestial rose as a mere part of a larger divine order. Her
innermost individual meaning becomes transcendent when it is not
separate from anything else in God.
At the outset of Canto 33, Bernard asks Mary to help Dante see
God. He tells her that all those who have been saved throughout
history up to the present day, including Beatrice, now pray for
Dante. This is universal agape, akin to Dante’s newfound love for
all the leaves of the garden—only here it is made explicit that it
works in reverse as well. In this moment of communion which
seamlessly combines agape and eros, not only does he love the
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whole garden, but the whole garden loves him in return. Mary, the
more traditional universal symbol of love, does not compete with
Beatrice as the mirror of God; she is now revealed as the completion
of Beatrice, the more perfect mirror. She resembles Christ more
than any other. Mary initiated Beatrice’s rescue of Dante in Inferno,
and now she finishes her task, turning Dante toward the Original
for which she is merely the image. But even this turn to the Original
in the final lines of the poem is not the end of these mirrors of God.
Christ himself is an image of the Father.
And there is a further image of God implicit in the closing lines.
Although Dante cannot misurar lo cerchio (“measure the circle,”
Paradiso 33.134), he finds himself moved by love sí come rota
ch’igualmente é mossa (“like a wheel that is moved in equal measure,” Paradiso 33.144). The attribution of mathematical equality in
the motion with the word igualmente implies that his motion does
in fact precisely measure the Love that moves him. This equality is
the most perfect correspondence of Dante’s desio and velle to God’s
self-understanding and self-love. In this sense, Dante himself becomes an image of God.50
50. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica I-I q. 93, a.4) enumerates three
forms of the image of God in man: first, that which all have by nature;
second, that which the just have by grace; and, third, that which the
blessed have by glory, the so-called “image of likeness.” In all three
cases, man is in the image of God in that he loves and understands God,
imitating the way in which God’s intellectual nature loves and understands itself. But in the third way, in glory, the blessed have the image
of God in the highest degree, because they love and understand God
more perfectly. Dante’s pair disio and velle achieve this third kind of understanding and love appropriate to those blessed by glory. Thomas’s
reference to God’s self-love and understanding are echoed in Paradiso
33.124-126. This suggests that the three circles of the Trinity are circles
because they represent the self-relation of God’s intellectual nature.
When Dante grasps how the human effigy fits within the circle, he sees
how the human soul can come to resemble God’s self-understanding and
self-love.
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THE EXTINCTION of SPECIES
Marlene Benjamin
To Din
In Memoriam
This is no abstract exercise.
There will be names and places
To tether you, to make you hear and note,
To make you listen and mark.
So mark this:
We live amongst the extinction of species. “Passenger pigeon,
great auk,
Stellar’s sea cow, Schomburgk’s deer, sea mink, antarctic wolf,
Carolina parakeet: all gone.”
I learn this from Quammen’s exhilarating book, which is yet depressingly full of incontrovertible facts,
Called The Song of The Dodo, a great bird also gone extinct.
Quammen was at Oxford with Saul, who was at Brasenose some
15 or so years before you, and who
Recently told me that he had long harbored a desire to meet you
there for High Table fare, a desire
He never satisfied. As for me,
My desire to sit at table with you was satisfied over and over
again across 43 years,
Giving me the singular joy of watching you
Grow from a child to the man you became, whose traits and
habits
Could be traced back to early childish behaviors.
At five, you were insistent on being right, but with a sense of humor
That made your rightness palatable to those who were faced with
Hearing it forcefully directed at their pale and insignificant positions.
“What,” you used to say, “is the point of that?” in mock horror at the
Emptiness of my claims concocted to counter yours.
Marlene Benjamin is Associate Professor Emerita at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. Her book, The Catastrophic Self: Essays in Philosophy,
Memoir, and Medical Trauma, will be released in late 2015 or early 2016.
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At six, you kindly said to me, using my own phrasing to illustrate
the foolishness
Of my arguments, “Now Marlene, we don’t want to hear any
more about bloody California.”
You knew this would kill me with laughter, and it did.
At twenty-five, you gently queried my political explanations to
end the conversation by saying
“Now that sounds like an extremely intelligent position.” Long
pause. “Or does it?”
And what, I ask you now, am I to do without your challenges?
Without your presence?
It is as if an entire species has gone extinct with your death,
Leaving a hole in the natural world that cannot be woven closed.
There are too many frayed edges.
And that is only me. For the damage done to the intimate family
is far worse,
Far more savage an attack on the fabric of the world.
How shall they carry on?
Perhaps they have a memory of your last moments to lean on,
A way to conjure up the finality of your departure and thus, paradoxically,
A way to hold you closer than is given to me.
I don’t know; I wasn’t there.
But I have this: I have what the camera captured in the photograph
On the cover of the Order of Service at your funeral, the picture
I have standing on my dresser
Facing me each morning, showing you (in Wales, is it?) surrounded by your girls – Lily and Molly and Bea;
Smiling at what I believe is Sue behind the camera – or perhaps
it is Mag or Jim or Vinny or Simon –
All of whom stand, for me, invisibly behind you, all of you together
In the shadow of the astonishingly full and lovely life you had, it
seemed, so effortlessly, made.
Looking at you like this is to repopulate the world,
My way to argue against the extinction of species.
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119
However tenuous the argument, for a few moments every day, it
works – even as I know,
And love, that you would challenge my saying so. And knowing
this, the hole,
For some few tremulous moments – as if the air is being beaten
by the concerted breathing
Of all the creatures gone from our world – is somewhat, though
evanescently,
Woven closed.
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Education and the Art of Writing:
Christopher Bruell’s Aristotle as Teacher—
His Introduction to a Philosophic Science.
South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014.
268 pages, $37.50
Book Review by James Carey
In Aristotle as Teacher—His Introduction to a Philosophic Science,
Christopher Bruell advances an interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics
that pays closer attention to the wording of the actual text than does, as
far as I know, any other study of that work since the imposing commentaries of the Middle Ages. It is also much the most original interpretation
of the Metaphysics that I have ever read.
Bruell has written impressive essays on Leo Strauss, and his fine
study of Plato’s shorter dialogues, On the Socratic Education, shows
the influence of Strauss. So one can call him, with some justification, a
Straussian.1 This is not to say that he necessarily agrees with Strauss
about everything, only that he takes seriously certain themes that were
of great importance to Strauss, such as the rival claims of Greek philosophy and the Bible regarding the possibility of revelation, the root
of morality, and, more generally, what constitutes the best human life.
Strauss is well known for having called attention to the fact—and it is
a fact—that the ancient philosophers, their medieval followers, and even
their early modern opponents often wrote in such a way as to disclose
their deepest thoughts only to their most careful readers while at the
same time presenting on the surface of their texts a teaching that was
more in accord with common opinions, especially opinions concerning
James Carey is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Santa Fe,
New Mexico.
1. Straussians take the intellectual tradition of the West seriously, read the great
books with exemplary care, and think hard about the things that are most worthy
of thinking hard about. Those of us who are not Straussians can profit greatly
by attending to what they have to say, whether or not we are ultimately persuaded by what they have to say.
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the sanctity of law and the existence and nature of the divine. Philosophers wrote this way because they could not forget the example of
Socrates, who in spite of his civic virtue and the caution with which he
conversed was put to death for being a philosopher by the citizens of a
regime that was democratic and, by ancient standards, generally liberal
and tolerant as well. This art of writing is properly called “exoteric”—
not “esoteric”—for the author realized that it would be available to be
read by anyone who was able to read, whatever his ability and whatever
his degree of sympathy or antipathy toward free inquiry.
Though it becomes obvious on close inspection, especially under
the guidance of Strauss, that many books of the philosophers have an
exoteric character, it is not so obvious that Aristotle’s Metaphysics is
one of these books. In fact, it is not so obvious that the Metaphysics
is a book at all, not in the way that, say, the Nicomachean Ethics is.2
Bruell is aware that the Metaphysics looks at first glance, and for most
readers at last glance as well, like a patchwork; and he does not rule
out the possibility that someone other than Aristotle may have been
responsible for the final form of the work (30).3 But he takes it as
heuristic principle that whoever was responsible for the Metaphysics
as it has come down to us from antiquity, whether it was Aristotle
himself or one (or more) of his followers, had sound reasons for organizing it as he did, and that we cannot begin to understand the teaching of the book, much less evaluate it, without paying the closest
possible attention to the stages in which it is presented. If the Metaphysics looks more like an assemblage of notes for lectures delivered
at different times than a through-composed book like Plato’s Laws,
Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, or Machiavelli’s Prince,4 that
very appearance should be regarded as contributing to the exoteric
character of the work. On Bruell’s interpretation, every chapter, and
virtually every sentence, of the Metaphysics is in its proper place. Bruell slows the reader of the Metaphysics down, way down, and he requires
2. See W. D. Ross, Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarion Press, 1970),
Vol. 1, xiii-xxxiii.
3. Pagination for citations from Aristotle as Teacher will be given within parentheses. The same practice will be followed for citations from the Metaphysics
and other works by Aristotle. When only the Bekker number is given, it should
be read as referring to the Metaphysics, except when a different work is specified in the text.
4. See Ross, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, xxviii, on the formulations at 1069b35
and 1070a4.
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the reader to pay the closest possible attention to the exact working of
the text. That by itself is one of the many merits of Bruell’s book.
The layout of Aristotle as Teacher is unusual. It does not contain
chapter headings of the kind that one typically finds in an extended
study. Bruell frequently refers to what modern editors of the Greek
text of the Metaphysics say about their editorial decisions, and he explains why he is or is not persuaded by them. But aside from these
references, and a few references to Thomas Aquinas’s commentary,
there is virtually no mention of the secondary literature (see 135).
There are no footnotes or endnotes in Aristotle as Teacher. There is
no bibliography, there is no index of persons, and there is no index of
subjects. In the course of his treatment of the individual chapters of
the fourteen books of the Metaphysics, Bruell makes many references
to passages from other chapters. These references are always interesting. But the reader longs for an index of Aristotelian passages dealt
with in the book, so that he can quickly find out what Bruell says
about a given passage, and what he does not say about it.
Straussians have occasionally suggested that the Metaphysics is
an exoteric work. Those who, like the present reviewer, have found
this claim implausible have wondered what in the world an intelligent
and thorough interpretation of the Metaphysics as an exoteric book
could possibly look like. Bruell’s book, written with a magisterial
command of the text, and in lucid and unaffected prose of a high stylistic order, is that interpretation. It behooves anyone who wants to
know, or who thinks that he already knows, what Aristotle is doing in the
Metaphysics to come to terms with what Bruell has to say about it.5
Before proceeding further, I need to say something about the
translation of some key Aristotelian expressions. One of these is
ousia, which Bruell translates sometimes as “thing” and “sometimes
as “essence,” in keeping with the fact that for Aristotle this word can
signify both an ordinary individual and the intelligible character that
the individual shares with other individuals like it. For the former
signification I prefer “entity,” since this word is broad enough to
cover both things and persons, sub-rational animals in between, and
gods too if they exist. For the latter signification, and often for the
former too, I shall leave ousia untranslated, as Bruell frequently does
5. The reserve with which Bruell communicates his interpretation could lead
one to infer that Aristotle as Teacher is itself an exoteric work. This inference
would be an error. There is no surface to Aristotle as Teacher. It is all depth.
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as well.6 Another expression is to ti ēn einai, which Bruell translates
as “the what it was to be.” Clearly, this expression names something
of capital importance for Aristotle.7 Early in the Metaphysics, in his
restatement of the four causes (983a27-32) that were presented in the
Physics (194b23-195a3), Aristotle names ousia and to ti ēn einai first.
He does not mention eidos here as one of the causes, as he did in the
parallel passage in Physics, where it is the second cause mentioned.8
In Book Lambda, the unmoved mover is said to be to ti ēn einai, indeed the “first” ti ēn einai (1074a35-36), but never “form” (eidos),
not even “pure form.”9 In what follows I shall also leave this expression untranslated.
6. “Beingness” is not unthinkable as a translation for the second signification
of ousia, but it is unthinkable as a translation for the first signification. Aristotle
calls such entities as individual men, horses, and plants, ousiai. It makes no
sense to speak of these entities as “beingnesses.”
7. Since the imperfect ēn can function as durative, I prefer translating it as “is”
rather than “was.” The formulation, “the what it was to be,” has an odd sound to
my ears, as though implying “what it was to be, but no longer is,” or “what it
was meant to be, but didn’t quite turn out to be.” Since the ti is interrogative,
one might translate the expression as “the what is it to be.” But that translation
is not entirely satisfactory either. Something of what Aristotle means by the expression can be gathered from the contexts in which he uses it. When he launches
his inquiry into to ti ēn einai in Book Zeta, ch. 4, of the Metaphysics he uses the
expressions to soi einai, to musikōi einai, to epiphaineiāi einai, to leukōi einai,
etc. (See 994b27: to apeirōi einai; and De Anima 429b11 ff: to megathōi einai
vs. to megathos, to hydati einai vs. to hydōr, to sarki einai vs. to sarks, to euthei
einai vs. to euthy.) These dative of possessors are stronger than genitives and
could be translated respectively as “the being proper to you,” “the being proper
to musical,” “the being proper to surface,” “the being proper to white,” etc. Such
expressions are presented as exemplifications of to ti ēn einai in the sphere of
what is sensible. (See also 1029b21: ho logos tou ti ēn einai; and De Anima
429b20.) When Aristotle is not speaking of this or that particular individual, he
tends to use the longer expression, to ti ēn einai. In the course of his treatment
of sensible ousia, Aristotle often uses to ti ēn einai interchangeably with eidos.
But the former is not a synonym for the latter. Furthermore, though in certain
contexts Aristotle will speak of hylē as ousia, he never to my knowledge speaks
hylē as to ti ēn einai (cf. Metaphysics 1032b14).
8. The presentation of the causes in Book Delta of the Metaphysics (1013b1627) follows the order of the Physics.
9. Eugene Ryan, “Pure Form in Aristotle,” Phronesis, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, 1973,
209-224.
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Bruell says of the formal cause, or the form, that it is “the perceptible or intelligible character of a being, nothing more” (20). The “nothing more” is intriguing, since Aristotle treats the form not only as what
is intelligible about a sensible (or perceptible—aisthētē) entity (ousia)
but, along with matter (or material—hylē), as an actual constituent of a
sensible, and composite, entity (Physics 193b6). It is not only one of
the causes, it is nature (physis) to a higher degree than is matter (ibid.,
193b7; 193b19—taking morphē here as equivalent to eidos: 193b3-5).
Indeed, it is activity, or being at work (energeia—Metaphysics 1050b2;
see 1043a28). If the eidos were not somehow a constituent of an entity,
then it is hard to see how it could be the perceptible or intelligible character of that very entity, or of its nature (Physics, 193b7). Bruell is
hardly unaware of the passages I have just cited. But he has reasons for
not placing as much weight on them as I and others do.
One of the pervasive themes of the Metaphysics is the criticism of
the “Platonic” account of the eidē as what is intelligible regarding sensible entities and, at the same time, as actual causes of these entities,
though separate from them. Bruell detects in the Metaphysics a roughly
parallel, but obliquely communicated, criticism of the “Aristotelian” account of eidē as well, and of the “Aristotelian” account of ousia more
generally (140). Aristotle’s account is certainly not problem-free, one
indication being his employment of the single word eidos to name both
a constituent within, hence bound to, a particular sensible entity, and the
species to which it and entities closely resembling it belong. Aristotle’s
explicit teaching is that the eidos is present in a sensible entity, causing
it to be the very being that it is, and yet also apprehensible, through the
joint operation of sensation, imagination, and the intellect (nous), and
explicable, in terms of genus and specific difference, as the intelligible
character of that entity.10 (See De Anima 431a16; 431b3). This is a demanding construal of the eidos indeed. But it is not nonsensical.
10. Bruell writes, “In concluding this portion of the argument [in Book Zeta
ch. 4], Aristotle does not speak of the form (eidos) but of species (eidē)” (138).
Bruell speaks here as though eidos (singular) does not mean species (singular)
and that when Aristotle wishes to speak of species (singular or plural) he uses
eidē rather than eidos. But Aristotle will use eidos with speaking of species in
the singular. See, for example, Categories 5, 2b7-23, Topics 4, 122b18-123a19.
Nor is his usage of eidos (singular) for species (singular) confined to the logical
writings. See, for example, Metaphysics 1038a25-26. Consider 1023b2. The
hylē of the eidos is intelligible hylē, rather than sensible hylē. It is the genus:
1024b4-10, 1038a3-9, and 1045a33-35.
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When Bruell comes to Aristotle’s treatment of the Platonic understanding of the forms, he writes, “Not even the considerable latitude
that Aristotle avails himself of in speaking of his teacher is sufficient
to permit the mention of Plato in connection with an imperfect grasp of
the formal cause (compare A 7 988a34-b6)” (29). The passage that Bruell refers to here could seem to undermine the point it is supposed to
support. For Aristotle writes there that “concerning to ti ēn einai [which,
in the case of sensible entities, Aristotle closely associates with eidos—
e.g., Physics194b26; Metaphysics 1032b1-2] and the ousia, no one [so,
not even Plato] has clearly introduced (apodedōke) them, though those
posting the forms do speak of them.” With his pointed reference to
988a34-b6, Bruell implies that Plato himself, as distinct from his followers, did not intend to introduce the formal cause clearly, inviting us
to infer that Plato was as aware as was Aristotle of the problematic character of the formal cause.
In his treatment of Book alpha (“little alpha”), Bruell correctly
notes that, for Aristotle “truth is being, as knowable” (31). Since “we
do not know ‘the true’ without the cause” (993b23-24), Bruell is led to
infer, “Truth, then, or nature is being, as caused or in so far as it is
caused.” But he immediately expresses a doubt about this inference,
and rightly so. For the inference can be sustained only by ruling out the
possibility that there could be an instance of truth that is being, not just
as caused, but as cause, that is, that there could be a first uncaused cause
and a first truth. For unless there is a cause that does not depend on a
yet more fundamental cause, and unless there is a truth that does not
owe its intelligibility to a yet more manifest truth, then we are caught
in an infinite regress, both in causes and in truths, with no cause sufficient of itself, nor any number of causes in the series sufficient taken
together, to account for what is caused and no truth evident of itself to
ground other truths (994b16-23; see 1005b5-1006a12). But Aristotle
says that what is most true (alēthestaton) is the cause of subsequent
things’ (tois hysterois) being true (993b26-27).11 He expands his point
11. Thomas Aquinas and others have detected the outline of an argument, from
gradations of being, for the existence of God right here in Book alpha (993b23994a2), an argument quite distinct from the argument from motion in Book
Lambda. This argument is not fleshed out. But if not only to on, but also ousia
as the premier instance of to on, has a pros hen character, which I think is Aristotle’s view (see, for example, 1004a3-5), then the ground has been laid in
Book alpha for an argument that there is an ousia that is in the highest degree
(malista) and is, moreover, the cause, or at least a cause, of other ousiai.
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immediately afterwards by saying that the first principles (archai), not
just of truths, but of eternal beings (to the extent that they have principles distinct from themselves—he likely has in mind the stars here), are
always the most true. Nothing else is the cause of their being. And, he
adds, just as each thing has being so it has truth (993b28-34). If Aristotle
is serious in making these claims, then he cannot mean that truth is
being as caused, period. Being as caused presupposes, in his account,
being as uncaused. Aristotle says that it is clear (dēlon) there is some
first principle (singular), and he expressly rules out an infinite regression of causes, either in a direct line or in type (994a1-2). Bruell does
not deny that there is some first principle or principles, but he asks
whether they are knowable (32). Whether or not they are knowable to
us, however, they would be knowable by nature if they knew themselves, a possibility that Aristotle has already mentioned (983a6; see
also 993b11; 1029b3-5; Posterior Analytics 71b34-35; Physics
1084a19; Nicomachean Ethics 1095b2) and will argue for explicitly in
chapter nine of Book Lambda (1074b15-35). Bruell presumably regards
these passages as exoteric.12
Aristotle begins chapter 2 of Book alpha by arguing that there can
be neither an infinite regress with respect to the hou heneka (the “for the
sake of which,” i.e., the final cause) nor with respect to to ti ēn einai. If
so, then there must be both a first hou heneka that is not for the sake of
anything else (994a8-10; 994b9-16; cf. 1072b1-3) and a first to ti ēn
einai that is not bound up with hylē and is not the einai of anything else
(1074a35-36), but is non-composite or simple (1072a31-34; 1075a5-10;
cf. Physics 266a10-267b20), fully actual and in no sense potential
12. Regarding latter chapters of Book Lambda, Bruell chooses “to depart so
far from [Aristotle’s] injunction (L6 1071b3-5) as to refrain from adding to
them, elliptical though they are” (251). Apparently, Bruell understands these
chapters, and earlier passages in the Metaphysics (e.g., 988b25-26; 1009a3638; 1012b30-31; 1037a10-17; 1037a33-b6; 1040b34-1041a3; 1041a7-9;
1045b23; 1064a33-1064b3: hoper peirasometha deiknunai) that anticipate
them by making mention of entities that are immaterial and separate—separate,
that is, from the perceptible entities with which we are familiar—to be accommodations to readers who would rather be moved (250) than see the truth for
what it is. Prior to the latter chapters of Book Lambda, Aristotle will use locutions such as “immaterial and separate ousiai . . . if they exist.” One can say
that Aristotle is hinting in such passages that immaterial ousiai, in fact, do not
exist. But one can also say, instead, that he is reluctant to positively affirm the
existence of such ousiai prior to advancing a complete argument for their existence, which he does not do until Book Lambda.
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(1071b13-14, 19-22; 1074a36), necessary (1072b10), necessarily eternal
(1071b4), an unmoved mover (1072a25-26: cf. Physics, 260a18-19), and
the principle on which heaven and nature depend (1072b13-14).
Aristotle argues that there are only four species of cause, and that
within none of these species is there procession, or ascent, into infinity.
Bruell is struck by the fact that Aristotle says, without elaboration, that
even in the case of to ti ēn einai, the formal cause, there cannot be a
procession into infinity (33). He speculates that this might be because
the other three causes presuppose the formal cause, and that it is only
on the basis of this presupposition that each of them, too, must have a
first causes—from which we are invited to infer that if there is no first
formal cause, then there is no first final, moving, or material cause either. Aristotle’s point, I think, is simpler. He is not committing himself
here to the existence of an actual sequence or series of formal causes,
but only noting that if one formal cause were the effect of another formal cause, then in this case too there could be no procession into infinity—and, again, he does argue for a first to ti ēn einai later on.13 Bruell
writes “[Aristotle] assumes that there is a beginning to the series [that
he is considering at present in terms of their downward direction], a
first cause, as if the necessity that there be such a beginning had been
shown also for causes in this way, as one might have been led to believe
that it had been shown for causes coincident with their effects in time”
(34). It is not clear that Aristotle is speaking at this point exclusively of
causes antecedent in time to their effects, rather than of causes more
generally (cf. 994b6-9). He does argue elsewhere that temporally antecedent causes—for example, fathers as causes of sons—can regress
backwards in time indefinitely, the world having no beginning in time
and the human species being eternal (Physics 206a24-206b27 cf.
258b10; 266a7.). But, as for causes coincident with their effects, Aristotle does not just lead us to believe that they cannot proceed to infinity
13. 1074a36. In Book Zeta, Aristotle will speak of the specific differences that
are present in the definitions of various species (eidē) as having a formal character that limits the genus, which is in turn the intelligible material (hylē
noetikē) that is also present in the definition (cf. 1023b2; cf. 1036a9-11); see
the passages referred to in footnote 10, supra. At the end of his interpretation
of Book alpha, ch. 2, Bruell notes that an infinite ascent in formal causes would
give rise to a problem for the possibility of science or knowledge (35-36). Such
a thing, however, would not be problem for knowledge alone. It would be a
problem for being itself: there would be no ousiai that are without qualification
(consider 1086b16-19).
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in the ascending direction. As Bruell noted earlier, “[Aristotle] explains
more generally why there must be a first cause, if there is to be any
cause at all” (33). Bruell does not elaborate on this general explanation.
He speaks as though he finds it unpersuasive; and he may think that Aristotle found it unpersuasive as well. Aristotle’s explanation or, rather,
argument is that there cannot be an actual infinite number of anything
(Physics 207b11-12.). Least of all, then, can there be, in a series of
causes coincident with a given effect, an infinite number of them efficacious at an instant. For if, per impossible, there were an infinite number of such causes, each the effect of another cause, then there would
be no cause, or number of causes, higher up in the series capable of producing any other cause or effect further down in the series. And so, “if
there were no first (cause), there would be no cause (properly so called)
at all” (994a18-19). One cannot avoid this conclusion by asserting that
“the whole infinity of causes” produces the given effect, for an infinity
of causes is not a whole. In the case of a series of causes coincident
with their effects, then, there simply must be a cause that is not itself
an effect within the series. Aristotle’s medieval followers, on both sides
of the philosophical-religious divide, held this to be a necessary truth.
Bruell seems to think that Aristotle’s shifting between speaking of
causes that temporally precede their effects and speaking of causes that
are coincident with their effects, and his sometimes treating both together in general statements, are hints that he may not have been altogether serious about his argument for the necessity of a first cause in
the case of causes that are coincident with their effects (see 32-36). It
would have been helpful if Bruell had spelled out exactly what he thinks
Aristotle might have found defective in this argument, which he makes
in his own name. Quite a lot turns on it.
As for causes that temporally precede their effects, it is here that
an infinity of formal causes in particular is ruled out. For though, to return to Aristotle’s example, in natural generation the series of fathers
and sons regresses backwards indefinitely into time past, the formal
cause, to ti ēn einai, in this case to anthropōi einai, is present throughout
the series. If this formal cause itself has a formal cause, which as such
would be temporally coincident with it, then the same argument applies:
there can be no ascent into infinity.
Aristotle announces at the beginning of Book Gamma that there is
a science that considers being qua being (to on hēi on). He says that
being (to on) is said in many ways, though always in relation to one
(pros hen) nature or principle (1003a33-34; 1003b5-6; cf. Categories
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1a12-15). That one nature or principle is ousia (1003b6-10; cf.
1003b17-19; 1028b2-7). Being, then, is not a universal like horse, in
which all the members of the class are equally horses. It is not a genus,
and it cannot be divided into subordinate genera (998b22-26; cf.
1070b1). To be subdivided, specific differences would have to be introduced; and yet these differences, too, are, in some sense of that word.
Aristotle gives two examples of what he means by the special kind of
“universal” that being is. Many things are called “healthy,” but always
with reference to health. Bruell sees a problem with this example:
though we call lots of things “healthy,” we do not call health “healthy”
(65). However, the second example that Aristotle gives is more apt,
namely, “the medical” (or “that which is medical”– to iatrikon –1003b12; cf. 1030b2-3.) A medical knife, a medical procedure, a medical building, a medical degree, etc., are all called “medical” with reference to
some one instance of medical that is medical in the preeminent sense,
and that is the medical art (hē iatrikē). The medical art is rightly called
“medical.” In the same way, ousia is rightly called a being (on), and
ousiai are rightly called beings (onta).14 Bruell, however, has misgivings
about calling Aristotle’s ousiai “beings” (65). For being is always said
in relation to some one nature or principle (1003b6; cf. 1028a 14-15),
and that turns out to be ousia. But ousia is not itself said in relation to
ousia. So it seems that ousia cannot be a being, after all. This, I take it,
is the reasoning behind Bruell’s misgivings. Aristotle, however, says at
once that ousiai are beings: “Some [things] are called beings because
[they are] ousiai,” (1003b6; cf. 1028a 14-15) others because they are
qualities of ousia, and so forth. The color of a horse is a quality of an
ousia; but the horse itself is an ousia. It is, then, in a quite special sense
that a horse is said in relation to ousia: the relation is one of identity,
where something that is really one is thought of as two (1018a4-9; cf.
1021b6-8). Aristotle frequently speaks of ousiai as beings later in the
Metaphysics (e.g., 1071b5), as he does here, and Bruell of course acknowledges this. But he regards this way of speaking as loose (100;
126), for reasons that become clearer later on (e.g., 230-231; 238).
Bruell distinguishes between two models of a philosophical science: “philosophy as originally conceived, on the one hand, and a divine
14. Cf. Physics 192b8-13. Among the onta that Aristotle lists here are animals
and plants, which are incontestably ousiai, if not exactly ousiai in the fullest
sense of the word. Only the separate ousiai of Book Lambda, chs. 6-10—if
they exist—would count for Aristotle as ousiai in the fullest sense of the word,
as I shall argue below.
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science (A2 983a4-11), on the other” (38). By the former, Bruell means
the various attempts at physics that were advanced by the preSocratics.15 He speaks of a need that Aristotle found himself under to
revise these two models. Regarding the model of “a divine science,”
Bruell says that Aristotle “cannot point to the needed revisions so visibly and unambiguously as to jeopardize the survival of a ‘metaphysics’ [Bruell reminds us that ‘metaphysics’ is not Aristotle’s term]
whose attractiveness offers the broad back on which the skeletal form
of a philosophic science might have the prospect of riding into and
through ages even less hospitable to philosophy than his own” (39).
The task that Bruell sets himself in his interpretation is to bring this
skeletal form gradually and cautiously into view, though only for those
who have eyes to see.
Not all readers of the Metaphysics have eyes to see. But Aristotle,
as Bruell interprets him, offers something of value to virtually everyone
who reads through it. When Bruell comes to speak about Book Kappa,
which makes something of a new beginning in the Metaphysics, he distinguishes between, by my count, four different groups of readers. These
readers can be grouped as follows (using numbers in brackets, so as to
reserve numbers in parentheses for Bruell’s pagination): [1] In the first
place are those who have not been “disappointed in the result, or at the
lack of result, of the investigation of ousia in Zeta and Eta, at its failure
to reach its announced goal (Z2 1028b27-31, Z17 1041a6-9).” That failure is “redeemed for them” by “the treatment of potentiality and truth
in Theta [and/or] of ‘the one’ in Iota” (225). For these, the most careful
readers of the Metaphysics, i.e., the readers who are equipped both intellectually and emotionally to apprehend and accept the austere teaching of this work, the inquiry into the science of being qua being is
substantively finished, that is, finished to the extent that it can be finished (1028b3), by the end of Book Iota. The express theology of the
latter chapters of Book Lambda, in particular, is not for them. However,
15. Aristotle does not make a sharp a distinction between these two endeavors.
Cf. infra, footnote 34. Regarding “philosophy as originally conceived,” Bruell
refers us to Book Alpha ch. 3-6, 8-9, and to Book alpha ch. 1-2 (38). Book Alpha
ch. 3-5, 8 (and 7 too) treat physical theories, though not exclusively. But physical
theories per se are not obviously the chief concern of ch. 6 and 9, nor of Book
alpha ch. 1, though they return for consideration in ch. 2 of that book. With his
references, Bruell suggests that “philosophy as originally conceived,” in distinction from “a divine science,” is physics properly understood, i.e., the study
of nature in the deepest sense of the word physis.
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another group of readers have been disappointed by the failure of the
investigation of ousia in Zeta and Eta, and this failure has not been redeemed for them by anything that was said in Books Theta and Iota.
Among these are [2] readers for whom Book Kappa, with its repetitions
of portions of Books Beta, Gamma, and Epsilon, is able to remind of
points already made and thereby to sharpen “their awareness of a problem which they will already have felt and which the sequel will, somehow or other, have to solve” (225).16 Some of these readers are
educable, psychologically as well as intellectually, and there is a
chance that by the end of Book Kappa, or by the end of the first five
chapters of Book Lamba at the latest, they will have come to understand what the first group of readers understood without reading beyond Book Iota. But also among the readers of Kappa are [3] a third
group to whom “the cold light of the intervening books [between
Books Alpha and Kappa] . . . will have proved no avail” (225). Nothing
they will have read prior to Book Lambda will have led them to doubt
that a philosophical science is able to demonstrate the existence of separate, incorporeal, eternal ousiai, and they continue to hope that the argument of the Metaphysics will culminate in this demonstration. However,
even within this group there are [4] some who are “unable to accept
Lambda’s result (its silence [i.e., Book Mu’s silence about Book Lambda’s
result] constituting a tacit acknowledgement of their good judgment in
that regard)” (254). It is largely, though not exclusively, for this fourth
group that Books Mu and Nu are written. For though they were unable
to accept Lambda’s result, “they have retained, whether for good reasons
or bad, an interest in the ideas and the mathematicals.” The good reasons
add up to a genuine theoretical interest in the greater intelligibility of the
ideas and the mathematicals in comparison with the sensible, composite
individuals with which we are familiar (999b1-4). The bad reasons add
up, it is not difficult to surmise, to baseless hopes and a deluded attachment to the idea of eternity (see 264 on “we wish,” and compare De
Anima 432b5-6), from which Aristotle has gently tried to pry his most
mature readers loose. In either case, Books Mu and Nu will hammer the
remaining nails that Aristotle has at his disposal into the coffins of
Pythagoreanism and Platonism. As for those readers who were able to
accept Book Lambda’s result, if they bother to read Books Mu and Nu at
all they will likely regard them only as superfluous and annoying appendices that detract from the comforting theology of Book Lambda.
16. Bruell does not spell out what this problem is here.
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To repeat, this is my count of the different groups of readers that
Bruell indicates. If I have enumerated and distinguished them more or
less correctly, there is surely overlap, and there may be other groups
quite different from these.17 At any event, at this point we have to ask
what it is that the first group of readers, the fully adult readers, have
come to see by the end of Book Iota at the latest. That is to say, what
does Bruell think is the deepest stratum of the teaching in the Metaphysics? It is not easy to be sure about this. If Aristotle expressed his
deepest thoughts in the Metaphysics with such circumspection that only
a very small number of readers, perhaps no more than a handful of them,
have ever read this book adequately, and if they in turn have refrained
from writing down exactly what they have discerned in it, then Bruell
must realize that Aristotle and his most competent readers had good
reasons for their reticence. Times have changed however. The attitude
of the public to philosophy today is less likely to be one of suspicion
and hatred than of indifference and contempt. Contemporary readers of
the Metaphysics underestimate the daring of Aristotle’s thought, and
hence fail to learn from it, because they find the express theology of
17. Working with Bruell’s guiding premise that in the Metaphysics Aristotle
tailors his teaching to different groups of readers, I venture to suggest a fifth
group, distinct from the four noted above. Near the beginning of Book Mu Aristotle says—I quote Bruell’s paraphrase—“‘first’ to be considered are what
the others have said about these questions,” i.e., the questions about the possibility of “some ousia that is without motion and everlasting” (254). Bruell
emphasizes the word “first” (1076a12) because this passage “conveys the impression or suggestion” that the investigation into this possibility “is about to
begin in earnest.” This impression or suggestion would then be an understated
repudiation of the results of Book Lambda. The alternative is that Aristotle is
only announcing a fresh beginning, of which there have already been several
in the Metaphysics: the “first” points to a “second.” That is, Aristotle leads us
to think that, after first treating what others have said about separate ousia, he
will add something further of his own about it. Whether it would depart significantly from Book Lambda or not, there is no way telling since the Metaphysics does not contain a further account of separate ousia or of anything else
after the critical treatment, in Books Mu and Nu, of what others have said.
This fifth group of readers, of whom I am one, infers that Aristotle simply
never got around to writing the sequel to Books Mu and Nu. To this group
Bruell might respond that the absence of the expected sequel should not be explained away so conveniently when it can be interpreted as the tacit response
to an expectation deliberately raised at the beginning of Book Mu only to be
deflated when the reader in this fifth group turns over the last page of Book
Nu and sees nothing there.
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Book Lambda preposterous. Bruell, for all his caution, discloses what
he takes to be the deepest stratum of Aristotle’s teaching in the Metaphysics more candidly than did any previous readers, if there were any,
who interpreted the book along the lines that he does. And so, I do not
think it inappropriate to attempt to state just what Bruell understands
this deepest stratum to be. As far as I can tell, it consists of several interrelated theses, which are not expressed unequivocally but are indicated here and there (again using numbers in brackets).
[1]There are no separate ousiai, which is to say, there is no God
and there are no gods. [2] The harmoniously ordered cosmos is not eternal. It is a transient phase, destined to pass away eventually. [3] The
heavenly bodies are not moved by an unmoved mover (or movers).
Their apparent, circular motion is caused by what they are, including
especially what they are made of, rather than by any mover apart from
them. [4] The articulation of the given world and the distinctions between things is largely the effect of the human intellect, so much so that
one is tempted to infer that the human intellect is the deepest root of
things. But that inference would be problematic since the human intellect is mortal. It is hardly the deepest root of itself. [5] The deepest root
of things is, in fact, matter, not just the “materiality” of the four elements, but something coursing beneath these, eternal, moving, not accessible to perception, and not really accessible to the intellect either.
The existence of this ultimate matter can be much more plausibly inferred than can the existence of separate ousiai, but only as a kind of
limit case of what the human intellect can infer. We know nothing about
it other than that it exists, and that it is some kind of cause. We cannot
even be sure that the claims we venture to make about it are governed
by the principle of non-contradiction.18 Since this eternal, moving, and
imperceptible matter is the deepest root of things, it is the deepest root
of the human intellect too. The human intellect is no more than a possibility, so to speak, that was always latent in this matter. [6]. On the
18. Aristotle claims that the so-called principle of non-contradiction is indemonstrable (1006a5-10). It is known, however, as self-evident, and is
thereby a first principle (archē) for the demonstration of other things (cf. Posterior Analytics 99b15-100b17). It is the most certain of all principles. It is a
principle about which one cannot be mistaken (Metaphysics 1005b8-25),
though one individual might not understand the articulation of this principle,
while another might feign ignorance about it because it cannot be demonstrated
(1011a3-b17) or just prevaricate about it (cf. 1005b 25-26). Bruell is not convinced that Aristotle was as confident of this principle and of its logical equivalent, the principle of excluded middle, as he lets on (67-83; see the full
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other hand, the human intellect, as tossed up by this matter and then
impinged upon by it, constitutes, somehow, a world, an ordered whole
that is more or less knowable, by physics in particular. Physics, and
not metaphysics, is the philosophical science—though only if physics
is properly conducted, that is to say, modestly conducted, without any
pretense of being able to draw the deepest root of things into the sunlight. The given world is the home of man, and it is the region to which
science, including philosophical science, is limited. It is given, not by
God or the gods, but by primordial matter acting upon one of its own
potentialities.
If Bruell’s interpretation is that the Metaphysics is intended to communicate the above theses, or theses resembling them, to its most careful readers, then it must be said at once that this interpretation is, strictly
speaking, irrefutable. Any passages in the Metaphysics that can be marshalled as evidence against it can be consistently interpreted by Bruell
as exoteric accommodations. And there is no way he can be proven
wrong. Still one can raise a few questions about these theses.
[1] The thesis that there are no separate ousiai is not argued for,
much less demonstrated, by Aristotle or by Bruell. It is what certain
passages in the Metaphysics “meant perhaps to suggest” (233). Since
there is no way of actually demonstrating that there are no separate ousiai, a less strident version of this thesis would be simply that there is
nothing in our experience of, and thoughtful reflection on, the given
world that enables us to reasonably infer that separate ousiai exist. This
version may be closer to what Bruell discerns in the Metaphysics.
[2] The thesis that the harmoniously ordered cosmos is not eternal
may be intimated (1074b10-13; see 252, bottom: “many times”), but it
is not argued for either. For this thesis to be taken seriously, some kind
of account needs to be given of how a well-ordered and, especially, intelligible cosmos could emerge out of chaos by chance, rather than
through the agency of something like a divine intellect or a demiurge
(994b8-22; 1060a26-27; 1075b24-27).
paragraph on 83). One thing is clear, however: if this principle, or one logically
equivalent to it, is not self-evidently known, then there can be no demonstration,
hence no genuine science (Posterior Analytics 71b20-34; cf. Republic 533b5c6), philosophical or otherwise, of anything in this world, to say nothing of whatever is above or beneath it. (Compare Strauss, “Freud on Moses and
Monotheism,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, edited by Kenneth Hart Grene, [Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1997], 285.) And
that would count as a point in favor of belief in revelation, which does not need
to validate its fundamental claims in the same way that philosophy does.
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[3] The thesis that the heavenly bodies move themselves and are
not moved by anything else is at odds with Aristotle’s theory, even his
very definition, of motion (Physics 201a10; a29). It is possible that he
did not intend his theory of motion seriously. But there is no alternative
theory of motion argued for in the Physics. And, as we shall see shortly,
the denial of Aristotle’s theory of motion undercuts a criticism of one
of the moral presuppositions of religious belief.
[4] The thesis that the human intellect is crucially responsible for
the world as we experience it (Anaxagoras’s audacious thought? [26])
cannot be simply dismissed. Among other things, there is textual support for the claim that Aristotle seriously entertained this view.19 But to
argue for it, while at the same time arguing for the possibility of science
as a communicable endeavor, one has to make a distinction between
what is idiosyncratic about this or that human intellect and what is common or pertains to the human intellect as such. Kant and Husserl, in different ways, made this distinction, which is the distinction between
empirical and transcendental subjectivity. And it is not unthinkable that
this distinction was anticipated in Aristotle’s distinction “in the [human]
soul” (en tēi psychēi) between an intellect that “becomes all things,”
the potential (or passive) intellect, and an intellect that “makes [!] all
things” (De Anima 430a13-16), the active intellect. Though the distinction between active and passive intellect would support this particular
thesis, Bruell does not speak to it, whether because he thinks that the
active intellect sounds too much like something divine, which Aristotle
as a philosopher could not take seriously, or because, if it is not divine,
it cannot plausibly be claimed to be deathless and eternal (cf. 250), as
Aristotle says it is (De Anima, 430a22-24), or for some other reason, I
do not know.
[5] The thesis that matter is the deepest root of things is, in my
opinion, much the least plausible of these theses, both on the merits and
as an interpretation of Aristotle. The most interesting textual support
that Bruell adduces for it is a rather obscure sentence near the beginning
of Book Lambda (1069a30-36; Bruell, 246). But, however one interprets this sentence, there are problems with claiming that matter is the
root of all things. For one cannot make good sense of the claim that the
mind is produced by, or is ultimately a property of, matter, given the
intentionality peculiar to the former. In fact, it is difficult to rescue the
claim that matter is the root of all things from the charge of ultimate
19. See Physics 223a22-27; De Anima 426a20-26; Metaphysics, 1036a1-8.
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self-contradiction.20 And even if one could show that something like
Aristotle’s passive intellect can be construed as physically produced by
matter, or as a mysterious and superfluous epiphenomenon of matter,
or as itself just a complex mass of matter—and I think that one cannot
show any of these things—one would be left only with an intellect that
(wondrously) corresponds to the things it apprehends. But on that basis
one would not be able to make a meaningful distinction between true
opinion and knowledge strictly so called. For this distinction one would
need, again, to introduce something like the active intellect, something
that knows it is knowing. Aristotle presents the intellect—the active
and/or divine intellect surely—and matter as radically diverse principles. Neither is reducible to or derivable from the other. One can claim
for whatever combination of reasons that the intellect and the truths that
it knows are occult properties latent in an aboriginal hylē. This claim
is, after all, one of the reigning dogmas of our time. But one cannot
make sense of it without transforming hylē from mere materiality (or
potentiality—dynamis), as we encounter it in the given world, into an
uncaused cause, primordial but also permanently present in its actualizing activity (energeia), and essentially elusive.
[6] Bruell aims in Aristotle as Teacher at showing that the pursuit
of a science of being qua being in the Metaphysics is as much concerned with the possibility of science or knowledge (epistēmē) as it
is with illuminating being. The Metaphysics aims at introducing its
readers to a philosophical science, which precisely as philosophic, requires exposing the problematic character of science, which is in fact
the problem of philosophy itself, to the extent that philosophy aspires
to validate, unequivocally, its claim to be the most choiceworthy way
of life for those who have what it takes to live it. That aspiration is
obviously compromised if philosophy cannot get at the deepest root
of things. For then it cannot know beyond the shadow of a doubt that
the deepest root of things is not much more akin to what its greatest
rival holds as a matter of faith than anything that natural reason can
penetrate to on its own. In that case, “does not science or philosophy
come into fatal contradiction with itself?” (28). If philosophy cannot
know more about the root of all things than that some such root exists,
then it cannot know beyond the shadow of a doubt that this root really
is a blind, deaf, and mute necessity rather than the God who dwells in
20. See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (New York: Harper and Row,
1966), 127-134.
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a thick cloud and reveals himself out of the freedom of his own inscrutable will, to those of his own choice, at a time and place of his
own choosing.
We encounter several of the above theses in Kant. For he, too, holds
that the human mind, stimulated by something essentially hidden from
it, constitutes the world, and that there can be a scientific investigation,
a physics, of the world, so constituted, even a metaphysics of nature,
but no metaphysics of whatever it is that lies beneath nature and outside
the constitutive activity of the human intellect. The conspicuous difference between Kant and Aristotle, as I take Bruell to interpret Aristotle,
is that Kant expends enormous effort in arguing for his theses, and he
does so openly and directly, for pages on end. Bruell’s Aristotle does
not clearly advance arguments for any of the theses suggested above.
The arguments may exist, disassembled, their premises partially concealed here and there in the thickets of Books Zeta through Iota. But
Bruell has not reassembled them. Or if he has, I have not been able to
discern them. Bruell’s Aristotle teaches by and large indirectly, by way
of intimations (e.g., 38), divergences from earlier intimations (39),
pointers (83), indications (100), thoughts that he allows himself to express only in conditional form (163), suggestions (101), tacit admissions
(118), tacitly withdrawn suggestions (125), and silence (128).
The preceding paragraph could lead one who knows nothing of
Bruell as a thinker and teacher to infer that his interpretation of the
Metaphysics is just too idiosyncratic to be worth the effort required to
grasp it. That inference would be seriously mistaken. The progressive
deepening of one’s understanding that results from following Bruell
as he thinks his way slowly, patiently, sentence by sentence and word
by word, looking behind and to the side as well as ahead, through the
maze that is the Metaphysics is worth incomparably more than the effort it takes to keep up with him. That Aristotle chose to teach indirectly, with a view to the diverse abilities and needs of his readers,
cannot be ruled out, if only because we know that he had before him
the examples of his teacher and of his teacher’s teacher. And we know
how indirectly they taught.
Though Bruell speaks of the “attractiveness” of “the broad back
on which the skeletal form of a philosophic science might have the
prospect of riding,” he does not describe it. For this reason, it is necessary to restate, if only briefly, the traditional interpretation of the Metaphysics so that it can be compared with the teaching that Bruell finds
indicated beneath the surface. The traditional interpretation takes sev-
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eral forms, and in restating it I can only sketch what I understand to be
its most coherent form. Others would surely sketch the traditional interpretation differently than I do. But all variations of the traditional interpretation have more in common with my sketch of it than they do
with Bruell’s interpretation.
According to the traditional interpretation, the concern of the Metaphysics is being, not the being of any particular entity, but being as such,
or being qua being (1003a20). But, as noted earlier, being is not a genus.
Ousia is the primary instance of being (1028a 14-15), and it is that in
relation to which everything else, such as color, size, position, and so
forth is said, in a derivative sense, to be. The inquiry into being qua being
is then primarily an inquiry into ousia. There is, however, a range of
opinion about what most deserves to be called ousia (1028b8-1029a5).
But since virtually everyone agrees that a sensible entity, which Aristotle
calls a whole (synolon) of eidos (or morphē) and hylē (1029a5-6) or a
composite entity (synthetē ousia—1070a14), is an ousia, and since we
cannot at the early stage of our inquiry be sure that there are any ousiai
that are separate from sensible ousiai, Aristotle begins with a consideration of sensible ousia, with how it is related to to ti ēn einai and how it
is known. Now ousia as the primary instance of being would seem to be
being least mixed with non-being.21 So, if there are imperishable ousiai,
i.e., ousiai that do not come to be and pass away, they would be ousiai
more fully than perishable ousiai are (cf. 1059b12-14; 1060b1-3).22 As
imperishable, and hence not bound up with hylē, which is not itself fully
intelligible, separate ousiai would also be more intelligible than sensible
ousiai, if not initially so to us, still more intelligible by nature, or intrinsically intelligible, or intelligible to themselves. Similarly ousia, as the
primary instance of being would seem to be that which is most actual
and least potential. So if there are unmoved ousiai, they would be more
fully ousiai than are moved ousiai (since what is moved is, to some extent, potential and not entirely actual: Physics 201a11; a30; b33; Metaphysics 1026a15-16 ). Finally, if there are ousiai that are altogether
separate from, and in no way depend on, other ousiai, either as features
21. See Plato, Republic 476e7-478e7.
22. Consider the full implication of 1026a27-32. Even if there are separate ousiai, why wouldn’t physics still be the first science, unless sensible ousiai are
found wanting in something that should pertain to them as ousiai, namely immobility and imperishability? I read the aporia noted at 1086b16-20 as resolvable through an account of separate ousiai that would recapitulate, in its
essentials, the chief claims of Book Lambda, chs. 6-10.
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of those ousiai or predicated of them, then they are ousiai more fully
than dependent ousiai are (1017b23-26; 1029a27-28). In sum, the primary instance of ousia, ousia in the unqualified sense, would be characterized by imperishability, intrinsic intelligibility, complete actuality,
and unqualified independence.
Among the sensible ousiai that inhabit the sublunar sphere, we find
something that, if not actually eternal, is imperishable at least as long
as we can attend to it in thought. And this is the form (eidos) of the sensible, perishable, composite entity, to the extent that its form is identical
to, or inextricable from, the species (also eidos) to which the perishable,
sensible composite “belongs,” as their common name suggests and
which is there for thought long after the composite itself perishes. But
for Aristotle, unlike the Platonists, the form is not separate, except in
logos, from that of which it is the form.23 It does not, so to speak, stand
on its own, as does the perishable, sensible, composite entity of which
the eidos is predicated. The hylē of the sensible composite does not, as
matter, stand on its own either. Matter, taken by itself, is merely potential being (1060a20-21); in this way it exists only in relation to actual
being, to something that, as such, is, not potentially but actually. Moreover, matter as such is not knowable (1036a8-9); we can know a perishable, sensible composite only to the extent that we can apprehend its
eidos (De Anima 429a27-28; 431b3, 27-432a1), apart from its matter
(ibid, 429b22). As potential being, matter can neither actually be nor
be knowable or even perceptible (De Anima 424a18-19). The perishable, sensible composite entity, then, has relative to its eidos the advantage of standing on its own, of being an individual and not something
that is only as predicated of something else. On the other hand, the eidos
has relative to that of which it is the eidos, the advantage of being imperishable to the extent that it continues to be intelligible, as species,
after the composite entity perishes.
The inquiry into sensible ousiai leads to the problematic result that
the features of separability, individuality, and independence, on the one
23. Bruell puts repeated, and wholly justifiable, emphasis on Aristotle’s criticism of the notion of subsistent universals, including any attempt to interpret
his own species and genera as subsistent. There is, however, nothing particularly controversial about this. The criticism is recognized in the traditional interpretation of the Metaphysics, and generally concurred in as well. It has no
adverse bearing at all on—in fact, it reinforces—Aristotle’s account of separate
ousiai in Book Lambda. For these ousiai are not universals. (And the Biblical
God is not a universal either.)
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hand, and immobility and imperishablility on the other, both of which
are characteristic of ousia (see, e.g., 1017b22-28; 1026a10-16), are bifurcated in the sublunar sphere. We cannot find any ousia in this sphere
that bears the features of both sets of characteristics, which is to say
that nothing here is without qualification. As for the superlunar sphere,
the stars are indeed separate individuals (as eidē are not) and they seem
to be imperishable too, for they have been up in the heavens, participating in ceaseless circular motion for as long as people have recorded
what they have seen in the heavens. But motion, including circular motion, requires a mover distinct from and causative of what is moved.
The stars, then, can be inferred to be moved without cessation by something distinct from them, which is itself unmoved (Physics 265a13 ff.;
Metaphysics 1072a19-26).
In Book Zeta, well in advance of the theology he advances in the
second half of Book Lambda, Aristotle makes the following statement.
Even if we had never seen the stars, nonetheless, I suppose, there would be eternal ousiai besides those [ousiai]
we knew; so that also now [i.e., when we have seen the
stars] even if we are not able to know what [these eternal
ousiai] are, still it is equally necessary for there to be some
[eternal ousiai]” (1040b34-1041a2).
I note at once that Aristotle’s statement here is not only elliptical, but
guarded as well. He uses oimai (“I suppose”) in the first main clause;
and in the second main clause he uses isōs, which I have translated as
“equally,” but which one could also translate as “probably” or even
“perhaps,” though doing so would produce something of a clash with
the word anagkaion (“it is necessary”), with which the second main
clause, and the sentence as a whole, concludes. In any case, my point
is not that Aristotle is advancing an actual argument here for the existence of separate ousiai, separate from all sensible ousiai, the stars included. His argument in Book Lambda for the existence of separate
ousiai is a cosmological one. What Aristotle is advancing in the above
quoted passage is, I would say, only an ontological consideration. That
is, if ousia is the premier instance of to on, if there are only sensible
ousiai, and if no sensible ousia is both imperishable and independent,
then there is nothing that is without qualification. And that may well
be exactly how it stands with being: “the nothing” is always present
with and within it. But Aristotle does not leave it at this Heideggerian
conclusion. The inquiry into sensible ousiai has led to the conclusion
that if there is anything that is without qualification, then it is both in-
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dependent and individual, on the one hand, and imperishable on the
other. The stars coming closest to fitting the bill, but their movement
leads Aristotle to think beyond them to the unmoved source of their
movement.
The trajectory of the enquiry into being qua being, which begins
with an inquiry into sensible ousia, leads to the latter chapters of Book
Lambda where Aristotle concludes that there must be an eternal unmoved mover of the fixed stars, a mover that moves by being the object
of desire or imitation, a mover that engages in an eternal act of intellection (noēsis). This unmoved mover is that on which, again, he says
heaven and nature depend. This mover is responsible for the movement
of the sphere of fixed stars. But Aristotle has to invoke a number of
other unmoved movers similar to it in order to account for the circular
motions of other heavenly bodies. Not only are the unmoved movers
intelligent beings, but the heavenly bodies that are moved by them are
intelligent as well. They move because the “sight” they have of the unmoved movers gives rise to an eros, to a desire to imitate, to the extent
possible for a sensible entity, the changeless activity of the unmoved
mover’s self-knowledge.24 This imitation takes the form of perfect circular motion, the motion that is most like immobility: what moves in a
perfect circle is always on its way to where it already is.
The account of the unmoved mover in Book Lambda, and especially the need to invoke a number of them, along with the necessary
presupposition that the heavenly bodies are themselves luminous intelligences, is so foreign to our way of thinking that not only is it hard for
us take it seriously, it is also hard for us to believe that Aristotle could
have taken it seriously. However, the heavenly bodies, the fixed stars
especially so, surely appear to move in circular motion, not just in Aristotle’s time but according to astronomical observations predating those
of the Greeks by centuries. Given the astronomical records available to
Aristotle, together with his own account of what motion is, the cosmological argument he advances in Book Lambda for separate, imperishable, and individual ousiai, is as reasonable an account as anyone at the
time could have come up with to explain the phenomena.25
24. Aristotle is aware that nous was eros were claimed, by Anaxagoras and
Empedocles respectively, to be principles of the whole. Such claims did not
keep him from grouping them among the physicists as distinct from the
mythologists.
25. The problem that Aristotle’s account Lambda gives rise to, and which he
does not address, is how there can be a multiplicity of unmoved movers, given
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Hoping that the above summary, inadequate in more ways than one,
provides something of a depiction of the “broad back” on which “the
skeletal form of a philosophic science” has ridden, all but unnoticed,
across more than two millennia, I turn to a comparison of the latter with
the former. There is a problem with the traditional interpretation of the
Metaphysics, for there are passages that appear to undercut it. I interpret
them, not so much as lapses or “nodding” on Aristotle’s part, but as the
raising and re-raising of aporiai that do not get resolved until the latter
chapters of Book Lambda, or as provisional formulations, or as formulations that are qualified by the context in which they occur—especially
when Aristotle makes certain statements about “all ousiai” in passages
where only sensible ousiai are under consideration.26
The difference between what I have called, with some misgivings,
the “traditional interpretation” of the Metaphysics and the interpretation—if I have it in focus—that Bruell suggests turns on the question
of which is the more plausible. One criterion for the plausibility of an
interpretation of an ancient author is whether it does justice to the boldness of the author’s teaching. If we are to evaluate these two interpretations in terms of which one brings the bolder teaching into view, we
would do well to attend to the following, insufficiently appreciated passage from Strauss’s lecture, “Progress or Return.”
There is a fundamental conflict or disagreement between
the Bible and Greek philosophy. This fundamental conflict
is blurred to a certain extent by the close similarity in
points. There are, for example, certain philosophies which
come seemingly close to the biblical teaching—think of
philosophic [!] teachings which are monotheistic, which
speak of the love of God and man, which even admit
prayer, etc. And so the difference becomes sometimes althat they are not differentiated by matter and that they all seem to be engaged
in the same intellectual act.
26. The following passages are, in my opinion, problematic for the traditional
interpretation, but they are not devastating: 999a4-5; 1030a11-13; 1032a18-19;
1043b21-22; 1059a38-b2; 1060b18-19; 1075a23-24; 1088a29-33. All these passages can be taken as hints by Aristotle (though read as hints, they are not particularly subtle) that there is no separate, individual, imperishable ousia or ti
ēn einai. The traditional interpretation has to regard these passages as not intended to be taken without qualification. But there are passages that Bruell, too,
has to regard as not intended to be taken without qualification. See, supra, footnote 12.
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most invisible. But we recognize the difference immediately if we make this observation. For a philosopher or philosophy there can never be an absolute sacredness of a
particular or contingent event.27
According to Strauss, the existence of God (or of gods), simply as a
first principle, even as an intelligent first principle, of the whole would
not by itself be a problem for philosophy. What would be a problem for
philosophy is an intelligent first principle that could freely reveal itself,
or himself, to man. For revelation, at the initiative of God, in his own
good time, to human beings of his own choosing who may not be
philosophers, would surely be a particular and contingent event, and an
event of absolute sacredness.28 Such a thing would be a problem for
philosophy because the full truth about this first principle would not be
accessible to man as man. That is, it would not be accessible to reason,
since reason can only work with the necessary as distinct from the contingent or accidental.29 And so, Strauss says quite consistently, philosophy must attempt to refute, not the existence of God, but the possibility
of revelation.30
Two divergent ways in which philosophy might refute the possibility of revelation suggest themselves here. One way, of course, would
be by refuting the existence of God. Strauss thought that every argument
purporting to do such a thing either begs the question outright or leads
to a dead end. A quite different way would be by arguing for the existence God but, in so doing, demonstrate that, contrary to what believers
believe, God is not the kind of being who is able to reveal himself to
man. This is the way followed by a kind of rational theology that consists in no small measure of a theological critique of the possibility of
revelation. Strauss is well aware of this kind of rational theology.31 In
27. “Progress and Return” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity,
117. Cf. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken, 1956—
translation of the 1930 German original), 149.
28. Creation would be a contingent event also: hence the effort of philosophers
to demonstrate, not the non-existence of God, but the eternity of the world.
29. Metaphysics 1027a19-21. Posterior Analytics 73a21. See Bruell, 123-125;
193-195.
30. “Reason and Revelation,” (Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theological
Political Problem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 150, 174.
See Bruell, 8-9; 28.
31. See Strauss’s references to “natural theology” in “Reason and Revelation,”
154, and “Progress or Return,” 131. And consider his perhaps surprising state-
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his lecture “Reason and Revelation,” he writes, “Plato’s and Aristotle’s
attempts to demonstrate the existence of God far from proving the religious character of their teachings, actually disprove it.”32
To limit ourselves to Aristotle,33 in the first book of the Metaphysics
Aristotle describes the science being sought as divine science.34 It would
be a divine science on two conditions: if God, most of all, possessed it,
and if it were about divine matters (983a5-8). These formulations are,
to be sure, conditional, for Aristotle has not yet advanced an argument
for the existence of a god, or a separate ousia of any sort, though he
does say that God is believed by all (dokei . . . pasin)—when he could
easily have said, “believed,” simply, if he had wished to quietly disassociate himself from this belief—to be among the causes and a principle
(archē tis). What is most remarkable about this passage, however, is the
ment in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, that the “Arab philosophers . . . actually
were believers in revelation” (151; cf. 155) in light of the curious expressions,
“selective revelation” and “particular revelation,” which he uses shortly afterwards (155; 157). By these latter two expressions, I understand Strauss to mean
revelation accomplished through God’s free choice, that is, revelation strictly so
called, as distinct from a non-selective and more general “revelation”—though
“disclosure” would be a better name for it—accomplished by philosophers, i.e.,
a “theology” established “on the basis of Aristotelian natural science” and culminating in the setting of “three fundamental theologems beyond all doubt”
(149). Spinoza’s Critique of Religion is an early book by Strauss. But The City
and Man is not (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964). Note the phrase, “in the ordinary [!] sense of the divine,” in the penultimate sentence of the latter work.
32. “Reason and Revelation,” 146. By “religious” in this sentence I understand
Strauss to mean “revealed.” Rational theology is not religion. It does not rely
on the claims of revelation, and it may attempt to demonstrate the impossibility
of revelation strictly so called —as the demonstrations of the existence of God
in Plato, Aristotle, and the great Muslim philosophers, to say nothing of Spinoza, can be interpreted as doing.
33. Though consider Republic 380d1-6; 381c5-9; 383e6.
34. The expression autēs hē ktēsis at 982b29, the beginning of the passage about
divine science, refers back to hautē (epistēmē) in the preceding sentence, and
thereby further back to the epistēmēn 982b8, including to epistasthai in between
at 982b21. And tēn ktēsin autēs at 983a11-12 refers back to tautēs (epistēmēs)
in the preceding sentence, the conclusion of the passage about divine science.
Book Alpha, ch. 2, could hardly be more explicit in stating that the science we
are seeking (982a3; 983a21) is divine science, which in this chapter is identified
with wisdom (sophia—982a6-19; cf. 981b25-982a2). Bruell speaks only briefly
to this passage. See 10-11, 38.
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conjunction of these two conditions. Aristotle acknowledges the possibility that someone—a human being, given the context—other than God
could come to possess the very knowledge, or science, of divine matters
that God himself possesses (983a9-10).35 God, if he exists, does not
dwell in a thick cloud that is utterly impenetrable by man; nor is he jealous of man’s attempt to know him. Indeed, Aristotle goes so far to say
that it is not possible for God to be jealous (983a2-3). How can Aristotle
be so confident on this point, unless he is already looking toward the argument he will make in Book Lambda? For according to that argument
God does not think, and perhaps because of his very excellence cannot
think, of what is beneath him (1074b18-1075a10). And so he can hardly
be jealous of what is going on beneath him, including the speculative
activity of philosophers. If God exists, according to what Aristotle says
close to the very beginning of the Metaphysics, then he is surely not the
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And he is not one of the gods of
Cephalus, Ion, and Euthyphro either. If God cannot even think of man,
then he cannot freely reveal himself to this man. Moreover, if as Aristotle
argues in Book Lambda, God causes as final cause, as object of desire
and imitation, alone, then he is not a free cause.36 Though he is the cause
on which nature and the heavens depend, he does not create the world
(which is also eternal), freely or otherwise. Whatever access man has to
God is through man’s (speculative) initiative alone, not the reverse. Because God does not even think of what is beneath him, not only does he
not reveal himself, he does not reward and punish human beings for their
moral and immoral choices. And if this were not enough to rule out divine freedom, and thereby the “absolute sacredness of a particular or
contingent event,” Aristotle argues that God is simple and not composed,
pure actuality devoid of potentiality, and necessary. How then can he
freely choose to do anything (cf. 1071b13-22; 1072b7-10)?37
35. Thomas Aquinas, who in his commentaries on Aristotle’s works typically
limits himself to stating only what he thinks Aristotle is saying, softens in his
own name Aristotle’s suggestion that man can come to possess knowledge of
God: this knowledge, he says, is something “borrowed” (mutuatum) from God.
(Sententia Metaphysicae, lib. 1 l. 3 n. 13). That is, for Thomas but not for Aristotle, if we can come to know not just that God exists, but something of what
he is essentially, in himself and to himself, revelation is needed. Note the distinction between preambles to the articles of faith and the articles of faith themselves in Summa Theologiae 1, q. 2, art. 2, ad 1.
36. Compare Summa Theologiae 1 q. 19, art. 3 ad 5; art. 10, corpus.
37. One of the great tasks that the Christian theologians of the Middle Ages set
themselves, arguably their greatest task, was to answer this very question.
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However persuasive or unpersuasive one finds the theology that
Aristotle presents in Book Lambda, it is a rational theology that gives
every appearance of trying to refute the possibility of revelation, of trying to rule out the “absolute sacredness of a particular or contingent
event.” If there is any reason to believe that God exists, then, according
to this book, there is every reason to believe that he is incapable of revealing himself. Aristotle’s Metaphysics throws a challenge into the
face of revealed religion; and it makes no secret about this. Even the
casual reader has to be struck by places where Aristotle dissociates himself from the religious beliefs of the multitude and from the poets who
have, after a fashion, educated them. Sometimes he does this implicitly
and gently (983b33-984a2; 989a9-12; 1023a19-21; 1091b4-8), but
sometimes quite explicitly as well (997b8-12; 1074b3-8), even caustically (983a3-4; 1000a9-19; and, above all, 995a3-8).38
One can object that Aristotle’s argument for the existence of God
depends not only on a whole cosmology but also on an account of how
motion occurs that modern science does not accept. For Aristotle, something in motion depends on a mover distinct from it, sustaining it in motion for as long as it is in motion (which in the case of the stars is
forever), and ultimately on a mover that is not itself in motion. But if,
contrary to what Aristotle teaches, a thing in motion can move itself
without depending on a mover distinct from it, then it sounds as though
something that is potential can actualize itself, or, better, that something
that is actual can actualize one or more of its own potentialities, all by
itself. If that is so, then the argument against radically free choice is
compromised. For radically free choice, whether in the case of God or
in the case of man, means self-determination.39 And though the claim
that things can move themselves without being moved by another is
hardly identical to the claim that a being can freely determine itself to
do this rather than that, the former claim is a giant step in the direction
38. The last passage cited is interesting because it does not occur in the middle
of the Metaphysics, nor in the middle chapter of the book (alpha) in which it
occurs, nor in the middle of that chapter. It is, one might say, “exposed.” The
existence and placement of this passage, and of others cited above, could lead
one to infer that the Metaphysics was never intended to be a book, i.e., a written
work composed for public distribution. If the Metaphysics has an exoteric
teaching, it is hardly a teaching designed to throw theological-political persecutors off track. Bruell acknowledges this (253). In his view, Aristotle’s art of
writing in this book serves a pedagogical function.
39. Consider 1072a26-30.
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of the latter. If man can freely determine himself to do this rather than
that, then a vital component of the critique of the moral presuppositions
of belief in revelation has to be abandoned. Aristotle’s view that whatever is in motion is moved by another, and more generally that whatever
is potential can be actualized only by something already actual, precludes, absent significant qualifications, man from acting freely, hence
from deserving reward or punishment for his actions, in this world or
in another. And to repeat, God, as Aristotle presents him in Book
Lambda, neither rewards nor punishes.
If, as Bruell suggests, Aristotle does not intend his rational theology
seriously, then there is nothing in the Metaphysics that seriously meets
the challenge that the possibility of revelation poses to philosophy. If
the deep teaching of the Metaphysics is that there is no divine being, it
is a teaching that is only intimated. There is no argument advanced by
Aristotle, or by Bruell on Aristotle’s behalf, for this teaching such that
one can confidently identify its premises and assess its logical cogency.
So the question of boldness boils down to which of two interpretations
of the Metaphysics causes more problems for the religious believer: (1)
an implicit teaching that merely denies, without so much as the appearance of a demonstration, that God exists, or (2) an explicit teaching that
attempts to demonstrate that God does exist, but exists in a way that is
incompatible with how religion, whether the religion of the Greeks or
that of the Bible, understands him to exist. Different readers of the
Metaphysics may give different answers to this question.
Nothing I have said about the explicit teaching of the Metaphysics
simply rules out there being a parallel but only implicit teaching, exactly as Bruell interprets it. But if the explicit teaching is as I have described it, and if the implicit teaching is as I understand Bruell to have
interpreted it, then we are left with an oddity. Aristotle would be arguing on the very surface of the book that philosophy in its inquiry into
being qua being can win a decisive victory against its perennial rival,
revealed religion, while effectively indicating beneath the surface of
the book that it cannot do any such thing.40 Would Aristotle not be leaving himself open to the accusation that he is corrupting, not necessarily
the young, but any reader of the Metaphysics who naively takes its surface teaching seriously? What does philosophy gain by promising more
40. One would expect the reverse: a surface teaching understating the challenge
that philosophy poses to revealed religion, and a deep teaching that does not
understate it.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
to the uninitiated than it knows it can deliver? Different readers of the
Metaphysics may give different answers to these questions too.
The incontestable merit of Aristotle as Teacher is that it leads anyone who reads it carefully back to the Metaphysics with an enhanced
appreciation of the problems it explores and open to the possibility that
Aristotle’s thoughts about these problems and how they might be resolved are much more profound than has hitherto been recognized and
stated. Aristotle as Teacher should be read as long as the Metaphysics
is read. If I have given excessive weight to the traditional interpretation
of the Metaphysics in this review, it is not because I find it more congenial to revealed religion than Bruell’s interpretation. The opposite is
true: the rational theology expressly advanced by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, and developed further by the great Muslim philosophers of
the Middle-Ages, constitutes a formidable challenge to the claims of
revelation. If one does not appreciate the magnitude of this challenge,
one is unlikely to appreciate the alternative rational theology developed, without appeal to the claims of revelation, by the great Christian
theologians of the Middle-Ages when they rose to meet it.
�149
Eva Brann, Un-Willing: An Inquiry into
the Rise of the Will’s Power and an Attempt
to Undo It. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books,
2014, xi + 367 pages. $35.00
Book Review by Matthew Linck
“Does it add up? Not on your life.” Thus begins the penultimate section
of the concluding chapter of Eva Brann’s book on the will. It is in this
chapter that Brann lays out what she calls the “un-willed life.” Brann has
her reasons for keeping her picture of the un-willed life reserved for the
end of the book. And even though one could skip right to the end, I would
like to try to say why that would be a mistake. In other words, I want to
say how the book makes a whole. Some questions will then be raised.
The book does not, I think, make the kind of whole one might expect. The table of contents is deceptive. Reading the names of the chapters and the section headings, one would think the book to be a study of
the will as understood by many great thinkers in the Western tradition.
One would also think the book to show the will in a variety of modes,
from ego-centered to cosmic in scale, from grand conception to narrow
academic topic. One will expect to learn a lot from reading the book.
And these things are all true. Brann approaches her subject mostly by
careful explication of the texts and arguments of individual thinkers. (A
glance at the table of contents will indicate the principal players, although there are many not-to-be-missed mini-essays on will-conceptions
by others in the endnotes. These are listed at the front of the book following the table of contents.) Furthermore, these expositions are grouped
thematically, although those themes do not always admit of easy summary. And, indeed, one can learn a lot, especially where the subjects are
unfamiliar. For me, this was true especially of the sections on Sartre,
compatibilism and neuroscience.
But one cannot make a whole out of things that do not add up just
by putting them between the same covers. The wholeness of Brann’s
book comes from two other sources. The first is the rhetorical force of
the not-adding-up. This, to me, makes good sense of what might look
like a lopsided book: 243 pages on something that turns out not to be
Matthew Linck is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
coherent, 21 pages on the alternative. The power of Brann’s concluding
pages comes not so much from an accumulated argument as from the
experience of being bandied about by all these competing conceptions
of the will. One is made receptive to the hope that there is some way out
of this mess. Let me say something about the mess before turning to the
second source of wholeness.
Since Brann herself supplies summaries of the main conceptions of
and approaches to the will at the beginning of her concluding chapter, I
think I can be pretty brief. I will give a rundown of some of the book’s
main thrusts, indicating some corresponding proper names parenthetically.
There was a time in the West when a human being and a human
life were understood without recourse to the idea of a will (Socrates,
Aristotle). And even for those thinkers where a kind of proto-will can
be glimpsed (Lucretius, the Stoics), it does not rise to the level of a fullfledged faculty. This all changes with Augustine. For Augustine, a
human life—his life—cannot be made sense of without a faculty of
willing. As Brann emphasizes, Augustine’s framing of the will is deeply
embedded in his Christianity and the question of sin. Correlatively,
since man is made in the image of God, God too must now be understood as having a will. From here we’re off. Chapters III-V offer visions
of the will from Scholastics, early-moderns and German Idealists
(Thomas, Scotus, Ockham, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant,
Fichte). The range of conceptions run through in these chapters defies
summary (but see the block quotation below). The recent queries and
debates concerning free will and determinism, whether from philosophers or scientists, are already prefigured in these early chapters. Brann
covers these topics in chapters IX-XI. Despite the faint echoes of prior
thinking, these chapters seem to me essential since they speak the language of our own everyday thoughts about the will. Even if one has
never read a philosophical defense of compatibilism or leafed through
the purported findings of neuroscience pertaining to the will, the cast
of mind, the questions asked, and the unexamined prejudices are deeply
familiar. In between these chapters are Brann’s “linguistic interlude”
(chapter VI, a delightful and important aside), conceptions of the will
that exceed the individual person (Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche)
and what Brann calls the “will’s last ontologies” (Hegel, Bergson,
Peirce, Heidegger, Sartre). It is all of this that Brann contends doesn’t
add up. The following gives a good sense of the range and likely incompatibility of the notions surveyed.
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151
[T]he will can be conceived as having the nature of a passion,
a power, a capacity, a faculty, an agency, a decision—or an illusion. It can be conceived as an operation that is an extended
process, a final impulse, a long deliberation, or a momentary
choice. It can be conceived as having its termination in seamless execution or in aborted realization. It can be conceived in
terms of its causality, as rationally connected or radically contingent. It can be conceived as having its finality in an external
end or in itself. It can be conceived with respect to its standing
as the highest human good in its obedience to duty or as a nugatory epiphenomenon in its subjugation to nature. It can be
conceived in scope as a hyper-human force causing universal
suffering, as bestowing individual potency, as a general determination overriding individual choice, or as the very principle
of individuality. It can be conceived, looking to the soul’s salvation, as vulnerable to perversion and sin or as analogous to
binding love. But above all, it can be conceived with regard to
human selfhood as being to some degree free from nature’s determinism, as self-activating and deliberately deciding—or as
altogether determined by natural law working on conditions
fixed from way back. It’s a notional miscellany. (243-4)
For every item on the list above, there is a text, an author, a movement,
or a research program considered by Brann. So, it is a lot of work to
follow her down all of these paths, but one might be ready for something else by the end. Hence the closing pages of the book are fitting
given what comes before.
There is, though, that other source of wholeness in the book,
namely, Brann herself. The mind, voice, and good sense that carry the
book along are not incidental to its substance. Issues that might at first
seem to be to one side—how to read a book, professionalism versus
amateurism, the role of self-examination in sifting philosophical arguments, regard for everyday speech—turn out to be essential. They are
essential because they both argue for and exemplify key features of
the life Brann advocates at the end of the book. Hence the book does
not just argue for this or that, but is an example of the very thing it
means to bring forth.1 Let me mention here the special place that
1. Here is an example (the context is Heidegger’s conception[s] of the will and
his propensity to rely on neologisms [under the guise of the retrieval of original
meanings]): “There is the perfectly sensible Socratic inquiry into the one being,
the eidos, intended by words in common use that have multifarious instantia-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Thomas Aquinas holds in Brann’s thinking and in the book. Brann is
convinced that Thomas’s account of the will (notwithstanding whether
there is a will) is the best we have. Her conviction is grounded largely
in believing that Thomas’s account is most in accord with experience.
Well, whose experience? Brann is upfront—principally her own experience, but not just. Despite the central place that Brann accords self-examination (and she invites us to do it), she also, carefully, looks for
whatever common ground she can obtain. (Nevertheless, the question
whether there just are different human types is raised more than once in
the book.) So, with a view both introspectively anchored and looking
widely, Brann sees in Thomas’s account a picture of human willing that
is wide enough in scope (many fail by being too narrow) and rightly ordered (others fail in wrong emphasis). Her reliance on Thomas throughout the book, then, is neither an appeal to authority, nor is it a claim that
Thomas simply has the best rational argument. Rather the reliance on
Thomas is a shorthand for reliance on her own criteria, themselves not
narrowly rational. (This would be the place to mention the centrality of
feeling for Brann.) But, one more twist to this: Brann relies on Thomas
for having laid out his picture of the will. Brann recognizes in Thomas’s
account something she can assent to, but she does not say she could have
seen it all without him. Hence she needs the books (and so do we). These
remarks about Thomas were meant to make good on the general claim
above, that Brann’s own thinking is a source of wholeness in the book,
but now with this addition: her manner of thinking is not independent
from the sources she is considering.
Hence the end of the book is also the heart of the book. My task
now is to say what Brann thinks the alternative to willing is and why
we should revoke the will’s license. It is important to note that these
are not the same thing. Brann could have presented us will an alternative
to willing as one possible mode of living among others. Instead, she
has endeavored to persuade us that it is better to be un-willing than willing (or worse, willful). So, first the alternative, then the revoking.
Brann presents Socrates as a model (not the model, not someone
to slavishly imitate) of un-willing. Brann highlights some key features
tions in the world—even in our world—for example the virtues and vices. But
what does it mean to search arduously for the meaning of a word-conceit used
in now-archaic language and then in different significations, words like
Galassenheit and Seyn, entirely without use-context, without living exemplars?” (162) Brann, it seems to me, tries to ground her thinking in “living exemplars” wherever possible.
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of his person. As a man, Socrates obeys above all his inner daimonion
which only stops him from doing this or that—he has no principle of
willful assertion; he is an “ontological optimist,” that is, he believes (or
at least proceeds as if) there is order and intelligibility in the world
grounded in the forms; he calls not on courage, but on his goodness,
thoughtfulness and justice throughout his life. As a thinker, Socrates is
always at the beginning of things and opens his thinking beyond the
tight logic of “rationality.” He has a vision of the human soul without
will, but one in which desire operates throughout. Socrates is committed,
perhaps, to only one maxim, “Virtue is knowledge.” Brann thinks virtue
here should be understood “not [as] a good will enclosed in its subjective
self-sufficiency,” but as “an on-the-brink power, a readiness to pass to
thoughtful doing without intermediate exertion of an executive will.” Finally, she contends that “this unhesitating passage to action . . . comes
from . . . doing deep, affirmative thinking.” (All of the above comes from
pages 248-51.)
With Socrates as a model, we might then ask, as moderns, where
our freedom resides. Brann wants to “relocat[e] freedom away from the
will” (253), to focus our attention not on “freedom of the will but freedom from the will,” and to suggest that “collectedness,” of a person or
a life, is not to be attained by “strenuous inward-drawing,” but by “other
means” (255). The key terms of these other means seem to me loving
attachment, desire as receptivity, the contemplation of beings, and imaginative living. How a life thus constituted issues in freedom, even Brann
is hesitant to say decisively—it remains, in a way, a “mystery” (262).
As for why this un-willed life should be preferred to the willful
one, is it enough to say that Brann thinks the latter is just plain bad for
us? That it diminishes our powers instead of enhancing them? That it
distracts us from what is important, truly worthy of desire and interest?
That it distorts our vision of the whole of things and leads, at its worst,
to genuine horrors? I hope it is not unfair to Brann to leave it at that.
The questions I would like to pose to Un-Willing were elicited
strongly by the book and, I think, are related. The first is whether instead
of endeavoring to revoke the will’s license we should rather think of
our task as overcoming the will. The second question is about how we
should read.
One way to take Brann’s global view is that with Augustine the
West goes astray, and that by thinking in terms of a will-faculty our selfunderstanding becomes perverted. Some subtlety is required here, since
Brann acknowledges that much of what falls under the name “will” is
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
not without sense. There are ways of making sense of all the talk on the
will, as Brann attempts to do throughout Un-Willing. Nevertheless, for
her these ways are neither necessary nor felicitous. But what if our errancy vis-à-vis the will was in some way necessary? What if we both
need the will and need to show its deficiency? Or, in other words, what
if Hegel is right? It would be foolhardy to insert here a lengthy discourse
on Hegel (although maybe necessary), but I want to try to sketch out
the Hegelian picture in which my questions are grounded.
While there are metaphysical aspects to my question springing
from Hegel’s logical writings2 and questions about the need to revise
our understanding of nature occasioned by his Philosophy of Nature,3
it might be enough to limit myself to “spiritual” issues. I could perhaps
locate my concerns with respect to Brann’s discussion of the self/subject in chapter of XI of Un-Willing. Brann seems to me correct to suggest that the ancients did not have a notion of self and that their
understanding of soul is not simply its equivalent. She is also correct,
I think, that questions of will and agency go hand in hand with questions of selfhood. But if this is the case, then it would seem to follow
that Brann might want to jettison talk of the self with that of the will.
It does not seem to me altogether that she does. Maybe there is room
to insert a wedge here. The Hegelian account, I believe, holds that the
2. For instance, there seem to me to be far-reaching implications of Hegel’s
treating of being in the way he does. Much of this could be spun out from the
fact that a doctrine of being is included in a Logic, and one particularly pertinent feature of that doctrine (under the heading of Essence) is that being exhausts itself in appearances. The “ontological optimism” that Brann attributes
to Socrates by means of the forms seems off the table for Hegel. This metaphysical point is, I think, of direct consequence for Hegel’s approach to human
action.
3. At least two prominent elements of Brann’s account are ripe for consideration via Hegel’s understanding of nature. The first would be the cogency of
the debates surrounding determinism and free will. Speaking for myself, the
implicit metaphysics which grounds the mechanical view of nature is long
overdue for a systematic and thorough demolishing. To continue engaging such
debates on those terms is to throw good effort after bad. Whether a new metaphysics of nature will get a hearing is hard to say. The second issue would be
that of feeling. This feature of the human soul is important for Brann, and it is
for Hegel, too. But I think one would have to take up Hegel’s account of animal
feeling in the Philosophy of Nature, especially as the mark of inwardness and
proto-subjectivity, in order to see what might be radical in his understanding
of human feeling.
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notion of self must be developed (and, perhaps, purified) because the
telos of human history is freedom and freedom is centered on how
things count or don’t count, are justified or not justified, for me. Here
a whole can of worms is opened, not the least of which would be
Hegel’s contention that Christianity is—was—necessary for us. At the
very least we might see that the infinite relationship of the individual
to the divine is a “picture-thought” of the modern subject’s relationship
to absolute spirit. Talk of a will would be one feature of this necessary
passage through Christianity. But the real burden of the Hegelian account falls on its insistence that the realization of human flourishing
is a historical achievement. It is in working out this claim that an account of overcoming the will would be located. One version of such
an overcoming can be found, I think, in the closing section of the fifth
chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, for there we are given a picture
of human action in which willful self-assertion must be replaced by
action grounded in mutual confession and forgiveness.4 But, of course,
for Hegel replacement will not mean simply canceling; the passage
through willfulness must in some way remain at work in its overcoming. None of this can count as an argument against Brann, but only as
an indication of the space in which to pursue a certain kind of
question.5 Another way to ask this question would be to query whether
Brann is right that Socrates’s thoughts “could be anyone’s thoughts,
anytime” (248). I suppose, in a way, I am raising the old question about
4. A perspicacious reading of these paragraphs can be found in J. M. Bernstein,
“Confession and forgiveness: Hegel’s poetics of action” in Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination, ed. Richard Thomas Eldridge
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 34-65.
5. One full-fledged example of the kind of argument I have in mind can be
found in Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as
Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Hegel’s treatment
of nature cuts deeply into many aspects of debates about the will, but one place
to look is Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends
of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). There is some direct overlap
between Un-Willing and Kenneth R. Westphal, “Autonomy, Freedom & Embodiment: Hegel’s Critique of Contemporary Biologism,” Hegel Bulletin 35
(2014): 56-83. An attempt to make good on Hegel’s account of freedom in terms
of the condition of modern institutions is undertaken in Alex Honneth, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014). A more Kantian flavored approach to these questions
can be found in Christine M. Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Indentity,
and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.)
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ancients and moderns, whether there is a genuine quarrel and, if so,
with whom to side.
Also at issue here would be whether Brann has done justice to
Hegel—can have done so—by analyzing his treatments of willing in
isolation. The question is not whether Brann interprets her chosen texts
correctly; the question is whether such interpretations can be adequate
if done (too much) in isolation from Hegel’s thinking more broadly.
This, as always, is a particularly vexed issue in dealing with Hegel, but
I wonder if Brann’s other readings don’t suffer similarly. For instance,
is it so clear that Thomas’s Aritotelianism can be easily separated from
its Christianizing (47)?
I also wonder if Brann’s treatment of the major thinkers in her book
is not too much one-at-a-time. After the strenuous effort of her surveying of so many conceptions of the will, Brann concludes that it does
not add up. Is this way of asking the question too static? What if instead
of asking if it adds up we were to see what these thinkers have to say to
each other? In some cases, such engagement is explicit: Kant dwells
with Rousseau in the development of his moral theory; Hegel has an
eye on Kant at every turn in working out his own positions. But even
where this is not so explicit, we can attempt to construct for ourselves
an imagined conversation between thinkers. I think, though, that this
act of the imagination cannot be just a comparing of arguments; we
must, again, endeavor to take up as much of a thinker’s thought as possible. On the one hand, this would require us to keep in mind how a
thinker sees, in some fundamental way, how things hang together; on
the other hand, it would ask us to keep an eye—if I can put it this way—
on the style of thinking involved.
The figure I most worry is slighted along these lines in Un-Willing
is Kant. My reservations are not about any particular assertions that
Brann makes about Kant’s thinking (she is illuminating here as well),
but about the spirit of the engagement. Here perhaps my own prejudices
and inclinations are at work, but it seems to me that both in spite of and
because of his excesses, Kant allows me to see something that I would
not have otherwise, that there is some element of human willing and
action that is excavated through his stark formulations. But not simply.
That is, I cannot just pluck out some insight from Kant to be combined
with insights from other thinkers. Somehow, I have to let Kant’s vision
of things as a whole set to work my own thinking. And then by putting
Kant into conversation with others, letting them, through my thinking,
contend with each other, I can think things I would not have otherwise.
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I fear that the structure and tone of Brann’s book could too quickly invite us to be over and done with a figure like Kant.6
Even as these questions were triggered by Brann’s book, and even
as I cultivated them, the book itself made me suspicious of them. Is the
Hegelian undertaking too sophisticated, too theoretical, too systembound, and, most of all, too remote from the immediacy of lived experience? Is the question of historicism itself too bound up with the will?
Is there a too-generous way of reading philosophical texts, a way that
slips into indulgence? At its best, Brann’s book shows us what it is like
to be comfortable dwelling at the beginnings of things, locating our concerns and principles nearby and within ourselves.
6. When consulting an essay on Kant that Brann’s book called to mind I found
there, and in two companion essays, these formulations: “Kant’s greatness,
like that of other great philosophers, lies in the simplicity of the fundamental
innovations on which his systematic edifice rests. . . The unavoidable dogmatism hidden behind the Kantian concept of ‘freedom’ (i.e., ‘will’ or ‘pure practical reason’) that has been pointed out so frequently, is irrelevant once we
address the problem of the modus operandi of the Kantian innovation.” “The
greatness of Kant’s practical philosophy is based on the fact that it is developed
within the framework of a critique of reason and that it is closely interwoven
with his theoretical philosophy, his philosophy of religion, and his philosophy
of history. In contrast, most contemporary ethical thought consists of ungrounded assertions, unprincipled casuistry and reflections lacking any organic
unity with the rest of our knowledge.” “Kant’s texts are not historical artifacts,
but still-contemporary deeds, erga: our age is, philosophically, the energeia
of Kant’s texts.” These quotations are from, respectively, Agnes Heller, “Freedom and Happiness in Kant’s Political Philosophy,” Vittorio Hösle, “The
Greatness and Limits of Kant’s Practical Philosophy,” David R. Lachterman,
“Kant: The Faculty of Desire,” all found in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 13.2 (1990). I offer these quotations only as examples of the cast of mind
I have in view.
�
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 57.2 (Spring 2016)
Editor
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Frank Hunt
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Elliott Zuckerman
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Res tene, verba sequentur ........................................................1
Eva Brann
WHERE, Then, Is Time?...................................................................12
Eva Brann
Music and the Idea of a World ..........................................................25
Peter Kalkavage
On Jacob Klein’s Greek Mathematical
Thought and the Origin of Algebra ..............................................47
Arian Koochesfahani
Which Sciences Does the Political Science
Direct and Use and How Does It Do So? .........................................70
Edward M. Macierowski
Ass, You Like It? Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Political Philosophy ......................79
Nalin Ranasinghe
��ESSAYS & LECTURES
1
Res tene, verba sequentur*
A Reflection on Three Questions Concerning
the Re-telling of Sacred Stories and of Myths
(An Academically Disreputable Inquiry)
Eva Brann
For John Roth
Questions:
I. Are there canonical sources—gold-standards—for myths, and
how would we recognize them?
II. Should our re-visioning of sacred persons and mythical people
stay true to the standard version?
III. Should there be myth-dilations?
Brusque answers:
I. Yes, the two Bibles for sacred stories, and Homer, mainly, for
pagan myth.
II. Yes, at least as far as their vitals, their life-data, the given facts,
are concerned.
III. Yes, myths demand amplification.
I. Gold-standards: Which and Why?
1. The Hebrew Bible (including the Apocrypha) and the Christian
Bible palpably differ in authority from, say, gnostic gospels, such
as the Gospel of Judas, which is flagrantly fantastic and deliberately contrarian. Since this little essay is mainly about pagan
myth, I shall stray into the Bible-related answer to the second
question with a testimonial and then have done with the Bible as
a canonical source.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
*Cato the Elder: “Hold onto things, the words will follow.” Quoted in
Jane Hirshfield’s essay “The Question of Originality,” in Nine Gates:
Entering the Mind of Poetry (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998).
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Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers (1933-1943) is the
most expansive re-telling of the Hebrew Bible I know of, twentysix chapters of Genesis (24-50), roughly thirty-five pages, expanded more than fifty-fold into eighteen-hundred pages. As far
as I can tell, this meticulous detailing, this exposé of the human
story behind the sacred story and of events not only on the living
earth and its terrestrial underworld, but also in a heaven of disaffected angels, does not deviate one jot or tittle from the given
Biblical fact, what you might call the life-structure of the twelve
brothers and their one father and several mothers, nor are Mann’s
thousand-and-one concrete realizations of the laconic original in
any way factually incompatible with it. This disciplined faithfulness, I will claim below, imparts to the retelling a pithy vitality
that a looser treatment would dissipate.
2. What can I mean by the “vital facts” of a mythical being? Here
is an anecdote that intimates what is meant by a fact:
Clemenceau, French prime minister from 1917-1920, during a
friendly discussion with a representative of the Weimar Republic
about what historians might write concerning German guilt for
the First World War, said: “This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.” Facts,
when ascertainable, are interpretation-proof residues of reality.
By “vital” facts I mean biographical data of that sort.
Where are the facts of myth to be found? In the canonical account, the gold-standard telling. I will give an example of divergent facts in different texts, which bear on the biographical
armature of Helen—the Helen of whom Marlowe asked: “Was
this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”
Stesichorus, a prolific sixth-century B.C. poet of a wholly
lost oeuvre, wrote, conventionally, of a Helen who went to Troy.
For this imputation on her respectability, the gods blinded him
until he produced a palinode, a counter-song of retraction (retold
by Plato in Phaedrus 243), in which she never was in Troy, but
was rescued from her abductor Alexander in Egypt by its king.
Homer, we may infer, refused this retraction, which would have
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nullified his Iliad—and remained blind. The counter-canonical
tale, in which Troy harbored a phantasm of Helen, is accepted by
Herodotus (Persian War, 2.112 ff.). His motive is, I think, to relegate to the status of “mythical” in the derogatory sense this early
West-East incursion. It is mere pre-history; history begins with
the datable antecedents to the East-West invasion of the Persian
War. Euripides later picks up this version in his Helen, a romance.
3. Now why is Homer’s version the standard reference? How can
I know that? Well, first he precedes Stesichorus by roughly a century, so the later writer is being reactive, derivative. Second,
Homer’s poems were saved, presumably deservedly. These are,
however, mere appeals to circumstance. The truly telling argument appeals to Homer’s greatness and the consequent poignant
actuality of his people.
I aver that books come in an arguable continuum of judgment-categories from really bad, through enjoyably competent,
to seriously good. But “great” is a category discontinuous with
this spectrum; it breathes in a different ether. The criteria are, in
fact, specifiable, although here only in abbreviated fashion: it is
sufficient to observe that the band of those who have actually
read the books in question tends to come together over their classification. For example, despite Hesiod’s wintry charm, I, at least,
have never heard anyone argue that he is seriously comparable
to Homer.
Why not? What propels Homer, for those who have savored
him line by line, into a darling of the gods who blinded him not
as a punishment but to make him the fitter a conduit for the
Muses’ song—an artful “maker” (Greek: poietēs) of epic poetry,
yet not out of matter created by himself, but from fully formed
figures imparted to him by the Musical divinities (a distinction
elaborated below, in II.3 and 4).
Take this very case—Helen. Stesichorus’s Helen is the
choice-less victim of an abduction, perhaps a rape. This Helenversion saves her reputation but at the expense of her vitality.
Homer’s Helen is in every respect fully actual: She is, before her
escapade as she is after her recapture, tired of her limp husband
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Menelaus. She willingly runs off with the pretty-boy Alexander,
taking along Spartan treasure and leaving behind her baby-girl.
A real abductor would have forced her to bring the child, a valuable house slave, as we learn in the Odyssey (14.447). Helen is
indefeasibly seductive—she will make up to Alexander’s brother
Hector in Troy and beguile Odysseus’s son Telemachus in
Sparta—but she never likes the man she’s with. A funny line in
the mostly unfunny Iliad comes after she has watched her present
man skedaddle from the single combat with her husband, the contest arranged to end the Trojan war then and there. She has been
watching it from Ilium’s topless towers (or rather high walls) and
Aphrodite comes to her with an order: “Go to your man, he’s
waiting in your bedchamber.” And she says (at some length):
“Why don’t you go?” (3.395). This fatally beautiful, flagrantly
defective female is unsteady and willful and altogether a presence—the real Helen, a woman who makes choices, bad ones.
At home in Sparta she could have bid the charming Trojan prince
a suppressedly tearful good-bye. And he would have seen enough
to make that devastating choice, the so-called Judgment of Paris,
that threw the goddesses into the war-mode. This heedless preference for the mortal Helen over three immortals expressed by
Priam’s most light-weight son is, incidentally, alluded to only in
one line, late in the Iliad (24.28) and in very vague language not
naming Helen; clearly Homer thinks it’s a very subsidiary cause
for his war. So Helen’s vitals are not to be tampered with, unless
lots of evidence is adduced. —She was in Troy, all right.
4. Some texts are excused from this obligation to preserve factuality. For example, Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), in bulk the post-pagan
counterpart to Mann’s post-biblical Joseph, is not to be held to
any fact, but can be as factlessly atmospheric as the author likes,
because Ulysses is not Odysseus in his own place and time; rather
Bloom is the Jewish-Irish reincarnation, the avatar of a remote
pagan.
Similarly Kazantzakis’s Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938),
a continuation grafted onto the twenty-second book of the
Odyssey, is a deliberate fantasy, a contravention of Homer’s ac-
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count of the hero’s return. In this epic, Odysseus returns for
good—a final return confirmed by a last short voyage in which
the sailor takes leave of his odysseian travels by going way inland, there to build a sailor’s cenotaph. Kazantzakis’s willful rewriting of the Odyssey, three times the length of the Homeric
epic, pays a price: This new, entirely modern—here meaning indeterminately straying—Odysseus and his wildly fantastic pilgrimage are difficult to take in (and I can’t pretend to have gotten
far). Moreover, this new Odysseus, who takes off into the wild
blue yonder, introduces a duplicity, a rending, into the mythical
world: There are now two Odysseuses. This doubling is not the
same as two perspectives on one character. For example, we may
ask whether Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra commits an assassination
or performs an execution and if his Orestes commits a vengeful
matricide or performs a divinely-ordered retribution—but only
if there is one queen and one son about whom we ask.
5. So Homer is not one of many, an idiosyncratic poetaster and
lax researcher who failed to acknowledge alternative versions.
His Helen is the Helen, not because, as I shall claim below, he
concocted, conflated, composed her cleverly, but because she
came to him. One way to put this is that, as he lived, blessedly,
with a tradition of tales from which to harvest concretely present
detail for his figures as well as hints of immemorial depth, so he
was unburdened by the scholar’s notion of “literature,” which replaces the natural coherence of the imaginative world with the
learned administration of written texts. His highly formal and
consequently very expressive prosody, his clever punning and
sparely-expressed psychological complexity, are only embellishments spun out of his artistry. —His people come from elsewhere
and they bring their own inimitable souls and their proper eventfulness. He holds on to his people and the words do come: Res
tene, verba sequentur.
II. Canonical Revisioning: How and Why?
1. From the writer’s perspective, adherence to the prototype is
profitable because the unconstrained, uncontained imagination
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goes flaccid; it becomes tautly concentrated when encased by the
cincture of fact.
2. From the story’s perspective, one might well ask “what’s the
difference?” as long as the tale is well told. Well, it makes a great
difference for the epic world, the world of the imagination, into
which the story taps. In bringing an invented alternative, an innovation, into this world, the writer, as I said above, rends it, tears
its fabric—for the pagan myths form a coherent universe in their
own time and place. Now there will be two homonymous but different beings, both now vagrants in their territory, vying for legitimacy. There seems to me to be an obligation for latter-day
writers to integrate their re-telling into its world—or why call
your creation “Helen”? Two Helens offend against Ockham’s
Razor by needlessly multiplying entities—a mere misdemeanor
in the realm of logic but a sort of sin against the land of the imagination.
3. Once the factual frame is subverted, the discipline is gone and
mere invention supervenes—that ludicrous human arrogation of
divinity called “creativity.” The tale now issues not from the character’s essence but from the writer’s, the faux-creator’s, invention. No longer does this author call on the Muses—“Sing,
goddess, the wrath” and “Speak to me, Muse, of the man”— but
on his own “creativity,” and all too often that piddling confection,
a literary creation, comes forth. Not, however, I hasten to say, inevitably, for human invention and artifice too can produce clever
and convincing works. So let me repeat here how a maker-poet
differs from a creator-poet. The former applies his well-trained
artistry to received material, of which more below (II.4); the latter
imitates God by making something out of nothing—in modem
parlance, out of his unconscious.
4. Disregard of Homer’s givens is an invitation to what appears
to me the most deleterious mode for making fictions: subjectivity.
Put positively, the poets that seem to me to make the most vital
fictions, beings that have more life and surely greater longevity
than real people (or animals: what real dog has lived through the
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
millennia that Odysseus’s old Argos has?), are objective reporters. Beings come to them, become manifest, and press to be
bodied forth. They appear, to be sure, in the imagination, but they
are not made by the imagination. The poet is to be credited for
his acute internal vision. It achieves his beings’ thereness: their
imaginative concretion and verbal articulation, their human-alltoo-human particularity and definitive description. That
Odysseus has a long torso and short legs is well-observed by
Homer and his vivid word pictures come from keen looking—
the kind of seeing that blindness fosters.*
There is a curious notion that poetry is self-expression: Well,
lyric poetry perhaps, but surely not epic or epic-derivatives, in
which the rare “I” is authorial, or better, reportorial, and not personal. There is a second strange idea that authors’ sufferings bring
gravity to their work. Well, if so, probably more for readers who
seek in fiction the warm motions of feeling rather than the cool
delights of imagination. To me it seems that the maker’s emotional vulnerabilities aren’t in it, at least not as generative principles; sympathy for victimized women, abhorrence for brutal
men, these are imported latter-day sensitivities, romantic in mode
and contemporary in content; so conceived, figures can’t come
into their own. Take, on the other hand, a case of an author clearly
in love: Tolstoy with Natasha Rostov, as actual a being, both as
an enchanting girl and as a dowdy, demanding mater familias, as
ever walked the earth. —Surely, she appeared to him first, and
he couldn’t help but love her. I can’t imagine that she was conceived to bolster the self-esteem of young wives thickening
around the middle.
There is, to be sure, good subjective fiction as well, but its
appeal is to readers’ personal sensibilities or their special interest
in the author. Such fictions tend to lack that poignant particularity
which is the facade assumed by universality in epics and novels.
In the course of the fifth century B.C., Odysseus seems to
have lost his Homeric standing—his vivid imaginativeness de*So the English Homer in his blindness sees and tells “of things invisible to mortal sight” (Paradise Lost 3.55).
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graded into self-serving lying, his ingenious versatility into base
scheming, his meaning-laden adventures into comic episodes.
Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Euripides’s satyr play, The Cyclops,
and minor pot-paintings are the evidence. Honest Homer gives
some cause for this view, to be sure, but why it took over, I don’t
know; perhaps Odysseus was regarded as a naturalized Athenian
and so fair game. But the Odysseus, Homer’s Odysseus, who has,
as the commander of his homeward-bound fleet, episodes of culpable obliviousness, and, as the returned repossessor of his
palace, a moment of murderous rampageousness, is accorded
some justification: sheer exhaustion on the seas, and once at
home, the discovery that his palace is infested by a hundred-plus
uninvited suitors who have eaten out his substance, plotted to
murder his son, and all but committed outrage against his wife.
The Homeric Odysseus is a dilatory but faithful husband, bound
to a wife who is his equal and partner; he is an ever-mindful parent who—as far as I know alone of all the heroes encamped before Troy—regularly refers to himself as a father, “the father of
Telemachus” (2.260, 4.354), a usually temperate and self-controlled man, and, above all, a great poet, the poet of his own
odyssey. To see him as repulsive is to put in suspension his full,
his objective, his primary Homeric being in deference to a preconceived sensibility.
5. What, then, is the function of human imagination in making
fictions, and particularly in filling out myths? I think that there
are two imaginative functions: one is like a workshop, the other
like a reception area.* The workshop is an internal place where
human artfulness goes to work on given material to curry and articulate it. The reception area is an internal place just waiting for
the Muses to present beings and the actions that spring from their
essence—that being a fancy way of saying outright what our con*Kant’s apparently similar “productive” and “reproductive” imagination
are toto caelo different, the first being a deep faculty for bringing together sensibility and understanding to make cognitive experience possible, the other being analogous to ordinary memory. See his Critique
of Pure Reason, B 181.
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temporaries find insupportably embarrassing: No one, no one
whosoever, has a non-evasive answer to the question where these
self-sustaining fictional beings come from. This I do know: that
their appearance in the imaginative chamber is what makes great
fictions objective—given rather than created. And that is precisely why it seems to me pusillanimous to refuse to consider a
theological explanation.
6. Another charge against subjectivity in myth-adaptation is that
it invites indeterminacy. For while objectivity is apt to let cheerfulness break out, the subjective mode tends to ally itself with
the suffering moods. Now objective suffering has some tragic
clarity, but subjective suffering tends to willful irresolution.
Irresolution, indeterminacy, is the via ignava, the “craven
way,” of the intellect; it is the enemy of openness, for it is a powerful pre-entrenchment. The mantra “Life is very messy” shifts
responsibility to a non-being, “Life”; in sober fact, it is people
who make messes, and people are meant to unmake them. Some
tragic dilemmas have no solution, but all human conditions have
a resolution: a way we come to deal with them, either by a masterful coping or by a determined resignation or by a decision to
take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.
It seems to me that art, especially narrative art, should not be
so unlike human reality as to be terminally indeterminate, when
the human life-span is a concatenation of crises-plus-resolutions,
and the whole often reveals order in retrospect. So, also, then,
should works of art offer not escapism, to be sure, but some sort
of sublimation—which is but a sort of condition-transcending
conclusiveness.
7. Aristotle says that plot (mythos) is the source, and as it were,
the soul of tragedy, because tragedy is primarily an imitation of
actions, and therefore only secondarily an imitation of agents
(Poetics 1450a40 ff.). In other words, the event structure determines the character. That may be true of tragedies, which are
brief cut-outs of extended life, concentrating on an event and its
actors. Epics, however (perhaps not the anonymous bardic songs
but surely the attributed Homeric poems), which are not under
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the Greek one-day time-limitation customary for tragedy, but are
time-extensible ad libitum (Aristotle, Poetics 1449b8-9), may be
said to work in reverse: the character extrudes, so to speak, the
events. Here the person determines the myth, at least in its detailed realization: Its people act out who they are, and an old story
of one of those East-West women-stealings (which for Herodotus
are, as I said, the dubious pre-historic antecedents of the Persian
War) is turned by the canonically envisioned Helen-character into
a willful running-off. For real, round people, in life or fiction, are
not mere victims for long—and especially not in fiction, where
victim-types tend to make the plot peter out and thus to prevent
finalities. After all, waiting to be rescued is no life, and such
supine characters have no after-life either. Hence, one might
make it a rule of receptive imagining and so of fiction-writing—
a first bit of advice to authors-to-be: Before you even begin to
write, know what happens after your telling is done. For if you
don’t know that, you don’t know the meaning of your story. Real
characters must live out the afterlife you’ve made for them, and
their fate must backlight your story.
8. Even a great work, like Charlotte Bronte’s best, Villette, is diminished by willful indefiniteness: By the last page we do not
know whether Lucy Snowe will receive her intended husband
back, saved out of the tempest encountered by his returning ship,
or will be left with the cold comfort of being the directress of a
well-established girls’ boarding school. There are, to be sure,
heavy hints at a shipwreck, but that is because the author, while
reluctant to burden her long-suffering heroine with one more final
disaster, also wishes to capture for her story the romantic gravity
of ultimate misfortune. But it is not done in good faith; Charlotte
Bronte must know whether his proper mythos makes the man
emerge safely—or drown.
Terminal indeterminacy, abandoning the reader in medias
res, is not only irritating, it is irrealistic, for in real life M. Paul
either walks in the door of that pensionnat in the “clean
Faubourg” or he doesn’t. So also one of these options should turn
out to be a fact of the Muses’ tale; why, then, muddy the waters
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with that indecisively raging tempest at sea? Better to build in
some clear clues of eventuation; that done, it is, to be sure, a neat
trick of the story-telling art to finish before the conclusion, leaving it for imaginative readers and epigonous myth-makers to clue
out the fact.
III. Should there be myth-dilations?
One feature of a solid, well-rounded item of reality is that its substance is attended by millions of strange shadows, or conversely,
that it offers indefinitely many perspectives: angular ones, as the
observer circumambulates the object, radial ones, as the viewer
pans in for close-ups and beyond. Well-actualized beings of the
imagination are just the same. The Muse-delivered prototype entrains multitudes of re-tellings; for the captivated imagination
there is no end of new views.
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WHERE, Then, Is Time?
Eva Brann
Let me first explain my odd-sounding title. It is a variation on
the most famous question-and-answer about time ever posed. It
comes from the eleventh book of Augustine’s Confessions, published about 400 C.E.: This is his question: “What, then, is time?”
And this is his preliminary answer: “If nobody asks me, I know;
if I want to explain it to him who asks me, I don’t know.” But
that’s only the beginning. What follows is, to my mind, the deepest and most persuasive positive solution to the perplexity.
I
In modern times the most sophisticated and detailed answer is
given by Edmund Husserl in his book The Phenomenology of the
Consciousness of Internal Time, finished in 1917. It is essentially
an elaborated version of Augustine’s solution. Its title tells why
I have substituted “where” for “what” in Augustine’s famous
question: Time is, in both works, understood primarily as an
event within our soul (or, as it is called for the sake of scientific
respectability, the psyche). I might say here by way of clarification that “soul” is traditionally used for the power from which
emanate all the activities of life, from sense perception through
all kinds of thinking to the intuition of supra-sensory being, while
“consciousness” applies only to the part of life that is aware or
self-aware.
Now I hope you’ll forgive me if I do some more name-dropping. It’s for distinguishing a second answer to the question
“Where is time,” namely outside, in the world, in nature. Three
great names—apparently—stand for this location: Plato, Newton,
and Einstein.
Eva Brann is a tutor and former dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
This lecture was originally presented at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. on 11 December 2015.
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Plato’s dialogue Timaeus (circa 360 B.C.E.) is, into modern
times, the classical astronomer’s very own work. The reason is
that it provides one set of conditions under which it is plausible
to make finite models of the world. That condition is that there
be a uni-verse, a well-ordered cosmos consisting of an encompassing starry sphere, an inner array of closed, non-intersecting
planetary orbits, including that of the sun, and a stable center for
the human observer, the earth. Of this world it is possible to produce a moving mathematical model called an orrery. And the reason we can model the world is that it is itself the incarnation of a
timeless ideal model, a mathematical paradigm for an incarnation
that is the work of a divine craftsman.
Time is built into this cosmic universe by the god, who, upon
having “thought of making a certain movable image of eternity,”
at once so ordered the heavens that they were “an eternal image
going according to number, which we have given the name Time.”
In other words, the whole cosmos is a clock, whose starry sphere
is a moving dial at night and the tip of whose hand is the planet
Sun, marking out the hours of the day by its positions in the sky
or by the shadows it causes the style of a sundial to cast.
Next, Newton, who states very definitively in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy of 1687, his Principia, that
there is an “Absolute, true and mathematical time,” an equable,
independent flux, distinct from that relative time which is only
the measure of some, presumably reliable, even motion.
And finally, in his introduction of special relativity, the 1905
paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” Einstein says
boldly that for local time, the definition of time can simply be
“the position of the small hand of my watch” (I, para 1). In other
words, time is what the clock tells.
These three understandings of the source of time seem certainly to place it squarely outside of consciousness, into nature,
namely as the divinely made heavens themselves, or as a universal stream within them, or as a humanly made artifact, a clock.
However, the externality really only works for Einstein, for
whom time, local or astronomical, is operationally defined in
terms of a theory of measurement based on the postulates of rel-
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ativity, a measurement by which astronomically remote clock
time can be compared with local time. But even in that case it
isn’t clear whether time so defined is established as external or
rather abolished altogether, being a mere designation for locations on an analogue dial or a digital register.
One more name here, actually the earliest to do away with
time: Aristotle, in the fourth book of his Physics (after 335 B.C.E.),
defines time as the counted number of a locomotion according
to before and after. In other words, time is no visible or sensed
something, such as a designated heavenly appearance or a pervasive flux, but just an activity of counting passages. And, as I
said, it seems to me that Einstein’s positivist, boldly practical understanding has the same effect: It’s not time but stations of
movement, the position of mobiles like clock hands, that is real.
So if time is outside, it’s just one unit motion measuring out or
counting up another motion. But then again, counting is ultimately a psychic activity; if we didn’t have the experience of
counting up moments internally, we couldn’t interpret a digitally
displayed aggregate as time that has passed.
It’s even worse with Plato’s and Newton’s view of time. Consider this: Some of the greatest works at the beginning of the sciences of nature are theologies. Certainly the Timaeus introduces
a divinity, a divine artificer. But above all, so does Newton’s
Principia. He devotes its final pages to an exposition of God in
Nature which ends with the words: “And thus much concerning
God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does
certainly belong to Natural Philosophy.”
In his Optics Newton says, moreover, that these appearances
betoken an incorporeal Being “who in infinite Space, as it were
in his sensorium, sees the things themselves intimately.” He
means that space is that part of God’s soul in which he receives
sensory impressions—presumably including primarily the temporal flux, which could, perhaps, be understood as his stream of
consciousness.
So also does Plato in the Timaeus ultimately put time inside
the soul, an encompassing world soul: For his divine craftsman
wraps the cosmos with bands of soul-stuff, structured by musical
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ratios so as to impart rationality and beautifully proportioned motion to the world within. In this strange and wonderful cosmology, the soul is the cincture, the sash of the world’s body.
The point I’m making is that if you ask the question: “Is time
internal or external?,” there appear to be some great scientists
who believe the latter, but if you ask it differently: “Is time in the
world or in consciousness, the number of such believers is reduced, because they think that the world itself is comprehended,
activated, by a sort of soul. And, as I said, there are those who
reduce going time to the counting of passage and told time to the
number pointed at on a dial (which is itself a motionless imitation
of a celestial circuit) or displayed on a screen (which is a lifeless
imitation of a soul seen counting). In effect, they too do away
with time as a distinctive “something.” It is nothing but one motion used to measure another.
II
The questions “What or where is time” now seem to need to become ultimate, to demand: “Is there time at all?” Perhaps a version of more immediate interest to you is: Is the dimension “t”
really needed in formulas of physics? I have tried to read books
like Julian Barbour’s The End of Time (2000), whose high level
arguments for the abolition of time from physics I am not competent to understand. But there is a very elementary consideration
along the same lines: Diagrams in elementary kinematics tend
to get loci of paths by plotting distance against time, but time itself is represented by distance, the t-axis (Galileo, Two New Sciences, Book IV, Theorem 1). Now most objects we symbolize,
we re-present in the dimension in which they actually exist, be
they visual, that is spatial, or auditory or tactile. For example,
the eight-sided sign that verbally says STOP, or crosses out motion
with the cross-symbol X, is itself in the plane dimension of space,
and that, in turn, is the dimensionality of the viewing plane of our
vision—for the third dimension is an experiential inference from
the two-dimensional picture plane onto which sight-lines from the
depths of space are projected—ultimately our retina. But when an
item is not representable in its own physical dimension (because
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it has none), be it an idea, an angel, or infinity, we are alerted that
something about it is not, so to speak, kosher. And all the images
of time I know of are indeed either spatial extensions marked by
selected now-points or registered counts of sensory pulses from
heart beats down to atomic periods.
But if that’s the only way to get hold of time, then time has,
as I said, been nullified: It’s just a way of measuring something,
say, life lived or ground covered, by means of the continuous motion of some uniformly moving mobile or the continual accumulation of some equably occurring events.
Are these notions a scientist needs to worry about? Well, no,
the realm in which questions of Being or Nonbeing are at home
is not a venue for result-oriented research. It’s a place to park
questions that need to be bypassed when you have engaging and
preoccupying research to do. They’ll keep there for the time
when you can’t help yourself because you really want to understand the postulated conditions of science, which cannot themselves be science.
The American psychologist William James knew as much
about the human soul as about the scientific psyche. I mentioned
“Phenomenology” before, when I cited Husserl’s work on internal time. Phenomenology is the careful description of the constitution of consciousness. I believe that James was actually the
transatlantic founder of this European movement, because I cannot think of a more acute analysis of our internal life than he presents in his short Psychology of 1892. In the Epilogue to this
classic he says plainly and candidly what we all need to hear. He
regards himself as a natural scientist and takes that to involve two
postulates: 1. Determinism—that all events are rigidly constrained by the laws of nature, and 2. Atomism—that the stuff
participating in these events consists of massy elementary particles, which are in force relations to each other. These claims applied to psychology make it a science and the psyche a naturally
constrained entity. In effect this means that our physiology determines our psychology.
Ethics, James then says, makes a counterclaim: Our wills are
free. Scientists do not concern themselves with spontaneity and
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freedom. Then he goes on: “The forum where they hold [such]
discussions is metaphysics. Metaphysics means only an unusually
obstinate attempt to think clearly and consistently.” He continues:
A specialized scientist’s “purposes fall short of understanding
Time itself . . . and as soon as one’s purpose is the attainment of
the maximum of insight into the world, the metaphysical puzzles
become the most urgent of all.”
III
So let me launch into one account of time that I find both in accord with experience and elegant in its presentation. It is that of
Augustine, with which I began. I am not quite sure if his understanding is metaphysical or theological. I’ve never read a great
theologian about whom I was clear whether he was more metaphysician or more believer—probably each for the sake of the
other: “I believe so I may understand” says Anselm in his Proslogion of the later eleventh century—and, though he denies it, perhaps the converse is true as well. Allow me to point out that
scientists do just the same: They accept postulates on faith so that
they may do research, and they do research so that they may find
a truth.
If it is the case that time never makes its appearance out in
the world but only motion is in evidence, then either time is not
or it is in the only other venue of which I can think, inside our
soul. As one of our seniors (Maxwell Dakin) put it to me when I
took him to lunch: “We aren’t in time, but time is in us.” For Augustine time is internal psychologically but also external theologically. When physical time has been shown to lack all physical
evidence and therefore to be scientifically void, it might still be
theologically real.
Augustine’s manuscripts contain no diagrams, as far as I
know. Yet his exposition of time seems eminently diagrammable,
and that’s how I’ll present it—to be internally imagined rather
than externally projected.
Inscribe, then, in the mental field of your imagination an upright line. Make it finite in length, for it is to stand for your mortal
soul, but also indefinite, for it is to represent that expansible stor-
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age, the part of the soul called the memory, and also those forward-projected images termed expectations. That is to say, points
on it are moments of memory, long ago or recent, and also hopes
and fears, near or far off.
Now set this perpendicular across a horizontal straight line.
That line will be quite definitely finite, for it represents the world
moving from the week of its creation to the last judgment and
the somewhat less well-defined end-time: Solvet saeclum in favilla, “Secular time will dissolve into ashes,” as goes the sacred
text, the Requiem. The crossing, it would be the “origin,” the zero
point (if we were to think of this picture anachronistically as a
diagram of Cartesian x- and y-axes) represents the location where
we, our aware soul or consciousness, take place, so to speak,
where we are actually present in and to the ongoing world as its
participating eye-witnesses. The part of the psychic upright below
the world-line represents the past, all the memories left by the
passing present that have been pushed down, point by memorypoint, into the deeper past, way back to earliest childhood. The
part of the upright above the world-line represents what we might
call “future-memory” or expectations, our projection of images,
drawn from modified memory, onto the future motions of the
world. The closer to the origin, the present, the sooner and more
likely are our predictions to come about and the more effective
are our anticipatory decisions.
So far this is a plane figure, but there is also a line through the
origin into the third dimension. Augustine calls this z-axis extensio,
which means roughly “outreach.” It represents the access we have
to unmoving timeless realms, such as mathematics, eternal verities,
and, above all, to the Divinity, whose time is the so-called “standing now” (nunc stans) of theology, within which our moving world
is an infinitesimal interlude. “Extension” is thus our stretching toward immortality, and it has no definable extent.
The upright soul-axis, on the other hand, he calls “distention.” By the z-axis we reach out beyond ourselves; by the x-axis,
our consciousness, we are distended, prolonged, so to speak,
within ourselves. Though we live in zero-time, within the present
moment, on the cusp of now, we carry above and below this
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crossing of world and awareness all our past in memory and our
future in expectant imagination. Though pointillistic beings in
actual world-presence, we are all there simultaneously in temporally ordered memory and expectation. We contain all the time
there is for us individually, all our past and all our future, present
within us. So I will quote Augustine’s famous formulation of exclusively internal time. He says:
Such three [past, present, future] are indeed in our
soul and elsewhere I do not see them. The present
of what has gone by is memory, the present of what
is present, eyewitness, the present of what is future,
expectation. (11.20)
The future, therefore, is not a long time, for it is not,
but the long future is merely a long expectation of
the future. Nor is the time past a long time, for it is
not, but a long time past is merely a long memory
of past time. (11.28)
In my youth I was an archaeologist, digging up the past in
Greece. You astronomers are, similarly, the archaeologists of the
universe, the experts of experts in pastness. Nothing comes to
your eyes but what is aeons in the past.
How then can Augustine say to us that the past that is not
specifically ours as memory has passed away? Well, if I dig up,
say, an Attic cooking pot, rough, undecorated, and with a blackened bottom, that pot is not past but present. The same for the
stars of which you capture evidence in your observatory. What
makes the pot a survival of the past, the kind called “historical
evidence,” is what might be called external memory. The fact that
the pot is deep beneath the earth’s surface, buried in strata that
are analogous to the soul’s memory stratification doesn’t help to
make it past; its thereness is still now. But the fact that there are
written epics and histories and other transmitted memories of the
“glory that was Greece,” together with some common sense
which tells me that they too boiled their beans—those circumstances make me infer a past beyond my own birth, a past-pot,
so to speak, made 2,500 years before I was born.
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I think it must be the same for you: You have ways of calculating the distance of the starry objects you focus on and you
know the travelling speed of the signals they emit, and so you
calculate your way back into a past that is, in fact, over: That
past, however, is now for you or it is not at all. There is an argument that world time must be real because it comes in different
configurations: The orbital times of classical Newtonian dynamics are cyclical and reversible. You can run the heavenly clock
backwards without damage to the laws of nature. And there is the
so-called “arrow of time” for a thermodynamic understanding of
the world as progressing, or rather deteriorating, into disorder in
the absence of shots of energy. And there is the theological view
I just referred to, in which the universe occupies a stretch of time
inserted into an atemporal eternity with a dramatic first week and
a less clear-cut end. This theological time-line is mirrored in cosmology by the claim that time has a spectacular beginning but a
fizzling end, if any. I should add here quickly that I am not pretending to understand these temporal possibilities. I just read
about them. But this I do see: All these theories are actually about
the measurements of motions and in them time may be a convenient symbolic dimension, but it’s not a substantial being; the present alone, our being there, is real. It is not time that displays
diverse qualities but particles of matter that obey different laws
of motion. Augustine, it seems to me, saves our sense that we
ourselves are temporal in the absence of any evidence that nature,
the world of bodies in motion, is so.
Let me, finally, speak of a culminating clarification Augustine
has accomplished. He has explained why time is naturally thought
of as having three phases. The explanation is in terms of three psychic capacities: In our memory we store away in a time-generating
order reproducible moments of the world’s motions and events
that have come to our attention. Those observations yield a past
with a chronological structure. Through sensory awareness we
live now, in an actual, if momentary, presence. That is our present,
our now. And in our imagination, which is memory in its transfiguring mode, we prefigure, expectantly, in hope, fear, or resignation, things that might come to be. That’s the future.
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IV
Allow me to end with a particular preoccupation of mine. When
I say that only the now is real, I may seem to claim that life in
the “just now” is the life there is. The Latin word for “just now”
is modo, from which comes our word “modernity.” Living in the
“just now,” in expectation of the next “just now,” does seem to
be a primary feature of modern life with its obsession for the
short-term, for speed and novelty. In fact, the adverb “now” is
etymologically related to “new” (Indo-European: newo). I’m all
for making the most of our moments, but not so much insofar as
they confront us with that hard-edged brash factuality, called reality. I have more faith in actuality, which I think of as bringing
vibrant significance to our lives. But that’s a long story not for
today, so let me dwell instead for a moment on the comparative
residual powers of the past and the future.
The past has passed away; we say “it was.” But the verb was
is a tensed form of is. For my part, I do not believe that anyone
can succeed in recalling the past into the present, as a German
historian (Leopold von Ranke) famously demanded of history: It
should render the past “as it really, effectively had been” (wie es
wirklich [or eigenlich] gewesen ist). That is impossible for two
reasons: First, because, since a human day has 24 x 60 = 1440
minutes, called “specious presents” by William James (Psychology (1892), Chapter XVII), meaning lived moments, an adequately real history would have to take account of and pass
judgement on each of these moments, both psychic and physical,
of every dead human being as well as every resultant group activity—which would be a practically infinite task even if the material were actually accessible. And second, it is impossible
because I believe that a thoughtful person coming to grips with
the past will have to go schizophrenic, that is, “split-minded,” in
order to entertain the following, unavoidable dual persuasion: On
the one hand, it is simply not determinable that there is a past
that has actually happened, because the conduct of human individuals, like the behaviors of electrons, may be terminally uncertain for an observer in a way analogous to the Uncertainty
Principle of physics: The historian’s observational perspective
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cannot help but suppress one feature of a situation in focusing on
another. Or even worse: Perhaps human life is just not ultimately
determinable because of our incurable inability to penetrate people’s interior or, yet worse, because human beings are in themselves indeterminable, perhaps more radically than electrons.
On the other hand—and here’s what splits the mind—who
can avoid believing that there really was one way it had actually
been in the past, that some things were the case and others not?
Thus when some revisionists were arguing that the Germans had
not indisputably initiated the First World War, the French statesman Clemenceau said something to this effect: “At least no one
will claim that on the night of August 3, 1914 the Belgians invaded Germany.”
So, all that said, whether the established past is always a tiny
selection of the real past, or the real past is itself in principle uncertain, either within clear limits or with large latitude, it seems
extreme to say that the past is totally not. There is a roughly recoverable past, especially by means of written works. And (I want
to say this briefly but emphatically) the depth and coherence of
the present depends on being mindful of this past. That too is a
subject for a different lecture.
So I come to my concluding expression of personal opinion.
Just as it seems to me essential to coherent living to ascribe actuality
to the past, so it seems to me essential to effective action to deny it
to the future: The future is far more not than the past. In fact it is a
big Nothing—at least the human future is just a nonbeing.
I am an amateur reader of anthropology, and here’s a pertinent anthropological discovery from the Andes.* In most cultures
the future is thought of as confronting us, coming toward us, existing ahead of us. In the Andes of South America there is, however, a language, Aymaran, and its speakers for which the future
comes up from behind. These people use the Aymaran word for
*Rafael Nuñez and Eve Sweetser, “With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time,” Cognitive Science
30 (2006): 1-49.
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“back” to refer to future events and gesture behind them to indicate its coming. This way is highly unusual, but to me it makes
perfect sense. There is a future that is fixed from the past, that
future which is predictable because past events are determinately
causative. Thus having a bad drought in the summer just behind
you makes a poor harvest in fall to come a practical certainty.
Above all, celestial motions, which are fixed by natural law, are
highly predictable; thus an Ephemeris gives the coordinates of
celestial bodies way into the future. That’s a way of saying that
the future is determined from behind us, since prior causes determine posterior effects—certainly in large-scale nature.
There’s a huge “but.” Determinists will argue that we human
beings are also bits of nature and entirely determined by brain
action. If we only knew the brain’s condition in every detail we
could entirely predict a human being’s action. Never mind the
practical impossibility of complete information; if we are altogether parts of nature, absolute prediction is in logical principle
possible, and impracticable only in mere fact. Then there is indeed a future, though not one coming at us but one issuing from
our circumstances.
But it is possible that we have a capacity for spontaneity of
action based on liberty of choice and freedom of decision. If that
is the case, then the human aspect of the future is indeed a great
big Nothing until we, here and now, decide to give it the shape
we choose. It may be that the antecedent causes of choice, which
are trains of thought, are even more exigently binding than the
laws of nature, but they include an element of weighing and judging that is inviolably ours. If there is this parallel track of free
choice, then this is what those future-gurus deserve who undertake to tell us what the future holds and sends at us, “like it or
not,” and who advise us to prepare for and accommodate to these
futuristic advents, even if we judge them to be bad—on pain of
being overrun by them. They deserve to be told that they are trying to invade the realm of our expectations and intending to highjack our imaginations. In other words they are attempting to
curtail our freedom, and their bid to have us bow to their inevitabilities should be met with a counter-bid for them to butt
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out. For to the question “where is time?” the answer is: For sure
not in the future; the human future is nonexistent until we imagine it and act accordingly—and by then it’s already the present.
Let me hasten to say as my final point: Our free choice,
which is, as I’ve said, sure to be ultimately quite constrained by
the demands of truth-seeking thought, has at least an initial moment of spontaneity, when we focus our attention on a subject
and commit ourselves to thinking it through—on its terms. This
spontaneity, this freedom, seems to me to be anchored in two,
somewhat iffy facts. One is the powerful, personal experience of
being my-self, my own mistress, unavoidably in charge. The
other is the powerful public sense of not belonging entirely to
myself but of willingly surrendering part of me to my community—and that this is a particularly telling practice of freedom.
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Music and the Idea of a World
Peter Kalkavage
“Music, too, is nature.”
—Victor Zuckerkandl,
Sound and Symbol
This lecture explores the differences between two perspectives on
music: one ancient, one modern. The texts I have chosen are
Plato’s Timaeus, a dialogue that freshmen will read in seminar toward the end of the year, and Schopenhauer’s The World as Will
and Representation, a great book not on the program. Each of
these works presents an all-embracing account of the world—a
cosmology—that highlights the bond between world and music.
I hope that my study in contrast will lead us to a deeper understanding of music as it relates to the whole of all things, our human
condition and our happiness. I also hope that it will show why
music is the most comprehensive of the liberal arts, and why it is
the case that to speak about music is to speak about everything.
My talk has three parts. In the first, I focus on the central role
that music plays in Timaeus’ cosmological optimism. According
to Timaeus, the world of Becoming is a beautiful work of art
ruled by the supreme goodness of intelligent divinity. In Leibniz’s
phrase, it is the best of possible worlds. In the second part, I turn
to Schopenhauer’s cosmological pessimism, according to which
the world is not the shining forth of intelligent purpose but the
work of a blind urge that Schopenhauer calls the will. Music, for
Schopenhauer, is the most potent and truthful of the arts because
it is a “copy [Abbild] of the will itself.” In the third part of my
talk I offer, by way of a coda, some thoughts on music and world
in the context of the Bible.
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture was first presented in Annapolis on 6 November 2015.
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Part One. Rootedness and Musicality
The Timaeus is Plato’s most overtly musical work. Music is
prominent in other dialogues as well, notably in the Republic and
Laws, and in the Phaedo, where Socrates calls philosophy “the
greatest music” (61A); but it is so much a part of the form and
substance of the Timaeus that the dialogue may be said to be all
about music.
The projected drama of the Timaeus is a performance by
three illustrious political men, whose task is to entertain Socrates
with a feast of speech: Timaeus of Italy, Hermocrates of Sicily
and Critias of Athens. A fourth was supposed to have joined them,
but he is a no-show. The men who did show up form a trio of
poet-rhetoricians, who have agreed to gratify Socrates’ desire to
behold his best city, which he had described on the previous day,
engaged in the words and deeds of war (19B-20C). The star of
the show is officially Critias, who boasts about how he will harmonize the particulars of Socrates’ city in speech with those of
an ancient unsung Athens. This Athens of old, Critias claims, really existed once upon a time and nobly fought against the insolent kings of Atlantis. But Timaeus upstages Critias with his long
speech about the cosmos and proves the superior poet. How can
one top a magnificent, richly detailed speech about the whole of
all things—the cosmology that is the unmatched model for all
cosmologies to come?
Early in the Timaeus, we hear about the importance of music
in human communal life, as Critias recollects what his greatgrandfather and namesake experienced when he was a young boy.
This Critias joined other boys in a music contest in which they
sang poems recently composed by the lawgiver Solon (21B). The
contest was part of the boys’ initiation into their family tribe and
took place during a festival in honor of Dionysus, the god of intoxication. It depicts the very moment in which impressionable
youths are officially rooted in their tribe, and by extension their
city. Through the act of singing, the opinions of Solon take root
in these young souls and become authoritative. They become
things not merely heard and obeyed but imbibed, incorporated
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and cherished. A similar ritual enrooting is at work, as we shall
see, in the speech of Timaeus.
We know from the Republic that music, which for the Greeks
includes poetry, is dangerous. Because music has the power to
shape the soul for good or ill, to make it orderly or disorderly, an
account of the best regime must include a critique of music as
one of its prime components. At one point Socrates tells us why:
So, Glaucon, . . . isn’t this why nurture in music is most
sovereign? Because rhythm and concord most of all sink
down into the inmost part of the soul and cling to her
most vigorously, bringing gracefulness with them; and
they make a man graceful if he’s nurtured correctly, if
not, then the opposite (401D5-E1).1
The passage underscores the tremendous power of music and
shows why music is crucial to moral-political education. It recalls the final book of Aristotle’s Politics, which treats the musical education of those who are to be free human beings and
good citizens.
Plato and Aristotle realize that we are on intimate terms with
music. The intimacy verges on the supernatural, since music
seems to be a kind of magic that causes the listener to be held
and spellbound. Music, like Orpheus, enthrals. Aristotle observes
at the beginning of his Metaphysics that sight is the privileged
sense, the one that we hold most dear and that most reveals the
differences of things. Musical hearing can lay claim to another
kind of privilege. Music has an intense personal inwardness, an
immediate emotional effect and a power to form our character,
opinions and way of life. In moving our affections it moves our
whole being. This is the ground of the danger that music poses.
In music there is no safe distance between perceiver and perceived, as there is in sight. There is also no refuge: we cannot
turn away from music as we can from a thing seen, since music
is not spatially bounded but sounds everywhere. Moreover, in lis1. I have slightly modified the translation by Allan Bloom, The Republic
of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
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tening to a piece of music, we are not free to survey its parts at
will, as we can with an object that is seen, but must wait for a
moment to sound.2 The tones come when they want to. And yet,
listening to music is more than mere passivity, for it affects us
by virtue of its forms and structures. Listening, in other words,
is an act, in which we not only feel but also perceive. This is the
paradox that is music, which can overwhelm our reason and selfcontrol but always through the order and precision of its tones
and rhythms. To borrow terms made famous by Nietzsche, music
could not be Dionysian if it were not thoroughly Apollinian,
which it must be if it is to be an art at all.
As I mentioned earlier, Timaeus’ speech—or, as he famously
calls it, his “likely story” (29D)—is an effort to put the world of
Becoming in the best possible light. It is a defence of Becoming
in response to Socrates’ indictment in the Republic. In that dialogue Socrates tells Glaucon that genuine education turns the soul
away from Becoming or flux and toward the changeless realm
of Being (7.518C). It leads the potential philosopher out of the
cave of opinion and up into the sunlight of truth. The likely story
takes us in the opposite direction—from Being down to Becoming. It tells us how a craftsman-god, who is without envy and
very ingenious, and who gazed on archetypal Being, brought
order to the primordial chaos through a combination of providence and the beautiful structures of mathematics. Timaeus calls
his speech both a mythos or story and a logos or account. Socrates
calls it a nomos, which in Greek means law and song, as well as
custom and convention (29D). The word implies that Timaeus’
cosmology is a form of quasi-political music. This music estab2. For a discussion of the difference between seeing and hearing, see
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966): “For the sensation of
hearing to come about the percipient is entirely dependent on something happening outside his control, and in hearing he is exposed to the
happening . . . he cannot let his ears wander, as his eyes do, over a field
of possible percepts, already present as a material for his attention, and
focus them on the object chosen, but he has simply to wait for a sound
to strike them: he has no choice in the matter” (139).
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lishes our right relation to the cosmic whole whose offspring we
are. It makes us law-abiding citizens of the world—good cosmopolitans. By playfully re-enacting the birth of the cosmos,
Timaeus is attempting to persuade his listeners, Socrates in particular, that the world of body and flux, properly understood, is
worthy of our serious attention, emulation and praise. All the
mathematical constructions and stories are songs that commemorate the Great Founding. By “singing” these songs of law and
order, we celebrate our cosmic roots. Moreover, since the world
for Timaeus is a god (34B), physics comes on the scene as the
truest act of piety.
Musical references abound in the likely story. The primordial
chaos is said to be unmusical or out of tune (30A), and the movement of the stars resembles a choric dance (40C). The elusive receptacle or matrix—the cosmic “mother” who shakes the four
elemental bodies into their proper places when they wander, like
wayward children—gives the world a rhythmic sway (52C-53A).
The sway is evident in all cyclic movement: our heartbeat,
breathing and walking, in the vibrating string and pendulum,
swings and cradles, and the undulating surface of the sea. The
construction of the regular geometric solids is also music. Here
Timaeus ingeniously harmonizes these beautiful sphere-like
shapes—tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron and cube—with
the observable properties and behaviour of the four elements:
fire, air, water and earth (53D-E).
The greatest musical moment in the story is the construction
of the musical scale out of ratios of whole numbers (35A-36B).
It is based on the Pythagorean discovery that the intervals that
make up melody—octave, perfect fifth, perfect fourth, etc.—are
produced by string-lengths that are in small whole number ratios.
Much can be said about the god’s act of scale building, especially
in light of the problem it solves, namely, the natural incompatibility of some intervals with others. Here I must rest content with
a brief summary. Timaeus’ god builds the world soul out of musical ratios, having first mixed together forms of Being, Same
and Other. He then cuts and bends the scale-strip to form the rotation of the celestial sphere and the orbits of the planets (36B).
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These periodic movements, which constitute time, are not only
the music in the sky but also the reflections of divine thought,
whose image we carry around in our sphere-shaped heads.
For Timaeus, musicality is the sum of human virtue and the
ground of happiness. By musicality I mean the adjustment of all
our actions to the regular, periodic movements of the heavens.
To be virtuous and happy is to conform to the cosmic law and to
move in sync with the music of the whole. It is to live a life that
is in every respect well timed, symmetrical and balanced—the
life of a star. We achieve balance when, for example, in devoting
ourselves to study, we also make sure we get enough rest and
physical exercise (88A). The most essential human musicality
comes from astronomy. This is not because the beauty of the
whole is most apparent in the visible heavens, but because the
heavens are the home of thought in its healthiest, most regular
form. To think the heavenly motions, to discern the ratios in the
sky, is to be one with that condition of intellectual health and consummate musicality enjoyed perpetually by the world soul.
I have said that the likely story is a song that celebrates our
cosmic roots. But it is also the story of a fall. In the book of Genesis, there is creation and fall; in the Timaeus creation is fall. As
I noted earlier, world building starts at the top and goes down—
just like a Greek musical scale. It goes from Being to Becoming
and from the best things in the world to the worst. The lower,
subhuman animals are generated by intellectual devolution. This
is the process in which human beings lose their divine intelligence by having lived an acosmic, disorderly life and must reenter Becoming in an animal form suited to their moral and
intellectual degradation. The likely story begins with the heavens
and ends with shellfish, creatures that contain the souls of humans who in their previous lives exhibited what Timaeus calls a
“total lack of musicality” (92B).3 But even these lowest beings
enhance the beauty of the whole, since without them the cosmic
scale of life would lack its lowest notes and be incomplete.
3. Translations of the Timaeus are from Plato: Timaeus, trans. Peter
Kalkavage (Newburyport, MA: Focus Press, 2001).
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According to Timaeus, our souls originated as pure intellects,
each living in its own star. In being born, we become profoundly
disordered. We leave off being star-lords and become mindless,
inarticulate babies, beings incapable of controlling any of their
movements. That is why education is necessary—because, as
fallen stars, we must recover “the form of [our] first and best condition” (42D). Mathematical astronomy is the most important
part of education because it is the means by which we humans,
whom Timaeus calls heavenly plants, return to our roots in the
sky (90A). It is also the highest form of therapy. By engaging in
astronomy, the human intellect, which grew ill at birth, comes to
itself and recovers its circular movement, former health and
proper functioning as the guide and navigator of daily life. We
study astronomy so that by “imitating the utterly unwandering
circuits of the god [Cosmos], we might stabilize the wanderstricken circuits in ourselves” (47C). Music that is heard and felt
plays a similarly therapeutic role. The gods gave us music “not
for the purpose of irrational pleasure…but as an ally to the circuit
of the soul within us when it’s become untuned, for the purpose
of bringing the soul into arrangement and concord with herself”
(47D-E).
On this note of music as therapy, I conclude the first part of
my talk. I now turn to a very different account of music and
world.
Part Two. From Divine Circles to the Wheel of Ixion: Music
in a World of Woe
The first and main volume of The World as Will and Representation is divided into four books.4 Thomas Mann, the greatest admirer of Schopenhauer in the twentieth century, called it “a
symphony in four movements.”5 Mann, himself a cosmological
pessimist, was keenly sensitive to the role that music plays in the
work. In his essay on the philosopher, he observes that Schopen4. The second volume consists of supplements to the four books in Vol. 1.
5. “Schopenhauer,” in Thomas Mann: Essays, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter
(New York: Random House, 1957).
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hauer, who was very musical, “celebrates music as no thinker has
ever done” by making music metaphysically significant. Mann
proceeds to speculate: “Schopenhauer did not love music because
he ascribed such a metaphysical significance to her, but rather
because he loved her.” For Mann, will rather than intellect is the
source of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music, where will signifies everything in us born of passion and feeling. The supremacy of will over intellect is the most important respect in
which the world of Schopenhauer differs from the world of
Timaeus.
As its title indicates, The World as Will and Representation
depicts the world as having two distinct sides or aspects. One
side, representation, is the topic of Book One. As representation
or Vorstellung, the world is everything that is vorgestellt, “placed
before” us and made present in the daylight of consciousness. Although a more accurate rendering of the word would be “presentation,” which suggests original coming-to-presence as opposed
to derivative imitation, I have chosen to keep the traditional term.
Representation is the realm of perceived objects—finite determinate things and all their properties, which appear in space and
time and interact according to the principle of sufficient reason,
that is, through the relation of cause and effect. Representation
is the world as a well-ordered surface. It is what most of us would
call the world simply.
Schopenhauer turns to the other, inner aspect of the world in
Book Two. He uses terms from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:
whereas representation is the world as appearance or phenomenon, will is the world as thing-in-itself or noumenon. Will, here,
is not a psychic faculty. It is not my will or your will, or God’s
will, since for Schopenhauer there is no God. Will is the universal
force and infinite striving that underlies all things and rises to
self-awareness in man. Schopenhauer calls the will “eternal becoming, endless flux” (164).6 As the world’s “innermost being”
and “kernel” (30-31), will is the source of meaning (98-99). Will
6. Numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in the edition by E. F.
J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969).
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reminds us that life is more than the cool perception of objects:
it is also feeling and care. Objects of representation are vessels
of my care. They are meaningful, important to me in all sorts of
ways. This object I desire and strive to possess, that one I avoid.
This event I hope for, that one I dread. This human being I love,
that one I despise. My body is the embodiment of my care. It is
the seemingly concrete reality to which I am intimately joined
and which I care about in a thousand ways. My living body reminds me that I am constantly in the condition of seeking to preserve my life and to stave off harm, pain, frustration and death.
My being and my life consist in striving to be and to live. I cannot
escape striving, not even when I sleep, for it is more obvious in
dreams even than in waking life that representations matter to me
and are the creatures of my care. Dreams are my hopes, fears,
anxieties and desires made into a private movie, often a surreal
one. Most of us would say that as a human being with a certain
nature I am subject to this care. Schopenhauer is far more radical:
for him, I am this care, this infinite striving to be and to live as
this individual with this body.
Dreams are to desire what the whole phenomenal realm is to
the noumenal will. Schopenhauer reminds us repeatedly that what
we call life is a dream. The will is not the cause of the world,
since causality operates only within the dream world of phenomena or appearances. There is no intelligible principle or intelligent
god (as there is for Timaeus) that is responsible for the natural
order. Nature is unaccountably there, just as human beings are
unaccountably there, “thrown” into existence. The will does not
cause nature but rather objectifies itself as nature—just as our
care objectifies itself in dreams. Hence the phrase, “the world as
will and representation.” The self-objectification of the will is
the basis of Schopenhauer’s cosmology. The will objectifies itself
in a fourfold way: as inorganic nature, plant life, animal life and
human life. Schopenhauer constructs an ingenious isomorphism
or analogy between these four grades of nature and the tones that
make up the major triad with its octave (153). The work of the
will is especially noteworthy in the case of our bodily parts,
which are so many ways in which the will objectifies itself:
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“Teeth, gullet, and intestinal canal are objectified hunger; the genitals are objectified sexual impulse; grasping hands and nimble
feet correspond to the more indirect strivings of the will which
they represent” (108). This striking rendition of the human body
is a modern counterpart to Timaeus’ outrageous stories about our
bodily parts, which are mythically represented as manifesting,
and ministering to, our souls. But whereas Timaeus is tongue-incheek, Schopenhauer is in deadly earnest.
The identity of will and meaning shows why music is metaphysically significant. As Schopenhauer writes in another work,
music, especially melody, “speaks not of things but simply of
weal and woe as being for the will the sole realities.”7 From the
standpoint of the will, being is meaning. Music is unique among
the arts because it depicts the inner world of care—pure meaning
apart from all objectivity. It represents not the rational world soul
but the passionate world heart.8 Music, moreover, is not an elitist
Pythagorean who speaks only to her learned inner circle but
rather the “universal language” that is “instantly understood by
everyone,” intuitively and without the aid of concepts (256).
In my account of the Timaeus I highlighted the therapeutic
function of astronomy and music, both of which minister to fallen
man. They are a corrective to the cosmic necessity of our having
been born as mortal beings subject to mortal flux and mindless
desire (42A ff.). Being born, for Timaeus, is in one sense a gift—
the gift of organic life. But it is also, for the reasons I mentioned,
our burden and our fate. Being born is a mixed blessing. For
Schopenhauer it is an outright curse. To be born is to become an
egocentric individual afflicted with insatiable desire, in particular
sexual desire. To be is to be subject to “the miserable pressure of
the will” (196). The will, as I noted earlier, is infinite striving—
7. Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1974), 430.
8. “The heart, that primum mobile of animal life, has quite rightly been
chosen as the symbol, indeed the synonym, of the will” (Vol. 2, 237).
The atheist Schopenhauer says at one point: “like God, [music] sees only
the heart” (Vol. 2, 449).
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striving with no ultimate good or end. Moments of contentment
and joy appear, but only as passing tones, ripples in a sea of frustration, ennui and renewed desire. To live is to suffer. Schopenhauer here reveals the hard edge of his pessimism and his “tragic
sense of life.”9 He cites approvingly poets like Calderon who define original sin as “the guilt of existence itself,” and who affirm
that it would be better never to have been born.10
Schopenhauer’s recurring image of life as suffering is the
wheel of Ixion. Ixion was King of the Lapiths. After being shown
hospitality by Zeus, he lusted after Hera and tried to seduce her.
For this attempted outrage Zeus bound Ixion on a wheel of fire
and consigned him to Tartarus. Only once did the wheel of torment stop—when Orpheus descended to the Underworld and
charmed its inhabitants with his song.11 This, for Schopenhauer,
is the human therapy that all fine art offers, in particular the art
of music. Music represents the will as thing-in-itself, meaning
apart from all things and pictures, and is for this reason metaphysically significant. But music also gives us momentary relief
from the fiery wheel on which we are bound, the wheel of infinite
longing. In music, as in all aesthetic contemplation, we are no
longer self-interested individuals but “pure, will-less subject[s]
of knowing,” subjects who are “lost in the object” (209). In art,
as Schopenhauer puts it, “We celebrate the Sabbath of the penal
servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still” (196).
The third part of Schopenhauer’s book is devoted to the arts,
which are beyond the principle of sufficient reason. This is evident in music, where tones, though tightly connected, have no
causal relation to each other. The opening phrase of Beethoven’s
9. The title of Miguel de Unamuno’s book.
10. Schopenhauer quotes from Calderón’s Life Is a Dream: “For man’s
greatest offence is that he has been born” (Vol. 1, 254). This is “the guilt
of existence itself”—original sin. Death is, in effect, the correction of an
error. Schopenhauer would say to the dying individual: “You are ceasing
to be something which you would have done better never to become”
(Vol. 2, 501).
11. Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.42.
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Fifth Symphony, for example, does not cause the second.12 Unconcerned with causality and deduction, art is the intuitive apprehension of the Ideas, which Schopenhauer takes from Plato,
for the most part from the Timaeus. The Ideas are the eternal archetypes of nature—the four grades of the will’s self-objectification that I mentioned earlier.13 In the human realm they are the
universals of experience. Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are
a distillation of what is eternally true of human life. In the complex ambition of Macbeth, jealousy of Othello and tragic integrity
of Cordelia, we behold archetypes of will at its highest grade.14
Art is therapeutic because, as the aesthetic contemplation of universal Ideas, art detaches us from the particular objects of our
care. That is why we take pleasure in even the saddest music,
which calls upon us us not to weep but to listen.
Art, however, is not an enduring release from Ixion’s wheel
and offers only “occasional consolation” (267). The fourth part
of Schopenhauer’s book takes us from artist to saint, who alone
is truly happy—if one can call resignation happiness. The saint
has neutralized the will to be and to live through the knowledge
that objects of care are nothing but illusion (451). He needs no
artworks. This neutralization of the will makes the saint good. In
the obliteration of his ego, he is released from his private suffer12. Schopenhauer makes this point in The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, trans. E. F. J. Payne (La Salle, IL: Open Court,
1974), 127: “In just the same way, the succession of sounds in a piece
of music is determined objectively, not subjectively by me the listener;
but who will say that the musical notes follow one another according
to the law of cause and effect?”
13. It is important to note how the Ideas for Schopenhauer differ from
how Plato describes them. For Schopenhauer, the Ideas cannot be genuine beings, for that would undermine the ultimacy of the irrational will.
They are simply eternal modes or ways in which the will objectifies itself. The Ideas are more like adverbs than nouns.
14. These archetypes recall Vico’s “imaginative universals.” See The
New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and
Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). See
Paragraphs 381 and 460.
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ings and free to take compassion on the suffering of other human
beings and even on that of animals (372).
I now turn to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music, which
appears in Volume One of his book and again in Volume Two.
These chapters contain the most fascinating discussions of music
one will ever read. They are an attempt to identify music as a
source of truth, indeed the deepest truth: “The composer reveals
the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty
does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she
is awake” (260). Schopenhauer illustrates his general ideas with
many references to specific musical phenomena. I shall address
only a few of them.
I begin with music as imitation. According to Plato and Aristotle, music, in its tones and rhythms, imitates the dispositions
and passions of the soul. As Aristotle observes in the Politics,
melodies and rhythms are “likenesses of the true natures of anger
and gentleness, and also of courage and moderation and all the
opposites of these and the other states of character” (1340a20).15
Aristotle is referring to the Greek musical modes—Dorian, Phrygian, Mixolydian, etc., which achieve their different effects
through a different placement of half steps in their scales. The
Dorian mode, Aristotle says, gives the soul “a moderate and settled condition,” whereas the Phrygian “inspires.” A difference in
mode can be heard in our familiar opposition of “bright” major
and “dark” minor. This huge musical difference hinges on no
more than whether there is a whole step or a half between the
second and third degrees of the scale. It is gratifying to hear
Schopenhauer, a philosopher, respond to this fact with fitting
amazement (261).
What Timaeus and Schopenhauer add to the imitative relation between music and soul is the connection between music
and world. We are responsive to music because the so-called external world has an interior, as do we, and is always already
15. Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus
Press, 2012), 250.
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music-imbued. For Timaeus, music in the form of the diatonic
pattern—the recurring order of whole and half steps—is woven
into the fabric of the cosmic soul, of which our souls partake.
That is why we respond to the diatonic modes. We look with
longing at the stars because that is where our souls come from,
and we take delight in identifying Same and Other in the things
of the world because our souls are made of Same and Other. So
too, we welcome music into our souls because we detect in it the
inflections of our psychic modalities—our various soul possibilities. Where there is music and listener, music calls to music. It
is a case of sympathetic vibration grounded in the nature of the
ensouled cosmos.
Schopenhauer differs from Timaeus in his understanding of
interiority. He rejects the soul as a principle of being on the
grounds that it makes real what is in fact illusory, namely, our individuality.16 The principle of individuation in general, like the
principle of sufficient reason, applies only to the world of phenomena, which Schopenhauer regularly calls the “veil of Maya”
or illusion. In listening to music, we suspend our individuality
and are in touch with will as process rather than with a stable
mode of soul and character.
From a musical standpoint, Schopenhauer differs from
Timaeus by going beyond the Pythagorean idea of interval as
sensed ratio and treats music as the embodiment of tension or
force. This modern concept of force, also known as conatus or
endeavour, is prominent in the physics of Newton and Leibniz
and was introduced into natural science by Hobbes, who, like
Schopenhauer, rejects a highest good and depicts desire as an infinite striving “that ceaseth only in death.”17 Dissonance in music
is a kind of tension or force. As the vector-like impulse to move
in a definite direction, it is the analogue of desire.18 The suspen16. “[S]oul signifies an individual unity of consciousness which obviously does not belong to that inner being. . . . The word should never
be applied except in a metaphorical sense” (Vol. 2, 349).
17. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 11.1.
18. “Hitherto, the concept of will has been subsumed under the concept
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sion is a good example of how dissonance works in music. In a
suspension, two lines or voices start out in consonance but then
produce dissonance when one of the voices moves while the
other holds its note. A resolution of the dissonance then follows.
Schopenhauer writes: “[Suspension] is a dissonance delaying the
final consonance that is with certainty awaited; in this way the
longing for it is strengthened, and its appearance affords greater
satisfaction. This is clearly an analogue of the satisfaction of the
will which is enhanced through delay.”19
The word “analogue” is important here. The suspension is
not the image or likeness of a specific desire that is eventually
gratified but rather a tonal event that communicates, in a purely
musical way, a universal truth about the will. When Schopenhauer says that music is the universal language, he is not being
poetic. He means that although tones are not words, they function
intuitively in the same way that words function conceptually—
not as likenesses of the things they signify but as symbols, bearers
of universal meaning. In the case of music, this meaning is perceived and felt rather than inferred. Listening to music is nonverbal symbol-recognition.
Music as force flourishes in the tradition of modern tonal harmony. This long and glorious tradition reaches from Bach and
Handel, through Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, up to Brahms
and Wagner, and continues in our own century. Tonal music, as
opposed to the mode-inspired music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, exhibits the directed tension I mentioned earlier. There
of force; I, on the other hand, do exactly the reverse, and intend every
force in nature to be conceived as will” (Vol. 1, 111).
19. Vol. 2, 455-6. An even better instance of the connection between
dissonance and will is the appoggiatura or leaning tone. This unprepared dissonance on a strong beat delays a tone of the melody and intensifies expectation. It is the perfect musical imitation of longing. A
fitting example occurs in Tamino’s love song in the Magic Flute.
Tamino gazes on a picture of Pamina and falls in love with her. By
singing in response to a picture, he moves from the world as representation to the world as will. His repeated leaning tones on the words “I
feel it,” “ich fühl es,” embody the universal truth of erotic love.
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is a play of forces—tonal dynamism. Needless to say, such music
is friendly to the language of will, for will is tension, and force is
will that has not yet attained self-consciousness. The musicologist
Heinrich Schenker applied this very term to music: Tonwille, the
will of the tones. In tonal harmony tension is not confined to isolated events, like the suspension, but pervades the whole of a musical piece and constitutes its unity. The term “tonal” refers to the
rule of a single tone, the tonic or keynote, to which all the other
tones in a tonal work point or, as some theorists prefer to say, the
centrality of the tonic triad, the I-chord. These tensions—Victor
Zuckerkandl calls them dynamic qualities—compose the major
scale and cause it to sound like a journey with clearly defined
stages and a predetermined end: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8.20 Tension is especially urgent in degree 7, which strives toward 8, as desire
craves its satisfaction. Degree 4 tends, less urgently, down to 3.
Together, degrees 4 and 7 produce the dissonant interval of the
tritone. This is the best example of directed tension in music, since
the tritone, when combined with degree 5 in the bass, makes up
the dominant seventh chord, which points to the tonic triad and
so fixes the music in a key. Thanks to their dynamic relations,
which operate at many levels, tones and the triads they form generate musical wholes through the artful prolongation and eventual
resolution of their will-like tension.
I cannot leave the topic of musical tension, and of tone as the
symbol of desire, without citing Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. In
this work we hear extreme chromaticism, constant unresolved
cadences and the deceptive shifting of tonal centers. These phenomena form the tonal analogue of eros as infinite longing. As
others have noted, the work pushes tonal harmony and musical
tension to the absolute limit by extending the striving of tones
over the course of several hours. The historical connection between Wagner’s musical drama and Schopenhauer’s book, although fascinating, is beyond the scope of this lecture. Here I
simply observe that the opening phrase of the Prelude, with its
20. The Sense of Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959),
18-28.
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famous “Tristan chord” resolving to a dominant-seventh chord,
is perhaps the most powerful evocation of tension-as-desire in all
of music. Wagner’s phrase sets up a cadence that is not completed
until the very end of the work, when the crashing waves of the
orchestra overwhelm the transfigured Isolde before settling into
the blissful, post-climactic froth of B major. For Schopenhauer,
this immense prolongation of musical tension is the noumenal
interior of the lovers’ prolonged phenomenal eroticism. More
cautiously stated, it is the analogical, symbolic representation of
that interior. The universal, undying truth of the story is not in
the death-bound characters but in the tones.
The central teaching of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of
music is that music is “a copy [Abbild] of the will itself,” not of
the Ideas of the will, as in tragedy (257). To be sure, all the arts
objectify the will, but the non-musical arts do so “only indirectly.” They present universality through the medium of things,
whether the Parthenon or the complex individuality of Cordelia.
Music, by contrast, makes no such appeal and represents, imitates, the world’s pure subjectivity. It does so through tones all
by themselves.
We must bear in mind when reading Schopenhauer that by
music he means “the sacred, mysterious, profound language of
tones.”21 This signals the primacy of what Wagner called “absolute music” and we now call instrumental music.22 Music as
the language of tones, captures, for Schopenhauer, the Absolute
through non-visual representations. It is the will “speaking to us”
through the medium of composers, who are the will’s symbolists,
somnambulists and high priests.23 Because tones are meaningful
all by themselves, Schopenhauer can make the astonishing claim
that music, in passing over the Ideas and everything phenomenal,
21. Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2, 432.
22. See Wagner on Music and Drama, ed. Albert Goldman and Emil
Sprinchorn (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), 171.
23. For a critique of the thinker’s claim that “through him speaks the
essence of things itself,” see the chapter entitled “Heidegger and Theology” in Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, in which Jonas connects Heidegger with Gnosticism and finds in Schopenhauer’s theory of music
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“to a certain extent, could still exist even if there were no world
at all” (257). The reason is that music, in negating the world as
thing, contains that world from the perspective of its deepest interior, its immortal heart. Schopenhauer states this with maximum concision in the other work to which I referred earlier:
“Music is the melody to which the world is the text.”24 In other
words, tones all by themselves represent the indwelling, immortal
spirit of the world. If we imagined the phenomenal world as a
staged opera or a movie, then the orchestral parts and score would
stand to it as inner to outer, essence to appearance, truth to seeming. As I observed in the case of Wagner’s Tristan, the real drama,
the world in its truth, would be taking place not in what we see
but in what we hear. It would be a drama of tones.
But although music transcends the world as thing, it also has
a profound connection with that world—again, by analogy.
Schopenhauer is fascinated by this analogism and speaks like an
Archimedes who has just made remarkable discoveries and cries
“Eureka! I have found it!” As I mentioned earlier, the major triad
with its octave captures in symbolic form the four natural grades
of the will’s self-objectification and is a mirror of the Whole. The
ground bass mirrors inorganic nature. Each note of this bass functions as the fundamental to the overtones that faintly sound above
it (258). This mirrors what happens in nature as a whole, where
higher grades of being develop out of the lowest, and where organic nature constantly depends on the inorganic, as the upper
partials depend on their fundamental. The tones between the bass
notes and the melody that floats above are the musical analogue
of plant and animal. These tones form the harmonic organism that
binds lower bass and higher melody. They mirror the way that
the sole philosophic precedent for Heidegger’s claim that poets and
philosophers embody “the voice of Being” (257). Jonas comments:
“Schopenhauer’s fantasy [unlike Heidegger’s] was innocent, for music
is nonresponsible and cannot suffer from the misconception of a duty it
does not have” (258). There is good reason to think that music is not as
“innocent” or “nonresponsible” as Jonas thinks.
24. Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2, 430.
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plant and animal life mediate between the inorganic realm and our
higher, human nature. This analogy exists within the scale itself,
where the hierarchy of tones mirrors “the whole gradation of the
Ideas in which the will objectifies itself” (258). To hear an ascending scale is, in a sense, to hear the entire cosmos. Even the inevitable impurity of intervals that exists in all tuning or temperament
is an analogue of phenomenal nature. An interval that is slightly
“off,” say an equal-tempered major third, mirrors natural idiosyncrasy—“the departure of the individual from the type of the
species” (258-9). The incompatibility of some intervals with others, the very problem that makes temperament necessary, is also
an aspect of the will: it is the musical analogue of the will’s “inner
contradiction,” which is the whole concern of tragedy (266). Even
death finds its way into the world of tones. Death occurs, says
Schopenhauer, in modulation, where a change of key “entirely
abolishes the connection with what went before” (261).
Finally, there is melody as the musical analogue of phenomenal
man: “in the melody, in the high singing, principal voice, leading the
whole and progressing with unrestrained freedom, in the uninterrupted significant connexion of one thought from beginning to end,
and expressing a whole, I recognize the highest grade of the will’s
objectification, the intellectual life and endeavour of man” (259).
Melody, the ultimate mythos and symbol of human life, “relates the
story of the intellectually enlightened will, the copy or impression
whereof in actual life is the series of its deeds.” But melody, for
Schopenhauer, “says more” because it goes beyond outward deeds
and events. It also “relates the most secret history [my emphasis] of
the intellectually enlightened will, portrays every agitation, every effort, every movement of the will, everything which the faculty of
reason summarizes under the wide and negative concept of feeling,
and which cannot be further taken up into the abstractions of reason”
(259).
To sum up, there is nothing in the natural world, or in the inner
and outer life of man, that does not find its counterpart in the all-embracing realm of tones. Music as symbol is the whole of all things.
It is the world. That is why, as Schopenhauer says, “we could just as
well call the world embodied music as embodied will” (262-3).
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Coda. Another World of Longing
I end my musical-cosmological reflection with a piece of music
that depicts the world as a certain kind of music, polyphony. It
is Palestrina’s motet, Sicut cervus. Beloved by St. John’s students, the piece is a musical setting of the opening of Psalm 42
in the Vulgate: Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, ita
desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus (“As the hart longs for flowing
streams, so longs my soul for you, O God”). The motet is a good
example of what Nietzsche called Palestrina’s “ineffably sublime sacred music.”25
Every musical composition is both a world unto itself and an
image of the world. This is the central proposition of my lecture.
The world of Sicut cervus is that of the Bible and the biblical
God. Creation, here, is good. It produces beings, not images of
intelligible originals or illusory phantasms. The world is not confined to head and heart, to our subjectivity, but is “out there” and
solidly real. The God of the Bible is not a craftsman who leaves
the world after having made it, or an indifferent prime mover, but
the God of promise and history—the God who makes covenants
with his people. He is someone to whom one can pray. Salvation
comes not from dialectic, or astronomy, or art, or the death of
care based on the gnosis of cosmic nothingness, but from faith
in God.
Although the words of the motet express longing, the tones
do not represent longing as stress and strain. The music is a continually graceful gesture that transmutes the pain of longing into
a serene order of voices—voices that seem always to know their
place. Sicut cervus is composed in two senses of the word: it is
well constructed, and it has an unperturbed disposition. During
the piece, motion goes on and time passes, but the overall “feel”
seems beyond time and change, like a musical emanation of the
nunc stans or eternal Now. It is as if grace were already present,
and the singers were experiencing, in the very midst of their
yearning, prospective joy in the object for which they yearn.
25. The Birth of Tragedy, 19.
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Aquinas cites three criteria of beauty: unity, wholeness and radiance or claritas.26 Sicut cervus has these in abundance, especially
radiance. The music seems to be suffused with warm light. It is
full of feeling but also sounds intelligent, lucid and self-possessed. The movement is a continuous flow, in imitation of the
waters for which the hart thirsts. The tones move, it seems, not
because they have to but because they want to, not out of compulsion but out of freedom. The sound is a spontaneous unfolding, as if the four vocal parts are miraculously improvising their
lines as they go along, only gradually discovering the perfectly
coordinated whole they are in the process of forming. Dissonances occur to enhance consonance and beget motion, but they
are not prominent, and the piece as a whole could not be described as a play of forces. Sicut cervus is music without will.
This brings me to the most important respect in which Palestrina’s motet is the image of a world. Sicut cervus is polyphony
that lacks (because it does not need) the tonal-harmonic principles at work in the polyphony of Bach. Vertical relations are for
the most part the result of simultaneous horizontal relations. The
four voices that compose the piece enter one at a time in points
of imitation. The voice that follows seems to be inspired to enter
by the one that leads. The parts move in obedience to the rules
of good voice leading but do more than exhibit formal correctness. They seem to delight in each other’s company and to be
naturally social. At times, they even graciously step aside for each
other, as if rejoicing in the being and individuality of other lines.
Sicut cervus, in its non-urgent flow, is a musical community that
captures the sound of friendship. And just as friends engage in
all sorts of play, the vocal lines play off one another, often exhibiting contrary motion—simultaneous movement in opposite
directions. Thanks to this friendly contrariety, which keeps the
parts audibly distinct, the voices celebrate, contrary to what
26. Summa Theologica I, Q. 39, a 8. For an excellent discussion of the
three formal criteria of beauty, see Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of
Thomas Aquinas, trans. Hugh Gredin (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1988), 64 ff.
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Schopenhauer asserts, the reality and truth of the principle of individuation, as they conspire to form a perfect, natural sounding
republic of tones. The voices of Sicut cervus, in this respect, may
be said to enact the contrapuntal play that we find among souls
in Dante’s Paradiso.
With this non-tragic image of the world, my study in contrast,
with its Biblical coda, reaches its end. These two great books,
Plato’s Timaeus and Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, differ greatly in how they view being, becoming and
the human condition. But they also go together because, more
than other great discussions of music with which I am familiar,
they invite us to consider that music is more important than even
music lovers might think—that music is, to quote Mann, metaphysically significant and captures the whole of all things, not in
concept but in image and feeling. Are the cosmologies of
Timaeus and Schopenhauer, separately or together, an adequate
account of music? I think they are not. There are limits to the
hyper-rational Pythagorean approach to music, just as there are
limits to Schopenhauer’s Romantic conception of music as representing feeling and irrational will. Both accounts are nevertheless inspired efforts that hit upon certain undeniable truths.
My closing note is inspired by the philosopher Schopenhauer’s personal love of music, which I share. Music, even the
saddest music in the world—music that is worlds apart from Sicut
cervus and may even be the sound of despair and crushing
grief—is dear to us and makes us happy, if only for a while.
Maybe this is because music, as a living presence that comes to
us, offers itself to us, assures us that we are not alone: that there
is something out there in the world that knows our hearts and
may even teach us to know them better. Thanks to music, we experience what it means to be connected to the whole of all things,
even when that whole seems tragic; what it means to have a soul
and not just a mind; to have depth, and not mere rightness, of
feeling and being; and, above all, what it means to be open to
ourselves and our world through listening.
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On Jacob Klein’s
Greek Mathematical Thought
and the Origin of Algebra
Arian Koochesfahani
Introduction
Descartes described his mathematical physics as a “practical”
philosophy by which human beings could “make ourselves like
masters and possessors of nature.”1 Today this feature of mathematical physics is almost uncontroverted and is usually the first
line of defense against skeptics.2 The proximity to truth of a physical theory is often considered directly proportional to its utility.
Jacob Klein (1899-1978) separated the utility claims and truth
claims of physics, arguing that since not all of the mathematical
equations used in modern physics can be translated into natural
language, physics is deficient in meaning and is “not so much the
understanding of nature as the art of mastering nature.”3 It is in
his book Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra4
(GMT) that Klein grounds the strongest version of this claim: the
“‘exact’ [mathematical] nature [sought by mathematical physics]
Arian Koochesfahani is a graduate of James Madison College, Michigan State University.
1. Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Richard Kennington (Indianapolis: Focus Publishing, 2007), 49.
2. By “skeptics” I mean nihilists, historicists, philosophical skeptics,
the “it’s just a theory” people—anyone who argues that modern physics
does not uncover significant truths about nature.
3. Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1985), 60.
4. Trans. Eva Brann (Boston: MIT Press, 1968), henceforth abbreviated
GMT.
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is not something that is concealed behind the appearances, but is
rather a symbolic disguise concealing the original ‘evidence’ and
the original experience of things.”5
In GMT there are three levels of argument at work. On the
surface, Klein makes the mathematical side of physics appear
strange and new by contrasting the unity of mathematics and ontology in Greek philosophy with the universal, tool-like character
of symbolic mathematics.6 In the middle layer, Klein argues that
this difference is characterized by the transformation of the Greek
notion of arithmos into the modern concept of number, a transformation with profound implications for all modern physical
concepts (gravitation, energy, etc.).7 Finally, there is Klein’s
philosophical thesis: symbolic mathematics is symbolic in that
it takes numbers to be mental operations, i.e., numbers are understood either as concepts or are defined in terms of the mathematical operations the mind performs. As a result, symbolic
mathematics legitimizes physical quantities that are intuitively
5. Klein, Lectures and Essays, 84. For Klein, what are disguised by
mathematical physics are the implications of the meanings that are
given in natural language and that arise from the sensible world, i.e.,
the material of Greek philosophy (GMT, 118-120).
6. GMT, 4.
7. Ibid., 117-121. Klein suggests that mathematical physics identifies
nature with a mathematical representation of nature. I believe this is
correct as a description of many of the practitioners of mathematical
physics, but incorrect as a description of the theories themselves. Consider magnetism. Magnetic action-at-a-distance has been eliminated
in practice, i.e., in the discourse of scientists, by filling space with
“fields” which, as mathematical objects, don’t actually constitute an
explanation of the phenomenon. The replacement of magnetic actionat-a-distance with magnetic fields bearing magnetic force is an example of identifying the presented (magnetic action-at-a-distance) with
the represented (fields, mathematical objects). But this is just how magnetism is thought about. It is not a logical consequence of anything in
mathematical physics. However, this statement has to be qualified because what is and is not a consequence of a physical theory can be difficult to determine.
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impossible.8 The challenge to physics is the claim that such
quantities are mere constructions of the intellect. These constructions may help us understand how things happen (“the structure
of the world”), but they don’t tell us what nature is.9
In what follows, I try to reconstruct Klein’s argument about
mathematics to put into context his suggestion that symbolic
mathematics makes certain equations in modern physics absurd,10
before discussing the entire argument in the conclusion. Klein’s
argument in GMT is that modern mathematics is no longer an ontological science of quantity but an epistemological science of
order. To grasp this, we need to understand that, for the Greeks,
mathematics—or at least arithmetic—springs from a reflection,
buttressed by a few basic preconceptions, on the experience of
counting.
Arithmos and Arithmetic
Two distinctions are fundamental to the Greek mathematical tradition.11 First is the philosophical distinction between being and
8. See Joseph K. Cosgrove, “Husserl, Jacob Klein, and Symbolic Nature,” at the Providence College Digital Commons, 2008 (http://digitalcommons.providence.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context
=philosophy_fac).
9. Ibid., 185. However, if general relativity tells us that shape is relative
to velocity, isn’t this a case of scientific progress refining our intuitions
about the properties of physical things and thereby refining our intuitions about nature? Assume that velocity does affect shape. Our ability
or inability to see velocity affecting shape is irrelevant to the discovery
of this truth. We should no longer think of shape as a monadic property,
and this constitutes a refinement of intuition. As Jodi Azzouni puts it,
“we didn’t see that coming.” See Jodi Azzouni, “Can science change
our notion of existence?,” in ProtoSociology 28 (2011): 206 (pdf version, http://www.protosociology.de/Download/Azzouni-Existence.pdf,
5).
10. I simplify certain aspects of Klein’s argument for the sake of clarity.
In cases where different interpretations are possible, I pick the one I
find most provocative.
11. GMT, 10.
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becoming. Since what can be known can be passed on essentially
unchanged, knowledge, for the Greeks, is knowledge of what is.
Greek mathematics is in this respect the paradigmatic Greek science. In fact, the Greek word mathesis means what is knowable
and teachable in general. Hence, for the Greeks, mathematics is
especially oriented towards being. The second distinction is made
within mathematics, and is the distinction between multitude and
magnitude, or between discrete and continuous quantity. To the
study of the first corresponds arithmetic and logistic, while to the
second corresponds geometry.
The difference between arithmetic and logistic is central to
Klein’s argument inasmuch as logistic, which occupies shifting
territory in Greek mathematics, has been perfected by modern
mathematics. To appreciate the difference between arithmetic and
logistic, it is necessary, before even defining these sciences, to
understand how the Greeks understood “number” (arithmos).
The notion of arithmos emerges from the experience of
counting.12 When we count, we always have a multiplicity of
things before us. When faced with a single thing, we do not count
it. If we say that it is “one,” we are speaking about its unity or
we are asserting that it exists. One is not many. Therefore, “one”
is not an arithmos. The first arithmos is “two.”13 Further, when
we count, not only do we always count definite things, but we
always count things of the same kind. When we count apples and
bananas, we count fruit, and when we count in addition the plates
on the table, we count objects. Thus, the definition of an arithmos: a definite count of definite things. In the case of ten sheep
and ten apples, the counts are equal, but the arithmos in each
case, the decad, is different. This is why the Greeks use funny
terms like “sheep-number” and “bowl-number.”14 Every arithmos
is a “counting number,” not a “counted number.” If I ask how
many of something there is and the answer is “two,” this is just
12. Ibid., 46.
13. Ibid., 49.
14. Ibid., 12.
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an abbreviation of “two of the thing in question.” Therefore,
arithmoi are expressed in sentences, not by symbols, and they
are not definable by the ways they can be produced by operations,
algebraic or otherwise.
One might object that we can speak of “two” without reference to any kind of thing. The Greek response is that such talk
tacitly refers to imperceptible entities: pure units. This claim is
based on an answer to the question of what it is that is the same
for everything that can be counted, a question that the Greeks
take as auxiliary to the question of what it is about every countable thing that makes it countable. The latter question is the focus
of arithmetic. On their way to answering this question, the Greeks
take their cue from the fact that we count in terms of kinds, and
they conclude that to be countable means (1) to be uniform with
respect to other countable things and (2) to be delimited, to possess a clear determination.15 After all, uniformity and delimitation
are properties of kinds. The countable as such is therefore externally discrete and, as a determined whole, internally indivisible.
In other words, to be countable as such is to be a “one” among
homogeneous “ones.” These “ones” are therefore “noetic beings”
(pure units) accessible to thought alone. The purely “intellectual”
quality of the pure units explains how we can speak of “two”
without referring to two things in the sensible world. This line of
argument also shows, incidentally, that the “one” is the arche or
source of arithmos, since without the “one” there could be no
arithmos; a fact accorded ontological significance by Plato.16 But
here, in the context of arithmoi, the “one” is always among other
“ones,” and as the paradigmatic expression of multiplicity, these
“ones” constitute an infinite field.17
Arithmetic, then, is the attempt to comprehend all these “ones”
and, in so doing, to explain the possibility of counting. It will become pertinent later that the specifically Platonist arithmetician tries
15. Ibid., 53.
16. Ibid., 49.
17. Ibid., 51.
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to determine how an arithmos, which is many things, can at the
same time be one, namely, this particular arithmos.18 This is a version of the general question about the existence of noetic arithmoi,
since in this context “being one,” “having unity,” and “existing” are
all equivalent. In any case, all arithmeticians rely on classification
to comprehend the arithmoi. The idea is to organize arithmoi by
recognizing a consistent distribution of well-defined properties,
each property being called an arithmetic eidos.19 The Platonist is
again an exception, in that the Platonist does not conceive of eidē
as properties so much as actual “entities” which allow each arithmos to be “one,” to have “unity,” or to exist.20 While it turns out
that both Plato and Aristotle criticize this way of accounting for the
existence of arithmoi as either incomplete (Plato) or incorrect (Aristotle), it is nonetheless true that classifying arithmoi is the main occupation of arithmeticians, their focus being on the truths, directly
ontological or not, about these mathematical objects.21
18. Ibid., 49.
19. Ibid., 57. This is in part because through the use of a gnomon we
can see that certain groups of arithmoi share similar “shapes.” A gnomon is a configuration of points which, after being fitted around a single
point (the “one”), can be continually expanded to produce a figure always similar in appearance. For example, starting from the one, three
points form a square, an addition of five points forms a larger square,
and so on for every odd number. Following the Pythagorean heritage,
each eidos is rooted in a genus, e.g., the “limited” or “unlimited,” and
this rooting anchors them in ultimate principles. The most comprehensive eidē are the “odd” and the “even.” The “odd” captures all those
arithmoi which cannot be divided without a remainder, while the “even”
captures all those that can be so divided. The “odd” links back to the
“same” and thus to the “limited” because only discrete quantities cannot
be divided without remainder. Because continuous quantity can be divided without remainder, the “even” links back to the “other” and thus
to the “unlimited.”
20. Since there are more eidē than the “odd” and the “even,” each arithmos is constituted by its own network of eidetic-memberships (e.g., five
is prime, while nine is composite as an “odd-times-odd”).
21. Ibid., 79, 102.
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Logistic and Greek Ontology
Logistic, in contrast to arithmetic, is concerned neither with
counting nor (derivatively) with adding or subtracting, but with
multiplying and dividing.22 Arithmetic and logistic work together:
arithmetic classifies arithmoi and accounts for their existence
while logistic determines the relations that hold between arithmoi
of pure units. If arithmetic is concerned with the eidos or “form”
of arithmoi, then logistic is concerned with their hyle or “material”—the units themselves.23 Consider multiplication: if I have
two pure units and am told to multiply this arithmos by two pure
units, I simply add together as many of the former as there are
units of the latter. Of course, whenever the multiplier is two units,
the operation is called doubling. Logistic is thus the study of the
relations or ratios that necessarily hold between arithmoi depending on which eidē the arithmoi belong to.24 It is especially important to think of logistic not as studying the relations between
eidē of arithmoi. It is always the arithmoi, not the eidē, that are
the objects of investigation. After all, you can’t multiply eidē.
How the eidē are understood has an important impact on logistic. Platonism makes logistic impossible. According to Plato,
the noetic arithmoi are given existence by the arithmetic eidē because these eidē are organized by the Ideai (the Ideas in the “theory of Ideas”).25 For Klein, Plato conceives of the Ideai as being
to the eidē just as the noetic arithmoi are to the pure units.26 This
22. Ibid., 19.
23. Ibid., 16.
24. Ibid., 24.
25. Ibid., 70.
26. Ibid., 89. For Plato, it is evident that in the phrase “each is one but
both are two,” the word “two” expresses a unity that belongs to each
only in their togetherness, by virtue of a special koinon or commonality
between them that gives rise to a koinōnia, a communion. Thus, in The
Sophist, three possibilities for the “ontological methexis” problem arise:
“(1) There is no koinōnia [of the eidē] at all. (2) All the eidē are mutually related. (3) There is partial koinōnia, in the sense that some eidē
can ‘mix’ with each other but others not.” The first two possibilities are
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is convenient for Plato because by conceiving of the Ideai as
quasi-arithmetic structures, he can solve the ontological problem
of the participation of the species (eidē) in their genus (Idea) and
the mathematical-ontological problem of the existence of the
arithmoi. The argument is this: the arithmetic “two” exists because it is an image of the foundational, absolutely separate eidetic two, the two, which is the Idea of Being, which holds
together the eidē “rest” and “change.”27 Platonism makes logistic
literally unthinkable, which leaves the third. The third indicates the
arithmetic character of the Ideai in that it implies that the eidē constitute
communities or “arithmoi” of “unique eidetic ‘units’,” which, on account of their uniqueness, cannot be counted, but exist in their togetherness.
27. Ibid., 82-3, 87-8, 95-6, 98, 235. To elaborate: assume rest and
change to be, as it were, the fundamental elements, and assume of rest
and change that each is and both are. We do not address in both some
“third thing,” because Being is to be understood as an arithmetic koinon.
But how can each be? If Being belonged to any one of the two, then
only that one would “be.” On the other hand, if both “were” simultaneously, then rest and change, which are not combinable, would be combinable. Plato resolves the dilemma like this: just as Being, as an
“arithmetic” structure, is other than rest and change, so too “are” rest
and change, which cannot be without each other, only because they are
other than each other. Since Being is therefore other than both (although
not both together), while each must be other in order to be at all, this
means that Being is always also Non-Being, namely, Other. And this in
turn means two things. First, that the conjunction of the “opposites” rest
and change is in fact only the “‘co-existence’ of elements other in kind,”
so that oppositions are only “appearances” (96). Second, that we may
“rightly speak of all things whatsoever as ‘non-beings,’ and conversely,
because things partake of being, as ‘being’ and ‘beings’” (96). But this
means at the same time that otherness is, in accordance with the first
point, recognized as the bond between every Idea and its eidē, and thus
as the source of all articulation. The ordinary way of speaking, on the
other hand, in accordance with the second point, ceases to make sense.
We can say with equal correctness that a horse is an animal and not an
animal. Thus, the answer to the principal question in the Sophist—how
images, which somehow both are and are not what they represent, are
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impossible because the pure unit is regarded as not only indivisible but as fundamentally separate from the sensible world, just
as the “one” which is the archē of arithmoi is regarded as an
image of the “One” of which there can be no Idea and which is
altogether beyond being.28 Since a unit that is indivisible and selfsubsisting can’t have fractional parts (not to be confused with
fractions, which dispense with units), the Platonist denies the existence of what makes possible the precise calculation already familiar to the Greeks. Platonism and logistic are thus
incompatible. This inability (in principle) of Platonists to theorize
calculation is a potential reductio of Platonism.
Aristotle’s philosophy, on the other hand, is more robust.
According to Aristotle, arithmoi receive their existence from the
existence of the kind of counted thing.29 This is first of all because the pure units are what is common to every kind of thing,
that is, they have the properties common to all kinds. Because
the noetic arithmoi are given existence not by their eidē but by
their units, which exist even less concretely than natural kinds,
it follows that all the noetic arithmoi exist in the same, highly
general way—a far cry from the fundamental differentiation of
noetic arithmoi that results from the Platonic position that the
noetic arithmoi get their existence from different eidē. Aristotle’s
position implies that the arithmetic eidē, rather than being the
sources of existence for arithmoi, are merely qualities of them.30
possible—is that being itself has a “‘mirror-like nature’” (82). On the
one hand, the uncountable ordering of being through the Ideai depends
on the archē of otherness, the indeterminate dyad. As the twofold in
general, it is the expression of all possible being and non-being, and
the source of imageability. This imageability stretches from the sensible
things to the eidē (which they image) and likewise from the arithmoi
to the Ideai. In the human realm, this imageability is expressed in
speech about being, because speech is considered the “image” of
thought. On the other hand, the archē of being (and therefore of
thought), the “One Itself,” is simply beyond being (98).
28. Ibid., 98, 100.
29. Ibid., 106.
30. Ibid., 110.
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This “demotion” of the eidē goes hand in hand with how Aristotle authorizes fractional parts of noetic units.
For Aristotle, fractional parts are actually whole units with
respect to a new measure.31 In other words, the indivisibility of a
unit is just a property of the unit insofar as the unit is a measure.
Why are all units measures? Because noetic units are a product
of abstraction, the selective disregard of a thing’s visible properties.32 Rather than thinking that the sensible things qua countable
presuppose the noetic units, we are to think that the noetic units
presuppose the sensible things. In every case, noetic units depend
for their existence on sensible or imaginary objects, making every
arithmos a “multitude measured by a unit.”33 In practice, this
means that if we split a unit in half, each “half” is now a whole,
because the original unit, say, one apple, has given way to a new
unit, the “half-apple.” It is a simple matter of determining the
unit measure, though this does not mean that we give existence
to the noetic units or that we can can pick units of measure with
total freedom. The appropriate measures are always limited by
what it is we want to measure, and the noetic units are always
there for us in the first place. Abstraction is just how we access
them. This intertwining of the sensible and noetic neatly blocks
the one-many problem that vexes the Platonist. Because noetic
units are always abstracted and never counted, the one-many
problem does not arise. The point with respect to the fractional
part of the unit is just this: since the noetic unit is always abstracted, it can be “divided” because its division is simply equivalent to the assumption (via abstraction) of a new unit of measure.
Note that this does not abolish the distinction between continuous
and discrete quantity, inasmuch as we cannot measure a line by
both a unit and infinitely decreasing fractional parts of that unit
simultaneously.
Aristotle’s position begins to blend arithmetic and logistic:
it explains the existence of noetic units in a way that explains the
31. Ibid., 109.
32. Ibid., 104.
33. Ibid., 109.
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possibility of precise calculation. Because the existence of arithmoi is not always “on loan,” as it were, from the eidē, Aristotle
can hold, with reference to Plato, that the “real” eidē of arithmoi
are nothing other than their “multitude” or “quantity” as such.34
The triad is “once three” independently of whether its “material”
is noetic or sensible. Aristotle thus identifies that aspect of “number” to be treated by logistic as the very being of “number.” This
is important because the shift from Greek to modern (highly logistical) mathematics involves (1) substituting the concept of
number for the existence of number and (2) treating the two as
equivalent.
However, the disagreement between Plato and Aristotle on
the “nature of number” takes place within a fundamental agreement that mathematics is an ontological science of quantity, that
“numbers” are always of units, and that “numbers” of pure units
do not exist in the mind alone.35 This is why the Greeks did not
develop symbolic formulae. As the next two sections show, what
made possible such a revolution is the notion that numbers are
concepts.
Viète’s Reinterpretation of Aristotelian Logistic:
Calculating with Concepts
Klein brings out the implication of Aristotle’s approach: “The
transformation of the ontological conception of mathematika
which leads by way of Eudoxus to the Aristotelian doctrine,” results in “the reversal of the ‘Pythagorean’ thesis that the mensurability of things is grounded in their numerability.” It is “now
numerability [that] is, conversely, understood as a—not even always complete—expression of mensurability.”36 Especially relevant is that Euclid not only takes up logistical matters under the
34. Ibid., 110.
35. Ibid., 179-180. The general theory of proportions is to Aristotle’s
ontology roughly as arithmoi are to Plato’s. Aristotle considers it to be
(1) methodologically akin to the study of being qua being, and (2) part
of that study itself.
36. Ibid., 240.
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name of arithmetic (causing henceforth the constant confusion
of the two) but also has logistic appear as a “special case” of the
general theory of proportions.37 This makes arithmetic (read “logistic”) seem subordinate to geometry, and it is from this perspective that François Viète introduced symbols into mathematics
through his reinterpretation Diophantus’s Arithmetica, the authoritative Aristotelian logistic.
Diophantus, following Aristotle, understands eidē as qualities
of noetic arithmoi.38 His calculations make use of eidē because
the solutions are supposed to exhibit relations that necessarily
hold between noetic arithmoi of certain eidē. The point is to show
that if the same calculation is performed with arithmoi of such
and such eidē, the resulting arithmos will always have certain
qualities. This is why, in the course of his calculative procedures,
Diophantus introduces signs that serve both as abbreviations for
eidē and as stand-ins for a single arithmos belonging to each
eidē.39 Recall that eidē can’t be multiplied (or manipulated in any
other way). For the Greeks, only arithmoi, definite counts of definite things, can be “operated” on. Diophantus’s letter-signs are
therefore “mere word abbreviations” for “some one arithmos belonging to this eidos.” They are not variables. Does this mean
that the mathematician has to perform an infinite amount of calculations to complete one proof? No: the generality and therefore
the theoretical character of Diophantian logistic is based on the
fact that a given procedure of calculation works for all cases of
the same type.40 Whether Diophantus proves this is open to question since Klein does not say, but it seems clear that if no such
proof appears in the Arithmetica, then Diophantian logistic is
open to attack—and this would include Viète’s transformation of
Diophantus’s letter-signs into objects of calculation.41
37. Ibid., 44.
38. Ibid., 143.
39. Ibid., 145.
40. Ibid., 132.
41. Ibid., 148.
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In light of Euclid’s blending of logistic and geometry, Viète
takes logistical analysis and synthesis as parallel to geometric
analysis and synthesis, believing that true analysis (algebra)
must “exhibit” magnitudes in figure or number because it is
about “numbers” with a “direct geometric interpretation.”42 The
point for our purposes is that Viète therefore (1) regards as superfluous the final computation and exhibition of a particular
arithmos, and (2) considers multitudes to have the same determinacy possessed by the magnitudes put to work in geometric
proofs, so that the determinacy of any multitude lies merely in
the proportion that it makes with other multitudes.43 Aiming to
realize Euclid’s general theory of proportions as a theory of
equations, Viète understands every proportion to be the construction of an equation and every equation, once transformed, to be
the solution of a proportion, thereby permitting an “arbitrary”
amount of determinate solutions “on the basis of numbers assumed at will.”44
Hence, to realize the general theory of proportions as a theory
of equations is in fact to transform the former—whose generality
lies specifically in demonstrating truths that hold for all instances
of a mathematical form—into an art of calculation which,
tellingly, Viète calls the “logistic of species.”45 First, about the
“logistical” aspect: Viète stresses the law of homogeneity, a law
which ensures, in contexts where magnitudes are represented by
multitudes, that the mathematician compares only homogenous
magnitudes—in other words, that one employs the same units of
measurement for each magnitude involved in a calculation.46 We
may not take the length of a line and add or subtract it from the
42. Ibid., 157, 164. See Burt C. Hopkins, The Origin of Symbolic Mathematics: Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), 273-275, 520, for a discussion of how Viète blends
these two modes of analysis and synthesis.
43. Ibid., 165.
44. Ibid., 163.
45. Ibid., 184.
46. Ibid., 172.
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area of a plane. In this, Viète follows the Greek logistical tradition. But he departs from this tradition by removing the distinction between theorems and problems. As Hopkins paraphrases
Klein, “[Viète] understands theorems to be problems whose solution is not so much the truths themselves about mathematical
objects but the ‘art of finding or the finding of finding’ of the
general solution to all mathematical problems.”47 As for the
“species” aspect of the “logistic of species,” the species are what
make possible the general solutions.
Having transformed the general theory of proportions into
a theory of equations, complete with the equality sign and syntactical rules that allow mathematical operations to be symbolized, Viète requires a general object to operate on, an object
defined by quantitativeness as such.48 For this purpose, he appropriates the Diophantian eidē and reads them as “variables.”49
Their determinacy, which makes them operable, comes automatically from their being set up in an equation. Once in an equation, a letter sign becomes interpreted not as a quantity but as
quantity-in-general. What distinguishes a symbol (in Klein’s
sense) from a Diophantian letter-abbreviation is that it signifies
the concept of quantity. Viète’s “species” can in this respect be
understood as a generalization of the “true” arithmetic eidē of
Aristotle (not to be confused with the eidē that feature in Diophantus’s logistic as mere properties of arithmoi). Recall that
for Aristotle the triad itself constitutes an eidos. Viète not only
replaces this eidetic triad with the concept of threeness, inseparable from the symbol 3 (or any stipulated mark), but replaces
the eidē of arithmoi in general with the concept of the quantity,
inseparable from the symbol A (or any stipulated mark). Viète’s
innovation, and the essence of symbolic mathematics, is to allow
47. Hopkins, Symbolic Mathematics, 496.
48. GMT, 166.
49. For the sake of brevity, I omit Klein’s interpretation of the role
played by the law of homogeneity in Viète’s appropriation of the
eidē.
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calculation with concepts.50
Is it nonsense to add the concept of twoness to the concept
of twoness? No: the problem is linguistic. The concept of twoness
is equivalent to two-in-general. To add two-in-general to two-ingeneral is simply to disregard the units involved. The difference
between three-in-general (the moderns) and the triad (Aristotle)
is that the latter cannot exist without units of some sort. If we
have three apples, then we have one triad. If we then apply abstraction to get noetic units, then we have two triads. There is no
triad-in-itself. Moreover, there is no Greek equivalent for quantity-in-general. For the Greeks, “quantity-in-general” refers to
every instance of quantity at the same time, not to something that
can be individually picked out by the mind as being any quantity
whose units we have disregarded. With the idea of quantity-ingeneral, the moderns cause something like a paradigm shift in
mathematics without justifying it philosophically. For Klein, the
one who produces the closest thing to a justification is Descartes.
Mental Operations as Symbols
Descartes explains that the concept of quantity is indeed suited to
be the subject of calculative operations.51 In the first place, a concept does not have the permanence of a being. It exists only insofar as it is “present to the intellect,” and it is present only insofar
as the intellect is “turned towards itself.” In other words, a concept
exists only so long as the mental act of conception is maintained.
The concept of quantity, in particular, arises when the intellect
takes the idea of number (which, residing in the imagination, always goes together with enumerated units) and separates (“abstracts”) from it the character of being a number (i.e., a quantity).
The intellect thus obtains for itself the concept of quantity.52 However, a paradox arises. On the one hand, because of its dependence
on the imagination, the concept of quantity can’t absolutely ex50. GMT, 175.
51. Ibid., 207.
52. Ibid., 201.
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clude the original beings “imaged” in the imagination. On the
other hand, as a concept, its content can’t include any determinate
beings. Therefore, to acquire the content of the concept of quantity, the intellect returns to the imagination and produces for itself
the “indeterminate content,” the countable or measurable in general, in the form of an arbitrary image having figure (in this case,
a letter-sign).53 The idea is that any image of a shape or a figure
can in principle be equated with any amount of an appropriate
measuring unit. This same mental operation applies to the “idea”
(in the imagination) of twoness, threeness, and so on.
This means that when we deal with a variable in an equation,
we present to ourselves our own mental act of conceiving of
quantity-in-general.54 We don’t err in identifying the object of
representation (the content of the concept of quantity) with the
means of its representation (the arbitrary image), because in this
case the two really are identical.55 The identity of an arbitrary
image and the content of the concept of quantity is the paradigmatic symbol in Klein’s sense. For Klein, this amounts to a new
“possibility” of “understanding,” according to which symbols are
the key to knowledge of the world.56 Klein’s point is that
Descartes gives an account of the sort of abstraction by which
we disregard the units of a quantity as well as the determinacy
of any quantity, similar to the way in which Aristotle explains
our access to pure units. One interpretation is that Descartes
builds on Aristotle’s philosophy, since his “symbol-generating
abstraction” depends on the prior activation of Aristotelian ab53. Ibid., 205.
54. Cf. Hopkins, Symbolic Mathematics, 521.
55. GMT, 123.
56. Ibid., 200, 210. To make this mode of cognition work, Descartes
characterizes the intellect not exactly by incorporeality but by an unrelatedness to corporeality. Descartes’s dualism is in this sense strictly
logical rather than ontological. The surprise is that this dualism makes
the mind a necessary condition for the substance of the world. Descartes
relates the corporeal directly to the imagination through the senses. But
for Descartes, corporeal things are the only things in the world, and the
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straction (interpreted in a certain way) to get “ideas” of arithmoi
into the imagination.57 The first abstraction provides “numbers”
of pure units, the second provides “pure numbers” and “pure
number in general.”
However, Descartes ascribes an epistemological “independence” to algebra that was achieved by John Wallis, who can be
interpreted as taking a fully “operational” view of numbers.58
Wallis drops Descartes’s notion that algebra exhibits the order of
the world (see footnote 56), but he spontaneously fulfills Viète’s
requirement of homogeneity by conceiving the homogeneity of
numbers to be given by their symbolic character.59 For Wallis,
numbers are homogeneous because they are dimensionless, and
they are dimensionless because treating numbers strictly in terms
of the “numerical genus” is identical to conceiving them symbolically.60 This allows Wallis to equate “numbers” with “indices
imagination, which is corporeal, receives its impressions of things without error. Therefore, since the imagination deals most easily and simply
with extended things, the essence of corporeality is extendedness (the
concept of extension), which is therefore the substance of the world.
But the content of the concept of extension is the measurable in general,
the same as the content of the concept of quantity. Therefore, the substance of the world is the concept of quantity. Descartes concludes that
correct algebraic equations exhibit the order of the world.
57. Ibid., 202.
58. It was the Flemish mathematician Simon Stevin (1548-1620) who
carried out the “complete and effective assimilation of the ‘numerical’
and the ‘geometric’ realm” under the concept of quantity by assimilating “the concept of ‘number’ to operations on ‘numbers’ already long
established” (GMT, 197, 293). Stevin thus “no longer deals with numbers of units which are determinate in each case but with the unlimited
possibility of combining ciphers” according to definite rules, thereby
allowing irrationals, negatives, and—crucially for the “continuity” of
number understood as a complete numerical correspondence to measurable magnitudes—fractions to become “numbers” (193).
59. GMT, 218.
60. Ibid., 217.
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of ratios.”61 “2” thus becomes equivalent to “2/1.” Moreover, because Wallis says that a ratio—which is dimensionless because
it tells us how many times one magnitude is contained in another—results from the division of one magnitude by another, his
implicit understanding of symbolic numbers is that they, in addition to the symbols for operations, image the mental operations
of calculation. It it true that we have to distinguish mental operations such as Descartes describes—concept-producing operations we aren’t aware of—from mental operations such as
division or squaring—straightforward operations we are aware
of. But “numbers” are in both cases understood as embodying
mental activity.
Because equating indices of ratios with number implies that
“number” has no connection to a particular multitude, Wallis,
with his “symbolic” reinterpretation of Euclidean ratio (radicalizing the “parallelization of ‘arithmetical’ with ‘geometrical’ procedure” initiated by Viète), detaches algebra from any real
objects.62 This makes the number symbols themselves the “beings” that correspond to knowledge , so that “the content of reasoning [i.e., mathematical propositions and inferences] . . . ipso
facto engender[s] its form [i.e., symbols], the latter doing nothing
more than formulating the very movement achieved by the mind”
in its ordered progression from quantities that are known to those
that are desired.63
It is in this sense that symbolic mathematics is an epistemological science of order and arrangement. Each symbol signifies
a mental operation (whether of calculation or conceptualization)
and symbolic (unit-less) numbers are substituted for the “definite
counts of definite things” familiar to the Greeks. Hence, to define
numbers, such as imaginary numbers, solely in terms of opera61. Ibid., 223.
62. Ibid., 212.
63. Quotation from Étienne Gilson in David Lachterman, The Ethics of
Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1989),
182.
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tions and the equality sign is just an extension of the “definition”
of numbers as mental operations.64 What prevents symbolic
mathematics from becoming arbitrary is its rootedness in the concept of quantity, a concept grounded in turn in the idea of arithmoi. Symbolic mathematics can therefore be seen as a system
with a hard core (involving conceptualized quantities) expanded
upon by postulations.
Conclusion
Is mathematical physics vitiated if symbolic numbers embody
mental operations? As Cosgrove shows with reference to the theory of special relativity, Klein’s work suggests an affirmative argument.65 In special relativity, time- and distance-measurements
are relative to a frame of reference described by a coordinate system. All coordinate systems are defined by four variables: three
for the dimensions of space, one for time. However, where space
is represented directly as x, y, z, time is represented indirectly as
66
67
√(-1)·ct. This way, every variable has units of distance, and
since (√(-1)·ct)2 = -c2 t2, it follows by substitution that s2 = dx2 +
dy2 + dz2 - c2dt2 is formally equivalent to s2 = x1 + x2 + x3 + x4. This
allows for an elegant mathematical characterization of the theory,
which flows from the fact that there are equations (the Lorentz
transformations) which take us from two mathematically described positions in one frame of reference to those same meas64. The imaginary “unit” (i) is that number which, when multiplied by
itself, gives negative one: i2 = -1. It is also stipulated that it is equal
only to the positive square-root.
65. Cosgrove, “Husserl, Jacob Klein, and Symbolic Nature,” 14-16.
Cosgrove advances an argument on Klein’s behalf, since Klein does
not fill the gap between his work on mathematics and his suggestions
that mathematical physics identifies nature with mathematical representations.
66. c is the constant velocity of light in a vacuum, t is an interval of
time.
67. Given that the velocity of an object multiplied by an interval of time
gives the distance traversed.
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urements in another frame of reference that is in uniform motion
relative to the first. From these equations it follows that all frames
of reference share the property s2 = dx2 + dy2 + dz2 - c2dt2.68 Each
value of s2 is called a space-time interval.69
Restricting consideration to one spatial dimension, and replacing, as Cosgrove does, c2 (a constant) with 1, the equation
reduces to s2 = dx2 - dt2.70 If we now regard the space-time interval
as a physical quantity given in units of space-time, then dx2 - dt2
is an intuitively absurd subtraction of units of time from units of
distance that yields units of space-time. We perform the subtraction only by operating on symbolic numbers. Thus, our path from
measurements in the sensuous world to space-time passes
through a mathematical symbolism that filters out our intuitions
inexplicably. In this way, we cover nature with a symbolic disguise, namely, space-time.
The main problem with this argument is that it begs the
question. It assumes that the space-time interval is a physical
quantity and argues for the shattering of our intuitions. But it is
not a logical consequence of the theory that the space-time interval is a physical quantity. The physical significance of the
space-time interval does not require the latter to be an “absolute” quantity representing the “real world” of space-time.
We can simply regard space-time interval as a quantity whose
value implies certain facts about any two events being related
to one another across all frames of reference. That is, we can
characterize the correlation between equations and experiments
68. x2 is in units of distance, c2 (as the constant velocity of light) in units
of velocity, and t2 in units of time. d tells us that we are dealing with
the difference between two coordinate values.
69. That the space-time interval is invariant with respect to all frames
of reference is the mathematical certification of special relativity, inasmuch as it preserves the universality of the laws of nature.
70. Cosgrove gives s2 = t2 - x2, but the difference is immaterial since in
either case the value of s2 is invariant between frames of reference. I
will object to Cosgrove’s substitution of 1 for c2 shortly.
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in terms of a network of inferences. For example, if dt2 is
greater than dx2, making s2 negative71 (this is termed a “timelike” interval), then there is no frame of reference in which the
two events being related to one another occur simultaneously.
From this inference-oriented perspective, to posit an “absolute
world” of space-time is an act of philosophical interpretation.72
As regards Cosgrove’s substitution of 1 for c2, this step, while
mathematically permissible, is required only by his assumption
that the space-time interval is a physical quantity.73 However, that
the space-time interval be given in units of distance, not units of
space-time, is the desired result of representing the time coordinate indirectly as the variable √(-1)·ct. Though we might want to
know where we can find the distance s2, this distance is nowhere
because it cannot be measured. It can only be calculated. But this
is no problem. From the claim that some quantity is in units of
distance it does not follow that this quantity can be measured. A
quantity can be imaginary—it can be a mathematical artifact—
without voiding any of the reasoning that leads to or away from
it. This is why the space-time interval can be imaginary and still
have physical significance. From its value, we can draw conclusions about any two events being related to one another across
all frames of reference. The space-time interval is meaningful
and intuition-preserving within the total context of the theory of
special relativity. It is only when it is interpreted as a physical
quantity that it covers over the sensible world like a symbolic
disguise. No experiment can prove the existence of space-time,
with reference to the special theory of relativity.
Therefore, assuming similar arguments can be made for similar “concepts,” I don’t think that Klein is correct to suggest that
71. For why this is unproblematic, see Cosgrove, “Husserl, Jacob Klein,
and Symbolic Nature,” fn. 43.
72. The interdependence of space and time, and even the mathematical symmetry of the two, is not equivalent to the existence of a single
physical medium.
73. As Cosgrove argues: “Clearly the quantity c2t2 - x2 cannot itself be
a space-time interval since it has units of distance” (15).
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modern physics is vitiated by mathematical symbolism—that it
substitutes a symbolic nature for nature itself. This is because the
character of symbolic mathematics as a reasoning tool is the heart
of symbolic mathematics. One could take the foundation laid by
Klein and argue that it is because symbolic mathematics allows
us to exhibit our own mental activity that the mathematical part
of physics can’t be responsible for generating a symbolic nature.
It only allows us to make that mistake. Of course, the example
of the space-time interval certainly supports Klein’s view that the
goal of modern physics is to identify immutable relationships
(“laws of nature” representing the “structure of the world”)74 that
hold between things insofar as the properties of the latter can be
measured. At least, reformations of our basic concepts, including
space and time, do not seem forthcoming.75 This frees us to philosophize in the Greek mode, drawing out the implications of the
meanings given in natural language, so long as we take into account the achievements of mathematical physics and science in
general.76
On the other hand, the intimate connection that Klein draws
between the Greeks and the theoretical character of algebra is
suspect. It is not clear that symbolic mathematics is logically dependent on Greek mathematics, because Klein does not discuss
any theories about mathematics other than those of the Greeks
and that of Descartes. He pulls off his argument by assuming that
showing how modern mathematics came to be is equivalent to
revealing its theoretical underpinnings. Though Klein refers at
least once to his work as “historical” in the ordinary sense, he is
concerned to reveal a “special kind of conceptualization,”
namely, “symbol-generating abstraction,” that is necessary for
symbolic mathematics.77 Thus, Klein concludes by asserting that
74. GMT, 184-185.
75. See Azzouni, “Can science change our notion of existence?”
76. The reason to prefer a proposition that issues from a theory over a
proposition that issues from intuition is that to discount the former is to
discount the theory. So, it can be reasonable to doubt one’s intuitions.
77. GMT, 4, 147.
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Wallis’s conception of arithmetic (which we may identify with
symbolic mathematics) “can be understood only in terms of a
symbolic reinterpretation of the ancient ‘numbered assemblage,’
of the arithmos.”78 I think it is fair to say that this has not been
demonstrated.
78. Ibid., 223.
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Which Sciences Does the Political
Science Direct and Use and
How Does It Do So?
Edward M. Macierowski
Core texts are at the heart of any educational tradition. Since they
are so close to heart, they deserve reading and rereading, and
sometimes in rereading we discover key forks in the road, decisive moves that lead us to think along certain lines rather than
along others. A recent translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics highlights one of these forks in the road and leads us to
reexamine the question about what Aristotle calls the “architectonic” role of political science, its role as master-builder over the
other sciences. In this paper I propose to do four things: (1) to
call attention to a seemingly trivial editorial choice made by Ingram Bywater in his influential edition of the Greek text of Aristotle’s Ethics; (2) to show that this editorial choice has no basis
in the manuscript tradition and is therefore misguided; (3) to
show what is at stake for political practice; and (4) to show in
what ways political science directs and uses the other sciences
and in which ways it does not.
1. Noticing the problem
One of the great merits of a recent translation of Aristotle’s Ethics
is that it meticulously adheres to Ingram Bywater’s 1894 Greek
critical edition in the Oxford Classical Texts. Let me first quote
from this translation Book I, chapter 2, and then from a note that
calls attention to a thought-provoking oddity. Here is Aristotle:
If, therefore, there is some end of our actions that we
wish for on account of itself, the rest being things we
Edward M. Macierowski is Professor of Philosophy at Benedictine
College in Atchison, Kansas. This paper was first delivered at the
twenty-first annual conference of the Association for Core Texts and
Courses held in Plymouth, Massachusetts on 10 April 2015.
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wish for on account of this end, and if we do not choose
all things on account of something else—for in this way
the process will go on infinitely such that the longing involved is empty and pointless—clearly this would be the
good, that is, the best. And with a view to our life, then,
is not the knowledge of this good of great weight, and
would we not, like archers in possession of a target, better hit on what is needed? If this is so, then one must try
to grasp, in outline at least, whatever it is and to which
of the sciences or capacities it belongs.
But it might be held to belong to the most authoritative and architectonic one, and such appears to be the political art. For it ordains what sciences must be in cities
and what kinds each person must learn and up to what
point. We also see that even the most honored capacities—for example, generalship, household management,
rhetoric—fall under the political art. Because it makes use
of the remaining [here note 10 calls attention to the elimination of a word] sciences and, further, because it legislates what one ought to do and what to abstain from, its
end would encompass those of the others, with the result
that this would be the human good. For even if this is the
same thing for an individual and a city, to secure and preserve the good of the city appears to be something greater
and more complete: the good of the individual by himself
is certainly desirable enough, but that of a nation and of
cities is nobler and more divine (1094a18-b11).1
Let us now read their useful note 10:
The MSS add at this point the word practical (or sciences
“related to action”: praktikais), but Bywater, followed by
Stewart and Burnet, deletes it.2
Let us now attend to the key sentence once again, with and without Bywater’s deletion. First with the deletion:
1. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan
D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 2-3.
2. Ibid., 3.
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Because it makes use of the remaining sciences and,
further, because it legislates what one ought to do and
what to abstain from, its end would encompass those
of the others, with the result that this would be the
human good.
In this version, political science seems to “make use of the remaining sciences” without any restriction. Now let us see what
the text sounds like without Bywater’s deletion:
Because it makes use of the remaining practical sciences and, further, because it legislates what one ought
to do and what to abstain from, its end would encompass those of the others, with the result that this would
be the human good.3
Our first question is this: To what did “the manuscripts add” the
restrictive word “practical”? Our second question is: From what
did Bywater delete the word “practical”? These questions bring
us to the next stage of our argument.
2. Evaluation of Bywater’s Deletion
It is easier to answer the second question than the first: Bywater deleted the restrictive adjective praktikais from the universal testimony of the Greek manuscript tradition. The only
possible answer to the first question is that the manuscripts all
and each added something to what Aristotle had said. But apart
from the manuscripts themselves, how would one know what
Aristotle said or thought? At any event, Bywater reports no
variant in the Greek manuscript tradition. The medieval Latin
3. “Because it makes use of the remaining practical sciences and, further,
because it legislates what one ought to do and what to abstain from, its
end would encompass those of the others, with the result that this would
be the human good” (1094b4-7; italics mine): chrōmenēs de tautēs tais
loipais [praktikais] tōn epistēmōn, eti de nomothetousēs ti dei prattein
kai tinōn apechesthai, to tautēs telos periechoi an ta tōn allōn, hōste
tout’ an eiē t’anthrōpinon agathon. Burnet reports no variant manuscript
readings and simply asserts of the bracketed word “seclusi”—“I have
set it aside.”
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translation must be based upon a Greek manuscript of the same
manuscript tradition; for it also keeps the restrictive adjective
“practical.”4 Even the medieval Arabic manuscript tradition reports the same reading.5 In short, Bywater flies in the face of
the universal testimony of all the surviving manuscript evidence. A scholar of Bywater’s stature must have had some reason. Can we find it?
It should be noted that a year after his Greek edition of the
Ethics he did provide a justification for his departure from the
manuscript tradition. Here is what he says about the passage
in question:
I, 2, 1094b4 chrōmenēs de tautēs tais loipais [praktikais] tōn epistēmōn.
loipais, though recognized indirectly by Aspasius (p.
6, 3-5), is represented in his paraphrase by praktikais
(hyparchei de tēi politikēi kai to chrēsthai tais praktikais tōn epistēmōn, p. 6, 11). From this I infer that
praktikais is really a gloss, which in the inferior MSS.
has found a place in the text along with the genuine
word loipais, and which in Kb, as sometimes happens
in this MS. (v. supra p. 19), has dispossessed it. In a
context like the present the limitation involved in praktikais is inappropriate; for if politikē is the one supreme
art, all other arts must come under it, not the practical
arts merely. The qualification was no doubt suggested
by what is said later on at the end of Bk. VI. (1145a 6),
4. The medieval Latin translation of this passage from the Ethics (found
in the Leonine critical edition of Aquinas’s Sententia Libri Ethicorum,
[Rome: Leonine Commision, 1969] T. 47, 7) obviously depends upon a
Greek manuscript with the same reading: “Utente autem hac reliquis
practicis disciplinarum, amplius autem legem ponente quid oportet operari et a quibus abstinere, huius finis complectitur utique eos qui aliarum,
quapropter hic utique erit humanum bonum” (italics mine).
5. The Arabic Version of the Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Anna A. Akasoy and
Alexander Fidora, trans. Douglas M. Dunlop (Boston: Brill, 2005), 114.7
“Since this art employs the practical sciences . . . ”; 115.7, line 8: “fa-idh
kānat hādhihi-ṣinā‘a tasta‘milu-l-‘ulūm al-‘amaliyya . . . ” (italics mine).
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but that point is not yet of any importance for the argument; and it would have required a much more distinct statement, if Aristotle had meant to insist upon it
at this early state in his discussion.6
Here Bywater prefers the authority of the second century
commentator Aspasius to that of the universal manuscript tradition, but attempts to eliminate the praktikais reported by Aspasius himself. On the other hand, Bywater himself admits
two circumstances, which limit and impair to some extent the value of the evidence in his Commentary.
(1) We must remember, in the first place, that the
Commentary, as we now have it, from MSS. of very
late date, has suffered sadly in the process of transmission to us. . . .
(2) In the second place, the Commentary is really
more of the nature of a paraphrase, with quotations
from the original interspersed or incidentally worked
into the text. Hence it is that in his restatements of Aristotle Aspasius often allows himself a pretty free hand;
he substitutes, for instance, his own connecting particles; he inserts what he thinks conducive to clearness,
and ignores what he deems trivial or unimportant for
the general meaning.7
The key to Bywater’s justification for preferring his inference from the spongy evidence of Aspasius against the universal manuscript tradition is therefore this doctrinal claim: “if
politikē is the one supreme art, all other arts must come under
it, not the practical arts merely.” Does Aristotle hold that “politikē is the one supreme art” without qualification?
6. Ingram Bywater, Contributions to the Textual Criticism of Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892; reprint, New
York: Arno Press, 1973), 22-23.
7. Bywater, Contributions, 1-3. For a recent survey of the scholarship
on the role of Aspasius in transmitting the text, see the introduction by
Joaquín E. Meabe to Aristóteles, Ética a Nicómaco (Buenos Aires: Las
Cuarenta, 2014), 1-24. The introduction is available on-line: https://
www.academia.edu/7973667/Ética_a_Nicómaco
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3. So what? Why is it practically important to keep the restriction in place?
Aristotle was a thoughtful and careful writer. Thoughtful and
careful writers do not use words without purpose. Aristotle
elsewhere distinguishes three kinds of thought: “If all thought
is either practical or productive or theoretical, physics must be
a theoretical science.”8 The productive sciences are concerned
with making something; e.g., a carpenter produces a cabinet,
which is able to stand on its own as a separate product once it
is finished. The practical sciences are concerned with doing
something; e.g. a singer acts only so long as she is singing: the
song, the singing, and the singer are actually inseparable. The
theoretical9 sciences involve the attitude of an on-looker; e.g.,
the spectator at a football game does not change anything in
the game merely by watching it. If there are any theoretical
sciences, that is, ways of knowing things that trace them back
to unchangeable first principles whose truth is self-contained,
8. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1025b25, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908). Against the background of Mill’s utilitarianism and
Marx’s obsession with practice (e.g., the conclusion of the eleven theses on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world
in various ways; the point is to change it” in Karl Marx and Frederick
Engle, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur [New York: International Publishers, 1947], 123), it is not surprising that theoretical philosophy in the nineteenth century might get out of focus. The polemic
against theoretical philosophy was more obvious even earlier in
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part IV (1651): “Of the Kingdome of
Darknesse.”
9. It is important not to misunderstand what Aristotle is getting at here.
Today, the words “speculative” or “theoretical” connote some idle, ungrounded, tentative attitude that may not even have anything to do with the
truth. For Aristotle, by way of contrast, theoretical sciences aim to take in
the truth of things as they are. Indeed, Aristotle argues that there are three
main theoretical sciences: a study of changeable beings, which he calls
physics or natural science; a study of beings dependent upon matter for
their existence but not for their intelligibility, which he calls mathematics;
and a study of being precisely as such which he calls sometimes “wisdom,”
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then there might be a possible tension between a political
leader who wants everything to be under his control and a
philosopher who recognizes that some things cannot be otherwise than as they are. Aristotle, however, respects the authority
of the political leadership, focusing attention on “the most honored capacities”; note, however, that theoretical philosophy is
not on the list. Aristotle’s three examples are all practical disciplines: “generalship, household management, rhetoric.”
4. Conclusion: in what ways political science directs the other
sciences and in which ways it uses them.
By way of conclusion, I should like to call attention to a recently published translation of Thomas Aquinas’s commentary
on this passage, wherein he finds “two characteristics of an architectonic science”: (a) “that it dictates what is to be done by
the art or science subject to it,” e.g. horsemanship orders the
activity of bridle-making and (b) that the architectonic science
uses the sciences subject to it “for its own ends.”10 If one blurs
the distinction between “practical sciences” and “sciences”
without qualification, as Bywater’s deletion does, the speculative sciences become entirely invisible, and so does Aristotle’s
point. Let’s focus on (a)—how politics dictates what is to be
done.
Now the first of these is applicable to politics or political
science both in regard to the speculative and in regard
to the practical sciences, in different ways, however. Political science dictates to a practical science both consometimes “first philosophy,” and sometimes “theology.” Aristotle makes
no explicit mention of any “theoretical” sciences in this passage, but, granting that the universal testimony of the manuscript tradition is right, this
should indicate to careful readers who know something about philosophy,
that there might be something somehow over the horizon of political thinking. Only in the last book of the Ethics does he point to a distinction between
two types of happiness: that of the citizen and that of the philosopher.
10. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, ed. Joshua Parens and Joseph
C. Macfarland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 274.
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cerning its use—whether or not it should operate—and
concerning the specification of its act. It dictates to the
smith not only that he use his art but also that he use it
in such a fashion as to make knives of a particular kind.
Both are ordered the end of human living.11
Given that there are also theoretical sciences to take into account,
we can now appreciate the contrast:
But political science dictates to a speculative science only
concerning its use and not concerning the specification of
its work. Political science orders that some teach or learn
geometry; and actions of this kind, in so far as they are
voluntary, belong to the matter of ethics and can be ordered to the goal of human living. But the political ruler
does not dictate to geometry what conclusions it should
draw about a triangle, for this is not subject to the human
will nor can it be ordered to human living, but it depends
on the very nature (ratio) of things.12
As to the second point (b), “the use of subordinate sciences belongs to political science only in reference to the practical sciences.” In modern terms, even a Stalin cannot make two plus two
equal to anything but four, though he might be able to intimidate
people into saying otherwise. “Hence,” Aristotle adds, “we see
that the most highly esteemed, that is, the noblest, skills or operative arts fall under political science, namely, strategy, domestic
economy, and rhetoric, which political science uses for its own
end, that is for the common good of the city.”13
Aquinas then notes the distinction between political science,
which “is most important, not simply, but in the genus of the practical sciences” which treats the ultimate end of human life, but
leaves room for the study of the “ultimate end of the whole universe . . . which is the most important without qualification.”14
11. Ibid., 274. Italics mine.
12. Ibid., 274. Italics mine.
13. Ibid., 275.
14. Ibid., 275.
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Against the background of the fuller range of Aristotle’s
properly philosophical thought, we can see in what sense Bywater’s position is right and in what way it needs to be qualified.
“The qualification,” he said, “was no doubt suggested by what is
said later on at the end of Bk. VI (1145a 6).”15 What is that?
And yet prudence does not exercise authoritative control
over wisdom or the better part [of the soul, just as the art
of medicine does not do so over health either, for it does
not make use of health but rather sees how it comes into
being; it is for the sake of health, then, that medicine issues commands, but it does not issue them to health. Furthermore, it would be just as if someone should assert
that the political art rules over the gods because it issues
commands about all things in the city.16
If Aristotle’s principal audience for his ethical lectures should
be gentlemen rather than philosophers, the reason “that point is
not yet of any importance for the argument” might well be that
gentlemen would not even think of disagreeing. Perhaps, as Bywater says, “it would have required a much more distinct statement, if Aristotle had meant to insist upon it at this early state in
his discussion.” But is there any dispute between a philosopher
who might claim to prove the existence of unchangeable beings
and gentlemen who would surely not contest the immutability of
the gods of the city? Aristotle does not trouble perfect gentlemen
with the fine points of theoretical philosophy, but he counts on
them to recognize that certain opinions held by gentlemen offer
a bulwark against tyranny. As for Aquinas, his proximate audience would likely not be gentlemen, even if they were scholars.
Aquinas does, at any event, show why the restrictive adjective
“practical” is not superfluous.
15. Bywater, Contributions, 23.
16. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, 134.
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Ass, You Like It?
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s
Dream as Political Philosophy
Nalin Ranasinghe
William Shakespeare’s early comedies are marked by the pervasive presence of twins. Remarkably, this theme extends even to
the level of the plays themselves: comedies and tragedies with
striking similarities appear on stage at about the same time. While
each play in such a dyad conforms to the requirements of its respective genre, the presence of a doppelgänger creates irony, and
raises questions about the comic or tragic conclusions reached in
each play.
One such pair is Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s
Dream. Both were written and performed in the mid-1590s, and
both raise very similar questions about love, marriage and politics
while yet describing exactly opposite—and thus perfectly complementary—dramatic trajectories. In Romeo and Juliet we see
a potential comic resolution to a political impasse turn tragic
through a malefic combination of religious meddling and starcrossed accident. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on the other
hand, presents an inherently tragic situation that slips into a conventional comic conclusion. Its characters are not weighed down
by determinate causality and intractable philosophical struggles
with their own natures; the whole play seems to share Puck’s airy
comment on human affairs: “Lord, what fools these mortals be”
(III.ii.115). The attitude of the fairies is broadly benevolent; they
revel in what’s comic and contingent in human matters, advancing rather than hindering the interests of mortals. Despite much
misunderstanding and maladroit manipulation, the actions of the
Nalin Ranasinghe is Professor of Philosophy at Assumption College in
Worcester, Massachesetts.
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play’s characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are hardly fatalistic. For the most part, humans entangle themselves in homespun webs of false necessity. They are foolish, but not wicked.
Unlike Romeo and Juliet, which shows the disaster that can arise
from imposing social, political, and clerical structures on human
life, A Midsummer Night’s Dream offers a self-portrait of Shakespeare, a man as playful as Puck and as wise as Bottom, as he attempts to reconcile the divine and the human in our nature, and
tries to repair the rupture between reason and religion.
In repudiating the reductive cruelty of Old Comedy, and rehabilitating, in the spirit of Erasmus, the gentler magic of a
Menander or Plautus, Shakespeare offers a truly Christian alternative both to the austere anti-theatrical hellfire of Knox and to
the corrupt ritualism of the Old Church. The new and overzealous
religious piety of Shakespeare’s time banished all playhouses
from London and re-situated them on the other side of the river.
Similarly, the young lovers Hermia and Lysander escape the
harsh laws of the city by taking refuge in the dark woods of the
imagination. I argue that A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes the
case for ending the ancient feud between philosophy and poetry,
which in Shakespeare’s day had become a conflict between rational but politicized religionists and pagan pastoral poets.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream signals its comic intent by
rewriting the myth of Theseus and Hippolyta. Anyone conversant
with the Greek tales would know that on the eve of Theseus’s
marriage to Hippolyta an Amazon invasion of Attica took the
bride’s life—a conclusion as contrary to the sunny ending of
Shakespeare’s play as any that could be dreamed. It seems, then,
that because of the events Shakespeare relates, the tragic outcomes of the myth were averted. Hippolyta did not die in battle
against her own people; Theseus did not take another wife, Phaedra; and Hippolytus, the son of Theseus and Hippolyta, did not
die misjudged by his father because of his haughty insensitivity
to his stepmother’s passion for him. Shakespeare’s alternative
mythology transmutes tragedy into comedy.
But Shakespeare does not leave the tragic behind entirely.
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We are reminded of darker forces at the very start of the play.
Theseus, in ordering Philostrate to encourage exuberance in the
kingdom, makes a reference to sorrow by way of contrast: “Go,
Philostrate, / Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments; / Awake
the pert and nimble spirit of mirth; / Turn melancholy forth to funerals; / The pale companion is not for our pomp” (I.1.11-15).1
Almost immediately, an old man bearing his father’s name,
Egeus, appears with a complaint against his disobedient daughter
Hermia. The original Egeus, Theseus’s father, threw himself into
the ocean when he failed to see the victorious signal flag that
Theseus forgot to fly over the ship returning him to Athens from
his mission to defeat the Minotaur in Crete. The Aegean Sea remains an enduring monument to Egeus’s precipitous despair.
Shakespeare’s Egeus is similarly hasty in despairing over his
child. Hermia has fallen madly in love with Lysander rejecting
her father’s wish that she marry the almost identical Demetrius.
For his part, Demetrius has recently turned his affections to Hermia, despite having previously wooed and won the love of Helena, who had once been Hermia’s closest friend. Shakespeare
paints the two pairs of lovers as being almost indistinguishable
in character from each other.2
Angry Egeus demands that the full weight of the patriarchal
Athenian law be applied against his disobedient daughter. If Hermia persists in denying her father’s legal right to overrule her affections, she must choose between execution and perpetual
confinement in a nunnery (I.i.69-73). Although Theseus is sympathetic toward Hermia, he claims to be powerless under the law
he must uphold; he gives her the same four days to make her
1. Citations from A Midsummer Night’s Dream are keyed to The Norton
Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt,
Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, and Katharine Maus, (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1997).
2. My reading of the play has been greatly influenced by Rene Girard’s
“Love by Another’s Eye: Mimetic Punning in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream” in his book A Theatre of Envy (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 72-79.
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choice that stand between him and his approaching nuptials.
(I.i.83ff.) According to Duke Theseus, Hermia should view her
father as a god. She is but wax, subject to his formative power,
to be defaced or reshaped in any way he chooses (I.i.47-51). It is
also clear that Egeus is willful; even though there is no real difference between the two men vying for his child’s hand, his own
freedom of choice is all that really matters. In other words, to
Egeus reason means nothing more than his authority to rule arbitrarily over the desires of those under his power. His law is not
just; it is merely the tyranny of age over youth. It is no wonder
that Hermia and Lysander try to flee from it.
Yet when we follow the lovers to overhear their conference,
we rapidly lose our respect for them as well. It is as everything
they know about love came from a poor staging of Romeo and
Juliet—a play, I think, which Shakespeare spent much of his career trying to atone for. In choosing Juliet’s adolescent passion
over Egeus’s self-centered authority, the lovers find themselves
hooked on the other horn of the dilemma. Pure passion is as mad
as puritanical rationality. Furthermore, since A Midsummer
Night’s Dream actually contains a poor performance of a crude
version of Romeo and Juliet, we see our lovers obliviously mocking a play that accurately reflects their own follies and vices. To
their elders, they are victims of Eros, tortured on the rack of passion.
Lysander and Hermia are quite certain that “the course of true
love never did run smooth” (I.i.134). To them this means that the
intensity of their mad passion is reinforced by the conventional
love-perils they must overcome—and they are unaware of the
fact that having love-perils is itself a convention. But this surely
amounts to choosing “love through another’s eyes,” (I.i.140) the
very command Hermia rejects when told her eyes must see with
her father’s judgment. Further confirmation of the self-conscious
madness induced by this kind of love is given by Helena, who
tells Demetrius of the lovers’ plan to flee Athens, thus jeopardizing her chance to be rid of her rival merely because she expects
to be thanked by him for this favor. Helena is all too aware of the
fickle nature of love, which “looks not with the eyes but with the
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mind” (I.ii.234), but she is no less prone to be ruled by a force
that elevates “to form and dignity . . . things base and vile”
(I.ii.232). Her judgment is ruled by forces to which she submits,
even as she laments their tyranny. We are again reminded of her
namesake, Helen of Troy, and her excuse “a god made me do it.”3
This divinization of love—both affirmed and denied in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the extent that it reveals love to be random and supernaturally potent—seems to distinguish between
two distinct ways of being influenced by love: we can fall under
the spell of an imaginary love we create for ourselves, or we can
actually succumb to the real thing. Although A Midsummer
Night’s Dream seems to warn that the effects of imaginary love
are as short-lived as they are rare, we will shortly receive an account of the transcendent origins of this sickness. This disease is
so potent that just the desire for it can lead to follies that lack all
the divine power and inspiration imparted by true love.
Meanwhile, in accordance with Theseus’s demand for merriment, a troupe of lowly but loyal Athenian artisans are preparing to stage a play. Although these men are far lower on the social
scale than the lovers, their affairs, and the account of imagination
that attends them, are of particular interest because Shakespeare
himself did not belong to the nobility, while he is almost universally considered one of the world’s greatest poets. Like the demideity Eros, whom Diotima describes in Plato’s Symposium as the
offspring of Need and Plenty,4 Shakespeare is a unique combination of low status and high imagination. Despite being out in
“the wind and the rain” like Touchstone at the play’s end, Shakespeare nevertheless had the honor of being summoned to entertain the highest nobility. One could say that Titania is the
alter-ego of Queen Elizabeth.
Thus, despite the ridicule they suffer, the players called “rude
mechanicals”—and Bottom in particular—will teach us how to
laugh at them; this will prepare us for the self-knowledge that
will have us laughing at ourselves together with Puck. The deep
3. Homer. Iliad, 6.349.
4. Plato, Symposium, 203b-d.
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self-knowledge that is to be imparted here is comic rather than
condemnatory: the doctrine of original sin and limited redemption is replaced by the doctrine that men are fools with immortal
yearnings that make us both sublime and ridiculous. Shakespeare’s theater takes the place of the church and its rituals, just
as Athenian theater sought simultaneously to worship, to edify,
and to entertain. As in the Christian liturgy, the Theater of Dionysus—a god-man who was torn apart and consumed by his devotees—brought grace and desire into close contact. In theater, the
performance is not marred by the personal imperfections of the
individual performers, just as in the Mass the sacrifice of the Eucharist is not tainted by any sins that may attach to the priest performing the service. Indeed, the theater constitutes a polite but
decidedly pagan challenge to the church’s claim to be the sole
pathway to God. Shakespeare’s comic theater does not insult divinity, and thus it avoids both hubris and original sin. On the contrary, it takes the ancient Greek view of the sacredness of theater
and joins to it the Christian humanistic belief in the ultimate
goodness of both creation and its God.
Now the rude mechanicals are anxious not to offend the nobles
in the audience; for this reason they try to explain away any troubling aspects of their performance. This concern is essentially political. Theater has always been a vehicle for breaking through class
constraints, and an indirect organ of social criticism, as the ruling
classes have always been well aware. Recall Elizabeth I’s alarm at
recognizing herself in Richard II: she is supposed to have said, “I
am Richard II, know ye not that?”5 Shakespeare too is aware of
the political implications of his art. By calling his play a “Dream”
and presenting it as fantasy, he makes it easy for his audience to
escape the strictures of society. This in turn allows them eventually,
like the young lovers in the play, to be delivered from the shackles
of self-ignorance that are tightened by society’s prohibitions—as
illustrated by the Myth of the Cave in Plato’s Republic.
5. See Jason Scott-Warren, Was Elizabeth I Richard II?: The Authenticity of Lambarde’s “Conversation,” Review of English Studies 64:
(2012), 208-230.
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Bottom the weaver stands out from all the other players. His
profession suggests that Shakespeare intends him to be a parody
of Plato’s statesman, who weaves together all the different constituencies of a city. He resembles the kind of poet most feared
by the guardians of the Republic in his zany desire to play every
role and steal every scene.6 His wild malapropisms suggest that
he cares little for the nature of things, and that nothing is stable
in his whirligig view of reality. For Bottom, at bottom, all things
are one. This would be worrying enough to the forces of order,
but what is worse is his earnest desire to “play” the tyrant (I.ii.2122, 33). Fortunately, no one has to take Bottom seriously. Although his boundless energy, incorrigible ingenuity, and good
humor might have stood him in good stead at a higher station in
life, Bottom’s Christian name, Nick, indicates his actual condition: he is “nicked,” or safely penned within the confines of social
reality.
The play now turns to the fairies in the depths of the forest.
We meet Puck (an emancipated version of Prospero’s indentured
spirit Ariel in The Tempest), who is the chief factotum of Oberon,
King of Fairies. If Bottom is the hidden solid base of our play,
Puck is its grand unifying principle; his task is “to jest to Oberon
and make him smile” (II.i.44). This sprite seems to delight in jolting all things out of their accustomed positions and thereby causing their true natures to be revealed. Nature, after all, involves
continual growth and self-revelation: as Heidegger pointed out,
in Greek the term for nature, phusis, essentially means “growth.”7
The nature of a city too must involve growth, repeated overturning of established categories, and continual revelation of its character. The static order of a city is only its body; a city only
becomes a polis by striving toward the beautiful and the just,8
and it often needs the aid of guiding daimon to do so. In fifthcentury Athens, Socrates played this role through his persistent
6. Plato, Republic, 398a.
7. Heidegger, Pathmarks, trans. William McNeil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 189.
8. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b.
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practice of public dialectic. In the Athens of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, Puck plays this role through his persistently playful upending of public norms. The continual reconsideration of
settled categories shows that the telos of the city, its true end and
purpose, cannot be sustained by economic and social stability
and self-sufficiency. Such as structure results in a stifling hegemony like that of Egeus, in which the old use the law to punish
the sexual desires of the young in order to advance their own
vices, which are directed more at gaining and preserving power
than at fertile productivity.9
Puck reports a quarrel between Oberon, his master, and Titania, the queen of the fairies. It seems that they have fallen out
over a changeling boy on whom they both have claims. While
the queen loves him for the sake of her dear friend, his dead
mother, with whom she spent many a pleasant hour, Oberon
seems to want him for reasons that have more to do with jealousy
than genuine affection. It seems that the mimetic impulse to desire another’s possession simply because the other takes delight
in it extends far beyond the human realm. But we also see the
contrast between this kind of jealous desire, which can only express itself through contending over things inconsequential in
themselves, and true friendship. When we recall how the longstanding friendship between Hermia and Helena was swiftly
ended by the introduction of mimetic romantic desire, we wonder
how and from source wanton fancy, a sort of love in idleness,
gains the tragic desire to uproot itself from what is natural and
orderly. Mimetic desires must reflect, however deceptively, some
transcendent reality that the natural order can only understand in
terms of transgression and outrage. Otherwise, we cannot explain
how the imagination effortlessly overturns the natural order,
strikes out after goals that cannot be grasped by the likes of old
Egeus, and threatens to turn us all into lunatics, star-crossed
lovers, and bad poets. Small wonder that the outraged rulers of a
city choose to fight this force using every means in their power.
9. See Montaigne, “On Repenting” in Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1958), 610-620.
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Some explanation of the origin of these desires is provided
when Oberon and Titania make their entrance accompanied by
their entourages. While they bicker we learn that both Theseus
and Hippolyta owe much to the fairy queen and king: although
their beneficiaries are oblivious to this, Oberon and Titania have
provided these lucky mortals whom they love with supernatural
assistance in their heroic exploits. It is striking that the benevolence of the fairy rulers is bestowed upon Theseus and Hippolyta
on the basis of erotic attraction. Even for fairies, love seems to
defy all the conventions of marital fidelity. Although they know
how to use love’s power far more efficiently than humans, the
fairies are clearly not immune to the madness of love. This is why
their quarrel over the changeling boy has produced terrible consequences in the physical world. Nature’s order has been terribly
disrupted: the harvests have been ruined; the seasons do not
change on time; indeed, all the limits of nature have been transgressed. Titania admits that she and Oberon are the progenitors
of this mad chaos. Their erotic desires are not fulfilled by sexual
union, but rather by infusing those they love with their power.
The rhythm and order of the cosmos, and of all the creatures in
it, seem to be kept through their meeting and dancing, which their
quarrel has prevented.
After Hippolyta’s angry departure, Oberon schemes to torment her for this “injury” to his pride. Now Puck is told to employ magic against Titania; he must use the juice of a flower, once
touched by one of Cupid’s arrows, to make her fall madly in love
with the next living creature she sees (II.i.172). Insofar as A Midsummer Night’s Dream analogizes the politics of its time, neither
Cupid’s arrow nor Puck’s flower-juice hit the mark. The intended
victim, the Queen of England, seems to have been immune to
love’s otherwise irresistible power. Elizabeth was about sixty
years old when the play was first produced, and by that time, it
appears, she understood the reality of love, and was not to be
ruled by its false signifiers.
While Shakespeare may tread, however lightly, on dangerous
political ground, he does not seem to be in open conflict with the
unstated doctrines of love that we have managed to derive from
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the play. We distinguished earlier between the real madness of
love and merely falling victim to the concept of love. Now let us
remember Plato’s Phaedrus, from which the language of lunatic,
lover, and poet is derived, and recall Socrates’ famous palinode
in defense of truly divine love.10 Like Elizabeth, Socrates—
whose only claimed area of expertize was in matters of love—
was immune to the blandishments of false love: he was more than
able to resist the sexual attraction of the all-but-irresistible Alcibiades.11 These examples of being able to separate true love
from false love show that love is not in itself madness. Nevertheless, it is also the basis of the various forms of lunacy come
over us because of our craving for love, a craving that is often
just as blind as it is selfish. We must distinguish between beholding the genuine object of love, falling into the genuine madness
of love, and embracing the base imitation of this genuine madness—recall Plato’s condemnatory suspicions in the Republic of
imitations twice and thrice removed from the truth.12 Moreover,
in the Phaedrus Plato describes even the god of Olympus as
being only a bit better than humans at pursuing true hyper-Uranian beauty.13 Although Oberon and Titania are not comparable to
the Olympian gods, they are still located on much higher rungs
on the ladder of love than humans. If Plato is to be believed, the
fairies can confer the benefits of love on those below them, while
they themselves also remain subject to the power of love.
Returning now to the play’s action: Oberon, hiding in the forest, observes Demetrius and Helena. Plato’s image of the magnetic chain of attraction from the Ion is the key to their behavior.14
Demetrius searches wildly for Hermia, despite being well aware
of the repugnance she feels for him; Helena meanwhile com10. Plato, Phaedrus, 244a ff.
11. Plato, Symposium, 219 b-d.
12. Plato, Republic, 602b-c.
13. Plato, Phaedrus, 247a-c.
14. Plato, Ion, 533d-536d.
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plains quite explicitly about the magnetic attraction that her
sometime lover still exerts on her. She is well aware of, but unaffected by, his repeated claims to be sickened by the sight of her.
Demetrius is disgusted Helena’s masochistic appeal, “The more
you beat me, I will fawn on you: / Use me but as your spaniel,
spurn me, strike me, / neglect me, lose me; only give me leave, /
unworthy as I am, to follow you” (II.i.204-5). But this reaction,
she says, only increases her desire for him.
Oberon watches them leave, the maid in hot pursuit of the
man, and he feels sympathy for hapless Helena. He instructs
Puck, who has just returned with the magic juice, to apply some
of it to the eyes of the man in Athenian garb so that he will return
the affections the young woman he has just spurned. While Puck
is occupied in this task, Oberon will treat sleeping Titania’s eyes
in the same way. While the fairy king’s intentions toward his own
queen are clearly mischievous, he sincerely wishes to help poor
spurned Helena win back her beloved. Unfortunately, or perhaps
serendipitously, Puck sprinkles the flower-juice on Lysander as
he sleeps some distance away from Hermia following a minor
disagreement over whether or not it would be correct for them to
lie in repose beside each other. Then, as luck would have it, Helena comes by, still chasing Demetrius. She awakens Lysander
only to see him fall madly in love with her. Helena, in a self-pitying mood after her encounter with Demetrius, believes that
Lysander is playing a cruel trick on her. She cannot understand
how else he would now speak so dismissively of his beloved Hermia, while lavishing the most fulsome praise on herself. Helena
then flees, hotly pursued by the newly ardent Lysander.
Meanwhile Hermia, waking up from a nightmare to find herself alone in the dark forest, panics. Certain that Lysander would
never have abandoned her, she is convinced that something quite
terrible has happened to him. By this time, however, her categorical certainty about Lysander has been undermined, for the audience at least, both by the implicit sexual overture he made to her
and by the subliminal message in her dream of a serpent stealing
away with her heart. Hermia takes this a warning that Helena will
betray her, as indeed she has (though not in relation to Lysander).
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Here we begin to note that the course of their love will be compromised equally by their own characters and by the impediments
others will throw in their paths. Whatever their fate will be at the
play’s end, their mimetically idealized expectations of each other
will have been modified by these magically induced events. The
four lovers, trapped between the stifling laws of the city and the
mad passions released in the forest, are consumed in pairs, just
as Theseus’s Minotaur devours the pairs of young people in
Crete. As the second act ends, attention is drawn to Titania, who
slumbers in her bower. She too will soon awaken to find herself
drawn to a most unexpected erotic object.
When the third act begins we are again reminded by the mechanicals’ elaborate precautions to avoid giving offense, that
Shakespeare too is conveying weighty and sensitive matters in
an allegorical fashion. Bottom begins the rehearsal by declaring
that some things in their comedy “will never please” (III.i.9). He
believes that gentle ladies in the audience will never bear the
sight of Pyramus killing himself. But, rather than leaving the
killing offstage as the Greeks would, Bottom proposes writing a
prologue that would dispel all fear by revealing not only that
Pyramus is not really killed, but also that Pyramus is actually
Bottom the Weaver. Further, since the sight of a lion would occasion even greater fear, the lion should name himself and wear
a mask exposing half the actor’s face. As a final absurd precaution, this fearful lion should expressly entreat the audience not
to show fear or even tremble as he comes before them; for that,
he should tell the onlookers, would be the pity of his life.
The players then address several ridiculous technical problems, with Bottom once again taking the lead. They consider how
to represent the moonlit night when Pyramus and Thisbe meet,
and decide it would be best for one to enter with a bush of thorns
and a lantern, saying “that he comes to disfigure or to present the
person of Moonshine” (III.i.51-53). Next, since the lovers speak
through a wall, Bottom proposes that another dress in materials
“that signify wall” and use his fingers to make a hairy, chalky
cranny through which Pyramus and Thisbe speak words of love
to each other (III.i.57-60).
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While it is very clear that Shakespeare intends Bottom’s audience to find these primitive representations hilarious, and in
the last instance even obscene, he fully expects, on the contrary,
that most of those in his own audience will be oblivious to his
taking similar—if markedly less absurd—precautions to obviate
offense and fear. He takes these measures in order to prevent his
audience from suspecting that they are being deceived. Just as
Helena should not have been convinced that Lysander and
Demetrius were mocking her intentionally, although they themselves in their separate delusions were quite sincere, Shakespeare
has to do all he can to prevent his audience from indulging in the
paranoid suspicion the playwright, or even the whole world, is
deliberately engaged in a conspiracy against them—as tempting
as such a conclusion may seem to their solipsistic egos. Shakespeare takes great pains to reveal the extent to which coincidences, accidents, and errors pervade the human world. Gods and
fairies seldom act with perfect foresight; more often, they are
scrambling to repair the damage done by blind chance, mortal
mistakes, and even their own well-intended plans.
The climax of A Midsummer Night’s Dream arrives when
Puck decides to place an ass’s head on Bottom. As a result of this
strange transformation the other players run away in terror and
the unsuspecting weaver is left alone with Titania. This fulfills
Oberon’s desire that his queen should fall madly in love with a
“vile thing” (II.ii.40) when she awakens to see Bottom with her
anointed eyes. Oberon’s aim is to embarrass Titania in order to
make her more willing to surrender to him her former favorite,
the little changeling boy. Yet, once again, while carrying out the
king’s instructions to the letter, Puck has somehow added an element of inspired randomness that produces unexpected results.
The “translated” Bottom somehow does not believe himself to
be changed in the least respect. His essential nature unchanged
by Puck’s trick, Bottom retains his characteristic aplomb and
does not give any credence to the fearful observations of Snout
and Quince that he is “changed” and “translated” (III.i.102-105).
He denies these allegations and refuses to be made an ass of,
telling Snout that he sees an ass’s head of his own—that is, Bot-
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tom sees that all other men are asses. His use of the word “ass”
in addressing both Snout and Quince also suggests that he does
not see himself in this light. Bottom believes that they are knavishly trying to frighten him. He refuses to be frightened. Is he
more or less the ass for this?
When Bottom begins to sing in order to show his fellow players that he is not afraid, he awakens Titania. Professing to be as
enchanted by Bottom’s singing as by his shape, the queen goes
on to declare that she has fallen in love with him at first sight.
He responds by telling her that, while she has little reason to feel
this way about him, he sees that “reason and love keep little company nowadays” (III.i.126-29). Bottom finds it a pity that some
honest folk cannot reconcile them, self-consciously owning that
he can “gleek” (III.i.129), or jest knowingly, on occasion; he is
perhaps laying claim to being that rare philosophical poet, one
capable of addressing the desires rationally. The enamored Titania then tells the asinine sage that he is as wise as he is beautiful—a claim that cannot be faulted. Bottom modestly denies both
claims, adding that he would be quite satisfied with sufficient wit
to find his way out of the forest. Just like the lovers, Bottom understands that he is trapped in a maze, but he is unable to see that
he now resembles the original bull-headed denizen of the Cretan
labyrinth.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a retelling, and perhaps a rectification, of the ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Bottom is as strange a hybrid beast as the man with the head
of a bull that Theseus slew in Minos’s labyrinth. Because he is a
weaver, however, he is tied to the ball of string that Ariadne gave
to Theseus in order to help him escape from the maze. His double
nature is sewn together when Titania falls in love with him, and
she too expresses a double nature: she is both Ariadne, who provides Bottom with the way out of his predicament, and Pasiphaë,
the wife of Minos who falls in love with the bull of Poseidon.
How will Shakespeare’s Duke Theseus overcome the monster
Bottom in a manner that is consistent with comedy? Will he retain the moral ambiguity of the original Theseus, who cleverly
outwitted the Minotaur to save his Athenian comrades but also
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betrayed his promise to marry Ariadne, leaving her behind on
an isolated island where she finally is rescued by the god Dionysus? Will Duke Theseus act in a similar way toward Bottom?
And will Dionysus, god of the theater, rescue him?
While the love-stuck Titania is plying the amazed Bottom
with gifts, even promising to purge Bottom of his “mortal grossness” and place at his disposal attendant fairies who will fetch
him “jewels from the deep” (III.i.139-142), the four young lovers
are rushing headlong into their own labyrinth—the labyrinth of
undifferentiated confusion into which they have been led by their
impulsive passions.
At the beginning Helena and Hermia were best friends
(III.ii.199-220). This relationship mirrors the pure friendship enjoyed by Titania and the changeling boy’s mother. Duke Theseus’s appropriation of the changeling reminds us that the original
Theseus violently snatched Hippolyta from her Amazon kingdom. This is why the Amazon invasion of Athens, which, as mentioned earlier, does not occur in A Midsummer Nights Dream,
becomes a significant non-event. Instead of an angry female reaction to male violence, the play substitutes the quarrel between
Hermia and Helena that erupts towards the end of Act III, scene
ii. Their forthcoming marriages alienate them from each other.
Their female sisterhood is fractured by the approaching demands
of sexuality and childrearing. The breast takes precedence over
the heart. Moreover, friendship, the candid sharing of souls, is
about to be replaced by the demands of economic necessity and
patriarchal power. (Patriarchal tyranny over womens’ lives is represented, as suggested earlier, in the figure of Egeus. Recall
Lysander’s angry jab at Demtrius: “You have her father love,
Demetrius; / Let me have Hermia’s: do you marry him” [I.i.9394]. Lysander is unacceptable to Egeus precisely because he has
wooed Hermia directly, rather than submitting to Egeus’s patriarchal rule over his daughter’s life.)
While it is certain that Demetrius becomes interested in Hermia after successfully wooing Helena, it is not clear whether this
occurred before or after Lysander gained Hermia’s love. In either
case, the bond between the two women had been broken. As
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Hermia and Helena progress from childhood friendship to adolescent romance to parentally approved marriage, they move
away from genuine friendship toward the social roles that stifle
self-realization.
Perhaps this move toward conventional roles could also explain Demetrius’s attraction to Hermia. If his conventional relationship with the beautiful but rather passive Helena became
dissatisfying, he would naturally seek the wonderful qualities that
his fiancée praised so highly in her friend. (To paraphrase the
song from Two Gentlemen of Verona, “Who is Hermia? what is
she, / that Helen so commends her?”)
By contrast, Lysander’s romance with Hermia, by virtue of
being disapproved by her father, may not yet have been soured
by familiarity or proximity. Short, dark, and thus less attractive
by normal standards of beauty, Hermia certainly seems to possess
more spirit than the somewhat masochistic Helena. Yet she will
be shocked to discover that Lysander’s attraction to her, despite
his apologies when she refuses to let him sleep beside her, is ultimately sexual in nature. He is not seeking a friend in marriage,
but a sexual partner. This natural urge toward marriage turns out
to be even less fulfilling than the conventional one to Hermia,
and perhaps to anyone who has shared true friendship with another soul.
It is all too easy to see how Lysander, after being spurned by
Hermia, finds the more physically endowed Helena to be more
attractive. On the other hand, Demetrius, whose sole reason for
being drawn to Hermia has been mimetic, loses interest in her
the moment he finds that Lysander is now drawn to Helena. This
fact makes her rise in stature in his eyes. Demetrius makes the
mistake Socrates points out in the Euthyphro: to him, Helena is
not loved because she is inherently desirable; she is loved because another person loves her.15 Whatever inherently desirable
qualities Hermia may possess, they become invisible to
Demetrius when he sees that Helena is loved by Lysander.
15. Plato, Euthyphro, 10a-11b.
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Though Hermia may be a far better object of mimetic desire,
once Oberon anoints Demetrius with the magic juice, he only has
eyes for Helena. When Puck brings Helena to meet the now enchanted Demetrius, he is delighted to find that she has Lysander
in tow. As Demetrius sleeps, Helena bitterly denounces Lysander
for his treachery. By using the very oaths he swore before Hermia
to now pledge his love to her, he is only proving that he is just as
false now as he was then. Things only get worse when Demetrius
wakes up. When he too professes his undying love, Helena smells
a rat. She believes mistakenly that both Lysander and Demetrius
are playing a cruel joke on her (note how this runs parallel to Bottom’s belief that the other players were trying to trick him!). She
is rightly convinced, however, that the feelings they profess are
not genuine. Their praise is for an idea rather than a real person;
they are not talking about her at all. Being the masochist she is,
Helena would rather be hated honestly than endure this kind of
rhetoric. She is also convinced that all this is part of their rivalry
for Hermia’s hand. While both Lysander and Demetrius deny this
charge, Hermia reappears, and Helena tells the two men that they
now have a chance to prove their claim before Hermia in person.
(Quite unlike Bottom, Helena has real difficulty accepting any
good fortune.)
With Hermia’s return matters reach a climax. First Lysander
brutally tells her that Helena’s beauty took him from her side,
and then Helena herself accuses a stunned Hermia of being a part
of a cruel conspiracy. Sadly recalling the blissful childhood years
they spent together as the closest of friends, growing together
“with two seeming bodies but one heart” (III.ii.215)—a state not
unlike that of Aristophanes’s circle-men of Plato’s Symposium—
Hermia accuses of Helena of betraying not just herself, but all
women. The distinction between true friendship and mimetic love
is now perfectly clear: in fact, A Midsummer Night’s Dream does
not depict one instance of true reciprocated love. Hermia’s
amazement at Lysander’s betrayal is redoubled when she finds
that Demetrius, whom she has just roundly abused for pursuing
her, has now returned his affections to her antipodes—the despicable Helena. Her world has been inverted.
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Even after Hermia states her astonishment at these accusations—“I am amazèd at your passionate words” (III.ii.221—another reference to a maze—Helena reiterates her charge of
conspiracy, drops a dark hint about death, and tries to leave.
When Lysander attempts to prevent her departure, calling her
“my love, my life, my soul,” (III.ii.247), Demetrius claims to love
her more and challenges him to a duel. Hermia then seeks to prevent Lysander from pursuing Helena, only to hear Lysander call
her an “Ethiope” and a “tawny Tartar” for her darker complexion,
and a “serpent” whom he will shake off as she clings to him
(III.ii.257-264). Worse, when Demetrius charges him with not
being really in love with Helena, Lysander haughtily responds
that he will not kill such a worthless thing as Hermia just to prove
his feelings towards Helena.
Nothing in her past life has prepared Hermia for this. Asking
him what can harm her more than hate, she asks “Am I not Hermia, are you not Lysander?” Yet her words “I am as fair as I was
erstwhile” (II.ii.274-275) do not recognize that beauty resides in
the eye and not in the object itself. This is why she, formerly
thought fair, is now but a dark tawny “Ethiope.” When Hermia
goes on to accuse Helena of having literally seduced Lysander,
maybe recalling too late his wish to sleep with her, Helena then
calls her a “puppet” (III.ii.289). Although Helena means “deceptive,” outraged Hermia takes this as a reference to her height.
Dubbing poor Helena a “painted maypole,” (II.ii.297) Hermia
claims she is yet tall enough to scratch her eyes out. Helena then
says that she will take her folly back to Athens. Her only fault,
in her eyes, was to betray the lovers’ plan to Demetrius whom
she still loves despite his offenses. When she declares her fear of
Hermia (“She was a vixen when she went to school / And though
she be but little, she is fierce [III.ii.325-326]) both young men
prepare to come to blows over who will defend her.
Now Oberon and Puck decide to step in. Puck denies that he
is to blame for the pandemonium but admits to being gladdened
by the “jangling” (III.ii.354). Oberon instructs him to separate
the two angry young men from each other by imitating their
voices in turn until they fall asleep, exhausted by chasing after
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illusions. Puck must then crush an antidote to the “love in idleness” in Lysander’s eyes, restoring his normal way of seeing
things. Oberon claims that this will take away “all error”
(III.ii.369) from his sight, and he declares that when the lovers
awaken, they will believe that everything they have seen and
done was nothing but a dream. He is sure that once back in
Athens they will be reunited “with league whose date till death
shall never end” (III.ii.374). While Puck attends to that, Oberon
will wheedle the changeling away from Titania before undoing
the spell on her and restoring peace to all things.
At this point, Puck urges Oberon to hurry before the daybreak,
as ghosts flee from the first rays of the sun. But Oberon corrects
him, saying that “we are spirits of another sort” (III.ii.389), who
need not fear the glorious day. It is as though Puck represents
something older and a shade darker; more mischievous than Ariel,
he is also a pagan force of chaos and disruption. There is a bit of
Mephistopheles in Puck; he inadvertently serves the ends of goodness, despite seeking to fool, trip and disrupt.16 While this residual
pagan element seems to interfere with and interrupt both the perfection of God’s creation and the order of the city, there is a vital
sense in which Puckishness saves what is joyful and spontaneous,
and thus truly human, from the rules, rites, and routines of
preachers, prudes, and prigs. Although he acted at Oberon’s bidding, Puck can take pride in his masterpiece of confusion—the
translated Bottom is Puck’s finest creation.
While the lovers sleep in the woods, Act IV finds Titania,
in her own words, “doting” on Bottom while her four attendant
fairies cater to his every whim. After he has been fed, scratched
and serenaded, Titania sends her fairies away and Bottom falls
asleep in her arms. Shakespeare—at least as tactful in his consideration of his audience’s sensibilities as is Bottom of his audience—presents no overt signs of a sexual encounter between
Bottom and Titania. But the connection to the myth of the
16. “Part of the power / That constantly wants evil and constantly does
good.” Goethe, Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy, trans. Margaret
Kirby (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2015), 1335-36.
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Minotaur dispels the possibility that their union is purely platonic. According to the original story, Pasiphaë’s mad desire for
the bull of Poseidon prompted her to have Daedalus build her
a portable wooden cow, within which she could position herself
in order to copulate with the bull.
Oberon and Puck arrive to find Bottom cradled in Titania’s
arms, and Oberon feels pity for her. After securing custody of the
changeling boy, he no longer feels the need to continue the farce.
He drops the juice on Titania’s eyes to remove the magic, then he
orders Puck to remove the ass’s head so Bottom may return to
Athens and “think no more of this night’s accidents / But as the
fierce vexation of a dream” (IV.i.66). Titania wakes and tells
Oberon of a most strange vision: “Methought I was enamored of
an ass,” though once awake she exclaims, “mine eyes do loath his
visage now!” (IV.i.73,76). While Bottom sleeps on, his head removed, the king and queen dance and are reconciled. They will
now bless the union of Theseus and Hippolyta. It is a fair inference
that, had this interlude in the woods with Bottom not taken place,
the royal pair would not have been reconciled, the marriage would
not have been graced by their presence, and the bloody Amazon
invasion, symbol of sexual strife, would have come to pass.
Meanwhile, Theseus and Hippolyta, while hunting in the forest, find all four lovers asleep. When Egeus finds out that
Lysander and Hermia were fleeing Athens in defiance of his will,
he asks Theseus to punish them, looking to Demetrius for support. Yet Demetrius confesses that his desire for Hermia has
“melted as the snow” (IV.i.163). Recalling this passion as he
would a sickness, he barely remembers or feels it now. Helena is
again the sole object of his love. This frees Theseus to decree that
the two couples shall be married along with him that very day.
This should be welcome news, yet the lovers are still in shock.
When the four lovers are alone, they canvass one another’s
memories and find, as Hermia puts it, that “everything seems
double” (IV.i.187). In other words, no identity is as stable as it
was a night ago when she was Hermia and he Lysander. Likewise, Helena reflects that she has “found Demetrius like a jewel,
mine own and not mine own” (IV.i.188). We all have deeper iden-
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tities that cannot be owned even by ourselves, let alone by others.
While Lysander, who was twice enchanted, has very little to say,
it seems to Demetrius that they are still asleep and yet dreaming.
As he observed earlier, things once indubitably certain now seem
distant and mutable “Like far-off mountains turnèd into clouds”
(IV.i.185). All that they are certain of is Theseus’s order that they
follow him to the temple. To Demetrius, only this proves that
they are awake. In essence, it is by the temple, the cave, and the
city—for all three are equivalent—that the uncertainties of the
nightmare in the forest are safely secured. This is why they
meekly return to the cave, despite knowing full well that they
shadows they behold there have unsuspected depths. The four of
them will no doubt fashion an agreeable account of what happened to them in due time.
And then there’s Bottom. He was never truly lost in the bottomless ambiguity of the enchanted wood because he’s his own
bottom. The “bottom” is the piece of wood around which a
skein of thread is wound, so that Bottom is connected, as we
said, to Ariadne’s thread. Bottom is able to exit from his enchanted confusion because of his ability to thread his way
through many different roles. Though comically ignorant, he is
nonetheless self-possessed, ingenious, and imaginative, and
these qualities lead him through his labyrinthine trials successfully, even as he playfully mangles all the roles he steps into.
After meeting Titania—an experience more supernatural than
anything the lovers undergo—Bottom is indeed purged of his
“mortal grossness,” as Titania promised. And yet he has enough
“bottom” to take up all the jewels that Titania’s fairies bring
him from the depths of the ocean.
Bottom’s appearance is deceptive, even to the spirits. Puck
ridiculed Bottom’s wit. Oberon confidently expected that the
ass-headed monster would forget everything about his wild
night in the woods. But they both seriously underestimated the
worth of humble weaver. A man who is stable and “bottomed,”
or self-contained, who can assume the humiliating mask of ass’s
head to hide his gravity, is not to be scorned if he is a master of
the royal art of weaving—that is, of statesmanship. Only such
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a person can guide us safely through the dark woods of imagination and the subterranean cave of opinion.
It is unclear whether Theseus, when he discovers the four
young lovers, ignores Bottom or whether Bottom is invisible to
him. In any case, Bottom’s experiences from that night in the
woods far surpass the lovers’ experiences. The lovers have only
encountered Hegel’s “bad infinite”—the anarchic possibilities
that haunt the soul on a dark night—but Bottom has seen things
sublime and trans-rational. Since he was never enchanted—it was
Titania who was magically induced to fall in love with him—he
does not need to be disenchanted; Oberon simply orders Puck to
“take off this head” (IV.i.77). Despite being discovered in the
queen’s arms, Bottom escapes punishment by being taken for an
ass. What would Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII have made of this
lèse majesté?
When Bottom awakens from his fairy-induced slumber, he
at first believes that no time has elapsed at all and that he is still
awaiting his cue in the play. Then he realizes that something has
happened to him: “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a
dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but
an ass if he go about to expound this dream” (IV.i.199-202). Bottom sees that he lacks the categories to describe his experience.
Instead, dipping into the stores of his memory, he produces a garbled version of 1 Corinthians 2:9 to describe the inability to describe his dream: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man
/ hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his / tongue to
conceive, nor his heart to report what /my dream was” (IV.i.21114). Shakespeare prudently stops Bottom from continuing on to
the next verse of the scripture, which details the blessings God
has prepared for us—that would be a blasphemous comparison
between Titania’s bounty and God’s. Instead, Bottom will “get
Peter Quince to write a / ballet [ballad] of this dream: it shall be
called Bottom’s / Dream, because it hath no bottom.” (IV.i.21416). And he will sing it after Thisbe dies, presumably because his
vision provides intimations of a glorious afterlife. Perhaps his
mystical vision will be the metaphysical basis of any future
comedies Bottom himself may create.
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Act V begins with Theseus and Titania discussing the four
young lovers’ account of their recollections from the preceding
night. The act is strikingly undramatic: nothing significant happens. So deliberately flat an ending seems to demand that we shift
from action to interpretation. Our focus goes from Helen to Hermes, from the enchantments of love to questions of hermeneutics.
It is amusing to see two well-known figures from mythology arguing over how much credence should be given to “antique stories” and “fairy toys” (V.i.3)—especially when Theseus uses
images from Socrates’s palinode in Plato’s Phaedrus, where the
philosopher defends divine madness and poetic inspiration. As if
to drive this point home, Theseus speaks of how “The poet’s eye
in full frenzy rolling, / doth glance from heaven to earth, from
earth to heaven” (V.i.12-13). This image derives from Plato’s
Symposium, in which Socrates recounts what Diotima told him
about Eros, the child of Need and Plenty.17 In A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, the child of need and plenty would correspond to
any offspring of the union between Bottom and Titania, who
would represent a weaving together of the human and divine
realms.
Since the matter of Theseus’s argument only serves to unweave its content, Shakespeare urges us to agree with Hippolyta
when she points out that the harmony of the four tales “More
witnesseth than fancy’s images / And grows to something of
great constancy [consistency]” (V.i.25-26): the stories are not
merely the fanciful products of over-heated imaginations. While
Theseus denounces the tendency of humans to exaggerate—
“How easy is a bush supposed a bear!” (V.i.22), this only makes
it harder for us to accept his own heroic, but no doubt exaggerated, deeds. It seems as if he kills monsters by denying that they
exist. This daylight dilution of night’s truths, anticipating the
Enlightenment’s tendency to disparage everything that cannot
be measured, strengthens the very irrationality it tries to contain.
Theseus’s hyper-rationality may well have caused the threat of
the Amazon invasion, which happily has been averted. Largely
17. Plato, Symposium, 202e-203a.
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thanks to Bottom’s intervention, nothing happens. As W. H.
Auden put it, “Poetry makes nothing happen.”18 The curse of
reification has been lifted from nature.
When Theseus is asked to choose among several alternative
forms of entertainment to fill the three hours before supper and
bed, it is clear that his strong preference is for comedy—and the
more banal the better—over epic, tragedy or lyric. This is quite
consistent with the tendency to reduce a bear to a bush, or turn
the Minotaur into an amazed ass. The first three choices offered
by the master of revels are (1) the battle with the Centaurs, (2)
the murder of Orpheus by the Bacchae, and (3) a lament over
the decline of learning by the nine muses. Theseus rejects the
first two: he has told Hippolyta about the one and already seen
the other. When the third choice is thought too satirical for the
day, all that remains is our “tedious brief scene” Pyramus and
Thisbe, of “very tragical mirth” (V.i.56-57). So the Duke
chooses it, albeit over the strong objections of Philostrate. The
strange combination of comedy and tragedy that is contained in
the promise of “tragical mirth” probably has more to do with
Theseus’s aristocratic predilection of finding amusement in unintended buffoonery than with Socrates’s assertion in the Symposium that the art of making tragedies is also the art of making
comedies.19
Even after being informed that the play both “tedious and
brief” (V.i.58), and only comic in that it is likely to be poorly
performed, Theseus is determined to favor the rude mechanicals
with his patronage. Hippolyta expressed a reluctance to see the
simple-minded players embarrassed undertaking a task that is
beyond their capacities, but Theseus replies that the audience
ought not to incline toward harsh criticism: “Our sport shall be
to take what they mistake: / And what poor duty cannot do, noble
respect / Takes it in might, not merit” (V.i.90, 92). But the intent
to judge the players by their “might”—by their widow’s mite,
18. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B Yeats” in Selected Poems, ed.
Edward Mendelson, (New York: Vintage, 1989), 80.
19. Plato, Symposium, 223d.
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one might say—fails, even though Theseus claims that he has
the power to see beyond appearances:
Where I have come, great clerks have purposèd
To greet me with premeditated welcomes,
Where I have seen them shiver and look pale,
Make periods in the midst of sentences,
Throttle their practiced accent in their fears,
And in conclusion dumbly have broke off,
Not paying me a welcome. Trust me, sweet,
Out of this silence yet I picked a welcome,
And in the modesty of fearful duty
I read as much as from the rattling tongue
Of saucy and audacious eloquence.
Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity
In least speak most, to my capacity. (V.i.87-99)
But this self-estimate is not accurate: the play is so bad that it
cannot help but elicit derisive comments even from Theseus. He
cannot get beyond reductive charity. Though he wishes to make
the meaningless speech of the rough artisans orderly, he lacks the
imagination to see that Bottom at least is pointing towards something that far exceeds the capacities of his station in the shadow
world of the cave. To Theseus, art is a diversion from reality,
filled with impractical ideals and impossible dreams, that must
be tolerated by a kind of benign neglect—which is precisely the
attitude that Theseus bestows on the mechanical.
Since the Duke does not allow Bottom speak his epilogue,
Shakespeare’s audiences must imagine it for themselves. The
contours of this epilogue are clear enough: first, it must conclude
the mechanicals’ rendition of Pyramus and Thisbe; second, it
must explain A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and third, it must also
explain Bottom’s mystical vision. This is why Bottom wants to
place it after Thisbe’s death: it has to reveal what lies beyond
death, what sustains life, and what justifies love. Bottom’s epilogue is the “bottom line” to be extracted form his near-death experience with Titania.
There are clear parallels between Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania. This is why the four roles are almost always
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played by the same pair of actors. The male power of reason imperiously believes that it can censor, control, and shape the
thoughts of the disordered female soul. But through his mystical
vision, Bottom has been initiated into a suprarational wisdom by
Titania. Can this wisdom be stolen from him as easily as Oberon
tricked Titania or Theseus raped Hippolyta? A Midsummer
Night’s Dream trusts the power of drama to resurrect visions long
forgotten by seers and heroes. “The best are but shadows and the
worst are no worse if imagination amend them” (V.i.208-209). It
must be the audience’s imagination, not the actor’s, that redeems
the poet in the cave. Every time A Midsummer Night’s Dream is
performed, it becomes the vehicle, being ridden by an ass,
through which salvation may enter the world.
Theseus cannot see that art bestows deeper meaning on
human life than order. The wall dividing Pyramus and Thisbe
represents the strife between reason and desire, between philosophy and poetry, city and theatre, law and will, civilized religion
and pagan nature. The role of Lion, who threatens to destroy
Pyramus and Thisbe, was one of those coveted by Bottom; it too
stands for the Minotaur, the monster that devours young lovers
in the dark labyrinth of desire that is nature. Yet it is the translated
Bottom who finds that Titania, the feminine principle at the heart
of nature, is far from monstrous. It takes imagination and charity,
qualities Bottom possesses in abundance, to reconcile principles
that seem to be separate and opposed. But this is precisely why
Theseus, acting in the name of the male principle that dominates
the city, must overcome overcome the horned beast by denial,
standing on his claim to have slain the Minotaur. The truth revealed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to be this: Men like
Lysander and Demetrius become horned monsters when they are
trapped in the labyrinthine coils of desires they cannot own or
even recognize. Their paramount ambition is to possess the
women they love and maintain their amour propre; that is to say,
they only want to know other souls as objects, without genuinely
trying to behold them as independent selves. But to burn with
unloving passion avails us nothing. To quote St. Paul, though in
a slightly different sense than he intended it, “Though I give my
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body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.”20
Despite his ignorance, Bottom, having been opened up to the
grace of Nature by Titania, sees much further than the lovers.
By comparison, they wear the heads of asses. True beholding
of another self creates a loving obligation to protect and nurture
the inner life of the other’s soul. One sees into that soul, as it
were, through the eyes of a god. One the one hand, a love like
this is infinitely preferable to the sort of “love” that motivates
Egeus’s feudal claims over his daughter Hermia, who is for him
“but as a form in wax, / By him imprinted and within his power
/ to leave the figure or disfigure it” (I.i.49-51). On the other hand,
because of the godlike glance into the other’s soul, a Christian
audience may well be inclined to regard it as blasphemous.
Other elements of Bottom’s epilogue would have to clarify
the various ways in which love can go wrong. One way is that
lustful or selfish love, in seeking spiritual support for its desires,
falls into despair when the poetry it gets hold of is bad. Another
way is that abstract reason, in seeking to domesticate the untamed
aspects of eros, falls into nihilism. To avoid these and similar errors, the passions must be educated by poetry—not manipulated,
as Oberon does, or rejected, as Theseus does. It is true that wellcrafted laws can mitigate or even remove the possessiveness inherent in some kinds of selfish love (such as the property rights
Egeus claims over Hermia). Indeed, such laws can help to ensure
equality and even aid in the perennial human struggle to climb
out of the cave. But neither law nor logos is easily taught to
lovers. It would be better, if fate allows, to attend to our own
soul’s need for love before being gripped by the passions. Our
own soul’s unique charity for itself is to become equal to itself,
to see itself clearly and love itself for what it truly is. This is the
preparation that makes us capable of dealing with our passions
competently. And the test of success in this preparation is to return
to the cave—as Bottom returned to Theseus’s court after his mystical vision, or as Socrates willingly entered the courtroom to deliver his apology—bringing love, disorder, erotically charged
20. 1 Corinthians 13:3.
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chaos, and “mirthful tragedy” to our fellow humans rather than
submitting to the reductive comedy of life constrained by generic
rationality. To draw an example from another magical play: It is
surely thus, after consolidating his mystical wisdom, that Prospero
returns to Milan as its Duke after the events of The Tempest.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is as anarchic a carnival, we
must imagine, as Bottom’s mystical vision must have been. Its
mad antics and category-crossing magic represent the way of
wonder, an approach to a wisdom that cannot be contained within
the rational confines of the logos. This wisdom, the wisdom of
the spirit, comforts and inspires us when we reach the limits of
the logos.
Spirit works in the spectral forests encircling the sublime, in
the element of amazed ignorance; wonder is its vehicle, enlivening us much more vitally than anything or anyone we may try to
possess. Its counterpart, logos, works with abstract categories,
trying to convince us that the divine is not deeply irrational, nor
jealous, nor unjust; but its reassuring arguments fail to convince,
because they fly in the face of human experience. Spirit, on the
contrary, addresses the passions, the absurdities, the savageries,
and the secrets of the individual soul—its struggles have more in
common with Dostoevsky’s novels than with Hegel’s System.
Each individual soul’s passage through the dark woods of imagination is different, and all are dialectical in the sense that the
traveler learns as much from error as from truth. Similarly, love’s
benefits come from giving, forgiving, losing, and laughing: these
acts strengthen and liberate the soul, whereas their contraries—
taking, accusing, winning, and excessive seriousness—weaken
and strangle it. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a feast for the
soul, and we leave it with richer eyes, emptier hands, and longer
ears. Only a beautiful ass can save us.
�
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Pastille, William
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Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Trentina, Allison
Sachs, Joe
Kalkavage, Peter
Koochesfahani, Arian
Macierowski, Edward M.
Ranasinghe, Nalin
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 52, number 1 (Fall 2010)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Barbara McClay
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Pamela Krause, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to the The St. John’s Review, St. John’s
College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800.
©2010 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
The St. John’s Communications Office
Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available on-line at
www.stjohnscollege.edu/news/pubs/review.shtml.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
3
Contents
Essay
Jacob Klein’s Two Prescient Discoveries..............................5
Eva Brann
“YOU ARE THAT!”: The Upanishads Read Through
Western Eyes.......................................................................21
Robert Druecker
Principles of Motion and the Motion of Principles:
Hegel’s Inverted World........................................................71
Peter Kalkavage
The Work of Education........................................................99
Jon Lenkowski
Falstaff and Cleopatra........................................................109
Elliot Zuckerman
Review
Portraits of the Impassioned Concept: A Review of Peter
Kalkavage’s The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit......................................123
Eva Brann
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5
JACOB KLEIN’S TWO
PRESCIENT DISCOVERIES
Eva Brann
Jacob Klein was in the last year of his nine-year tenure as dean of
St. John’s College in 1957 when I came as a young tutor. He died
in 1978, still teaching. In those twenty-one years during which I
knew him, he was above all a teacher—mine and everybody’s.
His spirit informed the college. While dean, he was a fierce
defender of his conception of this remarkable community of
learning. This passion had generous parameters, from a smiling
leniency toward spirited highjinks to a meticulous enforcement of
rules meant to inculcate intellectual virtue. As a tutor, he shaped
the place through lectures that the whole college attended and
discussed, through classroom teaching that elicited from students
more than they thought was in them, but above all through
conversation that was direct and playful, serious and teasing,
earthily Russian and cunningly cosmopolitan. We all thought that
he had some secret wisdom that he dispensed sparingly out of
pedagogical benevolence; yet he would sometimes tell us things
in a plain and simple way that struck home as if we had always
known them. I, at least, always had the sense of hearing delightful
novelties that somehow I’d known all along. He also had an
aversion to discipleship and a predilection for wicked American
kids. And he could be infuriating whenever someone tried to
extract definitive doctrines from him. His reluctance to pontificate
was in part indolence (we sometimes called him “Jasha the
Pasha”)—an indolence dignified by his aversion to philosophy
carried on as an organized business—and in part pedagogical
reservation—a conviction that to retail one’s thought-products to
students was to prevent inquiry. This aversion to professing
authority is, to my mind, his most persuasive and felicitous legacy
Keynote Address at the Conference on Jacob Klein, held at Seattle University on
May 27-29, 2010. Eva Brann is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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to the college, and the reason we still call ourselves tutors—
guardians of learning—rather than professors—professionals of
knowledge.
Nonetheless, there were doctrines and they were published.
He had set himself against academic publication, so much so that
I had to translate Jasha’s youthful book on the origin of algebra in
secret—though when confronted with the fait accompli he capitulated quite eagerly. This book is now the subject of Burt
Hopkins’s acute and careful analysis, The Origin of the Logic of
Symbolic Mathematics: Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein (to be
published in 2011).
Today I would like to present two of his chief discoveries
from a perspective of peculiar fascination to me—from the standpoint of the contemporary significance and the astounding
prescience, and hence longevity, of his insights. Now I grew up
intellectually within a perspective enforced by our program of
studies and reinforced by Jasha’s views (forgive the informality;
it was universal in his circle), which were rooted in certain continental philosophers, of whom Husserl was the most honorable.
The guiding notion of this perspective was that modernity is best
apprehended as being in a ruptured continuum with Greek
antiquity—a continuum insofar as the terms persist, ruptured
insofar as they take on new meanings and missions. That
perspective makes those who hold it avid participants in the
present—critically and appreciatively avid.
I will state immediately and straightforwardly the issues of
our present-day lives to which Jasha’s insights speak. First, they
speak to the ever-expanding role of image-viewing and virtual
experience in our lives. Here the questions are: What degree of
“reality” is ascribable to images? What does life among these
semi-beings do to us? Do we lose substance as they lose their
ground? Do originals retain their primary or even a residual
function in the virtual world? Second, Jasha’s insights speak to
the burgeoning brain science that tends to ascribe an ultimately
physical being to human nature. Here the questions are
approachable in terms of “emergence.” Granted that brain and
mind are intimately linked, what is the manner in which the latter
EVA BRANN
7
emerges from, or projects into, the former? How might an entity
emerge, be it from above or below, that is radically different from
its constituents? These are questions about consciousness (what
we are aware of) and about self-consciousness (who we are) that
should be of great concern to us, because they dominate public
life quite unreflectively. To put this in a form that is not currently
fashionable: Do we have souls?
Klein’s two insights, then, are both interpretations of Platonic
writings and are set out in A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (1965)
and Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra
(1934). The latter is a learned book written by a private European
scholar for academic readers, the former is a very accessible work
written by an American teacher for lovers of Socrates. Of both
these insights Burt Hopkins has produced detailed analyses,
which have added a new edge to doctrines I’ve lived with familiarly for half a century. I will, however, feel free here to
supplement, embroider and question Jacob Klein’s interpretation
of Plato and Burt Hopkins’s reading of Klein as I go. I’ll do it
implicitly, so you shouldn’t trust this account for faithfulness to
the letter, though I hope you may trust it for faithfulness to the
spirit. You’ll see, I think, what I mean when I speak of the
immediacy and naturalness of Klein’s interpretation: His readings
sit well.
The first insight, then, begins with an understanding of the
lowest segment of the so-called Divided Line in Plato’s Republic,
that mathematical image (picture it as vertical) of the ascent to
Being and the learning associated with that ascent. In this lowest
segment are located the deficient beings called reflections,
shadows, and images, and a type of apprehension associated with
them called eikasia in Greek and usually rendered as
“conjecture.” Klein’s interpretation starts with a new translation
of this noun: “image-recognition.” The nature of these lowest
beings—they are revealed as basic rather than base—is set out in
Plato’s Sophist. Consequently, the Republic and the Sophist
between them lay the foundations of the Platonic world.
The second discovery involves a complex of notions from
which I’ll extract one main element: the analysis of what it means
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to be a number, and what makes possible this kind of being—
which, as it turns out, makes possible all Being. Again, the
principal texts are the Sophist and the Republic, supplemented by
Aristotle’s critical account of Plato’s doctrine. To anticipate the
perplexity that is also the doctrine: Take any number—say two. It
is constituted of two units. Each is one, but both together are two.
How can it be that two emerges from elements that are each
precisely not two? I might remark in passing that Socrates thinks
that one mark of readiness for philosophical engagement is a
fascination with this perplexity. And from my experience with
students, I know that Socrates was correct.
So now, after these broad previews, some nitty-gritty.
Socrates begins by dividing the whole line mentioned above in
some arbitrary ratio, and then he divides the two subsections in
that same ratio. So if the whole line is, say, sixteen units, and the
ratio is, say, triple; then one segment is twelve units, the other
four. Then subdivide the twelve-unit segment similarly into nine
and three units, and the four-unit segment into three and one.
There are now four segments, two by two in the same ratio with
each other and with the first division of the whole. Whether you
want to make the top or the bottom segment the longest depends
on whether you assign more length to the greater fullness of
Being or to the larger profusion of items. It can also be shown that
in all divisions of this sort—called “extreme-and-mean ratio”—
the middle segments will be equal. Socrates will make the iconic
most of this mathematical fact.
Now the subsections make a four-term proportion called an
analogia in Greek—a:b::b:c—and they mirror, as I said, the
division of the whole line. You can read the line up or down.
Down is the cascade of Being, which loses plenitude as it falls
from true originals to mere images. Up is the ascent of learning,
ending in the direct intellectual vision of the prime originals, the
eide, the “invisible looks” in Klein’s language, usually called the
“forms.” Beyond all Being there is the notorious Good, the
unifying power above all the graduated beings, the principle of
wholeness, which I’ll leave out here. At the bottom is the aforementioned “image-recognition.” Now just as each of the object-
EVA BRANN
9
realms assigned to the upper sections is causally responsible for
the ones below, so, inversely, in learning, each stage, each
capacity, is needed for the learner to rise. None are left behind; all
remain necessary. And so the bottom, the first capacity, is also the
most pervasive. Children recognize images early on. Look at a
picture book with a two-year-old: “Kitty,” he’ll say, pointing.
“Careful, it’ll scratch.” “No, it won’t,” he’ll say, looking at you as
if you were really naïve. That’s image-recognition, the human
capability for recognizing likeness as belonging to a deficient
order: a cat incapable of scratching.
It is as fundamental for Socrates as it is low on the scale of
cognitive modes, because imaging is the most readily imaginable,
the least technically ticklish way of representing the activity by
which the realm of intelligible Being produces and rules the world
of sensory appearances. Each step downward in the scale of being
is a move from original to image; each step upward in the scale of
learning involves recognizing that something lower is an image of
something higher.
Just to complete the sketch of the Divided Line, here are the
stages of knowledge and their objects in brief. Above images,
there are the apparently solid objects of nature and artifice. The
acquaintance with these is called “trust,” pistis. It is the implicit,
unreflective belief we have in the dependable support of the
ground we tread on and the chair we sit in—the faith that our
world is not “the baseless fabric of a vision” that melts into thin
air.
This whole complex of dimensionally defective images and
taken-on-faith solidity of our phenomenal world is itself an image
of the upper two parts of the line. The third part, equal in length
to the second from the bottom, contains all the rational objects
that look, on the way up, like abstractions from the sensory
world—mathematical models and logical patterns. To these we
apply our understanding, a capacity called in Greek “thinkingthrough,” dianoia. They are then revealed to be the originals of
the sensory world, the intelligible patterns that impart to the
sensory world such shapeliness and intelligibility as it has. Thus
they make natural science possible; for they are the rational
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counterparts of the sensory world. Finally, there is the realm of
direct knowledge. As happens so often in the dialogues, the
contents of these upper reaches are named in inverse relation to
the contents of the lower ones: “invisible looks” (since eidos is
from the vid-verb, the verb for seeing), and they are reached by a
capacity for direct insight (which Aristotle will in fact analogize
to sensing)—noesis. Above and beyond them all is the very Idea
itself, the idea of all ideas—the Good, which produces, nourishes,
and unifies all beings, and grounds all human learning.
Implicit in this ladder of Being is the answer to the question
that matters most: What is an image, such that we can know it as
an image? The answer is given in the Sophist, whose main
character is, in his general person, an image incarnate—the mere
image of a truly truth-seeking human being. Socrates poses the
opening question of the Sophist, but he sits silently by as a
Stranger from Italian Elea, a follower of Parmenides, finds a
solution. I’ll venture a guess why he falls silent. In the Sophist
appears a serious ontological teaching, and ontological doctrine is
not Socrates’ way: He is the man of the tentative try, of
hypotheses. I’ll even venture a—perhaps perverse—appreciation
of this mode: His stubborn hypotheticalness, his unwillingness to
assert knowledge, is the complement of his unshakable faith in a
search for firm truth, carried on in full awareness of human
finitude.
What then is the Parmenidean solution? I call it Parmenidean
although the Stranger, the intellectual child of Parmenides, calls
himself a parricide, since he is about to deny a crucial
Parmenidean teaching: that Nonbeing is not, is neither sayable
nor thinkable. For he will in fact affirm a yet deeper teaching of
his philosophical father: that what counts is being thinkable and
sayable. The Elean Stranger will show how Nonbeing can be
thinkable and how speech is in fact impossible without it—as was
indeed implicit in Parmenides’ very denial.
It is thinkable as Otherness. To say that something is not is
usually to say that it is not this but that, that it is other than
something perspectivally prior. (I say “usually,” because there
“is” also something called “utter non-being,” which is indeed,
EVA BRANN
11
though superficially utterable, insuperably unthinkable.)
Relational, comparative Nonbeing, however, is one of the great
ruling principles of ontology. It is totally pervasive, since
whatever is a being is other than other beings. It is the source of
diversity in the world and of negation in speech. Has the Stranger
really done in his philosophical progenitor? No, as I intimated. He
has actually saved Parmenides from himself; for he has shown
that Nonbeing is, is Being in another mode. Being is still all there
is. There is no parricide. Moreover, this Other, a piece of apparently high and dry ontology, turns out to give life to the realm of
ideas and to the world of human beings: it informs the one with a
diversity of beings and articulates the other with the oppositions
of speech.
Why was this modification necessary in the search for the
Sophist? Because a Sophist is indeed a faker, himself an image of
a truth-seeker and a producer of images of what is genuine.
Otherness, the great genus of “The Other,” is the condition of
possibility for images, since it has three tremendous powers. First,
it makes possible that a thing not be what it is. And that is just
what characterizes an image: “It’s a kitty,” the child says,
pointing. But not really; it doesn’t scratch. Or people bring out
photographs in order to be in the presence of an absent one, but
they are not real enough to assuage longing. Hence an image is
understood first, and most ontologically speaking, as not being
what it is, but also, second, as being less than the original it represents; for it represents that original in a deficient likeness. Here a
second capacity of the Other shows up: it creates a defective,
derivative Otherness. And third, it makes negative knowledge and
denying speech possible: we can think and say, “The image is—
in some specifiable way—like its original; but likeness is not
identity.” The sentence “An image is not the original” displays
Otherness as negation, articulated as Nonbeing. The ability to
utter—and mean—that sentence is specifically human. Its loss
would be, I think, a serious declension of our humanity. Therefore
this complex of consideration, illuminated by Klein in his book
on the Meno, seems to me crucial for navigating our imageflooded world with full awareness.
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More particularly, the ability to distinguish image from
original is crucial today because the shaping of our American
lives, which is more and more a matter of declining options and
refusing temptations, is much in need of suggestive approaches
for coping with images. What are the truths and falsehoods of
images in general? What consequently are the effects of discretionary image-viewing on our consciousness? Do all images in
fact have originals, or is it images “all the way down”? And if
there are always originals, how can we find our way back to
them? What is real within our world, what is genuine beyond it?
I’ll assert simply that without occasional reflection on such an
eminently current issue our lives tend toward passing by rather
than being lived. “The unexamined life is unlivable (abiotos),”
Socrates says in the Apology (38a)—and so a life without
reflection on its central issues is thus, in effect, unlived.
I’ll now go on to Klein’s second interpretive discovery, a
much more technical, but equally future-fraught, construal.
A preoccupation of Socrates—it might be puzzling to readers
who haven’t yet seen the implications—is often expressed by him
in this way: “Each is one, but both are two.” To be gripped by this
odd perplexity is, as I said, a beginning of philosophizing. The
oddity comes out most starkly when we think of countingnumbers, the natural cardinal numbers. Take the first number,
two. (For the ancients, one is not a number; it is the constituent
unit of which a number is made.) Each of its units is one and
nothing more. Yet this unit and another together make up the
number two. Neither is what both together are. This ought to be
strange to us, because we are used to the elements of a natural
collection having each the quality that characterizes the whole:
The doggy species subsumes dogs. Whether we think of
dogginess either as an abstracted generalization or as a qualitybestowing form, each member has the characteristic that names
the kind. Clearly, numbers are assemblages that work differently
from other classes. Numbers have a uniquely characteristic, a socalled “arithmological” structure. The recognition of the significance of this situation and its peculiar appearance among the great
forms, particularly in respect to Being, is Klein’s achievement.
EVA BRANN
13
Let me begin by briefly reviewing the kinds of numbers Klein
takes into account. He observes—a previously ignored fact—that
the first meaning of the Greek word that we translate as number,
arithmos, is that of a counted assemblage of concrete things. Any
counted collection—a flock of sheep, a string of horses, a herd of
cattle—does not have, but is an arithmos. If we think as Greeks
(and we may, with a little effort), we count ordinally, because we
must keep items in order: first, second, third (and then go on
cardinally four, five, six, for verbal convenience). But when we
have counted up the whole, we allow it to become a heapnumber—a distinct, discriminated group. It is a counted
collection that has lost its memory. An arithmos is such a sensory
number. It is, for example, a sheep-number, and its units are
sheep-monads. To me it seems undecidable whether such a
concrete number has an arithmological structure, since in it the
sheep are both sheepish and mere units; as a flock we discriminate
them, as units we count them.
Next come the mathematical numbers made up of pure
monads, units that have no quality besides being unities. A mathematical number is defined by Euclid thus: “An arithmos is a
multitude composed of monads,” where a monad is a pure unit.
This type of number has an arithmological structure with a
vengeance, and you can see why: a pure unit has no characteristics besides unitariness. It’s neither apples nor oranges, which is
precisely why you can count fruit or anything at all with it. Being
thus devoid of qualities, it has mere collectibility, but it has no
other contribution to make to the assemblage. Being two is not in
the nature of a monad as a monad, though adding up to two is.
“Two” appears to emerge from these associable units. If you think
this is unintelligible, so does Socrates. It will get worse.
The difficulty is implicitly acknowledged in the modern
definition of number. It begins with arithmos-like concrete assemblages. If their elements, treated now as mere units, can be put
into one-to-one correspondence, the collections are said to be
equivalent. The collection or set of all equivalent sets is their
number. This definition evades the questions, What number is it?
and Does the set of sets arise from the units of the concrete
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
collection, or does it bestow on them the numerosity? Therein lies
an implicit recognition of Socrates’ problem.
It gets worse, for now a third type of number appears. Klein
knows of it from Aristotle’s critical report in the Metaphysics,
where there is mention of “form-numbers,” arithmoi eidetikoi.
The highest genera in the Platonic structure of forms are
organized in such numberlike assemblages. These are, unlike the
indefinitely many mathematical numbers, limited in multitude.
(There may have been ten, the so-called root-numbers of the
Pythagoreans.) Now the super-genera in the Sophist are Same and
Other. The highest after these is Being, which consists of Motion
(kinesis) and Standstill (stasis). (This last is often translated as
“Rest,” but that inaccurately implies a cessation from, or deprivation of, motion, though the two genera are coequal.) Notice,
incidentally, that the three kinds of numbers run in tandem with
the three rising upper segments of the Divided Line—concrete
numbers with the sensory world, pure units with the mathematical
domain, form-numbers with the eidetic realm.
Each of these forms acts like a monad in an arithmetic
collection. However—and this is Aristotle’s most pertinent
criticism—these high forms are not neutral units. They are each
very much what they are in themselves, indefeasibly self-same
and other than all others. They are, as he says: asymbletoi,
“incomparable,” literally “not throwable together.” Thus, unlike
pure, neutral mathematical numbers, they cannot be reckoned
with across their own genus, and so, a fortiori, it would be seen
that their association within their genus is unintelligible. For how
can Motion and Standstill be together as the genus of Being if
they have nothing in common and so cannot be rationally added
up?
Klein claims that Aristotle’s cavil is in fact Plato’s point. The
forms are associated in what is the very paradigm of an arithmological structure: what each is not, that they are together. It is
because they have a number structure in which unique eide
associate in a finite number of finite assemblages that
innumerable sensory items can collect into concrete countable
heaps organizable into finite classification. Furthermore, it is in
EVA BRANN
15
imitation of these eidetic numbers that we have the indefinitely
many mathematical numbers uniting as many pure units as you
please—though we are left to work out the manner of this
descent. For my part, I cannot claim to have done it.
I have mentioned before what is certainly the foremost
stumbling block for most people in accepting the forms as causes
of worldly being and becoming. The perplexity is usually put as
“the participation problem”: how do appearances “participate” in
the forms? These are infelicitous terms, because they imply the
least satisfactory answer—that dogs somehow take a part in, or
appropriate a part of the form, a non-solution scotched in
Socrates’ very early attempt in the dialogue Parmenides at articulating his great discovery of the forms. “Imaging” might be a
more felicitous term, since it is at least less awkward to the intellectual imagination than is “partaking.”
But let me stick here with the familiar term, and follow Klein
in pointing out that the participation problem has two levels. On
the lower level, the question is how the phenomenal world participates in the forms. On the higher level, it is how the forms
associate with, participate in, each other. For unless they do form
assemblages, genera and their constituent eide, the sensory world,
even granted that it does somehow receive its being and structure
from these, can have no learnable organization. Crudely put: we
can classify the world’s beings, natural and artificial, in terms of
hierarchies of kinds, such as the genera, subgenera, species, and
subspecies of biology, only because their causative principles
have a prior, paradigmatic structure of associations and subordinations. On this hypothesis, even only artificially distinguished
heaps can be counted up by reason of the arithmological character
of eidetic groupings.
The eidetic numbers are thus intended to be a Platonic
solution to the upper-level participation problem. It is, so to
speak, a highly formal solution. For while the type of association
is named—the arithmoi eidetikoi with their arithmological
structure—the cause of any particular association is not given.
There is no substantive answer to the question, Just what in a
form makes it associate numerologically with a specific other?
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
There should be no such answer, because the eidetic monads are,
after all, incomposable. Motion and Standstill have in themselves
nothing in common. Moreover, why are they the sole constituents
of Being? And yet, there must be an answer since they are in fact
composed. As Klein keeps pointing out, in the upper reaches the
logos, rational speech, fails. One way it fails is that to reach the
number two, for instance, we count off one, one, two; that is, three
items—yet there are not three, but only two. For Two, be it mathematical or eidetic, is not over and beyond the two units; it is just
those two together. How two items can become one our reason
cannot quite articulate. Nor can it say what makes either an
eidetic monad, which is a qualitative plenum, or the mathematical
unit, which is a qualitative void, associate with others in
“families,” (that thought-provoking classificatory term from
biology) or in “numbers” (those colorless collections that yet
have highly specific characteristics).
Now we come to Klein’s novel construal of just this eidetic
number Two, which occurs in the Sophist, although it is not
explicitly named there. Being is a great eidetic genus. It is
composed of Standstill and Motion. Neither of these can have any
part in the other; it is just as unthinkable for Standstill to be
involved in Motion as for Motion to be involved in Standstill. Yet
there is nothing in the world that is not both together. Our world
is one of dynamic stability or stable dynamism, in place and in
time. The duo responsible for this condition in the realm of forms
is called Being. Being is not a third beside or above Motion or
Standstill but just the togetherness of these subgenera. Being is
only as both of these together, and neither of them can be except
as part of a pair. As an unpaired monad, neither is; both are as a
couple: Being is the eidetic Two. And once more, it is this arithmological structure that descends to, makes possible, and is
mirrored in, the mathematical number structure of any mathematical two—on the one hand. On the other hand, it makes the
phenomenal world appear as I have just described it: at once
stable and moving, variable and organizable. On the way up, it
might look as if the eidetic numbers are an erroneous levering-up
of a mathematical notion; on the way down, they appear as the not
EVA BRANN
17
quite humanly comprehensible, but necessary, hypothesis for an
articulable world, a countable and classifiable world. And again,
seen from above, Being must—somehow—bring about its own
division; but seen from below, Being emerges from its
constituents. And just as the modern definition of number in terms
of equivalent sets leaves unarticulated the question of whether the
number set is the ground of or the consequence of the equivalent
sets, so too in Klein’s exposition of the first eidetic number, Two,
it is left unsaid whether the genus determines its eidetic monads,
or the reverse, or neither. It is left, as textbooks say, as an exercise
for the reader—a hard one.
I might, before I end, even venture a still formal but
somewhat more specific answer to the associability question. In
the upper ontological reaches, at least, what might be called
extreme Otherness—by which I mean either contrary (that is,
qualitative) or contradictory (that is, logical) opposition—seems
to be the principle grounding togetherness. Motion and Standstill
are as opposite as can be, and for that reason yoked in Being; so
are Same and Other. I will not pretend to have worked through the
hierarchy of these five greatest genera. Nonetheless I have a
suspicion that Same and Other, the most comprehensive genera,
are not only intimately related to each other as mutually defining,
but may ultimately have to be apprehended together as prior to
and thus beyond Being, as a first self-alienation of the One, the
principle of comprehension itself. As such, they might even be
termed the negative Two, but that’s too far-out. In any case, these
Plotinian evolutions are beyond my brief for today. I refer to
Plotinus at all only because his One is in fact articulable only
negatively and, is self-diremptive.
Now the strange structure of number, in which indiscernibly
different but non-identical elements like pure monads, mere units,
can be together what they are not individually, is only a case,
though the most stripped-down, clarified case, of what is
nowadays called “emergence.” Recall that emergence is the
eventuation of a novel whole from elements that seem to have
nothing in common with it. Examples range from trivial to lifechanging. Socrates himself points out that the letters sigma and
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18
omega are individually different from the initial syllable of his
own name, “So,” and that this is one new idea composed of two
elements (Theaetetus 203c). Two molecules of hydrogen and one
of oxygen combine to form water, whose liquidity emerges as an
unforeseeable quality. Individuals form communities that evince
a might beyond the additive powers of their citizens. The
emergent entity is other than rather than additional to, novel to
rather than inferrable from, its elements. In the reverse case,
sometimes called projection, the elements falling out from a
totality are qualitatively quite different from it. This case might be
called inverse emergence; an example might be the relation of
Platonic forms to their participant particulars.
The most significant problem of emergence is also the most
contemporary one. Since it seems indisputable that specific brain
lesions lead to specific psychic disabilities, it is claimed by scientists who don’t want simply to identify mind with brain that the
soul is brain-emergent. Does that make it a mere epiphenomenon?
A miracle? “Emergence” names the event as a bottom-up process.
But could it be a top-down happening, could the soul shape, or
participate in shaping, its physical substructure? These are the
recognizable old questions of “one-and-many”: one over, or in, or
out of, many?
I want to make a claim that in this company especially should
garner some sympathy: when deep human matters are at issue, it
helps a lot to have delved into some ontology; the inquiry into
Being may not affect our lives materially, yet it illuminates our
daily lives more directly than does research providing factual
information or theory producing instrumental constructs. This is
the hypothesis under which Jacob Klein’s opening up of two
Platonic preoccupations, images and numbers, is of current
consequence. Herein lies the prescience, the foresightedness of
his Platonic discoveries.
Addendum
I have omitted here, as too complex for brief exposition, a third,
more directly global interpretation of the modern condition,
EVA BRANN
19
which is central to Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin
of Algebra. It is an understanding of the basic rupture between
antiquity and modernity, of the great revolution of the West, as
brought about by, or at least paradigmatically displayed in, the
introduction of algebra. Algebra works with quantities abstracted
from concrete collections (such as were betokened by the Greek
arithmoi), with “general,” essentially symbolical “numbers,”
such as the variables x, y, z or the constants a, b, c. These letters
are symbols of a peculiar sort: they represent neither a concrete
thing nor a determinate concept, but rather present themselves as
the object of a calculation—a mere object, an indeterminate
entity. Klein saw algebraic problem-solving procedures, so
effective precisely because so contentlessly formal, as
emblematic of a modern rage for that second-order, deliberately
denatured thinking which dominates as much of our lives as is
method-ridden. The human consequences of this symbolic
conceptuality are great.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
“YOU ARE THAT!”
The Upanishads Read Through
Western Eyes1
Robert Druecker
Introduction
The original title of this essay—“You Are That!”—was a
quotation, from the Chāndogya Upanishad, of an exclamation
made several times by a man named Uddālaka to his son
Śvetaketu. The “That” refers to a realm or state of being, known
as “Brahman.” One who experiences it is called a “knower of
Brahman” (brahmavid). Uddālaka was a knower of Brahman,
speaking to his son out of his direct experience.
The classical Upanishads are expressions of, and invitations
to, this direct experiencing. Understanding them, therefore, is a
matter of understanding what that experiencing is like, not a
matter of believing or knowing some truths about the world.
Thus, elucidating the meaning of this title will convey a sense of
the experience of Brahman, which is what the Upanishads as a
whole are about.
But, of course, their ultimate aim is not simply to produce
understanding in this sense, but rather to bring about the direct
experiencing of the Brahman-realm. Even Śaṅkara, the most
highly esteemed expositor of the Upanishads, a man noted for his
theoretical acumen, considered direct experience as surpassing all
understanding. He is said to have regarded theoretical reflection
as one hundred times more efficacious than oral instruction,
meditation as one hundred thousand times more efficacious than
theoretical reflection, and direct experience of the Brahman-realm
as defying all comparison.
The revised title of the essay is: “‘You Are That!’: The
Upanishads Read Through Western Eyes.” In making this change,
Robert Drueker is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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I have followed Aristotle’s recommendation to begin with the
things best known to us, where “us,” in this case, refers to the St.
John’s community. Thus, Part One will give a sense of what the
Brahman-realm is like by elaborating on an analogous experience
in Homer and Aristotle. Part Two will elucidate the experiencing
of Brahman in a more direct way.
Finally, many of the writings in the Upanishads are dialogues
involving a knower of Brahman. Yājñavalkya is the central figure
in the conversations in the oldest Upanishad. In working on the
lecture, I imagined him, a knower of Brahman, as my interlocutor.
Throughout the essay, I will allow the voice of Yājñavalkya to
provide his understanding of analogues between the Brahmanrealm and the worlds of Homer and Aristotle.
Part One: Νοεĩν and Ittisāl (Conjunction)
A. Homer
Homer frequently refers to human beings or gods waking up to,
or realizing (νοεĩν), the full significance of a situation.
Sometimes, on the other hand, what they realize is their ability to
wake up to the full meaning of a situation (νόος in some uses).2
The verb in the aorist expresses an individual’s sudden flash of
insight. For instance, Hektor, resisting his parents’ entreaties,
holds his position, as he watches Achilleus coming toward him.
He is pondering what might happen should he retreat or should he
offer to return Helen; but then Achilleus closes upon him: “And
trembling took hold of Hektor when the realization suddenly
struck him (ἐνόησεν) [what single combat against Achilleus really
meant], and he could no longer stand his ground there, but…fled,
frightened.” (II, 22.136-37).3 The use of the progressive aspect,
however, conveys the process of fitting pieces together gradually
to form a wholly new picture, as when Theoklymenos tells the
suitors that the realization is dawning upon him (νοέω) that there
is an evil on the way that they will not be able to avoid (O,
20.367-70).
Because of the intensity of the character’s involvement in the
situation, the experienced shift in significance is often accompanied by strong emotion, as is the case with Hektor. When the
DRUECKER
23
insight concerns an individual object instead of a situation, the
realization is always accompanied by such emotion; it is as if the
shift in the meaning of the situation were compressed into a single
thing or person. So, For example, Menelaos, having caught sight
of Paris, leaps down from his chariot. Then, Homer tells us,
“when [Paris] realized the full significance of Menelaus standing
there among the champions, the heart was shaken within him” (I,
3.29-31). The full significance here is that Menelaus is drawing
near Paris, seething with an overwhelming desire to kill him.
“Realization of significance” has a variety of meanings that
spread over a directional arc.4 A character begins in a situation in
which he has already seemingly recognized (γιγνώσκειν) the
surrounding things or people as definite individuals that are
familiar. Then, once awakened to their real significance, he or she
experiences a corresponding emotional impact; a way of dealing
with the newly perceived situation comes to light and the will to
do so arises. Thus, the present naturally extends itself into the
future. When the primary meaning is at either end of this arc, the
other parts of the arc are co-present. Thus, when the emphasis is
on present clarity of mind, the future is nonetheless kept in view.
(For instance, when Kirke tells Odysseus that no magic can work
on his ability always to realize what is the real meaning of the
situation in which he finds himself, she also has in mind the
insightful character of his future aims, plans, and actions [O,
10.329].) And, on the other hand, when the emphasis in on future
action, clear vision in the present is also involved. (For instance,
when, according to Achilleus, Peleus vowed to the river
Spercheus that Achilleus would sacrifice to him upon the latter’s
return home, this wish [νόον] was not a representation of a vague
future, but rather a distinct depiction of the wished-for future
action and of the detailed steps leading to it [I, 23.144-49].)
The realization of significance may or may not be prepared by
a thought process. But when it is, the realization is distinct from
the preceding reasoning, in the same way as “seeing” one of
Euclid’s proofs is different from figuring out how it is justified in
terms of previous propositions. For Yājñavalkya, realizing
Brahman can also be characterized as including an emotional
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response—joy (ānanda)—and a way of acting—calm responsiveness to the whole situation.
The realization may penetrate to great depth and extend far in
space and time, like that of Theoklymenonos mentioned earlier or
like that of Athena when she speaks to Achilleus as he is drawing
his sword to kill Agamemnon. The more intense the situation and
the deeper and broader the realization, the more likely it is that the
characters are raised above their ordinary abilities, so that they are
able to see almost all the implications and consequences of the
situation with unusual clarity and to act with extraordinary
foresight. This experience of being raised above the ordinary is a
divine manifestation.5
Homer most often mentions Athena and Apollo in such
moments. For instance, Odysseus’s sudden realization of the true
meaning of return—the moment when he recognized the right
time to reveal himself to Telemachos—occurs in the presence of
Athena (O, 16.155ff.). And Hektor’s sudden waking up to danger
when he was about to oppose Achilleus is Apollo’s manifesting
himself (I, 20.375ff.). These two examples point to the difference
between the two gods. Athena remains untroubled and serene in
the midst of action, while she discerns at every juncture what the
situation requires, plans the deed with precision, and readies
herself to bring it about energetically. Apollo, on the other hand,
is associated with a cognitive attitude of stately objectivity, wideranging gaze, distance and freedom, clarity and good form. He is
the god of the saving or preserving awareness (σωφροσύνη)
expressed in the Delphic dictum, “Know thyself,” meaning
“Realize what human beings really are, that is, how great a
distance separates them from the omnitemporal gods” (HG, 21617, 215, 52, 57, 59, 78-79, 66). Yājñavalkya would remark that
such traits as serenity in the midst of action, the freedom of a
ranging gaze, and saving, or preserving, awareness pertain to the
Brahman-realm as well.
In a manifestation of Athena or Apollo, the god is revealed as
the very essence of the realization. That is, the realization’s
ultimate meaning is that it is a ray of the divine, illumining human
life. Homer realizes that the complete lucidity in which we
DRUECKER
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sometimes act is a connection with something superior to us, even
though we think of it as a quality of our own minds. In decisive
moments, what a warrior realizes is both himself and the deity
together (HG, 7, 247, 174, 184-85). Yājñavalkya would comment
here that in the Upanishads, this non-separateness of the human
and divine is known as “non-duality” (advaita; BU, IV.3,32):
“Whoever meditates on a divinity that is other (anyām) [than
himself], thinking, ‘This [god] is one (anyah), I am another
(anyah),’ does not know [‘I am Brahman’]” (BU, I.4.10).
Homer’s recognition of moments in which the divine and the
human are non-dual is sharply opposed to a view that would see
Athena and Apollo as external causes of the events he is narrating
(HG, 213). Somewhat similarly, according to Yājñavalkya, we are
invited to awaken to Brahman not as an external cause, but rather
as what is most profound in our experience.6
When the god is present in moments of non-duality, the
warrior’s ego and personality recede into the background (HG,
241f.). That sort of impersonality, which also characterizes the
moment when we experience the truth of a Euclidean proposition,
is inherent in the Brahman-realm, according to Yājñavalkya.
The divine coming-to-presence has been said to occur at “the
critical moment when human powers suddenly converge, as if
charged by electric contact, on some insight, some resolution,
some deed.”7 Lightning comes forth from the clouds to strike
buildings or trees that have risen from the earth; so, too, the divine
suddenly emerges from the background to shock an individual
only when that individual has gone forth from himself toward the
background. Yājñavalkya could note that the instant of recognition of the Brahman realm is also compared to “a sudden flash
of lightning” (BU, II.3.6; cf. KeU, IV.4). Moreover, he would
think that moving toward the background might be, in some way,
analogous to a “moving-towards” Brahman—something like the
movement involved either in practicing meditation or in coming
to wonder, “Who am I?”
While in the examples given so far the divine manifestation
has come in an awakening to significance or in an elaborating of
a plan, this should not lead us to think the divine is encountered
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merely by turning inward. The appearance of the goddess is not,
for instance, Achilleus’s pondering whether to kill Agamemnon or
to check his anger (I, 1.193), but rather the resolution of his introspection in a flash of certitude (HG, 174, 48). Yājñavalkya would
agree that introspection neither characterizes the Brahman-realm
nor is a means thereto. However, there is, he would add, a
different sort of inward turn that can facilitate its realization.
There are many instances in which a god is present at a
moment when none of the characters is aware of it. But
sometimes a warrior, when awakening to the full significance of
his situation, may realize that his very awakening is itself the
manifestation of a god. An interesting example occurs when
Poseidon appears to the Aiantes in the likeness of Kalkas. At first
neither brother is aware of the presence of a god; but, after
Poseidon departs like a hawk, Aias son of Oïleus realizes that
some god, whom he does not recognize, has addressed them,
while Telemonian Aias notices only his own increased strength
and energy (I, 13.43-80). On other occasions the human being
recognizes the god by name—sometimes only after the encounter,
but sometimes already at its inception (HG, 207-08).
A god may be especially close to a particular individual in
that the human being regularly displays the qualities of the
particular god, as Athena acknowledges Odysseus does (O,
13.330-32; HG, 192-95). There is even one person who seems to
be fully awake to divine presence—Homer himself, who
sees events through and through even when the participants see only the surface. And often when the
participants sense only that a divine hand is touching
them the poet is able to name the god concerned and
knows the secret of his purpose (HG, 195-96).
According to Yājñavalkya, there is just as much idiosyncratic
variety in realizing Brahman as there is in recognizing the
presence of a god in moments of waking up to meaning: different
individuals respond differently, both in frequency and in degree,
to such events.
Up to this point in our consideration of Homer we have
DRUECKER
27
emphasized cognition. This is appropriate because cognition in a
broad sense is the way in which we come to realize Brahman.
However, this focus on cognition gives a distorted picture of the
world as Homer depicts it. For there are many gods—Ares,
Aphrodite, Poseidon, Hera, and others—who manifest
themselves in the world in addition to Athena and Apollo, who are
especially associated with realizing significance. Moreover, the
appearance of a deity often involves an inner phenomenon other
than awakening, as when Hektor’s body is “packed full of force
and fighting strength” (I, ,17.211-12) or when Athena puts
“courage into the heart” of Nausikaa (O, 6.140). Yājñavalkya
could point out that these phenomena of enlivening, energizing,
and strengthening were included, along with realization, in what
the Upanishads call the “Inner Controller” (antaryāmin; BU,
III.7.1).8 He might also remark that Homer did not think of nonduality as limited to cognition, because he recognized that these
phenomena, too, were divine manifestations.
In addition to a character’s “waking up” to the presence of a
god, a deity often manifests itself by affecting a character from
outside. Most notably, Patroklos’s aristeia was put to an end by
Apollo, who “stood behind him, and struck his back and his broad
shoulders with a flat stroke of the hand so that his eyes spun” (I,
16.791-92). Yājñavalkya would point out that events like this
might be echoes of Brahman as “pouring forth,” or “emitting,” all
things. (MuU, I.1.7.) He would add that, just as Homer recognizes
the one Apollo both in his striking of Patroklos and in Hektor’s
realization mentioned earlier, so too the Upanishads express the
realization that the inner controlling and the outer emitting are
one when it states: “This Self is…Brahman” (BU, II.5.19).
B. Aristotle and Averroes
For help in thinking through the experiences highlighted by
Homer, we turn to Aristotle. In moments of realization, we are in
a state of what he called “being-at-work,”—what I will call
“activity.” Activity is “complete over any time whatever”; it is not
a temporal phenomenon. By contrast, a motion “is in time and
directed at some end…and is complete when it brings about that
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at which it aims” (NE, 1174a15-21). For example, whereas the
activity of dancing is “all there” at each moment, the motion of
learning to dance is complete only when you’ve actually become
a dancer.
Homer’s gods Athena and Apollo are manifested in activities
of ours that would be “choiceworthy in themselves” (NE, 1144a1)
even if they didn’t effect anything in addition. The active state of
our ability to awaken to significance is what is best and most
powerful in us and is “either divine itself or the most divine of the
things in us.” When it is directed toward the most divine, timeless
things, it is a pure beholding (NE, 1177a13-21).
One living in this state of activity would be living a life that
“is divine as compared with a human life.” Hence, Aristotle said,
“one ought to immortalize” (NE, 1177b25-34); that is, one ought
to be as much as possible in this best state of activity—the activity
of Homer’s Athena and Apollo, or of Aristotle’s impersonal
divinity. When we are in that state, we are in the same state over
a limited extent of time as is the divine over the whole of time.9
Moreover, “each person would even seem to be this [best state of
activity]” (NE, 1178a1). “[A]nd so the person who loves and
gratifies this is most a lover of self” (NE, 1168b33).
Yājñavalkya could comment that the Brahman-realm, too,
has the characteristics of being an atemporal phenomenon, of
being a sort of pure beholding, and of being our true self.
Moreover, it, too, is impersonal, not divided up into essentially
different Athena-moments and Apollo-moments. Finally, knowers
of Brahman, living the life of their true self, are leading a life that
transcends the human. Consequently, since most of us live in
ignorance of Brahman, most of us are not living the life of our
true self.
Aristotle seems to agree formally with this conclusion: it is,
after all, an implication of Apollo’s injunction “Know thyself.” It
might be objected, however, that Aristotle’s characterization of
the true self as divine contradicts Apollo’s insistence on
separating the human from the divine. Yājñavalkya would reply
that when a similar objection is voiced in his tradition, the
response is that the contradiction is only apparent. Someone who
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29
took the “You” in “You are That!” to refer to his ordinary sense of
self, would be engaging in self-inflation. Students are encouraged
to ponder “Who am I?” as a practice, in order to shift them from
the ordinary to the true sense of self. So, Yājñavalkya and
Aristotle could both take “Know thyself” in a double sense: “With
respect to your ordinary sense of self, think mortal thoughts, but
recognize that the true you is divine activity.”
In On the Soul Aristotle began to sketch what might be
entailed in realizing his analogue to “You are That!”—namely, the
immortalizing involvement in the best activity. One of Aristotle’s
foremost interpreters, Averroes, has developed Aristotle’s blackand-white sketch into a detailed, full-color portrait that bears a
striking resemblance to the Upanishadic picture. To that portrait
we now turn.10
The customary name in philosophical texts for Aristotle’s best
state of activity is “intellection.” Following Aristotle’s lead,
Averroes begins his account of intellection with what is clearer to
us, and he ends it with what is clearer by nature. There are three
main figures in his initial portrait—the “material intellect,” the
“disposed intellect,” and the “agent intellect.” Averroes compares
intellection, as Aristotle does, to a craft in which some material,
like clay, receives a form—say, that of a bowl (OS, 430a10-14).
When I acquire a simple intelligible, such as, ‘straight line,’ it is
received as form by the material intellect—which, not being
corporeal, is material only in the sense that it serves as materialfor. My disposed intellect,11 now having the acquired intelligible
as an active disposition (ἕξις), is in what Aristotle calls a first state
of maintaining itself (έχειν) in (ἔν) its completed condition
(τέλος), with respect to this intelligible. Henceforth we shall say,
somewhat inaccurately, that the mind in this state is “in first
actuality.” By analogy, we could say that Suzanne Farrell, the
accomplished dancer, is “in first actuality” when not dancing
(since she maintains all the dispositions of a dancer), but is “in
second actuality” when dancing (since she then makes use of
those dispositions.) Similarly, when I am not contemplating the
intelligible ‘straight line,’ my intellect is “in first actuality” (since
I have the disposition necessary to contemplate it if I so choose),
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but when I am contemplating it, perhaps in the course of a demonstration, my intellect is “in second actuality” (since I am then
making use of the disposition).
According to Aristotle, “the soul never engages in intellection
without an appearance” (431a24), which Averroes takes to mean
imaginative appearance.12 Thus, when I am led up to (ἐπάγεσθαι)
a particularly suggestive instance, say a good image of a straight
line, that image specifies that the material intellect will receive the
intelligible ‘straight line.’ Averroes said that the material intellect,
as so determined by my imagination,13 is “conjoined” with it and
that my disposed intellect is precisely this conjunction of the
material intellect with my imagination.
One of the unusual features of Averroes’ interpretation is that
according to him, there is only one material intellect. My disposed
intellect and your disposed intellect are the results of its conjunctions with the different images in our respective imaginations; we
actualize it differently. In this way the one material intellect is
said to be incidentally many. (Zedler 1951, 175.) Moreover, since
my imagination is corporeal, the intelligibles of mundane things
in me, and, consequently, my disposed intellect itself, are
generable and corruptible.14 Yājñavalkya might also say that the
one Brahman is incidentally many individual selves (jīvātman).
Now, before the intelligible ‘“straight line’” can be received
by the material intellect, the irrelevant portions of the image in
which it is “embodied” must be taken away (ἀφαιρεῖσθαι). This
abstraction brings it into the state of actual intelligibility. To
elucidate this act of abstraction, Averroes referred to another of
Aristotle’s comparisons: The passage from potential to actual
intelligibility is like a color’s transition from potential visibility to
actual visibility when the lights in a room are turned on. The
“light” that illumines the darkness of the image, producing the
abstraction of the latent intelligible, is the agent intellect.
This picture of the agent intellect as shining from the outside
onto a potential intelligible embedded in an image is, however,
only the way it first appears to us. Averroes said that if we
consider its role in the intellectual insights we have when we draw
conclusions from the intelligibles that we have acquired—for
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31
example, the insight that one and only one straight line may be
drawn between two points—we come to a deeper view. In reality,
the agent intellect is related to the intelligibles of my disposed
intellect as form to material. It is as though the agent intellect
were a light full of Color itself. What really happens when it
shines on an image is that the image’s conjunction with Color
itself draws out of the latter a particular color, one that had been
potentially within Color itself. Then that particular color is
received by the material intellect. Even in my acts of intellecting
simple intelligibles in the world, the agent intellect is incidentally
in partial conjunction with my imagination.15 Since I am, then,
intellecting it to some degree, it must be at work as the form of
my disposed intellect.
For Averroes, this understanding means that the agent
intellect itself is the source of the intelligibility of the corporeal
world. For since the image arises on the basis of sense perception
of things in the world, the potential intelligibles in my imagination are due to the potential intelligibles in the things in the
world. Consequently, Averroes takes the agent intellect to be
Aristotle’s unmoved mover from the Metaphysics (1072b18-30;
1075a5-11). Hence, there is only one agent intellect; and it is its
very activity of unchanging, eternal self-intellection.
Correlatively, the potential intelligibles of things in the world are
their actualities, their being-at-work maintaining themselves in
their respective states of completeness. Their intelligibility
depends entirely upon the agent intellect in the following way: for
each of them its state of completeness is the closest state to the
agent intellect’s self-intellection that its materials are capable of
attaining.16 The agent intellect’s responsibility for all intelligible
being makes it analogous to the one source of all existence in
Yājñavalkya’s tradition.
But how can the self-directed intellection of the agent
intellect be responsible for our intellection of the intelligibles in
things outside of itself in the world, when it and the object of its
intellection are absolutely one? Reflexively turned toward itself,
it is not aware of the multiplicity of the potential intelligibles of
mundane things as such. Yet it nevertheless does comprehend
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them, somewhat in the way that the craft of pottery-making
comprehends the forms of all the bowls for which it could be
responsible. But to be actively responsible for the intellection of
this intelligible on this occasion, the agent intellect must also be
“turned outwards,” as it were, away from itself, in order to shine
on the appearances of mundane things in the imaginations of
individual human beings.
When it is turned outward but still not illuminating any
appearance, the agent intellect seems to be lacking any intelligible. And yet as an image arises, the agent intellect will bring one
of the intelligibles into focus. Thus, surprisingly, the agentintellect-as-turned-outward is pure potentiality, pure material-for;
it is the material intellect. In order to appear as such, that is, as
empty of intelligibles of mundane things, it must become
“temporarily ignorant of itself” (Blaustein 1984, 214-15).
This self-forgetfulness is concretely realized by its
conjunction with our imaginations. By virtue of that conjunction,
the agent intellect becomes “ignorant” of being the self-intellecting source of all intelligibility; it appears, instead, in each of
us in a double form—first, as our partially actualized receptivity
for intelligibles (our disposed intellect) and, second, as light
eliciting those intelligibles by abstraction from our images. The
agent intellect’s ignorance of itself seems to be in remarkable
agreement with the role of ignorance in the Upanishads:
according to Yājñavalkya a knower of Brahman “knows
knowledge and ignorance, both of them, together” (IU, 11). For
Brahman, too, turns outward, so that ignorance, that is, awareness
of multiplicity, is one of its aspects (Aurobindo 1996, 61-62 and
94). But Brahman is both knowledge and ignorance; the two are
inseparable (Aurobindo 1996, 58 and 72).
From the perspective of an individual human being, as I learn
more, the agent intellect becomes the form of my disposed
intellect to an ever greater degree. In this way my three principal
differences from it will decrease. First, in acquiring more intelligibles, my disposed intellect becomes less and less a partial view
of the agent intellect. Second, in advancing to intelligibles that are
less and less referred to the corporeal world, my disposed intellect
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becomes purer.17 Third, in embracing ever more encompassing
intelligibles, it approaches the agent intellect’s unitary vision.
Ultimately, while still “in this life” (Ivry 1966, 83), I may
arrive at the point where I have acquired all the intelligibles.18
Then I will have achieved a state of complete conjunction19 with
the agent intellect. My disposed intellect will have lost all traces
of individuality,20 which are what make it my disposed intellect; it
will have perished as such. All of me that is not intellect is “cut
off” from my intellect, which is identical with the agent intellect
(Blaustein 1984, 272). In this sense the state of complete
conjunction has been said to involve an “existential break” from
the world.21 Once again Yājñavalkya would recognize in this
existential break an analogue, at a deep experiential level, to a
prominent feature of the realization of Brahman.
In complete conjunction, I experience myself permanently
(Ivry 1996, 83) as shining forth intelligibility, but this “myself” is
not the self I used to think I was, for the conjunction removes that
which had prevented me from recognizing that the agent intellect
is my form.22 Averroes says that at this point the agent intellect,
united with us as our form, functions as our sole operative
principle.23 We might wonder what life in this state of conjunction
would be like. One suggestion is that I might experience it as “a
wakeful loss of rationality,” a loss of consciousness of my
humanity (Blaustein 1984, 272). I would not be engaged in
thinking things out; I would not be conscious of myself as an
individual, as a member of the human species.
Alternatively, guided by his own experience, Yājñavalkya
would propose that perhaps I might be aware of myself (what
Aristotle in the Ethics pointed to as my true self) engaged in selfintellection, while simultaneously being aware of experiencing
my ordinary self involved in its everyday activities against this
backdrop. Yājñavalkya would offer two possibilities, the second
of which would not be analogous to his own experience. First, in
each instance of intellection, I could perhaps experience the agent
intellect as transitioning from unitary self-intellection to the
offering of an aspect of itself to my imagination. Second,
analogous to the end of the path outlined in the Yoga-Sutras (that
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is, kaivalya),24 it could be that when I am engaged in self-intellection I ignore the particulars of the world and desist from
everyday activities, and so, ultimately, wither away and die.25
Part Two: Cit (Pure Awareness)
To begin our consideration of pure awareness, let us return to
Aristotle. In the Nichomachean Ethics he writes:
[O]ne who is seeing is aware (αỉσθάνεται) that he is
seeing, and one who is hearing [is aware] that he is
hearing,…[and, in general,] whenever we are
perceiving [we are aware] that we are perceiving and
whenever we are engaged in intellection (νοῶμεν) [we
are aware] that we are engaged in intellection
(1170a29-31).26
To what aspect of experience is Aristotle pointing here? Many
believe this passage means that perceptual consciousness is
accompanied by a reflection on, or a thought about, that
consciousness.27 For example, I know that I’m looking at you
seated there before me. However, such reflection seems to occur
only intermittently. Hence, an alternative interpretation has been
proposed,28 according to which perceptual consciousness is
always “selfaware”—that is, aware (of) itself,29 but not conscious
of itself—although, at any given time, we may notice
selfawareness to a greater or lesser degree. Yājñavalkya would
emphasize that only diligent practice could enable me to
recognize the difference between reflective consciousness and
selfawareness in my own experience.
To clarify the difference between selfawareness and reflective
consciousness, we shall draw upon some descriptions of
experience by the philosopher J.-P. Sartre.30 Consciousness is
necessarily always aware (of) itself, but precisely as being
conscious of an object beyond itself. “[T]his awareness (of)
consciousness…is not positional; that is, consciousness is not for
itself its own object. Its object is outside of it by nature…. We
shall call such a consciousness ‘consciousness of the first
degree’” (S, 23-24). In this essay, “consciousness” will always
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mean positional consciousness, consciousness of an object.
As an example of first degree consciousness, let us take my
perceptual consciousness-of-a-coffee-cup-on-a-table—say, in the
mode of staring-at.31 In this experience, the perceptual
consciousness is not an object for itself, whereas the coffee-cupon-a-table is an object for it. But in each such act of
consciousness, there lives an attentive presence by virtue of
which the consciousness is aware (of) itself. When, as is usually
the case, the attentive presence goes unnoticed, we experience
only a dim awareness (of) consciousness.
Yājñavalkya could point out that in his tradition this
awareness is called the “witness” (sākshī; ŚU, VI.12-14) and the
self-aware quality of consciousness is called “self-luminousness”
(svajyotir). He might add that this is what he was referring to
when he said, “You cannot see the seer of seeing; you cannot hear
the hearer of hearing; you cannot think of the thinker of thinking;
you cannot perceive the perceiver of perceiving” (BU, III.4.2);
and when he said, “It is the unseen seer, the unheard hearer, the
unthought thinker, the unperceived perceiver. Other than this
there is no seer…hearer…perceiver” (BU, 7.23). Sartre would
seem to agree with him that this awareness cannot be the object
of consciousness: this sphere “is a sphere of absolute existence,
that is, of pure spontaneities, which are never objects” (S, 77).
As opposed to this selfaware, first-degree consciousness-ofobjects, which makes up most of our waking lives, there arises
from time to time “a consciousness directed onto [the firstdegree] consciousness, [that is,] a consciousness which takes [the
first-degree] consciousness as its object.” Sartre calls it a “seconddegree” or “reflecting consciousness.” Whereas in the previous
case there was no duality at all to synthesize, here “we are in the
presence of a synthesis of two consciousnesses, of which one is
consciousness of the other.” When I think, “Staring at this coffee
cup on the table is wasting time,” this act of reflective
consciousness involves a synthesis of the thinking consciousness
and the reflected-upon consciousness-of-the-coffee-cup.
Moreover, just like first-degree consciousness, second-degree
consciousness—my thinking, in this instance—is self-aware (S,
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28-29).
When the thinking consciousness posits the previously
unreflected-upon staring consciousness as its object, it is not its
own staring that it is positing. What the reflecting consciousness
states about the staring consciousness does not concern itself; it
concerns the staring consciousness, which the reflecting
consciousness reflects upon. Hence, what reflecting
consciousness is turns out to be selfaware consciousness of
another, prior, selfaware consciousness, which, in turn, is
consciousness of an object that is not a consciousness. Reflecting
consciousness really does re-flect; that is, it bends backward to
look at an earlier moment of consciousness.
The fact that it is not its own staring that the thinking
consciousness posits in reflecting on the staring consciousness
raises the question whether the I that seems to be thinking “is that
of the consciousness reflected upon” and not, in fact, an I
supposed to be “common to the two superimposed consciousnesses.” Indeed, one suspects that the reason why every reflection
possesses a sense of self is that the reflective act itself gives birth
to the sense of self in the consciousness that is reflected upon (S,
28-29).32 Sartre offers an example in order to test this hypothesis:
I was absorbed just now in my reading. I am going to
seek to recall the circumstances of my reading….
Thus I am going to revive…also a certain thickness of
un-reflected-upon consciousness, since the objects
were able to be perceived only by that consciousness
and remain relative to it. That consciousness must not
be posited as the object of my reflection; on the
contrary, I must direct my attention onto the revived
objects, but without losing sight of the un-reflectedupon consciousness, while maintaining a sort of
complicity with it and making an inventory of its
content in a non-positional way. The result is not in
doubt. While I was reading, there was consciousness
of the book, of the heroes of the novel, but the I was
not inhabiting that consciousness (S, 30; italics in the
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last sentence added).
Here Sartre reawakens the original self-aware consciousness and
dwells in the awareness.
That awareness is also a precondition for reflection. Should
he reflect, upon being absorbed in his readings, “I was absorbed
in my reading,” then, instead of dwelling in the awarenesscomponent of the original consciousness, he would, as it were,
transform it into an act of consciousness, the object of which is
the original consciousness, (of) which the awareness was aware.
There certainly is an I present to that second-order
consciousness.33 So, we may call it “self-consciousness.”
Based on this I of reflection, Sartre shows how I construct a
unified sense of self in three stages: first, as a unity of states, like
my hatred of Peter; then as a unity of actions, like my playing a
piano sonata; and finally as a unity of qualities, like my spitefulness. For instance, let us suppose a first-order consciousness of
disgust and anger, present together with the perception of Peter. If
the self-consciousness reflected only on what was appearing in
the first-order consciousness, it would be thinking, “I feel
disgusted with Peter.” But instead, the angry disgust at Peter
appears as a profile, or perspectival view, of the disposition
“hatred of Peter,” just as a house will show itself to me in different
profiles depending upon where I am standing. The hatred appears
to be showing a “side” of itself through the momentary
experience of angry disgust. To the self-consciousness, the angry
disgust appears to be emanating from the hatred. On a later
occasion, perhaps, the hatred will appear upon reflection as an
actualization of a quality of spitefulness, which is in me (S, 4546, 51, 53). But in neither case does the self-consciousness realize
that the hatred or the spitefulness is arising in the moment of
reflection; rather it supposes that the state or the quality was
already there in the first-order consciousness.34
This process resulting in a sense of self leads me to say things
like “my consciousness,” when in fact “[t]he I is not the owner of
consciousness; it is the object of consciousness” (S, 77).
Yājñavalkya could report that a process of construction of the
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sense of self (aham-kāra) also figures prominently in the
Upanishadic tradition. It leads to the arising of many fears and
desires, which, in turn, function as barriers to the realization of
Brahman by keeping us “glued” to objects. I note that there is a
remarkable agreement here with Sartre, who wrote: “But perhaps
the essential role [of the sense of self] is to mask to consciousness
its own spontaneity…. Hence, everything happens as if
consciousness…were hypnotizing itself over that sense of self,
which it constituted” (S, 81-82).
Usually we do not notice the awareness-aspect of
consciousness because we are so taken up with what is appearing
to consciousness. Yet, on occasion, awareness may stand out in
our experience. For instance: Some people are engaged in a
heated discussion at an outdoor café, when a nearby car suddenly
backfires. Several of the participants may be so caught up in the
conversation that they don’t even notice the loud sound; others
may be startled and shift their attention to the street; someone
who was anchored in awareness, however, would notice, but not
be jarred by, the sound.
Another example: On a good day the football quarterback Joe
Montana, at the top of his game, would experience a pass play as
follows.35 He was conscious of the linemen rushing at him, of his
receivers running downfield, and so on. But instead of looking
with hurried, anxious glances, he experienced an awareness
spread over the whole unfolding scene. All the players seemed to
be moving in slow motion, and everything appeared with great
clarity and distinctness. He was keenly aware of his own body, the
motions of his limbs and an overall sense of relaxation, as his arm
drew back and the ball headed toward the receiver.36 Taken by
itself this example may mislead us into thinking that awareness is
dependent on the attainment of a certain level of skill, in this case,
that of an MVP quarterback. But the previous example and the
following one make it clear that this is not the case.
A third illustration: Some automobile drivers experience
freeway traffic as follows: “First, one driver cuts me off; then a
slowpoke is holding me up. My consciousness narrows to focus
on the offending driver; and, irritated, I react by honking or
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39
suddenly changing lanes.” Another driver may perceive the same
cars on the beltway as if they were moving in a force field. She
experiences that field as calling forth the alterations in her driving
required in order to maintain a smooth flow of traffic.
A fourth instance: “Surgeons say that during a difficult
operation they have the sensation that the entire operating team is
a single organism, moved by the same purpose; they describe it as
a “ballet” in which the individual is subordinated to the group
performance” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 65).
A fifth example: The following story shows a transition out of
awareness into self-consciousness:
Suppose a woman is engaged in sewing something. A
friend enters the room and begins speaking to her. As
long as she listens to her friend and sews in
[awareness], she has no trouble doing both. But if she
gives her attention to her friend’s words and a thought
arises in her mind as she thinks about what to reply,
her hands stop sewing; if she turns her attention to her
sewing and thinks about that, she fails to catch everything her friend is saying, and the conversation does
not proceed smoothly. In either case….she has transformed [awareness] into thought. As her thoughts fix
on one thing, they’re blank to all others, depriving the
mind of its freedom.37
This example enables us to avoid the misconception that
awareness is incompatible with words. For it was a shift in the
way in which she attended to speech, or to her sewing, that led to
the woman’s loss of the ability to attend to both simultaneously.
A sixth and final case, as described by Merleau-Ponty (1945):
Being most of the time in the consciousness-mode, we live in a
world that “only stirs up second-hand thoughts in us.” Our mind
is taken up with “thoughts, already formulated and already
expressed, which we can recall silently to ourselves and by which
we give ourselves the illusion of an interior life. But this supposed
silence is in reality full of words rattling around.” However,
occasionally we may “rediscover primordial silence, underneath
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the words’ rattling around.” Then we pass from the mode of
consciousness-of-objects to dwell in awareness. We experience “a
certain emptiness,” “a certain lack which seeks to fill itself,” to be
transformed into speech (213-14). Then there can emerge “an
authentic word, one which formulates something for the first
time”—such as “that of the child who is pronouncing her first
word, of the lover who is discovering his feeling” (207-08), or of
“the writer who is saying and thinking something for the first
time” (214). In the mode of awareness, we can live through a sort
of original emergence.
Words usually serve to keep our thoughts moving within
already formulated articulations. They could be said to function
like “preciptitates” (Niederschläge)38 of previous “chemical
reactions,” brought about by our own words or those of others.
However, when awareness becomes prominent, it acts as a
catalyst, which facilitates a fresh chemical reaction.
All the above examples manifest an awake, keen involvement
in experience together with an absence of the sense of self and of
self-focused emotions and motivations from the foreground. And
each of them brings to the foreground a different property of
awareness: the first, “unstuckness” to objects; the second,
spaciousness, not merely in the spatial and the temporal senses;
the third, responsiveness to dynamic qualities of the surrounding
field; the fourth, organic connectedness with whom or what39 is in
the field; the fifth, motion away from the directing I; and the sixth,
a sense of emptiness out of which newness arises spontaneously.
We might say that a good seminar could give evidence of
some of these signs of increased awareness. If, over time, the
participants have developed seminar skills analogous to the skills
developed by the members of a surgical team, the seminar might
be experienced as a sort of ballet. Along with the development of
those skills, some of the members may have cultivated their
awareness to some degree, paralleling the range of levels of
awareness in the operating team. That cultivation may enable
them to experience “a certain emptiness,” from which an
“authentic word” may emerge with greater frequency.
Such characteristics of awareness as those listed above have
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led people in certain pursuits, such as martial arts, to cultivate it,
so that it will remain reliably in the foreground. In developing a
painterly vision,40 for instance, one must learn to forget what
things are, in order to see how they are actually appearing to the
eye—which means, how they are coming into being before our
eyes. As Merleau-Ponty says of Cézanne: “It is the mountain that
he interrogates with his gaze. What exactly does he ask of it? To
unveil the means, visible and not otherwise, by which it is making
itself a mountain before our eyes.”41
We might expand on this account in the following way. As a
potential painter’s awareness becomes more prominent, she no
longer sees things as already “finished off,” but, instead, as
having a potential for greater “aliveness.” It is as if they were
calling to her to join in their emergence. Then she may heed the
appeal and begin to paint. Now it is this particular piece of fruit
before her that she captures “coming into being before her eyes”
in such a way that it can do so later before our eyes.42
Another example of the cultivation of awareness is found in
psychoanalysis. In his recommendations on the proper attitude to
be adopted by the analyst, Freud counsels a state of mind
possessing, first, an absence of reasoning or
deliberate attempts to select, concentrate or understand; and [second,] even, equal and impartial
attention to all that occurs within the field of
awareness…. This technique, says Freud…“consists
simply in not directing one’s notice to anything in
particular and in maintaining the same ‘evenly
suspended attention’…in the face of all that one
hears” (Epstein 1904, 194).43
That is, the analyst deliberately withdraws from consciousnessof-objects and dwells in the awareness component of
consciousness. This open attentional attitude is to be distinguished, on the one hand, from a merely passive attention, in
which the mind wanders freely from object to object, and, on the
other, from a focal attentional attitude, searching for a particular
meaning (Epstein 1904, 195). Partly because evenly suspended
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attention was criticized as unattainable,44 Freud’s prescriptions to
practice it did not become integrated into psychoanalytic training
programs.
However, Wilfred Bion, perhaps the most thoughtful psychoanalyst of the latter part of the twentieth century, forcefully
advocated this practice in the following terms:
[T]he capacity to forget, the ability to eschew desire
and understanding, must be regarded as essential
discipline for the psycho-analyst. Failure to practise
this discipline will lead to a steady deterioration in the
powers of observation whose maintenance is essential.
The vigilant submission to such discipline will by
degrees strengthen the analyst’s mental powers just in
proportion as lapses in this discipline will debilitate
them….
To attain to the state of mind essential for the
practice of psycho-analysis I avoid any exercise of
memory…. When I am tempted to remember the
events of any particular session I resist the
temptation…. If I find that some half-memory is
beginning to obtrude I resist its recall….
A similar procedure is followed with regard to
desires: I avoid entertaining desires and attempt to
dismiss them from my mind. For example…it interferes with analytic work to permit desires for the
patient’s cure, or well-being, or future to enter the
mind. Such desires…lead to progressive deterioration
of [the analyst’s] intuition….
[There is an aspect of ultimate reality] that is
currently presenting the unknown and unknowable [in
the consulting room]. This is the ‘dark spot’ that must
be illuminated by ‘blindness’ [that is, ignorance].
Memory and desire are ‘illuminations’ that destroy the
value of the analyst’s capacity for observation as a
leakage of light into a camera might destroy the value
of the film being exposed (Bion [1970] 1983, 51-52,
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55-56, 69).
The effect of failing to observe this discipline is to interpret
what the patient says in terms of what the analyst wishes or
already “knows,” thus closing her off from what may be emerging
for the first time in the current hour. Bion’s psychoanalytic state
of mind may be comparable to Socratic ignorance. Both represent
an opening up of the self in conversation, for the sake of noticing
emergent possibilities that would otherwise remain unthought.
Another area in which a practice has been advocated for the
enhancement of awareness is philosophy. In the early twentieth
century, Edmund Husserl proposed pursuing wisdom by
following a path that he called “phenomenology.” By this he
meant an account of the things appearing to you precisely in the
way in which they actually appear.
Philosophy students sometimes think that studying phenomenology entails mainly reading books. However, learning to see the
things appearing to you precisely in the way in which they
actually appear takes practice. Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s best
known student, had great difficulty at the beginning of his study
of phenomenology.
It concerned the simple question how thinking’s
manner of procedure which called itself “phenomenology” was to be carried out…. My perplexity
decreased slowly…only after I met Husserl personally
in his workshop…. Husserl’s teaching took place in a
step-by-step training in phenomenological “seeing”
which at the same time demanded that one relinquish
the untested use of philosophical knowledge…. I
myself practiced phenomenological seeing, teaching
and learning in Husserl’s proximity after 1919.45
The phenomenological seeing that one would practice is
founded on an act called “the phenomenological reduction.”
While the reduction was instituted in the service of phenomenological philosophy, Husserl was aware of a powerful transformative effect it could have upon the person practicing it:
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Perhaps it will even turn out that the total phenomenological attitude, and the [reduction] belonging to it,
essentially has, first of all, the vocation of effecting a
complete personal transformation, which would, in the
first place, be comparable to a religious conversion,
but which beyond that contains within itself the
significance of being the greatest existential transformation to which humanity as humanity is called.46
Yājñavalkya would note at this point that the designation
“greatest existential transformation”—like the earlier “existential
break” associated with conjunction in Averroes—also fits with the
experience of “waking up to” (pratibodham) Brahman (KeU,
II.4).
In characterizing the phenomenological reduction, I shall
borrow the descriptions of the Husserl’s closest collaborator in his
later years, Eugen Fink, because they are vivid and strongly
suggestive of awakening to Brahman.47 The phenomenological
reduction is a two-part act (F, 41). Husserl called the first
component of that act a “disconnection” (Ausschaltung) or an
epoché (ἐποχή)—a suspension of the “natural attitude,” the
attitude in which we take things for granted, or as a matter of
course (als selbstverständlich).
Disconnection means that you deliberately abstain from all
beliefs; you inhibit your customary acceptance of what “counts”
(das Geltende) for you (F, 39-40). In Sartre’s terms, you cease
living in acts of positional consciousness. While remaining
disconnected, as we observed Sartre doing, you turn your
attention from the objects of consciousness to the awareness
ingredient in consciousness-of-objects. You are not caught up
with objects, but are attentively “spread” over the whole of
consciousness-of-objects, without positing that whole as an
object. And you alter your mode of attention from an active
searching-for to a receptive letting-things-come. You are learning
to do something involuntary, like preparing to receive “the
visitation of sleep,” which comes as the god Dionysus visits his
followers, when they no longer are distinct from the role they are
playing.48 You are not gradually acquiring things in the way the
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disposed intellect acquires intelligibles.
The disconnection includes the “nullification” of the sense of
yourself as an empirical human being—it “un-humanizes”
(entmenschlicht) you inasmuch as it “lays bare the…onlooker in
himself” that is “already at work” in you, into which you now
“fade away” (F, 40). In the terminology of this essay, you
disidentify with your sense of self, and you pass into awareness
instead of remaining in consciousness. Yājñavalkya might remark
that the realization of Brahman involves a similar correlation
between the deconstruction of the sense of self (nir-aham-kāra)
and a fading away into the “witness,” which, as we have seen, was
already at work.
You are now in a position to notice precisely what appears to
you in just the way in which it appears. As with Freud’s evenly
suspended attention, all the phenomena are treated equally; none
is assumed in advance to have priority over the others. As in the
case of painterly vision, you are not imposing your knowledge on
your experiencing; you are operating “prior” to your identification of things or events. Your going backwards involves a sort
of reversal of the outward-turning action of the agent intellect.
For the agent intellect elicited intelligibles from their latent state
in the appearances, whereas the disconnection goes back behind
those intelligibles, which, due to language, are already at work in
our ordinary experience of the appearances. In its open attentiveness, the disconnection has an “empty” relationship to
experience, perhaps somewhat like the agent intellect in its
“empty” state as material intellect.
The second component of the phenomenological reduction,
the reducing proper, is a leading-back.49 In the reducing, “while
explicitly inquiring backwards behind the acceptednesses…with
respect to your belonging to the world,” you “blast open
(sprengen),” through transcendental insight, the “captivation and
captivity (Befangenheit)” caused by those world-acceptednesses.
You experience this as a “breakthrough” (Durchbruch; FK, 348).
As a result, you discover for the first time that a primordial
conviction (Husserl calls this an Urdoxa) has been underlying all
of your experiences—an unformulated, implicit acceptance of the
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world and of yourself as belonging to it (F, 40-41). Here ‘world’
refers, not to the collection of all things, but to what is originally
given as a universal background, in the way a horizon is given for
vision. While you may have occasionally experienced a
breakdown of particular beliefs in the past, that did not shake your
implicit acceptance of the horizon.
You are now sharing in the onlooker’s awareness of the
world, which is the “universally flowing and continuing [world-]
apperception,” the “underground” (Untergrund) out of which
every act of consciousness springs up. In this sense, phenomenology is said to make the ultimate ground of the world available
to an experience (FK, 349, 352, 340),50 one in which we
experience “how…the world is coming about for us” (Husserl
1962, 147.29-32).
Yājñavalkya might accept the notion that painterly vision,
evenly suspended attention, and the phenomenological reduction
are at least partial Brahman-experiences, ones that go beyond the
spontaneously arising Brahman-moments on the football field or
on the highway. However, he would point out two differences.
First, they are cultivated in the service of other ends—painting,
healing patients, or pursuing wisdom—whereas realization of
Brahman is the supreme end (BU, IV.3.22), pursued for its own
sake. Second, in the other contexts awareness is to be actualized
only on particular occasions—before the canvas, in the consulting
room, or in the phenomenological “workshop”—whereas one
remains continually in the Brahman-realm.
According to Husserl, in going about the course of ordinary
life, the phenomenologist has the epoché as “an active-dispositional51 attitude to which we resolve ourselves once and for all”
and which “can be actualized again and again” (Husserl 1962,
153.36-37 and 140.19-20), like the dancer’s repeated re-actualizing of the dancing that she has as a first actuality. This raises the
question whether the knower of Brahman could be said to be
Brahman in this dispositional sense.
In the Upanishadic tradition you may engage in a meditative
practice, in which you could pass through several stages. At the
beginning you deliberately concentrate and turn your
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consciousness inward, while endeavoring to dwell more and more
in awareness (Sekida 1985, 62 and 93).52 You need to keep
reminding yourself to notice the awareness, which is always
there. Initially you cannot accomplish this while you are doing
something else, because a thing or event always captures your
attention.
After a while you will be able to maintain this centering of
yourself in awareness. While your mind gradually has become
dominated by awareness, you still occasionally experience
moments of conscious reflection on the immediately preceding
moment of awareness (Sekida 1985, 93).53 You are now “allowing
the mind to fluctuate.” The following analogy may convey some
sense of this experience.54 Suppose a neighbor were to ask you to
look after her children. When the children come, you could take
one of three different courses of action: first, you could abandon
responsibility by telling them that they can do whatever they want
as long as they don’t bother you; or, second, you could try to
control them by telling them what to do and what not to do; or,
third, you could
allow the children to play. This “allowing” is not
active, since you do not interfere. It is not passive,
since you are present with the children…in a total
way. It is like a cat sitting at a mouse hole. It appears
to be asleep, but let the mouse show but a whisker and
the cat will pounce. It is only by allowing that one
truly understands what allowing means.
“Allowing” brings awareness to the fore in a way that pushing
away and controlling do not.55 You are aware of movements from
focused to unfocused consciousness, of shifts from perceptual to
thinking consciousness, of fluctuations from consciousness-of to
empty awareness, and so forth, as well as of the reversals of all
these. “Allowing is…so to say, what fluctuating awareness is
‘made of.’”
Eventually no reflection is experienced any more; this total
wakefulness completely purifies one of the “sleepiness” which is
what the “habit” of consciousness really is (Sekida 1985, 62 and
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94).56 To be aware you don’t have to be conscious of something;
nor do you need to be someone, much less someone special (Low
1993, 40).
Positional consciousness-of-objects, which was first for us,
here shows itself to be in fact a derivative of non-positional
awareness, which is what is first in itself. Initially, consciousness
seemed to have the component of awareness; but now we may say
that awareness sometimes manifests itself partially in the form of
consciousness-of-objects, while in itself it is pure awareness (cit).
Again, this is quite analogous to what Averroes said of the agent
intellect. In itself it is pure, having no reference to the world; but,
through its outward turn, it conjoins itself with our imaginations,
resulting in the emergence from it of particular intelligibles.
Upon emerging from this absolute silence, you may be so
forcefully struck by something in the world that you consciously
recognize that you are just pure awareness (Sekida 1985, 95). You
momentarily become conscious of this “objectless being present
with the children in a total way” as yourself. You are now
conscious of having arrived in the Brahman-realm.57 Yājñavalkya
might note that this recognition is what is expressed in the words:
“I am Brahman!” (BU, I.4.10), adding that this experiencing of
pure awareness is what he was referring to when he said:
Though then he does not see [any thing], yet he does
not see while seeing. There is no cutting off of the
seeing of the seer…. But there is no second
(dvitīyam), no other (anyad), separate from him, that
he could see…. When there is some other (anyad),
then one can see…the other (BU, IV.3.23 and 31).
According to this account, pure awareness seems to be empty.
Yājñavalkya could respond that, while it is empty of objects, it is
full in the sense that it is an experiencing of the moment-tomoment “going forth of things in different directions”
(vyuccaranti), like “sparks from a fire” (BU, II.1.20).
Alternatively, it is an experiencing of the whole’s springing forth
(sambhavati), which is like a spider emitting (srjate) a thread of
its web, or like plants springing up from the earth (MuU, I.1.7). It
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is as if in pure awareness we had “gone backward” to a point just
“before” things, self, and world emerge. This brings to mind a
passage in Sartre: “Thus, each instant of our conscious life reveals
to us a creation ex nihilo...[—]this inexhaustible creation of
existence of which we are not the creators” (S, 79).
Yājñavalkya’s characterization of the fullness of pure
awareness is conveyed by the traditional name for the Brahmanrealm, saccidānanda. The three parts of the one word express the
oneness of pure existence (sat), pure awareness (cit), and pure joy
(ānanda). Since there is no “of,” as in “consciousness-of,”
awareness is pure sat rather than a consciousness of it. Fink seems
to be giving voice to the same experience when he refers to the
unique identity of the onlooker and the universally flowing worldapperception: as “there is…no other (anyad), separate from him,
that he could see,” so there are no objects to separate the onlooker
from the flowing world-apperception (FK, 355).
This oneness of existence and awareness appears in the
Thomistic branch of the Aristotelian tradition as follows: Each of
us exists by virtue of a separate act of “is-ing” (esse), which is
something other than our essence, our humanity. A human being
is, not by virtue of being human, but by participation in, or
reception of, is-ing from, absolute Is-ing, just as a piece of wood
that is afire is so by participation in Fire (ST, Q.3, A.4r). Absolute
Is-ing is like the Sun, and a human being is like some part of the
air. Each individual instantiation of the intelligible human essence
remains illuminated, that is, continues is-ing, only as long as
absolute Is-ing is shining on it (ST, Q.8, A.1r). That is why
Thomas says that what we call “creation” is, in fact, an ongoing
“flowing out, arising, springing out (emanatio)” (ST, Q.44, A.1r)
from absolute Is-ing. This much of Thomas’s view can help us to
understand how the Upanishadic experience of cit is an
experience of sat.
Jacques Maritain (1956) applied Thomas’s understanding of
the distinction between esse and essence to interpret the
experience of the knower of Brahman in the following way.58 In
reflecting consciousness we experience our soul in its acts. What
we experience in reflection is not our intelligible essence but
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rather our self as “prisoner of the mobility, of the multiplicity, of
the fugitive luxuriance of the phenomena and the operations
which emerge in us from the night of the unconscious—prisoner
of the apparent self” (145-46). But, as we have seen, the cultivation of awareness, as distinct from consciousness or reflecting
consciousness, enables those on the path toward realizing
Brahman to pass out of ordinary self-conscious experience and
into “an exceptional and privileged experience, emptying into the
abyss of subjectivity…to escape from the apparent self, in order
to reach the absolute Self” (146). These practitioners “strip
themselves of every image, of every particular representation, and
of every distinct operation to such a degree that…they reach not
the essence of their soul but its existence, substantial esse itself”
(148) “by an…annihilating connaturality” (146), in the absolute
silence of total wakefulness.
[F]rom the fact that existence is…limited only by the
essence that receives it…one can understand that this
negative experience, in reaching the substantial esse
of the soul, reaches, at once, both this existence
proper to the soul and existing in its metaphysical
profusion and the sources of existing, according as the
existence of the soul…is something that is emanating
and is pervaded by an inflow from which it holds
everything…. It is the sources of being in his soul that
the human being reaches in this way (153-54).
Thus, through practice in experiencing pure awareness (cit), the
knower of Brahman has come to experience himself as the inflow
of is-ing flowing out from absolute Is-ing (sat). One might say
that the transition from experiencing myself as the witness to
recognizing pure awareness is like going from having my finger
on the pulsing of the world to recognizing my finger as the
pulsing of the world. Maritain’s interpretation clearly distinguishes the Sun of Averroes’ outward-turned self-intellection of
intelligible essences from the Sun of outflowing self-aware
existence.
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Now we are in a position to say that when Śvetaketu realizes
“You are That,” he is experiencing himself as the outflow of sat
and he is recognizing, as his true self, pure awareness (of) the
continual emanation of sparks that are “on the way” to becoming
things—and that this recognizing is that very outflow. Moreover,
in this recognition Śvetaketu is what is recognized: “One who
knows the supreme Brahman becomes that very Brahman” (MuU,
III.2.9; cf. BU, IV.4.13) and “becomes this All” (BU, I.4.10).
Just as we wondered earlier what the daily experience of the
state of complete conjunction would be like, so now the
analogous question arises with respect to the Brahman-realm. In
the discussion of the phenomenological reduction, I raised the
possibility that we could acquire pure awareness as a first
actuality, in the sense of an active disposition. The knower of
Brahman would then alternate between pure awareness and
consciousness-of, in the way that I can “turn on” or “turn off” my
contemplation of the Pythagorean Theorem as I wish. This
suggestion would parallel Aristotle’s experience that we are, for
intermittent periods of time, in the same state as the divine itself
is over the whole of time. The difference would be that instead of
turning from one mode of consciousness (say, perceiving or
thinking) to another (intellecting), the knower of Brahman alternates at will between two different ways of total experiencing—
between consciousness and pure awareness. It would be
somewhat analogous to looking at the well-known ambiguous
figure of the duck-rabbit, and seeing it now as a duck, now as a
rabbit.
We learn from Yājñavalkya that living in the Brahman-realm
is, instead, like a hypothetical double seeing of both the duck and
the rabbit at once, rather than like a seeing of them in alternation
(Carter 1997, 54).59 The knower of Brahman is engaged with
“consciousness-of” while simultaneously remaining in the realm
of pure awareness. The following analogy, in which the author
(Sharma) quotes Ramana Maharshi, conveys something of this:
The ordinary person only sees the reflection in the
mirror but the realized person sees the reflection as
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well as the mirror. “For instance you see a reflection
in the mirror and the mirror. You know the mirror to
be the reality and the picture in it a mere reflection. Is
it necessary that to see the mirror we should cease to
see the reflection in it?” Similarly, the realized one
continues to experience the world in his realized state.
Thus the realized person appreciates “the distinctions”
of sound, taste, form, smell etc. “But he always
perceives and experiences the one reality in all of
them.”60
Brahman-knowers experience the everyday world in the mirror of
purified awareness, and this makes possible their keen yet calm
involvement in that world. In the analogy we could take “seeing
the reflection” to stand for consciousness of the world, and
“seeing the mirror,” for pure awareness. When I see the mirror
along with the reflections, the latter are not being viewed “from
outside,” as they are in the mode of consciousness, but rather as
emerging out of awareness. One might also apply the analogy to
the self by saying that knowers of Brahman experience their
ordinary selves, too, as being virtual images cast by the mirror.
The mirror analogy may be applied to the modes of experiencing other than those encountered specifically in meditative
practice. Consciousness-of-objects in any manner—perceiving,
sensing, emoting, evaluating, thinking, and so on—and selfconsciousness, too, are like a vision of things in the virtual space
of the mirror. There are two fundamentally different modes of
consciousness-of-objects, depending upon whether the object in
question is an object in the true sense. When it maintains itself
throughout a succession of acts of consciousness, it is an object in
the etymological sense, namely something set or put (jectum)
before or over against (ob) the act of consciousness. This settingover-against is what is meant by “subject-object duality.” Such an
object shall be referred to henceforth as an ‘Object.’ It has an
identity, to which we may return again and again.
The following example illustrates the different layers that
may arise in perceptual consciousness-of-Objects. It begins with
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the emergence of an implicit Object from the background,
continues with a prepredicative explicating of it, and then
undergoes various layers of predicative development. The
following illustration may help to explain this: While I am
engaged in seminar, someone’s coffee cup may emerge from the
margins of my consciousness and may attract my attention and
become an explicit object of consciousness. My attention may
travel from its color to a figure on the side, and then to its overall
shape, and so on.61 Then my interest may awaken sufficiently so
that I think, “The cup has a circular figure on the side.” This shift
represents a transition from the cup’s just previously having
become implicitly determined as having a circle on its side to its
being grasped in an active identification as determined by the
circle on its side.62 Then I may think, “The fact that the cup has
that circular figure on its side is puzzling. I wonder what it stands
for.” My thought may subsequently be led to such Objects as “the
circular,” “shape in general,” and “property.”63
“Prior” to such perceptual consciousness of Objects and its
developments, there is a sensory consciousness of objects that has
been vividly described by Erwin Straus (1956). We sense objects
in the same way in which we respond to the dynamic quality of a
tone, which is “a state of unrest, a tension, an urge, almost a will
to move on, as if a force were acting on the tone and pulling it in
a certain direction” (Zuckerkandl 1959, 19). We are in a
symbiotic relation (Straus 1956, 200) with the “tones,” to which
we respond with incipient movements as we do to dance music
(239). This pre-linguistic, flowing realm is the ground from which
Objects emerge (204). We live simultaneously in the Objective
and the sensory and may experience the tension between them, as
the latter resists being fit into the former. Some people may be
especially attracted to the loss of their stance over-against
Objects, to the dispersion of their self-consciousness, and to the
blurring of the distinctness within the Objective realm (284 and
275). Precisely because of its lack of subject-Object duality and
self-consciousness, sensory consciousness is occasionally
mistaken for awareness by beginners. It is, however, just another
way of viewing the reflections in the virtual space produced by
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the mirror.
All of the above are distinctions that can be seen clearly in the
vision of that virtual space. In addition to seeing these distinctions, the knower of Brahman sees the virtual space and its reflections as emanating from the mirror. This second sort of seeing is
pure awareness. While awareness is never totally absent from our
experience, we notice it to varying degrees.
Usually, the degree to which we notice it is very minimal—as
when we seem to be, in Sartre’s words, “hypnotized” by what we
are conscious of. This is our “default” mode of experiencing.
When we are reading, thinking, conversing in seminar, dancing,
gazing at a sunset, or “even stretching out a hand to open the
door,” we are absorbed in that moment’s action (Sekida 1985, 91).
When we are self-conscious, we are also absorbed in the selfconsciousness. In absorption, awareness seems to have gotten
lost; but it has only receded into the deep background.
In some special moments, which have been called moments
of “flow” (Csikszentmilalyi 1990), awareness becomes prominent
in an incidental way:
A rock climber explains how it feels when he is
scaling a mountain: “You are so involved in what you
are doing [that] you aren’t thinking of yourself as
separate from the immediate activity” (53).
The absence of the self from consciousness does
not mean that a person in flow has given up the
control of his psychic energy, or that she is unaware of
what happens in her body or in her mind…. A good
runner is usually aware of every relevant muscle in his
body, of the rhythm of his breathing, as well as of the
performance of his competitors within the overall
strategies of the race (64).
We do not deliberately pursue such moments; they just
happen. The flow experience may be spontaneous, as in the earlier
examples of the driver and of the woman sewing; or it may be
skill-related, as in the examples of Joe Montana, the surgeon, and
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the rock climber. In the case of skill-related flow experiences, one
might say that the body’s usual resistance to intended action is
overcome by practice. As a result, consciousness as “overagainst” the body disappears, allowing awareness to become
prominent. We move out of flow when the “over-againstness”
arises again as the “I” becomes active either in reaction (“Wow!
This is so exciting!”) or in action (“If I bear down, I can keep this
going”).
As we saw in relation to painting, psychoanalysis, and
phenomenology, prominence of awareness may be deliberately
cultivated in order to be able to engage in some pursuit. Here
awareness is practiced, so that the practitioner comes to
experience the witness as a disposition. Once the practitioner
comes to possess the witness as a first actuality, he or she can then
activate it when engaging in the activity for the sake of which it
was developed.
Finally, in the double seeing of the knower of Brahman, pure
mirror-awareness is permanently prominent as a second actuality;
and there is a “loose,” “unstuck,” clear consciousness-of-objects
as well. This is said to be the state of one “freed while alive”
(jīvanmukta; cf. BU, IV.4.7).
In virtue of the oneness of sat and cit, this double seeing is
one with the out-flowing of existence. Thus, freedom manifests
itself on the one hand inasmuch as one’s awareness is active or
creative in respect to the world, and on the other hand inasmuch
as one’s action is responsive or receptive with respect to the
world—a reversal of the usual receptivity of consciousness and
activity of action (Yuasa 1987, 68). In the realm of action, this
freedom is freedom to respond without a “hitch” to the [field of
dynamic qualities] in the field of experience, which are analogous
to the directional arc involved in realizing the full significance of
a situation mentioned in Part One. These field [tensions] include
what Yājñavalkya takes Aristotle to be referring to when he
speaks of feeling feelings or performing actions as required
(δεῖ)—in the required cases, with respect to the required people,
in the required way, and for the required reasons (NE, 1106b1727).
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Another way of putting this is to say that the freedom of the
knower of Brahman manifests itself in the ability to be able to
move freely through the world with grace and effortlessness,
which [preserves thoughful awareness] (σοφροσύνη):65
For σοφροσύνη is precisely the virtue of general and
unself-conscious self-possession, of universal grace
and effortless command neither specified by particular
action, which would transform it from σοφροσύνη to
some particular virtue, nor checked by any opacity,
which would translate it into a mode of self-control.
What could work better for its model than a pure
objectless knowledge?
Knowers of Brahman have no inner barriers that can impede the
spontaneous emergence of whatever is called for by the current
moment.
In conclusion, we note certain formal parallels between the
role of Brahman in the Upanishads and that of the agent intellect
according to Averroes. First, each is the source—Brahman, the
source of all existence; the agent intellect, the source of all being,
that is, of all intelligibility. Second, both are “self-luminous” and
are responsible for “seeing” in some sense. Third, the non-dual
relation between the individual self and Brahman is like that
between the disposed intellect and the agent intellect. Fourth, a
“self-forgetting” “outward turn” occurs in the case of each of
them. Fifth, both the experience of Brahman and the experience
of intellection could be said to involve a breaking-free from my
ordinary captivation by the images on the walls of a cave-like
dwelling; both involve engaging in practice; and both ultimately
arrive at an existential breakthrough to “immortalizing.” In that
breakthrough, in both cases, I deconstruct my ordinary sense of
self and discover my true self as being both non-private (that is,
not mine alone) and non-dual with respect to the true self of
others.
There are fundamental differences, however, in other
respects. In the case of intellection, one escapes the captivity of
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57
opinions and of the perceptual world by becoming free for intelligibles through the gradual purification of theoretical study; in
the case of realizing Brahman, one escapes the captivity of the
mundane way of experiencing objects, regardless of whether they
appear in sensory, perceptual, or intellectual consciousness, by a
sudden shift from involvement in consciousness (whether firstdegree or reflective) to pure awareness—a shift that may be
experienced by the practice of cultivating awareness. Moreover,
the one, impersonal, non-dual, true self of us all, in which we
share in our immortalizing, is understood by Averroes to be the
self-intellection of the agent intellect; Yājñavalkya, on the other
hand, understands it to be pure awareness. And finally, in intellection, the material intellect realizes conjunction with the agent
intellect, which is the source of all intelligibility in the world; in
experiencing Brahman, however, pure [selfawareness] realizes
that it is non-dual with respect to the emergence of existence in its
entirety, encompassing both the sensory and the intelligible
realms.
Jacob Klein makes the following comment on Aristotle: the
receptive aspect of “νοεῖν…is the state of wakefulness, a state of
preparedness and alertness…. Νοῦς…when it is…one with the
νοητά….[—o]nly then can be said to be wakefulness ‘at work’”
(Klein 1964, 65). Looking back at the beginning of this essay,
Yājñavalkya might wonder how Homer’s realization of the full
significance of a situation,66 Aristotle’s reception of an intelligible, and Averroes’ complete conjunction with the agent
intellect’s self-intellection would compare, in regard to their
degrees of wakefulness, with dwelling in pure awareness.
He might think that the major difference between the
Upanishads and our three Western thinkers is that in the former
the state of empty receptivity is supreme—that is, even more
wakeful than “wakefulness at work.” But, alternately, it might be
that Averroes’ account of complete conjunction is a satisfactory
partial depiction of Brahman. If we focus on the emerging
revelation that occurs in the empty, receptive intellect’s becoming
one with a “profile” of the full, unitary agent intellect, we may be
considering one face of Brahman, as it were, namely, the intel-
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lectual one. Perhaps Klein was directing our attention to the
wakefulness of the experiential living-through of such a moment,
a wakefulness that, however, is not limited to the intellectual
sphere.
Let us allow Yājñavalkya the last word: “What you may be
overlooking is that the empty, receptive material intellect is an
appearance of the outward turning of the full source of determinacy, the agent intellect, whereas, in the case of Brahman, the
full and determinate is an appearance of the outward turning of
the empty.”
1
This essay is a revision of two NEH-supported lectures given at St. John’s
College, Annaopolis, on February 15 and 19, 2008 and dedicated to the
memory of Ralph Swentzell, who did so much to further the study of Eastern
Classics at St. John’s College.
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59
meditate on them as [being] simply the Self (BU, I.4.7).
9
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1075a7-11: “So, the condition the human intellect...
is in at some period of time...is the condition the intellection that intellects
itself is in over the whole of time.” Cf.: “For the gods, the whole of life is
blessed, and for human beings it is so to the extent that there is in it some
likeness to such a state of activity” (NE, 1178b25-26).
10
I am indebted to my colleague, Michael Blaustein, for a very fruitful recent
conversation about Averroes. This section is based upon the works of Altmann,
Black, Blaustein, Hyman, Ivry, Leaman, and Zedler listed in the bibliography.
Leaman and Zedler have been particularly helpful for the early part, but I have
taken most of it from Black. In the later part I have relied heavily on
Blaustein’s working out of the details of the relation between agent and
material intellects and have made significant use of Altmann and Ivry,
especially the latter’s thoughts about conjunction while we are still alive.
However, responsibility for any errors that there may be in the interpretation of
Averroes is mine alone.
2
This and the following few paragraphs are based on K. von Fritz, “ΝΟΟΣ
and ΝΟΕΙΝ in the Homeric Poems,” Classical Philology 38 (1943), 79-93.
‘aql bi al-malaka, which means intellect in natural disposition, aptitude,
faculty; intellectus in habitu.
3
12
Also: “the intellective [part of the soul] intellects the [intelligible] looks in
appearances” (De anima 431b2). I accept Nussbaum’s (1978) suggestion about
the meaning of φαντσία. It is based on such passages as the following 428a1,
7, 14ff., & and 29ff., as well as; 428b30ff.), wherein in which the link between
φαντσία and φαίνεσθαι seems compelling.
The translations from Homer are based upon those listed in the bibliography.
4
This “directional arc” is analogous, at a higher level, to Merleau-Ponty’s arc
intentionnel on the level of sensing (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 158).
5
The following few paragraphs are based on W. Otto, The Homeric Gods: The
Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954).
6
Since this essay is intended to be an introduction to a way of experiencing, it
will not go very far into the many conceptual distinctions that have come to be
seen as part of the Upanishadic teaching. For instance, there is no discussion
of the distinction between nirguṇa and saguṇa Brahman. While it is true that
such distinctions do reflect distinctions in experience, the reader who is being
introduced to the way of experiencing in question is not likely to have encountered them.
7
This quotation and the situation described in the following sentence derive
from HG, 6, 210, 195.
8
The Inner Controller is depicted mythologically as follows:
He entered in here right to the tips of the nails, as a razor slips into
a razor-case…. When he breathes he is called ‘breath’; when he
speaks, ‘speech’; when he sees, ‘eye’; when he hears, ‘ear’; when
he thinks, ‘mind.’ They are just the names of his actions. Whoever
meditates on any one of these does not know [the Self], for [the
Self] is not completely active in any one of them. One should
11
13
In fact, for Averroes, the imagination or, more properly, the cogitative
power—which, together with the imagination and memory, prepares what is
given in sensation, so that, when illumined by the agent intellect, the intelligible look can appear through and in-form the material intellect—is a fourth
intellect, the passible intellect (LC, 449.174, and cfp. 409.640). “The cogitative
power has the following functions: it can make an absent object appear as
though present; it can compare and distinguish the re-presented objects with
each other; it can judge whether a given re-presented object bears a relation to
a directly presented sense intention” (Zedler 1954, 441).
14
Yet because the human species is eternal, the succession of human souls in
which intellection of intelligibles of mundane things occurs ensures the continuity of intellection in the material intellect and the omnitemporality of the
intelligible looks of mundane things as such. Through the repeated presentation of potential intelligibles in imaginative appearances, this succession
“provides a replica in time and in matter of the eternal” intellection of the
agent intellect (Zedler 1951, 173). It is possible that the belief that souls
migrate into different bodies in succession is a reflection in the form of popular
myth of the truth of the omnitemporal unity of the material intellect in the
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60
multiplicity of disposed intellects (Altmann 1965, 82).
15
The agent intellect in this incidental connection would be what Aristotle
referred to as the intellect that enters “from outside the door”: “It remains then
that intellect alone enters additionally into [the seed of a human being] from
outside the door (θύραθεν) and that it alone is divine, for corporeal being-atwork has nothing in common with its being-at-work” (De generatione et
corruptione 736b27). Cf.:
But the intellect seems to come to be in [us] while being an
independent thing, and not to be destroyed…. [I]ntellecting or
contemplating wastes away because something else in us is
destroyed, but it is itself unaffected (without attributes). But
thinking things through and loving or hating are affections
(attributes) not of the intellect but of that which has intellect,
insofar as it has it. For this reason, when the latter is destroyed,
the intellect neither remembers nor loves, for these acts did not
belong to it but to the composite being which has perished; the
intellect is perhaps something more divine and is unaffected (OS,
408b18ff.).
What Averroes actually says is that the incidental connection constitutes a
“disposition” (isti‘dād, which means readiness, willingness, preparedness,
inclination, tendency, disposition, propensity; dispositio) of the agent intellect,
but one located within human souls. It is a disposition to receive the intelligible looks of mundane things. Thus, the material intellect is in reality the
agent-intellect-as-having-such-a-disposition-in-human-beings.
16 Based
on Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072b12: “[I]t is beautiful and in that way
a source.”
17
When my disposed intellect is actively engaged in intellecting an intelligible
look, it is also intellecting itself, since, as Aristotle points out, the intellect is
one with what it intellects, in that the second actuality of both is identical, as
lumber’s being built is one with the activity of building. In contemplating itself
as informed by the intelligible look, my intellect is also directed toward the
image, which specifies the particular look that is to be received, in the same
way in which, when we look at a painting, we are directed toward the scene
that we see in it. However, since the mundane thing toward which the intellect
is directed via the image is not pure intelligibility, the disposed intellect’s selfintellection is not pure self-intellection; its act of intellection is not absolutely
one with its object of intellection. In this way it differs from the self-intellection of the agent intellect; for the object of the agent intellect’s intellection
does not point beyond itself.
18 What had been my intellect would now be either fully (Blaustein 1984, 272
and 283) or partly assimilated to the agent intellect. That is, either “I” would
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be engaged in intellection of everything intelligible or, having abandoned all
the contingent aspects of my intellection, I would be focusing solely on its
formal aspects, which are supplied by the agent intellect, so that I would be
participating in an aspect of the formal governing source of the whole
(Leaman 1998, 101-03).
19
Ittisāl =connectedness, unitedness, union; juncture, conjunction, link;
connection; contact (from wasala = to connect, join, unite, combine, link,
attach). Continuatio = a following of one thing after another, an unbroken
series, a connection, continuation, succession (from continuare = to join
together in uninterrupted succession, to make continuous). Wasala may be a
reformulation of Aristotle’s θίξις.
Altmann (1965, 83) says that this notion reflects Plotinus’s συνάπτειν (= [1]
[transitive] to join together; [2] [intransitive] to border on, lie next to;
combine, be connected with). Consider: “[W]e lift ourselves up by the part [of
the soul] which is not submerged in the body and by this conjoin at our own
centres to something like the Centre of all things…. [W]e must suppose that
[our souls conjoin] by other powers, in the way in which that which is engaged
in intellection naturally conjoins with that which is being thoroughly intellected and that that which is engaged in intellection…conjoins with what is
akin to it with nothing to keep them apart” (Plotinus, VI.9.8.19-30).
Altmann (1965, 83n.) also mentions that Plotinus refers to his experience of
union as a contact (ἁφή). However, in Averroes, “conjunction” (ittisāl) is to be
distinguished from “union” (ittihād); the latter signifies oneness, singleness,
unity; concord, unison, unanimity; combination; amalgamation, merger, fusion;
union, (from wahada = [1] to be alone, unique; [2] to make into one, unite,
unify; to connect, unite, bring together, amalgamate, merge). In Greek the
corresponding word is ἕνωσις = combination into one, union.
20
In its perfected state, as engaged in intellection of the agent intellect, the
disposed intellect is called the intellectus adeptus (Hyman n.d., 188), “intellect
that has reached to or attained or obtained.”
21
Altmann 1965, 74, characterizing the position of Averroes’ teacher.
22
Blaustein 1984, 284. Cf. also: “[T]he material intellect’s awareness of itself
even when it is not thinking of any intelligible form…is itself a kind of
actuality, however empty. Averroes claims that this kind of self-awareness is in
fact the obverse of the [agent] intellect’s fully conscious awareness of itself;
the material intellect’s awareness of its own potentiality is a dim awareness of
its actuality as the [agent] intellect.” (Ibid.)
23
It is interesting to note that with respect to conjunction, the agent intellect
exercises all four kinds of responsibility that Aristotle describes in the Physics.
It is responsible for my attainment of conjunction in functioning as my end
(τέλος). Moreover, it is responsible for the motion of learning, by which I
approach conjunction; for my learning is really its producing intelligibles in
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me by revealing itself to me as the form of my disposed intellect (Blaustein
1984, 276-77). Since the agent intellect is what I am increasingly intellecting
and, thus, coming to be, it is also responsible for conjunction in the manner of
a form. Finally, it is also responsible as material, since the material intellect is
ultimately identical with it. The same could be said of Brahman, with the key
difference that its responsibility is not limited to the realm of intelligibility.
24
Patañjali 1989, IV.34; see also Feuerstein’s comment in Patañjali 1989, 145.
Kaivalya is “the aloneness” of seeing.
25
As far as Averroes’ own position with respect to individual immortality goes,
there are two interesting possibilities. He may have thought that the only
immortality was the impersonal immortality of the state of conjunction and
that philosophers were orienting their lives accordingly; the belief in personal
immortality on the part of ordinary people would then be the closest approximation to truth of which they were capable. On the other hand, he may have
held that, while only a few intellects may attain conjunction, all souls are
immortal (Zedler 1954, 451-52). There is a somewhat similar divergence in the
Upanishadic tradition between Śankara’s position that the individual self is in a
sense unreal and Rāmānuja’s view that individual selves, while not
independent, are real.
26
Cf. the following passages: “Since [in all cases of seeing and hearing] we
are aware (αỉσθανόμεθα) that we are seeing and hearing, it must either be by
sight that we are aware [for example] that we are seeing or by some other
[sense]” (OS, 425b11-12). “To each sense there belongs something special and
something common. For example, what is special to sight is to see, [what is
special] to hearing is to hear, and similarly with the rest. But there is also a
certain common power that goes along with all of them, by which one is also
aware that one is seeing and hearing (for it is not, after all, by sight that one is
seeing that one is seeing).” (De somno et vigilia, 455a12-5.)
27
We may speak of self-consciousness in the sense as consciousness of myself
only “after” the construction of the sense of self, which is discussed in the text
below.
28
By Kosman (1975), who also made reference to Sartre’s La Transcendence
de l’Ego. In planning the lectures, I had intended to use Sartre to introduce the
notion of selfawareness (see footnote 29) as an alternative to anything in
Aristotle. However, Kosman’s article, which I discovered while writing the
lectures, made it possible to cite Aristotle himself in order to introduce this
notion.
29
I write “selfawareness” and “awareness (of) itself” to suggest that the
relationship between awareness and what it is aware (of) is not the same as
that between consciousness and the object of consciousness. I am following
Sartre’s practice in L’être et le néant (pp. 18-20), where he writes conscience
(de) soi to refer to what I am calling “selfawareness” or “awareness (of)
DRUECKER
63
itself.”
30
In La Transcendance de l’Ego, from which the quotations are taken, Sartre
uses only one word, conscience, which I have rendered as “consciousness”
when it is positional and as “awareness” when it is non-positional. Moreover,
he does not here write conscience (de), as he did later (see footnote 28).
31 What is said will apply as well to consciousness that is imagining, remembering, judging, thinking, intellecting, feeling, or evaluating.
32
See footnote 34.
33
The last two sentences represent my understanding of Gurwitsch 1985, 5,
second paragraph.
34
Gurwitsch (1941) pointed out that this account of the arising of the sense of
self is incompatible with the fact that reflection can accomplish no more than
to render explicit the content of the reflected-upon consciousness (332-33). He
later (1985) offered a corrected account of the construction of the psychical
empirical sense of self (15ff.). It is based on the recognition that both states
and qualities “designate psychic constants, i.e., regularities of
experience…rather than mental facts which themselves fall under direct
experience” (15), as they do in Sartre.
35
I remember many years ago reading an article by him in The Washington
Post, in which he described his experience in something like these terms.
36
These characteristics are similar to those in the example of the violinist in
Csikszentmihalyi 1990: “A violinist must be extremely aware of every
movement of her fingers, as well as of the sound entering her ears, and of the
total form of the piece she is playing, both analytically, note by note, and
holistically, in terms of its overall design” (64).
37
Bankei 2000, 58. I have substituted “awareness” first for “the Unborn” and
then for “it,” referring to her Buddha-mind.
38
This word is used passim in Husserl 1964.
39
It need not be living beings with respect to which we experience the
connection: “The [mountain] climber, focusing all her attention on the small
irregularities of the rock wall that will have to support her weight safely,
speaks of the sense of kinship that develops between fingers and rock.” “This
feeling is not just a fancy of the imagination, but is based on a concrete
experience of close interaction with some Other.” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 64)
40
A popular book on learning to draw tells us of a subjective state that artists
speak of, which is characterized by “a sense of close ‘connection’ with the
work, a sense of timelessness, difficulty in using words…a lack of anxiety, a
sense of close attention to shapes and spaces and forms that remain nameless.”
It is important for the artist to experience the shift from the ordinary state to
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
this one. The student is encouraged to set up the proper “conditions for this
mental shift” and to become “able to recognize and foster this state (Edwards
1979, 46). These characteristics correspond quite well with the qualities of a
consciousness in which awareness is in the foreground.
41
Merleau-Ponty 1961, 166, translation modified.
42 The articulation in this paragraph emerged in a conversation with Nina
Haigney, just a few minutes before I delivered this lecture. It was an example
of the sort of thing it attempts to articulate—a conversation, with awareness to
some degree in the foreground, allowing for the experience of “a certain
emptiness,” followed by the emergence, in two people, of an “authentic
word”—or a least a relatively authentic one.
43
The quotation from Freud is from “Recommendations to Physicians
Practicing Psychoanalysis” (1912).
44
By Theodore Reik in 1948; see Epstein 1904, 199-201.
45
M. Heidegger, On Time and Being, quoted in Ihde 1977, 15; italics added
and translation corrected at one point.
46
Husserl 1962, 140.27-33; to maintain consistency of terminology, I substituted “reduction” for “epoché.”
47
Husserl himself conveys the same view in different language (Husserl 1962,
Sections 37-42).
48
Merleau-Ponty 1945, 191, where, however, the expression is not being used
to characterize the phenomenological reduction.
49
The distinction between disconnection and reducing proper parallels that in
the Buddhist tradition between mindfulness (sati) and seeing distinctly in
detail (vi-paśyana).
50
Cf. “And so also must the gaze made free by the epoché be…an experiencing gaze” (Husserl 1962, 156.13-15).
51
I take habituell to correspond to an adjectival form of ἓξις.
52
This stage in the yogic tradition involves eight members, the last three of
which are concentration, meditation, and in-stance (samādhi), which is
opposed both to ex-stasy and to our ordinary counter-stance vis-à-vis objects
(Patañjali 1989, II.29).
53 Cf. Patañjali 1989, I.42 and 44: coincidence with reflection (savicārā
samāpattih).
54 The quotations in the remainder of this paragraph are taken from Low 1993,
149-50; italics added.
55
When allowing the children to play, you are not caught up in their playing;
DRUECKER
65
so, you have a kind of distance from it. Yet you are “with” them, accompanying them. Thus, your distance is of a different kind than the distance that
occurs in objectification, where the ob-ject stands over against you (discussed
in the text below). Moreover, while it might seem as though the objective,
perceptual world were free of captivation, when compared to the dynamic,
sensory realm (discussed in the text below), one can see that the former is, in
fact, grounded in the primordial doxa of the latter.
56 The
role that this experience of pure awareness plays in the Upanishadic
tradition parallels that of the “aloneness of seeing” (drśeh kaivalyam; Patañjali
1989, II.25) in the yogic tradition (Patañjali 1989, III.50; IV.26 and 34).
57
This account of realization of Brahman is based on zen sources. However, as
Shear (1983 and 1990) points out, this experience of awake, pure
selfawareness lacks any empirical qualities or content. As a result, differing
references to it as the Brahman-realm or Buddha-nature are not pointing to
qualitative differences in the experience (Shear 1983, 57-59; 1990, 392). [Note
added in revising the lecture: I now think it would be better to say that the zen
account is an interpretation of the realization of Brahman.]
58
The page numbers given in this paragraph refer to Maritain 1956.
59
Sekida 1985, 91-97, also depicts the corresponding state in the zen tradition
in this way. Carter proposes the comparison with binocular vision. It is interesting that Bion also uses this analogy (Grinberg, Sor, and Tabak di Bianchedi
1993, 35-36).
60
Sharma 1993, 43; first two sets of italics added. The quotation is from
Ramana Maharshi as reported in D. Goodman, ed., The Teachings of Sri
Ramana Maharshi (NY: Arkana, 1985), 42 and 41.
61
Cf. the description in Husserl 1964, 124-25.
62
Cf. the description in Husserl 1964, 206-08.
63
Cf. the descriptions in Husserl 1964, §§58-61, 80-82, 86-87 and in Husserl
1950, §10.
64
The page references in the remainder of this paragraph are from Straus
1956.
65
I believe that Kleist (1964) had the same phenomenon in view when he
reported Herr C.’s words after two anecdotes, one about a graceful dancer who
lost his grace when self-consciousness arose and the other about a bear, who
effortlessly parried every thrust of Herr C.’s rapier with a graceful swipe of his
paw:
[I]n the same degree as, in the organic world, reflection becomes
more obscure and weaker, grace emerges there ever more radiant
and supreme.—Yet just as…the image in a concave mirror, after
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
66
withdrawing to infinity, suddenly comes right in front of us again,
so when consciousness has, as it were, passed through an infinite,
grace will again put in an appearance. Hence, it appears most
purely in the human bodily structure that has either no selfconsciousness or an infinite self-consciousness (Kleist 1964, 67).
That is, in our terms, grace emerges in the realm of animal, sensory
consciousness, a realm that we can experience, but not enter completely
(Straus 1956, 284). And it emerges again in the realm of pure [selfawareness],
in which we are no longer caught up in first- or second-degree consciousness.
66
Another question to pursue might be whether Homer’s realization of full
significance became narrower and more limited in passing over into intellection.
DRUECKER
67
containing Ia, QQ.2-11.
TU
Taittitrīya Upanishad
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_____, On the Soul, tr. J. Sachs (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2001).
_____, Aristotle’s Physics: A Guided Study, tr. and ed. J. Sachs (New
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Otto, W., The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek
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I
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KeU
Kena Upanishad
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LC
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Sartre, J.-P., La Transcendance de l’Ego: Esquisse d’une description
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
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Husserl, E., Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die
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Catholic University of America Press, n.d.), 161-91.
Ihde, D., Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction (NY: G.P. Putnam’s
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Klein, J., “Aristotle, An Introduction,” in Ancients and Moderns, ed., J.
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Perception, ed. J. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
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(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967-88).
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the Alter Ego,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2 (1942), 323-47.
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71
Principles of Motion and the
Motion of Principles:
1
Hegel’s Inverted World
Peter Kalkavage
Oh, judge for yourselves: I have been concealing
it all the time, but now I will tell you the whole
truth. The fact is, I…corrupted them all!
—Dostoevsky, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”2
In the Phenomenology of Spirit, late in Hegel’s chapter on force
and understanding, a baffling figure comes before us. It is the
famous “inverted world.” This figure completes the dialectic of
understanding. As a result of the inverted world, consciousness—
the sole but protean hero of Hegel’s philosophic epic—undergoes
a conversion: it ceases to put truth in objects or things and instead
places it in the thinking subject.
My plan is to take us through Hegel’s chapter on understanding with the following questions in mind: Why, for Hegel, is
understanding logically unstable? Why is force its proper object?
What is the inverted world, and how does it come about? What
does it show us about the nature of thinking, and the nature of
nature? Finally, how does the inverted world bring about the great
turn in the Phenomenology from knowledge as the consciousness
of things to knowledge as grounded in self-consciousness?
Understanding, Verstand, has a range of meanings in Hegel.
It refers most generally to our capacity for making distinctions,
our power of analysis. In his Encyclopedia, Hegel indicates the
function and limit of understanding as follows: “Thinking as
understanding stops short at the fixed determinacy and its
distinctness vis-à-vis other determinacies.”3 In other words,
understanding establishes fixed boundaries and stable identities.
Fond of schematizing, it regards mathematics as the model of
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
what it means to know. In the Phenomenology, the archetype of
Verstand is the “new science” inaugurated by Galileo and
Descartes and brought to its peak in the force-theories of Newton
and Leibniz. The chapter “Force and Understanding” presents a
critical reflection on this science. Hegel studied the physics of his
day extensively and acknowledged its impressive achievements.
But it does not for him embody absolute truth; it is not science at
its highest, most complete stage. Hegel’s exposé in the
Phenomenology reveals why this is the case, why the supposedly
stable principles of modern physics are ultimately unstable.
Hegel’s chapter is difficult even by Phenomenology
standards. To guide us through its twists and turns, I have divided
my presentation into six parts. The first three deal respectively
with Force, Law, and Explanation. These are related as follows.
There are forces at work in nature that operate according to
immutable laws (for example, the law of universal gravitation).
The scientist explains nature by showing how a given
phenomenon (say, a body in free fall) is an instance of a force
grounded in one of these laws. Hegel’s account preserves this
familiar interweaving of force, law, and explanation but at the
same time places it in the context of a dialectical unfolding.
Hegel’s logic, unlike ordinary logic, proceeds genetically, like
life. Concepts, stages, moments, categories, whatever we wish to
call them, do not merely succeed each other, or relate to each
other in the manner of different aspects, but emerge out of the
evolutionary process that is thought. In the chapter before us,
force gives birth to law, and together these give birth to explanation, which eventually gives birth to self-consciousness. This
amazing process as a whole, this labor, defines understanding.
I. Force
The Phenomenology is the journey of consciousness to absolute
knowing, or what Hegel calls Science. We come upon understanding at a pivotal moment in this journey: at the transition from
the sensuous to the intelligible. The previous shapes of
consciousness are sense-certainty and perception. Like all the
KALKAVAGE
73
shapes in Hegel’s book, they embody certainty—a claim to know
absolutely or unconditionally. Sense-certainty places its absolute
trust in the sensuous particular, the whatever-it-is that is here and
now; perception trusts the thing and its properties. Both shapes of
knowing, together with their corresponding objects, prove to be
self-contradictory: they negate themselves.
Force is the Phoenix that rises from the ashes of thinghood. It
is an example of what Hegel calls determinate negation. This is
negation that preserves and lifts up what is negated [79, 113].*
Force is the proper object of understanding because it resolves the
dissonance that defines the thing of perception. The thing is a One
and a Many: this one thing and its many properties. To save this
opposition from being contradictory, perception posits another:
the thing is independent or for itself and dependent or for another,
that is, related to other things. In the dialectic of perception, these
opposed aspects become identical: the thing is shown to be
independent insofar as it is dependent, and dependent insofar as it
is independent [128]. It makes no sense, then, to regard the thing
as absolutely real: a thing is what it is, not through itself alone but
only in relation to what it is not, namely, other things. How this
ideality of thinghood comes about does not concern us here. The
relevant point is that force solves the problem at hand, the
problem of substance and relation. Things as things dissolve in
their essential relation to other things: they lose their substance.
Force, by contrast, is substance that is relation. It is the higher
category of substantial relation, the unity of being-for-self and
being-for-another, of independence and dependence.4
Let us look more carefully at what this means.
Force, our new object, is not something seen or heard or felt
but only thought. It is the purely intelligible inner core of perceptible things. Force is not property but act, the act of selfexpression.5 In the force-world, a thing does not, strictly
speaking, have a property but rather emanates what we call a
property from an intense invisible center.6 By analogy with
*
Numbers in square brackets refer to paragraph numbers in Phenomenology
of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
language, force, in Hegel’s terminology, is the utterance or
Aüßerung of an inner point. Hardness, for example, is not a
quiescent attribute lodged in the thing but an act by which the
thing asserts itself or “makes its point.”7 Moreover, to act is to act
upon another thing. Action implies interaction. This is how force
makes it possible for individual things to be what they are through
their relation to other things: their being-for-self is a being-foranother, and their being-for-another a being-for-self.
Force, Hegel tells us, is a movement [136]. This is not
movement in space but dialectical movement—conceptual instability or transition. Consider a metal sphere. Its hardness is one of
the properties by which the sphere, at the level of perception,
defined itself as an independent thing. Hardness is now to be
regarded as emergent from an intensive center, a center of force.
Force is the transition of a given content—in this case,
hardness—from inner to outer. As Hegel stresses in an earlier
version of his system, force is not cause as opposed to effect but
rather the identity of cause and effect.8 The intensive center of
force does not produce something other than itself but exactly
itself.9 It is a self-realizing potential. It is like an inward thought
that finds faithful expression in outward speech.
Dialectical movement comes into play when we attempt to
spell out precisely what is happening in the transition from inner
to outer. What we find is that the act of self-expression involves
negation. The hardness of the sphere, as an emergent property or
effect, must come out of hiding, be released from mere implicitness or potency; but if it were simply released, set free, it would
not be the hardness of the sphere, the expressive manifestation
sprung from the intensive center of force. And so, we must
conclude that as a property is affirmed or posited, it must at the
same time be negated as something independent or on its own. As
the property is emitted, it must remain the property of the thing,
the expression of the center of force. Hegel uses the terms force
proper and force expressed to distinguish the two moments
involved in the action of force. Force proper refers to the
intensive center (force as cause), force expressed to force as
KALKAVAGE
75
“there” in the perceptible world (force as effect). These moments,
Hegel says, are self-canceling [135]. Force proper must negate its
inwardness in order to be external or manifest, and, as we saw
earlier, force expressed must negate its outwardness in order to be
the expression of force proper. This self-cancellation on the part
of both moments of force is what it means to say that force is a
movement. We phenomenological observers see this dialectical
truth in the movement of force, but understanding does not. It
clings to the safety of stable distinctions and assumes that the
movement from inner to outer occurs simply, that is, without any
negation or self-otherness.
Force can do what thinghood cannot: it is a deeper, more
potent category. Why, then, does it self-destruct? To answer this
question, we turn to the phenomenon of interaction, the realworld event in which force meets force. As we proceed, we must
bear in mind that understanding claims not merely that there are
forces at work in the world, but that force is the absolute truth of
things—their abiding substance. Hegel will show, to our
amazement, that “the realization of force is at the same time the
loss of reality” [141]. Like the thing, force will fail to be
substantial.
The self-annihilation of force results from what Hegel calls
the “play” of two forces: active and reactive. This play is implicit
in Newton’s Third Law: “To every action there is always opposed
an equal reaction.” Force is spontaneous and impulsive but not
self-inciting. It must be inspired by the presence of another force
in order to express itself [137]. Hegel here borrows terms that
Leibniz uses in his analysis of collision. One force solicits, the
other is solicited: one is active, the other passive or re-active.10
This is like the human situation in which I voice my opinion,
translate my inner thought into outer speech, thereby inciting you
to respond with a verbal expression of your thought and opinion.
Perhaps the forcefulness of my expression prompts you to an
equally forceful counter-expression—an equal and opposite
reaction.
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The play that is essential to force can be maintained as
logically stable only if the difference between active and passive
force, soliciting and solicited, remains clear and distinct. We must
be able to say: “This force is active, that one passive.” Hegel
proceeds to show that this is not the case. The two opposed determinations of force—soliciting and solicited, active and passive—
become identical, or pass into each other. Once this happens,
force as the solid substance of things vanishes. It loses its status
as a self-subsisting entity and becomes merely ideal, what Hegel
calls a moment.11
To see how this evaporation of force as substance comes
about, imagine banging your fist against a wall. When you hit the
wall, the wall hits back: it re-acts. At first, it seems that your fist
is active and soliciting, the wall passive and solicited. But you
could not hit the wall unless, at the moment of impact, the wall
acted on you and solicited the hardness of your fist. This hardness
is just as much solicited by that of the wall as the hardness of the
wall is by that of your fist. Fist and wall have exchanged determinations, like actors who reverse their roles in mid-scene, and it
is impossible to call one of them only active and the other only
reactive. Each is both. Soliciting is a being solicited, and being
solicited is a soliciting.
Let us recapitulate the story of force. Force starts out as a
mere concept in the mind of a subject who claims to know
absolute truth: it is in itself or implicit, a theoretical good
intention. Then it is put to work as the substance of things: it
becomes for itself or actual. But in the act of making itself real, it
becomes evanescent and unreal: the distinction on which its reliability as substance rests becomes a play or interchange of nowfluid determinations. As force leaves the stage of the solidly real,
it assumes a new role. It reverts to being inward or conceptual,
retreats from the world and goes back inside the thinking subject.
We may imagine this as the act in which understanding experiences the dissolution of force, internalizes what it has experienced, and then comes up with a revised perspective. As Hegel
observes, force does not return to its original ideality but
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advances to a new state [141]. Force falls but does not simply fall.
Paradoxically, it falls up. In negating itself, it becomes a new and
improved universal, a new object that stands over and against the
thinking subject. This higher object, which force has generated, is
the deeper inner of things.
II. Law
The dialectic of law will lead us to the inverted world. Law, our
newly postulated absolute, will prove unstable. It will fall. This
fall is more dramatic than anything we have witnessed so far in
the Phenomenology. It is the collapse of the very citadel of
objective truth, truth that is grounded in objects.
In the fall of force and the rise of law, consciousness experiences a new relation to its object. Hegel calls it a mediated
relation. Understanding now “looks through [the] mediating play
of forces into the true background of things” [143].12 In other
words, understanding sees rest within motion, sameness within
difference, form within flux. Law is the eternally abiding, purely
intelligible “look” or ἰδέα of the always-changing world. Verstand
at this point is even more recognizable as the modern scientific
understanding, which seeks laws of nature so that it may gaze
upon change under the aspect of eternity.
Our new object, law, is the imperturbable base and depth of
the world. World, here, refers to the unstable play of forces, the
role-reversal of our soliciting and solicited “actors.” This play is
appearance, as opposed to law, which constitutes the world’s
essence. In its perpetual self-otherness, appearance recalls the
elusive “matrix” of Plato’s Timaeus, where the powers of body—
earth, air, water, and fire—constantly turn into each other, play the
game of self-cancellation (49B-C). Law is different from the
objects we have seen so far: the sensuous This, the thing of
perception, and force as individual substance. It is a world unto
itself, separate from but also governing and shining through the
world of appearance. Law opens up a supersensible world set
over and against the sensible world. Hegel calls it an “abiding
Beyond above the vanishing present”—a Jenseits or Over There,
as opposed to the Diesseits or Over Here [144]. Unlike the
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turbulent realm of sense, this Other World is “restful” [157]. It is
the heaven of scientific theory.
This two-world thesis will be the death of understanding. As
Hegel will show, the waywardness of appearance, the to and fro
of change, invades theoretical heaven: the Beyond will collapse
into the very realm from which it was to be strictly distinguished.
It will become an aspect of appearance. The certainty of understanding is that there are two worlds: the truth will be that there
is only one. Intelligibility is not separate from change, like a law
or a platonic Form, but is change—change as dialectical logic or
what Hegel calls the Concept. The clue, then, to the discovery of
concrete truth is not in some other world but in this one, not in
motionless being but in unstable becoming, where opposed determinations flow into each other. This inverts our normal
perspective on things, governed as that perspective is by the sober
teachings of Verstand. As we think our way through the inverted
world, we are inverted.
The conclusions I have sketched are already present in what
Hegel says just before his analysis of law. He reflects on the
nature of appearance, in effect telling us where the dialectic of
understanding will end up. Understanding mis-understands
appearance and the intelligible essence that supposedly governs it
in another world. From the perspective of understanding, law is
an eternal thing-like object that grounds and “saves” the appearances. But this object, the supersensible Beyond, has in fact been
generated by appearance [147]. Appearance is the dialectical
father, law the offspring. What understanding calls law or essence
is in fact, Hegel says, appearance as appearance.
To grasp the meaning of this utterance, we must observe that
appearance is not sensuous presence: it is neither the This of
sense-certainty nor the thing of perception. Appearance is process
and play, flash and shining forth. It is not presence but fleeting
presence—presence that constantly cancels itself to become
absence.13 It is becoming as the unity of coming-to-be and
passing away. In his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel defines time as
“that being which, inasmuch as it is, is not, and inasmuch as it is
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not, is; it is intuited becoming.”14 Time is appearance in its most
rudimentary form. It is the same process of self-negation that we
saw in the Now of sense-certainty. When the Now negated itself
to become the next Now, it gave birth to universality as the Now
of Nows, say, an hour of minutes [107]. Appearance, through its
self-negation, also begets a universal, as we have seen. This is
law.
Appearance, like time, is a process of self-transcendence,
self-beyonding. The understanding erroneously treats this selfbeyonding, which it has glimpsed in the self-contradictory play of
force, as a Beyond that is objectively there. It reifies process. But
essence, here identical with the supersensible, is the intelligible
truth of appearance, the truth that the play of force has itself
generated and brought to light. As Hegel puts it, “the supersensible is…appearance as appearance” [147]. The meaning of this
pivotal sentence, to which I alluded earlier, is that essence and
appearance, inner and outer, are identical. As one commentator
puts it: “The essence of essence is to manifest itself; manifestation
is the manifestation of essence.”15 Appearance, in other words, is
not a low but a high category. It is the self-otherness of essence,
the instability of sensuous things that has come out into the open
as their higher and deeper truth. In this revelation appearance
proves to be not something in need of being “saved.”
Hegel’s critique of the supersensible Beyond recalls Plato’s
Forms and the problem of separateness. This problem is
highlighted in the dialogue Parmenides, where the old Eleatic
stings young Socrates with the absurdities of his two-world
theory. How is it that a Form, a separate entity off in its own
world, is nevertheless manifested in its sensuous instances? Why
are we able to see the original in the image? Law is like a platonic
Form in that it is eternally self-same and purely intelligible. But it
is unlike a Form in being a universal that governs movements,
events. Law is the eternal self-sameness of perpetual selfdifference. Consider Galileo’s law of free fall. Expressed as an
equation, this is the familiar s = 1/2 gt2, where s is the distance a
body traverses as it falls, g the gravitational constant, and t the
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time during which the falling takes place. For our purposes,
however, the more revealing form is s ∝ t2: distance varies as the
square of the time. This expresses a constant difference or
otherness, as opposed to a mere identity. It helps us see what
Hegel means when he says that law is “universal difference” and
“the simple in the play of force” [148]. Things as such don’t come
into the picture. As far as Galileo’s law is concerned, it makes no
difference whether the falling object is a cow or a cannonball.16
What matters is the motion, the event. Galileo’s law is the simple
universal in this event. It is the perfectly general, purely intelligible form of falling.
Let us now turn to the dialectic of law. Understanding has, we
recall, a mediated relation to its supersensible realm of law. It
looks through the medium of becoming, as through a veil, to
glimpse being and truth in the unchanging forms of change. It
imagines that it will in this way take hold of absolute knowing.
Problems will emerge when understanding tries to explain how its
universal laws fit the actual determinate content of appearances.
Up to this point, law is only a good idea. This idea must now
prove itself in the act of governing. Law must become actually
true or what Hegel calls for itself.
To uncover the actuality of law, we turn once more to Galileo,
this time to his experiments with the motion of a ball rolling down
an inclined plane. Assume that we have found the law that
governs this movement and have expressed it mathematically. We
say: “This is true; it is the law.” But it isn’t absolutely true. Air
resistance, surface friction, and the phenomenon of rolling as
opposed to sliding all come into play to qualify the law. In order
for a law to be true, it must, as Hegel puts it, “fill out the world of
appearance” [150]. This can happen only if there are many laws
that apply to a given case. Here we have a sign of trouble to come.
Law, by definition, is sheer universality; its glory is to be above
cases and particulars. But the events to which law must apply if it
is to be actual truth involve cases and particulars: phenomena
have a determinate content that must somehow be subsumed
under law. The world is not movement in general but this
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movement in these circumstances. The problem can be stated as
follows: law, though stable, is general or empty, while appearances, though shifty, are full and differentiated. To overcome this
asymmetry, to unite the universal and the particular, law must be
on more intimate terms with the phenomenal world if it is to be
the truth of that world.
A single law, as we have seen, is not enough to “fill out” the
appearances. We need many laws to prevent law from being an
empty inner. These must be organized into one law that unifies
them—a mega-law. Hegel here refers to Newton’s inverse square
law of attraction, which unifies the laws of planetary motion and
those of ordinary mechanics. But this mega-law is, alas, the
victim of its triumph over specificity. By transcending the
difference among the many different laws, it becomes utterly
abstract. Hegel calls it “the Concept of law itself,”17 that is,
lawfulness as opposed to a law [150]. But then, what to do about
all the different ways in which lawfulness manifests itself in
nature? To address this problem, understanding interprets
lawfulness, the pure form of law, as the “inner necessity” of all the
different laws [151]. This inner necessity results in a new, more
abstract version of force—force as such [152]. Earlier, force was
differentiated as active and passive; law was the simple universal.
Now force is the simple or undifferentiated, and law is the source
of difference [152]. Gravity, for instance, is just plain gravity, a
simple force of nature, whereas the law by which a body falls
involves difference as distance traversed and time squared. So
too, electricity is just plain electricity, whereas the law of
electricity expresses the difference between positive and negative.
The assumption at work here is that law will express the
necessary action of simple forces. Hegel shows that this
assumption is false. Force and law are in fact “indifferent” to each
other, that is, fundamentally unrelated [152]. Electricity indeed
manifests itself as positive and negative, but not because of any
inherent necessity. The law does not express causal connection
but rather what Hume called “constant conjunction.”18 It does not
reveal the origin of difference, but simply states difference as a
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fact. It sidesteps the primordial act by which electrical force as
such divides into its two opposite forms. The result, Hegel says,
is that “necessity here is only an empty word” [152].19
Indifference shows up in yet another way for the scientific
understanding. The very elements that the law combines in its
formulas lack necessary connection with each other. Galileo’s law
of free fall, for instance, expresses a constant conjunction of
distance and time. But it sheds no light on why these should be
connected at all, let alone connected in this particular way. There
is nothing in the concept of distance traversed that necessarily
implies the concept of time squared, and nothing in time squared
that implies distance traversed. As mathematical variables, s and
t are logically indifferent to each other. They are quantitatively
conjoined in a ratio but not conceptually united in a λόγος.20
The necessity that understanding craves, we must note, would
be achieved if in its world-view there were a place for inner
difference, that is, the immanent self-differentiation of the
absolutely simple. That would account for why electrical force
necessarily, out of its own nature, divides itself into positive and
negative. Law, in that case, would be the Concept or dialectical
truth. But understanding is no dialectician. It likes its identities
neat and its distinctions restful. And so, to prevent simple force
from becoming (in its view) compromised, understanding takes
difference into itself [154]. Necessity now acquires a new
meaning. It ceases to be causality in the phenomena and becomes
instead the necessity at work in the human subject’s act of
theorizing.
III. Explanation
We are on the threshold of the inverted world, which is a second
supersensible world [157]. Understanding will reach this extreme
point of its effort once it is revealed that explanation is nothing
more than the propounding of tautologies—differences that make
no difference. Explanation, here, is not scientific account-giving
in general but rather a species of bad argument that regularly
occurs in physical science. It is the act in which understanding
propounds a law that supposedly governs an appearance but ends
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up being identical to the appearance. In explanation, ground and
grounded become the same.
We saw earlier that force is the absolutely simple (electricity),
whereas the law of force expresses a difference (positive and
negative). Understanding uses explanation to bridge the gap
between force and law, simplicity and difference. But its effort is
sophistical: it distinguishes force and law, and then “condenses
the law into force as the essence of the law” [154]. Hegel uses
lightning to illustrate his point. Lightning occurs: it is a
phenomenon. Indeed, as a flashing forth, lightning functions as
the symbol for appearance as such. Understanding explains
lightning by enunciating a law that supposedly expresses how the
force of electricity works. Force is assumed to be simple, but the
process of explaining involves positive and negative. The explanation purports to the necessary ground of the phenomenon. But
in fact, it just repeats what happened at the surface of the
phenomenon. It says: “There was a strong electrical discharge
because of positive and negative electricity.” This simply says all
over again what lightning as a phenomenon is. It is not something
new and different, but same: a tautology. Understanding posits
differences and then, once these differences disappear in the
phenomenon (in this case, once the electrical discharge subsides),
allows the differences to sink back into an undifferentiated simple
force—mere electricity. A distinction is made only to be
withdrawn.21 In other words, the distinction is merely an artifact
and formality of the process of explanation.22
Explanation, for Hegel, borders on the absurd, or at least the
comic. Why does electricity divide into positive and negative?
Because that is its law. And why is that its law? Because
electricity divides into positive and negative. When we ask understanding why something is the case, it pretends to show us some
underlying ground but in fact only repeats the appearance that
prompted our question in the first place. This sleight of hand is not
confined to physics. Why are human beings the way they are?
Because of their genes. What are genes? That which makes us
who we are. Or, to shift to the world of Molière: Why does opium
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induce sleep? Because it has a “dormitive virtue.” These are all
tautologies masquerading as etiologies, accounts of cause. In the
earlier version of his system, Hegel summed it up nicely. All
explanation, he says, ultimately reduces to the deflating
admission: “That is just how it is.”23
We might be tempted to accuse Hegel of oversimplifying
explanation in order to make his case. But Hegel is right. We are
surrounded by explanations that purport to reveal a law, a
necessary ground, for how the world works—or how the mind
works, or how language and culture develop—which, when
examined more closely, prove to be nothing more than
tautologies. I point this out to remind us that, in reading those
parts of the Phenomenology that are critical of theory-building,
we must allow our scientific, as well as our pre-scientific or
natural, perspective to be inverted.
Hegel, we must note, inverts what we ordinarily mean by
tautology. Tautology, for him, is not a static A=A, but rather the
dialectical movement in which a difference is posited and immediately canceled [155]. This recalls the play of force, in which
active and passive were posited as different and then became
identical. The movement of tautology is a turning point in the
dialectic of understanding. It is the point at which the shiftiness of
appearance “has penetrated into the supersensible world itself”
[155]. In the platonic analogy, motion becomes part of the once
restful realm of the Forms.
IV. The Inverted World
Who among us has not wondered: What if the world as it is, is the
exact opposite of the world as it appears? What if what we call
real is really nothing but a dream, and dream reality? What if
good people are in themselves bad, and bad people good? What
if, in obedience to some perverse cosmic law, being reverses
seeming, inner reverses outer? To pose such questions is to set
foot on the terrain of Hegel’s inverted world.
The dialectic of understanding is a series of postulated
objective inners. The first was force. When force as the substance
of things vanished, a new inner appeared: the restful realm of law.
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But law led to the sleight-of-hand called explanation, where
differences make no difference. This movement of tautology
generates another inner: the inverted world, which is the inner
truth of the first supersensible world [157].24 Hegel has taken us
on one long journey into the interior of appearance. But the
inverted world brings us full circle, confirming the truth of La
Rochefoucauld’s maxim: “Extremes touch.” The inverted world
will obliterate the Beyond. It will collapse the distinction between
essence and appearance, and make appearance the standard to
which law must conform.25
Inversion is our new principle, according to which, “what is
self-same repels itself from itself” and “the not self-same is selfattractive” [156]. Hegel’s language of repulsion-from-self and
attraction-to-other recalls the magnet, which soon emerges as the
paradigm of inversion.
The first thing Hegel tells us about the inverted world is that
it completes the inner world opened up by understanding [157].
We saw earlier that law failed to “fill out” the world of
appearance: it lacked a principle of change or alteration. As an
inverted world, the supersensible realm acquires this principle. It
becomes an exact replica of the world we actually live in. This is
the irony of the inverted world. Strange seeming at first, this
world in fact restores what is familiar to us and what had been lost
in the abstractions of understanding. It lets our world be as fluid,
playful, and self-contradictory as it seems.
This is our perspective, not that of understanding, which
clings to its abstractions and continues to think in terms of a
supersensible Beyond, where every restless appearance finds its
restful double. The inverted world is what the world is implicitly
or inwardly, what it is in itself. Hegel offers a broad range of
examples. The first ones he cites are suited to the theoretical bent
of understanding. Like, under the law of the first supersensible
world, becomes unlike under that of the second, inverted world;
black in the first is transposed to white in the second; the north
pole of a magnet in the first world is south in the second; the
oxygen pole of the voltaic pile becomes the hydrogen pole, and
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the hydrogen the oxygen [158]. But then Hegel goes beyond
theory. Revenge on an enemy in this world turns into selfdestruction in the other; crime in the first turns into punishment;
guilt into pardon; disgrace into honor.26
It would be highly instructive to think through all of Hegel’s
examples of inversion. Let us focus on one: the magnet. This
remarkable object will help us make the transition from inversion
as understanding represents it to the philosophic Concept of
inversion.
From the perspective of understanding, the poles of a magnet
are inverted in the sense that each pole has reference to a
separately existing and opposite in-itself. This in-itself—the home
or, in Gilbert’s phrase, the “true location”27 of the magnet’s
poles—is the Earth, the Ur-magnet that orients our mini-magnets.
It seems strange to regard the Earth as a Beyond, but this view
makes sense if Earth is the Earth of scientific theory. That the
Earth is a body in no way detracts from its theoretical function as
the locus of magnetic essence divorced from the things whose
essence it is. In our current usage, which was also prevalent in
Hegel’s day, the north pole of a magnet is called north because it
points to the magnetic north pole of the Earth. But as Hegel
argues in his Philosophy of Nature, it is more accurate to call it
“south,” since, by the law of magnetism, it must point to its
opposite.28 With this in mind, we can say that each pole of our
mini-magnet points to, and is defined by, the opposite pole of the
Earth-magnet. North “here” has its inner truth in South “there,”
and South “here” has its truth in North “there.”
Hegel calls this approach “superficial” [159]—superficial
because non-dialectical. Through its ingenious idea of inversion,
understanding, to its credit, hits upon a great principle of nature:
polar complementarity.29 But it fails to grasp the true meaning of
this principle; its two-world thinking gets in the way. In truth, a
magnet’s inversion is not to be found anywhere but in itself. The
magnet is self-inverting, which is to say that it contains negativity
within itself, or is self-other. How do we know? Because any
attempt to isolate a pole fails. If we chop off one of the poles, it
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simply reappears in the now-smaller magnet. “Pole” is not a
material chunk of a body but one term of an opposition. In the
Phaedo, Socrates tells an Aesop-like fable about how god, seeing
that Pleasure and Pain were always quarreling, tied their heads
together, so that where the one was the other was bound to follow
(60B). The same moral can be inferred from the magnet, where
each “head” always entails its opposite.
The magnet illustrates what is true in all cases of inversion. In
its true meaning, the inverted world is not a Beyond but rather the
intelligible form of the actual world. Inversion in this sense
undoes the superstition of understanding, according to which
things exist in one world but have their intelligible essence in
another: “antitheses of inner and outer, of appearance and the
supersensible, as of two different kinds of actuality, we no longer
find here” [159].30 Magnetic north, as I indicated earlier, is not
south somewhere else but right here: “the north pole which is the
in-itself of the south pole is the north pole actually present in the
same magnet.” Similarly, in the moral sphere, crime calls down
on itself the law’s judgment and correction, invokes its nemesis as
its fulfillment, not in some other world, but right here. Crime and
punishment are the inseparable poles of the moral magnet—a fact
well known to Dostoevsky. Moral self-inversion is at work even
when we don’t get caught. Having done something wrong, we
suffer the torments of conscience and punish ourselves: we strain
to negate our negation.
Let us sum up what we have seen so far. Understanding
embraces the principle of inversion as the true inner meaning of
its supersensible law. According to this principle, a given determination finds its truth in its opposite: it is the law of all determinations to be transposed into their opposites, to move. But understanding regards this shift in a static way, as mere reference to
another object-like world, another substance or medium. We see
what it does not: that inversion defines appearance as such. It is
the essence of all determinations in the realm of appearance to be
self-inverting, to summon their opposites in a new version of the
play of force.
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The precise meaning of the inverted world, and the corresponding critique of the supersensible Beyond, lead us to the
metaphysical primacy of motion. Understanding treats motion or
change as though it needed to be saved by transcendent principles
and mathematical formulas, as though rest alone were intelligible.
But motion, as the inverted world has revealed, is the intelligible
as such, the Concept as the unity in which opposites flow into
each other. In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel makes this point
with respect to our friend, the magnet: “For the magnet exhibits
in simple, naïve fashion the nature of the Concept, and the
Concept moreover in its developed form as syllogism.”31 He adds
in a note: “If anyone thinks that thought is not present in nature,
he can be shown it here in magnetism.”32 Magnetism, as opposed
to the thing we call a magnet, is a movement of poles toward and
into each other. It is the logically structured fluency of opposite
determinations present in a simple object.
To think the inverted world, then, is “to think pure change or
think the antithesis within the antithesis itself, or contradiction”
[160]. The inverted world, our second supersensible world, is not
alongside the first, but has in fact “overarched the other world and
has it within it…; it is itself and its opposite in one unity” [160].
The inverted world, rightly understood, generates what Hegel
calls “inner difference.” This act of immanent self-differentiation
is the genuine necessity that was lacking in understanding’s effort
to connect force and law.33 The simple force of electricity divides
itself into positive and negative because, as a simple force, it is
inwardly tense, polarized with respect to itself [161]. Difference
isn’t something tacked on as an explanatory construct but is
inherent in unity. To be one is to be self-divided, to contain rather
than exclude opposition. In revisiting electrical force, Hegel
applies the wisdom of the magnet: positive and negative
electricity “animate each other into activity, and their being is
rather to posit themselves as not-being and to cancel themselves
in the unity” [161]. This is our familiar play of force, which,
having been constrained by static principles and mathematical
formalism, now rises up against understanding to proclaim: “I, in
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my instability, was the truth all along! I, pure change, am the
essence of law!”
V. Infinity—And Beyond
Hegel gives inner difference an evocative name: infinity [161].
Infinity, here, is not indefinite ongoing-ness, which Hegel calls
“bad infinity” [238]. It is neither the potential infinite of Aristotle
nor those limitless mute spaces that terrified Pascal. It is rather the
logical process by which opposites flow into each other. Infinity
is transition as such. It is the self-negation of a finite determinateness. The magnet, with its inseparable poles, is the sensuous
symbol of infinity in this sense of the term.
Infinity sums up the dialectical movement we have already
seen in tautology. It is the “absolute unrest of pure selfmovement, in which whatever is determined in one way or
another…is rather the opposite of this determinateness” [163].
This flow of opposites into each other inverts the perspective of
understanding, which is infatuated with rest and wants to keep its
terms clear and distinct. Hegel makes the striking claim that
infinity “has been from the start the soul of all that has gone
before.” It is the energy of self-negation that was implicit in all
the finite shapes of consciousness that have appeared so far—and
will continue to appear. When one of these finite shapes selfdestructs, refutes itself, it is experiencing the infinity, the selfopposition, that it holds within. In suffering contradiction, it is
getting in touch, so to speak, with its inner magnet.
Hegel identifies infinity with what he calls “the absolute
Concept” [162]. Infinity and Concept both embody the self-differentiation of the self-identical, which for Hegel is truth. This selfdifferentiation appears in its purest form in Hegel’s Logic. Here in
the Phenomenology, Hegel calls infinity as Concept “the simple
essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood” [162].
Infinity, he says, “pulsates within itself but does not move,
inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest.” It is Hegel’s version of the Logos
of Heraclitus—the Fire that enlivens, pervades, consumes, and
unifies all things.
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Life, soul, blood. These words suggest that the force-world
we are now transcending, the world that seemed so eventful and
alive, was not really alive at all. To be sure, there was motion, but
not life—vis viva, but not organic being.34 Understanding is
prejudiced on behalf of physics. This is no doubt largely because
the phenomena of physics, unlike those of biology, are readily
reducible to the homogeneity of mathematical formalism, that is,
equations. Life is the scandal of Verstand because the determinations of life are fluidly interconnected and defy rigid boundaries.
To appreciate this fact, we have only to think of how animal
organisms, in their embryonic development, exhibit spontaneous
self-differentiation, develop their different organs and systems,
wondrously, from within.
Infinity, which has been generated by the inverted world,
brings us to self-consciousness. This step had already been taken
in the phenomenon of explanation, our internal movement of
differentiating what is simple or self-same [163]. Explaining
things, Hegel observes in passing, is fun—a holiday of the mind.
The reason, he says, is that in the act of explaining why the world
does what it does consciousness enjoys conversation with itself,
Selbstgespräch [163]. To explain is ultimately to enjoy the play of
our own inner movement, our self-consciousness.
Inversion, inner difference, infinity, explanation all converge
in self-consciousness, which now officially comes on the scene in
the Phenomenology. The truth of the magnet was the repulsion of
the self-same and the attraction of the self-different. This truth is
now fully revealed as the self. To be self-conscious, to be aware
of myself as myself, is to be tautologous in Hegel’s sense of the
word. It is my act of generating inner difference that is immediately canceled or negated. Hegel describes self-consciousness as
follows:
I distinguish myself from myself, and in doing so I am
directly aware that what is distinguished from myself is
not different [from me]. I, the self-same being, repel
myself from myself; but what is posited as distinct from
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me, or as unlike me, is immediately, in being so distinguished, not a distinction for me [164].
Hegel compares this movement of self-identity with the axial
rotation of a sphere [169]. As the sphere turns, it continually
generates different positions in space and continually cancels
them. It is constantly returning out of the self-otherness that it
constantly begets. Every move “away” is a move “toward” and
back home.
Hegel stresses that self-consciousness was behind the drama
of consciousness all along. It was the energy of self-divisiveness
that was the living soul of sense-certainty, perception, and understanding. Now it is revealed that, just as infinity is the true inner
of all objects, self-consciousness is the truth of consciousness. In
other words, external things are and are true only insofar as they
are and are true for a thinking subject or self. “True” means “true
for me.”
VI. From the Play of Force to the Drama of Man
How does Hegel get from the paradoxes of physics to the fight for
recognition with which the drama of self-consciousness begins?
This will be my closing question.
I begin by observing that force is already on the verge of selfconsciousness. Once physics takes force as its central concern,
once it identifies force with nature itself—as happens most
dramatically in the physics of Boscovich—it invites a connection
between the spontaneity of inanimate bodies and the inner state of
human beings.35 Nature and human nature find their common
source, their essence, in impulsiveness, or what Hobbes was the
first to call conatus, striving. Force, seen in this light, is protowill.36 If we keep in mind this connection between force and will,
it becomes less surprising that Hegel’s chapter on understanding
begins with force and ends with self-consciousness, which, for
Hegel, is our impulse or drive to self-affirmation.
As I suggested earlier, the dialectic of understanding
generates life as well as self-consciousness. Life and selfconsciousness come on the scene together. Both exhibit infinity as
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the process of self-differentiation. But for the self at this nascent
stage of its development, the mingling of life and selfconsciousness poses a problem. On the one hand, the self is aware
of itself as being beyond body and finitude. To be an inwardly
turned being is, in a sense, to experience myself as the absolute, a
god. But I am also immersed in organic life, the necessary
condition for self-awareness: I am aware of myself only because
I am alive, rooted in this living body, which is the immediate
object of my desire, care, and anxiety. And so the self is burdened
with a double being. It is both a transcendent or pure self, the self
in its glory, and an empirical self caught up in the mortifying
contingencies of the flesh. This incarnation of inwardness, this
unhappy unity of the divine and the mortal, is the contradiction
that self-consciousness must somehow resolve, the riddle of its
existence.
In the fight for recognition the self seeks to transcend its
animality or life. “Self-consciousness,” Hegel says, “is in and for
itself when, and by the fact that, it is so for another; that is, it is
only as a being that is recognized” [178]. Recognition, here, is not
blank awareness but honor. In winning the recognition of another,
I confirm the absoluteness that I experience within. This recognition is my self-recognition, my certainty of myself as absolute,
made concrete, out there, really existent. I use this other
individual to accomplish my goal, which is to achieve selfcertainty through the negation of my self-otherness. But this
other, who is also at my stage of raw self-consciousness, wants to
use me for the same reason. And so there is a fight for recognition.
In this fight I seek to negate the presumed absoluteness of this
other individual who confronts me. I also risk my life. I do so in
order to show myself and my alter ego that I am more than an
animal. I show that I am a pure self, a self that is worthy of being
recognized as absolute.
The two individual selves are thus bound together in what
Hegel calls a “double movement” [182]. It is double because two
selves are involved and because the negation each performs on
itself it also performs on the other, which is itself. This reciprocal
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action recapitulates the dialectic of force, in which the opposed
determinations of active and passive, soliciting and solicited,
came to be lodged in each of the separate forces: “In this
movement [of selves] we see repeated the process which
presented itself as the play of forces, but repeated now in
consciousness. What in that process was for us, is true here of the
extremes themselves” [184]. In other words, self-consciousness,
as a collision of interacting selves, is force made self-conscious.
In the Phenomenology Hegel mounts a critique of force. But
the poverty of force is also its potency, its impulse to develop into
self-consciousness, and, after many inversions, into the mutual
recognition that is spirit. Spirit, for Hegel, is the spirit of the
Greek polis, the spirit of the Roman Empire, the spirit of the
French monarchy, and the spirit of the German Reformation. This
last, which posits the absolute testimony of the heart, sets the
stage for Kant’s moral world-view, conscience, and the beautiful
soul. Each of these worlds is an attempt on the part of selfhood to
incarnate itself so that it may know itself as the shared truth of a
concrete community of selves. This communal selfhood Hegel
calls the “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’”[177].
What, then, is the dialectic of force in Hegel’s
Phenomenology? It is the Prelude to the Great Fugue of conceptualized history, which begins with the fight for recognition and
ends in absolute knowing.
Endnotes
1
A lecture delivered at St. John’s College in Annapolis on 15 October 2010.
The first version of the lecture was given at the Spinoza Society in
Washington, DC on 8 March 2010.
2
Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and Other Stories
(West Valley City, Utah: Waking Lion Press, 2006), 16.
3
The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S.
Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 125. Hegel extols understanding in the
Preface of the Phenomenology, where he calls the analytic “force” of Verstand
“the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power”
[32].
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KALKAVAGE
What pure labor of fine flashes consumes
Many a diamond with imperceptible foam,
And what peace seems there to be conceived!
When over the abyss a sun reposes,
Pure works of an eternal cause,
Time scintillates and the Dream is to know.
4
Hegel identifies force with relation, Verhältnis, in the so-called Jena Logic
(The Jena System, 1804-1805: Logic and Metaphysics, trans. John W.
Burbidge and George di Giovanni [Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1986], 47).
5 Leibniz is the father of this idea: “Substance is a being capable of action”
(Principles of Nature and Grace, G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans.
Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989], 207).
6
A thing’s property, for Hegel, is a universal, but one that is bedingt: conditioned or be-thinged. Force, by contrast, is unbedingt—an unconditioned or
unbe-thinged universal [132]. In other words, force is purely thinkable. It is
not, like color, qualified and limited by a material medium.
7
See Newton’s Principia, Definition 3, where body or mass is identified with
the force of resistance or vis inertiae.
8
See Jena Logic, 54.
9
“Force thus expresses relationship itself and the necessity to be within itself
even in its being-outside itself, or to be self-equal” (Jena Logic, 56).
10
“A Specimen of Dynamics” in Leibnitz, Principles of Nature and Grace,
121.
11 In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel at one point offers what is perhaps his
most deeply revealing critique of force. This is in the context of his argument
that Kepler’s account of planetary motion is philosophically superior to that of
Newton (Philosophy of Nature, Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the
Philosophical Sciences, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970],
65-83). He remarks: “Seldom has fame been more unjustly transferred from a
first discoverer to another person.” (Ibid., 66.) Hegel’s detailed critique elaborates the three aspects of scientific theorizing that we see in the
Phenomenology: force, law, and explanation.
12
Italics Hegel’s. Throughout his analysis of force and law, Hegel refers to the
syllogism. The middle term of the syllogism mediates between the two
extremes, not as a distinct and static tertium quid, but as the dialectical identity
of the extremes. For a fuller account of the syllogism, see Hegel’s Science of
Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1976), 664 ff.).
13
In his poem “The Cemetery by the Sea,” Paul Valèry precisely captures
appearance as the dazzling unity of shining forth and evanescence:
Quel pur travail de fins éclairs consume
Maint diamant d’imperceptible écume,
Et quelle paix semble se concevoir!
Quand sur l’abîme un soleil se repose,
Ouvrages purs d’une éternelle cause,
Le temps scintille et le songe est savoir.
95
14
Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 34.
15
Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,
trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1974), 125.
16
Throughout this part of his discussion, Hegel’s word for “thing” is Sache,
not Ding—that is, a generalized “matter at hand” or πρᾶγμα, as opposed to the
thing of perception.
17
Miller’s English translation reads “the Notion of law itself.” In all citations
from Miller the word Notion is changed to Concept wherever it appears.
18
Hegel cites his agreement with Hume on this point in the Jena Logic, 52-53.
19
The pseudo-necessity of scientific theory re-appears at the level of observational reason. For example, so-called “psychological necessity” (the supposed
necessity of psychological laws) proves to be “an empty phrase” [307].
20
Λόγος means both ratio and account. In the Philosophy of Nature, 59, Hegel
gives a genuinely conceptual λόγος of Galileo’s law of free fall.
21
More examples occur in the Jena Logic, 51. Why is the soil wet? Because it
rained. What is rain? Falling moisture. Which is to say that the soil is wet
because of wetness. In his Science of Logic, 458-466, Hegel identifies explanation with the sophistical “arguing from grounds.”
22
Berkeley had made a similar claim: “Force, gravity, attraction and terms of
this sort are useful for reasonings and reckonings about motion and bodies in
motion, but not for understanding the simple nature of motion itself or for
indicating so many distinct qualities” (De motu, 17, trans. A. A. Luce in
Berkeley’s Philosophical Writings [New York: Collier Books, 1965], 255).
23
24
Jena Logic, 61.
Donald Verene suggests that Hegel’s phrase was inspired by a play of that
name by Ludwig Tieck (Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the
Phenomenology of Spirit [Albany: SUNY Press, 1985], 39). The inverted
world is, in German, die verkehrte Welt. Verkehrt means either upside down, or
twisted and perverse. Hegel uses the term with the latter meaning in a section
entitled “The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit” [377]. Scholars
disagree as to whether, in the context of the inverted world, verkehrt means
perverse as well as upside down. Gadamer makes an interesting case for the
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double meaning (Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. P.
Christopher Smith [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976], 35-53).
25
This fits the analysis of the inverted world in the Science of Logic, 509: “In
point of fact, it is just in this opposition of the two worlds that their difference
has vanished, and what was supposed to be the world in and for itself is itself
the world of Appearance.” Hegel adds (510): “the world of Appearance is thus
in its own self the law which is identical with itself.”
26 An otherworldly inversion occurs in Sophocles’ Antigone. When Creon
accuses Antigone of having bestowed equal honor on both her brothers, even
though one was the enemy of his city and the other its defender, Antigone
responds (l. 521): “Who knows if down there this is holy?”
27
William Gilbert, De Magnete, trans. P. Fleury Mottelay (New York: Dover,
1958), 26.
28
Philosophy of Nature, Addition, 166. Hegel here follows Gilbert, De
Magnete, 27.
29
“There has been a lot of talk in physics about polarity. This concept is a
great advance in the metaphysics of the science; for the concept of polarity is
simply nothing else but the specific relation of necessity between two different
terms which are one, in that when one is given, the other is also given. But this
polarity is restricted to the opposition” (Philosophy of Nature, 19).
30
The first supersensible world was a theory of transposed essence, the second
that of transposed reversed essence. The transposition of essence is the theoretical analogue of what Hegel calls self-estrangement (Selbstentfremdung). In
the realm of pure theory, things have their essence in another world. In the
more advanced, praxis-oriented stages of spirit, man’s essence, the meaning of
his life, will be outside of and beyond his actually present world: “In the
Phenomenology, Hegel repeatedly discusses the duality he wishes to surmount,
a dualism which expresses the torment of spirit obliged to live in one world
and to think in the other” (Hypollite, Genesis and Structure, 382).
31
Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 163.
32
Ibid., 165.
33
Inner difference first appeared when force split into two interacting forces
[138].
34 The closest we got to life was with magnetism, which Gilbert regarded as a
kind of soul: “Wherefore, not without reason, Thales, as Aristotle reports in his
book De Anima, declares the loadstone to be animate, a part of the animate
mother earth and her beloved offspring” (Gilbert, De Magnete, 312). Hegel, in
a similar vein, praises magnetism in the Preface: “Even when the specific
determinateness—say one like Magnetism, for example—is in itself concrete
or real, the Understanding degrades it into something lifeless, merely predi-
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cating it of another existent thing [the Earth], rather than cognizing it as the
immanent life of the thing, or cognizing its naïve and unique way of generating and expressing itself in that thing” [53].
35
In order to save continuity in nature, specifically in the phenomenon of
collision, Roger Boscovich argued that the repulsive force mutually exerted by
two colliding bodies is exerted before the actual collision. All action is action
at a distance, and there is never any actual contact between two bodies. Max
Jammer puts it succinctly: for Boscovich, “‘force’ is consequently more fundamental than ‘matter’” (Concepts of Force: A Study in the Foundations of
Dynamics [New York: Dover, 1957], 178).
36 Schopenhauer goes even further by simply identifying force and will:
“Hitherto, the concept of will has been subsumed under the concept of force; I,
on the other hand, do exactly the reverse, and intend every force in nature to
be conceived as will” (The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, trans. E.
F. Payne [New York: Dover, 1969], 111).
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The Work of Education
Jon Lenkowski
Good morning to you, ladies and gentlemen, students, colleagues,
distinguished guests, family and friends; and, most particularly, to
the current graduates who will receive master’s degrees today.
While it is customary at commencements to be congratulatory
and encouraging, I’m not going to do that, at least not primarily.
Rather, I’m going to try to address the following two connected
questions: What exactly have you been doing here? and What
have you learned? The first of these two questions goes to the
peculiar nature of the work we have tried to get you to do here;
the second looks easier, but may also require further consideration. Having spent a certain time with us, these seem to be the
very same questions you have to be asking yourselves; and they
are not very easy questions to answer. I’m going to go over some
old ground and I want to assure you that, while I’m enjoying
myself, I promise not to keep you very long.
To say that you have spent a certain number of semesters here
and read a certain list of deep and important books, and have had
conversations about them, is not really to say enough, because it
does not capture the essence of the specific work you have been
doing. It is true that we read a lot of books. But we view this not
really as an end, but as a beginning, since we hope and expect that
you will return to these same books, and others like them, again
and again throughout your lives. And therefore what you have
been doing here must be properly called a commencement—that
is, only the beginning of an activity that will just continue in you
as an essential and constant part of your lives. But this can happen
only insofar as the books that we have read here together have
already gotten a sort of permanent hold on you. Thus our hopes
Commencement address to the Graduate Institute of St. John’s College in
Annapolis, Maryland, 14 August 2009. Jon Lenkowski is a tutor at St. John’s
College.
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for your future are inextricably linked to what we assume has
already taken root in you here. Let’s try to think through the
implications of this.
First of all, it would have to mean that you have not kept the
books at arm’s length, but have allowed them to enter into you in
deep and essential ways. In other words: that you have made the
books your own. This looks different from something like
memorization—say of songs or even certain verses of poetry—
which is also a sort of internalization. Memorization might look
like making something my own, but really I’ve only made it
always readily available to myself. I can now repeat the song
anytime the mood strikes me—but it is still kept at a distance and
is in no way active in me. On the contrary, it is our great hope that
what you have read, studied and discussed here will stay with you
in an active way; will continue to reverberate and resonate in you;
will remain active in the sense that these matters will forever
make demands on you, will continue to inform and remain central
to your lives and to whatever you think and feel as human beings.
This also distinguishes what we have you do here from
merely technical and professional studies. It is true that these also
make demands on us, but only in our capacity as professionals of
one sort or another, not as human beings as such. So while they
may be active in us in our professional work, they are compartmentalized and only kept off to the side, without touching us as
human beings, without being allowed to become, or without
being thought of as, central to our lives. Our hope here, on the
contrary, is that what we have you study will make deeper and
more thoroughgoing demands on you, simply as human beings
and as citizens.
Thus to say that you make the books your own is to say that
you carry your education inside yourselves, where you continue
to let it work on you. This is then what we expect you to have
been doing here: making the books your own, or—what is the
same thing—bringing your education within yourselves. To see
how completely appropriate this way of speaking is to what we do
here in particular, you have only to consider what you have
studied: the philosophy, politics, language and literature, history,
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mathematics, and science you have studied here are not simply
making claims in the abstract, are not merely certain subjectmatters over there, alien to me. Rather, we make the book our
own. We enter the book and make ourselves part of the book’s
world. Or, maybe better: we allow the book to enter us; we internalize the book and let it inform and illuminate the ways we look
at ourselves. Whether a political teaching centers on Athens in the
fifth century BC or on Florence in the sixteenth century, it is
always—immediately and directly—drawing my attention to my
own political situation. Whether it is Plato’s version, or Freud’s
version, of the tripartite soul, my attention is drawn—immediately and directly—to the phenomena of my own inner life. If this
were not the case these books could at most be only of antiquarian
interest. These books are always making such demands upon us,
saying things about us, demanding that we turn toward
ourselves—so that to read the books thoughtfully and intelligently is always to be turning toward ourselves.
This turning toward oneself has two aspects. First there is the
question of the unity or unification of the various things we study.
And here I would remind you that both our undergraduate
program and our graduate program, despite the variety of subject
matter in both, claim to be unified programs. So where is the unity
to be found? This question is addressed vividly in Book VII of
Plato’s Republic at 537b-c, where Socrates says:
And the various studies acquired without any
particular order by the children in their education must
be integrated into a synopsis, [or seeing-together,]
which reveals the kinship of these studies with one
another and with the nature of what is.1
This seeing-together (σύνοψις in Greek) is directed first of all to
the integration of what are there called gymnastic and musical
education, but then subsequently also to what is called the higher
musical education, or what we might call the liberal arts. It is the
“seeing-together that reveals the unity of these studies.” Only in
turning inward, toward ourselves as the locus of these various
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studies can we achieve this synopsis or seeing-together, for it is in
me, in my “seeing them together,” that these various studies find
their unity, gather and integrate themselves and do their work.
And this leads me to the second aspect of this turning inward
toward oneself: as the books become your own and enter into
your souls, they continue to work upon you and upon your view
of all things, including your view of yourselves.
This does not mean that what we read is simply believed or
swallowed whole or uncritically. It’s more that claims and
counter-claims—or even nuance and counter-nuance—vie with
one another; that what were fixed, and maybe dearly-held, views
get unsettled and become questionable. This is the work done by
the books and by our conversations about them. And all of this is
going on in us. Thus our attention is quite naturally, even effortlessly, drawn inward.
But we are not mere observers here; rather we become active
participants in this, our own inner drama. A certain activity or
work on our part seems to kick in almost automatically. Or it
could be said that the work that the books do elicits, and is
completed by, a certain corresponding work on our part. But
though this might initially arise automatically, a certain effort
seems required to sustain it and make it work for us. This
sustained effort at turning inward, turning toward yourselves, is
the peculiar and proper work we have been intent on getting you
to do. The tasks of reading the assignments and participating in
class, while necessary and important, are really only a first step,
preparatory to this more essential activity. We might name this
activity rumination, or simply thinking, and it consists in carrying
on a conversation within one’s own self, as the ideas take hold
and confront one another.
In Book I, Chapter 2 of the Politics (1253a8 ff.) Aristotle talks
about the importance of language for man, the political animal:
Now it is evident that man is more of a political
animal than bees or any other gregarious animal.
Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and
man is the only animal that has speech. And whereas
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mere voice is only an indication of pleasure and pain,
and is therefore found in other animals (for their
nature reaches as far as the sensing of pleasure and
pain, and the communication of these to one another,
and no further), the power of speech is intended to
articulate what is advantageous and what is disadvantageous, and therefore similarly what is just and what
is unjust. And it belongs to man that he alone among
the animals has any sense of good and evil, of just and
unjust and the like, and the association of living
beings who have this sense constitutes a household
and a city.2
Language is different from mere vocal sound and thus sharply
distinguishes human beings even from other social animals. What
is so important about the power of speech, according to Aristotle,
is that it is language that allows us to consider matters of justice
and injustice, good and evil, and—we would add—other matters
of the same order. We must note here that, while it is speech that
clearly distinguishes man from other animals, Aristotle himself is
more interested in the specifically human activity that speech
alone makes possible for us. It is this activity of thinking and
considering that really makes us human; it is this that is the
specifically proper activity of human being as such.
And this has been our principal aim in your time here with us
that, along with internalizing the books, and carrying your
education within yourselves, you have accustomed yourselves to
this turn inward, this rumination, this conversation with
yourselves, as the proper and essential work, or being-at-work
(ενέργεια in Greek) of human being as such—and to such an
extent that this activity becomes simply a part of your lives. This
is the principal aim of the education we offer you, and may well
be the essential and intrinsic goal of education as such.
To help me make the case for this last claim, let me return
briefly to Book VII of Plato’s Republic. I will read from 518b6d7, abbreviating the passage slightly. Socrates says:
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[T]herefore education is not what the professions of
certain men assert it to be. They assert that they put
into the soul knowledge that isn’t in it, as though they
were putting sight into blind eyes.... But the present
argument indicates that this power is already in the
soul of each and that, just as an eye is not able to turn
from darkness to the light without the whole body
turning, so also the instrument with which each learns
must, together with the whole soul, be turned around
from becoming, until it is able to look at what is....
And therefore there would be an art of this turning
around, concerned with the way in which this power
can most easily and efficiently be turned around: not
an art of producing sight in it, but rather, this art takes
as given that sight is there, but not rightly turned, nor
looking at what it ought to look at.3
So: education is not a matter of taking knowledge that is already
in the teacher’s soul, and then transposing it to the soul of the
learner. Rather it is a sort of turning of the power of seeing that is
already in the learner’s soul, in the right direction—a turning
brought about by a certain art (τέχνη) called the art of turning
around (περιαγωγή, μεταστροφή).
Book VII begins with an image of our education—that is, our
rise from ignorance to knowledge—depicted as the gradual ascent
of released prisoners from within a dark cave up to the light of
day. At each stage the released prisoner is torn away from what he
had been looking at, and what he had implicitly trusted as real, to
now confront something entirely new which conflicts with what
he had previously seen. This confrontation compels him to turn
inward—that is, to weigh the one against the other, and also
against all of the other views he had once held at stages already
passed through, each one of which had also made truth-claims
and had at one time been simply and implicitly trusted and
believed in. He is now forced to “see all of these together”
(συνορᾶν, the infinitive of συνοράω—that is, σύνοψις, synopsis)
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and carry on a conversation with himself, in which each of these
has its say.
The description of the release from shackles and of the
violent turning around of these prisoners at the beginning of the
Cave passage might suggest the necessity of some external agent
(a Socrates, for instance), but even the simplest reflection on the
passage quickly gets one to see that this process can occur entirely
within a single soul—in other words, through a conversation with
oneself. Such an inner dialogue, in which one “talks right through
something” is in Greek called διαλεκτική, dialectic, from the verb
διαλέγειν, where λέγειν means “to speak” or “to talk,” and the
prepositional prefix διά means “right through.” So someone who
finds himself in the same situation as this released prisoner would
have to effortfully “talk right through” this panoply of claims and
counterclaims upon him that he now finds in his soul. This is
captured nicely in the middle voice of the verb, where διαλέγεσθαι
often has the sense of talking with oneself. A bit further on in
Book VII, at 532b4-5, the release from bonds and the turningaround connected with it are identified with dialectic.
This, then, is the picture of education given in the Republic.
It is supposed to culminate in light, or in genuine knowledge. But
whether this culmination is ultimately a real resolution, and
whether all of the antagonisms in the soul between claims and
counterclaims are ever really left behind, seems difficult to assess,
especially since what the Republic claims to be the ultimate
moment of this journey upward—namely, the Good or the Idea of
the Good—is explicitly said to be beyond being (Book VI, 509b).
But however this turns out, we in the meantime accomplish
something of enormous significance:
First: This turn inward, turn toward the self, where the
synopsis or seeing-together occurs, could be called, or likened to,
a kind of conversion, since we have been turned around and
turned inward toward ourselves.
Second: Furthermore, and as a consequence of this, whatever
progress we make here toward knowledge seems at the same time
to also be a progress toward self-knowledge. So here knowledge
and self-knowledge seem to come together or coincide.
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Τhird: If we persist in this turn inward and allow it to develop
into a full-blown conversation with oneself, we are making actual
within ourselves the proper and essential work (ἔργον)or being-atwork (ἐνέργεια) of human being as such.
Fourth and finally: This dialectical movement of the soul
within itself, which is the essential work and the very heart of the
education we have tried to provide for you here, is at once the
inner essence of education as such.
Postscript
The inward turn talked about here might invite comparison with
the concept of Er-innern, Er-innerung in Hegel (cf.
Phänomenologie des Geistes, VIII: Das Absolute Wissen, the very
last paragraph), and importantly revived by Gadamer (cf.
Wahrheit und Methode, Erster Teil, Sec. II, 2, d, penultimate
paragraph), as well as the concept of Er-eignen, Er-eignis in
Heidegger (cf. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), passim).
In ordinary German, the verb erinnern normally means “to
remind,” and with sich in the reflexive form “to remember,”
though Hegel and Gadamer take the word more literally to mean
something like “to interiorize”—an easy enough connection via
the adverb inne (English “within”) in the verb root. The verb
ereignen normally means “to happen” and the noun Ereignis
means “an event.” The standard etymology (cf. Der Grosse
Duden, Bd. 7: Etymologie) traces ereignen, through a shift in the
root, to the archaic eräugnen, carrying the sense of showing
(itself) before the eyes (Augen in German). The connection
between this and “to happen” seems clear enough. But Heidegger,
true to his fierce independence, takes the verb in an entirely
different direction, linking ereignen through the root directly with
the adjective eigen (English “own” or “one’s own”)—a
connection that Duden explicitly warns against. Heidegger’s
insistence on linking ereignen to eigen, together with the
particular stress he puts on the motive power of the prefix er-,
leads him to take er-eignen to mean something like “on the way
to appropriating,” or “on the way to ownness.” (The current
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107
standard way of rendering this in English is “en-owning,” which,
while neither German nor English, tries to capture both the sense
and flavor of Heidegger’s usage.) Of course, there is an agenda
behind this reading. And yet it seems too simpleminded to dismiss
Heidegger’s interpretation as just bad philology. Should not the
presumption at least be that he has seen into something hidden
and essential which has allowed him to look beyond the everyday
and obvious?
Notes
1 The
Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968),
216. Translation slightly altered and emphases added by the author.
2 Translation
3
by the author.
The Republic of Plato, 197. Emphases added.
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Falstaff and Cleopatra
Elliott Zuckerman
I
Falstaff and Cleopatra do not look alike. We all have a mental
picture of Falstaff, and most of us think we can visualize
Cleopatra. Yet it is surprising how few words in their plays are
devoted to their physical descriptions. Falstaff comes upon us
unannounced in the second scene of Henry the Fourth Part One.
At the same moment we move suddenly from formal verse into
prose. If we envision as a whole the four plays of Shakespeare’s
mature history cycle—Richard the Second, Henry the Fourth
Part One and Part Two, and Henry the Fifth—then it is in that
scene that Falstaff begins his domination and transformation of
the two middle plays. After the regular verse that we have heard
so far, both Falstaff and the prose come as something new. They
announce that the messy world of London lowlife will be exposed
to us, inserted below the arena of dynastic rivalry and war. To put
it impressionistically into color and sound, it is as though the
greenish white and the glitter of Richard the Second have been
replaced by the rich browns of smelly taverns and Spanish sherry,
later to be succeeded by the golden brass of Henry the Fifth.
At the end of two full acts all we are actually told about
Falstaff’s looks is that he is old and that he is fat. We also learn
that he has wit, but wit, so far as I know, is not limited to a
physical type. As it happens, all three of these definitive words—
fat, old, and wit—are used by Prince Hal in the opening phrase of
their first exchange. But it is Falstaff’s habitual drink that Hal
calls old, and it is his wit itself that he calls fat:
Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack…1
A lecture delivered on 2 April 2010 at St. John’s College in Annapolis. Elliot
Zuckerman is a tutor emeritus.
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Later on, Falstaff will famously tell us that he is not only witty in
himself but the source of wit in other men. But here the Prince is
not referring to the expanse of Falstaff’s humor or the infectiousness of his intellect. In his banter Hal is calling his
companion thick-witted, the opposite of what we might call a
“rapier” wit. Yet isn’t it remarkable that in his opening words Hal
uses the three words—four, if we add sack—that signify what
may be most important in Falstaff’s being? Fat, Wit, Old, Sack—
it is one of those marvelous details in Shakespeare about which
we wonder whether he placed them there strategically in premeditated design, or whether they simply turned up, self-generated by
genius.
As for Cleopatra, all hints about her looks are eclipsed by
something said about her that beggars all description. It may be
the greatest compliment ever paid anyone:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.2
Perhaps such hyperbole is necessary not only because she tempts
one of the greatest Roman heroes to betrayal, emasculinity, and
death, but also because—in the company of Juliet and Cressida,
Rosalind and Viola, Imogen and Isabella—she is played by a boy.
I think she is the only heroine who explicitly refers to that
convention, when, near the end, she evades the captivity in which,
as she says, some squeaking actor will “boy” her greatness.
(Among her countless talents, Cleopatra is good at transforming
nouns into verbs.)
Cleopatra is not only associated with crocodiles and snakes,
but she is expanded into a personification of Egypt and the Nile.
We see her playing the capricious monarch and the jealous rival.
My favorite among her various guises is in her scene as music
lover. She calls for music by echoing the opening line that this
audience ought to know well:
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111
Give me some music, moody food
Of those that trade in love.
[Music is called for. After a performance of whatever
length, she interrupts:]
Let it alone, let’s to billiards. 4
By replacing music with billiards, Cleopatra demonstrates her
infinite variety.
In an instructive anthology of French prose, designed for use
in the language tutorial of the college, there are samples of the
short character sketches of La Bruyère. Each paragraph is a list of
personal and sartorial characteristics, and ends with a declaration
of what the person is: il est riche, il est pauvre. Such generic tags
cannot be attached to the great people in Shakespeare. There is
only one Hamlet, one Rosalind, one Lady Macbeth—only one
Falstaff and only one Cleopatra. Why, then, did I put those two
together in the title of this lecture, and why have at least some of
you already guessed why they deserve to be paired? Whether for
good or for ill, the Fat Wit and the Serpent of the Nile, each in his
or her respective world, represent a counterpoise and a threat to
what is going on politically.
The History Tetralogy has the bones of a Morality Play. In the
line of legitimacy, Prince Hal lies between Richard the Second,
who was legitimate but weak, and the Henry the Fifth that Hal is
to become, who will legitimize the crown his father wears
uneasily. Meanwhile there is a gamut of Honor, ranging from
Falstaff, for whom it is a mere word, to Hotspur, for whom it is
everything. Hotspur, by the way, is the only rival to Falstaff in
liveliness and language. In Part Two the underlying schematism
is further personalized by the introduction of the Lord Chief
Justice, representing the moral order for which the future king
must eventually reject Falstaff. Falstaff is also the Prince’s
surrogate father—a role that is memorialized in a long and
separate scene.
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Richard II
{
Falstaff
Henry IV
HAL
Hotspur
Lord Chief
Justice
Henry V
Prince Hal is at the center of four triads, which at their most
neutral should give him—and us—the wherewithal for a proper
political and moral choice. The trouble is that Shakespeare in his
fecundity has endowed Falstaff with so much being that the scales
are, so to speak, outweighed.
Falstaff cannot be a measurable factor within the world when
he is already a world in himself. As he tells the Prince in the
peroration of a play within the play:
…banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins—but
for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack
Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more
valiant, being as he is old Jack Falstaff, banish not
him thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy Harry’s
company, banish plump Jack, and banish all the
world.5
The Prince answers truthfully but mysteriously in a tone the actor
must think up for himself: “I do, I will.”
Cleopatra, too, despite her pairing with Antony, also has her
separable world. This is paradoxically most evident in the manner
of her death, which is sharply divided from the death of Antony.
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All the other Shakespearean tragic heroes die at the end of their
plays, but after the succession of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and
Macbeth, it is in Act Four that Mark Antony has his prolonged
suicide in the presence of Eros. The playwright needs an entire act
for something new: the exotic and polysemous apotheosis of
Cleopatra. That redemption looks forward, I think, to the final
plays, often called Romances, that follow, in which old dissensions are harmonized, lost children are found, and statues come to
life. When Cleopatra embraces the asps she is showing the tragic
hero how such things ought to be done. All the boyishness is gone
in this triumph of the woman. And it is accomplished amidst
verbal music that rivals the sensuality of that other triumphal
woman, Isolde, who, twenty minutes after the suicide of her
lover, achieves her first and final sexual climax.
Most of the Romans can’t understand Cleopatra, and are
persistently fascinated with her and with Egypt. Even Antony has
what she calls “Roman thoughts,” but unfortunately not often
enough. The most extremely Roman of them all—I refer to
Octavius Caesar, who is an undisguised boy marching in from the
arena of Coriolanus—seems to be unable to recognize her attractiveness. That is, anyway, how I interpret his entry, near the end
of the play, into her room in Alexandria. “Which is the Queen of
Egypt?” he asks.7 He was only the adoptive son of Julius.
I mention Julius because I want to tell a brief anecdote about
what happened some years ago in a Graduate Institute preceptorial. At the end of the first act we came to Cleopatra’s famous
reference to her youth:
My salad days,
When I was green in judgment, cold in blood...8
I asked what she could have meant, and an elderly man in the
class observed that she was referring to a Caesar salad. I thought
the interpretation was entirely Shakespearean. This addition to all
the other meanings of the salad metaphor would have seemed to
him apt and irresistible.
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II
Cleopatra’s arrival on the barge at Cydnus is a celebrated passage
of English verse. It is also a powerful example of how
Shakespeare can transform his sources. In this case the source is
the good prose of North’s translation of Plutarch. The speaker is
Enobarbus, who earlier spoke the lines describing Cleopatra in
general. He has one of the most privileged roles in Shakespeare.
The transformation from good prose to great verse, and then from
great verse to great poetry, is worth a lecture of its own. It is
certainly worth a Tutorial of its own. Here I can only point to a
detail or two that have been added to the description. They have
been italicized in the example:
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne
Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were
silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.
*****
Antony,
Enthron’d i’ the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.8
I have italicized the places where the winds, the water, and
the air itself are in love. Cleopatra has seduced Nature itself. And
as I transcribed these passages I felt obliged to insert a plea for the
restoration of this play—I am tempted to say this poem—to a
more secure place in the program. Not only should it be a seminar
reading, but it contains a detail that entitles it to be the very last
reading of the senior year. For—as my colleague Mr. Kutler likes
to point out—somewhere in its text it contains the word UNSEM-
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115
INARED.
The word unseminared—which refers to the deprivation of
something even more important than the Seminar—is used only
once in Shakespeare’s works. There are many thousands of such
words. When they occur in Ancient Greek we may assume that
other instances haven’t survived. In Shakespeare they tell us that
his genius had at its disposal a language that was rich in transitional flux. It could be said that Elizabethan and Jacobean English
displayed a variety that rivaled Cleopatra’s; or that, like Falstaff,
the language was fat and witty in itself.
When talking about iambic pentameter, or blank verse, I like
to show its remarkable range by quoting pairs of lines that as
neighbors highlight the immense contrasts possible in both the
language and what had become its characteristic dramatic
medium. Some of you already know the following lines as my
favorite example, from Hamlet’s dying injunction to Horatio:
Absent thee from felicity awhile
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.9
The first line is Latinate and quick-syllabled, leaving unrealized
two or three of the metrical stresses. The second is Anglo-Saxon
and monosyllabic, realizes extrametrical stresses, and even
provides clusters of consonants—“this harsh world”—that slow
the line down further, and that are unimaginable in, say, Italian
verse. Here is another such line, from Macbeth:
The multitudinous seas incarnadine
Making the green one red.10
Each of the two lines could belong to a different language. (If, by
the way, you don’t see that all but the last of these lines are legitimate and unarguable lines of iambic pentameter, please ask me
to show you—at the risk that I’ll actually do so!)
Such extravagance is in sharp contrast with the economy of
the other great modern dramatist we study here. According to one
set of tallies, Shakespeare’s lexicon is almost ten times that of the
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sparse and highly selective lexicon of Racine. (As the students
know, most of Racine’s vocabulary compensates for its brevity by
being untranslatable!) The difference is of course reflected in the
difference of the action. In answer to the on-stage horrors of
Shakespeare—even Sophocles would not have allowed the
audience to witness the gouging-out of eyes—the typical action
of the Racinian queen is to go off into the wings and then return,
having slightly changed her mind. The so-called unities of time
and place are usually ignored in Shakespeare, no more blatantly
than in Antony and Cleopatra, where Act Four has as many as
fifteen scenes. Those scene-numberings are, by the way, entirely
editorial. It is a delightful fact that in the First Folio, our only
original text, the heading of the play is Act One, Scene One—and
then there are no further act and scene divisions. Perhaps a
careless omission, but it is nicer to think that the first editors
realized that this play ought to flow on unimpeded, like the river
Nile—or like the overflowing dotage of Antony, which is
mentioned in the opening lines.
There is something about the richness of Shakespeare’s
language that is not always approved: his propensity for punning.
One of the great classical critics of Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson,
played right into my hands when he wrote about it. “The quibble,”
he said—in his day a pun was called a quibble—“is the fatal
Cleopatra for which Shakespeare lost the world.”11 Just as for
Antony the world was well lost, so Shakespeare’s attraction to
wordplay is happily inseparable from his love of the word.
Tonight there is no time to discuss the wonders of
Shakespeare’s quibbling, for, as you’ll hear, there is a rarer and
more hidden aspect of his wordplay to which I shall devote a few
minutes. But recently I have been reading learned discussion of
the pun—there are such things—and have been confirmed in
something I have always suspected: that an investigation of the
pun must lead to a discussions of language itself. But even when
you hear an everyday pun, let it be enough to remember
Shakespeare’s predilection when you automatically groan. If the
groan is simply to let the punster know that you “got it,” a smile
of appreciation is a better indication. But if it is a groan of
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reproach, the practice of our greatest poet requires that you at
least take the time to decide whether the pun is a good one.
But more broadly you might remember that there are petrified
puns at the roots of our words—a Platonic dialogue is devoted to
quibbling etymologies, strongly countering the now popular
notion that the form of words is merely conventional. Punning is
related to rhyming and to metaphor. Bear in mind the dangerous
double-meanings of the Delphic oracles, where the wrong choice
of interpretation might mean one’s death. Remember that it was
with a quibble that Odysseus escaped from the Cyclops. Much of
the sense of music depends upon the ambiguities of what can
fairly be called tonal punning, for every modulation pivots on a
pun. And above all consider what you are doing when you dream.
The other aspect of wordplay I just referred to is the
Anagram, and it is the occasion for my second anecdote. The
anagram got me into trouble in my early years of teaching at St.
John’s. In a language tutorial we were reading one of the sonnets,
which I present here. I’ll read the whole sonnet, but I’m afraid
that I shall talk about only line eleven, which I have italicized:
SONNET 64
When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,
When sometime lofty towers I see down razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store,
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate:
That time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
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There can be little doubt that the poet is asking us to hear the
connection between RUIN and RUMINATE, and I think he is
also asking us to see the connection in the printed text. We did so
in that class, long ago, noticing that when we removed RUIN
from RUMINATE we were left with a bereft MATE. We didn’t
stop there, but went on to look for more anagrams. We found
TIME, which is the theme of the sonnet, and words related to that
theme, such as MINUTE, MATURE, and REMAIN. Someone
happily discovered NATURE. There are more, but I’ll let you find
them for yourselves.
At a dinner-party that evening, I boasted of what we had
discovered in class. I was overheard by one of the elderly
members of the faculty, who later took me aside and told me that
at St. John’s College we don’t do such things. Perhaps he thought
I also counted up the letters in all my texts, in order to discover
what was at the dead middle.
It is now fashionable to include anagrams among the
treasures one seeks in the sonnets. I know of recent major studies
that do so. When the poem is printed out and non-dramatic, there
is an invitation for anagram hunting. But what about the plays,
which were presented without a text to follow, to an audience not
all of whom could read? Are we to find literal wordplay in the
spoken text?
For a test case, I seek the help of Iago. In most of the action
of Othello, we watch with fascination and dread the virtuoso
performance wherein Iago, malignantly and I think motivelessly,
brings to destruction a great hero and his innocent wife. He does
so by means of a handkerchief. His performance begins with what
is almost a whisper: “Ha,” he says, “I like not that.”12 What am I
to make of the fact that HA—that H and A—are the first two
letters of HANDKERCHIEF? What are you to make of it? Did
Shakespeare make anything of it? Did Shakespeare even notice
it? Does his intent matter, despite the warnings that there is
something called the Intentional Fallacy? Isn’t the richness and
variety of the play enough, without the need to pile up
superfluities?
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I think similar questions must be asked about any such
discovery, particularly when its attraction feels irresistible. Their
discovery is only a preliminary to the criticism of the poem.
Criticism begins with the attempt to decide whether what is
discovered is properly there.13
III
One reason why Shakespeare the Poet and Shakespeare the
Dramatist vie for supreme beauty is that the poetry spreads
itself—leaks out, so to speak—into the action. I am referring to
what, for want of a better name, I call Enacted Metaphors. The
poetic trope is staged for us. Cleopatra, on the upper level of the
storied stage, has the wounded Antony reeled up to her, and she
observes that fishing is a great sport. The blind Duke of
Gloucester thinks he is jumping off a cliff, but only falls from one
step of the stage to another. In a speech filled with other sublimely
monosyllabic lines, Othello extinguishes a lamp while on his way
to smother Desdemona:
Put out the light, and then put out the light.14
Whole scenes can be large figures of speech. The unweeded
garden of England, with a gardener named Adam. The Forest of
Arden, which always has Another Part. Lady Macbeth twisting
her spotted hands while wandering in disturbed sleep.
Falstaff stages his own resurrection. True to his denigration of
Honor, he plays dead in battle. When he gets up, he has the chance
to celebrate his ebullience in more than speech. Then, to make the
act entirely outrageous, he carries off the body of Hotspur, dead
from Honor, in order to claim the victory as his own. When
Falstaff was lying in pretended death, we heard an impromptu
eulogy from Prince Henry, which is in great contrast to the repudiation of Falstaff at the end of the play. Falstaff’s pretended death
is comic; his true death is pathetic, and it comes when he is still
alive. Cleopatra also keeps dying, and her deaths and recoveries
bring on the death of Antony and his brief resurrection. Her final
death, carefully staged, is, in the largest sense of the word, comic.
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About Falstaff’s actual death, there is an aspect I have never
seen mentioned in the books I have read. In two significant ways
the very end of his life parallels the death of Socrates. As you
know, when Socrates is about to die he refers to a debt he owes to
the demigod Asclepius—who, as I interpret it, cured him of
Becoming. Falstaff, right after his rejection, refers to the money
he owes Justice Shallow. More important, both Socrates and
Falstaff die from the bottom up. The effect of the hemlock starts
at the feet. And in her description of Falstaff’s death, Mistress
Quickly notices that the final coldness began at his feet. I asserted
earlier that one of the duties of criticism was to try to judge
whether an anagram, say, was admissible. A similar attempt at
discernment should be brought to bear on the significance of such
classical parallels.
The most magnificent of all the staged metaphors must be the
death of Cleopatra. She herself stages it. She nurses the asps, like
the mother of death. She readies herself to meet Antony again,
and her ladies follow her, to assist in the seduction:
The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,
Which hurts, and is desir’d.15
But this operatic love-death is not that of the singing divas. They
depend upon the easier effects of passionate music. Cleopatra’s is
the triumph of clarity and wit.
Epilogue
In the Folio version of King Lear, shortly after the five Nevers
that hammer out the culminating despair of the negative action,
the King, with the dead Cordelia in his arms, imagines that his
daughter is about to speak. As a staged metaphor, it might remind
us of Cordelia’s initial refusal, five acts earlier, to speak more than
a single repeated negative. At the end of the play she is saying
nothing. At the beginning she had uttered the word Nothing, and
with that word she seems to have released the army of uncanny
evil manned by her sisters and their allies.
Cordelia, who seems to be Grace itself, and who takes upon
herself a redeeming forgiveness, must be eliminated from the
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world. Nothing could be more perverse than the eighteenthcentury happy ending, in which she survives and is married off to
Edgar. This is not only absurd; it is, in another sense, not absurd
enough. From the point of view of stagecraft, it is easy enough to
save Cordelia. Shakespeare makes that obvious, so that we see
that the killing of Cordelia is of the utmost importance. While we
are all reasonably hopeful that there is still time to save her, he has
Edmund delay until it is too late the casual word that would have
meant rescue. It is being asserted, I think, that in order to
eliminate the extreme evil, the extreme good must also go. At the
end of this tragedy, and I think most of the others, the world must
be deprived of both Grace and Evil, leaving us with the merely
good and the merely bad.
I’ll go one rash step further and draw an analogy with my
chief subject. Both Falstaff and Cleopatra reveal a seductive
amorality that also, like Grace and Evil, must be purged. England
and Rome are left with the ordinary, the political, the moral, and
the livable.
1
Henry IV, Part I, I.1.4.
2
Antony and Cleopatra, II.2.278-81.
3
Ibid., V.2.262
4
Ibid., II.51-4
5
Henry IV, Part I, II.4.457-63.
6
Antony and Cleopatra, V.2.135.
7
Ibid., I.5.86-7
8
Ibid., II.2.230-58
9
Hamlet, V.2, 361-63
10
Macbeth, II.2, 77-8
11
Samuel Johnson, A Preface to Shakespeare, §44
12
Othello, III.3.37
13
I once gave a lecture on the opening note of “Dove sono,” the great C-major
aria of the Countess in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. It was only while
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speaking the lecture that I realized that the first syllable of the Italian text, DO,
was also the DO of the C-major scale.
PORTRAITS OF THE
IMPASSIONED CONCEPT
Peter Kalkavage, The Logic of
Desire: An Introduction to Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit.
122
14
Othello, V.2.7.
15
Antony and Cleopatra, V.2.343-44.
Paul Dry books, xvi + 537 pages, $35.
Book Review by Eva Brann
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is an enthralling “picture
gallery” (447)* of the successive incarnations in which human
consciousness appears in the world; it is also a repellant trudge
through the abstract dialectic by which its concept develops. I
would claim that until you’ve undergone the complementary
experiences of delighting in the imaginative recognition of the
various “pictures” and of suffering the pains of thinking through
the logic, you haven’t quite lived—if living means having
plumbed the possibilities of passionately driven thought in search
of self-awareness.
Like all great classics of philosophy, the Phenomenology is
written for all of us, the amateurs of thinking no less than the
professional philosophers (451), provided we have this single
qualification—that we are Hegel’s contemporaries in the sense of
living with him at the end of time, when consciousness has come
to full self-realization as spirit. More mundanely put, the
Phenomenology presupposes only “some familiarity with the
history of philosophy” (xii), and that can be supplied by any of
the good commentaries available.
Nonetheless, the book is a nest of labyrinths at whose every
turn we readers meet, in Peter Kalkavage’s words, a monstrous
Minotaur, a “Demon of Difficulty” (xi). To overcome each new
Minotaur we need help of a more global sort than even the best of
*
Page numbers in parentheses refer to The Logic of Desire.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries can provide. This is
exactly what Kalkavage gives us in The Logic of Desire. It is a
full-scale narrative, a readable yet faithful retelling of Hegel’s
story. It has several serious predecessors (which are given full
credit in a brief analytic biography), but is in a class of its own for
its engaging, distinctly American-flavored accessibility, its downamong-the-readers and do-it-yourself egalitarianism. Indeed, an
early reader of the book wrote to me to praise it as “a popularization of the right kind, explicating the thinking of Hegel in its
own terms, while constantly watching the mind of the potential
reader to see whether that mind is taking it in.” The Logic of
Desire intends to lead us “into the thick of Hegel’s arguments”
(xii), not from a commentator’s outside view but from the
position of a reader venturing into the labyrinth. That is, of
course, what an “introduction” should do – bring us into a text.
The Logic of Desire is, so to speak, a friendly doppelgänger of the
Phenomenology that steadily accompanies it (being as long as the
text) without ever eclipsing it.
Kalkavage presents Hegel’s book as one of a quartet of great
books on education, together with Plato’s Republic, Dante’s
Divine Comedy, and Rousseau’s Émile. All four of these works
present the drama of the soul’s development and liberation, as
Hegel puts it, from consciousness’s “immediacy” (its unreflectively natural familiarity with its world) to its “mediated” (that is,
conceptualized) appropriation of that world as fully selfconscious spirit. The Phenomenology is the story of the epochs in
the education of spirit, the life changes self-generated by its
“passionate self-assertion,” its spirited longing, its desire, to come
into its own. This eventful journey of consciousness’s becoming
spirit is a tragic drama, because the spirit-to-be “cannot become
wise without making a fool of itself. An extremist at heart, spirit,
our human essence, is fated…to learn through suffering” (2). The
journey that consciousness drives itself through is a logical one –
hence the title The Logic of Desire.
This logic is new upon the scene of rationality. Hegelian
dialectic is a living, developmental logic. It is not the work of
individual human understanding passing judgment on this or that
EVA BRANN
125
by reference to a fixed set of categories, but rather the work of
Thought itself—“the Concept” in Hegel’s language. This
energetic Concept drives itself in a violent, dialectical (that is,
self-antithetical) motion from continuously new “self-positings”
through inevitable “self-otherings” to ever current and ever
collapsing self-reconciliations, until an ultimate consummation of
mutual absorption by self and other is reached. In the hackneyed
and unhelpful language of some Hegel-explications, this rising
and plunging onward motion of the spirit is referred to as thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis, but Kalkavage does not use this terminology in his inside chronicle of spirit’s way. He finds fresh
language for every “moment,” every station of consciouness’s via
dolorosa.
In the self-motion of dialectical logic, two elements are
compounded: desirous striving and spirited assertion. Here one of
the accepted translations of the German Geist as “Spirit” (the
other is “Mind”) proves serendipitous, for it alludes to “spiritedness,” that proud self-assertion and other-negation which the
Greeks called thymos. The desire that drives the dialectic is thus
shown to be a powerfully negative and destructive force, and it
reincarnates itself in a succession of figures—that portrait gallery
of impassioned concepts by which spirit drives itself to cancel,
keep and raise (the three main meanings of the well known
Hegelian verb aufheben) all significant oppositions. The
paradigm of all these oppositions is that of subject and object, self
and other.
The Logic of Desire presents an exemplary attitude for a
reader to adopt toward a book. To use a fancy term, it embodies a
“hermeneutic,” a principle of interpretation. The most respectful
such hermeneutic rule I know is the so-called “principle of
charity”: give the text a chance to make maximum sense.
Kalkavage outdoes this principle by embracing a “principle of
appreciation”: savor and learn from the text to the utmost of your
ability. The principle of appreciation is to the principle of charity
as awed generosity is to squint-eyed tolerance—a way of treating
a book with magnanimity rather than with mere civility.
Thus it is not until the last pages, in the epilogue, that we
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
learn that Kalkavage could not possibly be a whole-hearted
Hegelian, that the book that has captivated him has not captured
him. The main sticking-point is that very condition mentioned
above, that coloring of spirit’s eros, of its desire to know itself, by
thymos—spirit’s aggression toward its other. “Desire here is not
other-affirming but self-affirming and other-negating” (454).
Thus, if Hegel succeeds, he will—and this is in fact his aim—
have killed philosophy, the love of wisdom, not only by the
combative self-positing of consciousness (which is discordant
with the open inquisitiveness of philosophy), but also by the
claim that the curriculum of self-development can be completed;
for, once Absolute Science, the knowledge that has absorbed all
its conditions, has been attained, philosophy is superseded.
Kalkavage’s approach is therefore a welcome counterweight to a
mode that is all too prevalent in contemporary philosophy: to allot
living space only to those problems and solutions currently within
the consensual range of the philosophical profession. The Logic of
Desire teaches the lesson of non-credulous admiration.
Does it follow from this way of reading that Kalkavage’s
Hegel must be either left-leaning or right-leaning? Hegel students
on the left—notably Marx—interpreted his work as atheistic
because God becomes man and is his congregation, while on the
right this entry of God into his people was thought to preserve
some transcendence. Kalkavage says that “what Hegel no doubt
intended is that each is absorbed into the other. God must be
humanized in order to be self-conscious, and man divinized in
order to enjoy absolute self-knowledge” (509, n. 2). This view,
certainly supported by the text itself, compounds right and left
Hegelianism. The Phenomenology is neither a theology nor an
anthropology but a theoanthropology.
There remains, however, the question of Hegel’s politics. In
some final advice to the now-engaged reader about which book to
tackle next, Kalkavage recommends Hegel’s Elements of the
Philosophy of Right as “the most deeply philosophic political
work of modernity, which contains his most powerful critique of
modern liberalism” (452). But since the liberalism Hegel was
critiquing has much in common with contemporary conservatism,
EVA BRANN
127
here too, the right-left question has no bold solution. Hegel’s
conservatism is too sui generis to fall neatly under any predetermined rubric. And yet, perhaps we can find a pidgeon-hole for
him. There is among Hegel’s epochal portraits a figure called “the
beautiful soul.” It is described by Kalkavage as being afflicted
with “spiritual narcissism,” as being “miserable in principle”
(345, 348); it is too pure to be practical, and is, on top of that, a
harshly unforgiving judge of those who are doers. Kalkavage
points out that Hegel himself is, in turn, a particularly harsh judge
of this beautiful soul (507, n. 28; 509, n. 48). In this portrait,
Hegel paints a wickedly true-to-type likeness of a liberal intellectual—thereby revealing himself to be the “right” Hegel after
all.
I might add here that Kalkavage recommends, as another next
reading after the Phenomenology, The Science of Logic. It
postdates the Phenomenology by five years, and yet it is an everfascinating question whether the former comes “before” or
“after” the latter. For the Logic (or its shorter, more accessible
version, often called the “Lesser Logic”) is in fact God’s pretemporal life-plan for the spirit in the world—that is, its purely
logical unfolding told through the abstractly dialectical moments
of the Concept. When this ideal plan, this Concept, enters time, it
takes on appearances. Hence “phenomenology” is the account of
the phenomena, the appearances of the Concept in a dialectal
sequence of forms. In Kalkavage’s more accurate and eloquent
rendering: “[P]henomenology, as the prelude to science, is spirit’s
rational communion with itself in its manifold appearances in
history” (108). Then the question for us readers might well be:
Does Hegel know the Concept through its appearances or the
converse? Does experience of the appearances precede the logic
that makes it rational, or is the dialectic plan prior to any comprehension of the shapes that invest it (516, n.10)? Kalkavage opts, I
think, for the first case, and that decision puts the Phenomenology
first in Hegel’s system and first for us readers.
Kalkavage has, as I said, done an end-run around the leftright controversy. And yet, as he leads us to listen to Hegel’s
language, to savor his symbolism, to follow his figures, we come
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
to see Hegel as an uncircumventably religion-bound writer. If the
structure of the Phenomenology is dialectical, its pathos is
religious. The above-mentioned “beautiful soul” is one of a
myriad of examples. When, as its dialectic demands, this
judgmental, holier-than-thou bystander is finally reconciled with
the doer (the Phenomenology is a roman à clef that names no
names, to which Kalkavage often supplies the key; in this case,
the man of action is Napoleon) they come together in mutual
forgiveness “Spirituality no longer consists in life-denying
judgmental inwardness, and the world is no longer God-forsaken
and vain” (357). Kalkavage’s rendering captures the spiritual
aspect of the event.
But more—he catches and conveys at once the pervasive
Christianity and the self-willed heresies of Hegel’s book. For
example, the religious drama of the Phenomenology culminates
not in the Resurrection of Easter Sunday, but in the Passion of
Good Friday. It is this “speculative Good Friday” that images the
conceptual ultimate reconciliation of man with God, the
revelation that God needs man in order to be fully God. The
Passion of Jesus (who is never named) already contains, has
conceptually collected and recollected within itself, the resurrection of the spirit, which is not a separate ascent but just “man
in history” (449-50). For it is in history that man and God are
united, and this union culminates in the infinite sadness of God’s
death which is also the first moment when spirit knows itself as
spirit. Philosophy must “go down” in order genuinely to “go up”
into the eternal Now of Absolute Science. (This moment of
consummation is far more complex, of course, than my account
of it.) Kalkavage accompanies his presentation of this bold
tampering with the climactic events in the calendar of the church
year by a remarkable list entitled “Hegel’s Heresies” (398). This
list on the one hand leaves me convinced that Hegel was indeed
the ultimate heretic; on the other, however, I remain mindful of
the fact that “heresy” (Greek for “choice” [hairesis]) is, after all,
a version of faith—though perhaps a willfully original one.
Indeed, the Phenomenology exhales such awe before the events of
EVA BRANN
129
God’s appearance on earth that it is palpable even to a nonChristian.
The Phenomenology is complex beyond summary but
without loose ends, and labyrinthine but without cul-de-sacs. The
complexities and abrupt corners, the startling turns and sudden
familiarities, the space-inversions and time-loops that mark the
Concept’s path are lovingly—and clearly—traced out in The
Logic of Desire. Near the center of the book an “Interlude” is
devoted to schematizing these movements and their achieved
moments, without letting us forget that conceptual thinking is
essentially unpicturable and that the Phenomenology speaks with
a forked tongue. The phenomenal picture gallery is an aid to be
continually subverted; its visualizable images are countermanded
by its sightless logic. For images are “out there,” since they are
objects, and thinking is within us, since we are subjects. To keep
the reader on the conceptual track, Kalkavage continually recapitulates—as Hegel does, but often very abstrusely—the purely
logical progress. But Kalkavage also asks the question of
questions about this text: “What, possibly, is lost in the move
from picture to Concept?” (518, n. 30.) He has, in fact, given an
answer, intimated above. What is lost is the element of positive
love animating philosophy when it welcomes some sort of vision.
This autobiography of the spirit is, then, the recollection of its
continually morphing recognition of itself both in and as the
world, of the moments of reconciliation between self and other, of
the mutual “mediation,” the bridging of the gap, between subject
and object. As in any autobiography, time is essential, and indeed
the latter is spirit’s ultimate definition: time is spirit’s intuition of
itself, meaning that its self-othering and self-finding, its
projection of itself into an object and its consequent seeing itself
in that object, is the motion, the dialectical flux of appearances,
that we call time. But this time is not necessarily chronological.
The time-loops mentioned above testify that spirit’s phenomenal
progress is not a mathematical continuum, a succession of linear
befores and afters. For example, Newton’s force of attraction,
which holds together the world filled by bodies, appears chronologically much later than God’s power which unifies the creation
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
inhabited by souls. Yet Hegel regards the latter as more conceptually complex, more replete with dialectical reconciliations, and
so, as Kalkavage points out, it appears later in Hegel’s account
(77). The grades of spirit’s self-education are not always consecutively numbered.
Consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, are the
beings whose experiences, whose successive times, are recollected in the Phenomenology. By whom? Who is the true teller of
the tale? All the Peoples of the Book, Jews, Christians, and
Muslims, are familiar with this enigma of authorship, which no
amount of textual analysis can solve. For suppose that numerous
hands are discerned—the question remains, Who guided the
hands? Just two centuries ago, in 1807—Kalkavage’s book
celebrates this bicentennial—Hegel, a professor of philosophy at
Jena, published his book. And yet, scandalous as it may seem, it
is not he but the spirit that guided his hand, the hand of one who
knows “conceptually grasped history,” who recalls the Golgotha
where spirit completed its suffering and became absolute—that is
to say, fully itself and self-sufficient. “[T]he Phenomenology,
strictly speaking, is the work of spirit rather than the work of
Hegel” (267; 494, n. 12). The willingness to utter such words is
testimony to a readiness to take this terrific book and its demands
seriously; it is what gives The Logic of Desire its own intensity.
Who or what, then, constitutes this gallery of impersonal
persons, from consciousness to spirit, that exhibits the unnamed
but identifiable human shapes of history? Logically, as concepts
in thought, they are the immature moments of the pure Concept;
temporally, as individuals on earth, they represent Everyman
(521, n. 71), the various human embodiments of the appearing
Concept that we readers, participating in Hegel’s “inwardizing”
(the literal translation of the German word for recollection,
Erinnerung) can still find within ourselves. For the spirit’s autobiography is also ours, and we now recognize the struggles which,
though opaque to our predecessors, have brought us to our
common modern humanity, to the community that has grasped its
history conceptually (449).
EVA BRANN
131
This consummation of Hegel is, I think, as dubious as it is
high-toned, but on the way there are many moments of wonderful
down-to-earth plausibility, and The Logic of Desire reports them
with down-home humor. I don’t know where else Hegel would
find himself so appreciatively joshed, in accordance with the
Socratic wisdom that playfulness can levitate dead earnestness
into live seriousness. (I should point out, though, that there is also
weighty evidence that Hegel himself has a sense of humor.) An
example of Kalkavage’s wise levity is a section called “Artful
Dodgers” that recounts a moment in the life of consciousness—a
moment in my history, recapitulable within me—when I no longer
find myself in external works and objects but shift suddenly to
being immersed in “the heart of the matter” (die Sache selbst).
That shift, however, lands me, by a convoluted evolution, in a
drama of deceit that leads to an inevitable downfall by selfnegation. For this project, to dwell with the true matter, is my
cause, and to my fellow workers it connotes a loss of the objectivity they were led to expect of me. Say—this is Kalkavage’s
example—I was a molecular biologist trying to discover the gene
for self-consciousness. Having become engaged with the matter
itself as it matters to me, I become irritated by other researchers
taking up my interest; my scientific “objectivity” shows its limits.
Since I can’t reappropriate my matter, I take my cunningly noble
revenge by interesting myself in theirs: I write a best-seller called
Genes Are Us (222). Thus I take part in a “pathology of appropriation”; for in praising the work of other laboratories I praise my
own. I am the Great-Souled Biologist.
Whoever has some small familiarity with modern institutional research will laugh out loud at these insights into the
mutual invasion of different scientists’ “techno-space” (221). Yet
who would have thought of this psychological episode as being a
way-station to the reconciliation of subject and object? But so it
is, for what consciousness learns at this moment is that
“subjective me-ness and objective this-ness are both essential to
the matter itself” (223).
Finally, for all the human intensity of The Logic of Desire, it
is a narrative kept as free as possible of personal opinion. Such
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
obiter dicta are relegated to the endnotes, which consequently
abound in concise illuminations and suggestive queries. Here is
Kalkavage on the beautiful soul: “Sensitive types are often
merciless judges” (508, n. 39). And a few notes later, he asks a
question incited by Hegel’s harsh condemnation of this same
beautiful soul and other condemned types hanging in his picture
gallery: How do such judgments fit into his scheme of mutual
forgiveness and the ultimate reconciliation of oppositions? “[W]e
wonder about the connection of reason and judgment in
philosophy. Is the philosopher allowed to condemn, or does
genuine rationality preclude all condemnation?” (509, n.48.)
This is a version of the unabashedly strange question—asked
of us not as an academic exercise but as a living perplexity—
whether Hegel the philosophy professor and Hegel the spirit’s
secretary quite coincide. It is also an example of the engaging
directness with which Peter Kalkavage leads us into one of the
wonders of the West.
�
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Pastille, William
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Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
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Druecker, Robert
Kalkavage, Peter
Lenkowski, Jon
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 52, number 2 (Spring 2011)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
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Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
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Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s
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�Contents
Essays
Reading Landscapes: Maternal Love in
Classical Tamil Poetry ....................................................1
Anne David
The Tocquevillean Moment ................................................19
Wilfred M. McClay
On Seeing Aspects ..............................................................45
John Verdi
Reflections
Full Fathom Five: A Tutor’s Sea Change ...........................73
Louis Petrich
Reviews
John Verdi’s Fat Wednesday:Wittgenstein on Aspects ........83
Eva Brann
Paolo Palmieri’s A History of Galileo’s Inclined Plane
Experiment and its Philosophical Implications............91
Curtis Wilson
�1
ESSAYS
READING LANDSCAPES:
MATERNAL LOVE IN
CLASSICAL TAMIL POETRY
Anne David
Pu!an"#$!u 2781
The old woman’s shoulders
were dry, unfleshed,
with outstanding veins;
her low belly was like a lotus pad.
When people said
her son had taken fright,
had turned his back on battle
and died,
she raged
and shouted,
“If he really broke down
in the thick of battle,
I’ll slash these breasts
that gave him suck,”
and went there,
sword in hand.
Turning over body after fallen body,
she rummaged through the blood-red field
till she found her son,
quartered, in pieces,
and she rejoiced
more than on the day
she gave him birth.
This poem was composed nearly two millennia ago in
Tamil Nadu, South India. It belongs to a corpus of more than
Anne David is an alumna of St. John’s College and the University of Chicago, and is
currently a research scientist at the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced
Study of Language, where she works on South Asian Languages.
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
two thousand exquisite, tightly constructed lyric verses written in the Tamil language. Tamil is one of the two classical
languages of India; the other is Sanskrit. Along with Greek
and just a handful of other languages, Tamil has among the
longest continually attested written traditions in the world,
one that began around the second century before the
Common Era, when literature flowered in South India in the
form of these lyric poems of love and war.
They are called the Cankam2 poems, from the belief that
they were composed at a legendary center of art and learning, a Cankam, that was patronized by the south Indian
kings. What we now call the Cankam period of classical
Tamil extended until about the fifth century CE. We have
well over two thousand of these poems, ranging in length
from three lines to about eight hundred, probably only a
fraction of what was actually composed. They were preserved on palm leaf manuscripts, which are susceptible to
humidity, fire, and insects; and because of their largely secular and often erotic content, they have also been subject to
human negligence and even malice. We also have a contemporaneous grammar, the Tolk"ppiyam, which describes
both the language of the poems and the elaborate semiotic
and aesthetic system on which their descriptions draw.
There were about four hundred poets, of whom some two
dozen were women; though still small, this proportion is
unusually high among classical corpora.3
The poem above depicts a mother’s elation when she
learns her role in society has been fulfilled because her son
has died with honor in battle. Her triumph is underscored by
the stunning image of her standing in a blood-soaked field
of bodies. Vivid portraits of battlefields are common among
the Cankam poems, where setting is integral, and they are
often depicted through metaphors of other landscapes:
agrarian, desert, sea.
ESSAYS | DAVID
3
Classical Tamil poetry has two genres. Poems of
romance and eros are classified as akam, meaning ‘inside,
interior’, while poems on all other subjects are called
pu!am, meaning ‘outside, exterior’. Akam poems address
our inner life, the life of heart and home. Pu!am poems
address all aspects of public life: they praise kings, recount
battles, sing of famine and death, lament the dire poverty of
poets.
Manifest in the Cankam works is a tension between
these two worlds—public and private, political and domestic. We gain insight into both kinds of poem, their
language of landscape, and the tension between them, when
we examine the one female character who, in Martha
Selby’s words, “may cross the membranous boundary between akam and pu!am,”4 who alone has been given a voice
in both genres—the Mother. We see the mother as a
powerful voice in both the akam and pu!am poems, facing
two kinds of maternal loss: that of her daughter to a young
man and that of her son to the warpath. While prominent in
the akam poems, the mother is a rarer character in the
pu!am world; nevertheless, she is fiercely present in a small
pu!am sub-genre on mothers and warrior sons.
The civilization that produced this exquisite lyric poetry
of love, war, and kingship was suffused with savagery. At
the turn of the first millennium of the Common Era, South
India was dominated by three great dynasties reigning over
many smaller leaders—a world of kings and chieftains who
patronized the arts and waged brutal wars against each
other. Poetry served as a vehicle of patriotic persuasion.
Through the voices of the pu!am poets, the ancient Tamilians glorified courage and ferocity. They regarded death in
battle as a moral obligation, and as the greatest of honors.
One pu!am poem, spoken by a mother, is a lyrical list of
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
societal duties: her duty is to bear sons, the father’s duty is
to make them noble, the blacksmith’s to furnish them with
arms, the king’s to exemplify good conduct—and the son’s
duty is to make war.5
In other verses we hear how the bodies of stillborn sons
and the elderly male dead were slashed with swords so that
they too might carry the honor of battle-wounds into the
afterlife. One poem describes a frenzied hero on the battlefield thus: “Like an elephant in chains, he is hindered only
by the guts that are entangling his feet.”6 Still other poems
describe a post-victory ritual in which the conquerors build
a hearth of severed heads, then boil the remains of the vanquished dead. And there are poems like the one above
whose common theme is the prideful, bloody-minded mother of a slain warrior.
But the pu!am anthologies also include poems celebrating life, poems about hospitality, drunkenness, the joy
of fatherhood. So we see in this literature a society struggling with this universal human dilemma: how do we live
well and raise happy families in a world filled with peril?
And in these poems, no figure embodies the conflict between a desire for domestic tranquility and an ethic that
glorifies slaughter more than that of the king. Kings are
central to the pu!am poems. They are vital to the world they
rule. One poem says, “Rice is not the life of this world nor
is water the life! / The king is the life of this world!”7 A king
was expected to be brave and ferocious against the enemy,
but kind and magnanimous to his people.
George Hart has talked about the Tamil king as the
mediator of sacred power: the modern Tamil word for
temple, k%yil, is etymologically ‘place of the king’, and the
indigenous Tamil word for ‘god’, i!aivan (literally, ‘he who
is highest’) originally referred to the king.8 The king’s
ESSAYS | DAVID
5
power extended both to taking and giving life; his control
over the sacred depended on his ruling justly.9 Likewise, the
fertility of his land and the well-being of his people depended on his maintaining that connection to the sacred.
So these violent warrior kings are also praised as loving,
nurturing givers of life: the king is called the life-breath of
the kingdom;10 other poems liken him to the sun. And he is
explicitly compared to a mother: an adoring subject is
drawn to the powerful king “like a child that runs to suck his
mother’s flawless breast.”11 The two landscapes of his kingdom—martial and agrarian—often merge into one, as fields
of battle are likened to fields of harvest. The poems startle
with metaphors of soldiers tilling the earth with their spears
and piling up haystacks of corpses, or of an elephant’s head
rolling along the soil “like a plow.”12 Even the warrior with
enemy guts entangling his feet is compared in the next line
to a mother cow defending her calf, as he fights for his comrade.
The family is in some ways a mirror of the kingdom.
Like kings, women were also regarded as vessels of sacred
power, power that was no longer benevolent if they cast off
their chastity and domestic virtue within marriage, just as
royal sacred power was harmed by kingly vice.13 And just as
a virtuous king brought prosperity to his people, a virtuous
wife brought fortune and fertility to her family. Where a superior king is compared to the sun, a wife who has produced
a male child is said to “light up the house” like a lamp.14
The family appears most frequently in the akam poems,
which are love poems composed under the guidelines of an
intricate and highly structured rhetorical system. The poet
always speaks in the persona of one of the characters in a
generic love story: a young woman or her lover, her friend
or his friends; her mother or nurse; occasional passersby; or,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
in the poems that take place after marriage, the husband’s
mistress. Each poem depicts one of five stages of love, as
well as certain moods, emotions, and situations that are
characteristic of those stages.
No one is ever named in the akam poems; the characters
are all types, abstractions of the sort of people commonly
caught up in any tale of young, romantic love. (Pu!am
poems always identify kings and eminent personages by
name; for that reason they are more useful for dating the
poems.) The hero and heroine are known simply as the
talaivan and talaivi, the ‘main man’ and ‘main woman’.
This anonymity emphasizes the universality of the events
and emotions depicted in the poems.
Each poem is a single soliloquy, spoken to one of the
other characters or sometimes to the world at large—never
to us. We, the audience, are always in the role of eavesdropper. The focus is usually on the woman’s experience of
love; the most frequent speakers are the heroine and her
girlfriend confidante. Common themes are her grief, anxiety, suffering, and most of all her helplessness in the absence
of her lover. The poems make it clear, however, that her
helplessness arises from societal constraints; hers is not an
emotional or physical helplessness. She has to stay put most
of the time: we see her confined by village gossip, parental
control, and later, motherhood.
Paradoxically, it is these akam poems that are most imbued with representations of the objects of the outer world.
Highly stylized rules associate the exterior landscape with
the interior landscape of human passion. Such associations
transform the different Tamilnad landscapes—desert and
seascape, wilderness and paddy, mountain and plains—into
an entire poetic language, where all the plants, animals, and
human beings not only connote, but often denote the emo-
ESSAYS | DAVID
7
tions and situations that engulf their two young lovers.
Here’s an example:
Ku!untokai 35615
A man who wears a hero’s anklet
keeps her safe as she hurries
through scant, dry lands
where the shade shrinks and dies.
At the bank of a scorched pool,
she sips at muddy, steaming water.
Where does she find the strength,
this girl, soft as a sprout,
with her tiny, curving bracelets?
She had refused even to touch milk,
mixed with fine puffed rice
in a bowl clad in blushing gold
that I’d held out for her,
saying that it was too much.
There are three important elements in this lyric vocabulary. The first is landscape, of which there are five types.
This poem’s landscape is p"lai, the wasteland, which conveys a theme of hardship and separation. The second key
element is the native constituents of that landscape: flora,
fauna, local people, and gods. These two elements—the
landscape and its denizens—constitute the setting and
evoke the third element, the mood or situation. So when a
love poem mentions stagnant water, midday heat, lizards,
cactus, or bandits, the experienced reader recognizes the
desert wasteland, and knows that the situation here is elopement—two young lovers are enduring danger and deprivation for the sake of being together.
The speaker is the young heroine’s mother or wetnurse.
There are several of these desert elopement poems in which
the mother reminisces about feeding milk to the daughter
now lost to her. Typically she contrasts the girl’s youth and
delicacy with the hardships she is surely suffering in the
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8
barren waste where the couple has fled. In all five akam
settings, the mother of the young lovesick heroine worries
for her daughter’s safety, happiness, and reputation:
Ainku!un$!u 37916
United with the man
with the gleaming white spear,
is going through the forests
where herds of bull elephants roam
on dew-covered slopes
sweeter to her
than the pleasure
of a good marriage
in the company of her dearest friends,
I wonder?
The forests, elephants, and dew-covered slopes tell us
that this poem’s landscape is kurinji, the cool, wild hillcountry, the setting for premarital love and secret midnight
trysts. These kurinji poems, of course, tend to be the most
sexual of the poems, although the eroticism is implied
through proxies; for instance, her lover’s gleaming spear.
The roaming herds of bull elephants also suggest uncontrolled male lust; the mother is implying a contrast between
what her daughter has chosen and a “good marriage,”
approved by those who truly care for her. (Most comparisons
in Cankam poetry are by implication. Subtlety is the norm.)
In the pu!am poems, we see the mother of a young
warrior grumbling about her loss of control over him:
Pu!a#"n$!u 8617
You stand against the pillar
of my hut and ask:
Where is your son?
9
ESSAYS | DAVID
I don’t really know.
This womb was once
a lair
for that tiger.
You can see him now
only on battlefields.
But more often she has lost him utterly, in poems exhorting mothers to proper pride and joy at his brave death. The
message: it was her duty to produce him and her culminating duty to give him up to war. But these are highly sophisticated poems, and as the exterior and interior landscapes of human life speak to each other in them, there are
sometimes signs of ambivalence towards the desirability of
death on the battlefield.
Earlier I alluded to a pu!am poem that lists people’s duties—the mother bears sons, the father teaches them nobility, and so on—ending with the son’s duty to make war. That
poem is more complicated, however, than I suggested.
Whereas everyone else gets one duty and one line of verse,
the son’s battle-duties are several and take up two lines: the
mother enjoins him to wage war with his shining sword, kill
enemy elephants, and come back home, not seek death in the
field. In a similar vein, a mother defiantly rejoices at the safe
return of her son as she recounts the warriors’ ritual drink
before battle:
Pu!a#"n$!u 28618
Like white goats, the young men surrounded him
and a cup was passed above the heads of many
to my son and yet it did not lead to his
being laid out on a legless bed
and covered with a pure white cloth.
And in another poem, we see a mother beholding her
badly wounded son, who has been laid out on his shield. As
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10
he denies that he can feel the arrow in his flesh, she remembers his childish fear when she had once scolded him for not
drinking his milk. These lines directly recall the bereft
mother of the akam poems who compares her daughter’s
stoicism in the desert with her childish distaste for milk.
This allusion in the mouth of the mother bending over her
wounded son suggests that she is not proud, but grieving
and bewildered.
A marvelous intersection of interior and exterior landscapes occurs in the following pu!am poem about a slain
warrior’s garland:
Pu!a#"n$!u 27819
The chaste trees, dark-clustered,
blend with the land
that knows no dryness;
the colors on the leaves
mob the eyes.
We’ve seen those leaves on jeweled women,
on their mounds
of love.
Now the chaste wreath lies slashed
on the ground, so changed, so mixed
with blood, the vulture snatches it
with its beak,
thinking it raw meat.
We see this too
just because a young man
in love with war
wore it for glory.
So a warrior has been killed—killed so brutally that the
wreath he wore on his head looks to a vulture like bloody
flesh. This powerful poem uses the image of leaves in
several ways to blend akam and pu!am themes. First, the
poet invokes the landscape of akam poems by reminding us
that nocci leaves, used here as battle attire, also cover young
ESSAYS | DAVID
11
women’s sexual parts. Those leaf garments were believed to
protect chastity,20 and elsewhere in the poems, the image of
destroyed garlands and other plants can signify that a sexual
act has taken place.21 We have a similar metaphor in English: the blood on the leaves suggests here the deflowering
of a virgin, reminding us of the akam mother’s worries for
her daughter’s virtue. Further, the leaves of the nocci tree are
a common motif in akam poems, where the mother of the
lovesick heroine remembers her little girl in happier times,
playing by a nocci tree.
So again a pu!am poem about a wounded young warrior
invokes an akam poem about a nostalgic mother grieving for
her lovelorn daughter. This is how the Cankam poems speak
to one another. To an audience steeped in this imagery, the
mixing of akam and pu!am through the juxtaposition of a
bloody battle wreath with images of happy little girls and
chaste, bejeweled young maidens would be both obvious
and jarring.
All these poems gainsay the poems that glorify combat,
extol ferocious kings, and speak of inflicting sham warwounds on males who die in peacetime. Moreover, they
challenge the implicit injunctions on mothers to desire and
celebrate the death of their sons in battle.
With this in mind, let us look at one last poem:
Pu!a#"n$!u 29522
There, in the very middle
of battle-camps
that heaved like the seas,
pointing at the enemy
the tongues of lances,
new-forged and whetted,
urging soldiers forward
with himself at the head
in a skirmish of arrow and spear,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
cleaving through
an oncoming wave of foes,
forcing a clearing,
he had fallen
in that space
between armies,
his body hacked in pieces:
when she saw him there
in all his greatness,
mother’s milk flowed again
in the withered breasts
of this mother
for her warrior son
who had no thought of retreat.
This poem is by Auvaiy!r, one of the two most famous
of the Cankam poets, and one of the few women among
them. Auvaiy!r also wrote the poem of the mother rejoicing
that her son has not come back on a cloth-covered bier, so
we have some idea where her sympathies lie. On the
surface, this poem seems yet another portrait of the proud
mother of a dead war hero. If we examine this joy more
closely, however, we will find that the poem suggests a different theme.
Let us look first at the prosody. This poem is full of the
sound of grief. Tamil poetry uses internal rhyme: in the transcription of the poem provided in the appendix, you can see
that the poet has a quadruple internal rhyme in lines four,
five, and six, and further, that the vowel sound in that
rhyme—/ai/—is frequent throughout the poem. (An unscientific sur-vey of a few nearby poems of similar length
shows that the sound /ai/ occurs about 30 percent more
often in this poem.) You can also see that its long-voweled
counterpart /!i/, a much rarer sound in Tamil, occurs three
times, and the long vowel /!/ seven times—also higher
counts in comparison with other poems. A common Tamil
ESSAYS | DAVID
13
interjection for grief and pain, still used today, is the word
aiy%, which contains /ai/. Even cross-linguistically, these
three sounds, /ai/, /!i/, and /!/ are onomatopoeic sounds of
wailing.23
Now let’s turn to the poem’s diction. The other poems
depicting proud mothers of dead sons all use the word
ci!uva# for ‘son’. Outside of those poems, this word is a
relatively uncommon locution for a ‘boy-child’; its literal
meaning is ‘little one (male)’. It is otherwise used sentimentally to refer to actual little boys. So the battle-death
poems are actually describing a mother’s joy at seeing her
“little one’s” body scattered all over the battlefield. Here
sentimentality has turned maudlin. Auvaiy!r has taken care
to avoid this tone by pointedly not using the word in her
poem. I say “pointedly” because first, everyone else uses it,
and second, because it would have been more metrically
suited to the line. Her choice of vi&alai ‘youth’ over ci!uva#
‘little boy’ means that the final syllable must be long by
position rather than by nature, because in Tamil prosody, /ai/
is considered short.
Let us look next at the imagery. The poem begins with
the word ‘sea’ (ka&al) and ends with the word ‘mother’ (t"y).
The oncoming armies are twice likened to the rising, heaving ocean, while the mother’s breasts are initially described
as v"&u ‘withered’—a word associated with the desert. But
then her breasts begin to spring or flow, and after that, to
gush or surge, like the wide, swelling, deep sea. The word
used to describe her son’s body, citai ‘scattered’, refers elsewhere in the poems to sand on a beach. So the mother starts
out like a desert and then, as the poem culminates, she
becomes like the ocean, which reclaims scattered sand as it
surges forth.
Linking an ordinary human being with vast and
powerful landscapes such as the desert and the sea is almost
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
unheard of in the language of these poems. People are
frequently compared to things in the landscape, especially
animals: young men are often likened to tigers or elephants,
young women to does, flowers, or ripe fruit. But integral
parts of the landscape are reserved for the king, who is
compared, for example, to the sun. We are reminded again
that both the king and the virtuous mother are vessels of
sacred power. Her flowing milk is a further reminder of this,
because mother’s milk has sacred powers; indeed, husbands
are portrayed as fearful of being touched by it.
So this breastfeeding imagery itself, rather than conveying the standard image of a joyful, patriotic mother, supports
an interpretation of this poem as iconoclastic. For if the conventional reading is the only one, then this female poet is
taking liberties with the biology of maternal love. The old
mother’s breasts spurting forth milk at the sight of her dead
son portrays the let-down reflex that all nursing mothers
know. It is triggered inexorably in mothers by their baby’s
cry, and powerful sense-memories of it linger years after
weaning. The image is first of all an allusion to other
Cankam portraits of grieving mothers nostalgic for the longgone days of milk-fed little ones. This mother is neither
pleased nor proud her son has died. Furthermore, any mother knows that the maternal let-down reflex is not accompanied by joy or pride, but by anxiety for the baby, together
with an intense desire to soothe the infant, and to banish its
hunger, sadness, fear, or pain. As her grief cries out in the
sounds of the poem, this mother’s despair amplifies her
sacred powers in response to a futile wish to succor her lost
son.
The raging mother of our first poem is certainly not a
weak or passive figure as she echoes her son’s war deeds,
rampaging through corpses on the battlefield, sword in hand.
But in her violent mania and ultimate joy, she is complying
ESSAYS | DAVID
15
with society’s expectations. In contrast, all the authorial
choices of this last poem—weaving the sounds of grief
throughout the verse, rejecting histrionic clichés, attributing
uncharacteristic primal powers to the mother—suggest that
it is a subversive rejoinder to Pu!an"#$!u 278 and the other
poems that share its bellicose theme. While a sanguinary
attitude towards maternal loss prevails in the pu!am genre,
the mother’s anguished voice in this poem and a handful of
others offers a compelling counterweight to the glorification
of war those poems celebrate.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
16
ESSAYS | DAVID
17
NOTES
APPENDIX: TRANSCRIPTION OF Pu!a"#n$!u 295
1
Translation in Ramanujan 1985, 182.
Pronounced sung-gum. Sometimes transliterated as Sangam.
3
Dr. Stephanie Nelson, private communication.
4
Selby 2000, 101.
5
Pura 312.
6
Pura 275; Hart’s translation in Hart and Heifetz 1999.
7
Pura 186; Hart’s translation in Hart and Heifetz 1999.
8
Hart 1975, 13.
9
Hart 1975, 15.
10
Pura 186.
11
Pura 379, Hart’s translation in Hart and Heifetz 1999.
12
Hart 1975, 32; Hart and Heifetz 1999, xix; Pura 19, 342.
13
Hart 1975, 93ff.
2
ka"al
SEA
ki#ar-nt-a$$a
vent-u
BE.HOT-CVB
t("u
CROWD
ka""%r
v!y
EDGE
ukai-ttu
DRIVE-CVB
varu-pa"ai
COME-ARMY
i"ai.p-pa"ai
MIDDLE-ARMY
n!ppa&
MILITARY CAMP
RISE-PTCP-LIKE
MIDDLE
va"i-tt-a
v'l
SHARPEN-PST-PTCP
e)u
RISE
tar-%u
GIVE-CVB
p()n-tu
PASS.THROUGH-CVB
a)uva-ttu
DEEP.SEA-OBL
ci*appu"ai.y-!#an
SUPERIORITY-POSSESSOR
talaippeyar-i
SPEAR APPROACH-CVB
tura-ntu
DRIVE-CVB
e*-i
SHOOT-CVB
v!yppa"-a
FIND.A.WAY-INF
citai-ntu
BE.SCATTERED-CVB
m!&pu
GLORY
ka&-"u
SEE-CVB
DESTROY-CVB
v'*!k-iya
BE.SEPARATED-PTCP
aru#-i
REJOICE-CVB
mulai
%*-i
BREAST
FLOW-CVB
cura-nt-a$a
WITHERED
oo"-!
p%"kai
vi"alai
t!y-kk-'.
STRENGTH
YOUTH
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
3PL:
CVB:
DAT:
EMPH:
INF:
OBL:
NEG:
PST:
PTCP:
third person plural
converb
dative
emphatic
infinitive
oblique
negative
past tense
participle
BATTLE
vila+k-i
v!"u
FLEE-NEG
ñ!"pi$
GUSH-PST-3PL
MOTHER-DAT-EMPH
14
15
Pu!a 314; Aink 405.
Translation in Selby 2000, 194-5.
16
Translation in Selby 2000, 193.
17
Translation in Ramanujan 1985, 184.
18
Translation in Hart and Heifetz 1999, 168.
19
Translation in Ramanujan 1985, 186.
20
Hart 1975, 93.
21
Hart 1975, 172.
22
Translation in Ramanujan 1985, 183.
23
These three sounds are highlighted by red type in the transcription
of the poem.
REFERENCES
Hart, George. (1975). The Poems of Ancient Tamil: Their Milieu and
their Sanskrit Counterparts. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Hart, George and Heifetz, Hank. (1999). The Four Hundred Songs of
War and Wisdom. (Translation) New York: Columbia University
Press.
Ku!untokai. (1983). A classical poetry anthology edited with
commentary by U.Ve. C!minataiar. A&&!malainakar: A&&!malai-pPalkalai-k-Kalakam. [In Tamil].
Lehmann, Thomas. (1994). Grammatik des Alttamil. Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner Verlag.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Lehmann, Thomas and Thomas Malten. (1992). A Word Index of Old
Tamil Ca(kam Literature. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
Mahadevan, Iravatham. (2003). Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. (= Harvard Oriental Series 62)
Chennai: Cre-A and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University.
Pu!a#"n$!u, Vol. I (1962) and Vol. II (1964). A classical poetry
anthology edited with commentary by Auvai Cu. Turaic!mi-p Pillai.
Fourth ed. Chennai: South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing
Society.
Rajam, V.S. (1992). A Reference Grammar of Classical Tamil Poetry.
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
Ramanujan, A.K. (1985). Poems of Love and War: From the Eight
Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil [translation
with commentary]. New York: Columbia University Press.
Selby, Martha Ann. (2000). Grow Long Blessed Night: Love Poems from
Classical India. (Translation) New York: Oxford University Press.
Selby, Martha Ann. (2003). Circle of Six Seasons: A Selection from Old
Tamil, Prakrit and Sanskrit Poetry. (Translation) India: Penguin.
Shanmugam Pillai, M. and David E. Ludden. (1976). Ku!untokai: An
Anthology of Classical Tamil Love Poetry. (Translation) Madurai:
Koodal Publishers.
Tamil Lexicon. (1982). Madras: University of Madras. 6 vols.
Zvelebil, Kamil. (1973). The Smile of Murugan on Tamil Literature of
South India. Leiden: Brill.
ESSAYS
19
THE TOCQUEVILLEAN
MOMENT
Wilfred McClay
I am delighted and honored to be back at St. John’s again,
and to have the privilege of addressing this community of
which I feel so enduringly a part, a community built around
a great shared enterprise: the serious reading and re-reading
of old books. Returning to the College is always a pleasure
because it is a return to my intellectual and moral roots, and
to the themes that have preoccupied me ever since I graduated. Few things are more renewing, more rejuvenating.
I find that the word “rejuvenating” is particularly apropos, provided that you understand what I mean by it. I am
not using it as one does when talking about taking a pleasant stroll down memory lane, waxing sentimental about the
past. I am using it in its original etymological sense of
“being made young again.” Returning to the College can be
rejuvenating in that sense because of something that you
tend not to realize when you are a student here (although you
might catch a glimpse of it), but that becomes much clearer
with the passage of time. As you get older, you come to see
that the deep appeal of old books is not only that they are
wiser than us, but also that they are younger than us. Let me
explain this seeming paradox. The word “archaic” is generally used as a pejorative meaning “out-of-date” or “obsolete.” But as every Johnnie knows, the word comes from the
Greek arch', which refers not only to the antiquity of things
A lecture delivered at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland on 12 November
2010. Mr. McClay is an alumnus of St. John’s and Professor of History at the
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he holds the SunTrust Bank Chair of
Excellence in the Humanities.
�20
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
but also to their foundational character. An arch' is a deep
spring from which all else emanates. The truest form of
“archeology” would not be merely a search for what is older,
but a search for what is primary, for what is closest to the
origins, for what undergirds and sustains us, even if sometimes it is buried or otherwise hidden from our sight.
Hence at St. John’s “the shock of the new” has never
been the specialty of the house. After all, the shock of the
new can be had any hour of the day, and indeed can hardly
even be avoided in today’s world. In fact, expressing one’s
admiration for the shock of the new has become so routine
that it has acquired the aspect of a solemn bourgeois obligation. I have even read letters of recommendation from staid
dissertation advisors who praise their doctoral students for
having written “highly transgressive” doctoral dissertations.
I am not sure what that means. But I am confident that it is
not really very shocking. Instead, what you seek and savor
here at St. John’s is the shock of the old, that electric and
uncanny sense of communion, across space and time, with
countless others who have shared our human condition. And
that can be very shocking indeed, because it is so often a
strange and unpredictable encounter, an interplay between
what is familiar and what is unfamiliar.
Let me give an example of what I mean. In the 1930s,
journalist Rebecca West and her husband described their encounter with remote Yugoslav tribesmen who still sang and
recited oral epics in the Homeric fashion. These bards recounted actions that “must have been made a million million
million times since the world began,” but in each new telling
seemed “absolutely fresh.” Thus, when one reads in the Iliad
of a man drawing a bow or raising a sword, “it is,” West
wrote, “as if the dew of the world’s morning lay undisturbed
on what he did.”1 An “archaic” book, such as the ones upon
ESSAYS | McCLAY
21
which you lavish your attention here, draws its abundant life
from its greater closeness to the origins of things.
I deviated somewhat from the true path by becoming a
historian—but not really very much. I never aspired to be a
prodigal son. Indeed, from the very beginning I appreciated
the fact that my tutelage at St. John’s would keep me safe
from the worst temptation of my field, which is to reduce
ideas, writers, and artists—and more or less everything else
worthwhile—to being nothing more than a product of their
context. In that sense, I remember a moment in my
graduate-school days at Johns Hopkins in which it became
clear to me that I would always be different from my
historian peers in firmly rejecting such reductionism. It was
a seminar on a paper dealing with the art and life of El
Greco, and I was stopped short by a casual, slightly apologetic comment from the distinguished paper giver: “Of
course, the point of studying El Greco so closely is for the
insight it affords into the Toledo in which he lived.” I realized in a flash that, of course, he was entirely wrong. In fact,
he had it precisely backwards. So far as I was concerned, the
point of studying Toledo was the insight it gave one into the
life, and ultimately the work, of El Greco. Having come so
firmly to that conviction, I have stuck to it ever since. And
the firmness of that conviction is something I almost certainly owe to St. John’s. The study of history, for me, should
always strive not to reduce ideas but to dramatize them, to
put them up on the stage of life and put them into motion, to
make vivid the ways that certain extraordinary individuals
have wrestled with the conditions of their existence and
have attempted to order them and make sense of them—
with a view to how we might do the same.
I have tried to follow that pattern in these remarks on the
great French writer Alexis de Tocqueville. His work can
certainly be read profitably without very much reference to
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the particulars of his life. But the work takes on even greater
importance, I believe, when understood dramatically, as an
instance of precisely the sort of wrestling that I have just
described. My title, “The Tocquevellean Moment,” refers to
a moment that he both described and experienced. It is the
moment of profound social transition, in which entire ways
of life are in the process of being transformed inexorably,
but in which also the precise manner, character, and extent
of the transformation are yet to be determined. In what
follows, therefore, it will be both useful and valuable for me
to mingle historical and biographical elements with my
discussion of Tocqueville’s ideas.2
*****
Tocqueville (1805-1859) was one of the most eminent
European social and political thinkers of the nineteenth
century, and is still regarded today as an incomparable
analyst of the prospects and pitfalls of modern democracy.
He was the child of an aristocratic French family, some of
whose members had suffered death or devastation as a result
of the French Revolution. Consequently, he was haunted all
his life by the fear of revolutionary anarchy, and by the
specter of ideological tyranny that such a sweeping social
revolution leaves in its wake. But such fears never led him
to advocate the wholesale restoration of the pre-revolutionary French social order. He was an aristocrat at heart, but he
was never a reactionary. Instead, those fears led him to look
closely at the change that was coming, in hope of finding a
way to direct it toward a more felicitous end.
A concern with the characteristics of modern democracy
is the guiding preoccupation of his Democracy in America
(1835-40), the work for which he is best known among
American readers.3 It was, of course, the product of a visit.
ESSAYS | McCLAY
23
Tocqueville was only twenty-six years old when, accompanied by his friend and sidekick Gustave de Beaumont, he
came to America in 1831.4 He was ostensibly being sent
here on official business for the French government, to study
the American prison system. But that was a ruse and a
pretext. In reality, he came to America intent upon “examining, in detail and as scientifically as possible, all the mechanisms of the vast American society which everyone talks of
and no one knows.”5 Tocqueville was extraordinary in the
extent of his ambitions, as in everything else, and it is clear
that he always intended to write a large and groundbreaking
book about America, which he hoped would make his reputation and launch a successful political career.
After touring the country for nine months, he returned
home with a bushel of notes and a head full of ideas. The resulting book, Democracy in America, which would be published in two successive volumes in 1835 and 1840, turned
out to be perhaps the richest and most enduring study of
American society and culture ever written. If one were permitted to read only one book on the subject, Democracy in
America would almost certainly be one’s best choice, even
more than a century and a half after its initial publication.
In this book, Tocqueville envisioned the United States as
a nation moving in the vanguard of history, a young and vigorous country endowed with an extraordinary degree of
social equality among its inhabitants, and without any feudal or aristocratic background to overcome. In America, he
believed, one could see embodied, in exemplary or heightened form, the condition toward which all the rest of the
world, including France, was tending. In America, which
was the only example the world then afforded of a large republic, one could gaze upon “the image of democracy itself,
of its penchants, its character, its prejudices, its passions.”
And having so gazed, one could perhaps take away lessons
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that would allow leaders to deal more intelligently and
effectively with the democratic changes coming to Europe.6
He was firmly convinced that the movement toward
greater social equality represented an inescapable feature of
the modern age, a hard fact to which all future social or
political analysis must accommodate itself. There would be
no going back. Indeed, one could say that the one great idea
in Tocqueville’s writing was this huge sprawling historical
spectacle, the gradual but inexorable leveling of human
society on a universal scale, a movement that he identified
with the will of God, so pervasive and so unstoppable did it
seem to be. Even those who try to impede it or reverse it end
up contributing to it all the more. Listen to his description:
Everywhere the various incidents in the lives of peoples
are seen to turn to the profit of democracy; all men have
aided it by their efforts: those who had in view cooperating for its success and those who did not dream of
serving it; those who fought for it and even those who
declared themselves its enemies; all have been driven
pell-mell on the same track, and all have worked in
common, some despite themselves, others without
knowing it, as blind instruments in the hand of God.
The gradual development of equality of conditions
is therefore a providential fact, and it has the principal
characteristics of one: it is universal, it is enduring,
each day it escapes human power; all events, like all
men, serve its development.7
The entire book, he confessed, was written “under the
pressure of a sort of religious terror in the author’s soul,
produced by the sight of this irresistible revolution. . . . To
wish to stop democracy would then appear to be to struggle
against God himself.”8
*****
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25
Aristocracy’s day was done, then, however lamentable that
fact might seem to those who shared Tocqueville’s background. He accepted equality as a modern condition, even if
he never warmly embraced it. For although Tocqueville was
a keen analyst of democracy’s unlovely or dangerous features, he insisted that the most effective response to them
was not sullen withdrawal, but the development of a “new
political science,” designed not to reverse democracy’s progress, for that would be futile, but instead to refine democracy’s crudities and counter its pathologies.9
The book, then, was no mere work of travel literature,
and in fact, the narrative elements of the book are probably
its least interesting parts. Instead, Tocqueville was sketching
out a philosophical framework for the understanding of democracy, and for that reason, arguably deserves to be considered alongside such political philosophers and theorists
as Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Marx. It would be a stretch, I
believe, to call him a philosopher himself, since he was
neither systematic nor comprehensive, and left largely
unexamined many of the traditional objects of philosophical
inquiry. In fact, the book’s relatively casual style of organization is part of its appeal for many present-day readers; you
can pick it up almost anywhere, and profitably read a short
chapter in complete isolation from the book as a whole.
But one should not be misled by that casualness.
Tocqueville was interested in far more than the relatively
narrow subject of American democracy in its political
forms. He argued that a democratic regime would manifest
its effects in every facet of human life: not merely in procedural and institutional ways, but also in family life, in literature, in philosophy, in manners, in language, in marriage, in
mores, in male-female relations, in ambition, in friendship,
in love, and in attitudes toward war and peace. It was not
just the outward forms of democracy that concerned him. He
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was an especially acute analyst of democracy’s innermost
effects, finely attuned to the ways in which a society’s political arrangements are not matters that merely skate on the
surface of life, but are in fact influences that reach deep
down into the very souls of its inhabitants.
He accomplished this analysis, mostly in the book’s
second volume, by contrasting the different forms assumed
by each of these phenomena in aristocratic societies and in
democratic societies. Those two terms, “aristocratic” and
“democratic,” represented for him what are sometimes
called “ideal types” because, although they are generalizing
abstractions that rarely occur in anything approaching their
pure state, their sharpness and coherence make them highly
effective as analytical tools.
For Tocqueville, an aristocratic society was one governed by a small, privileged class, a society that insisted on
the necessity of social hierarchy grounded in the authority of
tradition; a society in which one’s status was ascriptive,
assigned at birth, retained for life, and bound up in the identity and place of one’s family; a society in which families are
permanent fixtures in the social firmament; a society in
which there was a permanent diversity of types and classes
of persons.
In the ideal democratic society, however, matters are
quite different. There one finds a general “spirit” of equality;
the people are sovereign and the right to vote is widely extended; hierarchies are disestablished and any legal status or
privilege extended to the well-born few is abolished; rights
are universal, or tending toward universality, as is literacy
and access to education; families are comparatively weak
and mutable, even ephemeral; there is a constant pressure
toward the dispersion of inherited wealth, aided by laws that
break up large estates and large fortunes; and there is a
resulting tendency toward social and economic leveling,
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ESSAYS | McCLAY
together with a fading of class distinctions—all leading to
universal sameness and homogeneity.
Although the two volumes of the Democracy differed in
significant ways, taken together they presented a coherent
and memorable image of a distinctively democratic American social and individual character. Tocqueville’s America
was a strikingly middle-class society: feverishly commercial
and acquisitive, obsessively practical-minded, jealously
egalitarian, and restlessly mobile—a constant beehive of
activity. Tocqueville saw many things to admire in this
energetic, bumptious democracy, but also much to fear.
Chief among the dangers was its pronounced tendency
toward individualism. Tocqueville saw in America the peril
that citizens might elect to withdraw from involvement in
the larger public life, and regard themselves as autonomous
and isolated actors, with no higher goal than the pursuit of
their own material well-being. He acknowledged that in a
modern commercial democracy, this was a particularly
strong possibility, since self-interest would inevitably come
to be accepted as the chief engine of all human striving. But
where then would the generous and selfless civic virtues
needed for sustaining a decent society come from? How
could the individualistic Americans of the 1830s prevent
self-interest from overwhelming all considerations of the
public good, and undermining the sources of social cohesion?
*****
Before trying to answer that question, it will be helpful to
flesh out more fully Tocqueville’s understanding of individualism. It differed in subtle ways from what generally goes
by that name. It was closer to what today might be called
privatism, a complete withdrawal from public life and
society at large in favor of almost exclusive involvement
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with a small personal circle of family and friends. As such,
it was quite distinct from the age-old vice of egoism or
selfishness. It was not merely a prevalent emotion or
passion, but a settled, more or less consciously held attitude
in the moral outlook of Americans.
In aristocratic societies, things were different. Families
remained in place for centuries. Every man remembered his
ancestors and anticipated his descendants, and strove to do
his duty to both. Paternal authority was formidable. And yet
such families were not private enclaves set apart from a
larger public world, but crucial and visible elements in the
makeup of society as a whole. The different classes of
society were distinct and immobile, and citizens occupied a
fixed position in the social pecking order, with tight bonds
to those in their same social niche. So enmeshed was the
individual person in this comprehensive social order that it
was literally nonsensical to imagine him or her apart from
it—as implausible as swimming in the air, or breathing
beneath the waves.
In democratic societies, however, where the principle of
equality dictated a more generalized and fluid sense of
connection, such duties and fixities were lost. Tocqueville
describes this new condition hauntingly in one of the most
unforgettable passages in the Democracy, conjuring the
specter of an individualism carried to its barren logical limit:
In democratic peoples, new families constantly issue
from nothing, others constantly fall into it, and all those
who stay on change face; the fabric of time is torn at
every moment and the trace of generations is effaced.
You easily forget those who have preceded you, and
you have no idea of those who will follow you. Only
those nearest have interest. . . . Aristocracy had made of
all citizens a long chain that went from the peasant up
to the king; democracy breaks the chain and sets each
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ESSAYS | McCLAY
link apart. . . . As conditions are equalized, one finds a
great number of individuals who . . . owe nothing to
anyone, they expect so to speak nothing from anyone,
they are in the habit of always considering themselves
in isolation, and they willingly fancy that their whole
destiny is in their hand.
Thus not only does democracy make each man
forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants from
him and separates him from his contemporaries; it
constantly leads him back toward himself alone and
threatens finally to confine him wholly in the solitude
of his own heart.10
One should add, too, that the prospect of this atomized
condition, in which families, neighborhoods, communities,
and all other forms of intermediate human association are
rendered weak and listless, leads Tocqueville to express, at
the book’s conclusion, a fear of democratic despotism, an
all-embracing “soft” tyranny which relies upon dissolving
the bonds among its members, and their consequent inability to act together as citizens, to smooth the way toward
a massive bureaucratic state that would rule over every feature of their lives.11
*****
So we return to the question that we left dangling a moment
ago. How does a democratic society, in which all the formerly reliable defenses against anarchy and anomie have
been lost or removed, still find a way to order itself, and
produce the kind of virtuous behavior and commitment to
the common good that is required for it to be cohesive,
successful, and free? Or to phrase the question in a slightly
different way: Can a society in the grip of a massive and
inexorable change nevertheless find ways to import into the
new order some of those things that were most estimable in
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the old, while leaving behind the elements that were either
pernicious or inadequate? Does great historical change require that the slate be wiped entirely clean? Or is there a way
that the best of the past can be carried over into the present
and future?
This is, it seems to me, a question of the first importance
to those of us who believe so fervently in the importance of
reading old books. And it is also a question that provides the
optimal opportunity to explain more fully what I mean by
“the Tocquevillean moment.” It is the moment when an old
order becomes conscious of the imperative to give way to a
new one—and the particular dilemma that this change
presents to thoughtful individuals, like Tocqueville, who
seem destined to ride the crest of a monumental transformation knowing full well both what is passing and what is
to come. The Tocquevillean moment makes two contradictory demands: first, that it is essential to accept the inevitability of sweeping changes, however difficult that acceptance may be; and second, that it is equally essential to find
ways of incorporating into the emerging new order that
which was wisest and best in the passing order, no matter
how much the new order may resist.
This way of looking at things makes several important
assumptions. It assumes the fact of contingency, and the
possibility of free and meaningful choices. Tocqueville was
emphatically opposed to any and all forms of determinism,
partly because they sapped the will and extinguished the
spirit of liberty, and partly because they simply failed the test
of truth. All is not foreordained, and there are clearly better
and worse ways of managing the transition to democracy.
The outcome depends upon the ways in which change is
directed, and that in turn depends upon the prudential
judgment of wise and skilled leaders.
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31
Let me make what I am saying clearer by offering another example of what I am calling “the Tocquevillean
moment” taken from outside Tocqueville’s work and his
immediate context. A similar moment of profound political
and social transition is described with great vividness in
Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard.12 The
book relates the story of a proud Sicilian prince, Don Fabrizio, who is thoroughly steeped in a venerable and traditional
social order at whose apex he stands, but who must nevertheless find a dignified way to accept and yield to the winds
of change. When the Risorgimento, the movement for
Italian national unification, intrudes upon his island world,
he is surprised to discover that his well-born, talented, and
ambitious young nephew Tancredi has decided to sign on
with the revolutionaries, who have set their sights on the
overthrow of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and its replacement by the Kingdom of Italy. Why, the Prince wonders, would a young nobleman like Tancredi desert his king
and stoop to make common cause with a ruffian like Garibaldi and his mob of redshirts?
But Tancredi is moved by more than a young man’s hotblooded desire to be in on the Big Event. He also has a persuasive explanation for his choice. Change was inevitable.
But without the participation of the older elite classes, the
nationalist movement could well be taken over or supplanted by something immensely more destructive, a radical
republicanism that would sweep away every vestige of the
life that the Prince had known. “If we want things to stay as
they are,” said Tancredi, “things will have to change. D’you
understand?”13
And yes, the Prince did come to understand, and the
book is about his gradual and methodical accommodation to
the new order, albeit one laced with intense melancholy and
regret, and occasional doses of cynicism. That process of
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accommodation culminates in his embrace of a marriage
between Tancredi and the beautiful daughter of Don
Calogero, a man of lowly birth, who had made himself into
a wealthy landowner and influential businessman, and who
was a strong supporter of the nationalists. Don Calogero
perfectly embodies the emerging democratic order in all its
callowness and vulgarity. The very idea of linking his family
to Don Calogero’s was a change that the Prince’s ancestors
would never willingly have contemplated, and it was certainly a change that the proud Prince would rather not have
had to make. But he recognized that there was much good
that could be salvaged in some areas, if only he were willing
to make a strategic retreat in others. Such a union would
allow him to retain his social authority and the prestige of
his house, and along with it the commitment to refinement
and culture that were the distinguishing mark of his class,
since Don Calogero and his offspring would now have an
equal stake in the perpetuation of these things. Some things
changed, precisely so that other things could stay the same.
This story neatly encapsulates what is meant by “the
Tocquevillean moment.” It involves discerning those cases
in which change is inevitable and accepting that inevitability, while also recognizing the possibility of carrying over
what is essential or desirable—just as Aeneas fled from his
ravaged Troy with his household gods and with his father
Anchises on his shoulders, carrying the most precious relics
of the past with him as he struggled toward the founding of
something new and unprecedented.14 It involves recognizing that the change can occur in many ways and understanding that, within certain limits, many things are possible.
There is no one way for history to flow. So much is contingent and uncertain. So much is up to us.
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33
Many of Tocqueville’s contemporary readers failed to
see this aspect of his work. In particular, the reception of the
second volume of the Democracy was a tremendous disappointment to Tocqueville. Reviewer after reviewer criticized
the book, or praised it only blandly. Evidently its ambitiousness, its scope, and its abstractness put them off. Only John
Stuart Mill, whom Tocqueville had come to know during a
visit to England, seemed to grasp the book’s intentions. His
long and careful review of the book brought forth a grateful
letter from Tocqueville, one that showed how deeply the
book’s poor reception had stung and frustrated him.15
Another letter Tocqueville wrote to an uncomprehending
French reviewer is worth quoting at length, because it offers
a remarkably clear explication of Tocqueville’s goals and
beliefs, and tells us much about the dilemmas that an intelligent and high-minded political Frenchman faced in his time.
We do not know for certain whether this letter was ever received, or even sent. But it is as clear a statement as Tocqueville ever provided of precisely what he was up to with the
Democracy:
I cannot help expressing to you the painful impression
[your review] has made on me. It does not do justice to
the most important point, the principal idea, the
governing thought of the work. . . .
I had become aware that, in our time, the new social
state that had produced and is still producing very great
benefits was, however, giving birth to a number of quite
dangerous tendencies. These seeds, if left to grow
unchecked, would produce, it seemed to me, a steady
lowering of the intellectual level of society with no
conceivable limit, and this would bring in its train the
mores of materialism and, finally, universal slavery. I
thought I saw that mankind was moving in this direction, and I viewed the prospect with terror. It was essen-
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tial, I thought, for all men of good will to join in
exerting the strongest possible pressure in the opposite
direction. To my knowledge, few of the friends of the
Revolution of 1789 dared point out these very frightening tendencies. . . . Those who saw them and were not
afraid to speak of them, being the sort of men who
condemned in one fell swoop the entire democratic
social state and all its elements, were more likely to
irritate people than guide them. The intellectual world
was thus divided into blind friends and furious
detractors of democracy.
My aim in writing [my] book was to point out these
dreadful downward paths opening under the feet of our
contemporaries, not to prove that they must be thrown
back into an aristocratic state of society . . . but to make
these tendencies feared by painting them in vivid
colors, and thus to secure the effort of mind and will
which alone can combat them—to teach democracy to
know itself, and thereby to direct itself and contain
itself.16
It would be hard to imagine a fuller expression of what
I am calling the Tocquevillean moment, the moment when
social change arrives at a crossroads, and awaits further
direction. Two things are particularly worth noting. First,
Tocqueville’s words make clear how uncomfortable he felt
having to choose between the hard-right monarchism of his
aristocratic friends and the hard-left republicanism of his
democratic ones; neither of these options, he believed,
offered hope for the preservation of liberty—and the preservation of liberty was, for Tocqueville, the highest and most
fundamental of political goods. Second, the letter gives the
lie to those critics who attribute to Tocqueville a fatalistic
view of democracy as inevitable decline, a view reflective of
his ingrained elitism. It simply wasn’t so. For one thing,
Tocqueville had the asceticism that most great thinkers
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35
share, the ability to think against his own sentiments in the
pursuit of the truth. But more importantly, he always wrote
with the idea of contingency, and of the freedom of man’s
will, firmly in mind. The Tocquevillean moment is a
moment of decision—a decision conditioned and structured
and hedged about by large social changes, but a consequential decision nonetheless. In this respect, Tocqueville’s
view was dramatically different from that of his younger
contemporary Marx, for whom the relationship between
large structures and individual action was hopelessly
muddled. Tocqueville was an ardent foe of any and all determinisms, and he would never have countenanced the view
that his writings discredited democracy in toto.
Indeed, a fundamentally Christian view of man’s freedom was at the heart of Tocqueville’s vision. As he wrote at
the very end of the second volume of the Democracy:
I am not unaware that several of my contemporaries
have thought that peoples are never masters of themselves here below, and that they necessarily obey I do
not know which insurmountable and unintelligent force
born of previous events, the race, the soil, or the
climate.
Those are false and cowardly doctrines that can
never produce any but weak men and pusillanimous
nations. Providence has not created mankind entirely
independent or perfectly slave. It traces, it is true, a
fatal circle around each man that he cannot leave; but
within its vast limits man is powerful and free; so too
with peoples.
Nations of our day cannot have it that conditions
within them are not equal; but it depends on them
whether equality leads them to servitude or freedom, to
enlightenment or barbarism, to prosperity or misery.17
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The Tocquevillean moment calls forth all the capacities
we possess for coming to terms, not only as individuals but
also as citizens and societies, with that fatal circle.
*****
Now we can give a fuller answer to our long-dangling
question: How did Tocqueville believe that the Americans of
his day had managed to counter the dangerous aspects of
democracy and create a relatively free and vibrant society?
He identified a number of factors. First, he gave credit to the
pervasive influence of religion in American life, noting to
his astonishment the numerous ways in which American
religion supported democratic values and free institutions.
Such a development seemed particularly surprising, coming
as it did at the very time when educated Europeans were
abandoning religious faith and practice, in the mistaken
belief that the “spirit of liberty” was incompatible with the
authoritarian “spirit of religion.” Tocqueville’s visit to
America convinced him that the opposite was true. In
America, religious beliefs and institutions restrained selfassertion in ways that made the exercise of freedom more
stable and more effective. Although religion took no direct
or official role in governance, it was, he declared, “the first
of [Americans’] political institutions,” for all Americans
regarded it as indispensable to the maintenance of republican government.18
Tocqueville was always deeply concerned about materialism, connecting acquisitive materialism—the unrestrained
desire to possess more and more things—with philosophical
materialism—the belief that the soul is perishable and only
matter truly exists. As a social philosopher committed both
to the power of free will and to the ideal of self-rule,
Tocqueville found the deterministic implications of philosophical materialism intolerable, and condemned it force-
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37
fully as a “dangerous malady of the human mind.”19 Fortunately, he believed, the Americans had so far proven
resistant to its temptations. But without the countervailing
force of religion, and in particular, without a belief in the
moral responsibility of an immortal soul, democratic institutions could easily be overwhelmed by their own tendency
to beget an uncontrolled passion for physical gratifications.
And there were other factors that he believed countervailed against democracy’s dangers. Tocqueville applauded
Americans for their talent in forming voluntary associations,
and for their federal institutions, both of which tended to
disperse pow er and encourage the involvement of citizens
in the activity of governing themselves—and both very
much in contrast to the centralizing tendencies of French
politics. “Local freedoms,” he wrote, “which make many
citizens put value on the affection of their neighbors and
those close to them, therefore constantly bring men closer to
one another, despite the instincts that separate them, and
force them to aid each other.”20
As this description implies, such a scheme did not depend upon selflessness. Indeed, the axiomatic principle that
made effective political and social association in America
possible, he believed, was the principle of self-interest rightly understood or well understood (l’intérêt bien entendu). To
ask an American to do virtuous things for virtue’s sake was
quite possibly to waste one’s breath. But the same request
would readily be granted if the prospect of some personal
benefit could be shown to flow from it. The challenge of
moral philosophy in such an environment, then, was demonstrating repeatedly the ways in which “private interest and
public interest meet and amalgamate,” and how one’s
devotion to the general good would therefore also promote
his or her personal advantage. Belief in that conjunction—
belief that one could do well by doing good—was exactly
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what Tocqueville meant by the “right understanding” of
self-interest.21
The prevalence of this belief could be seen in the characteristic forms of moral discourse Tocqueville encountered in
America. In the United States, he wrote, “it is almost never
said that virtue is beautiful. They maintain that it is useful
and they prove it every day.” They do not care about virtue
for its own sake, but are completely convinced that it is in
the interest of every man to be virtuous.22
Tocqueville was quite willing to accept this deal in much
the same spirit that the Prince accepted Don Calogero. After
all, the Tocquevillean moment involves making a calculation, whereby the transition into the new democratic order
could be effected with the least possible loss of what was
precious and estimable in the old ways. “I shall not fear to
say that the doctrine of self-interest well understood seems
to me of all philosophic theories the most appropriate to the
needs of the men in our time,” because self-interest was
destined to “become more than ever the principal if not the
unique motive of men’s actions.”23
Hence, it was imperative to educate citizens to understand this. “Enlighten them, therefore,” wrote Tocqueville,
“at any price; for the century of blind devotions and instinctive virtues is already fleeing far from us, and I see the time
approaching when freedom, public peace, and social order
itself will not be able to do without enlightenment.”24
Lamentable as the loss of these older virtues seemed to be,
their loss was not the end of the story for Tocqueville. The
American example made him hopeful that there might be
ways for the principle of self-interest to be so channeled,
hedged about, habituated, and clothed as to produce public
order and public good, even in the absence of older and
more venerable motives.
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*****
“Enlighten them, therefore, at any price.” Éclairez-les donc
à tout prix. Or, as the older Phillips Bradley translation
expressed it, “Educate them, then.” This exhortation brings
us full circle, back to where I began in reflecting on what is
being done here and now at this particular college. For
whatever else we may believe about the applicability of
Tocqueville’s ideas to the present day, and there is a lot of
room for debate there, we can be in no doubt that he was
right in his emphasis upon education. But not just any kind
of education. He is talking about liberal education, in the
strictest sense of the term, meaning an education that is
designed to make men and women capable of the exercise of
liberty, and of doing so within the context of the particular
society in which they find themselves. Such an education is
likely to require a serious and sustained encounter with old
books.
Modern Americans are likely to assume that the value of
such an education is mainly contemplative. And I say this
without any hint of disparagement. Many of us believe that
an education aimed at contemplative truth is a very high and
worthwhile endeavor. I don’t think I need to make that case
here at St. John’s. But I do want to argue that such an education also commends itself on very practical grounds, for
reasons that seem to me quite thoroughly Tocquevillean.
For, to borrow from the very words Tocqueville used in his
letter to his French critic, liberal education is the kind of
education that seeks to teach democracy to know itself, and
thereby to direct itself and contain itself. Such an education
can help equip us to negotiate, with both intelligence and
wisdom, the multitude of Tocquevillean dilemmas that are
presented to us by our times—changes that are too formi-
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dable to be resisted entirely, but at the same time too fluid
for us to refuse the challenge of influencing their direction.
This only serves to underscore the profound importance
of that process I described at the beginning, the process
whereby we pass on to the present and to the future the most
worthy and enduring elements of human ages that have
passed or are passing away. This is why the theory of strict
historicism is so wrongheaded and impoverishing, because
it denies us that very benefit by demanding that everything
be perpetually bound to its immediate context—as if every
cargo had to remain forever in the hold of the ship that transported it, and as if no child could ever make his parent’s
legacy into something of his own.
When, for example, we accord Plato’s Republic our high
respect as a great text warranting a lifetime of study, this
does not imply that we approve or ignore the many defects,
cruelties, and inequities of the Athenian society in which it
was produced—let alone that we prefer such a society to our
own democracy. We do not study the Republic merely for
what it tells us about Plato’s Athens. We study the Republic
partly, and far more importantly, because its criticisms of
democracy remain enduringly valid and troubling—and
because in reading it, we are teaching our democracy to
know itself better, thereby contributing to its ennoblement.
It is neither elitist nor ahistorical for us to seek to perpetuate,
not a way of life that is past or passing, but the things in it
that remain estimable and enduringly valuable.
There is much reason for hope, then, in this vision of
things. And yet, to be faithful to Tocqueville, I have to end
on a somewhat more somber note. Tocqueville was himself
prone to melancholy, and worried that the task of democracy’s ennoblement would prove too difficult, too exacting,
and too exhausting to perform. There is always in his work
the sense of an uphill challenge, with the issue very much in
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41
doubt. And it does not take much imagination to find, in his
description to his French critic of the “downward paths
opening under the feet of our contemporaries,” a description
that applies very much to our own democracy today.
But what remains still, both in Tocqueville and in the
present day, is the imperative of freedom. Remember his
words at the end of the Democracy: “[Providence] traces, it
is true, a fatal circle around each man that he cannot leave;
but within its vast limits man is powerful and free; so too
with peoples.”25 It is hard at any given time to know where
our containing circle is drawn, and we are just as likely to
err in presuming to cross over the line as we are in shying
away from it out of timidity and fear. Yet Tocqueville clearly
thought the danger of the latter outweighed that of the
former, and that we have far more power to shape our lives
and our destinies than we allow ourselves to believe. That is
why the Tocquevillean moment is, at bottom, an occasion
for the exercise of the profoundest human freedom.
It is not an unlimited freedom, of course. But what could
such a thing mean? What, after all, is a radically unconditioned state, other than a state of utter randomness and
inconsequentiality? “To live without let or hindrance would
be life indeed,” observed George Santayana, “Yet there is a
snare in this vital anarchy. It is like the liberty to sign
cheques without possessing a bank account. You may write
them for any amount; but it is only when a precise deposit
limits your liberty that you may write them to any purpose.”26
No, the difficult and complex freedom of the Tocquevillean moment is precisely the sort of freedom for which we
humans were made, and it provides the opportunity for our
finest qualities to flourish. The fatal circle is also the ground
of our freedom, the horizon that gives focus and purposefulness to our efforts. History may delimit our choices, but
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it does not dictate what we should do with what is set before
us. For that, Tocqueville asserted, we must look to ourselves. It is bracing but encouraging counsel.
NOTES
1
Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through
Yugoslavia, 2 vols. (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009), 1044.
2
The reader who is interested in knowing more about Tocqueville’s life
and times can consult two excellent English-language biographies:
André Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography, translated by Lydia Davis with
Robert Hemenway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988); and
Hugh Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2006).
3
De la Démocratie en Amérique is the book’s French title, a title that
conveys far better than its English translation the fact that Tocqueville’s
greater interest was in “democracy” rather than in “America.” I have
used the scrupulously literal and reliable recent translation by Harvey C.
Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, Democracy in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), and all quotations and page numbers
refer to that text. I confess to retaining a fondness for the often more
graceful (if less accurate) translation by Phillips Bradley, based on the
Henry Reeve text as revised by Francis Bowen, published by Alfred A.
Knopf in 1945 and still widely available, which was generally considered the standard English translation until being supplanted by the
appearance of the Mansfield/Winthrop edition. There are other worthy
English translations in circulation, including a most welcome bilingual,
French-English, historical-critical edition edited by Eduardo Nolla,
translated by the distinguished Tocqueville scholar James T. Schleifer,
and published in four volumes in 2010 by Liberty Fund.
4
On Tocqueville’s journey, see George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and
Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938).
5
Tocqueville to Eugène Stoffels, Paris, February 21, 1831, cited in
James T. Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,
second edition (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2000), 3. Schleifer’s
book is a meticulous and fascinating account of the book’s composition.
6
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 13.
ESSAYS | McCLAY
7
43
Ibid., 6.
Ibid., 6-7.
9
Ibid., 7. Here I acceded only reluctantly to the Mansfield/Winthrop
translation of une science politique nouvelle as “a new political science,” which is literally accurate but seems to me to run the considerable
risk of being conflated with the use of the term “political science” as the
name for a particular academic discipline that did not exist in Tocqueville’s time. The Bradley/Reeve/Bowen translation, “a new science of
politics,” is less literal but seems less liable to that confusion.
10
Ibid., 483-4.
11
Ibid., 661-73.
12
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard, translated by Archibald
Colquhoun (New York: Pantheon, 1960); originally published as Il
Gattopardo (Milan: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1958).
13
Ibid., 40.
14
Cf. Aeneid, Book 2, 624-804.
15
Mill’s review, which appeared in October 1840 edition of the
Edinburgh Review, is described in Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography,
274-5.
16
This unpublished letter written by Tocqueville to Sylvestre de Sacy is
in the Tocqueville family archives but has been translated and quoted at
length in Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography, 272-3. Brogan also refers to
this same item, characterizing it as a “blistering letter” which “it is to be
hoped that he sent,” given the fact that “here, in a couple of sentences,
he expresses the central concern which drove his investigations . . . and
explains why posterity has argued over them ever since.” See Brogan,
Tocqueville, 368-9.
17
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 675-6.
18
Ibid., 280.
19
Ibid., 519.
20
Ibid., 487.
21
Ibid., 500-503.
22
Ibid., 501.
23
Ibid., 503.
24
Ibid.
25
See note 17.
26
George Santayana, Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty,
Society, and Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995), 241.
8
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45
ON SEEING ASPECTS
John Verdi
Introduction
If philosophy, which seeks to encompass all of being in
thought, has a question as its source and its guiding principle, that question might be, What is there? To this question
we can give a disarmingly simple and obviously true answer: What is there? Everything. There are particles and
waves, brains and consciousness, nations and peoples, Hamlet and Hamlet, and on and on. There is . . . everything. The
“everything” answer—which in the end may show itself to
be the only true universal answer available to us—delegates
to various disciplines and modes of thinking the task of determining what there is, each in its own way. The physicist,
the psychologist, the historian, the poet: each receives his
share, with perhaps nothing left over for the philosopher.
Somewhat like Meno’s paradoxical question to Socrates
about the futility of seeking either what one does or what
one does not know, the “everything” answer tries to silence
philosophy at it source.
But we philosophers retain the belief, perhaps even the
conviction, that in spite of everything the effort to comprehend the unity of things is still worthwhile. Philosophy’s
subject matter is precisely not one thing among many others,
but rather the interrelatedness of all that is. We philosophers
believe that the fundamental questions—beginning with the
question, What is there?—can continually bring into light
the inexhaustible being of things and can place us, as thinkers, squarely in its presence. The essence of these questions
is to open up possibilities and to keep them open. This is
John Verdi is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This essay was first
presented as a lecure on 28 October 2005.
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why there is philosophy in life. In this essay I would like to
show, in a very preliminary way, how the concept of aspects, and especially our experience of seeing aspects, can
help us think about being, and about the meaning of philosophy’s opening question, What is there?
We can turn to Aristotle for an entry into the idea of
aspects. In On Memory and Recollection, he raises a question about what goes on when we remember something. For
Aristotle all perception involves an image of some kind,
present right now, in the soul. He call such an image a phantasma. The question of how the past can be present is the
problem of memory. Aristotle writes:
[I]t is clear that one must conceive the sort of thing that
comes about in the soul as a result of sense perception
. . . as something like a picture (z%graph'ma), the active
holding of which we assert to be memory. . . . But if
what goes on in the case of memory is of this sort, does
one remember this experience or the one from which it
came about? For if it is this one, we would not
remember any of the things that are absent, but if it is
the earlier one, how, while perceiving this later one, do
we remember the absent thing that we are not
perceiving (450a25-31, 450b13-16).
So if what I have now is a present image, a phantasma, how
is it that this image can be of the past?
To overcome this impasse Aristotle distinguishes phantasmata from eikones, that is, images from representations
or likenesses. (We see this also in Plato’s Sophist [240b12c2], and passim throughout the Republic.) He says:
For example, the picture drawn on a tablet is both a
picture (z%on) and a likeness (eik%n), and one and the
same thing is both of these, although what it is to be
these two things is not the same, and it is possible to
behold it both as a picture and as a likeness; so too one
ought to conceive of the image that is in us as being
ESSAYS | VERDI
47
itself something in its own right, and as being of something else (450b21-26).
We can say that the memory image I have of something I
experienced in the past can display at least two aspects, depending on whether we see it simply as a phantasma, that is,
as an image fully present in its own right at this moment, or
as an eikon, a reminder or pointer to something else—something that may in fact no longer even exist.
One reason, then, for investigating the seeing of aspects
is that we might come to understand how it is possible for
something absent to be represented by something present.
Put in broader terms, how can one thing stand for another
and be its representative? In the broadest terms, we might
ask how anything comes to have meaning at all.
I have had another, more personal, reason for getting
involved with aspects. Some years ago I had occasion to
read and discuss Augustine’s Confessions both in one class
during the summer and in another class the following fall. I
was profoundly moved by these encounters with Augustine,
who at the time he was writing would have been about the
same age I was while reading. I felt certain that if I were to
read the book yet again soon after I would begin to see
things in the world—things I hadn’t seen before or had
stopped seeing long ago. I felt sure I would experience some
sort of change, both in what I would see and in the way I
would see it. Whether it was from prudence or cowardice—
I still don’t know—I did not pick up the Confessions again
until years later. But my near encounter with conversion left
me wondering what conversion is and how it comes about.
I’ve come to suspect that conversion, whether religious or
otherwise, sudden or gradual, toward or away from, has the
power to change what one sees in the world—perhaps even
to change one’s answer to the question, What is there?
Whether I come to see the world as “charged with the grandeur of God,” as Hopkins says, or I say along with Words-
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48
worth that “the things which I have seen I now can see no
more,” in either case, my world becomes different.
This essay is in three parts. In the first part, I will look at
some pictures and discuss some of the apparently simple
phenomena associated with aspect-seeing. In the second
part, I will present the beginnings of an account of aspects
and their significance to the question of what there is. In the
last part, I will examine a painting by Caravaggio, The
Calling of St. Matthew. There is also one joke in the essay.
49
ESSAYS | VERDI
This is the duck-rabbit.
Figure 3
Part One: Ducks and Rabbits
This is a duck.
We can see the duck-rabbit either as a duck or as a rabbit. When we see it as one or the other we are seeing one or
the other of its aspects. When we see it first as a duck and
then as a rabbit, we experience a change of aspect. It is also
possible that a person might never see anything but a rabbit
in the picture. That person could be said to be seeing the
rabbit aspect continuously (PI, 194).
Here is another example of aspect-seeing and change of
aspect.
Figure 1
This is a rabbit.
Figure 2
Figure 4
Figure 4 is called the Necker cube. Look at it for a moment. Do you notice a change in the cube while you are
looking? Most people will see the cube jump, seeming for a
while to have its front side pointing down to the right, and
then for a while to have its front side pointing up to the left.
If you’re still not seeing this change of aspect, you might be
helped by Figure 5, in which the two ways of seeing the
cube are emphasized by dots.
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50
Figure 5
First imagine the black dot as closer to you than the
white dot. Then reverse this relationship and try to imagine
the white dot as closer. Now look one more time at the original cube. Even with the assistance of the dots, there may
still be some people who do not see the cube jump between
aspects.
Consider next Figure 6. How many cubes are there? The
correct answers are six or seven, depending on which aspect
one sees while counting—six if the black squares seem to be
on the tops of the cubes, seven if they seem to be on the
bottoms. Those who can count only six or only seven may
be helped by the additional drawings in Figure 7.
Figure 7
Figure 6
The paradoxical quality of these examples lies in the
awareness that what is seen has not changed at all, and
nevertheless what is seen is quite different. In what does this
difference consist? If I asked you to draw what you saw in
both instances, and you were to represent both by exact
copies—and wouldn’t those be good representations?—no
change would appear, because the copies would be congruent (PI, 196). If I see the duck-rabbit as a duck, I might
ESSAYS | VERDI
51
point to other pictures of ducks, and say that I’m now seeing
something like that. This, however, is not a description of
what I see, but rather an expression of it.
These simple examples raise once again the question,
What is there? What is seen are contraries: rabbits that are
not rabbits, corners both closer and not closer, cubes both
six and seven. These apparent contradictions can lead us
into a dialectical inquiry. In Book XII of the Metaphysics
Aristotle suggests that dialectic begins not from what there
is, but from contrary assumptions about what there is (1078
b25). The object of our concern itself opens a road of
inquiry for us, and coaxes us along the path (984a17-20).
If the difference between what is seen before the change
of aspect and what is seen after it did not lie in some sense
in the object I was looking at, we might be tempted to think
that our eyes and heads are responsible, that something has
changed in us. While the new aspect seems to appear suddenly out there, we nonetheless feel that we must have had
something to do with it. The image on my retina, the way my
eyes follow the figure, the organization of impulses in my
brain: any one of these might be the source of the change of
aspect. But the fact remains that what I see is still out there.
Seeing an aspect is not like having a hallucination, because
it is a true seeing of something that is, even if we can’t all
see it simultaneously, and even if some of us may never see
some aspects of things. Furthermore, I am not aware of what
is going on in my eyes and brain while aspects change. So,
while these physiological events may be causally related to
my experience, they necessarily fail to get at what I mean by
change of aspect and what I mean by seeing aspects. Neither
a physiological account of aspect-seeing, if one could be
provided, nor any other causal account can satisfy us any
more that Socrates was satisfied by the causal accounts of
Anaxagoras. In the Phaedo, Socrates tells his friends that
Anaxagoras at first seemed to say that “Mind puts the world
in order and is responsible for all this” (97c), but in the end
he assigns only physical causality to things. Socrates says
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that Anaxagoras was like someone who gives an account
based on the relationship of bones and sinews to explain
why Socrates is sitting in prison awaiting death, rather than
providing the account that Socrates himself finds most
convincing: “Since the Athenians judged it better to condemn me, so I for my part have judged it better to sit here
and stay put and endure whatever penalty they order” (98de). The physical account fails to answer the question of what
Socrates’ time in jail means, just as a physiological account
would fail to tell us what our seeing of aspects might mean.
Consider now what happens when I contemplate a face,
and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that
the face has not changed, and yet I see it differently. I have
noticed an aspect of the face (PI, 193). The aspect is not a
part of the face as is the nose, nor a part as is its color or
shape. And yet I see the resemblance of this face to another;
I do not infer it or reason it through. I am struck by a similarity I had not before noticed, as if the being of the resemblance asserts itself, and I cannot help but see it. What is it
suddenly to notice what has been there all the time? Or has
it really been there all along? Perhaps it has come into being,
or perhaps I have been thrust into its presence. Or consider
the case of meeting someone I have not seen for years; I see
him clearly but fail to recognize him. Suddenly I know him,
and I see the old face in the altered one. I believe I would
paint a different portrait of him, if I could paint, now that I
have seen the old in the new. Is this a special sort of seeing?
Is it a case of both seeing and thinking, or an amalgam of the
two? (PI, 197.)
Seeing an aspect or change of aspect is not like seeing an
optical illusion. Optical illusions, such as those shown in
Figure 8 through Figure 10 appear to be what they are not.
In the case of the two diagonal lines of Figure 8, ab and bc,
it appears that ab is greater than bc, but in fact they are of
equal length, as a measurement would show us. In the illu-
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ESSAYS | VERDI
Figure 8
Figure 9
Figure 10
sion of Figure 9, all the vertical lines are parallel to one
another, as are all the horizontal lines, which we could determine by placing a straightedge against them, or looking at
them close up. And in the illusion of Figure 10, the squares
labeled A and B are actually the same shade of gray. Some
kind of light meter might help to show this, even though we
cannot see it. Many optical illusions are understood when
we learn something about how the eyes and brain work. An
optical illusion is a kind of trick that can be of value in understanding how we see, in the causal, physiological sense.
The questions raised by illusions are limited, and their answers tend to bring an end to wonder. Aspect-seeing is of
interest precisely because it is a kind of seeing whose concept is not explicated through physiology, not because we
don’t yet know enough about the eyes and brain, but because it is not a concept whose place in our thinking can be
made any clearer through such an approach.
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55
Figure 11
In the image of Figure 11, those who do not see a
change in aspect will be helped by something I am about to
say. This picture is of interest because it demonstrates that
speech can encourage a shift in aspect that might not otherwise occur. If speech can play a role in aspect-seeing, and if
what someone says can affect what we see, then there might
be some connection between speaking and seeing. Figure
11 represents the letter E.
Now here is a more complex image. To most people, the
image in Figure 12 seems to lack any unity. That may be
because it is upside down. If we turn it right side up as in
Figure 13, some people will see something they did not see
before. Most of the rest will be helped by a verbal description to see something like a late medieval representation of
Jesus.
Figure 12
Figure 13
The upper margin of the picture cuts the brow, so the top of
the head is not shown. The point of the jaw, clean-shaven
and brightly illuminated, is just above the geometric center
of the picture. A white mantel covers the right shoulder. The
upper sleeve is exposed as the rather black area at the lower
left. Do you see it now? Some people never see it, but for
those who do, dark marks have become human eyes, and
blobs of black and white have become an expressive human
face. How did that happen and why might it be important?
Part Two: The Being of Aspects
The distinctive mode of being characteristic of aspects is in
question here, and in particular we are now asking the question, What is there? The pictures we have examined so far
have engaged us in a form of dialectic and have brought us
to some kind of impasse. It is the peculiar characteristic of
our relationship to pictures that we see into them the very
objects they depict. We regard the picture, the drawing, or
the photograph as we regard the object itself, and so in a
sense we see what is there and what is not there simultaneously, in much the same way as, in Aristotle’s account of
memory, we recall things by considering a present image as
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pointing to the past. In a picture we see lines, shapes, paints,
colors; but we also see ducks and rabbits.
If we had in front of us the
original of this portrait of Descartes by Frans Hals, we would
be able to see brush strokes and
paint thicknesses. But our description of this canvas as a
portrait of Descartes will include
elements that do not belong to a
description of the picture as a
purely physical object. Descartes’s eyes look out at us; we can
study the expression on his face
and wonder what it reveals about Figure 14
him. In this paint-covered canvas we see a human being. (It
is perhaps not surprising to learn, then, that in Greek, the
same word, z%on, does double duty for both “living thing”
and “picture.”)
The reason that we hang pictures on our walls at all, I
think, is because we can see into a picture the very thing of
which it is a picture. We also hang snippets of text (PI, 205).
There is, of course, also a sense in which Descartes is not
really there in the picture. The dual nature of aspects—that
what we see both is and is not there—allows the picture to
make a demand on us and to ask us the question, What is
there? Our seeing itself is made questionable. By raising the
question of being, the aspects of the picture also raise the
question of truth. What is true about a picture?
The kinship between pictures and aspects may be put
this way: An aspect of something—that is, what I can see it
as—is what it can be a picture of, or more generally, what it
can stand for or represent: the image I now see can represent, or be seen as, an image of the past; the triangle I draw
on the chalkboard can represent the triangle of the proposition I am demonstrating. I see the duck-rabbit as a duck
57
ESSAYS | VERDI
when it is placed in a field of pictures of ducks. It can be a
picture of a duck. In a field of pictures of rabbits, I see it as
a rabbit. It can be a picture of a rabbit. You could imagine
the image in Figure 15 appearing in several places in a
book.
Figure 15
In the text surrounding the different appearances of the
figure, a different object could be under discussion in each
case: here a glass solid, there an inverted open box, there a
wire frame, there three boards forming a solid angle. We see
the illustration now as one object, now as another (PI, 193).
What we seem to be doing in these various cases is both
seeing and thinking—seeing because I have an illustration
in front of me, thinking because I am guided by the description to see it as one thing or another. It may take something
like imagination or a conscious act of interpretation to see
the drawing as now this, now that. When, by contrast, I view
the portrait of Descartes or see the duck-rabbit in a field of
duck pictures, I needn’t consciously engage the imagination.
And yet I am still inclined to say that imagination—or is it
thought?—suffuses itself throughout my seeing in all these
instances.
When aspect-seeing does not involve the sort of interpretation necessary to see the schematic solid as many different objects, it is more like ordinary seeing in this way:
when I see the duck-rabbit as a duck, my seeing is immediate and non-inferential—though it is still full of mind in
some way. In seeing the duck, I do not draw a conclusion
from a line of reasoning, such as “This must be a duck because all the others are ducks.” It could be said that mind
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reaches through the world of my knowledge and experience
to give shape to my sight. This is not to say that aspectseeing is two things, thinking and seeing, any more than
playing a piece of music with expression involves both the
playing and the expression. Rather, our seeing is one form
that thought takes in our lives, and it is only in a world of
thought that there can be aspects (RPP I, 1029). We have
thinking eyes and we see thinkingly. In De Anima, Aristotle
shows that all aesthesis, all perception, tends towards a universal, even if every sense has its own specific field, so that
what is immediately given is not universal. The fact is that
we see particulars in relation to something universal. We see
not merely a white patch, but a man. Merleau-Ponty, in his
book The Phenomenology of Perception, restates Aristotle’s
position, giving it a linguistic turn. He says that “language
intervenes at every stage of recognition by providing possible meanings for what is in fact seen, and recognition
advances along with linguistic connections” (131). In this
sense, seeing can be a direct and immediate grasp of the
meanings of things.
Can there then be a connection between a pathology of
mind and a pathology of seeing? What would it be like to be
aspect-blind? What would the world of the aspect-blind person be like? The eyesight of such a person would not be defective in any ordinary sense, but he would be unable to see
a picture jump from one aspect to another. He would not, for
example, see the Necker cube switch from first pointing
down to then pointing up, though he might be able to reason
that the existence of two aspects is a possibility. Furthermore, he might be blind to the expression on a face. He
might not see the picture face of Descartes as proud or pious
or cheerful, though he might be able to learn to deduce from
its features that it expressed these characteristics. In general,
his attitude toward pictures would be quite different from
that of a person who is able to see aspects (RPP II, 49). It
might be like the attitude most of us have toward a blue-
ESSAYS | VERDI
59
print: it needs to be figured out. He would not see motion in
the picture of a runner, though he would know that the picture was meant to represent motion. Aspect-blindness would
be akin to lacking a musical ear.
Oliver Sacks, in the title case study of his book The Man
Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, describes a distinguished
professor of music, Dr. P., who gradually loses the ability to
recognize faces and even quite ordinary objects. On first
meeting him, Sacks doesn’t understand why he has been referred for treatment, because he seems normal. Sacks then
opens for him a copy of National Geographic and asks him
to describe some of the pictures in it. Sacks writes:
His responses here were very curious. His eyes would
dart from one thing to another, picking up tiny features,
individual features. . . . A striking brightness, a color, a
shape would arrest his attention and elicit comment—
but in no case did he get the scene-as-a-whole. . . . He
never entered into relation with the picture as a
whole—never faced, so to speak, its physiognomy. He
had no sense whatever of a landscape or scene (10-11).
While he could recognize abstract shapes, such as the five
regular solids, he could identify a face only if he could find
in it some distinctive feature, from which he could draw the
conclusion that this must be so-and-so’s face. Nor could he
any longer identify the expressions on faces. He could see
the features, but could not see the face. As Sacks writes:
It wasn’t merely that he displayed the same indifference to the visual world as a computer but . . . he construed the world as a computer construes it, by means
of key features and schematic relationships. The
scheme might be identified . . . without the reality being
grasped at all (15).
There is also the case of young man named Schneider,
who suffered a brain injury during World War I. He was
studied by the psychologists Kurt Goldstein and Adhemar
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Gelb. In most respects Schneider appeared to be quite
normal, with undiminished language ability, intact intelligence, and adequate visual acuity. But Goldstein and Gelb
discovered that Schneider was unable to identify certain
words and objects when they were exposed briefly on a
special viewing apparatus called a tachistoscope, a device
that displays images for a specified length of time. If letters
or pictures were shown him with their contours obscured or
their interiors marked by cross-hatching, he was unable to
recognize them. Even the difference between straightness
and curvature escaped him. The doctors eventually learned
that he could read words and recognize objects and pictures
only through a series of slight head and hand movements,
which could be frustrated if several lines led away from a
single point.
Away from the laboratory and out in the real world,
Schneider managed to find his way around only by using
cues to deduce what things were. He was able to distinguish
a tree from its shadow because the shadow was darker. He
could distinguish men from vehicles because men were
narrow and tall, whereas vehicles were long and wide.
Merleau-Ponty says that he had lost “the symbolic function”
(123). For him the world no longer had any physiognomy,
no characteristic look or feel. Schneider had also lost the
ability to see things as representations, and consequently
could no longer wonder, for wonder is possible only when
we can see in something both that it is and that it is not. He
could himself no longer recognize the power of images to
express meaning and to point beyond themselves. MerleauPonty remarks that “it was through his sight that mind in
him was impaired” (126). It seemed that mind no longer
informed his eyes. The best his eyes could do was to send
information about what was in front of him to his mind,
which would then reason about what there was. In a sense,
his eyes could no longer see.
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These pathological cases suggest that there exists a deep
connection between aspect-seeing and meaning. The human
world—our world—is full of meanings. Pictures, words,
objects point away from themselves and towards other
things through an endless web of connections. Meaning
arises and spreads out through our recognition of the fundamental interconnectedness of things, the unity of being. In
this regard, aspects are themselves meanings, and as such
they belong, I would suggest, to human experience. Neither
beasts nor gods see aspects, at least not as fully as we do.
Animals for the most part appear to be unable to see something as something else. A dog might mistake a stick for a
bone, but it cannot see the stick as a bone. The Homeric
gods seem to live in a world almost devoid of representations except for language. They do not create representative
works of art for themselves, though Hephaistos does make a
shield for Achilles (Homer, Iliad, 18: 478-608). Do they
delight in poetry or music? Do they find meanings in the
objects of the world? Perhaps they simply see what truly is
and stand in no need of the suggestiveness of art. All this is
merely to say, in slightly different words, what Diotima says
in the Symposium: The gods do not philosophize (204a1).
The condition of aspect-blindness also suggests a
connection between aspects in general and what we might
call “experiencing the meaning of a word” (PI, 214). What
would you be missing if you never could experience the
meaning of a word—if, for instance, you could not feel that
a word loses its meaning and becomes mere sound when it
is repeated ten times over? A word has a familiar physiognomy; it arouses a feeling that it is an actual likeness of
its meaning. We manifest these feelings by the way we
choose and value words and by the care we take to find the
“right” word. The meanings of words are like the aspects of
visual representations: a sentence can resemble a painting in
words; an individual word in a sentence can resemble a picture (PI, 215).
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As an example, consider the two ideas “fat” and “thin.”
Would you be inclined to say that Friday was thin and
Thursday fat, or the reverse? Which one feels right to you?
Here “fat” and “thin” are not metaphors. Someone who does
not understand what is being asked here would be at a loss—
but not because he did not understand the primary meanings
of the four words. In fact, it is just because he does understand these meanings that the question might seem like
nonsense to him. These people exhibit a kind of meaningblindness, or perhaps meaning-myopia, as most of us do to
some degree. For these people, “finding the right word”
often involves thinking things through, figuring them out,
rather than listening for the right fit. They might have a hard
time appreciating poetry and certain kinds of humor, especially puns. This reminds me of a cartoon I once saw, showing a man in a business suit with a briefcase, standing in his
kitchen presumably after a long day at the office (or in the
classroom), with something like a scowl on his face. His
wife cheerfully asks: “Did you have a nice day, dear?” To
this he responds: “Of course I did. You told me to, didn’t
you?” The humor turns in part on our grasping at once the
dual aspects of the expression “Have a nice day,” usually
meant as a hortatory subjunctive, but grammatically equivalent to an imperative. (But I know it’s impolite to explain
jokes.)
Part Three: The Calling of St. Matthew
Seeing different aspects and experiencing multiple
meanings play important roles in our understanding and
appreciation of visual art, music, and literature, especially
poetry. Consider the representation of King William in
Figure 16 and imagine that we have the actual painting in
front of us.
We can see this image in at least three ways. That is, we
can see at least three of its aspects. First, we can see it as a
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ESSAYS | VERDI
Figure 16
physical object. It is a canvas nearly eight feet high and five
feet long, surrounded by a frame of wood, rather heavy,
covered with paint of different colors and thicknesses,
applied probably by different brushes with different strokes
by Sir Godfrey Kneller sometime in the late seventeenth
century.
Second, we can see it as what we might call a geometrical object. We can focus on its composition, on how the
shapes and colors blend or contrast, on which lines point in
which directions, and on how our eyes are guided through
the picture by its geometrical and optical qualities. Finally,
we can view it as a portrait of King William III. We can
study his facial expression and his posture. We can notice
his eyes looking down at us, and his left hand encircling the
handle of his sword while it gently holds his cloak. We see
his power; perhaps we can see his justice. Our seeing of the
painting as King William is continuous. We don’t see it now
as King William, now as paint on canvas, though one might
make an effort to do so. But no effort is needed to see it as
a representation of a living human being.
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Figure 17 shows another painting, The Calling of St.
Matthew by Caravaggio. It was painted around 1600 and hangs
in a small corner chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi
in Rome.
Figure 17
It is about eleven feet on each side. On the other two walls
of the sanctuary hang two other depictions by Caravaggio
from the life of St. Matthew. It is impossible to view this
painting head-on without entering the sanctuary, so most
people see it at an angle from the left, as shown in Figure
18.
As we know from Scripture, the painting is a representation of a conversion, that is, a turning. Levi (the pre-conversion name of Matthew) becomes Matthew—and the world
ESSAYS | VERDI
65
changes for him. He sees what he had not seen before.
Caravaggio’s painting attempts to reveal this moment of
conversion, or what we might call a sudden change in
aspect. We can examine the painting under three or four
aspects.
In its aspect as a physical
object, the painting is a large
square. Caravaggio has applied the
paint thinly to the canvas, using
only a small number of colors. A
very close inspection would reveal
brush strokes that to the trained eye
could indicate the size of the
brushes Caravaggio used, and perhaps even the haste or care with
which the paints were applied.
When we consider the geometrical aspect of the painting, we see
Figure 18
that it is divided into two parts. The
standing figures on the right form a vertical rectangle; those
gathered around the table on the left, a horizontal block or
triangle. The two groups are separated by a void that is
bridged by a pointing hand. There is a grid pattern of verticals and horizontals that serve to knit the picture together:
the window, the table, the finger of the bearded man sitting
at the table, a stool, a line running up the wall in the upper
left. The contrast of light and shadow serves to guide our
eye across the painting from right to left.
When we turn out attention to the content aspect of the
painting, we notice that the setting seems ordinary, unremarkable. Perhaps it is a room in a tavern or, if the scene is
outdoors, a courtyard. And yet, even if we did not see it
hanging in the chapel, we might see at once that it is a religious painting. The languid, pointing hand of Jesus commands assent in a way that might exceed mere human
authority. The light streaming in from the right over the head
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of Jesus draws our attention to his face and hand. There is
also an urgency and a dignity about the painting that suggests there is other work to be done than counting money.
Some people might come to see this as a religious painting
only with help from cues—for example, the halo over the
head of Jesus. Others will recognize this aspect right away.
It is perhaps only or largely through created images and
words that the divine becomes picturable, and so enters the
world. Religious paintings, therefore, play a special role in
revealing the power of pictures in general to disclose what
there is.
The bearded tax-gatherer, Levi, is seated at a table in the
center of a corolla consisting of himself and four others,
perhaps his assistants. Coins litter the table, and the
hunched-over figure on the left appears to be counting some
of them. The group is lighted by a source at the upper right.
Jesus, his eyes veiled in shadow, with a halo hinting at his
divinity, enters alongside Peter. A gesture of his right hand
summons Levi, who is surprised by the intrusion of these
bare-footed men, and perhaps dazzled by the sudden light
from a just-opened door. Levi draws back and gestures
toward himself, as if to ask, “Who, me?” while his right
hand remains pressed onto some coins. The two figures to
the left are so concerned with counting money that they are
oblivious to the arrival of Christ, and so symbolically deprive themselves of the opportunity he offers for salvation.
The two boys in the center do respond, the younger one
drawing back as if to seek Levi’s protection, the older, with
his sword hung conspicuously, leaning forward somewhat
menacingly towards Peter, who seems to freeze him in place
with a finger. For the moment captured in the picture, no one
does anything. In another second, Matthew will rise up and
follow Jesus and his world will be forever different. The
painting captures the very moment of Matthew’s turning.
This brief account of the painting is much like what you
would find in many art books, and has been an accepted
version for many years. It is both revealing and compelling.
ESSAYS | VERDI
67
But we know that there a fourth aspect to this painting,
along with its being a physical object, a geometrical object,
and a representational object. The painting is itself derived
from a representation in words, a Gospel story. Here are the
accounts of Matthew’s calling from his Gospel, and also
from the Gospels of Mark and Luke. First Matthew:
As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called
Matthew sitting at the tax office; and he said to him
“Follow me.” And he rose and followed him (Matt.
9:9).
Mark writes:
And as he passed on, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus
sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, “Follow
me.” And he rose and followed him (Mark 2:14).
And Luke:
After this he went out, and saw a tax collector, named
Levi, sitting at the tax office; and he said to him,
“Follow me.” And he left everything, and rose and
followed him (Luke 5:27-28).
The accounts are bare and simple, merely hints of what
might have taken place. What strikes us, however, is what
the stories do not say. No account suggests that Matthew
hesitated or questioned before leaving his collection table
when summoned by Jesus. Of course, Caravaggio’s understanding of the story may be that it is fully human to doubt
and question and ask, so that, despite the Gospel narrative,
the bearded man sitting at the table, whose finger points
questioningly, almost unbelievingly, is very likely Matthew.
But if this is not the case, if his own finger is not pointing at
himself, who is Matthew? Jesus does not seem to think that
he’ll need to stay long to answer questions, because his foot,
seen in the lower right, is already turned to leave. Is it clear
at whom Jesus is looking and pointing? If we follow the arc
of his finger, is it not met by the body of the hunched-over
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young man, whose back curves up and whose head leans
towards Jesus? His eyes are the only ones of the five at the
table that are not illuminated by the bright light from the
right. We are drawn toward both pairs of shadowed eyes—
the young man’s and those of Jesus—not because they are
focal points of lines of light, or because they are centrally
placed. They are human eyes in shadow and they beckon us
because we want to know who they belong to and what they
imply. If the young man is Matthew—and I offer this with
many reservations—then the painting depicts a turning or
conversion without hesitation, without questioning, without
delaying at Kierkegaard’s stage of infinite resignation before
arriving at faith (Fear and Trembling, 46)—an unexpected
and undeserved grace. It is a conversion that Matthew experiences as a sudden change of aspect, for which no preparation was required, or even possible.
We take interest in works of art such as Caravaggio’s
Calling of St. Matthew in part because they seem to affirm
their own being, even while they exist as representations.
They compel us to wonder about how true they might be.
But because the unity of a work of art is never completely
and simply given, that is, because it requires our seeing and
talking to bring it continuously into being, it questions us
and engages us in dialectic, much as great books can do. As
we talk about—and with—a work of art, it may reveal to us
its aspects, which can be thought of as its possible unities,
and therefore its possible modes of being as an object and as
a representation.
In music we also recognize the importance of aspecthearing in the instructions given on how to listen or how to
play. Not merely “louder,” “softer,” “faster,” “slower,” but,
as Wagner does in Tristan und Isolde, “ever more animated,” or “with elevation,” or “with enthusiasm.” Tchaikovsky asks the pianist to play the opening theme of his first
piano concerto with “much majesty.” Instructions like these
must make sense; they must click in some way. When I am
ESSAYS | VERDI
69
told to hear these measures as an opening theme, how am I
to obey this order? I might be able to be taught exactly why
this other theme is a variation on the opening, but unless I
hear it as one, I will remain deaf to some aspect of the
music. Instructions like: “Think of it as a march, then you
will play it right,” or “You must hear this section as a
response to that one,” or “Hear this as in the Phrygian mode,
then you will get the ending”—these ways of guiding are
common and useful and not metaphorical. They can bring us
to hear aspects and not merely to reason our way to them.
As for poetry, I feel I have little insight. We might perhaps improve our reading of poetry by paying more attention to the experience of a word’s meaning. The tempo, too,
at which one reads a poem seems to be as important as it is
in music, and may be analogous to the distance at which one
views a painting. There may be a reading speed at which a
poem is most at home, most itself. I don’t know how one
comes to hear what this tempo would be, or how exactly the
tempo affects the life of the poem, but I am pretty sure that
some people possess this sense as much as others possess a
sense for the right tempo of a piece of music. Perhaps studying music helps one’s reading of poetry. I think also that
someone who knows the meter of a poem hears it differently, and would read it differently, from someone who does
not know the meter. If we think of the poem as a living
thing, we’ll understand that hearing its integrity requires that
we attend to the aspects of both meter and tempo.
The ability to experience the meanings of words plays a
critical role in appreciating metaphors and similes. There are
what may be called “secondary” senses of words, which can
be used and understood only if the primary meaning of a
word is already understood. If I say, “For me the vowel ‘a’
is red,” I do not mean “red” in a metaphorical sense, because
I could not express what I want to say in any other way than
by means of the idea “red” (PI, 216). A secondary sense is
something like an aspect, and those who are deaf or insen-
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sitive to secondary meanings will be less able to get into a
poem and feel their way around in it. They might of course
still learn to analyze, how to recognize to some degree what
the poem is saying and how, but they won’t be able to hear
the poem in the same way as those to whom secondary
meanings are alive. “Sorrow is like a leaden gray sky” is
either heard and acknowledged or else analyzed into submission. A poem can awaken a secret life in ordinary words
that seem used up, exhausted of meaning. Since we find
much of our experience to be equally ordinary and unremarkable, a poem can help us see new aspects of our experiences, by calling into question our usual ways of describing
them.
Let me close with the suggestion that coming to see new
aspects—and thus perhaps to answer the question What is
there? differently—is a central part of one’s experience
while a student at St. John’s, and can remain so throughout
life. Conversations can provide occasions for changes of
aspect in both our seeing and our thinking, as long as we
keep in mind that not every question requires an answer. In
seminar we all make the effort to understand why others say
what they say. We also ought to try our best to see what they
see. Questions are often requests that we look at things
differently, and that we try to find the maximum amount of
common ground with others.
And finally, I must return again to that writer I cannot
escape. When St. Augustine, in tears and almost in despair,
hears the voice of a child while he sits in the garden, he
takes the voice as a command from God to open the first
book he comes across and to begin reading. He hears the
voice as a command and he obeys it. When he later leaves
the garden, the world he enters is completely different for
him, and yet nothing in it has changed. We can imagine that
he hears the voice the way he does because he has received
grace. Perhaps such graces grace our own lives too, and—
who knows?—perhaps we can come to see the duck-rabbit
as a paradigm for the miracle.
ESSAYS | VERDI
71
REFERENCES
PI
PP
RPPI
RPPII
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception
(London: Routledge, 2002).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of
Psychology, Volume I (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of
Psychology, Volume II (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980).
Howard Gardner, The Shattered Mind (New York: Vintage, 1976).
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Edna H. Hong and
Howard V. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1983).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962).
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York:
Harper and Row, 1970).
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REFLECTIONS
73
FULL FATHOM FIVE:
A TUTOR’S SEA CHANGE
Louis Petrich
I send my hearty greetings to the community of St. John’s College
from the Caribbean island of Bonaire (part of the Netherlands
Antilles, 50 miles north of Venezuela), where, after seven years as
a tutor, I am privileged to be spending my first sabbatical. There
is no place I prefer to St. John’s for finding my satisfaction in this
life. I don’t need to specify its forms—you know them. But you
must also know what one American writer said after he found his
calling and happiness at a pond outside Concord, Massachusetts:
“Thank Heaven, here is not all the world.”
I am exploring and learning the ways of another world—the
underwater world. I wish I could show this world to you. Maybe
then it would not seem puzzling that I would choose to dive these
warm coral reefs for a whole year rather than immerse myself in
all those good, non-Program books I have collected over the
years, but never have time to read at the College. I could show
you some photos that I have taken of the marine life in the
southern Caribbean, including one of a unicorn filefish (Aluterus
monoceros), which is almost as rare here as a unicorn. But I don’t
think you would be that impressed. Rareness by itself does not
signify beauty, or even inspire wonder. So let me instead try to put
into words an impression of what my island life is like.
It is strange for me to make this effort, since one of the
pleasures I take in diving everyday—often twice, and usually
with my wife or eleven-year old son as a partner—is not having
to talk much about it. We have gained that pleasure with
experience. During the dive, we may point at special things or
exchange a few hand signals, and in an emergency we can bang
on our tank and hope for immediate attention. But otherwise,
Louis Petrich is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. He sent this open letter
to the college community from his sabbatical during the 2009-2010 academic year.
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diving delights me as a speechless activity of beholding the
myriad forms of life and their busy behaviors. To call them
“fantastical” is no exaggeration. Were it not for the limited supply
of air and the loss of body heat over time, I am not sure that my
activity of beholding would come to an end. The bulk of these
lines were written during an extended interval on the surface,
which is necessary to allow the nitrogen absorbed under pressure
to escape from my blood and tissues before I can safely return to
the deep, where I would otherwise linger and marvel as if present
at the fifth day of Creation—and that day were enough.
On the surface, Bonaire is not sublime. It is a small and
simple island, about five miles wide and twenty-four miles long,
shaped like a crescent, and home to about fifteen thousand
people—Antilleans, Dutch, and foreign residents like me. There
are no traffic lights on the island, no stop signs, no buses, no horns
blowing except to say “hello,” no theaters or cinemas, no long
stretches of white sandy beaches packed with oily sunbathers (the
beaches are rocky), no hotel or restaurant chains, no malls—
nothing, really, worth shopping for (the island produces only
salt)—and no fall, winter, or spring. There is always a breeze to
satisfy the windsurfers and kitesurfers and to make the hot sun
feel dry and light. Parrots squawk and some fifty other species of
birds sing at dawn to wake us up. Iguanas warm themselves on
the rocks, while wild donkeys and goats go marauding through
the dusty yards and fields, where our bare feet have acquired
calluses. Our hair has grown longer and lighter-colored,
toughened by the salt of the turquoise sea, which is never far from
view. Pink flamingos by the hundreds paint themselves on inner
landscapes, wherever the water pools. The capital of the island,
Kralendijk, can be traversed in about five minutes—a fact that has
led many a cruise ship passenger to wander off in conspicuous
confusion, looking for things that Bonaire simply does not have.
We point them back toward their ships and their buffets. What
Bonaire does have, most emphatically, is the freest and easiest
diving in the entire world, on healthy coral reefs that can be
reached from shore after a five- to ten-minute snorkel from almost
any point on the island. The surrounding sea, down to 250 feet, is
REFLECTIONS | PETRICH
75
a protected national park. Fishing is forbidden. Divers must pay a
park entrance fee and pass a buoyancy control test before being
permitted to dive. No gloves allowed. The reefs and animals may
not be handled, but they may be watched very closely, at any hour
of the day or night, according to one’s interest and pleasure.
The biologists I have met all testify that there is no place on
earth where a person can have such unmediated access to abundant animal life as one finds on Bonaire. Perhaps, they tell me, the
species count in tropical jungles is similar, but the jungles do not
offer free and easy access. In just the first minute of a descent to
forty feet, I have learned to identify thirty species on average (and
that’s just the fish)—one species every two seconds. My son
Louie can do better, since his vision is still acute at all distances.
If we were to include the coral and the other invertebrates and the
aquatic plants, the species count would double. This abundance of
life satisfies a passion that is not only taxonomical. O Lord, how
manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all: the
earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein
are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts
(Psalm 104: 24-25).
Bonaire’s “things creeping innumerable” are mostly small
(under a foot in length) or medium-sized (up to three or four feet).
Yes, there are leviathans out there: the whale shark (up to fiftyfive feet), the great hammerhead shark (twenty feet), and the
goliath grouper (eight feet), but these creatures are very rarely
sighted on Bonaire’s reefs. (Once I did encounter a goliath
grouper, also known as a “jewfish.” At first I thought he was a big
boulder. He was sleeping on the bottom at 106 feet and barely
budged when I poked him in the side. If he had felt that his meal
were being threatened, he might have charged me like a bull.
Some scripture commentators say it was a goliath grouper that
swallowed Jonah. I cannot dismiss the claim.) So I dive with a
magnifying glass in hand, very slowly, becoming one with the
seeing of my eyes. Ideally, a gentle current carries me, and my
muscles do no work except to turn my head, point my glass, and
breathe. I feel no gravity so long as I remain neutrally buoyant, a
state I maintain by proper breathing, as fish do by adjusting the
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volume of their air bladders.
To be free of gravity several hours a day, every day, has
become for me almost a need. I think this is one reason I see quite
a few obese scuba divers. They have discovered the only earthly
dispensation from having to carry their bodily burden. I wonder,
when I observe my large fellow humans, why the first forms of
life to emerge from the sea would have given up their freedom to
be oppressed by weight. When my air is running low and I make
my exit to shore, the first several steps on the sloping rocky coast
under the renewed pull of gravity are very difficult to take. I have
to concentrate on how to walk; otherwise, I would tumble, and the
surf would dash me on the rocks. This has happened more than
once. This forgetting how to walk, especially with all that extra
scuba gear to carry on my back, poses the most likely peril of
daily multi-diving.
Yet the physical pleasure of freedom in diving is only secondary. The primary pleasure lies in learning to recognize all those
“somethings” in the water as the very things that are imitated and
described in my field books. The impression of random motion by
innumerable, nameless forms of life begins to make sense as I
learn to see the fish “perform their parts” time and again. My
eyes, instead of darting around to be entertained by colorful
shapes in motion, come to rest on the actions of one fish, or on the
distinct parts of a fish, until the essential aspects, which are often
inconspicuous, acquire meaning. A tiny line under the gills, a pinhead spot next to the eye, the height of the dorsal fin, or some
other precise marking, contour, or motion—which the fish somehow read reliably—can mark the difference between two species.
As I become more acclimated to their element, as my body’s
vibrations become unobtrusive to their senses, the fish let me get
closer. Slowly they reveal more of their forms and purposes, and
if they could talk, I almost believe they would tell me their names.
Then, perhaps, I could do without the imitations.
Until then, let us imagine a six-foot long, green moray eel,
thick as a young pine tree. Its jaws, lined with razor-sharp teeth,
keep opening and closing—an ominous sight even to those who
know that by this action the moray moves water through its gills
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77
to breathe. This is not a threatening gesture, the books say. (Why
can’t it be both threatening and respiratory?) I approach very
slowly, head-on, to stare into its face. If you touch its tail, the
moray, feeling “mugged,” may turn round, bite, and not let go
until its teeth have ripped off whatever they have seized.
Approached from the front, however, they hold steady and
breathe ominously, not recognizing me as either prey or predator.
But if the moray sees his green reflection in my camera apparatus,
he may poke his snout into the housing. In this way, while he gets
acquainted with a puzzling stranger, I get an extraordinary photo.
I have also seen one divemaster scratch a green moray under the
gills; the moray appeared to enjoy this, as if he were being
cleaned by a little sharknose goby.
I save my scratching for creatures who breathe with their
mouths shut. Who would have thought that if you scratch a
hawksbill turtle vigorously on its shell—especially on the underside—he will spin round and round, driven wild with the pleasure
of it? I have done this only a few times. The turtle conservationists of the island (who tag, track, and protect the endangered sea
turtles) patrol assiduously for trespassers on the turtle breeding
grounds, for turtle chasers, and for turtle ticklers. Not all turtles
are brave enough to defy this mafia and submit to the tickling, and
only a few divers even know about this secret pleasure.
The Caribbean reef octopus is said to be a “curious” animal;
some even pronounce him “intelligent.” Not because he changes
his colors, instantly and dramatically, to camouflage himself
against any background or to intimidate his opponents. Many reef
fish and creatures change their colors as admirably as he does.
(How do they change so expertly, I wonder? And do any of them
have a “true” color?) The reef octopus appears curious and keen
because you can see him take various objects with one or more of
his eight arms, bring them under his head, and, after a period of
scrutiny, either discard them or carry them back to his den, where
he breaks mollusks open to eat. Reaching out to take various
things in hand (or in arm) for further investigation and possible
eating looks a lot like what the more intelligent animals do.
I put my metal tank banger within reach of the octopus, to see
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if he will take it under his head to test its nature. He grabs it with
three arms and starts to glide off toward the protection of a
crevice. I want that tank banger back. It’s mine. I kick hard to
chase the octopus, while reaching out with one arm, hoping he’ll
drop the banger. He turns entirely white, blows himself up to
twice his former size, and extends his eight arms in a circle
around his body, hovering above the banger. I keep at a respectful
distance and estimate my chance of winning a tug of war with this
inky octopus over a fourteen dollar tank banger. That is what
intelligent animals do. I decide to let him keep it.
I said earlier that diving is primarily a visual, not a tactile
experience. But now I find it necessary to say this differently.
When I take my four-year old daughter, Abigail, down to fifteen
feet on my spare regulator hose, and we swim around the bottom
together for forty-five minutes, she wants to touch everything she
sees. I have to teach her what to avoid by holding her back with
my hands. She learns the hard way, too. Once, having picked up
a pink, fuzzy, caterpillar-like thing, she signaled me urgently to
surface. “My fingers are burning, daddy,” she cried. “When will
they stop?” “In a short while,” I replied. “You picked up a fireworm.” She sometimes surprises the flounders—overconfident in
their camouflage—with a poke from her finger: “They’re slimy,
daddy, and their eyes are funny.” (She likes to talk about all her
doings.) She tirelessly turns over rocks to uncover urchins and sea
stars; and she enjoys picking up sand to drop on the heads of
parrotfish as they busily scrape up algae. “They drop sand on us
when they poop, so it’s only fair,” she says. All her instinctive
touching of things is how we get to know those things better: we
have learned by the reactions of sea creatures to our touch how
stunningly changeable they are, and how thoroughly they associate being touched—being known—with being eaten.
Most predators on the reef swallow their prey whole (sharks
and barracudas being two notable exceptions). But if a piscivore
happens to take a fish in the wrong position for swift swallowing,
it will pitilessly bash on the rocks whatever protrudes from its
mouth, until it can safely let go to swallow its prey again—whole.
It has to perform the bashing very quickly, because the other
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predators will notice the commotion and try to seize the halfswallowed prey from its mouth, devouring whatever pieces they
can. Feeding happens so quickly that one seldom sees it performed at all. The reef may thus give an impression of a peaceful
commingling of hundreds of species, who are content, for the
most part, to observe one another. But the reason that the little fish
live among the corals is to hide, and the reason that the bigger fish
cruise the corals is to hunt the littler ones—and hide from even
bigger ones. If the corals do not tell the whole story, they tell at
least the deadly part of it that Darwin says is difficult but necessary for us to bear in mind constantly if we are to understand “the
face of nature.”
I like the reefs no less for their quiet pitilessness, and in fact
I like them all the more for bringing into focus the ultimate
concerns of the poetry that I could have been studying on this
sabbatical:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
—W.B. Yeats
Yet it is not always easy to pass by these scenes coldly while
riding the warm currents of the Caribbean. On moonless nighttime dives, it is pitch black in all directions, save where my divelight is pointed—at the red squirrel fish and cardinal fish, the most
common night-hunters. I love their vibrant red colors and black
eyes—overly large in order to admit the scant rays of stars that
barely penetrate the deep. Suddenly, a six-foot-long silvery tarpon
swoops across my right shoulder, brushing his caudal fin against
me. Then there is another one, shooting forward from directly
below my chest, with a sharksucker attached to his side. They are
using my light to hunt.
They have used me thus hundreds of times, but my heart still
quickens when hungry creatures as big as I swim past me, abruptly and intimately, from out of the darkness. I join the party of the
hunter, coldly shining my light on the sleepy ocean surgeonfish
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(whom I don’t much care for), and I watch the tarpons try to
swallow them up before they slip away into the recesses of the
coral. The tarpons’ mouths open widely, creating an audible
suction that draws their prey from a foot away into their maws,
quicker than I can see. A jolt of satisfaction passes when they
catch their prey—or rather, when we catch our prey. Questions
arising from my partisan participation in this sea hunt intrude on
my breathing and my buoyancy. When the jaws of death open
wide for me, will I slip away into a dark, secret place for all time?
Or will a light be held to mark my drawing into that sudden,
irresistible openness?
The night-prowling tarpons always make a big impression on
divers, but they are nothing compared to the little longfin damselfish, three inches in length, that spend their lives (up to ten years)
aggressively guarding a patch of algae the size of a doormat. If I
get within a few feet, they’ll charge directly into my mask or nip
at my hands. It feels like a little pinch. You can see them routinely
drive away fish ten times their size, because no one likes being
nipped at incessantly; and besides, there is always some place else
to go on the reefs for food or shelter. If the damselfish were as
large as the fish they attack, the reefs would not be swimmable. I
thank the Creator for making the most aggressive animal in the
Caribbean so small.
One of the highlights of my diving sabbatical occurred during
the two coral spawning periods, a week after the full moons of
September and October. The reefs became cloudy with gametes,
released in unison at night by hosts of invertebrates. The touchme-not sponges emitted their seed like smoke from chimneys.
The always-recumbent tiger tail sea cucumbers stood up vertically and spewed forth stuff that looked like breath in cold air.
The star corals released their little balls of DNA nonstop, like
bubbles from a carbonated beverage. This sea of fecundity staggered the senses. It went on for three successive nights, while
most of the fish that would have eaten the gametes slept. I felt awe
to see how these creatures beat the bad odds of the ocean by
means of a coordinated, all-out emptying of themselves, twice a
year.
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81
Fish are spawning all the time, though it takes patient observation to notice it. In the late afternoons, you may spy peacock
flounders gliding three feet off the bottom like Frisbees, risking
their lives to signal a readiness to mate. When the male and
female Frisbee-flounders come together like two hands in prayer,
they shoot up toward the surface and release their gametes near
the top of the water column, where the gametes’ predators are
least abundant. Then they separate and return at once to the
bottom, making themselves indistinguishable from the sand or
rocks. Those four seconds of jetting upward look so unlike the
behavior of flounders that I wonder if this joint activity is when
they are most at-work-being-themselves, or most possessed by
something outside themselves. As my daughter, innocent of philosophy, would say, “It’s freaky, either way.”
Each evening at dinner we watch the sun set over the Caribbean from our seaside patio dining room. We look for the proverbial “green flash” at the very instant of the sun’s disappearance
below the horizon. We have yet to see it. To be honest, more often
than not these passing days, we forget to look. Some of the old
and experienced divers I have met have grown tired of looking for
new things on the reefs, and don’t seem to think it is worth the
effort anymore to go deep. Of our “brave new world, that has such
creatures in it,” they would say (if they knew their Shakespeare),
“’Tis new to thee.” Can we not find ways to keep this world new?
When we have our diving friends to dinner, we sometimes
find it pleasant to play a game of “sea charades.” The children
start it off by acting like their favorite fish. Even the tired, old
divers enjoy the renewed experience of not quite knowing what in
the world they’re looking at: Abigail wiggling around on her back
is . . . a fairy basslet, which can swim belly up; Louie sticking out
his stomach and pulling at his nose in the corner is . . . a sharpnose
puffer that inflates itself when there is no escape. When it’s my
turn, I go to the refrigerator and take out the most unappetizing
leftover I can find and eat it. I am . . . an angelfish, which has
evolved to eat certain things that no other fish will eat (sponges)
because they taste bad. In fact, I have adapted myself to occupy
this niche in our family, as a matter of economy. But to see the
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familiar things in life as tasteless leftovers is not a fine, or even
fitting, use of either our senses or their things. Let it always be
worth the effort, I pray, to go down deep, again and again, into
this world of sensuous things. That is the simple meaning of this
sabbatical, put into words.
I was afraid at one time that by revealing my free and easy
occupations in this “Divers Paradise” (the official motto of the
island), I would cause there to be sent a “messenger of Satan” to
molest my breathing and my buoyancy. That messenger has long
since come to the occupants of the air-breathing world, even here
on Bonaire; but not even the omnipresent internet together with
all its beeping, vibrating, pocket-sized accomplices can reach me
underwater—yet. So then, as my surface interval comes to a
close, I end these impressions of my island life without fear of the
new or the old, but with gratitude for the existence and easy availability of this underwater world that is not all the world, and with
praise to the College for granting its tutors this time of rejuvenation to keep us up with youth and its joys—and in touch with
things of beauty and wonder. Fare you well, as to the elements of
the isle I go free, unwearied, changed, to see things rich and
strange.
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83
FAT WEDNESDAY
John Verdi, Fat Wednesday:Wittgenstein on
Aspects.
Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2010, xii + 296
pages.
Book Review by Eva Brann
I’ll reveal my own predilections and aversions up front: I trust
Socrates—without completely believing him—and I distrust
Wittgenstein, without thinking him completely wrong. In fact,
I’m in some respects terminally puzzled by both, but more so by
Wittgenstein, whose main book, as John Verdi tells us on the first
page of Fat Wednesday (the title will be explained below and has
a purely coincidental relation to “Fat Tuesday,” Mardi Gras),
contains 784 questions of which only 110 are answered, and 70 of
those wrongly—on purpose. Now 744 unanswered questions
seems to me an overplus of perplexity; I am especially sensitive
to such erotetic overload (from erotesis, “question”), since I have
heard it said of our college that we accept students who know
nothing and graduate them now knowing that they know nothing.
So I was a grateful member of a faculty study group on this
question-laden work, the Philosophical Investigations, which
John Verdi led in the spring of 2009, as he was writing his own
book, with the resigned calm of a man who does believe in this
author and is, for that very reason, unwilling to proselytize. Under
his guidance and in conversation with my colleagues I learned a
lot, enough to formulate two judgments. One concerned the
reason for my near-constitutional incomprehension of Wittgenstein’s project: he is the only non-fiction writer I know whose
outlook on life is systematically—and rousingly—askew of mine.
The other judgment was that Verdi’s book would likely be a most
trustworthy introduction to this strange thinker’s upending of all
that seems humanly sensible. And so it proved.
Eva Brann is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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In Fat Wednesday, Verdi approaches Wittgenstein through
two notions central to his later thinking: aspect-seeing and experiencing the meaning of words. The first three chapters explicate
these, while the last two introduce Verdi’s own development and
applications of these two topics. So his book introduces us both to
Wittgenstein and to the world his work implies. It seems to me
that, considering Wittgenstein’s relentless the-proof-is-in-thepudding attitude toward human mentation, this organization is
faithful to Wittgenstein’s intention, since it shows what one can
do with his way of seeing and speaking.
What then is aspect-seeing and why is it crucial to Wittgenstein? Such “seeing” is based on an ineradicable ambiguity: one
shape, objectively self-same, is seen alternately in one way and in
another. Since such ambiguity arises primarily in the absence of
context, deliberately devised drawings instigate it best. The most
famous of them (Verdi illustrates several) is the “duck-rabbit,” a
figure showing two forked protrusions, devised to look now like
a duck’s open bill, and then again like a rabbit’s laid-back ears.
The picture is one, but the aspect “goes about hither and thither”
(Verdi points out that this is the etymology of the word ambiguity), so that we cannot help “seeing” the picture flip between
resembling a duck and resembling a rabbit. This raises the question, What is resemblance?
Here I confess that I have two misgivings of my own about
Wittgenstein’s project. One is that aspect-seeing is not a novel notion, as Wittgenstein seems to suggest, but is related, rather, to an
old, old question—the one-over-many problem in metaphysics,
where it is precisely the aspect (a fair translation of eidos, that is,
looks or form) that is one, and the appearances, the phenomena,
that are many. (So why, incidentally, does Wittgenstein write as if
philosophical investigation began with him?) The other misgiving, less born of irritation, is that I have little faith in basing inquiry on special and devised cases, which are essentially distinct
from the ideal cases that I would rather look to. These ideal cases
may go fuzzy at the edges, but are probably substantial at the
center. But then, it is just this center that, as Verdi confirms, Wittgenstein wishes to attenuate.
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Wittgenstein’s aim is to establish the centrality of resemblance: family resemblance is to replace essence. Verdi [12]*
quotes Wittgenstein’s account of this point:
[F]or the various resemblances between members of a
family . . . overlap and criss-cross in the same way.
[W]e extend our concept . . . as in spinning we twist
fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not
reside in the fact that some fibre runs through the
whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres
(Philosophical Investigations, §67).
So we are not to ask, What do the phenomena to which we
naturally give one name have in common? Instead, we are to look
for a sequence of resemblances; the first and last of these must
perforce be quite unlike each other or there will be, after all, a
thread of sameness. In the old ontology (set out in Plato’s Sophist)
resemblance or likeness is sameness conjoined with otherness.
But, true to his program, Wittgenstein does not engage in nailing
down centralities but in clarifying concepts: “Conceptual (linguistic) questions ground casual questions, not the other way
around” [5].
(This is the late Wittgenstein. I want to take the opportunity
here to express a personal fascination. Wittgenstein recanted—
how deeply is a matter of debate—his early Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, a hard-edged view of a world consisting of logically connected facts exactly pictured by our language, which is
similarly structured, so that reality is explicable by a logical
analysis of language. To me it is an absorbing question whether
there are systematic differences between thinkers who develop by
absorptive tweaking and those whose maturity comes through
degrees of self-refutation. Is the latter a mark of unflagging vigor
or of suspect instability?)
The crucial word of Verdi’s sentence is in parentheses: Wittgenstein seems to equate the terms conceptual and linguistic. A
concept is not, as we were brought up to think, a cognitive entity.
*
Page numbers in brackets refer to Fat Wednesday.
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As resemblance was construed anti-essentially, so concept is
understood anti-cognitively—if cognition is thought of as an
internal eventuation: Conceptual questions do not ask for interior
states discerned by introspection, but demand observation of the
external phenomena of linguistic usage—just enough such observation to discern how people actually use words. This notion
establishes the transition from Verdi’s first chapter, “The Aspects
Family,” to the second one, “Aspects and Words.”
“Seeing,” for example, has two uses [25]. One use can be
accompanied by pointing to the picture of the ambiguous duckrabbit. But pointing is not possible for the second use, for a duckrabbit is not a this, but rather it flips from a this to a that. Something similar holds for any seeing of resemblance. You can’t point
to a resemblance, though you can point it out, that is, make useful
observations in words.
Wittgenstein means something much more radical than to say
that words can be useful. He invites us to “think of words as
instruments characterized by their use” [44]. In fact, the analogy
is to a toolbox; the “functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects” (Philosophical Investigations, §11).
Here are my misgivings on this point. This way of analyzing
language should depend not only on a receptive ear for the phenomena of speech, but on conceding our fellow human beings’
primary competence to know what they mean. I have long had my
doubts about Wittgenstein and his language-analytical progeny in
regard to the first point. As for the second, there is little doubt that
Wittgenstein means to correct my sense of which meanings are
acceptable and to control my claim that overt words express
interior events, that I often have a thought or feeling for which I
subsequently labor to find the word, and moreover, that this
language is really only residually private, because I cherish a faith
(and, finally, what else is there?) that human souls, with all the
particularity that embellishes their being, are ultimately alike—
even when they willfully plead ultimate diversity. Or to express it
in the relaxed logical mode of real thinking: we have our privacies
in common. These opinions of mine are questioned in form, but
proscribed in effect, by Wittgenstein.
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Privacy and sociality are central issues for Wittgenstein, since
we operate, he thinks, with words as if we were playing languagegames. These games are governed by socially established rules
that we must learn; the rules tell me what the words, the gamepieces of language, do and what moves are permitted, just as the
rules of chess govern that game. “One would not say,” as Verdi
neatly puts it, “‘I know what a bishop does. Now tell me what it
really is’” [45]. It is a neat formulation because it raises the
question-hackles. Does it mean “would not” or “should not”? I for
one would ask, meaning I might like to think about, “What, really,
is a lusory bishop, a piece of ecclesiastic anthropomorphism (like
a nautical nun-buoy)? What causes its possibility, beyond its
being enmeshed in a game?” Can I be talked out of that predilection?
The rest of Verdi’s second chapter fleshes out, in lucid detail,
Wittgenstein’s disabling of the “what is it?” question—not in
terms of an argument against it, for that would be an admission of
its admissibility, but by the circumscription of an alternative way
of being in and with our world. It is a way that consigns the inner
human being to terminal opaqueness, for which it then compensates by undertaking a persistent and critical analysis of behavior,
both gestural and linguistic. This way of abstemious philosophizing has at least one tremendous virtue: it raises our sensitivity to
how we learn and what we say [106]. In particular, it attunes our
ears to distinguishing how people speak before misguided ratiocination has tempted language into useless utterance.
Here Verdi stops to consider the very condition I touched on
before, that there might be a real division among people’s experiences, and that some people might be “aspect-blind.” In the third
chapter, he considers a group of true pathologies that afflict
patients with the inability to see ambiguities. They are literalists
of vision and language, and so miss crucial aspects of the world.
They lack experiences of meaning.
“Fat Wednesday” itself is an example of such an experience
[150]. “Fat” here is not a metaphor, since there is no sensible relation of obesity to Wotan’s Day. Unless it seems perfectly nonsensical to you, it will evoke a meaning, an “emergent” meaning. I
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think of it as a meaning-aura, a strong one for me. For in the Nazi
Germany of my childhood, Wednesday was the day of mandated
one-pot suppers (the resultant savings to be dropped into the collection can of a visiting storm-trooper)—and one-pot meals tend
to be greasy. This “secondary meaning,” this emergence, is a
startling development since it seems to be an overt intimation of
interiority. As words have emergent meanings, so aspects can
emerge; the inside will be outed.
Emergent meaning governs the fourth chapter, “Aspects and
Art.” It begins with a reflection on a portrait of Descartes by Franz
Hals, a reflection addressed to the basic ambiguity of all pictureviewing: that there is, in one aspect, a piece of canvas with
splotches of paint that we can point to, and in another, a likeness
of something, here the man, that we can’t reach by following the
laser line from our index finger. (I might point out here that this
analysis of physical images was an abiding preoccupation of
Husserl, his student Fink, and Sartre, but I also want to retract my
complaint about Wittgenstein’s willful aboriginality. Much better
not to be too entangled in conceptual indebtedness!)
Here Verdi puts his Wittgensteinian sensibility to work on objects ranging from paintings (Verdi “sees” some arresting alternative aspects in well-known works) to music, to—and here it becomes wonderful—wine tasting, in the section entitled “Emergent
Meaning and Wine.” Verdi plucks out, from notes on wine tasting
in Wine Spectator Magazine, a group of enologically descriptive
words that are candidates for emergence, including “velvety,
chewy, taut” [201]. He observes that these terms of praise can’t be
metaphorical. Who wants to run his tongue over something
velvet-like? Instead the words carry emergent meanings, which
are shared by other people and, he implies, widen our sensibility.
If I don’t get it, I am (non-pathologically) aspect-blind. If I do, “I
can better make my way in the world of wine-tasting and describing” [203].
The last chapter, provocatively entitled “Ethics and Aesthetics are One,” is a real culmination. It considers the discovery of
new science as a form of aspect-shift, and the letting-be of others’
religion as a form of aspect-seeing. The latter case exemplifies the
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chapter title. Verdi is as far as possible from the despicable central
European aestheticism that once permitted murder by day if only
the nights were spent listening to Schubert Lieder. Doing right
and seeing multivalently are one, to be sure, insofar as we must
be aesthetically (that is, sensorily) adroit in order to be ethically
(that is, morally) good. The former is not, however, so much a
condition for the latter as it is the same with it—an attitude
realized in a skill. Both are our very own; both are acquired by
attentive learning. Verdi calls this disposition “active tolerance”
[259]. Just as he is far removed from mere aestheticism, so too is
he worlds apart from the essentially disrespectful, because inattentive, tolerance of “I’m OK, you’re OK.” Active tolerance is a
subtle, sophisticated version of the ability to see both—or even
many—sides of an issue. Where Socrates says, “Virtue is knowledge,” Verdi’s Wittgenstein says, “Ethics is aspect-seeing,” an
ingrained appreciation of alternate possibilities and the respect
that goes with it.
Let me indulge in a final cavil, then, one which I’ve already
intimated. Wittgenstein’s probing, pushing, and pulling feel to me
like a clearly offered and cagily retracted condemnation: statements of absolute value are respectfully denominated nonsense
by him [242]. So is Verdi’s deeply liberal conclusion still Wittgenstein, or has it become more Verdi? If the latter, I would, at
risk of paining him, take Verdi over Wittgenstein anytime.
If Wittgenstein has got under your skin, or if you want him to,
read this book.
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91
MONSTER AM I
Paolo Palmieri, A History of Galileo’s
Inclined Plane Experiment and its
Philosophical Implications
Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press,
Forthcoming, 2011, 220 pages.
Book Review by Curtis Wilson
The project of this book, Palmieri tells us, emerged slowly, in
close relation with the attempt to reenact certain of Galileo’s experiments, in particular the inclined plane experiment. Galileo’s
adventure with balls rolling down inclined wooden beams was
not a single event to which a date can be assigned, nor yet a set of
operations described in sufficient detail to admit of mere copying.
It was a sequence of explorations lasting nearly a lifetime, involving difficulties and puzzles that Galileo struggled to resolve, with
less than uniform success. A love affair, Palmieri calls it.
Our author seeks to touch the very nerve of Galileo’s endeavor. He challenges the assumption—beguiling to some Galileo
scholars—that armchair philosophy can plumb the complexities
that Galileo met with in the inclined plane experiment. He seeks
to put himself in Galileo’s actual problem-situation, with its puzzles on both the experimental and the theoretical side. Experimental work and theoretical explanation, carried on in tandem,
pose questions of each other. The result, Palmieri reports, is liberating: the experimenter-theoretician-scholar probes more feelingly, with a new intensity. He becomes a participant in a revolutionary endeavor.
The earliest writings we have in Galileo’s hand appear in
Volume I of the Edizione Nazionale under the title Juvenilia,
which was assigned by the editor, Antonio Favaro. He took them
to be a compilation from unidentified sources (they remain unidentified today). Their late-medieval character is striking. Paragraphs frequently begin with Advertendum quod. . . (“It is to be
Curtis Wilson is Tutor Emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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noted that. . .”), a scholastic verbal tic implying that the following
sentence is accepted on authority. Is our scribe a mere copyist?
Palmieri detects indications to the contrary. In places Galileo
appears to be paraphrasing or summarizing; here and there he
leaves blank spaces as though for later comment or elucidation.
Included in the Juvenilia is a discussion of “the intension and
remission of forms,” a much-treated topic in scholastic discussions from the fourteenth century to at least the early sixteenth
century. It concerns increase or decrease in the intensity of a
quality. The hotness or hardness of a body may vary from point to
point or from instant to instant at a point. There is no evidence that
the fourteenth-century schoolmen attempted actually to measure
such variations, but they introduced language for describing them
as measurable secundum imaginationem. One of the qualities thus
dealt with was the speed of a moving body.
To the uniform variation of the intensity of a quality, the
schoolmen applied a special rule, now dubbed “the Merton rule”
after the Oxford college where it seems to have originated. It
states that a quality varying uniformly in intensity over a spatial
distance or interval of time is equivalent to the unvarying or
uniform quality of the mean degree stretching over the same
extension, spatial or temporal. Suppose, for instance, that the
hotness of a body varies uniformly from two degrees at one end
of the body to eight degrees at the other, the degree being an
imagined unit of intensity. This “latitude of form” was said to be
equivalent to a uniform hotness of five degrees from one end of
the body to the other.
Applied to the intensity of motion or speed, the Merton Rule
was interpreted as saying that the distance traversed in a motion
uniformly accelerated from an initial to a final speed was equal to
the distance traversed in a uniform motion having the same
duration and the mean speed of the accelerated motion. Compare
this with the crucial first proposition of Galileo’s treatise “On
Naturally Accelerated Motion” in the Third Day of his Two New
Sciences (1638)—do not both come to the same result? The
Merton Rule is not mentioned in the Juvenilia or in any of Gali-
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leo’s writings. Nevertheless, a number of historians of science,
Pierre Duhem and Marshall Clagett prominently among them,
have concluded that Galileo’s theorem was a redaction of the
Merton Rule.
The jury, Palmieri objects, is still out: no evidence has yet
turned up to show that Galileo actually encountered the medieval
enunciation of the Merton Rule. Palmieri suggests that such influence as the medieval discussion may have had on Galileo was
likely indirect, through the Geometry of Indivisibles (1635) of his
friend Bonaventura Cavalieri. The trajectory of Galileo’s thinking, Palmieri urges (following Favaro), is best determined from
his writings and the experiments he sought to carry out.
At the very time Galileo was writing the Juvenilia, and thus
becoming acquainted with the scholastic conception of the natural
world, he was also annotating Archimedes’ On Sphere and Cylinder, a strict deduction of mathematical consequences from premises. The analytical thrust of Archimedean thinking, Palmieri
believes, peeps through the text of the Juvenilia. Galileo sweats to
understand the medieval four-element physics of the sublunary
realm, and how all qualities are to be derived from the four “prime
qualities” or “alterative qualities,” hot, cold, dry, and wet. Are
motive qualities and speeds grounded in this fundamental Aristotelian ontology? The question is not explicitly addressed in the
Juvenilia, but shows itself in Galileo’s De motu, dating from ca.
1590.
The De motu, Palmieri observes, is polemical. Galileo denounces his teachers for the way they teach. When introducing the
elements of physics, they bring in Aristotle’s other works, quoting
from De anima, De caelo, or Metaphysics, as though their pupils
already knew everything or else will accept all on faith. Galileo
pledges to proceed differently, following the mathematicians in
advancing solely by deductive steps derived from explicit premises.
A central question posed in the De motu is: How do the
weights and speeds of the same body, descending along planes
differently inclined but of equal elevation, differ? By considering
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the forces needed to equilibrate the weight on the different planes
as weights applied to a lever, Galileo shows that the forces are inversely as the lengths of the planes. (Unbeknownst to Galileo at
the time of the De motu, this same result had been given in the
thirteenth-century Scientia de ponderibus attributed to Jordanus
de Nemore.)
Galileo in the De motu also attempts to deal with the question
of why a falling body accelerates. The body’s heaviness is a virtus
impressa (impressed force) that acts downward. Were it acting
alone, Galileo assumes that it would produce a constant speed of
fall. But to this impressed force downward, Galileo adds an
accidental lightness or levity, imparted to the body when we raise
it from the earth. When we release it, its motion downward accelerates because the impressed lightness exhausts itself over time.
The downward acceleration is thus explained in terms of the Aristotelian qualities of heaviness and lightness, with the important
additional assumption that the accidental lightness decays with
time. Galileo is here entangled in the fundamental ontology and
categories of the Juvenilia, along with a misconception, widely
accepted up to the time of the publication of Descartes’s safari,
Principles of Philosophy, that every velocity has to be maintained
by an impressed force. How did he free himself—as he unquestionably did—from the medieval mindset and its stultifying questions?
Palmieri proposes that certain life-worldly learning experiences—among them, finding how to make glass goblets sing and
brass plates howl—taught Galileo a lesson about the fine structure of nature. By patiently repeated experimentation, the young
Galileo learned how to attend to and control the fine detail of
what happens in the production of these effects. The beginnings
were in the workshop of his father, Vincenzo Galilei. During the
1580s, Vincenzo, a professional lutist, engaged in musicological
controversy. Opposing the Pythagorean claim that numerical
ratios are the cause of musical intervals—that the ratio 2:1 is the
cause of the octave, the ratio 3:2 the cause of the fifth, and so
on—he claimed that these intervals are to be determined by the
ear alone. One of his prime exhibits was the singing glass, a
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goblet containing water which, on being struck, gave forth a
musical tone. The pitch depended on the amount of water. Years
later Galileo Galilei in his Two New Sciences told of a further
result, not previously reported: the goblet could be set singing if
its rim were stroked with a wet finger-tip. Concomitantly, a standing wave was produced on the surface of the water. Sometimes
the tone shifted up an octave, at which moment the number of
waves per unit length in the standing wave doubled.
Palmieri—apparently the first among Galileo commentators
to do so—has replicated this experiment. Success requires practice, and it is best to begin with a large goblet (Palmieri used a
brandy snifter). One must rub the rim rhythmically, while repeatedly wetting the finger and watching for the evanescent wave
pattern. The wave pattern is more readily produced in the brandy
snifter than in a smaller goblet, but Palmieri found it possible to
obtain Galileo’s result also with the latter.
The howling brass plate is another of Galileo’s experiments
that Palmieri has replicated. As Galileo reports in the Two New
Sciences, while scraping a brass plate with a chisel to remove
stains, he found himself producing sounds. Sometimes they were
musical tones, and in such cases the chisel left evenly spaced
marks on the plate. On one occasion two tones sounded in succession, forming the interval of a fifth. In the two sets of marks
formed on the plate, the numbers of marks per unit length were as
3 to 2. Getting these results was helped by a bit of practice, but
was easier than obtaining the standing wave in the glass goblet.
A correct interpretation of these experiments presupposes the
physics of sounding bodies, which Galileo himself lacked as have
some of his recent commentators. A sounding body vibrates predominantly with certain frequencies that depend on the shape and
mechanical properties of the material. These frequencies are the
body’s “natural modes” of vibration. For a body of regular and
relatively simple shape, the predominant frequency modes are
harmonically related, e.g. as octave or fifth, etc. The vibrations
are reflected from the boundaries of the body, and the reflected
waves, combining with the original train of waves, form a standing wave pattern. For a given speed of propagation (which is de-
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termined by the medium), the wavelength is inversely as the frequency, and thus the wavelengths of two standing waves have ratios inverse to the integral numerical ratios of the corresponding
natural modes. The natural modes therefore account for the emergence of the Pythagorean ratios in these two experiments. By
confirming Galileo’s experimental results, Palmieri has put them
beyond doubt. They form a beautiful early confirmation of the
theory of natural modes.
Important as this conclusion is, it is a different point that
Palmieri aims primarily to make. Galileo’s experimental results
are obtained only with patient attentiveness to the fine structure of
experience. They yield an experience in which hearing, touching,
and seeing are integrated—a holistic experience. Such experience
can direct consciousness away from false expectations and
toward new facts. This kind of learning, Palmieri proposes, assisted Galileo in liberating himself from the medieval mindset with
its pre-established categories.
What about the inclined plane experiment? Here also, besides
the visual sight of a ball rolling down the plane, a complex of
other sensory data is offered—sounds, vibrations that can be
sensed through skin and bone as well as the ear, changes in sound
as a bronze or wooden ball descends along the wooden track. Did
Galileo attend in a focused way to these effects? We know only of
the cases already cited, in which he focused on the details of
experimental happenings with attentiveness and care. In the Third
Day of the Two New Sciences, in the section On Naturally
Accelerated Motion, he focuses on the kind of acceleration that
nature employs for descending bodies—on this, its consequences,
and not on causes. The latter question as posed by the schoolmen
has been set aside:
[W]e decided to look into [the properties of this kind
of motion] so that we might be sure that the definition
of accelerated motion which we are about to adduce
agrees with the essence of naturally accelerated motion.
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It is this that he is now seeking the essence of—naturally accelerated motion itself.
Galileo’s adoption of this new focus, Palmieri believes, could
have been triggered by the very intensity of the auditory and
vibratory experience of the ball rolling down its inclined track. To
receive this nonvisual experience as fully as possible, Palmieri
placed his forehead in contact with the underside of the beam
serving as inclined plane, and grasped the beam with his hands
around its sides so that his fingertips could sense the upper side of
the beam. An assistant then released a ball to roll down the
inclined plane. As it rolled, Palmieri’s fingertips picked up the
vibrations induced in the beam, which were also transmitted
through his cranial bone, and he heard the sound through his ears
as well.
The resulting experience Palmieri calls holistic auscultation.
It is no mere juxtaposition of different effects, but an integrated
effect. It powerfully suggests that through our senses we can
delve deep into the fine structure of physical reality. The experience is markedly stereoscopic. The experimenter, hugging the
plane at a particular location, is first aware of the ball’s starting to
move far up behind his head, then hurtling close by, and finally
fading away in the distance. The descending ball produces a
sound that varies as the ball speeds up. Sound and speed grow
uniformly together, and this togetherness takes center stage. The
arresting character of this experience, Palmieri proposes, could
have derailed the young Galileo’s ambition to reduce changing
speed and sound to effects of the qualities dubbed primary by
Aristotle and the schoolmen.
In the scriptorium [where the Juvenilia were produced], the hot-cold-dry-wet chemistry of pitch and
speed can only be thought-through. But it is possible
to leave the scriptorium, visit workshops, and turn life
into a tastier affair. . . . We reach a new balance between knowledge and values when we learn how to
reconfigure life-worldly objects while letting our
senses be affected by them.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
In The Two New Sciences Galileo stresses the simplicity of the
means nature adopts—in the case of descending bodies, the increase of speed in proportion simply to time elapsed. Reenactments of Galileo’s inclined plane experiment, however, yield at
best rough confirmations of this relation. In multiple repetitions
of the experiment, Palmieri and his students used a water clock of
the type Galileo describes, weighing the water released during the
duration of the descent to obtain a measure of elapsed time. In a
descent of the whole plane, compared with a descent of one
quarter of it, the expected ratio of the times is 2:1. In five trials of
a bronze ball one inch in diameter, running on the groove cut by
a router into the beam (so that the ball was running as though on
rails), the numbers obtained were 2.18, 2.19, 2.15, 2.09, 1.97,
averaging to 2.12, hence with 6 percent error and a root-meansquare dispersion from the mean of 0.08. In five trials of a bronze
ball seven-sixteenths of an inch in diameter, running in the
groove, the numbers obtained were 2.04, 1.90, 1.95, 1.90, 1.84,
averaging to 1.93, hence with 3.5 percent error, and a root-meansquare dispersion from the mean of 0.067.
Palmieri records twelve more sets of five trials each. The
errors are dramatically larger for decreased inclinations of the
plane, especially in the case of smaller and thus lighter bronze
balls. Five trials with a bronze ball seven-sixteenths of an inch in
diameter and an inclination of 1.36 degrees gave an average of
2.74, hence with 37 percent error; but five trials with a bronze ball
one inch in diameter and the same inclination yielded an average
of 2.17, hence with 8.5 percent error. An increase of the inclination to 3.8 degrees for these two balls reduced the errors to 18
percent and 6 percent respectively.
The deviations from expected theoretical ratios do not easily
admit of a detailed explanation, nor does Palmieri attempt one. Of
the factors likely to be operative we mention two. Human reflexes
cannot be relied upon to open the water-clock precisely when the
ball is released to start rolling, or to close it precisely when the
ball hits the stopping block. And, throughout the run, friction is no
doubt operative. Friction is an action at or between surfaces.
Seeking to find what schoolmen were saying in Galileo’s day
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concerning friction, Palmieri examined the Juvenilia and a book
on natural philosophy by Galileo’s contemporary, the Paduan
professor Giacomo Zabarella (d.1589). He found discussions of
“reaction” and “resistance,” but not of friction. The presumptive
role of friction in the inclined plane experiment, Palmieri believes, was a potent riddle leading Galileo to abandon scholastic
explanations in favor of an atomistic ontology. Galileo knew and
undoubtedly consulted Lucretius’s De rerum natura. It gives a
psychophysical explanation of pleasant and unpleasant tastes in
terms of smooth and rough or hooked atoms. The shapes of atoms
could similarly account for friction in the sliding or rolling of one
surface over another. Friction would thus be a “fight” between
particles of different shapes. The amounts of friction would no
doubt differ with the extent of contact between ball and trough,
with the shapes of atoms, and with the speed of the ball. Such
factors may be the causes of the deviations between observed and
expected time ratios above reported. But it is hard to imagine how
this hypothesis could be tested quantitatively. Besides, Galileo
may have shied away from openly entertaining a hypothesis
deriving from Lucretius’s philosophy—such a move on his part
could have led to a new charge of heresy.
One of Lucretius’s doctrines appears to have played a seminal
role in Galileo’s thinking about falling bodies. Lucretius states
that, since bodies falling in the void meet with no resistance, all
fall with the same speed. He attributes the observed differences
in the rates of fall to the checking action of the medium, which
hinders the motion of lighter bodies more than that of heavier
bodies. Galileo in the Two New Sciences will reach an analogous
conclusion, but with a crucial difference: all bodies falling in the
void fall, not with the same speed, but with the same acceleration.
We recall that earlier, at the time of the De motu, Galileo had
thought that the rates of fall would be as the specific gravities
(weights per unit volume) of the bodies. That assertion differed
from the Aristotelian position, which made the speed of descent
proportional to the body’s weight. Galileo rejected the latter
position on the basis of the following argument. He hypothesized
that any heavy body that falls has its speed, or (if accelerated) its
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
degrees of speed, fixed by nature, so that the speed or the acceleration cannot be increased or decreased without violence. (Thus
the argument applies whether the body falls with a constant or an
accelerated speed.) He then imagined two bodies equal in volume
and weight, e.g., two bricks. If let fall together, their speeds or
accelerations are equal, and they remain side by side. If tied
together so as to form the double weight, the result does not
change: they still fall with the same speed or acceleration, neither
“burdening” the other. Hence speed of fall cannot be proportional
to weight.
By the time he wrote the First Day of The Two New Sciences
(probably in 1634), Galileo had concluded that all bodies that fall
begin by accelerating, and he was hypothesizing that all bodies in
the void, independent of their specific gravities, accelerate with
the same acceleration. The reasoning leading to this conclusion,
as given in the Postils to Rocco (marginal notes on a work in
which Antonio Rocco attacked Galileo’s arguments in Two New
Sciences) proceeds as follows. He imagines two equal spheres,
one of gold and the other of cork, that are let fall from the same
height. Since both are surrounded by air, both are buoyed up by
the same force, equal to the weight of the volume of air they
displace (the buoyancy effect identified by Archimedes). Each
body in its motion will also be slowed by the viscosity of the air,
and this effect, since it derives solely from a property of the air,
would likewise be the same for both. Friction, which Galileo
explains as due to the sticking of particles of the medium to the
asperities of the body’s surface, can also be imagined to differ
negligibly in the two bodies (both could be covered by the same
surface material).
Finally, there is the resistance to the speed of each body,
which is greater for greater speeds. Galileo does not imagine that
this resistance can be eliminated practically (as it was a few years
later, after Galileo’s death, in experimentation with Torricelli’s
mercury barometer and with von Guericke’s air pump). But experience, Galileo tells us, suggests that this resistance is entirely
an effect of the medium. In a fall of the gold and cork spheres
through 100 braccia (150 feet?) in air, the gold, he asserts, will
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precede the cork by two or three braccia. In a fall of 1 or 2 braccia
the difference all but disappears. If in a thin medium like air, differences of speeds all but disappear, then, Galileo claims, we are
entitled to hypothesize that in a vacuum the speeds would be
identical. For this conclusion, we note, Galileo can claim only a
hypothetical status.
Galileo’s Third Day of his Two New Sciences is in one respect
strange—even peculiar! The First and Second Days, dealing with
the strength of materials, are clearly about real material bodies.
The Fourth Day, likewise, deals with real projectiles, actual
bodies moving through the air and resisted by it in their motion.
The mathematical part of the Third Day, by contrast, is presented
as about points descending along inclined lines. Real bodies are
absent, as are real planes along which they could descend. Friction is nowhere mentioned. The idealization of bodies is at least
as drastic as that in Euclid’s Elements. Galileo’s adoption of this
extreme idealization may owe something to the seeming impossibility of eliminating the effect of the medium, and the difficulty
of quantifying the effects of friction.
Among the numerous theorems proved in the Third Day is
the “expansion theorem”: points falling simultaneously along
variously inclined lines starting from a single point as origin are
all at each instant on the surface of an expanding sphere. Galileo
has the interlocutors of his dialogue engage in a considerable
discussion of this theorem. It may be, Palmieri suggests, a relic of
an earlier project to elaborate a Lucretian cosmogony starting
with point-atoms—another dangerous project which Galileo may
have relinquished to avoid further conflict with the papacy.
Early in his book Palmieri cites John Dewey’s Experience
and Nature for its “take” on Galileo’s quest for a science of
nature. To Dewey, Galileo’s turn to active, controlled experimentation represented a radical challenge to the Graeco-Christian
spectator-theory of knowledge. In Aristotle’s philosophy, as coopted by Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, high value
was placed on detached contemplation of the world. The human
being was seen as situated at the center of the cosmos, empowered to survey and understand its parts. But in Dewey’s pragma-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tist perspective, true knowledge can be gained only by intervening in the world and attempting to bring disturbing or confusing situations under control. Detached contemplation is “out of
touch,” powerless to penetrate the intricate mysteries of the
world. Only by intervening, risking mistakes and failure, can we
begin to learn the world’s ways.
Was Galileo self-conscious about the revolutionary break he
was making with the methodology of earlier natural philosophy?
Palmieri in his Chapter 7 adduces three pieces of evidence
suggesting that he was.
During his three-year professorship at the University of Pisa
(1589-1592), Galileo had as friend, tutor, and colleague the
professor of Platonic philosophy, Jacopo Mazzoni. Mazzoni was
a syncretist, seeking to show the compatibility of Plato and
Aristotle with each other and with Christianity. He was, indeed,
the very model of a late sixteenth-century Graeco-Christian philosopher. Yet there was one opinion, apparently shared by Plato
and Aristotle, that Mazzoni took issue with, the opinion that
theoretical mind was categorically distinguishable in kind from
practical mind. Every branch of philosophy, Mazzoni insisted, has
both a theoria and a praxis. Each of these incorporates operations
directed toward particulars. In theoria such operations are for the
sake of propping up the truth; in praxis they are for the sake of
attaining the truth, and of finding the essence of things in the
order of existence. Such praxis Mazzoni saw as dangerously rushing toward particulars, plunging the seeker after truth into the
perilous world of the unstable, of the disturbed situation where
action can make the difference between failure and success. In
this characterization Galileo, struggling to make sense of his
results in the inclined plane experiment, might have recognized
himself.
Another glimpse into Galileo’s discomfort with the suffering
of experiential learning may be gathered from his Considerazioni
al Tasso. This consists of notes criticizing Tasso’s epic poem,
Gerusalemme liberata. The publication of the poem in 1581 had
sparked a lively debate among Italians as to its merit relative to
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Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516). Pro-Ariosto by taste, Galileo
was vehemently anti-Tasso. He rejected Tasso’s treatment of the
human passions. Whereas in Ariosto’s poem there was a metamorphosis of res into verba, leading to a satisfying outcome,
Galileo judged Tasso’s poetry to lack poetic inspiration, and to
end up cobbling together fragmented concetti (imaginations)
lacking continuity and reciprocal dependence. The result was thus
like marquetry, in which colored pieces of wood are fitted together, and the border lines between pieces always remain sharp
and crudely distinguishable. Tasso had failed to realize that the
passage from res to verba must be dynamic, transformative.
Aficionados of Tasso found in his poetry a new conception of
human feeling: feeling as a force originating from deep sources in
the senses and the body, so strong at times as to overwhelm the
mind. Imitating the pathos in Tasso’s poetry became a project for
composers of madrigals like Monteverdi. The resulting works
were among those sharply criticized by Galileo’s father Vincenzo.
Vincenzo saw “modern music” as mixing together voices and
modes, diverse words (in polyphony), different rhythms and
tempos, and thus giving rise to disparate and confusing emotional
reactions in the intellect of the listener. The future of music,
Vincenzo urged, lay in resolving the polyphonic “confusion” of
voices of the madrigal into a monodic style of singing.
Vincenzo’s criticism of polyphonic music as fragmented and
unintelligible is closely parallel to the younger Galileo’s criticism
of Tasso’s poetry as marquetry. Palmieri sees Galileo’s disdain for
Tasso as a disdain for “the real, oblique, polyphonic nature of
experiential learning.” Galileo’s preference for Ariosto is “a preference for an ideal of experience in natural philosophy in which
he had been inducted by Mazzoni’s teachings.” But “Galileo’s
radically new practice of philosophy . . . had brought him face to
face with the reality of experiential learning.” A deep rift runs
through Galileo’s mind, as Palmieri reads him: on the one hand,
Galileo ardently strives after a science of nature—which requires
dealing with the reality of experiential learning; on the other
hand, he would like that science to conform to the ideal sketched
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by Mazzoni. Perhaps, Palmieri suggests, Galileo was salvaging
something of Mazzoni’s ideal in his sanitized accounts of his
experiments.
Finally, Palmieri adduces a sonnet written by the dying
Galileo, giving it both in the original Italian and in a translation
by Dennis Looney. The latter runs as follows:
Enigma
Monster am I, stranger and more misshapen
than the harpy, the siren, or the chimera.
There is not a beast on land, in air or water
whose limbs are of such varied forms.
No part of me is the same size as any other part;
What’s more: if one part is white, the other is black.
I often have a band of hunters behind me
who map out the traces of my tracks.
In the darkest gloom I take my rest,
For if I pass from the shadows to bright light,
Quickly the soul flees from me, just as
The dream flees at the break of day.
And I exhaust my discombobulated limbs
And lose my essence, along with life and name.
Palmieri interprets the sonnet as a meditation on experiential
learning, caught between the polarities of individuality and universality. The metaphor of the monster captures the jagged contour of experience. The darkness is Galileo’s blindness, physical
as well as metaphorical. The hunters are his persecutors, real and
imagined. Only after death, with the loss of individuality, will the
light of truth shine forth. Thus Galileo recognizes that knowledge
is not coextensive with human experience. His sonnet refracts as
through a prism his lifelong pursuit of truth; an active engagement with the life-world, turning up more difficulty and more
unsolved conundrums than he has been able to cope with. The
strife, the tension, as he still relives it toward the end, is tragic in
its intensity. The only resolution is limitless relinquishment.
�
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Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
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Sachs, Joe
David, Anne
McClay, Wilfred M.
Verdi, John
Petrich, Louis
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 53, number 1 (Fall 2011)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Deziree Arnaiz
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
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Contents
Essays
Reading the Constitution as a Great Book............................1
William Braithwaite
Platonic and Jewish Antecedents to ...................................33
Johannes de Silentio’s Knight of Faith
Jacob Howland
Kant’s Rational Being as Moral Being ...............................47
Joseph Smith
Reflections
What Did You Learn? .........................................................73
Lise van Boxel
Poem
To the New Recruits............................................................81
Elliott Zuckerman
Reviews
Delphic Examinations
A Review of David Leibowitz’s The Ironic Defense of
Socrates: Plato’s Apology ............................................83
David Bolotin
Toleration
A Review of Eva Brann’s Homage to Americans.............101
Janet Doughterty
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1
Reading the Constitution as a
Great Book
William Braithwaite
Our national political conversation is just now being much
exercised in a deliberation about the Law and the Divine:1 on
one side, those who hold sacred a certain place in New York
City, because of those who died there; on the other, those who
plead the cause of religious freedom. Jews, Christians, and
Muslims have spoken on both sides. These circumstances can
remind us that the horrific brutalities we human beings
continue to inflict upon one another often arise somehow from
what we believe about the Divine: either that it is, and the
disputes over what it is, or that it is not, and the disputes over
what, in this event, we should look up to, if anything. These
questions are so ancient, universal, and persistent that they
appear rooted in some primal dividedness of the soul. Politics
and law cannot, it seems, escape the Divine; nor we, our own
double nature.
In Book I, Chapter 1 of the Physics, Aristotle observes the
most natural path of inquiry starts from what is familiar.
Especially to those Americans who have grown up with it, the
Constitution is familiar. But if this makes us think we already
know what it says, we might fail to read it with the care that a
great book deserves. We can study the Constitution with this
kind of care even while suspending judgment on whether it
truly is a great book. We then avoid the error that is committed
when, for example, one reads Euclid while assuming he has
been made obsolete by Algebra—looking down, from a place
of assumed superiority. We cannot know a priori whether
William Braithwaite is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This article was
originally a lecture delivered at the College in Annapolis on Constitution Day,
September 17, 2010.
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Euclid’s Elements, Aristotle’s Physics, or the Constitution, is
outdated, and we disable our judgment if we begin by looking
down on what we may come to learn we should look up to.
Diminishing its magnitude in relation to ourselves, we distort
what it presents to us. We will not see it for what it is.
Other obstacles besides familiarity can get in the way of
reading the Constitution well. It is short; so we may suppose,
mistaking its brevity for lightness, that it doesn’t need much
time. It can be taken to belong to a special discipline, the law;
lacking expertise, we read it without confidence that we can
understand very much. It’s political; since it touches issues we
may care passionately about, we search it for what we want it
to say, and can fail to notice that what it does say might not
agree with our partisan inclinations, or even when it does
agree, that its grounds may be different from our presuppositions.
This essay has five parts. In the first, I will suggest why I
think the Constitution can usefully be read as the preeminent
chapter, one of four, in what we might call the Book of the
Constitution. The second and third parts deal, from two
different points of view, with the distinctively American
experience of trying to form a political union based on an idea,
rather than on blood ties or religious beliefs. In the fourth part,
I will propose a way of thinking about the Constitution’s
Article VI, which contains the well-known “Supremacy
Clause,” providing that the Constitution “shall be the supreme
law of the Land.” In Part V, to conclude, I will suggest brief
and tentative answers to two questions: Is the Constitution
really a great book? Who can understand it best?
I
The Constitution is arranged into a Preamble, seven Articles,
and at the very end, formulaic legal words attesting authenticity. Some Articles are divided into numbered Sections. Parts
of Sections, or of Articles with parts not separately numbered,
BRAITHWAITE
3
are called Clauses. These are either paragraphs, sentences, or
parts of sentences.
The Preamble: “We the People of the United States, in
Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure
domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,
promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessing of
Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish
this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The grammatical skeleton is: “We the People . . . ordain
and establish this Constitution”—a subject, two transitive
verbs, and one direct object. “We” is plural; “the People” can
signify one or many. If we wanted to translate this sentence
into Ancient Greek, should the verbs be singular or plural?
Should the aspect of the verbs be aorist, to signify something
completed? Was the American Founding over and done with,
once and for all, when the Constitution was ratified, in 1789?
A verb of progressive aspect would signify that the ordaining
and establishing are continuous; they may still be going on.
Would the verbs be active voice, middle voice, or passive
voice? It makes a difference—doesn’t it?—whether the lawmaker says (active voice): I ordain and establish a constitution,
a regime of laws, and you choose to accept it? Or (middle
voice): I choose to obey, for my own reasons, only the laws I
make for myself? Or (passive voice): I make the laws, and you
have to accept them, like it or not?
“The People” are “of the United States.” A State is more
than a geographical place—land and water. The New York
mosque controversy reminds us that there are sacred and nonsacred places, garbage dumps and burial grounds. What kind
of place is a State of the United States—Maryland, for
example? What does it mean to say that places are “united”?
We all know that churches, temples, and mosques are sacred
places. Do legislatures and courts partake of the sacred also?
Those who serve there do take an oath, to uphold the law
(Article VI, last Clause). Why do we require this?
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The Preamble says that “the People” “ordain and establish”
the Constitution. “Ordain” means put in order; “establish”
means make firm. But political things seem to be disorderly
and always in flux. How is it possible that what is always
changing can be arranged so that it is stabilized?
In the Physics, Aristotle leads us through a long inquiry
into this question. Among his elemental ideas are place, form,
and material. What material do “the People” work on when
they “ordain and establish” a Constitution? And what is the
form of a constitution? Is it found in the words? If the Constitution has a place, where is it? In the national and State
capitals, and halls of city government? In ourselves? When
people speak of a “living Constitution,” where do they think
the Constitution lives?
The Preamble states six aims: union, justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and securing the
blessings of liberty. What is the principle of order here? Did
the men who wrote the Constitution believe, for example, that
without union, justice would be harder to achieve? That without tranquility at home, Americans would be less well prepared
for common defense against threats from abroad? That
liberty’s blessings are secure in proportion to the general welfare of all Americans?
The Preamble speaks of a “more perfect” union. Some
kind of union already existed, and it was deficient, less perfect.
It is named, in Article VI, “the Confederation.” This was the
union ratified in 1781, though first proposed in the Continental
Congress in 1777, ten years before the Philadelphia Convention proposed the Constitution we now have. The predecessor
constitution we know as the Articles of Confederation. If the
Constitution was a maturation, then it matters to know what it
grew out of, just as it matters, if you want to know a tree or
fish, to know how and from what it came to be what it is when
it is full-grown. To read the Constitution well, we must read
also the Articles of Confederation. I will say more about the
Articles later.
BRAITHWAITE
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The Preamble may be the best-known part of the Constitution. We turn now to the least-known part, at the very end,
the Attestation Clause. It says: “done in Convention by the
Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day
of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven
hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the
United States of America the Twelfth In witness whereof We
have hereunto subscribed our Names.” Thirty-nine signatures
follow.
Constitution Day is September 17 because this is the day
the Delegates signed it, attesting what they had done; it is the
Constitution’s “birthday.” But why should its birthday be the
day it was written, rather than the day it became legally
effective? The 39 men who signed were the ones who proposed
it, but under Article VII, only “the People” could make it law,
by ratifying it in State Conventions. Is the Constitution’s
birthday the date of publication, rather than the date of ratification, because publishing the words was more its coming into
being than the actions of ratification which made it law?
The Attestation Clause dates the Constitution from two
beginnings: the beginning of the Christian religion and
calendar (“Year of Our Lord”), and the beginning of the
Americans as a separate people (“of the independence of the
United States of America the Twelfth”). As the beginning of
the Constitution implicates the Articles of Confederation, its
end implicates the Declaration. To read the Constitution well,
we must also read the Declaration, out of which it somehow
grew.
The words of the Declaration came into effect on October
19, 1781, when the commander of the main British army, General Cornwallis, acknowledged military defeat by his surrender
at Yorktown, Virginia. But Americans celebrate their independence on July 4, the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration in 1776. Were the words more the beginning of the
United States than the deeds of war necessary to make them
effective?
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The Constitution is a plan of government. The Articles of
Confederation were a treaty, agreeing to a “league” among
thirteen independent, sovereign States. The Declaration of
Independence is neither of these. It is an argument. Its aim is
to justify the action of Great Britain’s American Colonists in
separating themselves from the Mother Country. It has an
argument’s five-part formal structure: Introduction, Statement,
Proof, Refutation, and Conclusion.
An introduction is what leads us into. Here is the Declaration’s: “When in the course of human events, it becomes
necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which
have connected them to another, and to assume among the
Powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the
Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent
respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should
declare the causes that impel them to the separation.”
The Colonists appeal to Law, from three sources. Two are
mentioned here; the third we will get to shortly. “Laws of
Nature” points us back toward Aristotle’s Physics, the first
sustained inquiry into the regularities and patterns we can see
in the world around us. He shows that the phenomena of the
natural world are not chaotic and jumbled, but on the contrary,
have characteristic regularities and patterns, ways of being and
working. Nowadays we would say they change, grow, and
move according to laws—for example, the laws of force,
which, as Newton demonstrates, govern the motions of the
planets. If “Nature’s God” refers to the God of the divinely
created order of the world described in the Book of Genesis,
then this phrase points us back toward the Bible. In the
Declaration, law comes ultimately from the Divine, by way of
Nature, or from Nature as a manifestation, a showing forth, of
the Divine.
The Declaration does not “dissolve” all ties with Great
Britain—only the political ones. Ties of blood, language, religion, and law, along with common culture, history, and habits
BRAITHWAITE
7
remain. In the Refutation, the Americans call those in England
“our British brethren.” The American War of Independence
was in some sense a war within the family, a war of brothers.
It thus recalls stories of other, more ancient animosities among
kindred: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau; Polyneices and Eteocles, the sons of Oedipus; Romulus and Remus. How do we
reconcile the apparent inevitability of war with the shedding of
kindred blood, which seems to be one of the most unnatural of
human actions?
Thucydides claims that his History of the Peloponnesian
War is the only book we need to read about war. It recounts the
war of the Athenians and the Spartans, both of them Greek
peoples, who once were united in resisting invasion by the
Persians, an earlier war recounted by Herodotus. In the later
war, they turn against each other. The paradigm of war,
according to Thucydides, is the killing of kindred, the people
of one’s own kind.
In their War of Independence, 1776-81, the thirteen
American States united against their “British brethren.” Three
generations later, the Americans fought another war, also
against kindred—our Civil War of 1861-65. Both wars were
between people related by blood, or “consanguinity,” as the
Declaration puts it. Both were wars about the words of the law:
the earlier war was about who may speak words of law (only
those who speak with “the consent of the governed”); the later,
about what the words of the law meant (are all men created
equal, and if so, in what politically relevant ways are they
equal?).
Both wars were also about Equality and Liberty: the
American Colonists wanted to free themselves from a lawmaking power in which they had no equal voice; the American
South, calling itself “the Confederacy,” wanted to be free to
tell the negro slave and his descendants that they would never
have any voice in making the laws to which they were
subjected.
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The proposition to be proved in the Declaration’s Proof
section is that “the present King of Great Britain” (he is
nowhere named) is a tyrant. This Section begins: “To prove
this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.” Eighteen
complaints follow, and more than half deal specifically with
the power to make laws. Throughout this 18-count
“indictment” of the King, the Americans speak as if claiming
no more than their rights under established English law. This is
the third source of law they appeal to—not new rights, but
traditional ones, belonging to them as Englishmen. The King is
a tyrant because he has abused these traditional rights. Exercise
of the powers of government without the consent of the
governed is tyranny, the Americans argue. This is the startingpoint of their argument; it is found in the Declaration’s second
part, which begins with the famous “self-evident truths.” There
it is asserted that the only just powers a government has are
those “derived from the consent of the governed.”
That a government’s just powers derive from consent of
the governed depends on prior premises. The first of these is
asserted in the Declaration’s most famous words—“That all
men are created equal.” This is the philosophical source of the
American people’s claim that to be ruled rightly, they must be
ruled by their own consent, by laws they themselves have
made. “All men are created equal” are the words under contention during the Civil War, in which my own ancestors were on
opposite sides. Whom did the Declaration’s authors intend to
exclude, if anyone, from the words “all men”? Did they mean
to exclude negro slaves and their descendants? In 1857, the
Supreme Court of the United States, in Dred Scott v. Sanford,
said Yes. Did the Court read the Declaration rightly and well?
Do the Declaration and the Constitution exclude negroes from
citizenship? I will say more about this question later. Many
people seem to believe that the Constitution is about rights,
mainly. It isn’t. What they are probably thinking of is the first
ten Amendments, which we now call, collectively, the Bill of
BRAITHWAITE
9
Rights. These were added later, in 1791, after the original
Constitution was ratified. The Articles of Confederation and
the Constitution are about powers; the Declaration and the first
ten Amendments are about rights. According to the Declaration, the powers are derived from the rights, and the rights are
derived from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
Rights are primary, because they are the source; powers are
derivative, because they pre-suppose rights. Thus the soul of
American law is the Declaration, for it is there that the organic
bond between powers and rights, or between government and
nature, is made explicit. As the beginning and end of the
Constitution implicate the Articles of Confederation and the
Declaration of Independence, the powers in the Constitution
implicate the rights asserted in the Declaration and the Bill of
Rights. To read the Constitution well, we must also read the
Bill of Rights.
With the Bill of Rights in mind, we have become accustomed to speaking of “individual” rights. The Constitution
never does. Throughout the Constitution proper and the Bill of
Rights, the standard language is “person,” “persons,” or “the
people.” The Third Amendment does refer to “the Owner”; the
Sixth, to “the accused”; but these terms are used nowhere else,
I believe. The Sixth also uses three masculine pronouns, but
for reasons that I will spell out later, with respect to the
Rendition Clause, I believe it doubtful that these refer only to
males. What is the difference, if any, between “individual”
rights and rights of “persons,” or “personal” rights? Does the
difference matter?
“Person” comes from Latin persona, meaning mask, especially one worn by an actor. Our persona is our public face, the
one we put on, for example, when we mask our private feelings
from strangers or acquaintances we don’t know very well.
Good manners require that we sometimes do this. Does politics
require it too? What do people mean when they say “All politics is personal,” or “The personal is the political”? “Personal”
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seems nowadays sometimes to mean “private.” What are the
real differences, the ones that matter, between our public or
political lives and our private lives? Does the Constitution
suggest which things belong to which? Should it?
The use of “person” in the Constitution was not motivated
by an effort to find what some call today “non-sexist”
language. “Person” is a technical term in law; it means human
beings in their public, or political, capacity. This usage came
into English law from Roman law, and is directly traceable to
the codification of twelve centuries of Roman law that was
ordered by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. The
language of “individual” rights began, I believe, to be more
common and customary in American law during the middle of
the twentieth century, when the now-extensive body of court
opinions on the Bill of Rights was developing. “Individual,”
like “persona,” is also Latin in origin, but its meaning and
connotations are quite different. It is cognate with “indivisible,” that is, with the unit, the monad, the atom. This carries
implications of the uniquely private—that which makes each
of us, as each snowflake is said to be, absolutely different from
every other of the same kind. Has the elemental language of
mathematical physics crept unawares into our understanding of
the law? Our vanity, pride, and ego certainly prefer “individual” rights. We cannot help wishing to be special; most of us
do seem to have a deep longing to be loved for no other reason
than that we are who we are. But what the Constitution secures, in law, is “personal” rights, not “individual” rights. In
exchanging the former for the latter, what have we gained, and
what have we lost?
We now have a book of four parts: the Declaration of
Independence of 1776, the Articles of Confederation of 1781,
the Constitution of 1787, and the Bill of Rights of 1791. This
is the Book of the Law for a self-governing people. To read
well its pre-eminent “chapter,” the Constitution, we must read
the whole of which it is a part. The theoretical first principles
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BRAITHWAITE
of this people are Equality and Liberty; these are mediated by
Justice. The practical first principles are Prudence and
Tolerance; these are mediated by Law.
Among this self-governing people, all persons are politically equal. Each has equal right to speak freely in public
places about all that relates to the common good. Each has,
also, equal right to worship freely in his own church, temple,
or mosque. It is the work of the law (among other things)
constantly to mediate, heedful of prudence and tolerance,
claims to these fundamental rights and to other rights derivative from them. Which, if either, is primary—the right of
freedom of religion, or the right of freedom of speech? Both
are mentioned in the First Amendment, ratified in 1791, and
both are in the foreground of our national political conversation today. How are these two rights related?
II
To be one and whole is a human yearning. When our heart says
yes, and our head says no, we say we are conflicted. We are at
war with ourselves. We are not one and whole. In friendships,
the things of each are common to both, says Phaedrus in
Plato’s dialogue of that name (279c). In marriage, the Hebrew
Bible’s teaching (Genesis 2:24), inherited by the Greek Bible
(Mark 10:7-8), is that a man and woman become “one flesh.”
Modern biology and genetics confirm this. So does Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium (189c-193e). What would a
community that is one and whole look like? Might much of its
law not need to be written? This would be the law of custom.
In English legal history, unwritten or customary law was called
the common law. The American Colonists inherited this law,
and, consonant with its animating spirit, they reshaped it to
their own circumstances. We learn the common law by living
in it. We abide by the law, and it abides in us. It becomes a
second nature, and eventually we may feel as if it were natural
simply. At home in our community, we feel one and whole,
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both in ourselves and in relations with others. We have a place.
We know who we are. To be one nation and whole, a true political union, has been what Americans have aimed at since the
beginning. It has therefore been our greatest political problem
as well. Is it also the greatest political good and the greatest
political problem simply?
After their War of Independence, from 1775 to 1781, the
Americans, recently united against a common foe, tried to
establish a political union among themselves. Their first
attempt, the Articles of Confederation, failed. Their second attempt, the Constitution, has stood the tests of 225 years. What
made the American Union under the Articles “less perfect”?
Both the Articles and the Constitution aimed at union. The plan
of government each designed toward this end was different,
however. This difference is apparent on the face of the two
documents. The Articles are wordy and legalistic. Their substance is marred by excessive precision through avoidable
repetition, the spelling-out in detail of cumbersome procedures
for resolving differences among the States, and the political
asymmetry of imposing obligations on the States without giving the national government powers to enforce them. Article
IX (of thirteen Articles) spells out the powers of the Confederation Congress. It is over 1,400 words, in nine lengthy, unnumbered paragraphs. It would take over ten minutes to read it
aloud, at a brisk pace.
About two-thirds of Article IX deals with two subjects,
boundary disputes and raising “land forces,” that is, an army.
The complicated procedure for settling boundary disputes between States is set out in a single sentence of about 400 words.
This sentence piles one dependent clause on top of another:
three clauses begin with “if,” or “but if”; two others, with
“provided that.” It is a labor to read and understand it. The
provision for raising land forces gives the Confederation Congress power to request a proportionate quota of soldiers from
each State. These requisitions “shall be binding,” but the Arti-
BRAITHWAITE
13
cles give Congress no legal power to enforce them. This is true
also of Congress’s power to collect contributions from the
States to “a common treasury” and to pay expenses for “the
common defence or general welfare.” Consequently, there was
no national army and no national treasury, except insofar as the
States chose voluntarily to comply with Congress’s quotas and
requisitions.
The different aims of the Articles and the Constitution are
revealing. The Constitution’s Preamble, we recall, states six:
union, justice, domestic tranquility, defense, general welfare,
and securing the blessings of liberty. The Articles, in Article
III, state three: defense, security, and general welfare. Notably
absent are justice and domestic tranquility. That the Articles’
primary object was defense against foreign enemies is
indicated by that part of Article III in which the States agree “to
assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made
upon them, or any of them.” The vulnerability felt by the
American States in 1781 is understandable. They were militarily weak, having just fought an exhausting five-year war.
They had won only with the help of the French and good luck.
England, Spain, and others still coveted further possessions in
the New World. The Americans had won their independence;
now they had to keep it.
The Confederation’s “union” was “less perfect” in being
more for defense against attack from outside than for political
union within, and in being more detailed on paper than feasible
in practice. The States agreed to a mutual defense treaty, but
did not empower Congress to raise a national army through
legally enforceable quotas of soldiers from each State. The fear
of foreign enemies was counterbalanced by an equally
powerful fear of yielding local powers to that genuinely
national government which some thought necessary for true
political union. Fear breeds, and is bred by, distrust. A sign of
the States’ fear and mutual distrust was their uncertainty about
what to call their relationship. In the Articles of Confederation,
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the introductory “Whereas” Clause and the Attestation Clause
at the end call it “a perpetual union.” Article I calls it a
“confederacy,” Article II a “confederation,” Article III, “a firm
league of friendship.” Perhaps they could not find the right
name because they were not yet sure what they wanted to
name. “League” may have been closest to the truth, in its sense
of coming together for a common purpose. History has
decided, however, to call our first, “less perfect” Union “the
Confederation.” This fits, because “to federate” means to come
together in a league. In another way, it does not fit. The Latin
root of “federate” and “federal” is related to fides, meaning
faith or trust. What is missing from the spirit of the Articles of
Confederation trust is mutual trust. A coming together for a
common purpose is not yet a union.
III
What drives us apart, makes us decide to separate? What are
the differences that get in the way of forming a real and lasting
union? Are there natural kinds, natural differences that inevitably have political consequences? Male and female seem to be
different kinds by nature. Aristotle argues in Book I of the Politics that some men are naturally slaves, or slavish. Linguistic
and cultural differences can feel almost natural. Whatever the
source of whatever differences there are, political arrangments,
if they are to be decent and sensible, will have to take account
of them. Which differences matter most, politically? How do
they matter, and to what extent? We now consider some differences of kind that are implicated in the Constitution.
In 1972, it was proposed to amend the Constitution to
provide that “Equality of rights under law shall not be denied
or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of
sex.” The intent of the Equal Rights Amendment was to prohibit, with the force of written law, discrimination against women. The main argument for it was the claim that the Constitution “excluded” women, because the only sex-specific pro-
BRAITHWAITE
15
nouns in it are masculine. It is true that the Constitution’s text
does not anywhere use feminine pronouns. Does this signify
intent to exclude women from the rights of citizenship and the
holding of public offices?
Article II vests the Executive Power of the National
Government in a President and specifies requirements of age,
citizenship, and residency. It says, “No Person” shall be eligible to the office without these requirements. “Person” is neuter in grammatical gender, and does not exclude women. This
Section further provides, with respect to the President, “Before
he enter on the Execution of his office, he shall take the
following oath or affirmation” (emphasis added). Do these
masculine pronouns exclude women? The conventions of
English grammar, both in 1787 and in 1972, allowed masculine
pronouns to refer to the female sex. Whether a particular
masculine pronoun was presumed to include females, or
intended to exclude them, was to be determined by context.
Supposing that the Constitution as a whole is the proper
context, let us look at other uses of masculine pronouns to see
if they exclude women.
An example is in Article IV. Its Section 2 includes what is
called the Rendition Clause. It says that a criminal fugitive
who flees from the State where he committed a crime “shall on
Demand of the Executive Authority of the State from which he
fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having jurisdiction of the Crime.” If we read the “he” in the phrase “the
State from which he fled,” to refer only to men, here is the
result: A man who robs a grocery store in Maryland and is later
discovered by Maryland authorities to be in police custody in
Virginia, is constitutionally required, by the Rendition Clause,
to be “delivered up” to Maryland police. But his female
accomplice is not, because she is not a “he.” It seems to me
unlikely that the authors of the Constitution intended this
result.
The Equal Rights Amendment came close to being ratified
before the time to do so ran out in 1982. How should we under-
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stand the American people’s declining to ratify it, after more
than ten years of public deliberation about it? No serious
argument seems to have been raised, during the Democratic
primary-election campaigns of 2008, that then-Senator Hilary
Clinton was constitutionally ineligible for the Presidency because the ERA had not been ratified. The question remains,
nevertheless, whether there are differences between men and
women of such a kind that the law can properly make distinctions between them for some purposes, such as combat duty in
military service.
We turn now to another common misreading of the
Constitution. Among some Americans, both black and white,
an opinion persists that it favors, or supports, slavery. Three
specific provisions deal with this subject directly, two others
indirectly. None uses the words “slave” or “slavery.” Used
instead is “Person” or “Persons.” It should seem odd that a law
said to approve of slavery fails to name its subject plainly and
correctly. What could account for such reticence? Article II
vests the National legislative power in a Congress consisting of
a Senate and House of Representatives. Section 2 provides that
each State shall have not more than one Representative in the
House for every 30,000 of its population. With exceptions not
relevant here, population includes “the whole Number of free
Persons, . . . [and] three fifths of all Other Persons.” No one
disputes that by “Other Persons,” the Constitution’s authors
meant slaves.
Does the phrase “three fifths of all Other Persons” mean,
then, as some people continue to believe, and to say publicly,
that according to the Constitution, the negro is three fifths of a
Person? Such an opinion would be consistent with the opinion
that the phrase “All men are created equal” in the Declaration
of Independence was intended to mean “All white men,” and
therefore to exclude negro slaves and their descendants (this is
the reading of the Declaration by the Supreme Court in the
Dred Scott case). Often not noticed by those who say these
things is that the Three-fifths Clause deals not only with repre-
BRAITHWAITE
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sentation in the House, but also with taxation. The relevant
language says, “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States” according to population,
counted according to the formula just noticed.
From each State’s point of view, representation in the
House and direct taxation have opposed incentives. To get
more seats in the House, the Slave States wished to count all
their slaves; to pay less taxes to the National Government, they
wished to count none of them. The Free States, on the
contrary—those in which slavery was forbidden—wished to
have the Constitution count no slaves for representation in the
House. This would give the Free States greater power there,
increasing the prospect that Congress could eventually abolish
slavery. But for taxation, the Free States would have been glad
to agree to count all slaves. This would increase the tax contributions required from Slave States to the National Treasury. In
this controversy over representation in the House, what the
Free States wanted was that the Constitution not prohibit or
impede the eventual abolition of slavery; what the Slave States
wanted was its constitutional preservation. These opposed
interests were compromised by joining the opposed incentives
of gaining political power and reducing taxation. More House
seats meant more taxes; paying less tax meant fewer House
seats, and less political power.
In Mathematics, three one-fifth parts of 100 is the same as
100 three-fifths of each unit. But the dispute in the Constitutional Convention addressed by the Three-fifths Clause was
not about counting parts of slaves. It was about whether to
count all slaves as whole Persons, or some of them, or none.
Has the Three-fifths Clause been read in the mode of mathematics, rather than with a proper understanding of the language
of the law? Reading the Constitution in the mode of mathematics is consistent with thinking of individuals, of ones or
monads; but as we noticed earlier, the Constitution speaks of
“persons,” not of “individuals.” Ones can be fractionally
divided; “persons” cannot. What the Constitution says is that
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three-fifths of the total slave population were to be counted as
“Persons” and two-fifths were not to be counted at all. Did the
authors of the Constitution mean to say, by these words, that
out of every 100 slaves, sixty were Persons, and forty were
property? Which ones were which?
If the text obliges us to acknowledge that the Constitution
acquiesces in counting two-fifths of the slave population as
property, then we must concede that it also counts three-fifths
of that population as Persons. More slaves are constitutionally
recognized as human beings than are not so recognized. Is this
pro-slavery or anti-slavery? It seems more just to the text to
say that the Constitution looks up to the ultimate good aimed
at—placing slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction,” as
Lincoln was to put it—more than it looks down at the political
constraints that made this good temporarily unachievable in
1787. Would negro slaves have been better off in 1787—would
we be better off today—if the opponents of slavery in the
Convention, acting on high-minded principle, had simply
refused to consider any compromise whatever with the slave
interests? (This was the stance, later on, of the Radical
Abolitionists.)
We have taken note of two differences that American
Constitutional Law has had to deal with: man and woman,
master and slave. The first difference is natural. Slavery,
according to Aristotle’s Politics, has two forms, one natural,
the other conventional. In American law, slavery is against
natural law, or natural right. “All men are created equal.”
Slavery existed here, legally, only by convention, by positive,
written law. It could therefore be abolished, without injustice,
if the lawmaker changed the law. The Slave States saw, and
feared, that Congress would do exactly that. They were
willing, in consequence, to fight a Civil War to keep what they
claimed as their freedom, or “natural” right, to hold the Negro
in bondage. In the decades leading to that war, the Southern
legal arguments turned more and more to the assertion that “the
Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” made Negro slavery
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19
lawful because it was both natural and consistent with the
Bible. The slave interests felt these claims to be vindicated
when the Supreme Court decided the Dred Scott case in 1857.
So the war came.
It can be tempting to view the Union victory in the Civil
War as a victory for the jurisprudence of natural rights, on
which the Constitution is founded. With different political
leadership, and if President Lincoln had not been assassinated,
perhaps the victory might have had some chance to become
that. But it didn’t. What the South lost on the battlefield, it won
in politics and the law. One visible sign of the South’s triumph
was racial segregation—that vestigial remnant of slavery
which the most unregenerable elements in the South clung to,
in defeated rage, dragging down with them their decent and
moderate, but timid, compatriots. This was the South in which
I grew up, in Virginia, during the 1940s and 1950s.
The triumph of Southern jurisprudence involves, and is
involved with, the story of what we today call “judicial
review,” and this story belongs to a third difference for our
examination—the different aspects of sovereignty. The specific
question is this: what distinguishes the making of law,
legislative power, from the interpretation and application of it
in particular cases, judicial power?
The Constitution, in Article I, vests the law-making power
in Congress. The power to decide “Cases and Controversies” is
by Article III vested in “a Supreme Court and such inferior
courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and
establish.” What we seek is to discern how these two powers,
aspects of sovereignty, differ. We cannot, on this occasion,
make an adequate inquiry into this question. I offer, instead,
some observations we might draw upon, in order to begin
thinking about how a judge differs from a legislator.
“Judicial review” refers to the Supreme Court’s power to
act as a kind of super-legislature by declaring Acts of Congress
“unconstitutional,” which is taken to mean, “not lawful,” or
not law. Is judicial review consonant with the spirit of the
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Constitution? What is the source of the Supreme Court’s power
to overrule the deliberate will of “the People,” expressed in
laws passed by Congress? What is at stake here, in the words
of the Declaration, is the “consent of the governed.” The
Declaration accused the British King of the arbitrary exercise
of power. What are the differences, with respect to “consent of
the governed,” between an arbitrary king, an arbitrary Congress, and an arbitrary Supreme Court? If “arbitrary” means
unreasonable and willful, then all three are forms of unjust
rule, even if different in formal appearance and practical
consequences. Are an arbitrary Congress and an arbitrary
Supreme Court dangerous in equal degree? This may depend
upon the remedies available to the People, and on the kind of
harm either branch might do by its willfulness. Senators’ terms
are six years; House Members’ terms, two; the constitutional
power to remove them belong to the People, and can be
exercised at the ballot box. Supreme Court judges serve,
constitutionally, “during good behavior”; they seldom resign
voluntarily. With good health, most serve as long as physically
and mentally able. The most recent retiree was ninety years
old. The Chief Justice and the newest Associate Justice are
both about 50; they are likely to serve for several decades.
Bad or questionable laws enacted by Congress may be
more accessible to correction, both constitutionally and in
practice, than abuses of power by the Supreme Court. The
Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, holding
that racial segregation of negroes and whites in public schools
was unconstitutional. To reach this result, the Court had to
overrule its own prior decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy
was decided in l895. Both Brown and Plessy involved state
legislation, not an Act of Congress, so these two decisions
were not, technically, exercises of the power of judicial review.
But the jurisprudential progenitor of Plessy, insofar as it addressed racial segregation, the remnant of slavery, from the
perspective of positive law rather than of natural law, or natural
right, as affirmed in the Declaration, was the Court’s decision
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in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which did involve an Act of Congress.
Dred Scott was decided in 1857. There Mr. Chief Justice
Taney held that Congress had no power to exclude slavery
from United States Territories not yet admitted to the Union as
States. On the way to this conclusion, Taney opined that the
words, “All men are created equal” were intended by the
Declaration’s signers to mean only white men. “The Negro has
no rights a white man is bound to respect,” he said. I believe
this to be a misreading of the Declaration; if it is, Taney’s opinion “de-natures” the Constitution by poisoning its seminal
source in the Declaration’s doctrine of natural right, tranforming its vital principle from the sovereignty of reason into the
will of the sovereign. Beginning with the Dred Scott decision,
and its repudiation of the political principle that “All men are
created equal,” the Supreme Court’s prestige and authority
stood behind the legally sanctioned and publicly tolerated policy of racial segregation for a hundred years, until the Brown
decision in 1954.
By contrast, efforts to change legislation enacted by
Congress can begin, if the People choose, after the next
election. The Civil Rights Movement of the l960s can be seen
as a “bottom-up” citizens’ effort (assisted by a better-instructed
Supreme Court) to make this ballot-box power effective
against those Members of Congress who held influential
committee chairmanships that made it possible for them to
impede, stall, or stop civil rights legislation in the National
legislature. A bad law is sooner corrected than a corrupted
understanding of the law itself. In the most important moral
controversy ever to divide this country, the Supreme Court was
on the wrong side for a century. Dred Scott was the first time
the Court effectually exercised the power of judicial review. In
doing so, the Court abandoned, in order to assert the political
power of a “super-legislature,” what might have been its
proper role as law teacher to the nation.2 It also prepared the
groundwork for suffocating the natural-right source of
American law in the Declaration of Independence. Without
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22
natural law, or natural right, the highest thing in American law
is the power of the sovereign. By asserting the power of
judicial review, the power of exercising a veto over Congress,
the Supreme Court declared itself first sovereign. We are under
a Constitution, a Chief Justice of the Court said in 1907 (and
repeated in 1908), but the Constitution means what the Court
says it means.3 This understanding of law seems to take as its
essence the political (and sometimes military) force that is
certainly necessary to make law effective in practice, rather
than that ultimate good which law looks up to, aims at, and
constantly strives toward. This good, according to the
Preamble, is to “establish Justice.”
IV
What is law for us? This is Socrates’ opening question in
Plato’s short dialogue Minos. The Constitution, I suggest,
answers Socrates’ question for Americans in the way I shall
now crudely sketch out; for a fuller answer, we would need of
course to read Plato’s Laws, to which the Minos is propaedeutic, and some other books as well.
Article VI in the Constitution has three unnumbered
Clauses. The first requires that the National Government honor
“Debts and Engagements” made under the Articles of Confederation. The obligation to perform contracts continues, notwithstanding a change in the external form of government.
This first Clause gives constitutional recognition and stature to
the principle of keeping your promises. This is a moral
principle, because a promise invites reliance, and to ask
reliance is to accept moral responsibility. Promise-keeping
nurtures trust. When our words invite others to rely firmly on
what we say, we vitalize our personal, social, and commercial
relations. Our expectation that most people, most of the time,
will generally do what they promise, governs such commitments as “I’ll meet you at the Dining Hall at 11:45” and my
marriage vows, as well as our commitments to friends and all
the buying and selling we do everyday, including the commer-
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23
cial contracts we enter into by e-mail and telephone with
people we have not met, don’t know, and will never see. The
law of promise-keeping is very ancient, its origins obscure.
Abraham relies on it when he buys a burial place for Sarah;
Jacob relies on it when Esau sells him his birthright. This law
was for a long time unwritten, residing in the habits and
customs of people’s ways of dealing with one another. In
England, it was one element in the nurturant soil of what came
to be called the common law.
The second Clause of Article VI is the famous Supremacy
Clause. It provides that the Constitution, laws enacted pursuant
to it, and treaties made by the United States, “shall be the
supreme Law of the Land.” This Clause makes the Constitution the highest written, or positive, law for the American
people. Unlike the law of promise-keeping, the Constitution
and its Supremacy Clause are recent in time, and its authors are
known by name. All peoples have laws of promise-keeping.
But only the Americans have “this Constitution,” ordained and
established by themselves.
The third Clause of Article VI requires all members of
Congress and the State legislatures, and “all executive and
judicial officers” of the United States and of the several States,
to bind themselves “by Oath or Affirmation” to support the
Constitution. This requirement resonates with the tones of the
closing lines of the Declaration of Independence: “And for the
support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the
Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each
other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” These
closing lines recall, in turn, the Declaration’s beginning, with
its reference to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
The three Clauses of Article VI ascend hierarchically. They
move from the law of promise-keeping that has grown up
spontaneously and been preserved among all peoples by
custom, to the highest law of a particular people, to the laws
that are highest simply, the Laws of Nature and the Laws of the
Divine, however understood. The written Constitution referred
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to in the Supremacy Clause is in the middle of Article VI,
placed between the unwritten laws of custom and the unwritten
laws of the Natural and Divine orders.
Is the being of the Law to be found more in its stability,
which may be most manifest in its written and unchanging
words, or more in what the Law is grounded upon and in what
it looks up to? The structure of Article VI suggests that what
we hold, or ought to hold, most solidly to be Law is the ways
and usages, of unremembered origin, that give identifying
character to us as a particular people. This, according to the
Declaration of Independence, is the English common law (with
its reliance on natural right), as we have adapted it to American
circumstances. The structure of Article VI suggests, as well,
that what American Law looks up to is the relation between
Nature and the Divine. The Divine is referred to in the
Declaration four times: as “Nature’s God” and the “Creator,”
the source of “unalienable rights,” and hence of the just powers
of government, and of law; as “divine Providence”; and as
“Supreme Judge of the World.” As presented in the Declaration, the Divine could appear to be the transcendent original
form of which the National Government’s three branches—
legislative, executive, and judicial—are the earthly image and
shadow.4 Such a view seems consistent with the Biblical
testimony that Man is created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27).
What does this way of reading Article VI suggest about
reading the Constitution as a great book?
Reading the Constitution as a great book entails trying to
see what is in it, not only expressly, but also implicitly. I have
suggested that both women and blacks are “in” the Constitution, as potential citizens—human beings who were not
citizens in 1787, but whom the Constitution did not legally bar
from becoming citizens. Women are “in” because they are
“Persons,” and the men who chose the Constitution’s masculine pronouns knew these pronouns could be understood as
including women. Women are in the Constitution because they
are not out—they are nowhere excluded, expressly or by impli-
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25
cation. Blacks are “in” because even if the Constitution grudgingly acquiesces in treating 40% of negro slaves as not
countable in the population, it affirmatively treats 60% of them
as countable “Persons,” that is, as potential citizens, as “men”
politically within the meaning of “All men are created equal.”
It is best to interpret the words and intentions of the
Constitution and the law in the same way we want our own
actions interpreted, that is, in the way we should try to interpret
the actions of others—by the good that is aimed at, rather than
by the necessities, circumstances, and human weaknesses that
impede or hobble the practical realization of our better hopes
and dreams.
Reading the Constitution as a great book entails trying to
see, also, what lies under it—a Western tradition of over two
thousand years, accessible to us in a few hundred surviving
books. But much of what underlies the Constitution and the
law is not in books. It was, and is, unwritten. No express words
in the Constitution command us to be just, prudent, and
tolerant. We learn such things, to the extent we do learn them,
by living with, and among, others.
Reading the Constitution as a great book also entails trying
to see what is above it, what it appeals and aspires to—Nature
infused with the Divine, the Divine as the First and the Final
Cause of Nature. To read the Constitution most deeply, we
have to read the Bible and Plato’s Laws, Aristotle’s Physics
and Metaphysics, Aquinas’s Summa, and much more.
Reading the Constitution as a great book entails, finally,
trying to see what is behind it, the background out of which its
thought emerges. This background begins to reveal itself when
we ask the questions, Does it make a difference that the
Constitution was written in English? Could its meaning be
expressed in German, or French, or Chinese? Perhaps what is
particular in it could not be. But what about the things in it that
are universal? Which things are these? If it makes a difference
that the Constitution was written in English, then, for the same
reason that reading Homer illuminates the background neces-
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26
sary for reading Plato, reading Shakespeare illuminates the
background for reading the Constitution.
To begin to know what the Constitution and the law are—
this is the work of a lifetime.
V
A great book, for me, is one that speaks with the authority
of depth and weight about serious questions that really matter
to me. Friendship is such a question. Who are my best friends?
Surely those who want for me the highest good I am capable
of. How do I know who these are? Aristotle’s Ethics might help
me to know. Whom can I love? Whom can I trust with the
innermost thoughts and secrets of my heart? Who, or what,
should I love and trust the most? Plato and the Bible, Jane
Austen and George Eliot, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have a lot to
say about these questions.
A great book, for others as well as for me, is one that
speaks with coherence and insight about questions that will
matter a lot to most of us throughout our lifetimes. Work is
such a question: What should I do with my life? What work am
I most fit for?
Aristotle’s Politics and Tocqueville’s Democracy in
America can help us think about how to find a place in the
American polis where we, all and each of us, may thrive with
the talents we have by nature and the good habits we can
acquire by care and self-discipline.
A great book simply, for all human beings, speaks with
clarity, harmony, and proportion about questions that stay with
mankind always. What is Law? Does God exist? If God is not,
where are we? What is the soul? Is it immortal?
The Constitution was not a great book for me when I was
in law school, or during the 25 years of law practice and law
teaching that followed. Nor was it a great book for me when I
came to St. John’s College in 1995. But, for me, it is now.
Whether or not it is in itself a great book, I have found that it
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27
has always been a doorway and a path for me to the questions
in the greatest books. What I had not known before was how to
read it. Can the Constitution be a great book for you? Yes, if
you choose to let it. But no book can matter very much for any
reader who is not ready, or able, to accept as a genuine possibility that he may always have to be stretching upward in order
to approach its meaning.
Who can read the Constitution? Anybody willing to make
the effort. But as with all other difficult and worthy activities,
some people are likely to be able to do this better than others.
A book published fifty years ago has something to say on this
point. Its title is The People Shall Judge. The Preface begins
this way:
This book expresses the faith of one American
college in the usefulness of liberal education to
American democracy. If the United States is to be a
democracy, its citizens must be free. If citizens are
to be free, they must be their own judges. If they are
to judge well, they must be wise. Citizens may be
born free; they are not born wise. Therefore, the
business of liberal education in a democracy is to
make free men wise. Democracy declares that “the
people shall judge.” Liberal education must help
the people judge well.5
If a liberal education helps us read the Constitution better, then
those with such an education have an advantage over those
who lack it. It is unhappily the fact that most lawyers and
judges today lack a liberal education, since one is to be had in
only a very few colleges.
Perhaps the most discerning readers of all will be those
with much leisure who are able to use it well in reading the
greatest books. Probably it would help to have had some direct
experience of politics or war. The opportunities for such a life
are infrequent, however, and the men and women few who can
make the most of such opportunities when they are available.
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BRAITHWAITE
29
The rest of us must do the best we can with whatever gifts we
have, trusting in the indemonstrable premise that one evanescent glimpse of something high, even from a great distance,
may be worth more than the solid worldly goods always
tempting our grasp from nearby.6
EPILOGUE
The artist of the work depicted in these four images is Albin
Polasek. He was born in 1879, in Moravia, now the Czech
Republic, and apprenticed as a wood-carver in Vienna before
emigrating to the United States at age 22, later becoming an
American citizen. He was head of the Sculpture Department of
the Art Institute of Chicago for nearly 30 years.
At age 28, while still a student in sculpture at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, he made
the work shown here. It is one of his most famous. Its title is
Man Carving Out His Destiny. (Later he made the following
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female companion piece called Unfettered, an exquisite nude
in bronze, with blue-green finish:
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NOTES
1. At the time of this lecture, public debate was raging over whether
a community center proposed by a Muslim organization should be
built near the site of the attack on the World Trade Center in New
York City.
2. See George Anastaplo, The Constitution of 1787: A Commentary
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 135.
Unlike Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost, Polasek’s Woman directs her gaze exuberantly upward.)
The first two views of Man Carving Out His Destiny show
the work in progress, initially as a small-scale plaster model,
then in full size, in stone, in a version that very likely was
preliminary—compare the positions of the right arm in the
studio and outdoor versions. The last two views show two perspectives of the finished work.
As you see, the work of the Man whom the sculpture depicts is not finished. If we take this statute to represent a selfgoverning people shaping themselves by means of the law,
then the verbs in our Greek translation of the Preamble should
be progressive in aspect, not aorist: self-government is never
over and done with, because our own lives are always a work
in progress. So far as “the living Constitution” dwells within,
to “ordain and establish” it is up to us.
3. “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the
judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and
of our property under the Constitution.” Charles Evans Hughes,
“Speech before the Elmira Chamber of Commerce, May 3, 1907,” in
Addresses of Charles Evans Hughes, 1906-1916, 2nd ed. (New York:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 185. “Congress may pass laws, but the
Supreme Court interprets and construes them, and determines their
validity. The Constitution, with its guarantees of liberty and its grants
of Federal power, is finally what the Supreme Court determines it to
mean.” Charles Evans Hughes, “Address Delivered at Youngstown,
Ohio, September 5, 1908,” ibid., 307.
4. Cf. Anastaplo, The Constitution of 1787, 26.
5. The People Shall Judge: Readings in the Formation of American
Policy, Vol. I, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), vii.
6. Cf. Plato, Phaedrus 279c.
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Platonic and Jewish Antecedents
to Johannes de Silentio’s
1
Knight of Faith
Jacob Howland
As very young children, we tend to engage the world with the
joyful expectancy and unimpeded capacity for delight that
spring from a trust as yet unbroken. But repeated experiences
of loss and disappointment almost inevitably cool our enthusiasm for life, and teach us the usefulness of detaching
ourselves from what Kierkegaard in Either/Or calls “the fair
wind of hope.”2 According to Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, Abraham was an
exception to this rule: through “the wonder of faith,” Abraham
remains “young enough to wish” and “preserve an eternal
youth.”3 Fear and Trembling begins with the story of a man
whose ever-increasing admiration for Abraham was proportionate to the degree to which “life had separated what had
been united in the child’s pious simplicity.”4 Silentio thus
announces the central question of his book: how can a mature
understanding of the ways of the world coexist with a childlike
love of life?
Silentio is neither the first nor the last to pose this question.
The associate between wisdom and resignation is something of
a commonplace. In the Greek tradition, it appears as early as
Aristophanes’ Clouds, in which Socrates, who is portrayed as
the ascetic head of a school into which men have withdrawn
from the city in order to devote themselves to philosophical
studies, is called “miserably unhappy” by Pheidippides.5 In the
Hebrew Bible, the same sentiment occurs in the Book of
Ecclesiastes: “I set my mind to study and probe with wisdom
Jacob Howland is McFarlin Professor of Philosophy and past Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tulsa.
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all that happens under the sun.—An unhappy business, that,
which God gave to men to be concerned with! I observed all
the happenings beneath the sun, and I found that all is futile
and pursuit of wind.”6 In modern literature, this theme is
expressed by Goethe’s Faust:
True, I am more clever than all the vain creatures,
The Doctors and Masters, Writers and Preachers;
No doubts plague me, nor scruples as well.
I’m not afraid of devil or hell.
To offset that, all joy is rent from me.
*****
Hemmed in by all this heap of books,
Their gnawing worms, amid their dust,
While to the arches, in all the nooks
Are smoke-stained papers midst them thrust,
Boxes and glasses round me crammed,
And instruments in cases hurled,
Ancestral stuff around me jammed—
That is your world! That’s called a world!
And still you question why your heart
Is cramped and anxious in your breast?
Why each impulse to live has been repressed
In you by some vague, unexplainèd smart?7
Three decades after the publication of Fear and Trembling,
Friedrich Nietzsche would argue that loving life is inconsistent
with understanding it; wisdom produces nausea, while the
appetite for life can take root and grow only within an atmosphere of illusion.8 For his part, Silentio insists that there is a
solution to the problem of the unity of youthful enthusiasm and
adult knowledge, the name of which is “faith.” But while
Silentio does not doubt the actuality of faith—particularly as
exemplified in Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac—he
cannot satisfactorily explain its possibility, much less
reproduce its movements in his own life.
The subtitle “A Dialectical Lyric” announces that Fear and
Trembling is simultaneously a philosophical and a poetic
HOWLAND
35
work—one that employs intellect and imagination to
illuminate its subject. Yet Silentio is unwilling to accept without qualification the title of “poet” or “philosopher.” More
precisely, in denying that he is a philosopher, he affirms that he
is a poet, and in denying that he is a poet, he affirms that he is
a philosopher.9 If, as this contradiction seems to imply, he both
is and is not a poet and a philosopher, we might be entitled to
assume that he both does and does not know what he is talking
about. We are thus invited us to identify and ponder the potentially fruitful inconsistencies in Silentio’s discussion of faith.10
Here is one such inconsistency. Silentio states: “I can very
well describe the movements of faith, but I cannot make
them.”11 But if the movements of faith are wholly internal, and
so invisible to others, how could Silentio know them without
having experienced them? Caveat lector: Silentio’s explanation of the internal structure of faith—in particular, his
assertion that faith involves a movement of finitude that
follows a movement of infinite resignation12—deserves critical
scrutiny.
I. Silentio’s Flat-Footed Knight
The clearest description of the phenomenon that Silentio is
trying to understand in Fear and Trembling is contained in his
imaginative description of what he calls the “knight of faith.”
Silentio’s first encounter with this knight is inauspicious.
“Dear me!” he exclaims, “Is this the person, is it actually him?
He looks just like a tax collector.”13 In Silentio’s imagination,
the knight of faith is literally and figuratively “pedestrian.”14
We watch him as he strolls around the city and makes his way
through the week. At work, he labors with the precision of an
“Italian bookkeeper”; at church, he is “impossible to distinguish from the rest of the crowd”; at leisure, he resembles a
“mercenary soul.” He walks like a “postman,” talks of food
like a “restaurateur,” plans construction projects like a
“capitalist,” and relaxes with his pipe like “the local tradesman . . . vegetating in the twilight.” In brief, Silentio detects in
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the knight of faith not the slightest “crack” through which one
might catch sight of the infinite: “He is solid through and
through. . . . He belongs entirely to the world; no bourgeois
philistine could belong to it more.”15
But Silentio’s imagination goes beyond appearances, for
he also tells us what the knight of faith thinks and feels. From
this perspective, it is clear that he is free of the bourgeois
philistine’s social ambition, restless anxiety, and slavish
adherence to convention. Although he is poor, he “thinks about
an appetizing little dish of warm food his wife surely has for
him when he comes home.” Indeed, he “firmly believes that
his wife has that delectable dish for him,” and to see him eat
this meal would be an “enviable” and “inspiring” sight. But if
she doesn’t have it, “oddly enough—it is all the same to him”;
whatever he may find on his plate, so to speak, leaves him
deeply satisfied. He runs into a stranger at a building site; “in
no time he erects a building, having at his disposal all the
resources required for that purpose.” For “if it came to that,” he
thinks, “I could easily get it.” The knight of faith evidently has
an active imagination—for how can a man who “does not have
four beans” afford delicious delicacies, much less finance a
building project? What is more, “he enjoys and takes part in
everything”; “everything that happens—a rat scurrying under a
gutter plank, children playing—everything engages him with a
composure in existence as if he were a girl of sixteen.” In a
word, “he lets things take their course with a freedom from
care as if he were a reckless good-for-nothing.”16
Silentio remarks in passing that the knight’s appetite is
“heartier than Esau’s.”17 This statement cuts two ways. Jacob
purchases Esau’s birthright for a bowl of stew, and later steals
his brother’s paternal blessing. Like Esau, the knight of faith,
in his simple contentment and guileless freedom from care,
must be an easy mark for more cunning men. But unlike Esau,
the knight of faith is always blessed in life, because he receives
everything as a blessing. And this is the main point. To the man
for whom “life had separated what had been united in the
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child’s pious simplicity,”18 Abraham presents a paradox. Just
so, the knight of faith presents a paradox to Silentio, for whom
“God’s love, both in a direct and inverse sense, is incommensurable with the whole of actuality.”19 Silentio supposes that
the movement of faith comes after that of infinite resignation;
faith makes whole what life has fractured. But his imaginative
description of the knight of faith tells a different story. While
this knight knows the difference between actuality and possibility, reason and imagination, he combines them in his day-today existence in such a way that each augments the other: he
enjoys the products of his imagination as if they were actual,
and the actual conditions of his existence as if they were what
one could wish for in imagination. Silentio claims that the
knight of faith is “not a poet,”20 yet we see that his love of life
is essentially poetic and authorial.21 Inasmuch as he “enjoys
and takes part in everything,”22 God’s love has furthermore
never appeared to him to be “incommensurable with the whole
of actuality.”23 The knight of faith is thus no more familiar with
Silentio’s conception of resignation than he is with his Godforsaken conception of actuality, because the former is
dependent on the latter. The knight of faith, to repeat, is “solid
through and through”;24 there are no cracks, because he has
never been broken.
Let me put this point another way. Although Silentio does
not explain why he thinks that God’s love is incommensurable
with the whole of actuality, this is evidently a general
conclusion that he has drawn from experience. On the whole,
and setting aside particular exceptions, men act as if they did
not love God, and events proceed as if God did not love man.
Now this conclusion rests on the inherently uncertain presupposition that inductive reasoning gives one access to the nature
of actuality as a whole. Silentio accordingly envisions faith as
the solution to a problem that his intellect has posed.25 This
problem, however, is entirely foreign to the knight of faith.
Like Alyosha Karamazov, and unlike Alyosha’s brother Ivan,
he has always loved life “before everything else,” and in
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particular, before its “meaning” and “logic.”26 And because
love has always come first for him, he has never felt the weight
of the incommensurability that comes to light when one is
guided primarily by the mind rather than the heart. Unlike
Silentio, the knight of faith never renounced the world, so he
does not need faith to get it back.
II. Philosophers and Fools
The differences between Silentio and the knight of faith can be
delineated more clearly by looking at two antecedents to the
latter—one from Athens, the other from Jerusalem. The first
suggests that there may be more than one way to combine a
youthful passion for life with a mature understanding of it,
while the second suggests that the problem as Silentio understands it—namely, how to make the movement of faith after
the movement of infinite resignation—may be insoluble.
Plato’s Socrates resembles the knight of faith both externally and internally. Like Silentio’s knight, Socrates is poor; if
anything, he is even more carefree in his poverty inasmuch as
he does not work at all.27 Like Silentio’s knight, he is just as
satisfied in times of scarcity as in times of plenty. Alcibiades
explains in the Symposium that, during military campaigns,
Socrates put up with hunger better than anyone, yet he alone
was able to enjoy his meals when food was abundant.28 This
last detail suggests Socrates’ equanimity in the face of death,
something he amply demonstrates during his trial and execution.29 Like Silentio’s knight, Socrates is superficially pedestrian, and not just because he lacks the financial resources to
attain any higher rank than ordinary foot-soldier. “He speaks of
pack-asses and blacksmiths and cobblers and tanners, and
seems always to say the same things in the same ways,” Alcibiades observes.30 But as with the knight of faith, the inner is
not the outer: anyone who opens up his speeches or is vouchsafed a glimpse of his soul finds a sublime beauty beneath his
quotidian exterior.31 Like the knight of faith, Socrates’ appar-
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ent simplicity exposes him to the schemes of more cunning
men. Callicles accordingly warns him that he runs the risk of
being put to death by his enemies.32 But again, Socrates simply
is not afraid of death—a fact that has caused some commentators to infer that Socrates hates life, or, in Silentio’s terms,
that he embraces death with a kind of infinite resignation.33
This inference, however, flies in the face of his earnest and
energetic engagement with the essential tasks and opportunities of a human life. As Socrates makes clear in the Apology,
his watchword is wakefulness, not sleep.34 And yet, he takes
leave of life without apprehension and without regret.35
Socrates’ relationship to the world could be described as
one of engaged detachment. He approaches life in a manner
analogous to an athlete who “leaves everything on the field,”
but who nevertheless immediately forgets the result and is
utterly gracious in defeat as well as victory. In my view, it is
philosophical eros—which Socrates regards as even more
essential to the philosopher than intellectual capability36—that
sustains his attitude of engaged detachment. Socrates’ philosophical eros relates to a conception of actuality that differs
both from Silentio’s inductive disappointment and from the
poetically augmented conception of the knight of faith. Silentio describes a youth whose love for an unattainable princess is
“transfigured into a love of the eternal being.”37 Here we have
something like Socrates’ philosophical love of the Ideas or
Forms, except that Silentio associates this love with a movement of resignation that springs from an intellec-tual acknowledgment of the disappointing character of actu-ality. But
Socrates’ longing for wisdom is not a consequence of his
understanding of the world, and is not born of frustration.
Rather, it is nothing less than the most dedicated and persistent
love of the whole of actuality—and here actuality must be
understood not as the dispiriting way of the world or the
tedious limitations of human life (whether real or imagined),
but as that which most fully is, in the distinctive integrity of its
being.38
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The second antecedent of Silentio’s knight of faith that I
would like to consider is the Hasidic fool in Rabbi Nachman of
Bretslav’s influential story “The Clever Man and the Simple
Man.”39 Nachman’s tale is a religious allegory about two childhood friends who follow separate paths in life. “Determined to
conquer the world,”40 the clever man travels extensively,
becomes an expert in “every artistic achievement,”41 and
ultimately “penetrates the heart of everything in nature and in
the soul of man.”42 He becomes “enormously rich and wise,”43
yet his wisdom serves only to make him miserable: “a violent
disgust at the imperfection of life drove him from place to
place, and he nowhere found rest.”44 This is consistent with
Silentio’s assertion that God’s love is incommensurable with
actuality. But the clever man goes further than Silentio, for
when he is summoned by the king, he reasons—and tries to
convince others as well—that the king does not exist.
The simple man remains at home and learns the humble
trade of shoemaking. He is a clumsy craftsman and lives in
great poverty, yet he does not suffer from the spiritual anorexia
that afflicts his clever friend. Indeed, he is “joyous and in good
spirits from morning till evening.”45 Like the knight of faith, he
uses his imagination to enhance his experience, and so savors
everything that life sets before him. His wife gives him bread
and water, but he delights in these as if they were the finest
meat and wine: “Thus he seasoned the scanty bites with gay
fancies . . . and while he ate he really tasted all the choice
dainties of which he spoke.”46 He rejoices in his “shabby
sheepskin” as if there were no “nobler garment.”47 People
often make fun of him and attempt to dupe him, but their
insults and tricks have no effect on his good humor. “Ay,
friend,” he is accustomed to answer, “just see how foolish I
am! You can be a good deal cleverer than I and still be a proper
fool.”48 And when the king calls for him, he answers immediately, responding to this unexpected bit of good fortune estatically: “the joy of the simple man was overpowering.”49
It is significant that the simple man’s happiness is not
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41
purchased at the price of ignorance. Because the simple man
“had passed his life without intrigues, he knew how to see into
the heart of right and wrong.”50 In the person of the simple
man, this essential moral knowledge is inseparable from the
knowledge of how to live joyfully, come what may. In
Nachman’s story, it also pays off by conventional standards.
Valued by the king for his “virtue and simple understanding,”51
the simple man becomes the governor of his province and
finally the king’s prime minister. Meanwhile, the clever man
becomes impoverished due to his unwavering devotion to
exposing the “madness and delusion” of those who continue to
believe in the king’s existence.52 One day he meets the simple
man, and tries to prove to him that he, too, has been fooled
about this fundamental matter. The simple man cannot counter
his arguments, and does not even attempt to do so. Rather, the
story ends with the simple man declaring to his friend, “You
will never receive the grace of simplicity!”53
Rabbi Nachman’s tale recapitulates the main themes of
Silentio’s imaginative encounter with the knight of faith. Both
narratives trace the practical and theoretical problem of resignation to the sovereignty of the intellect in the soul.
Conversely, both teach that equanimity, together with the
ability to live joyously, springs from the poetically productive
love of a trusting and grateful heart. But Nachman’s story does
not merely confirm that Silentio’s problem of how to repair
what life has fractured is foreign to the knight of faith, for it
also warns that there may be a point beyond which what the
intellect has broken cannot be made whole. Measured by the
exacting standards of the intellect, the world manifests an
ineluctable imperfection. The “violent disgust” elicited from
the clever man by this imperfection convinces him,
furthermore, that there is no king—and such a repugnant world
is utterly inconsistent with the hypothesis of intelligent rule.
The simple man rightly refuses to challenge this inference,
because logical argumentation cannot address the deeper issue
of the clever man’s profound spiritual and emotional
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incapacity. How could one who regards every blessing as a
curse learn to feel joy? By the “grace of simplicity,” on the
other hand, the simple man is able to experience life as a
blessing, and it is this experience that leads him thankfully to
acknowledge God—the melech ha’olam, or “King of the
Whole,” who is the ultimate source of all blessings.
III. A Very Brief Conclusion
Rabbi Nachman’s simple man is wiser in his foolishness than
the clever man is in his wisdom, for only the simple man has
attained knowledge of himself and others. In this respect, the
simple man resembles Plato’s Socrates, who is also wrongly
considered by more cunning and worldly men to be deluded.
Like the knight of faith, Socrates and the simple man understand intuitively that love precedes cognition in the wellordered soul. This is a secret that Silentio makes available to
his readers, even if he himself fails to grasp it. But unless we
readers either love the whole or can learn to do so, our
knowledge will be of no more value than Silentio’s ignorance.
NOTES
1. This article was originally presented at the Sixth International
Kierkegaard Conference at St. Olaf College in June of 2010. I would
like to thank David Possen for his critical comments, and Ed Mooney
for his encouragement.
2. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I, ed. Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 292.
3. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. C. Stephen Evans and
Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15.
4. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 7.
5. Aristophanes, Clouds, l. 104 in Four Texts on Socrates, trans.
Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1998), 120.
6. Ecclesiastes 1:13-14. JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, 2nd ed.
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999), 1766.
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7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. George Madison
Priest in Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard
Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, vol. 47 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1952), Part I, ll. 366-370 and 402-413.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of
History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 814.
9. “The present writer is not at all a philosopher; he is, poetically and
tastefully expressed, a free-lancer” and “I am not a poet and go about
things only dialectically.” Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 5 and
79.
10. This is not the only indication that Fear and Trembling presents
us with a partial and incomplete understanding of its subject, yet one
that nevertheless enables a discerning reader to glimpse more than its
author has seen, and thus to begin to correct his mistakes. As Stephen
Evans observes in his Introduction to Fear and Trembling, the book’s
epigram—“What Tarquin the Proud communicated in his garden
with the beheaded poppies was understood by the son but not by the
messenger”— invites us to see Silentio as a messenger who is
unaware of the deeper significance of his own message
(Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, x). But because we do not know
whether this is the point of the epigram as Silentio understood it, we
also cannot know whether Silentio himself understands that he says
more in Fear and Trembling than he knows.
11. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 31.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 32.
14. Ibid., 34. The Danish word is Pedestre.
15. Ibid., 32-33.
16. Ibid., 33-34.
17. Ibid., 33.
18. Ibid., 7.
19. Ibid., 28.
20. Ibid., 33.
21. The word poet comes from the Greek poiētēs, which derives from
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the verb poiein, meaning to make or to produce—clearly apposite in
reference to the knight of faith. The word author comes from the
Latin auctor, which, among other things, signifies an authority, a
creator, a principal cause, a founder of a people. Note, too, that
Silentio consistently emphasizes the fruitfulness of faith as
exemplified in “father” Abraham, the auctor generis or progenitor of
the people.
22. Ibid., 32.
23. Ibid., 28.
24. Ibid., 32.
25. His relationship with God is mediated by his intellect: it is not
God’s love that makes him “unspeakably happy,” but the “thought”
that God is love. Ibid., 28.
26. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press,
1990), 231.
27. Plato, Apology, 23b-c.
28. Plato, Symposium, 220a.
29. See Alcibiades’ description of his exemplary composure in battle
in Symosium. 220d-221c. Alcibiades also makes it clear that Socrates
has no desire for conventional honors, which others pursue as a
means of overcoming the oblivion associated with death—cf. 220de and 208c-d.
30. Plato, Symposium, 221e-222a.
31. Plato, Symposium, 216e-217a.
32. Plato, Gorgias, 486a-b.
33. See “The Problem of Socrates” in Friedrich Nietzsche, The AntiChrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed.
Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 162.
34. Plato, Apology, 30e-31a; cf. Republic, 476d.
35. Plato, Phaedo, 117-118.
36. In explaining who the philosopher is, Socrates accordingly begins
not with the philosopher’s intellect but with his desire: he is a lover
of the whole of wisdom. See Republic, 475b).
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37. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 36.
38. See especially Republic, 476a-d.
39. Martin Buber, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, trans. Maurice
Friedman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 71-94. On the
significance of this story within the context of Yiddish literature, see
Ruth R. Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
40. Buber, Tales, 72.
41. Ibid., 74.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 78.
44. Ibid., 74-75.
45. Ibid., 75.
46. Ibid., 76.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 78.
49. Ibid., 85.
50. Ibid., 86.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 90.
53. Ibid., 94.
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47
Kant’s Rational Being
as Moral Being
Jay Smith
In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure
Reason Kant writes:
This discussion as to the positive advantage of critical
principles of pure reason can be similarly developed in
regard to the concept of God and of the simple nature of
our soul. . . . Even the assumption—as made on behalf of
the necessary practical employment of my reason—of
God, freedom, and immortality is not permissible unless at
the same time speculative reason be deprived of its pretensions to transcendent insight. . . . I have therefore found it
necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for
faith. The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the preconception that it is possible to make headway in metaphysics
without a previous criticism of pure reason, is the source
of all that unbelief, always very dogmatic, which wars
against morality.1
As evidenced by the Critique of Practical Reason and other
works such as Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, the
simple act of limiting the excessive and dogmatic claims of
speculative metaphysics in order to secure morality proved
more contentious, difficult, and complex than the passage
above suggests. The situation of practical reason changes in
radical and complicated ways as it emerges out of the shadows
of speculative reason to become the primary faculty that determines our rational being. I will first discuss the context established for practical reason and morality in the Critique of Pure
Jay Smith is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. This article was first delivered
as a lecture at St. John’s College in Santa Fe on April 10, 2009.
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Reason. Then I will try to show how pure practical reason is
connected to rational faith in the Critique of Practical Reason.
This examination will uncover the uncanniness of pure practical reason, an uncanniness hidden in part by Kant’s commitment to, and transformation of, a traditional view of pure
reason. The uncanniness is caused by the operation of a power
that is beyond, or out of, the normal course of nature—a power
that differs from natural powers. This essay tries to show that
Rational Being, for Kant, is Moral Being, and that this equivalence preserves a higher dignity for human beings than is
compatible with the mere pursuit of secure and comfortable
living.
I. Practical Reason and Rational Faith in the Critique of
Pure Reason
Kant connects a concept of knowledge with a synthesis made
possible by the reception of givens under the forms of sensibility, namely, space and time. By synthesis, Kant means an
activity that produces a unity. These sensible givens are made
ready for further synthesis by the productive imagination. Finally, by the exercise of synthetic judgments, the worked-up
impressions are brought under the unity of the categories of
the understanding, so that an object of experience is constituted. This constitution is possible only because these spatiotemporal givens worked up as presentations or representations
are accompanied by the formal ‘I think’—they are prehended
and apprehended by the same mind. It is this assertion of the
necessity of an overarching unity, a transcendental unity of
apperception, that is Kant’s response to Hume’s claim that the
mind is only a bundle of impressions. Without this ‘I think’
belonging to a persistently identical self-consciousness, the
subject would not recognize all these presentations as its own,
and, immersed in the stream of lived happenings, would
simply forget itself.
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49
Let me give an example as a way to explain this process
without getting too bogged down in Kant’s technical details. I
am standing in the kitchen, I hear a loud noise, I turn, look out
the window, and see a motorcycle going by. These impressions—hearing the loud noise and seeing the motorcycle—
arise in a temporal sequence and are spatially arranged: I was
standing by the refrigerator when I heard the noise, and then I
turned my head to look out the window and see a motorcycle
going by. These happenings, even given in a spatial and
temporal arrangement, are not yet an experience in the Kantian
sense. There is as of yet no constituted object of experience. To
have an experience it is necessary that these two happenings be
brought into unity—in this case, under the category of cause
and effect: the loud noise is the backfire of the motorcycle.
To be able to constitute an experience out of these happenings, I must be able to temporally and spatially rearrange these
happenings, cutting their ties to the way I happened to notice
them while standing in the kitchen. This rearrangement, which
prepares them to be taken up into the categories of the understanding, is the work of the productive imagination. The sound
I heard before I saw the motorcycle is not the cause of the
motorcycle but vice versa. Our mind in this way rearranges
these happenings to give us an objective experience, an experience in which the subject who has the experience—namely the
transcendental subject who spontaneously produces the ‘I
think’ that marks these happenings as happenings of the same,
constant mind—also posits a correlative transcendental object
of experience, a bare x, a placeholder as it were. The happenings become an experience, are constituted into an object of
experience, when the reference point shifts from the subject of
the happenings to the posited placeholder, so that the
happenings are experienced as centered on an object over and
against the subject. “Oh, that loud noise was the backfire from
the motorcycle.”
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This concept of knowledge and this description of how our
experience is constituted—that is, how we shape experience
and give it unity—are easily grasped by us and, for the most
part, accepted. For instance, here is a common puzzle: we
present someone with a series of, say, six pictures—six different stages of a person chopping down a tree. These pictures
are presented in a random order with the expectation that
everyone will reorder them in the same way. In Kantian terms,
we would say that each person can synthesize these
happenings into an objective experience valid for everyone.
Why is this concept of knowledge important for a
discussion of Kantian morality? First, because all objective
experience is constituted in this way, even what we take to be
our internal experience is given under a form of sensibility,
namely time, worked up by the productive imagination and
subsumed under the categories of the understanding. What we
take to be our inner experience, our inner selves, our deepest
and truest desires, are constituted and conditioned in this
manner. Kant calls this inner self the empirical or phenomenal
self. We have no speculative access, no intellectual intuition
either into the thing-in-itself that is the self or into a putative
“real” or “authentic” self—which Kant labels the noumenal
self. This lack of speculative access into the self has significant
repercussions on our discussion of morality and on what is
demanded from practical reason.
Kant’s concept of knowledge also produces a second, more
complicated consequence for our discussion of morality. Kant
seeks to reject the sort of speculative thought that emerged
from mythical thinking when we began to claim access to a
universal unity, a One. This One could be seen as the cause and
the ground of the Many; in the light of this One, the Many
could be conceived as a whole, a totality.
In striving for such a conception, the human mind marks
out for itself an extramundane point of reference in which the
flow and jostle of concrete events and phenomena are joined
together in a stable whole. In this distancing view, one is able
SMITH
51
to differentiate between the totality of what is and individual
entities, between the world and what occurs within it. Things
are understood not in their particularity but in what underlies
them. They are understood as ideas, as essences, as forms or
substances; that is to say, they are understood in regard to what
connects them back to the One. As part of this cognitive stance,
of this bios theōrētikos, the soul, in striving for an intellectual
intuition of the cosmos, forms itself as it becomes conscious of
itself in the recollective and reflexive intuition of the One. The
uniting of the knower with the One is both an ecstatic selftranscendence and a reflexive self-assurance that enables one
to see and live his or her life from this extramundane point of
reference. Within this self-assurance, fears of death, of
isolation, of frailty, of contradiction, of surprise, and of novelty
can be faced.
Kant provides a universal unity as well, but of an entirely
different stripe. He begins with the transcendental unity of the
knowing subject which, in relating itself to itself, requires, as a
posited correlate, a symmetrical concept of everything that
stands over and against the subject—that is, a transcendental
concept of the world as the totality of all appearances. Kant
calls this correlate a Cosmological Idea, which aims at the
whole of possible experience and the unconditioned. The
unconditioned is the ground of appearance and occupies what
would have been the place of the One. Perhaps an example
from Aristotle might be helpful here. At the end of the
Metaphysics Aristotle talks of an unmoved mover whose
activity is thought thinking on thought. The experience that he
wishes to ground is a theoretically worked-up experience that
has its roots in our sense-experiences of an ordered whole, an
eternal cosmos of ordered motions. Given that we can have
such an experience, how is it possible? To understand Aristotle’s unmoved mover, I am often tempted to make a transcendental move of positing the unmoved mover as a necessary
logical construct that lays out the conditions for the possibility
of this eternal and ordered motion while unifying everything in
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light of an overarching end. Aristotle, however, does not make
this move. Instead, he makes the puzzling assertions that such
an unmoved mover is alive, and that, in its activity of thought
thinking on thought, it exhibits the best kind of life there is, the
bios theōrētikos—which is a real possibility only for some of
us and only for short periods of time. In whatever way we are
to understand this exhibited life, we can point to it as
something transcendent, as a One that is the ground of the
order of the cosmos, a One of which we can say that it is not
merely a logical construct. Dante, in the context of a religious
journey, also calls upon this One at the beginning of his
Paradiso: “The glory of Him who moves all things pervades
the universe and shines in one part more and in another less.”2
Kant recognizes that this orientation toward the One, in the
philosophical context, is motivated by the needs of reason.
Reason is marked by universality and necessity as it strives for
systematic completeness and perfection. Speculative reason
seeks this One, this universal unity, as it attempts to bring
together in one synthetic act the conditioned—that is, the
whole of possible experience—and the unconditioned—that is,
the ground or end of such a whole. The results unfortunately
are the antinomies, the contradictions that reason inevitably
falls into when it seeks to know, to speculatively point at, the
overarching unity, the One. As Kant explains: “Either,
therefore, reason through its demand for the unconditioned
must remain in conflict with itself, or this unconditioned must
be posited outside the series, in the intelligible.”3 The positing
of something outside the series of appearances is needed in
order to point to a ground for appearances that makes the
possibility of appearances conceivable. This positing is also
needed in order to give a fuller account of us than are provided
by references to an empirical ego and to a transcendental unity
of apperception. But why take the trouble to label this positing
the intelligible world, especially since Kant has denied us any
intellectual intuition, and since his concept of knowledge en-
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sures that an intelligible world could never be a possible object
either of experience or of knowledge?
As a way to begin, let us look at what Kant accomplishes
in resolving the antinomies of pure reason by the positing of an
intelligible world. First, Kant preserves an idealizing synthesis,
a world-constituting synthesis that allows the distinction to be
made between the world as a whole and what is in the world.
This distinction helps to guide understanding in its work of
knowing objects in the world. In preserving the synthesis,
however, Kant downgrades the cosmos into the object-domain
of the natural sciences, into a kingdom of nature, a kingdom
whose only unity is a unity under a certain set of laws. This
unity is not a unity that could become an object of knowledge,
much less exhibit the highest form of life. It is not the One that
holds together the Many. This regulative unity merely assures
us that for any set of conditions a previous set of conditions
can be found from which the latter can be understood and so
on, ad infinitum. This world of nature, of appearances, is no
longer a whole organized according to ends; because its unity
is merely regulative, it has the heuristic goal of advancing
theory-construction. The regulative unity of the Cosmological
Idea does not provide an extramundane point of reference, nor
can it satisfy reason’s demand—or our need—for a whole that
contains contingencies, neutralizes negations, and calms the
fears of death and isolation.
Second, Kant preserves a space outside of nature that does
not conflict with the regulative unity needed for the
functioning of the understanding, as he states in the section that
discusses the Antinomy of Pure Reason:
The sensible world contains nothing but appearances, and
these are mere representations which are always sensibly
conditioned; in this field things in themselves are never
objects to us. It is not surprising that in dealing with a
member of the empirical series, no matter what member it
may be, we are never justified in making a leap out
beyond the context of sensibility. . . . On the other hand,
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to think an intelligible ground of appearances, that is, of
the sensible world, and to think it free from the contingency of appearances, does not conflict with the unlimited
empirical regress.4
As we said above, this intelligible world cannot be known
by us. The resolution of the antinomies of pure reason
therefore evokes resignation, which Kant expresses in this
way:
The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of
pure reason is therefore only negative; since it serves not
as an organon for the extension of knowledge but as a
discipline for the limitation of pure reason, and, instead of
discovering truth, has only the modest merit of guarding
against error.5
If there is to be a positive use of pure reason, it will not be in
its speculative use but in its practical use. Furthermore, Kant’s
assertion that he found it necessary to deny knowledge6
suggests that it is not in the search for truth that we find our
dignity; it is rather in guarding against error that some other
possibility is preserved for us.
To conclude this first section, let us consider why this
space is labeled “the intelligible world.” Our metaphysical
desire, the desire for a One that can satisfy reason, cannot be
satisfied speculatively; moreover, as Kant has shown, attempts
to do so propel us into a land of illusion and deception. Unlike
David Hume, who claims that this desire will disappear once
we see that it cannot be satisfied, Kant rightly asserts that this
metaphysical desire will not wither. The needs of reason are
always pressing, and it is these needs that provide the context
for Kant’s exploration of practical reason. The burden that
speculative reason attempted to carry in response to the
demands of reason and the needs of our metaphysical desire
can only be carried by practical reason—and in particular, by
practical reason intimately bound up with morality. This is why
Kant says,
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The idea of a moral world has, therefore, objective reality,
not as referring to an object of an intelligible intuition (we
are quite unable to think any such object), but as referring
to the sensible world, viewed, however, as being an object
of pure reason in its practical employment, that is, as a
corpus mysticum of the rational beings in it, as far as the
free will of each being is, under moral laws, in complete
systematic unity with itself and with the freedom of every
other.7
Kant strives to preserve for us a rational core, a moral world
whose objective reality is affirmed by the fact of the ought. An
ought requires an I beyond the empirical ego, an I not reducible
to the kingdom of nature, an I somehow connected to considerations of freedom. Kant tries to preserve rationality by relying on pure practical reason, and on its affiliated concept of a
world of rational beings, each of which acts at all times as if,
through his maxims, he were a legislator in the universal kingdom of ends. Reason, which requires universality, necessity,
and ends, must be at play in this moral world that is also intelligible. Comprehending such a world would be an exalted and
stirring project; but Kant’s articulation of the project at the end
of the Critique of Pure Reason—as was pointed out by Kant’s
critics—lacked both clarity and content. Let us turn now to the
work that tried to respond to such concerns, Kant’s second
Critique, The Critique of Practical Reason.
II. Kantian Moral Being
Here is how Kant introduces his Critique of Practical Reason:
The theoretical use of reason was concerned with the
objects of the cognitive faculty only, and a critique of it
with regard to this use really dealt only with the pure
cognitive faculty, since this raised the suspicion, which
was afterwards confirmed, that it might easily lose itself
beyond its boundaries, among unattainable objects or
even among contradictory concepts. It is quite different
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with the practical use of reason. In this, reason is
concerned with the determining grounds of the will,
which is a faculty either of producing objects corresponding to representations or of determining itself to
effect such objects (whether the physical power is
sufficient or not), that is, of determining its causality. For,
in that, reason can at least suffice to determine the will and
always has objective reality insofar as volition is at issue.
The first question here, then, is whether pure reason of
itself alone suffices to determine the will or whether it can
be a determining ground of the will only as empirically
conditioned. Now there enters here a concept of causality
justified by the Critique of Pure Reason although not
capable of being presented empirically, namely that of
freedom; and if we can discover grounds for proving that
this property does in fact belong to the human will (and so
to the will of all rational beings as well), then it will not
only be shown that pure reason can be practical but that it
alone, and not reason empirically limited, is unconditionally practical. Consequently, we shall not have to do a
critique of pure practical reason but only of practical
reason as such. For, pure reason, once it is shown to exist,
needs no critique. It is pure reason that itself contains the
standard of critical examination of every use of it. It is
therefore incumbent upon the Critique of Practical
Reason as such to prevent empirically conditioned reason
from presuming that it, alone and exclusively, furnished
the determining ground of the will. If it is proved that
there is pure reason, its use is alone immanent; and the
empirically conditioned use, which lays claim to absolute
rule, is on the contrary transcendent and expresses itself in
demands and commands that go quite beyond its sphere—
precisely the opposite from what could be said of pure
reason in its speculative use.8
A mouthful to be sure! Let us try and bring some clarity to this
passage. First, Kant refers to pure reason as a unified faculty
that can be talked about either in its speculative or practical
use. Next, pure reason is concerned with the questions of
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freedom, God, and immortality, as is made clear by Kant’s
insistence upon universality and necessity. Finally, pure reason
bears within itself the “standard of critical examination of
every use of it.” Pure reason does not look to a higher authority
for its standards, nor does it see its finiteness as marked and
determined by reference to an infinite, divine reason. The unity
of pure reason is preserved over the difference between its
speculative and practical use by promoting pure practical
reason to a place of primacy, while at the same time demoting
speculative reason to secondary status. This reversal of priority
is quite striking when compared to theological explorations of
the relation between human and divine reason. A look to
theology’s distinguishing of divine and human reason puts this
reversal of priority in an interesting light. For some theologians, human reason is intimately connected to divine reason,
because the former takes its standards and orientation from the
latter. Thus, as regards human reason, the primary faculty is
speculative and the supporting faculty is practical. In speculative reason man looks up to an order of higher ontological
status than himself—God and his created order—while
practical reason guides man’s actions within this order of ends.
God, however, cannot have speculative reason as primary,
since there is no order of higher ontological status for him to
look up to. If there were such a higher order, he would not be
the creator, but the divine craftsman. So for God it is his reason
in its practical aspect that is primary. He creates by his word—
Let there be light!—and then he beholds that it is good.
By reversing the primacy of the two faculties of reason,
Kant makes human reason resemble divine reason: pure
practical reason, or reason in its moral activity, comes first;
then speculative reason follows—creating, then beholding.
There is no ontologically higher order that is open to man’s
speculative view, and thus the traditional metaphysical claim
that actuality anchored in this higher ontological order is prior
to potentiality becomes suspect as well. This rejection of the
priority of actuality is part of what is at stake in Kant’s
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rejection of the ontological and cosmological arguments for
the existence of God. For Kant, possibility—a possibility not
tied to an already existing actuality, but a possibility tied to
freedom—will be central. Since there is no existing order of
the Good that is open to our view, and thus no way to measure
our actions by reference to such an order, this reorientation is
a significant break from traditional ethics with its concerns
about such things as the distribution of goods, and with its
grounding of obligation in the demand that we bring to
fulfillment our potentialities as human beings.
Let us now turn more directly to the passage quoted above.
Kant seems to assert that practical reason determines the
faculty of the will, but that the will can be determined in two
different ways: it can produce objects corresponding to representations, or it can bring about such objects. To understand the
first alternative, we must see how something can be a cause of
our actions. In the Preface to the Critique of Practical Reason,
Kant says, “Life is the faculty of a being to act in accordance
with the laws of the faculty of desire. The faculty of desire is a
being’s faculty to be by means of its representations the cause
of the reality of the objects of these representations.”9 In other
words, this faculty of desire requires representations of certain
objects, from the very concrete (such as desiring an ice cream
cone) to the more abstract (such as honor or shame). The
subject is affected by a certain representation of a desired state
of affairs, and then practical reason goes to work to determine
how to attain or bring about such a state of affairs. The content
of this representation and the attendant evoking of pleasure or
pain is determined by our experience. Kant claims that we do
not innately know what we desire and what will bring us
pleasure or pain; and furthermore, he claims that these will
vary from person to person. We find what it is that makes us
happy through experience. When practical reason determines
the will through representation, it is operating as empirical
practical reason. Under various descriptions it should be
familiar to all of us.
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When we strive toward a desired end—usually happiness—empirical practical reason is at work as the overall endin-itself that needs no reference to another end. Maxims and
rules of conduct formed in consideration of this end Kant calls
hypothetical imperatives: if you want this, then you must act in
this way. A way of life organized around such imperatives is a
prudential life. Kant indicates this dependency upon experience by the word empirical. This dependency on experience
motivates most of our actions, and that is why Kant sees those
actions as pathological—because they are determined heteronomously rather than autonomously.
Kant thinks that heteronomous determination is natural to
us, since he believes that we are inwardly determined in the
same way as the course of nature is determined. Our inmost,
authentic desires, which we believe both determine and
express who we really are, have been shaped by our education,
by our experience, and by our society—that is, from without.
Hence to be determined by these inclinations is not to be free,
but to be determined heteronomously. Kant regards everything
we think of as deeply, inwardly human—our desires, our social
roles, our insights, our feelings of love, care, and devotion—as
heteronomously determined, which is to say, conditioned from
a moral perspective, and radically pathological. Kant considers
all desire-driven action to be pathological because it arises in
us as a pathos, as a suffering of a determination that arises
outside of us. In this sense, therefore, pathological activity is
not contrasted with normal activity—since it is precisely
normal activity that is pathological—but with autonomous
activity, that is, with freedom and the formal determination by
one’s own will.
This other possibility of determining the will, in which we
are not determined heteronomously, is to have the will effect
the object by the exercise of the faculty of pure practical reason
that is not grounded in our experiences. This way of determining the will may be rather puzzling, but we can at least
understand that it would eliminate the mediation caused by
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representing to ourselves objects of experience that then activate the faculty of desire, thereby bypassing our dependence
on experience. To be subject to representation and desire is in
fact to be determined pathologically; moreover, to be motivated by concerns for happiness is to be determined heteronomously. Kant frames this option in the form of a question:
“The first question here, then, is whether pure reason of itself
alone suffices to determine the will or whether it can be a determining ground of the will only as empirically conditioned.”10
Kant claims that what is at stake here is freedom and the possibility of autonomy in the sense of self-determination. Our
freedom might well be at stake, but it is hard to accept the
claim that pure reason alone, pure practical reason, can be
sufficient in itself to determine the will. The common view,
which is easier to accept, was expressed by Hume in his
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: “Reason being
cool and disengaged, is no motive to action, and directs only
the impulse received from appetite or inclination, by showing
us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery.”11
There are, of course, actions that we perform under the guidance of reason for which we have no immediate inclination—
for example, submitting to a painful and risky surgery, or dragging oneself out of bed early to work at a job one dislikes. But
the motivations for these actions are also tied to inclinations—
to the desire for health or the desire for food and shelter. In
other words, reason in its practical work can only direct inclination—that is, in Kantian terms, it can function only as conditioned or empirical practical reason.
Kant is aware of this limitation, of course, and so he asserts
that it is “incumbent upon the Critique of Practical Reason as
such to prevent empirically conditioned reason from presuming that it, alone and exclusively, furnishes the determining
ground of the will.”12 If we stand aside from our mode of
representation, if we leave aside our faculty of desire—which
is, after all, the defining faculty of life—we are certainly in an
uncanny place. Is it possible that there could be an ethics or a
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morality that is not the fulfillment of desire in some form, a
fulfillment guided by the representation of the way the world
is? Kant proposes that such an ethics or morality is possible,
and that it is made possible by the operation of pure practical
reason, a practical reason that is not dependent upon the representation of a desired object or state of affairs, not dependent
on ends that are given to it. This claim about a will that can
determine itself apart from representation sets the stage for the
prominence of will as a basic metaphysical category for many
thinkers following Kant.
Kant pushes us very hard here. In effect, he says that we
are less free than we believe. There is no internal sanctuary in
which we can discover our true selves, and if we respond to
divine commands or act on promises of an afterlife we are
being determined heteronomously. Morality for Kant will not
consist of a set of norms for bridling desire in order to keep our
conduct free of excess. In relation to the smooth, normal
course of events—now seen as pathological—morality is always an interruption, a going beyond the way the world is, a
going beyond even the pleasure principle. Kant, in fact, rejects
the distinction between higher and lower desires, between
higher and lower pleasures, a distinction based on whether the
desire originates in the intellect or in the senses. Such a
distinction lies at the center of much moral reasoning and
education, and is implicit in all appeals to moderation. The aim
of such a morality is to refine our desires by reflection and to
redirect them toward objects of higher ontological status, that
is, objects that are visible to the mind only. By lifting our eyes
to the intelligible heavens, as it were, we lift our desires as
well. A simple example: Pleasures of the senses have a limit—
sound, for example, can become so loud that it can destroy the
sense organ; pleasures of the mind, on the contrary, can be
unlimited—learning simply prepares the mind for more
learning. Kant flatly states that all desires are on the same
level; this is indicated, for instance, by the fact that we can and
do leave a poetry reading because we want to go running and
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vice versa. His contention is supported further by the fact that
there is no intelligible heaven open to our view, and by the fact
that we are determined in what we desire, we are fully conditioned beings. Because we are fully conditioned beings, we are
less free than we believe, and everything we take as proper to
our humanity stands on one side of the ledger, while only an
invisible marker stands on the other side, pointing toward an
empty dimension into which we can think ourselves, and in
which we can imagine that it is possible to determine our moral
being rationally, that is, universally and necessarily.
If, however, on the one hand we are less free than we believe, Kant nevertheless also indicates that we are freer than we
know. In his critique of practical reason, Kant often refers to
the experience of moral necessitation, the experience of the
ought—I ought to perform this action, I ought not to have done
this, this ought not to have happened—and he gives us an interpretation of this experience that indicates that we are freer than
we know:
Lest anyone suppose that he finds an inconsistency when
I now call freedom the condition of the moral law and
afterwards . . . maintain that the moral law is the condition
under which we can first become aware of freedom, I want
only to remark that whereas freedom is indeed the ratio
essendi of the moral law, the moral law is the ratio
cognoscendi of free-dom. For, had not the moral law
already been distinctly thought in our reason, we should
never consider ourselves justified in assuming such a
thing as freedom (even though it is not self-contradictory).
But were there no freedom, the moral law would not be
encountered at all in ourselves.13
The positing of freedom is bound up with the moral law as a
condition of its possibility, and this interpretation shores up the
experience of the ought, making it a necessary, rather than a
contingent, element in human cognition. In order, then, for the
moral law to be encountered as the moral law—and for Kant
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that means it must be encountered in its universal and necessary character—it is necessary to posit freedom. In this way,
we are freer than we can know, since the moral law necessarily
calls forth the postulate of freedom: even though freedom is
not a possible object of knowledge for us, we must postulate it.
This rational necessity of positing freedom is, for Kant, the
first tenet of a rational faith.
Of course it is critical for Kant that this positing of freedom
should not contradict the doctrine of freedom found in the
Critique of Pure Reason—namely, that freedom, though
incapable of being an object of experience, is thinkable and
conceivable as a transcendental connected with our noumenal
selves, as part of the intelligible world needed to resolve the
antinomies. This theoretical conceivability does not ground the
concept of freedom, does not give it objective reality, but it
does leave open the possibility of freedom. In the Groundwork
of The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says:
The intelligible world signifies only a “something” that is
left over when I have excluded from the determining
grounds of my will everything belonging to the world of
sense, merely in order to limit the principle of motives
from the field of sensibility by circumscribing this field
and showing that it does not include everything within
itself but that there is still more beyond it; but of this
something more I have no further cognizance.14
The only cognizance of the freedom proper to our intelligible,
noumenal self, is an indirect one, a posited one. Only through
the experience of the moral law, as interpreted in a certain way,
can I become aware that I must be free.
Of course this experience of the ought, of the moral law as
universally and necessarily binding, can be interpreted otherwise. For example, following Freud, we could see the categorical imperative as an internalization of the strictures of our
parents and society, resulting in the formation of the superego;
or, following Freud’s contemporaries, we could see it as no-
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thing more than the consequence either of long-settled custom
or of the necessities dictated by prudence. Kant, however, is
strongly drawn to this interpretation of the moral law because
it solidifies many aspects of his thought. In the Preface to the
Critique of Practical Reason he says,
The union of causality as freedom with causality as
natural mechanism, the first of which is established by the
moral law, the second by the law of nature, and indeed in
one and the same subject, the human being, is impossible
without representing him with regard to the first as a being
in itself but with regard to the second as an appearance,
the former in pure, the latter in empirical consciousness.15
This positing of freedom fills out a possibility foreshadowed in
the Critique of Pure Reason, allows for some kind of unity of
the human being, and supports a view of reason that is not
unavoidably in contradiction with itself. Our noumenal self in
its freedom prescribes universal and necessary laws to our
empirical and conditioned self, which experiences itself as
necessitated by these prescriptions, not heteronomously, but
autonomously, as self-determining. The preservation of the
universal and necessary character of these prescriptions allows
Kant to see this experience as rational. Only in this way do we
gain some purchase on the intelligible world. We will take up
this rationality again at the end of this essay.
But why talk of this purchase on the intelligible world in
terms of a rational faith? We see a similar move on the part of
Maimonides in his recognition and resolution of a question that
I am going to frame as an antinomy: Is the world eternal or
does it have a beginning in time? Maimonides is concerned
about the claim that Aristotle has demonstrated the eternality
of the world. To hold onto the belief that God created and
governs the world in the face of such a demonstrated claim is,
for Maimonides, to be placed in an impossible situation.
Neither he nor Kant could tolerate the proposition that we must
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sacrifice reason for faith—that we should believe precisely
because it is absurd. Maimonides spends a great deal of time
showing that Aristotle did not claim to demonstrate that the
world is eternal; and, in fact, he tries to show that it is not
possible to demonstrate either that the world is eternal or that
it has a beginning in time.16 We do not have a coherent,
scientific account of our world to base such a demonstration on
because our best physics (an Aristotelian one) and our best
astronomy (a Ptolemaic one) are in contradiction. Thus, we are
at liberty to decide this issue on other terms. Aristotle can hold
a considered opinion that the world is eternal because it
concurs with and supports his other metaphysical concerns. Of
course, Maimonides is also at liberty to base his considered
opinion on considerations of compatibility with his traditional
faith. Kant goes a bit further than this compatibility, because he
sees the moral law as universal and necessary: he holds that in
determining the moral law we act as legislative members of a
kingdom of ends. The underpinning of such universal,
necessary, and teleological action must likewise have this rational character. Thus, for Kant, freedom is a tenet of a rational,
not a traditional, faith.
Let me now address the other two tenets of this rational
faith. As mentioned above, somehow the will, quite apart from
representation and desire, brings about an object. This object,
for Kant, is the highest good, in which happiness ought to be
distributed according to how much one deserves to be happy.
Kant tells the painful truth: that in this world, those who
deserve happiness often do not attain happiness—the wicked
do indeed often prosper, and the good often suffer. Virtue is not
its own reward; moreover, happiness does not constitute a
coherent system: the things that make us happy often work
against each other. In addition, it is not in our power to bring
about this highest good. We can act individually as if we are
legislating members of a Kingdom of ends, but to bring the
highest good into being requires that others act with us—thus,
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to do so is not in our power. God is posited as a necessary
condition for the possibility of such a highest Good, inasmuch
as He can somehow harmonize our actions with those of
others. Furthermore, the human will is not good, as we can see
through the experience of being morally determined: we must
struggle against our sensual nature as we strive to be virtuous.
Now although we can strive to perfect our will, it is an impossible task, which Kant must reframe as an infinite task in order
to make the completion of our striving at least conceivable.
The condition for the possibility of such an infinite task is the
immortality of the soul. Thus in order for the will to bring
about the highest good, and thereby to have a rational hope that
our actions are not completely futile, the rational postulates of
God and immorality are required. The postulate of freedom
grounds the moral law while the other two postulates, God and
immortality, transform our moral actions (namely, making the
world into what it ought to be and perfecting our will) into an
infinite task. It is important to see that these rational postulates
give us neither any knowledge of what God is in himself nor
any knowledge of what life after death may be like. All I know
is that it is necessary to assert these tenets in order to make it
conceivable that we can bring about the highest good as an
object of our will. In this way, our metaphysical desire is
addressed and met by a rational faith; and this is the only way
that these desires can be met, since Kant has demonstrated that
they cannot be met by striving for a speculative vision.
Let us now marshal further support for Kant’s assertion
that we are freer than we know. We have already seen that in
claiming to be the sole power that can determine the will,
empirical practical reason oversteps its boundaries and closes
off the uncanny space of freedom. This space is preserved by
pure practical reason. But is there other evidence of our
freedom?
Kant presents several examples that show situations in
which our freedom is made manifest. In the Critique of
Practical Reason, he rebuts the claim that we are impotent in
the face of our desires—that, for instance, those of us who lust
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are controlled by our lust. Kant responds that a lustful person
about to enter a brothel would soon learn to control his lust if
he encountered a gallows in front of the door together with an
official proclamation that anyone frequenting the establishment would be hanged. We can certainly conceive of controlling our lust under such a threat, but if we do exert control,
it is for the sake of self-love and self-preservation. Kant then
extends this rebuttal with a slightly different example: A prince
pressures someone to bear false witness against an innocent
man whom the prince wants eliminated. Kant claims not only
that everyone knows what ought to be done in such a situation,
but also that it is quite conceivable that someone in that
situation would refuse to bear false witness even despite the
threat of the gallows. The first example shows that we can
exert control over our desires if something serious, like our
life, is as stake; the second example shows that we can refuse
to perform an action even if our life is as stake. These
examples show that our relation to moral activity takes place
on two planes; in one we appear to be determined by the
situation, while in the other we appear to be free.17
A few pages later in the same book, Kant provides another
bit of evidence for our being freer than we know—what might
be called a phenomenological description of the difference in
self-critical response between losing at a game and cheating at
a game. He who loses a game (or, by extension, loses the game
of life by not becoming as successful or respected as he might
have desired), might be angry with himself or at his unskillful
play; but if he knows himself to have cheated at the game, he
must despise himself as soon as he compares his action with
the moral law. These two failures are different; the second
clearly lies in the moral realm and is connected to freedom.18
In this second response, we see again that there is a plane of
moral action that points to an independence from external
determination.
Finally, let us look at one last piece of evidence for our
freedom: the categorical imperative. Both our own inclinations
and sometimes the blandishments of others, including our
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friends and family, try to persuade us that we are a special case,
that a normally prescribed action is necessary just this once,
and that to take the action is really, in this situation, better for
all concerned. We may be told that this action is what God, or
our church, or our family, or our country demands of us if we
are to fulfill our responsibilities. These persuasions of sentiment, reason, and authority are effective because they touch on
our foremost moral weakness—the temptation to make a specific exemption for ourselves in a special case. The tendency
toward self-favoritism or particularism is a commonplace both
in philosophical systems of morality, where judgment of
actions typically must be made by an impartial spectator, and
in everyday legal practice, where we may not sit in judgment
in our own case. The Categorical Imperative is a rational procedure that makes this common and pervasive temptation
explicit, because it demands that actions be judged by universal and necessary laws: we must act so that the maxim of
our action can serve as a law for all rational beings—including,
quite pointedly, the law-determiner himself or herself.
Now it may seem that following commands, doing as one
is told, has the same form as Kantian duty. But this is problematic for several reasons. First and foremost is the sacrifice of
freedom in following a command that is not the product of
one’s own self-determination. In a bold move, Kant places
following commands together with following inclinations (two
functions that are kept strictly separate in most moral systems)
under the same heading, namely, being determined heteronomously. It is at this point that Kant introduces his famous
distinction distinguishing actions that are merely in conformity
with duty from actions that are in conformity with duty and
done for duty’s sake. Kant places actions that merely conform
with duty in the category of legality, which is, strictly speaking, an empty formalism, since it is independent of intentions
and motivations. Actions that are both in conformity with duty
and done for the sake of duty bring into play the pure practical
reason as well as a will that can determine itself, apart from
SMITH
69
desire and representation, by means of the universal form of
the categorical imperative. The pressing question here is: How
can a form, namely the form of universality, serve as a material
incentive?
Kant’s answer to this question takes us to a strange place.
In his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant asserts
that we are free to decide, after a certain age, which of our
inclinations we will we allow to influence us. He does not
mean that we cease to feel these inclinations; he is asserting,
rather, that in feeling them we are not necessitated to act. Or,
to put it more broadly: we can choose our character by deciding which of our inclinations to emphasize. It is in this freedom
of choice that we can decide to have the universal form be the
principle of the maxims by which we act. This decision
happens in the twinkling of an eye. Kant describes it in this
way:
[I]f a man is to become not merely legally, but morally, a
good man . . . this cannot be brought about through a
gradual reformation, so long as the basis of the maxims
remain impure, but must be effected through a revolution
in man’s disposition. . . . He can become a new man only
by a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation.19
Strictly speaking, this does not constitute evidence of Kant’s
uncanny space of freedom. But he is not the only thinker to
claim that our freedom to decide what will influence us determines what character we will have. In the myth of Er near the
end of the Republic, Plato depicts our souls in a place outside
of time, having to choose a life, a character that they will fall
into.20 Kant suggests something similar: a place of freedom, a
place outside of time, in which we can actually exercise the
faculty of choice.
III. Conclusion
Kant’s step of setting our humanity aside, of asking us to be indifferent to our desires, has evoked passionate criticism. Some
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are upset by his refusal to allow our inclinations—especially
our positive inclinations such as care and sympathy—to serve
as a ground for obligation; others complain that he ignores the
consequences of our actions; yet others are genuinely puzzled
by what in the world (or out of it, for that matter) Kant could
possibly mean by designating humans as “finite rational
beings.” For the most part, these criticisms come from critics
of single-principle moralities such as Kant’s that place a
premium on conformance to duty and obligation; such moralities tend to denigrate concerns for life-fulfillment or happiness,
that is, questions about what is good to love or good to be, both
for ourselves and for others. The great benefit of Kant’s moral
system is that it can resolve complicated situations in which
there are competing goods, and cut short the angst of moral
remorse. But the critics of single-principle moralities ask, At
what cost do we purchase this benefit? And for them, the
answer seems unacceptably high: At the cost of our humanity.
All of these are understandable concerns, but behind most
of these criticisms is the fear that if we become indifferent to
our desires, to our humanity, we will lose what makes us most
truly who we are. This self is our personal self—not personal
in the Kantian sense of having standing in a court of law as a
bearer of rights, but personal in the sense of a personal touch
or personality. In creating the moral world by acting as if we
are members of a possible kingdom of ends (a creation ex
nihilo, since we are not guided by a pre-existing good nor tied
to our existing potentialities), we are acting impersonally. Kant
is asserting that at the very core of our being exists an impersonal space. It is this space that Kant seeks to preserve,
because he sees it as the guarantee for whatever dignity we
have. As he says in the Groundwork of The Metaphysics of
Morals:
There is a sublimity and dignity in the person who fulfills
all his duties. For there is indeed no sublimity in him
insofar as he is subject to the moral law, but there is
insofar as he is at the same time lawgiving with respect to
SMITH
71
it and only for that reason subordinated to it.21
Our dignity demands that happiness is not a blessing to be
bestowed on us by a higher power as a reward for obedience or
service; rather, it is a right belonging to reason, and it ought to
be distributed in proportion to the worthiness of being happy.
If we insist that a personal self lies at our core as the
foundation for our dignity, we abandon the possibility of being
a lawgiver in a possible kingdom of ends; in effect, we
abandon reason. If we replace Kant’s pure reason with a reason
that is socially and historically mediated, we relinquish the
possibility that reason can access the space of freedom. For
Kant, it is this lawgiving self, a universal, necessary, and enddetermining rational power, which is admittedly impersonal
and uncanny, that is at the center of our being. This rational
power, this pure practical reason, determines its own ends, and
therefore it should be respected as an end-in-itself—that is, as
a moral being. In Kant’s view, as expressed in the passage from
the Introduction of the Critique of Practical Reason quoted
earlier,22 pure practical reason allows us to attain a threefold
end that other moral systems cannot match: the requirements
of reason are satisfied by rational faith; the supremacy of our
faculty of pure reason (which defines who we are) is preserved
as practical; and our dignity remains intact—not as knowers of
eternal truth, but as autonomous moral beings.
NOTES
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp
Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), 29 (Bxxix-xxx).
2. Dante, Paradiso, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander
(New York: Anchor Books, 2007), 3.
3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 482 (B592).
4. Ibid., 482 (B591).
5. Ibid., 629 (B823).
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6. Ibid., 29 (Bxxix-xxx).
7. Ibid., 637-38 (B836).
8. Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason” in Practical
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 148-49.
9. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 144n.
10. Ibid., 148.
11. David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,”
in Moral Philosophy, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 2006), 274.
12. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 148.
13. Ibid., 140.
14. Kant, “Groundwork of The Metaphysics of Morals,” in Practical
Philosophy, 107.
15. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 141.
16. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, Part II, Chapters XV-XIX.
17. Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, 163.
18. Ibid., 170.
19. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans.
Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, ed. John Silber (New York:
Harper and Row, 1960), 42-3.
20. Plato, Republic 614b-621d.
21. Kant, “Groundwork,” in Practical Philosophy, 88.
22. See above, pp. 00-00 and note 8.
REFLECTIONS
73
What Did You Learn?
Lise van Boxel
Congratulations on successfully completing the Master’s
Program in Liberal Arts.
Now that you have your M.A., it is a good time to reflect
upon what you have learned and the reasons why you began
the journey that led you to your degree. What knowledge have
you acquired at St. John’s College? Have you gained any
practical skills here? Your employers or potential clients, your
friends and your family will certainly ask such questions. What
will you say to them? What do you say to yourself?
Before turning to a consideration of possible answers to
such questions, consider briefly some of the presuppositions
that often underlie them. Frequently, the real meaning of
“What did you learn?” is, “In what way has this education contributed to your value as a worker or to your ability to earn a
living?”
These questions are not ridiculous. Unless you are lucky
enough to be independently wealthy or to have a patron, you
have to think about how to support yourself. On the other hand,
it is wrong-headed to think of education simply or primarily in
these terms, as if employability and income were the highest,
most important considerations for a human being.
Friedrich Nietzsche offers a vivid description of this
impoverished and narrow understanding of education—an
understanding that characterizes the modern era. In sum, he
argues that an education that looks solely or primarily to the
marketplace deforms the souls of its students because it is
Commencement Address to the Graduate Institute in Liberal Education, August 12,
2011. Lise van Boxel is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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ignorant of, or denies, the proper fullness and activity of the
human soul:
[T]he present age is . . . supposed to be an age, not of whole,
mature and harmonious personalities, but of labour of the
greatest possible common utility. That means, however, that
men have to be adjusted to the purposes of the age so as to
be ready for employment as soon as possible: they must
labour in the factories of the general good before they are
mature, indeed so that they shall not become mature—for
this would be a luxury which would deprive the ‘labour
market’ of a great deal of its workforce. Some birds are
blinded so that they may sing more beautifully; I do not think
the men of today sing more beautifully than their grandfathers, but I know they have been blinded.1
Nietzsche grants that the emphasis on science, and more
specifically on science directed by the marketplace, will indeed
produce economic success, at least in the short term. However,
he adds that this kind of science is a desiccated version of the
comprehensive understanding that is the proper goal of science
or higher learning more generally—a goal that the modern
world has largely abandoned:
I regret the need to make use of the of the slave-owner and
the employer of labour to describe things that in themselves
ought to be thought of as free of utility and raised above the
necessities of life; but the words ‘factory’, ‘labour market’,
‘supply’, ‘making profitable’, and whatever auxiliary verbs
egoism now employs, come unbidden to the lips when one
wishes to describe the most recent generation of men of
learning. Sterling mediocrity grows even more mediocre,
science ever more profitable in the economic sense. . . .
Those who unwearyingly repeat the modern call to battle and
sacrifice—‘Division of labour! Fall in!’—must for once be
told in round and plain terms: if you want to push science
forward as quickly as possible you will succeed in destroying
it as quickly as possible; just as a hen perishes if it is
compelled to lay eggs too quickly.2
REFLECTIONS | VAN BOXEL
75
If Nietzsche’s account of the trend in modern education
aptly describes the kind of education you did not receive and
to which, I think, St. John’s is opposed, how might you describe what you did learn here?
While denouncing an overly narrow view of education,
Nietzsche alludes to the effect of a complete education: it
would create “whole, mature and harmonious personalities.”
Neither you nor I can honestly claim that you acquired a complete and harmonious soul as a result of several years of education at St. John’s. This is not to say that I reject the idea that the
truly authoritative education aims at, and can produce, a harmonious soul. Rather, I think this education is the ongoing
activity of a lifetime. Nonetheless, I do believe that the liberal
education you received here can contribute greatly to the
attainment of this goal. However, I will put aside these ideas
for the moment, and I will turn instead to a more modest articulation of what a liberal education is and what skills may be
acquired as a result of it.
To do so, I will replace Nietzsche’s high-flying, though
accurate, description of a complete education with Aristotle’s
sensible, though still ambitious, account of a liberal education.
In distinguishing a specialist from someone who, like you, has
been generally educated, he says:
With regard to every [kind of] contemplation and inquiry,
both lowlier and more esteemed alike, there appear to be two
ways of being skilled, one of which it is well to call the
science of the thing, and the other as it were a kind of educatedness. For it is characteristic of an educated man to be able
to hit the mark and judge appropriately what the speaker sets
forth finely and what he doesn’t. For something like this is in
fact what we suppose the generally educated man to be, and
that to be educated is to be capable of doing this very thing—
except that we believe that this one, the generally educated
man, is able to judge about virtually all things, though being
one man, but that the other one is able to judge [only] about
some limited nature.3
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I do not recommend launching yourself into this quotation
when asked what practical skills you acquired at St. John’s
College, though if you decide to do so, take a deep breath, and
deliver it with panache. You can, however, capture the essence
of what Aristotle says in your own words.
In my own words, I say that, as a result of your liberal
education, you are better able to judge when an argument or
account is adequate and when it is not. When it is inadequate,
you are more capable of seeing how it is deficient and what
would need to be addressed to alleviate this shortcoming. Such
judgment can be brought to bear on any argument, regardless
of the field. If the argument includes technical language, all
you need is the time to look up the definitions of these words
before you are able to proceed as you would with any other
account. At bottom, such an argument is no different from any
other.
To Aristotle’s description, I would add that, as a result of
your education, you are now better able to admit when you do
not know something, and to do so without embarrassment. Do
not underestimate the value of this intellectual honesty. It will
help you to continue to learn. In addition, it will be greatly
appreciated by other people, most of whom are anxious about
their own ignorance, but are afraid to admit that they do not
know. It can be a tremendous relief to encounter someone who
can say without shame that he does not know, but that he wants
to learn.
This training in judgment—in clear thinking—is an
essential part of a liberal education. And it can indeed help you
to advance your career. I advise you, therefore, to consider how
you can describe this skill to others so that you can represent it
with the full strength that it deserves and in a manner that is
readily apparent to others. If you do this, you will be well
equipped to respond to those who want to know how you can
apply what you learned to the workplace.
This account of your education, however, is neither
complete nor does it capture the most important element of
VAN BOXEL
77
education. Aristotle would say that, in order truly to judge well,
one must have a satisfactory understanding of the ultimate end
at which one aims. It is not enough to have an idea of the
proximate goal that one seeks to fulfill. One must have
adequate knowledge of whether and how this proximate goal
accords with the highest and most comprehensive goal at
which human beings can and should aim. Without a sufficient
account of this authoritative, supreme good—the Good—no
judgment is adequate, strictly speaking, and consequently one
cannot truly be said to know. Thus, any education can and must
be considered in terms of whether and how it can contribute to
the Good. Regarding questions about whether your education
here was practical, therefore, the real issue is not whether this
education will contribute to your employment opportunities,
but whether it contributes to your knowledge of the Good. And
the real question about your job is not whether your education
has made you suitable for it, but whether it can contribute to
your ability to lead a good life.
No, I will not let go of the highest account of education to
which Nietzsche alludes and which, I dare say, all great
thinkers share. Moreover, I expect that you empathize with me
in my refusal to forgo these highest goals.
While some of you came to St. John’s partly in order to
advance your career, I doubt that any of you came here
primarily for this reason. You came because you had
questions—questions that perhaps you could not quite articulate, even to yourself, but that you could not put aside. As you
made your way through the works of our Program, I suspect
many of you began to recognize your questions reflected back
to you in the Great Books: “What is justice?” “What is love or
friendship?” “What kind of beings are we, and what is our
place in this world?”
Many and perhaps all of these questions arise from a
common origin: the yearning to have a good life, combined
with the realization that you do not know clearly enough what
this is. I suspect, in other words, that the fundamental reason
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why you came here was because you thought this education
might help you to understand the Good.
Since our human life is limited, and since the clock is
already ticking on the time that we have, this question of the
Good is urgent. No one wants to realize at the end of his life
that he misused or wasted his time. And since none of us know
how much time we have, it is foolish for any of us to postpone
the question of the Good indefinitely.
Such talk of mortality and the Good sounds very serious.
Well, what did you expect? Has anything valuable that you
have read or discussed here been unserious? Thankfully,
seriousness does not have to be grave. You need only recall the
company you have kept as you have pursued your questions,
and you will feel, not weighted down, but elevated by the
astounding souls who have walked alongside you.
Here is Plato, on the same journey as you, speaking with a
voice as nuanced and relevant as it was some 2,400 years ago.
With a touch of mischief, he doubles himself, adopting the
voice of Socrates, who recollects taking this same path, just a
day earlier: “I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, son of Ariston.”4
Another man introduces himself with the words: “Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the
Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment
that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war.”5
He hands you his book, which contains his thoughts about your
shared questions, saying as he does so: “I have written my
work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the
moment, but as a possession for all time.”6
Homer turns his blind eyes upon you and points to Achilles
and Odysseus, each of whom tackles the questions of the good
life and what it means to be a good human being. Shakespeare
speaks to you with a profundity that is surely expressed in
some of the most beautiful language ever heard. Nietzsche
reaffirms life with a cry from his electric soul: “We still feel it,
the whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow.”7
REFLECTIONS | VAN BOXEL
79
These souls are among the best students and teachers ever
to have lived. Their greatness consists largely in the fact that
they investigated the most serious eternal questions with
unmatched comprehensiveness and depth. What have you
learned from them about the Good?
If you have learned anything, it is that, when speaking to
one who does not already know the answer, you cannot
respond meaningfully to this question in a single sentence or
two. You might say, for example, that they taught you that the
good life is the philosophic life or the life devoted to the
Divine, but then you would have to explain what philosophy or
the Divine is and what it would mean to dedicate your life to
such things.
While there are answers to these questions, each answer
leads to a new question—and this is not the occasion for a long
conversation. It is the occasion, however, to remind you that all
of these great students and teachers spent their lives engaged
with such questions. Inquiry is thereby shown to be central to,
if not the essence of, a good human life. Furthermore—and this
is worth emphasizing, since you are have now exited the
Master’s Program—these students were able to learn from virtually everything and everyone, if not directly, then indirectly.
Life after your M.A. may not be as leisurely as it was when you
were a student, but you can and will find opportunities to learn,
if only you come to embrace life itself as a learning opportunity.
I hope and expect that something of this way of life has
become a part of you and that, if you look around now at the
faces of your fellow students, you will see in their eyes something of the souls of those great human beings who are your
models.
Continue to be thoughtful. Be open-minded. Retain the
flexibility of soul that is necessary for continued learning. In
sum, keep the goal of a good life always before you. Use the
Good as your North Star to guide every significant action and
decision you make. Doing this will not guarantee that you
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always make the right decision, but it will mean that you will
have done the best that you could do, and that, whatever contingencies you may face, you will have led the best life that is
possible for you.
Let me conclude with one of Plato’s favorite valedictions:
“Have success in action, and do what is good.”8
NOTES
1. Friedrich Neitzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for
Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 97-98.
2. Ibid., 99.
3. Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, 639a2-15, trans. David Bolotin.
4. Plato, Republic, trans. Allen Bloom, 2nd ed., (New York: Basic
Books, 1991), 3.
5. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, in The Landmark
Thucydides, ed. Robert B.Strassler (New York: Free Press, 2008), 3.
6. Ibid., 16.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kauffmann
(New York: Vintage, 1989), 3.
8. Plato, Republic, 303 and 472.
POETRY | ZUCKERMAN
To the New Recruits
Elliott Zuckerman
From now on I’ll refer to you as waiters,
even those whose ears do not resemble
the picture in the magazine.
You will be issued the standard bill of fare
including a list of all the famous sauces
and all the substitutions we allow.
You’ll wear the studded cuff
the collar and the pied cravat
and those who can will wear the earrings
that fascinate the men who dine here,
whether they arrive by pre-arrangement
or enter dazed directly from the street.
I ask you not to fall in love.
When two of you collide, just smile,
stand up again and go about your business.
The moppers will come running.
Ignore the murmuring of the clients who
deplore the loss of sequence in the dance.
After a month or two you’ll get the steps
and grow to like the music.
Then we can film the service.
We’ll play it back at half the pace of life
And next we’ll show it speeded up.
The comic rondo will delight us all.
81
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REVIEWS
83
DELPHIC EXAMINATIONS
David Leibowitz, The Ironic Defense of
Socrates: Plato’s Apology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
204 pages, $80.
Book Review by David Bolotin
David Leibowitz’s book on Plato’s Apology of Socrates is in the
first place a thorough and penetrating interpretation of the dialogue. It also claims, however, and attempts to show, that the
Apology is the key to the entire Platonic corpus, and to this end it
includes thoughtful interpretations of various aspects of other
dialogues. Yet the book’s ultimate ambition goes much further
even than this. For its chief aim is to show, in Leibowitz’s words,
“that Plato’s Socrates is not just a colorful and quirky figure from
the distant past, but an unrivaled guide to the good life—the
thoughtful life—who is as relevant today as he was in ancient
Athens” (1).* Thus, Leibowitz combines his interpretations with
arguments for the truth of the Socratic positions that he has
brought to light. The book even includes arguments in Leibowitz’s own name that reply to objections a reader might make to
Socratic views. Now it is likely to be younger readers who are
most open to the question of whether Plato’s Socrates is an
unrivaled guide to the good life, and thus the book’s primary
audience is not other scholars but these younger readers. But
Leibowitz asks of his readers that they follow him in his
scholarly, and even more than scholarly, attention to the details of
Plato’s text (24-25). And his reason for doing so is indicated in his
book’s title. Socrates was ready and even wanted, on Leibowitz’s
* Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in The Ironic Defense of Socrates:
Plato’s Apology.
David Bolotin is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe.
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view, to be convicted at his trial and executed, out of a wish to
promote the cause of philosophy by becoming a martyr for it. But
this wish required him to explain to potential philosophers what
philosophy is while concealing from the other citizens—even as
he was courting death—those aspects of it that, as he thought,
could never become publicly acceptable (59-60, 154-160). And in
order to achieve all this in a single address, Socrates had to speak
ironically, a term that Leibowitz well explains to mean speaking
“in a ‘double’ fashion so as to be understood differently by
different listeners” (18). But this implies that Socrates’ deepest
thoughts could be revealed only in hints, whose intended meaning
could come to light only though careful attention to his words. We
who have the good fortune to be able to study these words as
Plato presented them must therefore pay great attention to subtle
details of Plato’s text. Leibowitz himself has surely done this, and
though his account of the philosophic life and his argument for its
being the good life are ultimately stated with great directness, he
develops them in stages, following Socrates’ own guidance,
through an almost line-by-line reading of the Apology.
It would be too large a task for me to comment on Leibowitz’s work in its entirety. So I shall limit myself instead to what
he himself presents as the core of his account, his interpretation
of Socrates’ story of the Delphic oracle. According to Leibowitz,
this story is a fiction, whose purpose is to call attention, as
inoffensively as possible, to the central theoretical crisis in
Socrates’ life. As we know from the Phaedo and from Aristophanes’ Clouds, Socrates in his youth was a student of natural
philosophy. But the Phaedo also teaches us that Socrates’ study of
nature led him to an impasse, since he realized that he could not
be certain of the causes, i.e., the necessary causes, why things
come into being, are as they are, and perish. Recognizing the
limits of his knowledge of nature, Socrates also came to recognize
that he could not even be certain that there is nature, which he
understood as a necessity that limits what a being or class of
beings can do or suffer. The implications of this awareness of
ignorance were made more acute by his recognition that many
REVIEWS | BOLOTIN
85
people at least implicitly deny that there is nature, since they
believe in gods with unlimited power to intervene in the world.
Moreover, at least some of these believers claim to have had
evidence of there being such gods from their own experience of
them. Thus, Socrates had to admit that, for all he knew, the study
of “nature” was a pseudo-science based on a false premise, and
also a turning away from the deepest human evidence of truth.
According to Leibowitz, it was this crisis resulting from Socrates’
youthful pursuit of natural philosophy that led him to the crossexaminations that he pretended to undertake at the instigation of
the Delphic oracle. In keeping with this suggestion, Leibowitz
presents these examinations primarily as attempts by Socrates to
learn that his interlocutors lacked the evidence of omnipotent
gods that they thought they possessed—or in other words, that
what they had thought of as evidence was illusory. For if he could
know this about his interlocutors, then even though he lacked
certainty that natural necessities are at the root of things, he could
at least know that he knew no one else with a firmer hypothesis
(63-69). Leibowitz also argues that there was a second reason for
Socrates’ “Delphic” examinations, even on the assumption that he
could successfully refute his interlocutors’ claims to superhuman
wisdom. For he says that Socrates came to doubt, even on the
assumption that there is no such wisdom, whether the life of
philosophy is the best or happiest life, and he interprets the crossexaminations as having the subordinate aim of confirming that it
is (72-73).
In discussing Leibowitz’s interpretation of Socrates’
“Delphic” activity, I will stress what I see as difficulties with his
account rather than its merits. This is not because I am blind to
these merits—which seem to me to be quite considerable—or that
I disagree with Leibowitz about what is primarily at stake in
Socrates’ examinations—which I do not. But since I believe that
he does not give an adequate account of this central aspect of
Socrates’ life, I feel compelled to say why.
Let me begin with the second of the two reasons that Leibowitz gives for Socrates’ Delphic examinations, since it is the one
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he focuses on first in his own elaboration. To repeat, Leibowitz
claims that Socrates had to examine the various classes of nonphilosophers in order “to confirm that the life of philosophy or
science, or to speak more cautiously, the life based on human
wisdom, is the best or happiest life if indeed there is no ‘superhuman wisdom’ to guide us” (72). And the first thing I would say
about this suggestion is that I can see little if any evidence for it
in Plato’s text. The only time that Socrates even mentions the
question of whether his life is preferable to those of his interlocutors, as distinct from the question of whether he is wiser than
they—though even here it is not simply distinct from it—is in the
context of his examination of the craftsmen. And the reason he
asks it seems to be that he had to grant to the craftsmen a superiority of sorts in wisdom, since they were wise in their crafts, even
though, like his other interlocutors, they turned out to suppose
falsely that they were wise with regard to the greatest things. For
that reason he asked himself whether he would prefer to be as he
was, neither wise in their wisdom nor ignorant in their ignorance,
or to be as they were; and he replied that it was better for him to
be as he was. But apart from this, Socrates’ account of his examinations deals only with the question of whether he was wiser than
his interlocutors. It is true, of course, that he will later claim that
his own way of life is “the greatest good” (or, perhaps more
precisely, “a very great good”) for a human being, and that “the
unexamined life is not livable for a human being” (Apology of
Socrates 38a1-7). But he never suggests that these conclusions
relied on any fruits of his examinations other than the knowledge
he gained of his interlocutors’ inferiority in wisdom.
Further difficulties with this suggestion of Leibowitz’s
emerge when we consider his discussion of it in more detail.
Leibowitz stresses, and rightly, that after coming to the conclusion that the first political man he examined was not wise,
Socrates “did not leave it at that. Instead, he tried to show him
both that he thought he was wise and that he was not. . . . In short,
Socrates exposed him as a fraud” (75). Not surprisingly, this
caused Socrates to be hated, both by the politician and by many
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of the bystanders, and Leibowitz asks what Socrates’ reason could
have been for “the seeming malice of his procedure. Why did he
rub the man’s nose in his foolishness” (75)? Dismissing what I
agree is the implausible suggestion that Socrates hoped to steer
the politician toward philosophy, Leibowitz proposes an answer
to his question in terms of Socrates’ eagerness to establish—even
assuming “that he is already confident that no superhuman
wisdom (divine guidance) exists”—that “philosophy is the best
way of life for any human being capable of living it” (77-78). And
he suggests that Socrates hoped to confirm this belief by prompting his interlocutors, once they saw that they lacked wisdom
about the noble and good, about which he questioned them, to
acknowledge that their lives appeared “fundamentally defective
or unsatisfying” (78). In other words, Socrates confirms that
philosophy is the best way of life by showing that everyone can
in principle be brought to agree with him that their alternative
ways of life are unsatisfying. Ultimately, then, there is no dispute,
since the philosopher is the only one whose belief in the goodness
of his life can be maintained in the face of scrutiny. According to
Leibowitz, Socrates’ interlocutor will come to feel dissatisfied
with his life because the beliefs that Socrates shows to be false or
inconsistent are central to his way of life. But how will Socrates’
interlocutor reveal his dissatisfaction with his life? Leibowitz
says that he will do so by “getting angry at Socrates. . . , blaming
him for his distress, perhaps even coming to hate him” (79). This
anger and hatred will reveal the pain he feels once he sees not
only that Socrates’ refutation is sound, but also that it destroys a
prop on which his satisfaction with life has depended. And
accordingly, “anger and possibly even hatred are part of the
confirmation that Socrates seeks, not unintended, or altogether
unintended, byproducts of his examinations. In many cases, they
may be the only confirmation available” (79).
But as I said, there are difficulties with this account. In the
first place, it assumes that Socrates is successful in showing his
interlocutors that they are unwise, or that their fundamental
beliefs are false. But Socrates says explicitly, in the only case
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where he describes at length this aspect of his examinations, that
his (first) interlocutor did not see this, but that in Socrates’ view
he continued to suppose that he was wise (Apology of Socrates
21d4-5). According to Leibowitz, however, this continuance of
his false belief, and therefore also his continuing sense of satisfaction with his life, was the result of “powerful defenses,” which
allow people to “bury this awareness [viz., that their lives are
unsatisfactory] by the next day or even the next minute” (79-80).
“But this changes nothing,” he continues. “For in their one
moment of clarity, they themselves have judged their lives to be
defective” (80). Socrates’ first interlocutor has revealed this judgment by his anger, or more precisely, “the disturbing insight that
leads to his anger is clouded by or in the anger itself,” so that
Socrates’ attempt to show him that he was not wise “both did and
did not succeed” and “its success was partial and unenduring”
(80-81). This is how Leibowitz can square his account with Socrates’ unambiguous statement that he thought he had not succeeded in his attempt to show this interlocutor that he was not
wise.
But in fact Leibowitz’s suggestion is unsupported by the text
of the Apology. On the basis of the dialogue, it makes more sense
to say that Socrates’ interlocutors, or at least those among them
who became angry at him, never stopped believing that they knew
what the noble and good (or virtue) was, even when their assertions about it were refuted. They may have recognized that they
were unable to give an adequate account of it in the face of
Socrates’ questions, but this meant only in their view that they
were unable to give adequate expression to what they knew (cf.
Meno 79e7-80b4; Laches 194a7-b4, 200b2-4). And so their anger
at Socrates must not have stemmed from the pain of becoming
aware of their ignorance, and thus dissatisfied with their lives, but
rather from the more common pain of being insulted (cf. Meno
94e3-95a3). Indeed, an additional difficulty with Leibowitz’s
suggestion is that an interlocutor’s anger could never reveal
clearly that its source was anything other than this more obvious
one. Leibowitz acknowledges the difficulty of interpreting an
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interlocutor’s anger, but he dismisses it on inadequate grounds,
with a mere assertion that in practice it “may not be very difficult”
to distinguish the anger that he says Socrates is looking for from
other kinds (79).1
But if Socrates’ attempt to make his (older) interlocutors
aware of their ignorance was not aimed at eliciting the kind of
anger and hatred that Leibowitz suggests it was, what was its
purpose? I am not certain of the ultimate answer to this question,
but the most plausible beginning point is that Socrates must have
wanted to confirm what he in fact discovered, that he would be
unable to show them their ignorance of virtue, or in other words
that their confusion about it was ineradicably deep-seated or that
they had a stake in holding on to this confusion. This discovery
must have been important enough to Socrates that he was willing
to incur the anger and hatred that he knew he would arouse in the
course of coming to it. But he was not looking for the anger itself.
Leibowitz has given a surprising amount of weight to what he
regards as Socrates’ attempt to discover through conversation that
his interlocutors, in addition to being his inferiors in wisdom,
lived less satisfying lives than his own. His Socrates does not
assume that his discovery of their lack of wisdom, or their
confusion about virtue, is sufficient to confirm the superiority of
his life to theirs. They themselves must be made to see, if only
partially and only for a moment, that their lives are unsatisfying.
Leibowitz argues for the significance of such a moment by
reminding his readers that we human beings want more than
illusory happiness, such as the “happiness” of a deceived cuckold,
but a contentment rooted in truth (82-84). But what if it turned out
that some human beings were satisfied with illusory happiness, or
that their contentment with their lives was not affected, even for
a moment, by the discovery that they were based on falsehood?
How could this imagined state of affairs have been of any concern
to a man like Socrates? Would it have made him doubt the superiority of his life to theirs? Hardly. And more generally, in order to
be convinced of the choiceworthiness of the philosophic life,
Socrates did not need to burst other people’s bubbles.
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Leibowitz’s belief that Socrates deliberately sought to
provoke anger and even hatred in his interlocutors has an unfortunate bearing, it seems to me, on the tone of his own writing. For
too often he expresses his unavoidably challenging views with
unnecessary and un-Socratic harshness, a harshness that could
well provoke anger and hatred, especially in older readers. I have
already cited his claim that Socrates exposed the first of his
examinees “as a fraud,” and that he rubbed his nose “in his
foolishness.” Along the same lines, he claims later in the book
that those refuted by Socrates’ youthful imitators—their fathers,
or at least men of their fathers’ generation—act “as if Socrates
were to blame for their own stupidity.” And he adds that when
they are asked how Socrates corrupts the youth, as they accuse
him of doing, they are “of course not about to reply, ‘by teaching
the young to expose men like me for the fools and frauds we
really are!’” (105). Such language on Leibowitz’s part seems to
me to show a failure to appreciate the respect—even intellectual
respect—that Socrates, like any sane man, would naturally feel
for at least some of those who turn out to be confused about the
questions he raises. Another example of Leibowitz’s harshness is
his suggestion that “ordinary decency” (which he here distinguishes from the “deeper and more solid decency” of the
philosopher) is “perhaps the chief enemy” of philosophy (109).
Or consider his claim that Socrates is confident, even before
conversing with his typical interlocutor, that “his moral beliefs are
always false. . . , in the first place because they are sure to
presume the existence of ‘high’ things. . . , yet Socrates knows
through his own reflection that highness in the relevant sense is
literally inconceivable” (96). A footnote makes clear that by
“highness in the relevant sense” Leibowitz means “intrinsic worth
or goodness” (97). And later in this footnote he adds, “Given the
unintelligibility of the notion [viz., of intrinsic worth or
goodness], it is a cause for wonder, then, that belief in high things
has such extraordinary vitality in people’s lives” (97). Now in
company with Kant, as well as most ordinary people, I disagree
with Leibowitz’s assertion that intrinsic worth or goodness is an
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unintelligible notion (whether or not it is as fundamental a
concern for us as Kant thinks it is). But even apart from this, why
does Leibowitz choose to assign the word “high”—even if
slightly qualified at first—to a notion that he rejects as unintelligible? Later in this footnote he admits, “[T]o deny that there are
high things is not, of course, to deny that there are admirable or
beautiful ones” (97). But this admission rings hollow in the wake
of his initial rejection of the very notion of highness. And readers
of what he calls ordinary decency, who are likely to be deeply
attached to the notion of highness, whether or not they understand
it adequately, are therefore also likely to feel anger and hatred
toward a way of life that is said to reject it out of hand. Under less
liberal conditions than those which prevail now in the West, such
feelings could lead to a renewal of the persecution of philosophy.
Even now, they are likely to stand in the way of Leibowitz’s
attempt to guide the most promising young people toward the
philosophic life (cf. 174). And I fear that Leibowitz’s apparent
indifference to these concerns—in practice, if not in principle (cf.
59-60)—is at least partly rooted in his view of Socrates as a man
who deliberately sought to provoke anger and hatred.
But let me turn now to the primary reason that Leibowitz
gives for Socrates’ Delphic examinations, namely, his concern to
meet the theoretical challenge to philosophy posed by those who
claim to have evidence of an omnipotent god or gods. For, to
repeat, this claim directly calls into question the presupposition of
philosophy that there are natural or necessary limits to all possible
change. Now it is not immediately apparent, to say the least, to
the reader of Plato that Socrates’ Delphic examinations had this
anti-theological motive. But Leibowitz’s excellent interpretation
of many large and small details of the Apology (and of other
dialogues) might well convince even a reader who, unlike me,
was not already persuaded of it that this view was sound.
However, Leibowitz’s account of the precise manner in which
Socrates’ refutations aim to meet this challenge to philosophy
seems to me to be problematic, both in itself and in terms of the
textual evidence that he claims for it. According to Leibowitz,
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Socrates thought that his Delphic conversations, which were
primarily about virtue, “are somehow the key to answering the
question of whether or not there are gods, and hence whether or
not philosophy in the full sense is possible” (71). More precisely,
I would say, and in keeping with the bulk of Leibowitz’s argument
(e.g., 67-68, 72), Socrates thought that they were somehow the
key to answering the question of whether or not human beings
have genuine evidence of there being gods. In Leibowitz’s view,
Socrates suspected that the belief that one has experienced the
presence of a god, a belief whose soundness—or, as I would say,
the alleged evidence for which—he could not dispute directly,
“rests on other false beliefs” (88), about virtue or morality, whose
falsity he thought he could show. Accordingly, his refutations are
intended to lead his pious interlocutors, once they have seen the
falsity of their own beliefs about virtue, to come to understand, if
only for a moment, that what they previously may have interpreted as experience of the supernatural was no such thing.
Leibowitz suggests that these interlocutors would perhaps reveal
their loss of faith in what they had taken to be their experience of
a god “by getting angry,” and he adds that “their reaction to what
he showed them must have been a crucial part of his confirmation
of the possibility of philosophy” (88, cf. 96).
I have the same doubts about this last suggestion as I do about
Leibowitz’s earlier suggestion that Socrates intended to provoke
in his interlocutors a momentary awareness of ignorance about
virtue and an angry response to it. But leaving this aside, let us see
how he supports his more fundamental claim—that according to
Socrates, belief that one has experienced the presence of a god
rests on one’s beliefs about virtue or morality. He leads up to this
suggestion through his account of Socrates’ examinations of the
poets, which he begins by quoting from Socrates’ own report of
these examinations. What Socrates says, in Leibowitz’s translation, is that he “soon came to know . . . that the poets do not
make what they make by wisdom, but by some sort of nature and
by divine inspiration, like the prophets and those who deliver
oracles. For they too say many noble things, but they know
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nothing of what they speak. And it was evident to me that the
poets also are affected in the same sort of way (22b8-c4)” (86).
According to Leibowitz, this passage means more than what it
says clearly, which is that the poets, like the prophets and those
who deliver oracles, do not speak as they do by wisdom or with
knowledge of what they are speaking about. Leibowitz thinks it
also means that these three classes are all “consciously or unconsciously . . . makers [not merely of poems and other verses, but]
of gods and of reports of seeming evidence of gods,” and that they
make these gods and these reports about gods by nature and not
by divine inspiration (87-88). Now I do not accept this interpretation of the text or the argument leading up to it, but rather than
going into tedious and I think unnecessary detail, let me say only
what seems to me most important: by presenting Socrates as
denying that his interlocutors were divinely inspired—though
Socrates explicitly asserts that they were, whether or not he meant
it literally (cf. Philebus 15e1)—Leibowitz weakens the focus of
Socrates’ concern, which was not to learn what cannot be learned,
namely, that there are no gods and no divine inspiration, but rather
to learn that the poets and the others do not possess knowledge of
what they speak about (which would of course include the gods).
But to continue with Leibowitz’s account, he goes on to ask,
“How has Socrates confirmed . . . that all three classes make what
they make by nature and not by wisdom or divine inspiration?
How has he to this extent settled the question of the gods? He
explains briefly with the words, ‘for (γάρ) they too’—the prophets
and those who deliver oracles as well as the poets—‘say many
noble things’—he does not say true things—of which they know
nothing. In other words, he implies that the belief that one has
been inspired by a god rests on other false beliefs about the
noble” (88). But these words of Socrates, which are presented by
Leibowitz as an answer to his question of how Socrates has
settled the question of the gods (to the extent at least of ruling out
that poets or prophets are divinely inspired), are clearly intended
rather by Socrates to explain why he has just likened the prophets
and those who deliver oracles to the poets. And from all that I can
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see, Socrates is not concerned here to settle the question of the
gods, except to the extent that his interlocutors’ claim to knowledge of them can be successfully challenged through the discovery that they say the many beautiful things they do—primarily, as
I agree, about virtue and about the noble, rather than the gods (cf.
Republic 598d7-e4, 599c6-e1, 600e5-6; Ion 531c2-d2)—without
knowledge of what they are speaking about.
But precisely how could the discovery of such ignorance on
the part of his interlocutors help Socrates make any progress at all
with respect to his question about the gods? Leibowitz addresses
this question directly in a section of his book entitled “Socrates’
Approach to the Theological Problem” (92). He contends that
Socrates tries to show his interlocutors, or at least those among
them who claim to have had “vivid and detailed experience of a
god,” that “the moral content of their experience—the divine
command, let us say—is incompatible with the moral perfection . . . that they demand, perhaps without knowing it, of god”
(93). “Consciously or unconsciously,” as Leibowitz elaborates a
bit later, “the believer raises the claim that god’s commandments
and actions are just, and this claim can be examined” (94). And,
returning to the original passage, “In the most successful cases the
interlocutors then come to doubt, at least for a time, that their
experience was genuinely divine” (93). This would of course
corroborate Socrates’ own suspicion. Leibowitz illustrates the
possibility of such conversations by referring to Socrates’
refutation of the definition of justice that he attributes to Cephalus
at the beginning of the Republic. In Leibowitz’s view, Cephalus’
belief that it is a requirement of justice always to return what one
has taken—to the extent, at least, that this really was his belief—
seems to have its origin, or to find support, in dreams in which a
Zeus-like figure commanded him to pay all his debts or be
tormented forever. On this view, and assuming that Cephalus
really held this belief about justice, Socrates would have hoped to
confirm that Cephalus would not respond to a reasonable critique
of this belief by objecting that a god’s commands must be obeyed
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whether or not they are just or seem just to our human reason, but
would instead come to doubt that his dreams were really divine.
This account, however, of Socrates’ approach to the
theological problem suffers in the first place from a lack of textual
evidence. Leibowitz’s premise that Socrates’ interlocutors
thought of morality or virtue as consisting in obedience to
divinely revealed commands seems to me to find no support,
except in the Euthyphro, where the virtue in question is piety (cf.
Leo Strauss, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, 134-35). The only
other instance I can think of where interlocutors in a Platonic
dialogue speak of virtue as obedience to divine commands, and
where their beliefs about what the gods have commanded are
transformed in the wake of a rational critique of their opinions
about virtue, is in the Laws. But in the Laws, the philosophic
character is not Socrates, but an Athenian stranger. And though
this stranger does indeed seem to be a kind of fictional “Socrates”
(who chose to flee Athens rather than accept death at the hands of
the city), his intention is not to provide a theoretical defense of the
possibility of philosophy, but rather to help frame a code of laws
for a newly founded city in Crete in which philosophy would, to
the extent possible, have legal sanction. Now it is true, as these
two instances suggest, that Leibowitz’s account does indeed
capture a genuine aspect of Socratic thought. But I see no
evidence that it gives an adequate picture of what Socrates hoped
to learn about the gods, or about our knowledge of them, from his
Delphic examinations.
Moreover, there is at least one substantive difficulty with
Leibowitz’s account, a difficulty that he raises himself, namely,
that it deals only with those interlocutors who believe that the
gods are just, and not with anyone who believes that they are
“unjust or unconcerned with justice” (95). Now for Leibowitz to
state the objection in this way is perhaps unfair to his own
argument, since he has just said that in Socrates’ view the believer
“consciously or unconsciously” (94) claims that god’s commandments and actions are just, and he has argued that Socrates
confirmed this view by seeing his interlocutors’ response to his
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refutations. But at all events, Leibowitz goes on to downplay the
significance of this objection by claiming, as he suspects that
Socrates discovered, that the belief in gods who are unjust or
unconcerned with justice is both rare and “almost never
supported—at least among believers who are even modestly
educated and sane—by the experience of revelation, that is, by
seeming evidence that natural philosophy cannot assess” (95).
Still, he acknowledges that “Socrates’ approach to the theological
problem cannot tie up every loose end,” and that “the possibility
of revelation from an amoral, willful, or radically mysterious god
cannot be ruled out” (95). But this last is a very serious admission.
For whatever may be the case about belief in gods who are unjust
or unconcerned with justice, the belief in a god who is radically
mysterious—in his actions, and even in his commands—has been
held by thoughtful people throughout the centuries (cf.
Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, III 25-26). For Socrates to
leave unchallenged, then, the alleged evidence of those who claim
to have had experience of such a god would be to fail to respond
to a most serious objection to the possibility of philosophy.2
But let me turn to Leibowitz’s most important reason for
focusing only on believers who believe in (intelligibly) just gods,
a reason that comes to light in what is also his most important
discussion of the confusion about morality that he thinks these
refutations disclose. Leibowitz claims that Socrates thought of
morality or virtue as something that people regard as the source
of happiness, not by constituting happiness itself, but by
promising it as a deserved reward. But since virtue itself, as the
argument continues, does not deliver this reward, it can have the
power that people think it has only if there are gods who do
deliver it. “Virtue, one can perhaps say, is a claim on the attention
and concern of just gods” (177). Leibowitz goes on to argue that
Socrates rejected the belief in just gods on several grounds, but
chiefly because the concern for virtue that it presupposes (and to
which it also gives support) rests, as he claims that Socrates
thought, on a confused and even contradictory view of our own
motivation. Leibowitz presents what he sees as this contradiction
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in the following way. He begins by observing that “virtue, seen in
the first place as noble, inspires devotion” (178). But then he says
that “devotion would seem to be harmful, if only because it
distracts us from the pursuit of our own good” (178). And since,
as he reminds us that Socrates claimed, no one voluntarily (or
knowingly) harms himself, he asks how voluntary devotion is
possible. His proposed answer to this question is that devotion to
virtue gives us hope that we will obtain—because we deserve to
obtain—a greater good than anything we might give up as a result
of such devotion. It is, then, as he says that Socrates suggests, “the
expectation, perhaps only half-conscious, of benefit to oneself
that makes devotion possible” (179). But this line of reasoning,
Leibowitz continues, which would seem to establish the possibility of voluntary devotion, “suggests instead the impossibility of
all devotion. For if benefit to oneself—as Socrates implies—is
our ultimate consideration, no true devotion is possible, for
devotion embraced as a benefit is not true devotion” (179). And
“if men are never truly devoted, they never meet the condition of
deserving rewards as they understand that condition” (179).
However, most of us never face up to this truth about our
motivation, and it is through this failure that we can preserve the
hopes that our attachment to virtue inspires. Accordingly,
Leibowitz concludes, our attachment to virtue, or at least the kind
of virtue that arouses hope in rewards from the gods, is rooted in
the contradictory thought that what we most care for is both the
noble and our own happiness.
This is a powerfully stated argument, as it seems to me, and I
am sympathetic to it, having even tentatively proposed something
similar to it in print myself. But Leibowitz proposes his argument
without tentativeness, and I must therefore say that in my view he
has failed to make his case. I will leave aside the difficulty that his
description of the believer as someone who thinks he deserves
divine rewards shows a surprising insensitivity to the fact that at
least the most thoughtful believers regard themselves as unworthy
to receive the blessings they hope for. For even apart from this,
the argument fails to show that the believer has contradictory
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thoughts about what he most cares for. A believer will readily
grant to Leibowitz that he cares very much about his own good or
his own happiness, which he hopes for both in this world and the
next. But he would deny that this is what he loves or cares for
most (cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, qu.26, a.3).
He might fear that, because of his weakness, a loss of hope for his
own happiness could undermine his attachment to virtue, but he
would not believe that it would necessarily do so, and he might
even be thankful never to have experienced or yielded to such loss
of hope. And Leibowitz’s argument, it seems to me, has done
nothing to show that the believer’s view of himself is wrong. The
most he has done is to attribute to Socrates the claim that we care
mostly for our own good. But I don’t see his evidence even for
this assertion. What he apparently relies on is Socrates’ exhortation to virtue, “Not from money comes virtue, but from virtue
comes money and all of the other good things for human beings
(30a-b).” Leibowitz interprets this exhortation to mean that “men
should care above all for virtue, and for virtue for the sake of the
good things it brings. Men should and should not care above all
for virtue” (178). It is the latter of these conflicting claims that he
thinks Socrates means seriously. But Socrates’ statement that all
good things come from virtue does not say, as Leibowitz says it
does, that men should care for virtue for the sake of the good
things it brings, and surely not for the sake of these good things
above all. Socrates knew, of course, that the many among his
listeners might take him to be saying this. But that he made it easy
for them to do so means only that he understood them well
enough to know that he could not reach them with a higher
appeal. Leibowitz has therefore not shown that our own good is
our ultimate concern even according to Socrates. And so he has
also not shown, and not even shown that it was Socrates’ view,
that a believer’s hope for divine rewards rests on self-contradictory thoughts about what he cares for most.3 And this means,
finally, that he has neither undermined nor shown that Socrates
thought he had undermined the basis for this hope on the part of
the believer.
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It seems to me, then, that Leibowitz has not explained with
sufficient clarity what Socrates wished to accomplish through his
Delphic examinations or how he sought to accomplish it. In
particular, he has not explained adequately how Socrates hoped to
meet the challenge posed to philosophy or the study of nature by
those who claim to have evidence of miraculous gods. On the
other hand, he has outlined this challenge in an unusually
compelling way, and he has made a persuasive case that the
Apology presents the core of Socrates’ response to it. For this
merit, among many others, we should be grateful to Leibowitz for
his book. Even if he has not shown, as he intended to show, that
Socrates is an unrivaled guide to the good life, he has, I think,
shown that this is at least a serious possibility, and he will help his
best readers to keep considering the evidence for and against it on
their own.
NOTES
1. In a footnote, Leibowitz refers to Callicles’ anger in the Gorgias as a clear
case of what he calls the deeper kind of anger, but he offers no evidence that
Callicles ever becomes aware of his ignorance of virtue, as I believe he does
not. (Moreover, at the moment when he seems to come closest to that
awareness, at Gorgias 513c4-6, he is not angry at Socrates.)
2. I suspect that Leibowitz thinks that the possibility of revelation from a
radically mysterious god can indeed be ruled out, at least to some extent, on
the basis of what he speaks of as a necessary “second branch” of Socrates’
Delphic examinations, or the conversations he had with those “promising”
young people who could go “to the end of the road” with him in their
critique of our ordinary moral beliefs. Accordingly, when he says that
Socrates sought to determine “whether for them, as for himself, all traces of
seemingly divine experience eventually disappear,” I think he meant to
include in this even the apparent experience of a radically mysterious god
(98-100; cf. 134: “the so-called experience of the gods of the city, and
indeed of any gods”). But even if one admitted for the sake of argument that
this was Socrates’ intention and that he learned what he hoped to learn from
his most promising interlocutors, this would not be adequate to the question
at hand unless one could show the bearing of these conversations with
regard to his examinations of his more typical interlocutors. After all, a
radically mysterious god, and even a not so mysterious god, might be disin-
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TOLERATION
clined to reveal himself to people like Socrates. And I do not think that
Leibowitz has given an adequate account of the bearing of this “second
branch” of Socrates’ Delphic examinations.
3. There is perhaps the outline of a stronger argument for Leibowitz’s view
of our ultimate concern in his discussion of Glaucon on pages 96 and 97.
But even there I think he has failed to present an adequate case. In this
connection, I wonder about Leibowitz’s claim, in note 72 on page 99, that
Socrates would like to know “whether those who reconcile themselves to
unfathomable gods and inexpressible divine experiences could also, if
brought to see the truth about highness, reconcile themselves to the unintelligible nobility and goodness of the commands that these allegedly divine
experiences communicate.” For if Socrates knows, as Leibowitz claims he
knows, that “the noble and good,” or virtue, “does not exist” (180), because
it rests on contradictory thoughts about our motives, why would he care
whether others who appeared to understand his argument would accept its
conclusion? If they did not accept the conclusion, wouldn’t he assume that
they had not understood the argument?
Eva Brann, Homage to Americans
Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2010. 273
pages, $19.95.
Book Review by Janet Dougherty
Eva Brann’s Homage to Americans is an expression of heartfelt,
genuine, and ungrudging respect for the American people. As Ms.
Brann explains in the first essay of the book, “Mile-High Meditations,” true respect may involve—nay, it requires—thoughtful and
sometimes pointed criticism. In particular, she notes that toleration,
which has eclipsed and perhaps supplanted all other standards in
contemporary American society, is “helpless before reality” (7)* and
“culpably helpless in the face of evil” (3). Like Lincoln, Ms. Brann
displays a kind of “radical conservatism” in her writing: she reminds
us of our roots and thereby invites us to renew our awareness of our
convictions and our goals. She never preaches; she reflects. Beginning, as she says all reasoning must, in media res, Ms. Brann speaks
for herself and writes so as to invite her readers to engage in the
examination of our shared habits of thought. Homage to Americans
is the work of a master teacher who respects her students and therefore wishes them to think for themselves.
Homage to Amerians is divided into three parts: “Mile-High
Meditations,” “Close Readings,” and “Time-Spanning Speculations.”
“Mile-High Meditations” is a single essay in eight sections, named
according to the time and place of her reflections. In it we see Ms.
Brann’s mind at work, beginning with immediate responses to what
she sees around her and deepening into philosophical and practical
thinking of wide-ranging significance. The second part of the book
comprises close readings of Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance
*
Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in Homage to Americans.
Janet Dougherty is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The third part includes a lecture
given to the students of the Air Force Academy on “The Paradox of
Obedience,” together with a lecture given at St. John’s College on
the destruction of two great South American civilizations, the Aztec
and the Inca, by conquerors from Spain. The book is unified by Ms.
Brann’s persistent concern with the integrity of American culture,
and therefore with the prob-lem of reconciling the adherence to true
and defensible principles of human society with toleration of
otherness.
“Mile-High Meditations” is a fitting opening of the book, for in
it Ms. Brann puts into perspective the principle of toleration—which
means, in part, putting it into the context of the Western tradition.
Ms. Brann and the Americans to whom she speaks share this
tradition, albeit some of us half-heartedly and with little awareness.
Her writing moves seamlessly from contemporary American society
to Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Spinoza and Heidegger, Swift, Shakespeare, and Wallace Stevens. This is no display of erudition, but
rather of openness to the tradition wherever it can offer support for
genuine inquiry. Ms. Brann’s style of writing is egalitarian in its
openness to insight wherever it manifests itself, and therefore to the
tradition that shapes our society. In “Mile-High Meditations” she
invites her readers to reflect upon the appropriate limits to toleration,
and the invitation is unequivocally democratic. All may engage in the
inquiry she shares with her readers; all, that is, who are willing to risk
“respectful contempt,” the rightful punishment for those who fall
short of the standard to which we deserve to be held. This is democracy in the high sense. This is the democracy that we ought to count
as our heritage.
For a thoughtful citizen there are no insuperable barriers
between intellectual inquiry and everyday reflection. Americans can
seek depth of understanding wherever it is to be found and we ought
to begin wherever we find ourselves. Ms. Brann shows the way by
reflecting on an overweight couple playing chess in the Denver
airport. (Their tastes, happily, are not limited to fast-food pizza.) She
provides a model of judging cautiously without surrendering the
power to make judgments. Toleration, she shows us, cannot be held
REVIEWS | DOUGHERTY
103
as a principle overriding all others without being intellectually flabby
as well as weak in the defense of right; but respect for others requires
openness to their sometimes surprising combinations of traits. With
no absolutes to rely on, Ms. Brann plunges into the morass of distinctions that alone help to untangle mere prejudice from thoughtful
conjecture. In this piece Ms. Brann exhibits an intellectual courage
and straightforward honesty worthy of emulation. She acknowledges
that she shares the “bias for the thinkable, the bias of our West” (63).
(Who, after all, lacks biases?) Her ability to examine the grounds of
her convictions and the convictions that characterize the West does
not fade but rather gains momentum as she identifies what may be
the bias of all biases: “The faith that some thoughts are true and their
opposites false is attended by this unease: It is not itself a truth,
meaning a mode of the intellect in which it is through and through
lucid and—or rather because it is—about something through and
through genuine. It is rather an opinion, even a prejudice” (27). The
prejudice that there are truths drives one to seek them. Ms. Brann
does not pretend to settle the difficulties she articulates and clarifies.
But she does work towards greater clarity and, ultimately, toward
answers.
The compelling question of this piece, as I see it, is whether our
biases serve us as human beings worthy of respect, and, in doing so,
serve humanity? Do they allow for the “personal practice of virtue”
(both intellectual and moral) that Ms. Brann, by her own admission,
prefers over general principles of morality (79)? While falsity is a
condition for thinking through to the truth (31), and a multiplicity of
perspectives can give us insight into another’s position, to acknowledge those perspectives is not to obliterate the sense that some things
are beyond the pale. Near the close of this essay Ms. Brann reflects
on the difference between intellectual and moral virtue (“a virtue in
thinking is, however, often a vice in doing” [82]), and announces the
importance of “doing right.” This conviction is easy to account for in
those who “care less about the livability of life than its consecration”
(8)—that is, those who acknowledge a firm religious faith. With
regard to faith in God, Ms. Brann is Socratic: she chooses “knowing
that I don’t know” (49). She begins and ends the essay, however,
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
with a reference to the possibility of evil. Without assuming that evil
is always easy to recognize, one must acknowledge the problem of
evil while putting toleration into perspective. One brief reference to
Nazism is enough to prove the point: “What, for example, was the
attraction offered by the Nazis to the young but Romanticism writ
large and made official” (82)?
The key to toleration might be seen as “letting others alone,” but
in the face of evil it is clear that such thoughtless toleration is
shameful and irresponsible. In section IV of the essay, Ms. Brann
lays out several reasons for thoughtfully respecting, not merely tolerating, others. Throughout the essay she demonstrates what it means
to avoid forcing the truth into preconceived notions, by letting something be, but not letting it alone (12), and this distinction, it seems to
me, points to a standard for action as well as for thought. Like people
who espouse values in conflict with one’s own, the current trends
demand respectful examination; Ms. Brann demonstrates that they
are unworthy of slavish adherence. Toleration without respect is a
standard that is below the dignity of human beings. The contemporary emphasis on the dissimilarity of races, for example, on “dissimilation” rather than assimilation (59), is flawed in that it overemphasizes otherness. Particular humans combine their share in universal humanity with particular accidents and unique choices—here
Ms. Brann finds an opening into the perennial philosophical problem
of the relation of same and other. That problem is just beneath the
surface of the complex and delicate issue of how various ethnic,
racial, religious and otherwise differentiated groups relate to one
another in a society that derives its fundamental principles from
universal humanity and whose status depends upon the respectability
of these principles. American society cannot maintain its integrity
unless its members maintain a habit of thoughtful reflection. Ms.
Brann’s “Mile-High Meditations” provides us with a model.
In the next section of Homage to Americans, Ms. Brann goes on
to make available to the reader the kind of thinking and writing that
gave this nation its character. Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address are both models of
thoughtful eloquence; the first united Virginians, the second, Amer-
REVIEWS | DOUGHERTY
105
icans committed to the preservation of the union, to uphold convictions that provided the basis for liberty and mutual, respectful, toleration. Ms. Brann’s examinations of these two texts are models of
close and informed reading. Her analyses reveal to the reader the
greatness of these documents in a way that a casual reading—that is,
a reading uninformed by knowledge of the tradition in which
Madison and Lincoln were steeped—cannot. After a paragraph by
paragraph account, Ms. Brann, quoting from Hume’s “On
Eloquence,” sums up Madison’s work as “at once ‘argumentative
and rational,’ grandly passionate and carefully constructed” (123).
As for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Ms. Brann shows in a line-byline reading its beauty as poetry and its resonance with the Biblical
language by means of which Lincoln tried to persuade his audience
of the “bonds of affection” (181) that could alone preserve the union.
Both sections of this central part of the work deserve slow and
careful readings. The section on Madison’s Memorial showed me
that I had read this document only superficially. While I have read
and heard Lincoln’s Address many times and with great appreciation,
Ms. Brann’s account showed me that it too is a richer piece of writing
than I had ever imagined.
In his Memorial and Remonstrance, Madison argued against a
bill to support Christian education and in support of the toleration of
all religions because he was confident that without governmental
interference they would thrive. He was far from disparaging the role
of religion in supporting a healthy society. Ms. Brann asks, “What
would Madison have said in the face of an observable decline of
religious commitment and the increasing legal expulsion of religion
from communal life” (110)? She wonders whether the kind of
rhetoric he uses in the Memorial is an irrecoverable art. These are
pressing questions for us to consider, questions, it seems to me, that
were easier to address in a time when the hope that the United States
could provide a “practical political pattern to the world” (161) was
not considered narrowly self-serving, and when few if any would
claim that “truth is a private predilection and everything is ‘true for’
them that believe it” (116).
Not only did Lincoln and Madison not share this prejudice, but
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
they did not feel obligated to respond to it. The depth of both
statesmen’s grounding in religion, far from being a hindrance to their
promotion of democracy, was at its heart. Lincoln looked forward to
a “new birth of freedom” in the aftermath of the Civil War, a new
birth that was possible only through the common respect for the
principles of the Declaration of Independence, and especially the
principle that “all men are created equal.” The principles of the
Declaration must be held, he thought, as sacred. Respectful
tolerance thrives on the support of such principles.
In the penultimate piece of Homage to Americans, a lecture
addressed to students of the U. S. Air Force Academy entitled “The
Paradox of Obedience,” Ms. Brann maintains her characteristic sense
of balance between opposing respectable views in the difficult
context of the use of armed force. She avers that an “unthinking
warrior is a fearful thing” (195), and argues that “submission can be
an act of freedom” (208). She broaches a question that is urgent for
those who defend this nation with force: how does one fulfill one’s
duty to obey one’s superiors while cultivating a thoughtful awareness
of the possibility that “personal, conscientious disobedience” (206)
may sometimes be morally necessary? Citing the Spartan obedience
to law rather than to an individual, Ms. Brann suggests the possibility
that freedom requires some sort of obedience. But blind obedience
cannot support freedom. It seems to me clear that the respectability
of a warrior must depend on the respectability of the nation he or she
serves, but it is equally clear after reading this lecture that the
nation’s general character is insufficient by itself.
The discussion of toleration that opens the book is complemented by the last piece in the book: “The Empires of the Sun and
the West”—and in particular by Ms. Brann’s account of the intolerance of human sacrifice that characterized Cortés and his men,
which contributed to their determination to conquer the Aztec
people. This is no whitewashing: the Spanish conquistadors were
guilty of unnecessary brutality, which Ms. Brann appropriately deplores (253). The motives of the Spanish conquerors were self-interested, but their prejudices, like ours, were integral to the Western
tradition that promotes respect for human dignity. Where then ought
REVIEWS | DOUGHERTY
107
we to set the limits to toleration? This is no small problem. Ms.
Brann peremptorily dismisses the suspension of judgment as any
kind of solution: “A non-judgmental historian is an incarnate contradiction and produces only an armature of facts without the musculature that gives it human shape (222). In this respect she sides with
Cortés himself, who “dignifies his subjects with his condemnation”
of their practice of ritual human sacrifice (223).
The role of human sacrifice in the Aztec (or Nahuan) culture,
Ms. Brann argues, is the key to their defeat by the Spanish conquistadors. For the Aztec people thought they were compelled to sacrifice
human beings in order to render more reliable the annual and epochal
returns of the sun, their primary god. The nobles themselves may
have experienced a sense of doom, for they were “living over a moral
abyss” (241) created by the compulsion to kill their own kind. They
were betrayed by their trust in their gods (248-9). The Spanish, by
contrast, worshipped “a god mysterious but not capricious, [who]
made nature according to laws and left it largely alone” (257).
Although Ms. Brann describes the conquistadors as ruffians, she
attributes their victory over the Aztecs and the Incas to the Western
culture that shaped them, and she supports their disgust and horror at
a practice they could not see as justified or tolerable.
This account of the conquest of the Aztecs is well informed and
extensively researched. Ms. Brann describes a wide variety of
sources, including Cortés’ own letters to his king, and acknowledges
their biases. No set of citations can demonstratively establish the
truth of Ms. Brann’s account, but its plausibility is, to me at least,
manifest. The contest was by no means a conflict between good and
evil: it is worth repeating that there was plenty of wrongdoing on the
side of the Spanish conquerors. But their victory does seem to have
been a victory of the West (our “West”—an ambiguous but convenient term, as Ms. Brann acknowledges [217]), of a culture that
produces a kind of human being who knows “how to fight back,” and
“how to correct our aberrations by returns to sounder beginnings”
(229). The Aztecs were trapped by their culture; we, with all our
defects, may find renewal at the heart of ours. This is not a promise
but a task.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Ms. Brann has accomplished a great deal if she has helped her
readers to understand that task. I think she has done that and more.
To read Homage to Americans is to prepare to undertake the task of
renewing our culture.
�
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Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T. H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Arnaiz, Deziree
Sachs, Joe
Braithewaite, William
Howland, Jacob
Smith, Joseph
Boxel, Lise van
Bolotin, David
Dougherty, Janet
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 53.2 (Spring 2012)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Deziree Arnaiz
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s
College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800.
©2012 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
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ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
The St. John’s Communications Office
Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available online at
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�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�Contents
Essays & Lectures
Aesthetics Ancient and Modern .........................................1
James Carey
Passion and Perception in Mozart’s Magic Flute ...........38
Peter Kalkavage
Socrates, Parmenides, and the Way Out ...........................68
Judith Seeger
Rolling His Jolly Tub: Composer Elliott Carter,
St. John’s College Tutor, 1940-1942.........................97
Hollis Thoms
Reflections
Talking, Reading, Writing, Listening .............................133
Eva Brann
Caged Explorers: The Hunger for Control.....................150
Howard Zeiderman
Poetry
The Love Song of the Agoraphobic ................................177
Elliott Zuckerman
Reviews
Henry Kissinger on China: The Dangerous
Illusion of “Realist” Foreign Policy
Book Review of Henry Kissenger’s China..........................179
Joseph A. Bosco
Everything is One
Book Review of Eva Brann’s The Logos of Heraclitus ......195
David Carl
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�ESSAYS & LECTURES
Aesthetics, Ancient and Modern:
An Introduction
James Carey
The phenomenon of beauty is trans-political, trans-historical
and trans-religious. Whether we are believers or non-believers, we can admire Greek temples, an archaic statue of
Apollo, Islamic calligraphy, a Gothic cathedral, Bach’s St.
Matthew Passion, Hindu architecture, Chinese landscape
painting, a Japanese tea ceremony, and so forth. Our admiration of these things need not be animated by religious belief.
To be sure, they mean incomparably more to those who believe that they are intimately connected with the sacred or divine than they mean to those who deny such a connection. But
the beautiful in art is accessible to all, the beautiful in nature
even more so. We should not be surprised, then, to find some
agreement among the greatest minds as to what beauty is.
It is often pointed out that philosophical inquiry into the
nature of the beautiful did not get designated as “aesthetics”
until the eighteenth century. The inquiry itself is not an exclusive modern concern, however. It was launched by Plato.
His most impressive attempt to shed light on the nature of the
beautiful is not to be found in the Symposium or the Phaedrus, but in the Hippias Major. The Symposium and the
Phaedrus are chiefly concerned with the erotic relation of the
soul to the beautiful. The concern of the Hippias Major is,
on the face of it, more limited: what is the beautiful?
Hippias has come to Athens on a diplomatic mission to
represent the interests of his native city of Elis. He is a well
known sophist. He plays a small role in Plato’s Protagoras
James Carey is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. A shorter version
of this essay was delivered as a lecture at St. John’s College, Annapolis,
on September 10, 2011. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Thomas
McDonald, in whose soul were uniquely combined intellectual powers
of the highest order with rare loftiness of spirit and refinement of taste.
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
and he is the chief interlocutor with Socrates in another dialogue, the Hippias Minor. He has a high opinion of how
much he knows, and he boasts about it without shame. Hippias is, as one of the most careful students of the Platonic dialogues notes, “the great fool.”1 There are other fools in the
Platonic dialogues—Ion and Euthyphro come quickly to
mind. But Hippias is the greatest fool of them all. His limitations in combination with his vanity keep the conversation
with Socrates from ascending to the highest peaks of speculation. But the conversation ascends very high nonetheless,
though to appreciate this the reader has to compensate for
Hippias’s dullness by engaging his own thought with what
Socrates has to say.
There is a rather lengthy introductory exchange between
the two men. It begins with a comparison of earlier sophists
with contemporary sophists. It thereby brushes up against the
theme of wisdom, though without explicitly exploring it. Instead, the introductory exchange centers on the problem of
Hippias’s failure to make money through sophistry on his visits to Sparta, in contrast to his general success in this endeavor elsewhere. At one point, when Hippias claims to have
composed a beautiful speech about the beautiful, Socrates
says that Hippias has reminded him “opportunely” of something.2 Someone, Socrates says, has recently been throwing
him into confusion with the question, “What is the beautiful?” Socrates asks Hippias to help him find an answer to this
question. But his expression “opportunely”—eis kalon—is
not quite serious, since he has used the word kalon, the Greek
word for” beautiful,” or its derivatives seven times in the
opening exchange. Hippias himself used it once in the opening exchange, rather strangely.3 He does not, however, seem
interested in elaborating what he might mean by it, in spite
of the fact that Socrates tacitly invites him to do so by responding with a double echo of the word.4
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | CAREY
3
Unlike the conversations that Socrates has with Euthyphro and Meno in the dialogues named after them, and, in
particular, unlike the exchange at the beginning of the Republic and the ensuing conversations with Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus, Socrates
himself initiates the conversation with Hippias in this dialogue, as he also does in the Hippias Minor after being invited
to do so by Eudicus. When Socrates initiates a conversation
we must ask ourselves what he hopes to accomplish through
it, that is, why he even engages in it. And it is especially important for us to ask this question when Socrates bothers to
initiate a conversation with someone like Hippias or Ion who
is not already a friend or associate of his and whom he knows
in advance to be limited in philosophic capacity and commitment.
We might think that Socrates is not well acquainted with
Hippias. But right off the bat he appeals to Hippias’s vanity
by calling him “Hippias, the beautiful and wise” and in the
same sentence he refers to a prior encounter with Hippias.
Socrates may be alluding to Hippias’ role in the conversation
reported in the Protagoras, where he does not make a good
impression.5 Is it possible that Socrates thinks that Hippias,
in spite of his limitations, might nonetheless help him achieve
a bit of clarity regarding something about which he is admittedly perplexed?
In response to the distinctively Socratic question, “What
is the beautiful?” Hippias offers three answers. The beautiful
is a beautiful maiden, it is ornamental gold, and it is the
solemn occasion of a funeral. Socrates exposes the deficiencies of these answers. In doing so, he couches his observations in the name of a third party who is not present, someone
who, Socrates says, chastises him about his thoughts on the
beautiful (to kalon). It later appears that this person is Socrates
himself. Socrates, then, presents himself as being in conflict
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
with himself about the beautiful. And yet one of the very few
things that he says he is an expert on is erotics.6 So, given
Socrates understanding of the necessary relationship of eros
to the beautiful, we find a tension, to say the least, between
his uncharacteristic profession of expertise and his apparent
confusion about something that falls within the purview of
his expertise, to be even at the center of it.
After disposing of Hippias’s answers to the question,
“What is the beautiful?” Socrates himself suggests three answers. His first answer is that the beautiful is the fitting (or
the appropriate—to trepon).7 This leads to the question of
whether its presence causes things just to appear beautiful or
to really be beautiful. The difficulty here is in the Greek expression to kalon itself. It can mean the beautiful as we today
usually use the word, the aesthetically beautiful.8 But to kalon
can also mean the noble—moral nobility or nobility of character. In the case of the latter there can be a great difference
between being and appearance. Someone could have a noble
character without appearing so, not at first glance anyway.
Socrates himself is the conspicuous example. Nobility manifests itself most conspicuously in those situations that, as we
say, exhibit one’s character. In the case of noble laws and pursuits, the discrepancy between being and appearance is so
striking and of such contention as to lead, Socrates says, to
“strife and battle . . . privately for individuals and publically
for cities.”9 In the case of the aesthetically beautiful, the other
sense of to kalon, there seems to be no difference at all between being and appearance. It would be strange to say that
a landscape or a painting, for example, only appears to be
beautiful but is not really so.
Socrates’ second answer to the question “What is the
beautiful” is that it is the useful (to chrēsimon). And this an-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | CAREY
5
swer gets transformed into the claim that the beautiful is the
helpful (to ōphelimon).10 We can perhaps think of the noble
this way, although we can easily imagine situations in which
nobility of character does not help very much, and other situations in which it even brings physical harm to him who exhibits it. It is even less obvious how something aesthetically
beautiful, such as a statue or a sunset, is useful or helpful.
We might get the impression from his first two definitions
that Socrates is interested in debunking the aesthetically
beautiful, which sometimes gets pejoratively called the
“merely pretty.” This impression is dispelled with Socrates’
third and most interesting, definition. Here is what he says:
I think that I have just now found my way out. Observe. If we were to say that what makes us delight
is beautiful—in no way do I mean all pleasures,
but rather that [which pleases] through hearing
and sight—how then would we do in the contest?
I suppose, Hippias, that beautiful human beings at
least, but also all decorations and paintings and
pieces of sculpture, whichever ones are beautiful,
please us when we see them. And beautiful voices
and music in general, discourses and stories too,
produce this same thing, so that if we should answer that bold man [i.e., Socrates’ “critic”] this
way—“Noble one, the beautiful is the pleasant
[that pleases] through hearing and sight”—don’t
you think we would check his boldness?11
We notice a couple of peculiarities in this passage. In the
first place, there is a double chiasmus. Socrates speaks of the
pleasant that comes through hearing and sight, in that order,
at the beginning of this passage and again at the end. The
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pleasures that come through hearing would seem to have
some primacy over those that come through sight. And yet,
in the middle of the passage, Socrates first mentions the
pleasures that come through sight, and afterwards those that
come through hearing. So, though one might infer that
Socrates holds discourses to be more truly beautiful than
sights, the passage above does not support this inference.
Beautiful discourses and beautiful sights are situated on the
same plane here.
In the second place, Socrates includes the human as well
as the non-human in that which can please through hearing
and sight. And he also includes that which pleases without
any logos in the strictly discursive sense of the word, such as
decorations, paintings, sculpture, voices, and music, and that
which does please discursively, such as discourses and stories. He thereby highlights the two senses of to kalon, as
meaning, again, both the aesthetically beautiful and the
morally noble. The morally noble, which pleases us through
a rational consideration of it, and the aesthetically beautiful,
which pleases us through sensation and presumably without
any rational consideration, are intimately connected, so much
so that, again, a single Greek word can mean both. Beautiful
human beings, in particular, can be beautiful in their looks or
beautiful in their character, or both.
We leave the Hippias Major at this point, with some regret. For we shall not follow up Socrates’ ensuing and profound distinction between two types of classes, a distinction
that no lesser a student of Plato than Jacob Klein held to be
the clue to Plato’s understanding of the eidetic duality that is
constitutive of Being itself, a theme that Klein shows is at the
heart of the Sophist and is alluded to in other dialogues as
well.12 Our regret, however, is somewhat assuaged. For Socrates’
claim in the Hippias Major that the beautiful is what pleases
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through sight and hearing induces us to reflect on similar
claims about beauty made in the greatest work on the subject
ever written, Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
The Critique of Judgment is divided into two parts, the
Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and Critique of Teleological
Judgment. We confine our attention to the first part, the principal task of which is to validate the concept of taste as something that can be cultivated, something that can be good or
bad, and something that has the beautiful—and not the pleasant simply—as its primary object.
Early on Kant raises the question of whether in the judgment of taste the feeling of pleasure precedes or follows the
judging of the object.13 One might think that this question
could be decided empirically, simply by paying attention to
the temporal sequence in which feeling and judgment occur.
But the mind moves so rapidly that the question cannot be
answered by empirical inspection alone. It can only be answered by way of an argument. Kant says that the solution
to this problem is the key to the critique of taste. He argues
as follows.
Nothing can be universally communicated except cognition (Erkenntnis) and presentation (Vorstellung), so far as it
belongs to cognition. One can report a certain sensation, say,
that buttermilk tastes good. But one cannot be sure that others
who have also tasted buttermilk will concur in this report. If
a difference of opinion emerges, that is the end of the matter.
On the other hand, an argument, say, a Euclidean demonstration, can be not just reported but universally communicated.
Anyone who sets out to prove, for example, that the base angles of isosceles triangles are equal, can expect anyone else
who is familiar with the preceding definitions, common notions, postulates, and propositions to follow the demonstration. Each step of the argument can be made clear. And if
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someone observing the demonstration discovers a flaw in the
argument, then that discovery too can be communicated. The
reason for this agreement is that, when we communicate our
cognitions to one another, what is individual about us recedes
into the background. We communicate our cognitions simply
as one rational being to another rational being. In doing so
we expect agreement; and if we find disagreement we expect
an argument of some kind in support of it.
We do not communicate our sensations to each other this
way. If I say that the room is warm, and you say that it is cold,
I do not ask you for a demonstration that it is cold. If I find a
certain dessert excessively sweet, and you don’t find it sweet
enough, we do not set out to refute each other. In a similar
way, if I experience something as beautiful, say, the slow
movement from a late Beethoven string quartet, and you hear
it as more boring than beautiful, I do not try to demonstrate
to you that it really is beautiful. An argument establishing
something as beautiful, a definitive argument compelling assent from everyone who can follow the argument, is not possible.
But in spite of this similarity, the experience of something
as beautiful is not just a feeling of pleasure either, though
pleasure is surely bound up with this experience. Kant thinks
that, unlike the feeling of pleasure, the judgment that something is beautiful is universally communicable, at least in
principle. This is possible because the encounter with something beautiful gives rise to a peculiarly harmonious interaction of the understanding, or the faculty of concepts, with the
imagination, and hence produces a state of mind (Gemütszustand) that can be communicated. There is no comparable
harmonious interaction of the cognitive faculties in the experience of something as merely pleasant, such as the scent
of patchouli or the taste of cilantro, about which there can be
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a difference of opinion that is in principle irresolvable.
In the case of a judgment of cognition proper, there is also
a relationship between the understanding and the imagination. The synthesis of the imagination is subsumed under a
definite concept. For example, two events are subsumed
under the a priori concept of cause and effect; the empirical
concept of a plate is subsumed under the pure concept of a
circle; an individual dog is subsumed under the general and
empirically derived concept of a dog. Such subsumption
under a definite concept Kant calls a determinative judgment.
This kind of judgment determines the object as this or that
definite kind of thing. It fixes the object, establishes its
boundaries as it were, and thereby renders it intelligible. The
result is a definite cognition.
In the judgment of something as beautiful, however, the
synthesis of the imagination is not subsumed under a definite
concept. The harmonious interaction of the cognitive faculties that is initiated by the presence of a beautiful object Kant
calls “free play” (freies Spiel). The resultant state of mind can
be universally communicated because it is formed by a free
play of cognitive faculties that we all possess. On the other
hand, this harmonious interaction, precisely as free play, does
not give rise to a definite cognition (ein bestimmter Erkenntis). It is only what is required for cognition in general
(Erkenntnis überhaupt).
That this state of mind is communicable, even universally
so, does not by itself imply that it is actually communicated.
For the latter, taste is also required. And taste is developed
primarily by cultivating a habit of attention to the formal relationships that are present in beautiful objects. These relationships, precisely as formal, cannot be apprehended
through sensation alone—as pleasure can—but must be apprehended by specifically cognitive faculties. And yet, be-
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cause here the imagination is not simply subordinated to the
understanding and placed in its service, but harmoniously and
freely interacts with the understanding, a feeling of pleasure
necessarily arises, as always happens in play.
A judgment that proceeds, not determinatively and by
way of subsuming a particular object (in the broadest sense
of the word) under a given definite concept, but by finding a
universal concept for the particular object is what Kant calls
a reflective judgment. In the investigation of nature determinative and reflective judgments are sequentially made. But
in the experience of an object as beautiful only a reflective
judgment is made, though in reading a work of literature in
particular, determinate judgments prepare the way for the reflective judgment that the work is beautiful. The universal
concept “beautiful,” the predicate of the reflective judgment,
“This object is beautiful,” is an indefinite concept. It refers
only to the way the individual object has of animating the
cognitive faculties into free play.14 The effect of this free play
is a pleasure that we expect everyone who has taste to feel.
To Kant’s argument that, in the encounter with a beautiful
object, the feeling of pleasure is consequent to and founded
on the judging of the object as beautiful, and not vice versa,
one might object that he has only shown what the sequence
could be. He has not shown what the sequence must be. But
Kant would respond that only this argument accounts for the
phenomenon of aesthetic enjoyment. For we do not call all
the things that please us “beautiful”—not by a long shot.
There would, however, be no reason not to do so if pleasure
precedes and founds the judgment that the object is beautiful.
Kant’s argument also makes sense of how one can distinguish between good taste, educated taste so to speak, and bad
or uneducated taste. Most of us recognize that our taste is
more refined now than it was when we were younger. The
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broadening experience of attending to the formal relations
present in beautiful objects enables us to note, appreciate,
and, as a consequence, delight in them. Again, these formal
relations cannot be apprehended by sensation alone, as is the
case with pleasures that are not mediated by judgment and
the cognitive principles that make judgment possible. And
yet, because no definite cognition is involved in a pure judgment of taste, we cannot actually demonstrate that an object
is beautiful, however perfect its formal articulation. What we
say by way of communicating the satisfaction we take in a
work such as the Adagio of Beethoven’s “Hammerclavier”
Sonata or Josquin Desprez’ “Déploration de la Mort de Jehan
Ockeghem” to someone whose musical taste we think is cultivated or susceptible of cultivation, is “Just listen to this.”
Or, in the case of painting by, say, Vermeer, “Just look at
this.”
A beautiful object does not consist of formal relations
alone. It has a material element as well, such as shades of
color or volume of sound. Unlike form, this material element,
which gives rise to what Kant calls the charm of sense, is not
communicable. Two individuals might possess an equally developed and refined appreciation of the formal relations in a
Bach fugue. But one of them prefers to hear a given fugue
played on the piano rather than on a harpsichord, whereas the
other prefers exactly the opposite. The timbre of a harpsichord and the timbre of a piano belong to the matter of the
music. For that reason, the extent to which one pleases more
than the other lies entirely within the domain of individual
preference. But the motivic, melodic, tonal, and structural elements belong to the form of the music. It is these formal relationships that stimulate the free play of the cognitive faculties
and thereby allow for universal communicability.
Formal relations are best apprehended at a distance. We
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can experience little in the way of formal relations through
the sense of touch, and only a little more through the sense
of taste and the sense of smell. Our sense of smell, unlike our
senses of touch and taste, can, of course, apprehend things at
a distance. If it were more developed in us humans we might
be able to smell formal relationships. But as it is, we cannot
do so, certainly not as readily as we can through sight and
hearing. It should not be surprising, then, that we rarely if
ever speak of a tactile sensation, however pleasant it may be,
as beautiful, and the same is true of an excellent meal or a
fine wine. We might say that the layout of a meal is beautiful,
or that the color of a wine is beautiful. But on tasting these
things we do not say, “What a beautiful flavor!” We say instead, “What a delightful flavor!” and maybe even “What a
lovely flavor!” Someone might decide to say “What a beautiful flavor!” just to show that it is possible to do so. But this
is not how we typically speak, however pleasant we may find
tactile, gustatory, and olfactory sensations. The reason seems
to be—and this is what Plato caught sight of—that any formal
relations we might apprehend through touch, taste, and smell
are almost infinitely vague in comparison to what we can
hear in a piece of music or see in a painting, to say nothing
of what we can apprehend in a work of literature.15
There is a further sign that Plato and Kant are right in
their agreement that the beautiful pleases through sight and
hearing uniquely. In the case of touch, taste, and smell, the
pleasure is felt right on the skin, and right on the gustatory
and olfactory organs. One feels a pleasure in or on the organs
of sensation, granted that it can also be quickly suffused
throughout one’s body as a whole. This is not the case regarding the pleasures associated with sight and hearing. On looking at a beautiful painting one does not experience a pleasing
sensation on the eyeball. Nor on hearing a beautiful piece of
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music does one experience a pleasing sensation in the ear.
Regarding music in particular, we can enjoy it up to a
point just by remembering it. A talented and well trained musician can imagine and delight in music he has never heard
before just by reading through a score as though it were a
book. Beethoven composed his greatest works when he was
stone deaf. Schubert did not live to hear a single one of his
symphonies performed. Brahms is reported to have said,
partly in jest but not entirely so, that when he wanted to hear
a really fine performance of the Marriage of Figaro he would
light up a cigar and stretch out on his couch. Many composers
refuse to compose at the piano. They want their compositions
to originate in the imagination, not in their fingers, not even
in their ears.
The distance that separates what is visible and audible
from our eyes and ears enables us to apprehend the visible
and the audible with a measure of detachment. To be sure, a
light can be so bright that it causes a pain in one’s eyes, and
a sound can be so loud that it makes one’s ears hurt. But,
again, the intensity of a light or a sound pertains to sensory
matter, not to form. Form, as such, causes no pain in the sensory organs, and the pleasure it gives rise to does not occur
there but somewhere else. It occurs in the mind.
Kant argues that the satisfaction associated with the experience of the purely beautiful is disinterested. He has been
famously taken to task on this point by Nietzsche.16 If Nietzsche
read the Critique of Judgment, he did not possess the patience
to read it carefully; for Kant very early in that work explicitly
says that “a judgment about beauty, in which the least interest
mingles, is quite partial and no pure judgment of taste.”17 A
judgment of taste can indeed be interested, but to that extent
it cannot be a pure judgment of taste. The judgment of a beautiful human form, for example, is an aesthetic judgment, but
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it is not entirely disinterested. Kant recognizes this, though
Nietzsche seems to think it undercuts Kant’s thesis. Even
when the beautiful is combined with the good, it cannot, according to Kant, be the object of a pure judgment of taste;
and the same is true of what he calls “the ideal of beauty.”18
In Plato’s Symposium Socrates relates Diotima’s saying
dictum that “eros is not of the beautiful. . . . It is of engendering and bringing to birth in the beautiful.”19 However we are
to understand this, Plato seems to recognize, as Kant does,
that eros, being about as interested as interested can be, for
that very reason cannot have the beautiful, simply, as its real
object. The antecedent disinterested contemplation of the
beautiful may well give rise to a consequent interest in, even
a desire for, a certain non-contemplative relation of oneself
to the beautiful, a relation of engendering and bringing to
birth in it. Still, what eros is of is not the beautiful. Instead,
Diotima says, “eros is of the good’s being one’s own always.”
Diotima seems to be saying that, though the good can be
one’s own, the aesthetically beautiful cannot be one’s own.
The delight you take in contemplating the beautiful object in
no way detracts from the delight I take in it. Quite the opposite. Your delight enhances my delight.
The experience of pure beauty gives rise to a disinterested
satisfaction not simply because beautiful sights and sounds,
unlike pleasant tactile sensations, flavors, and odors, are mediated by distance, but because they are thereby also mediated by judgment. The satisfaction bound up with the merely
pleasant, on the other hand, is immediate. No act of judgment
is needed to enjoy the pleasing sensation of a cool breeze on
a hot day. An irrational animal can enjoy tactile sensations as
easily as a human being can. When we call a flower “beautiful,” we do so because of how it looks, not because of how it
smells. After all, one can, and often does, call a flower beau-
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tiful without ever smelling it. One does not, however, call a
flower beautiful without seeing it, however pleasant may be
the scent that comes wafting through the window. The assessment of how a flower looks, of how it is shaped and articulated, is made in an act of reflective judgment, which occurs
so naturally and rapidly that we rarely realize that we are even
making a judgment.
Because the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is consequent to and founded on the judgment that the object is
beautiful, this pleasure bears an analogy to, without being
simply identical with, the pleasure we take in contemplating
moral nobility. As Kant argues, we do not do what is morally
right because of the pleasure that doing so gives rise to. For
we would not experience any pleasure in doing what is
morally right unless we thought that acting this way was good
in itself, regardless of whether it gave rise to more pleasure
than pain or the reverse. Any reduction of moral nobility to
pleasure seeking is as morally obtuse as a reduction of the
admiration of moral nobility to pleasure seeking.20
The remarkable affinity between the pleasure taken in the
beautiful and the pleasure taken in the morally good leads
Kant to speak of beauty as the symbol of the morally good.
Aesthetic education, though by no means a substitute for
moral education, can nonetheless facilitate moral education.
The cultivation of taste elevates one above enjoyment of the
coarser and more immediate pleasures to those refined pleasures that are mediated by judgment. The pleasure that one
takes in contemplating the aesthetically beautiful is then analogous to the pleasure that one takes in contemplating exemplars of moral nobility, and to the pleasure that one can also
take in establishing a measure of integrity in one’s own character. Kant says:
Taste makes possible, without too violent a leap,
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the transition (as it were) from the charm of sense
to habitual moral interest, because it represents the
imagination in its freedom as purposively determinable for the understanding, and so teaches us
to find even in objects of sense a free satisfaction
apart from any charm of sense.21
Thomas McDonald puts this matter well when he speaks
of a teleological function of aesthetic education. It is conducive to developing “a susceptibility to rational determination immanently, working from within and from beneath,
[such] that one’s practical moral determinations not always
be imposed from without or from above.”22 That there is but
one Greek word, kalon, for both the aesthetically beautiful
and the morally noble is not a linguistic accident.23
To return briefly to the Hippias Major, that to kalon
pleases through sight and/or hearing holds true of the morally
noble as well as of the aesthetically beautiful. Moral nobility
can be seen in an act and heard in a speech. Obviously it cannot be touched, tasted, or smelled. Now, Socrates sees that
this formulation, though true and highly significant, describes
a beautiful object only in terms of its effect. He is interested,
however, in more than the effect that the beautiful object has
on the subject. He is also interested in what causes the beautiful object to be beautiful. If we say that the cause of the
beautiful object is itself the beautiful—a possibility that
Socrates briefly entertains—then we are not saying very
much: the beautiful is the cause of the beautiful; cause and
effect are the same. And yet if the cause and the effect are
different, but both are somehow beautiful, we find ourselves
confronted with the so-called “third man” problem: there
must be some third “beautiful” in which the beautiful as cause
and the beautiful as effect both participate; and then some
fourth “beautiful” in which all three participate; and so on ad
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infinitum. The question of what causes an object to be beautiful is a real question. Socrates does not answer it.
Kant, however, does answer this question. The cause of
the beautiful in art—we are not speaking now of the beautiful
in nature—is genius. Kant does not use this word the way we
do. For him it does not necessarily denote someone with an
exceptionally high intelligence, as intelligence is commonly
understood. Newton, he says, is not a genius, and Kant would
certainly not call himself one. Genius names a kind of mysterious spirit that is at work within the artist, assuming that
he is a great artist.24 According to Kant, only an artist can
possesses genius. Newton notoriously moves from one assertion to another without supplying the intervening steps that
logically connect the one with the other. But Newton can fill
these steps in. With much more labor than it cost him we can
fill them in as well. Newton can justify each step in his
demonstrations. If we understand his demonstrations we can
do the same.
Kant maintains that the case is different with the artist
and his art. Mozart, for example, cannot explain why the interval of a sixth at just this point in a melody is exactly the
right interval, and not, say, a fourth. Michelangelo cannot explain how he visualized a captive within an uncut block of
stone, or why he decided to paint the newly created Adam
just as he painted him. The great artist must of course possess
a communicable knowledge of the elements of his craft. And
these elements are teachable. Mozart could teach counterpoint, and Michelangelo could teach the techniques of sculpture and of representing perspective in two dimensions. But
Mozart could not teach anyone, no matter how technically
proficient he was at mastering the rules of counterpoint and
harmony, how to write a “Jupiter Symphony,” or even a comparatively simple but beautiful melody like “La ci darem la
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mano” from Don Giovanni, or the even simpler but equally
beautiful melody from The Magic Flute, “Drei Knäbchen,
jung, schön, hold, und weise.” (The latter melody, in B-flat
major, begins implausibly with five F’s in a row followed by
five D’s in row, and then three B-flats in a row—and yet, for
all its simplicity, I daresay there is nothing more beautiful in
opera.) Similarly, Michelangelo could not teach anyone how
to sculpt a masterpiece comparable to his “David.”
Kant says that to the extent that an artist is animated by
genius he cannot articulate the rules by which he produces
his works of art.25 Genius presupposes technique, but it is not
identical with technique. Genius is an altogether mysterious
force that even the artist cannot account for. Brahms once
said that when he was a young man melodies came to him
while he was polishing his shoes.
This attitude of the artist toward the sources of his inspiration is a familiar one and millennia old. An unnamed goddess is invoked in the third word of the Iliad; an unnamed
muse is invoked in the fourth word of the Odyssey. In Plato’s
Ion, Socrates makes a number of comic observations about
the pretentions of rhapsodes, poets, and soothsayers. While
we are laughing at them, however, we should not overlook a
remarkable observation he also makes that is not so comic:
A great indication [that the god is speaking
through these people] is Tynnichos the Chalcidean, who never made any poem whatsoever
that would be worthy of remembering, but then
[made] the paean that everyone sings, just about
the most beautiful of all lyric poems, simply (or
artlessly—atechnōs) as he himself says, “a discovery of the muses.”26
How did Tynnichos manage to do this? Socrates does not
say. One might say that Tynnichos was visited by genius. If
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so, it was a brief visit. Beethoven, who was in a position to
know, held that genius is always prolific. Beethoven may
have had Bach in mind. He once said, “Bach ought not to be
called Bach (German for “brook”) but Meer (German for
“ocean”).
What is the ultimate source of the beautiful in art? The
twentieth-century German philosopher Max Scheler gave a
blunt and characteristically provocative answer to this question. “The artist is merely the mother of the work of art. God
is the father.”27 So direct a theological answer to this question
is not the only one. Leo Strauss, hardly an unqualified admirer of the fine arts as distinct from the liberal arts, and
highly suspicious of aesthetics, writes in a letter, “[O]nly the
moderns are so crazy [as] to believe that ‘creation’ of a ‘work
of art’ is more worthy of wonder and more mysterious than
the reproduction of a dog: just look at a mother dog with her
puppies . . . .” It is not clear what crazy moderns Strauss has
in mind. Kant, for one, would grant that nature, prodigal in
its production of the beautiful and sublime, is more worthy
of wonder than any work of art. But also worthy of wonder
is the process of artistic production. Strauss recognizes this,
and continues his sentence as follows: “. . . and the force, by
means of which Shakespeare conceived, felt, and wrote
Henry IV, is not Shakespeare’s work, but [is] greater than any
work of any man.”28
Kant is not averse to a theological account of artistic genius, but he is determined, as always, to keep theology at
arms length until compelled by his argument to bring it into
the picture. He entertains the possibility that what is at work
in genius is nature. “Genius is the innate talent of the mind
(ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art.”29 A
bit later Kant says:
In science . . . the greatest discoverer differs only
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in degree from his laborious imitator and apprentice, but he differs specifically from him whom
nature has endowed for beautiful art. . . . The artist
is favored by nature. . . . [Artistic] aptitude (Geschicklichkeit) cannot be communicated; rather, it
is imparted to every [artist] immediately by the
hand of nature; and so it dies with him, until nature endows another in the same way, who needs
nothing more than an example to let the talent of
which he is conscious work in a similar way.30
The way nature works is mysterious. After Mozart died a
lot of attention was directed toward turning his son into “another Mozart.” It did not work. The boy had a very good ear,
and he was taught the nuts and bolts of composition, but he
lacked genius. He was not one of nature’s favorites.
In the above passage Kant indicates that artistic activity,
which cannot be reproduced, can be a way in which artistic
activity gets, not exactly reproduced but further produced,
assuming that talent is present and technique has been mastered. The artwork of an earlier artist can serve as an example
to a later one—not to be copied of course, but to be emulated.
Beethoven’s great piano concertos are not copies of Mozart’s,
not even structurally. But they were in large measure inspired
by Mozart’s concertos. Artistic inspiration is, to be sure, occasioned not only by examples of artistic masterworks.
Beethoven wrote the “Molto Adagio” of his E minor string
quartet under the direct inspiration of the night sky.
The literary critic Eric Heller reports that the great physicist Werner Heisenberg was once speaking with a small group
of English research students on the difference between humanistic studies and scientific pursuits. A grand piano was in
the room, and after the discussion Heisenberg, who was a
highly accomplished pianist, improvised on it a bit. He then
played, beautifully, a Beethoven sonata. When Heisenberg
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finished, he said to those present, “If I had never lived, someone else would have discovered the Uncertainty Principle.
For this was the solution of a problem that had emerged from
the logical development of physics and had to be solved in
this and no other way. But if there had never been a
Beethoven, this sonata would not have been composed.”31
Kant’s claim that genius is an endowment of nature is
problematic. He labored at length to ground and validate the
post-Aristotelian, non-teleological, mathematico-mechanical
concept of nature in his first Critique and in the Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science. Kant construes nature in
these works as simply the complex of phenomena standing
under architectonic laws prescribed to it a priori by the human
understanding. It is hard to see how nature, so construed,
could be the source of anything so inscrutable as artistic genius. The post-Kantian rise of a putatively non-teleological
biology has the effect of making genius all the more inscrutable. One might say that the force that produced, say,
Schubert’s final piano sonatas, his Ninth Symphony, his
Grand Duo for four hands, and his great string quintet (the
last three works all composed in C major, incidentally) was
just a rare and transient anomaly, like a black swan. But this
claim does not adequately account for the taste by which we
are able to appreciate these works, and this taste is not anomalous at all. It is not easy to see how taste for beauty, or even
the capacity for such taste, could have gotten naturally selected for enhancing the survival prospects of the human
species. For, again, the satisfaction bound up with our experience of the beautiful is the effect of a disinterested judgment. The cognitive faculties that are set in free play by the
presence of the beautiful can certainly be placed in the service
of our biological needs. But does their free play serve these
needs? It is one thing to assert that it does. It is something
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else to make sense of this assertion. The nature that gives rise
to genius can hardly be the nature of modern natural science.
It is something whose inner workings in the case of genius
are essentially veiled from view—from the view of the scientist and from the view of the artist as well.
The activity of artistic genius is as mysterious as its ultimate source. Kant understands this activity to be one that is
productive of what he calls, almost paradoxically, “aesthetic
ideas”:
[B]y an aesthetic idea I understand that presentation (Vorstellung) of the imagination that occasions much thinking, yet without any definite
thought, i.e., any concept, being adequate to it, a
presentation that speech, consequently, cannot
completely compass and make intelligible.32
In spite of the last clause, Kant understands poetry to be
the art form that is most impressive in its production of aesthetic ideas. Intelligibility, according to Kant, is constituted
through the understanding’s imposition of concepts on intuitions that have previously been synthesized by the imagination.33 This activity of our understanding is highly selective.
Only a portion of what the imagination has previously synthesized in intuition gets attended to. For us to understand
something, much of the material that the imagination synthesizes has to be passed over and disregarded. It suffices to
think of the controlled experiment, in which the scientist deliberately attempts to eliminate everything from consideration
that is extraneous to the experiment itself.
In the case of writing poetry, something quite different
happens. Kant says that there the imagination “is free to furnish unsought, over and above . . . agreement with the concept, extensive undeveloped material for the understanding,
material which the understanding did not take into consider-
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ation in its concept.”34 Though this activity of the imagination
is not in the service of the understanding’s constitution of an
object, and hence not in the service of acquiring knowledge,
it is still, as Kant says in the preceding quotation, “for the understanding.” In the first place, this activity “quickens the
cognitive powers.” That’s the element of free play, assuming
genius in the artist and a cultivated taste in his audience. But
in the second place, this activity, in the case of poetry especially, provides a kind of “nourishment” for the understanding. “[T]hrough his imagination [the genius] gives life to his
concepts.”35 Let us consider a few lines of poetry to see how
imagination furnishes material for the understanding that is
deliberately ignored by the understanding in its purely cognitive endeavors and typically overlooked in ordinary experience by those of us who are not geniuses.
The rejected lover says, in a poem by Fulke Greville:
Cynthia who did naked lie
Runs away like silver streams;
Leaving hollow banks behind,
Who can neither forward move,
Nor if rivers be unkind,
Turn away or leave to love.36
Banks of a river exposed by receding water are gray,
grassless, and pitted. Warped roots of nearby trees protrude
at random. They are desolate, and anyone can see this. But
to connect this sight with the condition of a lover who has
been abandoned and can neither follow his love nor cease
loving her is the work of genius. It is the production of aesthetic ideas.
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman attends to the phenomena
of nature with all his senses, though he finds little consolation
for grief even in its splendors:
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But not for him those golden calms succeed
Who while the day is high and glory reigns
Sees it go by, as the dim pampas plain,
Hoary with salt and gray with bitter weed,
Sees the vault blacken, feels the dark wind strain,
Hears the dry thunder roll, and knows no rain.37
Thomas Hardy, with a sensibility as cultivated as Greville’s and Tuckerman’s to “undeveloped material normally
passed over,” writes of how others may remember him after
he has died:
If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,
The dew-fall hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
“To him this must have been a familiar sight.”38
We are accustomed to speak of such things as Hardy’s
“dew-fall hawk” and “wind-warped upland thorn” as poetic
images. But this is an imprecise way of speaking, for they are
not images of anything else. They are the bird and the branch,
not visibly present in this room to be sure, but surely, in their
own way, present in the poem.
In these passages we can see how the imagination provides the understanding with material for, as Kant puts it,
“much thought”—not the kind of thought that is at work in
scientific research and philosophical enquiry, but thought directed to features of human experience in which we take an
interest as mortal beings and not as minds only. Kant understands the taste for beauty to be something unique to man, to
a finite but nonetheless rational being, an animal possessing
both sense organs and intellect.
Beauty is a sensible phenomenon. It is a spatial or temporal phenomenon, or both spatial and temporal. It is for this
reason that, for Kant, the term “aesthetic” can designate fea-
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tures or statements regarding the beautiful and sublime as
well as space and time themselves. In fact, the different art
forms can be ordered in terms of how they work with space
and time. Painting is the most spatial and least temporal of
the arts. A painting can be seen all at once, assuming that it
is not excessively large or curved like a cyclorama. The time
involved in the apprehension of its composition is minimal.
In the case of sculpture more time is required, for one must
move around it to take all of it in. In the case of architecture,
yet more time is required, not only because buildings are
larger than statues, but also because one must enter them as
well as walk around them. In the case of dance we observe
spatial figures themselves move through time. This is true of
theater and also of film, where we must also apprehend
speech. Speech fills time and takes time to understand. In poetry and literature in general the spatial relations referred to
occur only in the imagination of the reader.39 Music is at the
opposite end of the scale from painting. Spatial relations are
absent, though they can be imagined. The formal relations in
music are temporal. And all these different forms can be combined, most comprehensively in opera. Wagner intended his
gigantic music dramas to be unities of all the art forms.
The various art forms can, of course, make man himself
their theme. Kant speaks of the possibility of representing
man at his height in a section of the Critique of Judgment entitled the “The Ideal of Beauty.” The following sentence from
the Critique of Practical Reason can serve as an introduction
to it. There Kant says:
The [moral] law should obtain for the world of
sense, as a sensible nature (as this concerns rational
beings), the form (Form) of an intelligible world,
i.e., the form of a supersensible nature, without
interrupting the mechanism of the former.”40
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It is our consciousness of the moral law that causes us to
regard other human beings to look like something more more
than obstacles to be gotten around or targets of sexual appetite, and causes them to manifest themselves not as things
at all but as persons. The very looks of the phenomenal order
are modified, indeed ennobled, by our consciousness of obligation. In the expression of the human being before us, in
the pressing out of his interior rationality and intrinsic worth
to the surface of his countenance, we behold an end-in-itself
that our consciousness of the moral law commands us not to
treat as a mere means to the attainment of our private ends.
In his treatment of the ideal of beauty in the Critique of
Judgment Kant makes two important distinctions. The first
is between idea and ideal. “Idea properly means a rational
concept [a concept of reason], and ideal the representation of
an individual being, regarded as adequate to that idea.”41
The distinction between idea and ideal is the fundamental distinction governing Hegel’s aesthetics. For Hegel
the idea is the whole dialectically interrelated system of
rational concepts, which he attempts to explicate in his
Science of Logic. According to Hegel, art attempts to make
the idea, which is truth in its purity, immediately present
to sensible intuition. The attempt is never fully successful,
for what it aims at is impossible. Art according to Hegel
necessarily falls short of philosophy. The ideal is for him
only an ideal. On the other hand it really is ideal. The ideal
would be (per impossibile) that the idea be intuitively
present, right there in front of us, rather than accessible
solely through discursive, laborious, and largely abstract
thought, as Hegel argues it must be.
According to Kant, however, the great artist is more
successful at presenting the ideal than Hegel supposes.
The unconditioned, for Kant, is not so much a comprehen-
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sive system of speculative concepts as it is a practical law.
And it is possible to depict a human being as governing himself through this law. Kant makes a distinction not only between the idea and the ideal but also between the aesthetical
normal idea and the ideal. The aesthetic normal idea is the
visible archetype of the species, whether of man or of some
other species. It exhibits regularity and perfect fitness of form
to function, whether of man or animal. The ideal, on the other
hand, “makes the purposes of humanity, inasmuch as they
cannot be sensibly presented, the principle for judging of a
figure [Gestalt] through which, as their phenomenal effect,
those purposes are revealed [offenbaren].”42 According to
Kant, this ideal can be represented only in the human figure,
and it is an expression of the moral.
The visible expression of moral ideas that rule
men inwardly can, to be sure, be taken only from
experience; but to make their connection with all
that our reason unites with the morally good in the
idea of the highest purposiveness—goodness of
soul, purity, strength, peace, and so forth—visible
as it were in bodily expression (as the effect of
what is internal): all that requires a union of pure
ideas of reason with great imagination even in him
who wishes only to judge of it, still more in him
who wishes to present it.43
If we leave aside specifically religious art, with its own
complications and profundities, and limit our attention instead to secular art, two candidates for the ideal of beauty in
painting immediately suggest themselves. One is a portrait
by Rembrandt. But Rembrandt’s portraits, though in the
finest instances surely representing “moral ideas that rule
men inwardly,” do not take their departure from the normal
aesthetic normal idea. Quite the contrary, the individual in
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his individuality is represented—warts and all, as we say. His
face is not the ideal type of our species. A better candidate
for the ideal of beauty is Michelangelo’s sculpture of Lorenzo
de Medici, Il Penseroso (Fig. 1). This
sculpture does not represent the Duke of
Urbino as he really looked, and probably
does not even try to represent him as he
really was. The task of making a statue of
Lorenzo for the de Medici tomb seems to
have served as the occasion for Michelangelo to present, on the foundation of the
normal aesthetic normal idea but rising
Fig. 1:
above it, the ideal of the beautiful as the
Michelangelo,
visible expression of “all that our reason
Il Pensoroso
unites with the morally good in the idea of the highest purposiveness.”
The interest, essentially practical, that we take in the ideal
of the beauty as Kant understands it, that is, as the visible expression of moral nobility, keeps the judgment pertaining to
this ideal from being a purely aesthetic judgment. The same
can be said of the interest we take in beautiful poetry. Poetry,
however so beautiful it may be, to the extent that it treats of
human concerns, cannot be the object of an entirely disinterested satisfaction, and our judgment of it is not a pure judgment of taste. And yet Kant ranks poetry as the highest of the
arts. And so we are led to an unexpected conclusion: loftiness
of beauty and purity of beauty are not identical.
Although the primary focus on of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment is on the beautiful, its secondary focus is on
the sublime. Kant thinks that the beautiful exists not only in
art, but in nature as well, in flowers, gardens, landscapes, and,
of course, in the human figure. Though what Kant has to say
about natural beauty is intriguing, we have restricted our at-
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tention to what he has to say about beautiful art because of
its connection with genius and aesthetic ideas. We turn now
to his account of the sublime, for it too has a relation to the
moral, though one quite different from that of the beautiful
to the moral.
Whereas the beautiful is characterized by phenomenal form,
the sublime in nature is characterized by phenomenal formlessness. Kant divides the sublime into the mathematical sublime
and the dynamical sublime. The mathematical sublime appears
as vastness: a towering mountain, a view from its summit, the
ocean in a still calm, and, most strikingly of all, the celestial
vault on a clear night. The dynamical sublime appears as power:
a cataract of water, flashes of lightening, a violent hurricane,
the ocean in full tumult. We take a certain pleasure in beholding
such things, though only when we behold them from a safe vantage point. If they place us in imminent peril, we are too frightened to take pleasure in them. But why, even if we are not
threatened, do we take any pleasure in them at all?
Kant’s answer to this question is remarkable. The mathematical sublime requires us to recognize that our physical
being is, by comparison, infinitesimally small, and the dynamical sublime requires us to recognize that our physical
being is infinitesimally weak. But at the same time the sublime leads us to recognize that in our moral being we are elevated above the whole phenomenal order. For nothing, no
threat of extinction, not even extinction itself, could cause us
to freely betray our moral principles. Some force of nature,
even a drug, could wreak such havoc on our nervous system
as to impair or even destroy the rationality that is the origin
of our moral principles. But as long as we possess our rationality, and hence our will,44 no external force or threat of force
can compel us to abuse our freedom.
The sublime in art is similar to the sublime in nature. The
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sublime in art, however, cannot be
formless. For then it would not be
art at all, but a mess. In sublime
art, form is placed in the service of
representing vastness and power.
An example of the mathematical
sublime in art would be that part
of the façade of Saint Peter’s
Cathedral that was designed by
Michelangelo (Fig. 2).45 An example of the dynamical sublime in art
would be the first movement of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, especially that point at which, the
Fig. 2: Michaelangelo,
development having been brought Façade of St. Peter’s Cathedral
to pitch of intensity, the hushed D
minor opening is recapitulated in a blazing and thundering D
major, but in first inversion with an F-sharp in the low bass,
as though the very cosmos were exploding, or fully displaying itself for the first time.
We said earlier that the satisfaction bound up with the
judgment of taste is, according to Kant, disinterested. It is to
that extent unlike both the satisfaction one takes in the merely
pleasant and the satisfaction one takes in morally good—as
different as these latter two satisfactions most definitely are
from each other. The beautiful pleases, but it is not the merely
pleasant. And, though the beautiful can serve as the symbol
of the morally good, it is not the morally good. Nor does a
cultivated taste imply moral nobility, though an aesthetic education can, as we noted, facilitate the task of a moral education.
Aristotle says that the beginning of philosophy is wonder, especially regarding the causes of things. But, he adds,
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we must end in the opposite and the better state, not with
wonder about the causes of things, but with knowledge of
the causes. Knowledge is better than wonder.46 And Aristotle
seems to think that we really can know something about ultimate causes, even if we know them, not as they are essentially and in themselves, but only as the ultimate cause or
causes of what we are familiar with, of what is close at hand,
of what is not first in itself but first for us.
Kant does not think that even this attenuated knowledge
of ultimate causes is available to us. Wonder is not only the
beginning of philosophy. It is itself a kind of end, an end not
replaced by knowledge. Wonder is present in our aesthetic
experience of the beautiful and the sublime, and in a different way it is present in our moral experience as well. Wonder
is bound up even with the longed for, indeed a priori assumed, discovery of special empirical laws of nature and
their interconnection, which is not accomplished by the
human understanding’s a priori prescription of architectonic
laws to a nature in general.47 Like aesthetic experience in
general, wonder is possible only for a finite though rational
being.
Kant speaks of the wonder that emerges from the accomplishment of reason, both speculative and practical, in an impressive passage that occurs near the end of the Critique of
Practical Reason. Part of the first sentence was inscribed on
his tombstone. It is well known and frequently quoted. But
the whole passage should be better known. If the ancient
philosopher Plato often seems to be the most poetic of
philosophers, the modern philosopher Kant often seems to
be the most prosaic. And yet the passage at the end of the
Critique of Practical Reason, which can serve as a conclusion to this introduction to aesthetics, shows that there was
more poetry in Kant’s soul than one might have guessed
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solely from working one’s way along the “thorny paths” of
the Critique of Pure Reason:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe (Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht) the more often and more steadily reflection
occupies itself with them: the starry sky above me,
and the moral law within me. . . . The former begins at the place I occupy in the external world of
sense; and it broadens the connection in which I
stand into an unbounded magnitude of worlds beyond worlds and systems of systems and into the
limitless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and their continuance. The latter begins
at my invisible self, my personality and exhibits
me in a world that has true infinity, but which is
perceptible only to the understanding, a world in
which I recognize myself as existing in a universal
and necessary (and not only, as in the first case,
contingent) connection, but thereby also in connection with all those visible worlds. The former
view, of a numberless mass of worlds, annihilates,
as it were, my importance as an animal creature,
which must give back to the planet ([itself] a mere
speck in the universe) the matter from which it
came, the matter which is for a short time provided with vital force, we know not how. The latter, on the contrary, infinitely elevates my worth
as that of an intelligence through my personhood,
in which the moral law reveals a life independent
of all animality and even of the whole world of
sense—at least so far as it may be gathered from
the purposive destination assigned to my existence
through this law, a destination that is not restricted
to the conditions and limitations of this life but extends into the infinite.48
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NOTES
Leo Strauss, Letter of February 26, 1961 to Helmut Kuhn, in The Independent Journal of Philosophy 2:1978, 23.
2
Greater Hippias Major 286c5
3
282d6. Cf. fn. 1 in the Greater Hippias, translated by David Sweet in
The Roots of Political Philosophy, edited by Thomas Pangle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 307.
4
At 283a1 and a9.
1
Protagoras 314b10-c8; 337c7-338b2: “meta de ton Prodokon Hippias
ho sophos eipen” ff. Cf. fn. 17 of in Sweet’s translation of the Greater
Hippias, 307.
6
Symposium 177d79-810.
7
Greater Hippias Minor 293e5.
8
The later coinage of the term “aesthetics” emerges for a reason. There
is a special connection between aesthesis, the Greek word for “sensation,”
and beauty. The beautiful, and the sublime too, are present in sensory experience, even if something super-sensible shines through them. For this
reason the expressions “the aesthetically beautiful” and “the morally
noble” can both be used to translate the two distinct but related senses of
the expression to kalon.
9
294d1.
10
295c3 and; d9; 296e2. Note the introduction of power (or that which is
powerful, to dynaton) at 295e5, and the grouping of the helpful, the useful, and “the power to make something good” at 297d4.
5
Hippias Major 297e4-298a8.; Cf. Phaedrus 250d1-e1.
12
Greek Mathematics and the Origin of Algebra, translated by Eva Brann
(Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968), 79-99.
13
Immanuel Kant, Werke in Zehn Bänden, hereafter Werke, edited by Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981),
Band 8, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 295-298. (English translation, Critique
of Judgment, translated by J. H. Bernard, (New York: Haffner Press,
1951), 51-54. Pagination for in this translation will hereafter be given immediately following the German pagination and separated from it by a
slash. I have made some alterations in the translation in the interest of
greater literalness.)
11
14
The concept beautiful is nonetheless predicated of the object; it is not
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predicated of the subject. But, for Kant, it is predicated of the object only
because of what it occasions in the subject. And yet the object would not
occasion this effect were it not, in itself so to speak, already characterized
by perfection of composition, simplicity of means and richness of effects,
radiance and mutual illumination of whole and parts or, in the language
of Thomas Aquinas, integritas, consonantia, and claritas (Summa Theologiae 1, Question 39, Article 8, corpus). Kant’s argument in the Critique
of Judgment does not presuppose the particulars of the case he makes for
the a priori constitution of nature via transcendental subjectivity in the
Critique of Pure Reason. On the contrary, beautiful objects, just like special empirical laws of nature, are not deducible from the architectonic
laws of a nature in general that he argues are prescribed to it a priori by
the human understanding. The exact source of the special laws of nature
as such is as mysterious as the exact source of beauty. It remains a problem that, though taken up again in the “Introduction” to the Critique of
Judgment, in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, and in
the Opus Postumum, is never fully solved by Kant. “For who can entirely
draw out from nature her secret?” Werke, Band 8, 316/70.
15
In the case of a really fine wine, one goes so far as to speak of structure,
balance, and bouquet, borrowing terms from architecture and floral
arrangements. Still, one does not call the taste of the wine, but only its
looks, beautiful. The same can be said of fine pipe tobacco. It may look
beautiful in the tin, but no one says that it tastes or smells beautiful.
Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Section 6.
17
Werke, Band 8, 281/39.
18
Ibid., Werke, 311/66; 314/69. We shall consider the ideal of beauty
below.
16
Symposium 206e1-207a3.
Cf. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1953), 128.
19
20
Werke, Band 8, 462-463/200.
22
From “Thoughts on Kant,” a Friday-night lecture given at St. John’s
College, Annapolis, in the spring of 1979. This lecture, which Mr. McDonald delivered from notes, was recorded, and each library on the two
campuses of St. John’s has a compact disk of it. I listened to the lecture
more than once in gearing up to write the present essay, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in understanding Kant’s project
in its full scope.
21
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“Shakespeare wrote at a time when common sense still taught . . . that
the function of the great poet was to teach what is truly beautiful by means
of pleasure.” Allen Bloom and Harry Jaffa, Shakespeare’s Politics
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964), 6. Kant would say
that this formulation (whether or not it is what common sense taught in
Shakespeare’s time, which one can doubt) gets the relationship between
beauty and pleasure exactly backwards. The function of the great poet is
to teach what is truly pleasant by means of beauty, inasmuch as the truly
pleasant—more precisely what is pleasant to a rational animal as such—
presupposes the recognition that what is under consideration is aesthetically beautiful, or, for that matter, morally noble.
23
Werke, Band 8, 417-420/160-163. This spirit can be thought without
contradiction as being divine in origin.
24
Werke, Band 8, 406-410/151-153.
Ion 543d7-10.
27
Quoted by Gershom Scholem in “Revelation and Tradition as Religious
Categories” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism, (New York: Schocken
Books, 1971), 303.
28
Letter of August 20, 1946, to Karl Löwith. The force that Strauss speaks
of in this clause cannot be easily distinguished, in the case of the genius,
from the “creation” to which he refers, within quotation marks, in the preceding clause.
25
26
Werke, Band 8, 405-406/150.
30
Werke, Band 8, 408/152.
31
Eric Heller, “The Broken Tradition: An Address,” in The Age of Prose,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 31.
29
Werke, Band 8, 413-414/157.
“Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are
blind” (Critique of Pure Reason B 75, Werke, Band 3, 98). “An object is
that in whose concept the manifold of a given intuition is united” (ibid.,
B 137, Werke, Band 3, 139). “It is one and the same spontaneity, which
[in the synthesis of apprehension] under name of the imagination, and [in
the synthesis of apperception, under the name] of the understanding,
brings combination into the manifold of intuition” (ibid., B 162 note,
Werke, Band 3, 155).
34
Werke, Band 8, 417/160.
35
Werke, Band 8, 423/165-166.
32
33
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
From Number 56 in “Caelica,” Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, edited
by Thom Gunn, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 85.
36
From Sonnet 5 of the First Series, 1854-1860, in The Complete Poems
of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, edited by N. Scott Momaday, (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 5.
37
From “Afterwards,” in The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, edited
by James Gibson, (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 553. Particularly fine
studies on the poetry of Greville, Tuckerman, and Hardy, among others,
can be found in Yvor Winter’s Forms of Discovery (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1967).
39
On the quite different, even opposed, ways in which great poetry and
great painting stimulate the imagination, see Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s
magnificent study, Laokoon; or, On the Limits of Painting and Poetry
(1766).
38
Werke, Band 6, 156.
41
Werke, Band 8, 314/69. Compare Critique of Pure Reason B 595-598.
For Kant, an aesthetic judgment in the strict sense is singular (Werke,
Band 8, 293-294/49-50). The individual per se is not the concern of science. (Cf. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 81b8: there is no scientific knowledge, no epistēmē, of singulars—though for a possible exception to this
general rule see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1, Question 1, Articles 2-8). But the individual per se is very much the concern of fine art.
One reason why Plato so frequently gets called a “poet” is that he presents
his teaching through the voices of flesh and blood individuals, Socrates
chief among them. Dostoyevsky goes somewhat further in this direction:
“[T]he image of the [Dostoyevskian] hero is inseparably linked with the
image of an idea and cannot be detached from it. We see the hero in the idea
and through the idea, and we see the idea in him and through him. . . . [W]hat
is important is not the ordinary qualifications of a person’s character or actions, but rather the index of a person’s devotion to an idea in the deepest
recesses of his personality.” Mikail Bakhtin, “The Idea in Dostoyevsky,”
in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, (edited and translated by Caryl
Emerson in Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 8, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 87. Cf. infra, fn. 44.
40
Werke, Band 8, 315/70.
Werke, Band 8, 318/72.
44
“Everything in nature works according to laws. Only a rational being
has the capacity to act according to the idea (Vorstellung) of law, i.e., ac42
43
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cording to principles, [and so has] a will.” Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals in Werke, Band 6, 41.
45
See Ralph Lieberman, “Bramante and Michelangelo at St. Peter’s,” The
St. John’s Review 40.1 (1990-91), 1-38. Our Fig.2 is Fig. 37 in Lieberman’s article. He submits it in support of the following perspicuous observation: “Michelangelo’s predecessors at the church, even the most
gifted of them, could merely build big; he solved the problem of St.
Peter’s because he could think big” (35-37).
Metaphysics 982b11-21; 983a12-20. Cf. Plato, Theaetetus 155d1-8.
47
Critique of Pure Reason B 164-165; Critique of Judgment inerke, Band
8, 260- 267/17-25. Cf. fn. 14 supra.
46
48
Werke, Band 6, 300.
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38
Passion and Perception in
Mozart’s Magic Flute
Peter Kalkavage
Mozart leads us deep into the realm of spirits. Dread
lies all about us, but withholds its torments and becomes more an intimation of infinity.
—E. T. A. Hoffman on Mozart’s
Symphony No. 39
This essay is an excursion into the world of Mozart’s Magic
Flute. My focus will be the aria “Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd
schön,” “This image is enchantingly beautiful.” One of the
most exquisite love songs ever written, it occurs early in the
opera and is sung by Prince Tamino as he gazes upon a likeness of Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night and
Tamino’s destined Other.
Mozart’s final opera, written in the last year of his short
life, is a musical meditation on large themes: love, friendship,
marriage, the human and the divine, world-order, virtue and
vice, light and darkness, lust, resentment, vengeance, illusion
and disillusionment, hardship, despair, trials, death, and reconciliation—all this in the context of a bizarre fairy tale that
is by turns solemn, light-hearted, homiletic, dire, ceremonial,
and slapstick. The Magic Flute is a magical work that reflects
on magic, especially the magic that is music. It offers us a
perfect opportunity to examine the elements, principles, and
causes of musical phenomena in an admirably distilled and
lucid form.
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This essay
was first delivered as a lecture at Thomas Aquinas College on 11 November 2011.
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The Magic Flute has been called Mozart’s “Masonic
opera,” and so it is. Mozart was a serious Freemason. So was
his librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, at whose Viennese theatre the work was first produced and who was the first to play
the birdman, Papageno. The opera—or rather Singspiel, “play
with songs”—is filled with the ideals, symbols, terms, rituals,
and numerology of Freemasonry.1 The Masonic Three is especially prominent: three flats in the key signature, Three
Ladies, Three Boys, Three temples, and, of course, three
tones in the major triad, which Mozart celebrates in the middle of the Overture and throughout the opera.2 The sovereign
Three is the major triad, which Mozart highlights in various
ways throughout the opera. I say all this now because the Masonic influence, though pervasive, will not be my concern. I
want to focus instead on the power—and, as I hope to show,
the wisdom—of Mozart’s music.
Part One: The Story
The plot of the Magic Flute is strange, to say the least, and
often confusing. Since it may be unfamiliar to some of you,
I will go through it briefly.
Our story begins with Prince Tamino, lost in the dark
wood of C minor and pursued by a giant serpent.3 He carries
a bow but no arrows. Three Ladies who work for the Queen
of the Night slay the serpent and give Tamino a portrait of
the Queen’s daughter, which causes the prince to fall in love
and to express his feeling in the aria we are about to examine.
By this time, he has heard Papageno sing his lusty birdcatcher song. The Queen majestically appears. She tells a sad
story about her daughter’s abduction by Sarastro, and sends
Tamino on a mission to rescue Pamina from this fiend.
Tamino is given a magic flute, and Papageno, now Tamino’s
sidekick, is given silver chimes. The flute inverts the dark
passions of its listeners: its magic turns sadness to smiles,
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cold-heartedness to love. Flute and chimes will protect the
two friends, who are also assigned guiding spirits: Three
Boys who are said to be “young, beautiful, gracious, and
wise.”
In the next scene, we meet Pamina. Her cruel treatment
at the hands of the slaves and the Moor Monostatos (“he who
stands alone”) suggests that Sarastro is indeed a villain and
tyrant. Papageno arrives ahead of Tamino. He and Pamina
become fast friends, as the birdman tells her about his longing
for a mate and the young prince who is on his way to rescue
her. The princess and the birdman sing a graceful 6/8 duet in
E-flat major. It is an ode to marriage. “Man and Woman,
Woman and Man,” they sing, “reach unto divinity.”
This brings us to the Finale of Act I. Having arrived at
the stronghold of Sarastro,Tamino enters the Temple of Wisdom and meets a priest, who tells him he will never achieve
the reward of love and virtue while he burns with death and
vengeance. The priest disabuses Tamino of his false opinion
about Sarastro, who rules in this Temple. Tamino is told that
many of his questions must for now remain unanswered. One
thing he does learn: Pamina is alive.
His spirits renewed, Tamino plays his flute, as wild animals gather and listen, their impulses tamed by the flute’s
warbling. Papageno and Pamina arrive, but before they find
Tamino, Monostatos and the slaves arrest them. Papageno
plays his silver chimes and, for the moment, charms his
would-be captors. Then Sarastro enters, as the chorus sings:
“Hail, Sarastro! He it is to whom we joyfully submit!” Pamina, resolved to tell the truth, confesses her guilt. She gives
Sarastro two reasons for her escape: the Moor’s lustful advances and the sweet sound of her mother’s name. Sarastro
cuts her off. Her mother is a proud woman, he says: a man
must guide Pamina’s heart. Monostatos drags in Tamino, and
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he and Pamina see each other in person for the first time.
Monostatos thinks he has earned a reward but is brutally disappointed. Sarastro sentences him to seventy-seven strokes
on the soles of his feet. As Monostatos is led off, the chorus
resumes its song of praise. Tamino and Papageno are then
taken to the Temple of Probation to be purified.
Act II begins with Sarastro’s prayer to Isis and Osiris. He
asks the deities to send the spirit of wisdom to the young couple, along with patience in the upcoming trials. If Tamino and
Pamina succeed, they will have proved themselves worthy of
one another and of acceptance into the priesthood. The male
hegemony will be transformed through marriage. It will incorporate Woman into the ruling class—a bold move on the
part of Mozart and Schikaneder, since women were not allowed to become full-fledged Freemasons.4
Tamino and Papageno go through the first trial together.
They resist the temptations of the Three Ladies, who now appear in their true, demonic form. Meanwhile, the Queen of
the Night comes to Pamina and is similarly unmasked. She
gives Pamina a dagger and commands her to murder Sarastro.5 “The vengeance of hell,” she sings, “boils in my heart.”
If Pamina refuses, her mother will cast her off forever. After
the Queen leaves, Monostatos enters. He has heard everything about the planned murder and blackmails Pamina, who
can save herself and her mother only by yielding to his lust.
When Pamina refuses, Monostatos says: “Then die!” As he
raises the dagger to kill her, Sarastro enters and holds him
back. He dismisses the Moor and reassures Pamina with an
aria that is warm, regal, and deep-sounding. Pamina need not
fear that Sarastro will take vengeance on her mother. In these
sacred halls, he says, vengeance is unknown, and the spirit
of friendship and forgiveness reigns supreme.
Tamino and Papageno must again endure a test: this time
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they must remain silent in the face of all temptation to speak.
Papageno has a comic interchange with an old woman who
brings him water. She is about to reveal her name when a
thunderclap calls her away. The Three Boys come on the
scene and hand Tamino and Papageno their instruments. The
flute attracts Pamina, who arrives to find her beloved sad and
silent. She takes this as a sign that Tamino no longer loves
her. She sings of her despair in a deeply tragic aria, which
sadly mimics the lilting 6/8 rhythm of Pamina’s marriage
duet with Papageno.6
Sarastro tells Tamino that two “dangerous trials” remain.
Pamina is summoned, only to be separated from Tamino, who
goes off to face the test alone. Meanwhile, the old woman returns to Papageno and gets him to promise marriage, at which
point she is magically transformed into Papagena—a female
Papageno! But when Papageno tries to embrace her, she is
led away by an official who tells her that Papageno is not yet
worthy of her. Papageno and Pamina are now paired once
again, but in contrast to their duet, in which they sang joyfully
about the blessings of marriage, this time they sing separately
about their loneliness and despair. Both attempt suicide, but
they are stopped by the Three Boys, who rekindle Pamina’s
hope by informing her that Tamino is waiting for her.
Tamino prepares for his first dangerous trial, thinking that
he must go it alone. He hears Pamina’s voice. “Tamino, stop,”
she calls, “I must see you!” The two Men in Armour—who
gravely warn Tamino about the need to be purified by the
four elements, and to conquer the fear of death—switch to a
jolly tune once Pamina shows up. They tell the pair to enter
the Temple hand in hand. Pamina vows never to leave
Tamino’s side and to face whatever hardships come their way.
“I myself will lead you,” she says, “love will guide me.” She
urges Tamino to play his flute, so that by the power of music
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they may “walk joyfully through death’s dark night.”7 After
they endure the tests of fire and water, the chorus greets them
with a song of triumph.
The scene shifts to Papageno. After preventing his suicide, the Three Boys remind Papageno about his magic
chimes. The chimes play, and Papagena appears. The pair
sing a courtship duet suited to their birdy nature. They take
turns repeating the opening syllable of their names—“Pa, pa,
pa”—in a musicalized rendition of panting. They sing about
all the offspring they plan to have.
But a menace looms. Monostatos, the Queen, and the
Three Ladies march on the temple, supported by a threatening
accompaniment in the key of C minor. Thunder and lightning
defeat them, and they are plunged into “eternal night.” The
scene then shifts to the Temple of the Sun, as Sarastro stands
on high, and Tamino and Pamina appear dressed in priestly
vestments. “The sun’s rays,” he says, “drive away the night,
destroy the stolen power of the hypocrites.” At the end, a jubilant chorus hails the two initiates and offers thanks to Isis
and Osiris. “Strength,” they sing, “conquers and crowns, as
a reward, beauty and wisdom with an eternal crown.”
Part Two: The Unfolding of a Song
We love music because of how it makes us feel. We listen to
some works more than others because we want to experience,
again and again, the feelings they stir in us. But feeling is not
primary in music, nor is it always the reason why we listen.
Sometimes we listen to a piece of music because we wish to
hear a quality or perfection that is present in it. The reason
for listening is an active, even strenuous, contemplation
through which we participate in, and unite with, the life and
shape of the musical object—not the emotion the object
arouses.8 Our feelings, in any case, are grounded in, and
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prompted by, what we perceive in the tones; they are rooted
in what is there in the phenomenon we call music. As we now
turn to Tamino’s aria, I shall make the attempt to say what is
there.
Tamino’s aria is inspired, as we know, by an image of
Pamina, or, as we might call it, given Tamino’s fervent devotional response, an icon. The image is said to be magical,
but it surely needs no magic beyond Pamina’s likeness to enchant the young prince, who sings as if caught up in a dream.
The words to his song are as follows:
This image is enchantingly beautiful,
such as no eye has ever seen!
I feel it, how this divine portrait
Fills my heart with new emotions.
I cannot name this,
yet I feel it here burning like fire;
Could the feeling be love?
Yes, yes, it is love alone!
O, if only I could find her!
O, if she were standing before me!
I would, warm and pure . . . what would I?
Enraptured I would press her to this burning breast,
And forever would she be mine.
Tamino’s words trace out a progression in three stages: first,
he admires a divine image; second, he asks whether the feeling it inspires in him, and which at first he cannot name, is
love, but then affirms that it must be love; and third, he wonders what he would do if the beloved were standing before
him, concluding that he would press her to his breast, and she
would be his forever.
Tamino is doing more in this song than expressing his
feelings. He beholds his inner state and makes it an object of
reflection. He wonders at the power of the magical object that
he perceives and his passionate response to it. He does not
immediately identify his new emotion with love but rather
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reaches that conclusion through inner dialogue and questioning. Mozart’s music perfectly expresses the stages of Tamino’s
response, the meaning of his words, and the motions of his
soul.
The music that accompanies these words is one of
Mozart’s greatest love songs. Young listeners are sometimes
put off by the aria, as if embarrassed by Tamino’s heart-onthe-sleeve outpouring of feeling. It is easy to be condescending toward Tamino, who is young, naïve, and not very bright.
He lacks irony.9 His aria, nevertheless, towers above immature judgment and puts it to shame. As a musical object, a
work of art, the song is gorgeous, brilliant in its shadow play,
and deep. It is also truthful—a faithful rendering of the
human soul in one of its most profound shapes. Do we want
to know what it is like for a young, noble soul to experience
romantic love for the first time? If so, then we should immerse ourselves in the aria—in what tones can tell us about
love.
My musical starting-point is the observation that “Dies
Bildnis” is a precisely formed, perfectly balanced whole.
Tamino is agitated and confused. But his music, though passionate, is restrained, stately, and inward-sounding.10 It expresses his awareness, not just his feeling. The music critic
and writer of tales E. T. A. Hoffmann once said that Haydn,
Mozart, and Beethoven all had the musical virtue of “Besonnenheit.”11 The word means something like rational awareness, sensibleness, being in one’s right mind. Tamino’s aria,
with its beautiful melding of feeling and form, passion and
restraint, is a superb example of this virtue.12
The song is in E-flat major—the solemn, heroic key of
the opera—and has a moderately slow, two-beat measure. It
is scored for strings, clarinets, bassoons, and French horns
(no flutes or oboes). Their sound is like a warm glow ema-
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nating from Tamino’s heart. The aria is in a truncated version
of sonata form. It follows the usual tripartite structure of the
sonata—exposition, development, and recapitulation—inasmuch as its key-area plan goes from tonic to dominant and
then back to the tonic; but there is no repeat of the opening
theme as is customary in the sonata. Unlike song-form, which
is also tripartite, the sonata emphasizes the progressive, forward-moving unfolding of musical ideas. Circularity is
achieved, but only at the end. Along the way, the tones move
in a linear, arrow-like trajectory.13
The opening sound: a tender statement of the E-flat major
triad spelled out in dotted rhythms and played by the strings.
Clearly, the singer we are about to hear—unlike Papageno,
with his bouncy bird-catcher song—is noble. Tamino’s first
utterance is a leap on the words “Dies Bildnis,” “This
image”—a rising major sixth from scale degree 5 up to scale
degree 3 (B-flat up to G). This tonal leap expresses an event
in Tamino’s soul, the passionate wonder inspired by Pamina’s
likeness.14 When his sentence is spoken in German, the accent
is on “schön,” “beautiful”—“Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd
schön.” Mozart’s melody shifts the accent to “Bildnis,”
“image,” leaving no doubt that for Tamino the focus is on
what he sees, on the source and cause of his surging passion.15
After the inspired leap from 5 to 3, the melody gently descends by steps, pausing on degree 4 (A-flat), an unstable degree that tends downward toward 3. The musical phrase
corresponds to the first phrase of the sentence: “This image
is enchantingly beautiful.” As Tamino moves to the second
part of his sentence—“as no eye has ever seen”—he sings a
second rising sixth—from 4 up to 2, A-flat to F. He then descends by steps to 3, the tone to which his earlier 4 was pointing. Whereas the first phrase landed on a tone that was
unstable and “wanted” to move, the second complements the
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first and brings it to rest. The two phrases, thanks to the postponement of the move from 4 to 3, form a single phrase—
not two sets of tones but one coherent movement composed
of two sub-movements.16 The entire phrase is bounded by an
octave that extends from the high 3, to which Tamino leaps,
to the low 3, to which he descends by step.
Mozart’s musical language is that of tonal harmony. This
means that the music is firmly grounded in a tonal center, the
tone to which all the other tones point, and has a background
or underpinning in the movement of what we call “chords.”
We can say that this movement is an accompaniment to the
melody, but it is more precise to say that the harmony is the
structured movement that interprets the melody and reveals
its depth.17 Harmony is present in the two-part phrase we have
just examined. The harmonic movement is from the I chord,
or tonic, to the V7 chord, or dominant seventh, and back again
to I—a musical oscillation. This works because the instability
and tension of the V7 chord has a precise direction: it points
unambiguously to the I chord, in this case the E-flat major
triad. And so, we can regard Mozart’s opening two-part
phrase as the cooperation of melody and harmony, or rather
as the unity of two simultaneous kinds of tension that beget
movement: the melodic tension of individual tones and the
harmonic tension of chords. It is possible to argue that these
directed tensions and their various relations to one another
are the primary object of musical perception, that to listen to
music, at least in the tradition of tonal harmony, is to perceive
not pitches per se but forces—dynamic qualities that manifest themselves in and through pitches and hold the piece
together.18
After the opening phrase, which goes harmonically from
I to V and back again, the tones open up and move forward.
This effect is due largely to the harmony, which, having so
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far confined itself to I-V7-I, now moves to the IV chord, or
subdominant, a chord that signals the “away” move in a tonal
journey, as well as a certain leisureliness and lessening of harmonic tension. Tamino moves from the picture to his inner
state: “I feel it, I feel it, how this divine portrait fills my heart
with new emotions.” As he says “I feel it, I feel it,” he sings
appoggiaturas on “feel”—B-natural to C, then A-natural to
B-flat. Appoggiaturas are leaning tones, unstable tones on
strong beats, which briefly delay the arrival of a main tone
in the melody. The effect is an increased expressivity, an inflection perfectly suited to Tamino’s word “feel.” The accompaniment echoes the heartfelt leaning tones: as Tamino leans
into his feeling, the entire string section leans as though in
sympathy with him.
Right after his appoggiaturas, Tamino speaks of his heart,
“Herz,” and the new emotions that have been aroused in it.
He expresses an outburst on “Götterbild,” “divine portrait,”
with a second dramatic leap, this time from B-flat up to Aflat, the highest tone of his song. The interval, a minor seventh, is an even bigger leap than his opening sixth. The
melody here outlines part of the V7 or dominant-seventh
chord. The music does not resolve this tense chord, which
points to the tonic, but rather stresses it and lingers on it.
When the tonic chord finally arrives, it is not the end of
the previous phrase but the beginning of a new one. Now past
his initial outburst, Tamino retreats to a calmer, more inward
mood as he completes his sentence: “fills my heart with new
emotions.” The accompaniment is measured and lovely, like
the gentle strumming of a guitar: bass note, chord / bass note,
chord. The harmony takes us on a little musical journey, as
the melody above begins and ends on scale degree 1, that is,
E-flat. The sequence of chords here—I6, IV, I6/4, V7—arouses
the expectation that the tense V7chord will resolve to the
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tonic, which would fit with the E-flat, or scale degree 1, in
the melody. But this does not happen. When Tamino sings
his E-flat on “füllt,” “fills” (which in German closely resembles “fühlt,” “feels”), the harmony subverts the expected closure. It interprets this E-flat as part of a dissonant diminished
seventh chord based on A-natural. The tones seem to have
gone off course.
We have here a so-called deceptive cadence: we expect
the cadence to reach its end, but the harmony takes a detour
at the last minute and puts instability (in this case, extreme
instability) in place of stability. This creates tension and the
need for continued movement—for a repeat of the formula
that will finally reach its destination. This is in fact what happens. The unexpected and darkly passionate diminished-seventh chord is an applied dominant (or secondary dominant).
This is a dominant that tenses toward a chord other than the
tonic, in this case, to the V7 chord of E-flat: a B-flat dominant
seventh chord. As Tamino rises up stepwise to his E-flat on
“fills,” the tones fill the measure with a mounting passion.
On this word, three kinds of musical tension unite in a single
chord: deceptive cadence, applied dominant, diminished seventh chord. Tamino’s unassuming E-flat in the melody does
not reveal the depth of the word he sings or of the passion it
expresses. But the harmony does: it interprets Tamino’s Eflat and releases in it an unexpected possibility.19 This harmonic inflection of a melodic tone recalls what Wagner said
about harmony in general: that it is “the first thing that fully
persuades the feeling as to the emotional content of [the]
melody, which otherwise would leave to it something undertermined.”20 The more we perceive the structure and detail of
this flawless movement of tones when Tamino first sings the
word “fills:—this marriage of melody and harmony—the
more intimately we move with it, know it for what it is.21
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Right after the deceptive cadence, the first violins, as if
inspired by Tamino, sing rising phrases that form a gentle
two-part wave: up and down, higher up and down. Their
tones outline the degrees of the B-flat7 chord, to which the
diminished-seventh chord was pointing. With this move, the
tones regain their direction in the musical journey.
The dominant seventh chord spelled out by the first violins gently leads Tamino to repeat his sentence, this time with
musical closure. Again he sings his passionate rising sixth
from B-flat to G on the words “mein Herz,” “my heart,” and
then goes even higher—to his A-flat. He ends his phrase with
a smooth 3→2→1. The harmony here traverses a complete
cycle or journey, at the end aligning itself with Tamino’s Eflat: I, ii6, I6/4, V7, I. I observe in passing that this conventional
symbolism, which is admittedly useful for analysis, conceals
the true phenomenon, which is not a succession of separate
tone-stacks but rather a continuous movement of closely related phases: starting-point (I), stepping away (ii6), preparing
to point back (I6/4), pointing back (V7), and being back (I).22
Moreover, the cadence formula is not tacked on but grows,
as if organically, from what has come before. Not a device
that merely stops movement, it is a true telos, the gratifying
completion of Tamino’s opening 16-measure period.
Throughout my discussion I have emphasized musical
tension. Indeed, the Greek word for tone, tonos, derives from
the verb tenein, to stretch or strain. Tonal music makes sense,
even to the untutored ear, because we directly perceive the
continuity and the whole formed by the interrelation of musical tensions. Precise expectations are aroused, postponed,
and ultimately fulfilled. Tonal harmony may thus be characterized as erotic, as constituting a musical universe animated
by a desire or longing that is present in the tones themselves.23
That is perhaps why the tones can arouse longing in the per-
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ceptive-passionate listener. In the tones we hear the strains
of our souls: the music gives them coherent shape and represents them as objects for our contemplation.24
Right after his opening 16-measure period, Tamino
pauses, as clarinets in gentle thirds take us into a new section
of the exposition. Here the music changes key from E-flat to
B-flat, from I to V. This is a standard move for a sonata-form
piece in a major key. But it is not an imposition of a prefabricated abstract schema. It is rather an organic, natural continuation of musical movement. I and V are intimately
related: they are neighbours on the circle of fifths. Also, V is
the harmonic degree that points to I. Finally, in the music of
Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, V functions as a sort of
counter-pole—an opposite that competes with I for tonal supremacy.25 In our present case, we should note, above all, how
E-flat is dislodged and B-flat established as the new tonic.
The upper clarinet goes from G to F, that is, from 3 to 2 in E
flat, and then repeats the F. Had it gone from G to F and on
to E-flat, the key of E-flat would have been maintained:
3→2→1. It is the emphasis on 2 that subtly begins to move
the harmony from I to V. It blocks the move to E-flat as scale
degree 1, and begins to set up F as degree 5 of our new key,
B-flat. The appearance among the tones of A-natural, scale
degree 7 in the B-flat scale, solidifies this move.
Earlier, Tamino sang his appoggiaturas and the orchestra
followed. Now the reverse happens. The upper clarinet introduces a new musical strain, which Tamino follows, as if inspired by it. “I cannot name this,” he sings, “yet I feel it here
burning like fire” (“Dies Etwas kann ich zwar nicht nennen;
doch fühl ich’s hier wie Feuer brennen”). In imitation of the
clarinet, Tamino begins on his high G (now scale degree 6)
and descends stepwise. His gently undulating phrase ends
with a leaning tone (C-sharp leaning into D) on the word
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“nennen,” “name.” He then repeats the phrase, with a slight
variation, on the words “yet I feel it here burning like fire.”
The harmony is simple: oscillation between the tonic (now
B-flat) and the dominant (now F).
A brief transition in dotted rhythms, played by clarinets
and bassoons, takes us to Tamino’s first question, which he
stresses by singing it twice: “Could the feeling be love?”
(“Soll die Empfindung Liebe sein?”) Both phrases end on
tense chords: the first on an applied dominant (the V7 of V),
the second on the dominant of B-flat (an F major triad). This
harmonic tension—this upward-tending interrogative gesture—is reflected in the melody. Tamino’s first utterance of
his question outlines the B-flat triad and ends on an E-natural,
a tone foreign to B-flat (the F at the top of the triad becomes
a leaning tone to the E). His second utterance begins with a
downward leap from G to B-flat (the inverse of his opening
sixth) and ends on the unstable scale degree 2. The E-natural
with which Tamino ends the first utterance of his question is
especially affecting: “Could this feeling be love (“Liebe
sein”)?” The chromatic E-natural (highlighted by the preceding F as leaning tone), the applied dominant of which it is a
part (C7), and the florid notes of the first violin all sound as
though a light were beginning to dawn, as though the question “Could this be love?” was more than just a question. The
anticipation of the answer is heightened by the brief interlude
played by the clarinets. Their rising phrases in dotted rhythms
give Tamino his cue. His “Ja, ja!” completes the sequence of
upward melodic gestures.
Tamino answers his question: “Yes, yes, it is love alone,
love, love, it is love alone.” He utters the word “Liebe,”
“love,” four times in all—three times with an expressive leaning tone and once with a climactic flourish called a “turn.”
At the end of his first phrase (right after “Ja, ja!”), Tamino
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sings a straightforward 3→2→1 (D→C→B-flat) on the word
“allein,” “alone” or “only.” But the harmony undercuts the
stability of his final B-flat with a deceptive cadence. Instead
of V→I, we get V→VI, where VI is a minor chord. Musically, this is a subtle way of extending the phrase and producing the need to move on. Also, the minor VI adds a gently
dark inflection and fervor to the word “allein.” But the deceptive cadence may also suggest, in this case, that Tamino’s
certitude is doubtful, that he is still in the dark about what he
is feeling, just as he is ignorant of what it really means to
love.
As Tamino repeats his sentence (“It is love alone”), he
dwells on “Liebe” and makes it into its own musical phrase
in three parts: first a leap that gently descends by step, then
this same phrase repeated, and finally an embellished ascent
to a high G. The chord on this G is a dramatic diminished
seventh chord that points to the F major triad, the V of B-flat.
Both melody and harmony are at this point up in the air, begging for resolution. The eighth-note rest that follows heightens the suspense. After the rest, tension is released, as Tamino
completes his sentence: he drops more than an octave to an
F and proceeds by step to B-flat, scale degree 1, this time supported rather than undercut by the accompanying harmony.
The cadence, embellished by a turn played by the first violins,
brings the section to a close. It provides the release that the
preceding deceptive cadence had postponed.
We now enter the development or middle section of the
aria. I think you will agree that although not much time has
passed, much has happened. We have perceived the unfolding
of a musical idea that expresses the unfolding of Tamino’s
enraptured soul: music has given us access to the soul that
words alone cannot give. That the tones are embarking on a
new large section of the piece is signalled by a pronounced
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shift to quicker rhythms in the accompaniment. The tonal
drama now has more forward momentum. Up to this point,
it has been pretty much a matter of beautiful phrases in starts
and stops. This new section as a whole, this middle of the
aria, is the point of maximum tension—the crux of the tonal
drama. As we put ourselves into this extended moment of
mounting tension, we are unsure of where the tones will go.
How will the tones end this section and lead into the recapitulation? How will the recapitulation resolve all the tensions
that have built up in the course of the song?
The quicker rhythms in sixteenth- and thirty-second notes
are played by the strings. The winds enter with a recurring
pattern of syncopations or offbeat rhythms. Underneath this
dense rhythmic complex, the bass viols provide support with
a persistent B-flat in sixteenth-notes (a so-called pedal point).
They are the quickened pulse and heartbeat of this part of
Tamino’s music. Mozart brilliantly adds yet another rhythmic
element that heightens tension: he has the first violins surge
upward in thirty-second-notes grouped in quick pairs, followed by a rapid succession of appoggiaturas. These leaning
tones then take over and become the principal theme of the
violins. They are like little flutters of the heart produced by
heightened expectation. All the rhythms together form a complex musical image of the surging yet reflective passion that
leads Tamino to his second, more pressing question: “O, if
only I could find her! O, if only she were standing before me!
I would, warm and pure . . .what would I?”
The melody here begins as a stepwise ascent, which
Tamino then repeats, from B-flat, that is, scale degree 1, to
the high A-flat. Could this A-flat be hinting that we are already on our way back to the home key of E-flat major, or is
it just part of an applied dominant? When Tamino sings the
A-flat to complete his sentence “O, if only I could find her,”
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he outlines three-fourths of the dominant seventh chord that
points to E-flat (the pitches he sings are A-flat, F, and D). But
the harmony does not go to E-flat. The tones seem to be
caught in a region of harmonic indeterminacy, which is highlighted as Tamino repeats the same phrase with the same harmony. As he approaches his second question, he breaks the
pattern and sings a perfect fourth from C up to F on “ich
würde” (“I would”), then another perfect fourth from B-flat
up to E-flat on “würde” repeated. The repetition alone suggests that Tamino is suspended in mid-thought by the indeterminacy of his feelings and intentions. His melodic
indeterminacy is echoed and strengthened by the accompaniment, which here plays mysterious, dusky sounding measures with a flurry of chromatic appoggiaturas. When Tamino
sings “warm and pure,” he uses a warm-sounding G-flat on
“warm.” The harmony interprets this G-flat as part of a diminished seventh chord on A-natural, scale degree 7 of Bflat. This chord points to the B-flat major triad. The tones
seem to have found their direction, their tonal center, in scale
degree 1 of B-flat. But as Tamino now utters his second question (“what would I?”), he ends his phrase by falling a major
sixth from F down to the A-flat an octave below the A-flat
we heard earlier. The gesture is an anticlimax, coming as it
does after Tamino’s three dramatic rising phrases: two ascents
to A-flat and one to G-flat. The gesture suggests a momentary
deflation—rising confidence that is suddenly at a loss. The
low A-flat blocks the reassertion of B-flat as key. It is part of
a B-flat7 chord, the dominant seventh of E-flat major, our
home key. Tamino’s question “What would I?”, melodically
a deflating fall from F to A-flat, finds a fitting harmonic expression in an upward gesture of incompleteness—an unresolved V7 chord that leaves this entire section of the aria
hanging.
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The intense anticipation that has built up is further emphasized by the full measure of rest that follows. It is the
longest, most dramatic pause in a song full of pauses. The
soundless measure is no mere absence. It is an active nonbeing—the tense non-being of eros, that greatest and most
potent of all human tensions, the tension music seems
uniquely suited to express.
Once again, the orchestra leads the way, as the bass viols
play a constant E-flat in sixteenth notes and the violas play
an oscillating figure called an Alberti bass in thirty-second
notes. This confirms that the B-flat7 on which Tamino’s question ended was indeed the V7 of E-flat. We have returned to
the home key, and the recapitulation has begun. In this final
section of his song, Tamino, with rising self-confidence, answers his second question: “I would press her to this burning
breast, and forever would she be mine.” The harmony is refreshingly determinate. We know where we are—firmly
planted in E-flat major—as the harmony oscillates repeatedly
between I and V7. We are hearing a tonal homecoming.
Tamino’s melody is straightforward: first, a little melodic
wave that starts on a B-flat and rises to E-flat through an appoggiatura on F—“ich würde sie” (“I would her”)—then the
same melodic phrase repeated—“voll Ent-zü-cken” (“enraptured” or “utterly thrilled”). His next phrase, which begins
similarly, introduces a pattern of skips and ends on a chromatic D-flat: “an diesen heißen Busen drücken” (“press to
this burning or heated breast”). The E-flat to D-flat on
“drücken,” “press,” captures the act of pressing. This chromatic tone tenses forward. It conspires with the tones in the
accompaniment to form a I7 chord, that is, the E-flat major
triad with D-flat as a destabilizing seventh. The I7, which interprets and deepens Tamino’s D-flat, is an applied or passing
dominant that pushes into the final phrase of the aria: “und
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ewig wäre sie dann mein,” “and forever would she be mine.”
Tamino repeats this final phrase five times in all, three
times with the upbeat “und” (“and”) and twice without. The
phrases without the “und” have greater urgency and are allowed to begin on the crucial word “ewig,” “forever.” The I7
chord on “drücken” tends toward an A-flat triad, the IV
chord, or subdominant, in E-flat major. But as Tamino moves
to his first utterance of “and forever would she be mine,”
Mozart substitutes the ii6 chord, which plays the same role as
IV in the harmonic cycle—the moment of stepping away and
preparing for the dominant. Why the substitution? No doubt
because the ii chord, being minor, has greater warmth. On
this ii6 chord, which lasts an entire measure, Tamino sings a
smooth ascent to his high A-flat. He then drops to D, scale
degree 7 in E-flat, by way of a leaning tone. The first violins
second this lovely melodic phrase. The D is part of the chord
played by the strings: the V7 of E-flat. The music pauses on
this tense dominant chord.
Then, something familiar returns: the calm measured
phrase from the exposition, where Tamino sang the words
“fills my heart with new emotions.” The first appearance of
this phrase ended with a deceptive cadence on a diminished
seventh chord (on the word “fills”). Mozart repeats that cadence here. But whereas in the exposition Tamino ended his
second phrase serenely on scale degree 1, here, at the corresponding moment, he bypasses the E-flat and leaps to a high
G on “mein.” This is the measure in which phrases with
“und” switch to phrases without it. This change quickens the
movement of the song. It also produces an elision on the
tones G, E-flat, and C that allows Tamino to combine “mine”
and “forever” in the single phrase “mine forever.”
Tamino goes on to stress the degrees of the E-flat major
triad in a smoothly flowing phrase that seems destined to land
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on a low E-flat, that is, scale degree 1. But at the last moment
he leaps from low F (scale degree 2) to the G a ninth above
on the word “mine”— and then overtops the G with an A-flat
on “ewig.” This is the most dramatic moment in the aria, as
Tamino intensifies his previous elision, his musicalized,
heartfelt dream of eternally possessing his beloved. Tamino
sounds very heroic and confident here. He sings his signature
G a lot, as though this single tone, scale degree 3, embodied
the whole of his passion. When he gets to the last restatement
of his phrase, the melody emphasizes the tones of the E-flat
major triad. He leaps, for one last time, to his signature G—
this time, significantly, on the word “sie,” “her.” This G is
not a stable degree of a chord but an appoggiatura tending toward F, scale degree 2. Tamino, in other words, does not
merely stress the pronoun that refers to Pamina with a high
note; instead he puts his whole heart into the word and leans
toward his beloved. Having reached high G, the tones now
descend to E-flat, scale degree 1, by step, with the assistance
of D, that is, scale degree 7: 3→2→1→7→1 (“sie dann
mein”). A straightforward cadence affirms closure: IV, I6/4,
V7, I.
The entire orchestra ends the piece with a brief, noblesounding coda composed of two complementary phrases. The
phrases are the tonal expressions of the two complementary
sides of Tamino’s nature, as it is revealed in the aria: the first
heroic and forte, the second tender and piano, a recollection
of the fervent E-flat chords with which the song began.
So ends my journey through Tamino’s aria. I have tried
to be faithful in speech to what is there in the tones. I have
not, of course, captured all that is there. No one could.
Mozart’s music, like all great music, is inexhaustible, and
every act of listening brings new discoveries. I have tried to
present the aria as a wondrous object—a time-structure—that
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comes to us and is welcomed by our musically receptive
souls. This time-structure “speaks” to our passion and our
perception, just as the enchanted portrait, a visual or spatial
form, “speaks” to the soul of Tamino.
I have placed special emphasis on tonal tension, and on
directed tension as the possible ground of coherence and
unity in tonal music. To listen to Tamino’s aria—his strain of
musicalized longing—is not just to hear coherence from one
moment to the next. It is to hear the tension at work in the
whole: in the overall form that unfolds in time, by analogy
with organic growth. The exposition is an ordered accumulation of tension. The development section extended and
heightened that tension; it expresses Tamino’s point of maximum anticipation and perplexity. Of all three sections, it is
the one that most has the character of an arrow. The recapitulation takes us home, reaffirms E-flat as the central key, recalls part of the music from the exposition, and brings the
whole time-structure to perfect balance and resolution. It does
all this by accumulating its own tensions, with which the
tones move swiftly and urgently to a satisfying close.
To listen perceptively to the aria, to hear what is there, is
demanding. It takes effort and study. I would like to suggest
that behind all the complexities, a simple scheme prevails.
The melody, as we know, begins with a rising sixth to a G,
scale degree 3 of E-flat major. The entire piece may be heard
as the attempt by 3 to reach 1 through the intermediation of
2: G→F→E flat. Recall that the first key change came about
because the first clarinet played 3→2→2 rather than 3→2→1.
This facilitated the transformation of 2 in E-flat into 5 in Bflat. The rest of the piece—key changes and all—exploits and
further develops this move to 2.26 The completion of the move
3→2→1 in the overarching scheme takes place only at the
end, only after the recapitulation has affirmed E-flat, not
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merely as the key of the final section but as the governing
tone of the entire aria. Only at the end of the journey do we
really have the beginning.
Part Three: Wisdom
My account of Tamino’s song would be incomplete if I did
not talk about Pamina, the enchanting object of Tamino’s
love. Pamina is the focal point of the opera. Of all the “good”
characters, she endures the greatest and most prolonged sufferings: her mother’s absence, the stern tutelage of Sarastro,
the violent advances and blackmail of Monostatos, and the
revelation of her mother as a demon bent on a murder Pamina
herself is ordered to commit. Finally, she suffers despair over
what she thinks is lost love, and is almost driven to suicide.27
Pamina is also an exalted figure in the opera. It is she who
most embodies what is new about the new order. It is she, a
virtuous woman, who gives the lie to all the negative things
said about women in the opera. Sarastro told her that a man
must guide her heart. This is true, in a sense: Tamino gives
Pamina’s heart its proper object and bearing. But in the last
two trials, it is Pamina who guides Tamino, as love guides
her. Finally, it is Pamina who reveals that the magical vocation of music is not to gain power over others, or merely to
amuse oneself, but to ward off the fear of death.
When Pamina joins Tamino for the final trials near the
end of the opera, the two face each other in more than the obvious sense. They now see each other clearly for the first
time. There is mutual recognition. This recognition is mirrored, or rather enacted, in the complementary phrases the
lovers use to sing each other’s names: “Tamino mine! O what
happiness!” “Pamina mine! O what happiness!” The string
of monosyllabic German words that the lovers sing to each
other—“O welch ein Glück”—is both simpler and more con-
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crete than this English translation. A more accurate rendering
is: “O what a stroke of good fortune!” Tamino and Pamina
are not referring to a subjective state or feeling, but to an
event, to something wondrous that has just happened and that
presents itself to their perception: the arrival and the presence
of the beloved. The phrases they sing are two halves of a little
musical circle or period in F major. When Pamina sings
Tamino’s name, she does so with a rising major sixth—the
same interval with which Tamino’s soul rose up in response
to Pamina’s image. But this is not mere repetition. The sixth
at the beginning of Tamino’s aria was the sound of passion
that aspired but did not know itself. It had shadows. Pamina’s
sixth is different. It is pure, luminous, and rationally aware.
It has “Besonnenheit,” and in more than the strictly musical
sense.28 Pamina’s sixth is the enlightenment and perfection of
Tamino’s. It is the sublime moment in which passion, now
perceptive, finds its purpose.
When Tamino first responded to the magic that was Pamina, his love was mediated by an image. He asked himself
what he would do if the beloved were standing in front of
him. That moment has arrived, for here stands Pamina, not
as image but as solid reality. Tamino’s first rush of love was
itself a kind of image and dream, a first step in the soul’s journey from erotic striving and heroic aspiration, through painful
disillusionment and trials, to the moment of enlightenment,
when images are seen for what they are, and when the lover,
having transcended mere feeling, now grasps what love really
is. Pamina is the Other in and through whom Tamino can
know himself as the man who loves Pamina, not as a possession but as partner. He can see who he is in the eyes of the
beloved because the sound of her rising sixth, as she sings
his name, shows him how. Her sixth, her love in musical
form, is his unfailing guide.
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Pamina is more than Tamino’s beloved, more than a symbol of virtuous womanhood (her mother in redeemed form),
more even than the first Woman Ruler of a new order based
on marriage and reconciliation. She is Tamino’s wisdom, and
the wisdom—and true magic—of Mozart’s Magic Flute.
NOTES
1. For an exhaustive study of the Masonic elements in Mozart’s opera,
see Jacques Chailley, The Magic Flute, Masonic Opera, trans. Herbert
Weinstock (New York: Knopf, 1971). Chailley finds Masonic meaning
even in the number of notes used in individual phrases. His analysis
makes the plot more coherent but ultimately distracts us from Mozart’s
music.
2. Chailley makes the interesting observation that there were originally
five Ladies, in keeping with the Masonic number for the Female, and that
this was reduced to three due to “necessities of casting” (109-110).
3. “[T]he key of C minor throughout Die Zauberflöte is nearly always
connected with death or the threat of death.” From Erik Smith, “The
music,” in Peter Branscombe, W. A. Mozart: Die Zauberflöte, Cambridge
Opera Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 130.
4. During Mozart’s time there existed ancillary Masonic lodges that accepted women—so-called “Lodges of Adoption”—but the members of
these lodges were barred from the loftier honors and duties open to men
(Chailley, 74-79).
5. The Queen explains that killing Sarastro is the only way she and her
daughter can retrieve the “seven-fold Circle of the Sun,” which Pamina’s
father, at his death, gave Sarastro. She recalls, resentfully, that the father
wished to give the magical object to the “manly” care of Sarastro and refused to entrust it to “your woman’s spirit.” In the Queen’s resentful mind,
the murder of Sarastro will topple the dominance of the Male and assert
the supremacy of the Female.
6. Pamina’s aria is in G minor, the key her mother used to tell the story
of her daughter’s abduction. It is also the key Papageno will use when he
prepares to commit suicide. Charles Rosen observes the following: “In
all of Mozart’s supreme expressions of suffering and terror—the G minor
Symphony, Don Giovanni, the G minor Quintet, Pamina’s aria in Die
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Zauberflöte—there is something shockingly voluptuous.” The Classical
Style, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1997), 324-5.
7. It is here that Pamina reveals the history of the flute, which her father
carved, amid thunder and lightning, from the heart of a thousand-yearold oak.
8. See Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, translated by Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986). Hanslick famously attacked
the “aesthetics of feeling”: “to induce . . . feelings in us is not the task of
music or of any other art. Art first of all puts something beautiful before
us. It is not by means of feeling that we become aware of beauty, but by
means of the imagination as the activity of pure contemplation” (4). Unfortunately, Hanslick’s dichotomy makes it impossible to understand the
musical bond between feeling and contemplation, or, in the terms of this
essay, between passion and perception.
9. Kierkegaard (or rather one of his personae) criticizes Tamino, who
compares poorly with Don Giovanni, Mozart’s fully developed embodiment of music as eros: “As a dramatic character, Tamino is completely
beyond the musical, just as in general the spiritual development the play
wants to accomplish is a completely unmusical idea” (“The Immediate
Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic,” in Either/Or, translated by Howard
V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 2 vols. [Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1987], Vol. I, 82.) The Magic Flute is musically deficient, it would
seem, because “the whole piece tends toward consciousness,” that is, toward the clear daylight delineation of good and bad, or the ethical. It celebrates marriage, which “is absolutely unmusical” (ibid., 83). In these
assertions, Kierkegaard (or rather his alter ego) seems unaware of the
subtly dark, erotic side of the noble characters in Mozart’s fairy tale. See
note 3 above.
10. Ingmar Bergman’s film portrays Tamino accurately as he sings this
aria. The actor gazes lovingly at the picture and, at one point, presses it
to his heart. The singer performs the song not as though he were seeking
the admiration of an audience, but as an internal, musical-erotic meditation. Even his high notes, which sound properly heroic, retain this inward
quality.
11. Hoffmann defends Beethoven against the charge that he doesn’t know
how to control himself as a composer: “In truth he is fully the equal of
Haydn and Mozart in rational awareness, his controlling self detached
from the inner realm of sounds and ruling it in absolute authority.”
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(“Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, edited by David Charlton, translated by Martyn Clarke [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989], 98.) Mozart’s own affirmation of this
virtue appears in a letter to his father. Explaining his reasons for a certain
key change in the Abduction from the Seraglio, Mozart writes that just as
“passions whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of
exciting disgust,” so too “music, even in the most terrible situations, must
never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or in other words must
never cease to be music.” (The Letters of Mozart and his Family, translated and edited by Emily Anderson [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966],
Vol. II, 769).
12. The Queen, too, in her most hysterical moments, sings in a way that
is orderly, lucid, and musical. She is always a pleasure to hear. In Mozart’s
universe, even the Queen exhibits “Besonnenheit”—though, admittedly,
she pushes the envelope.
13. For the authoritative treatment of sonata form, see Charles Rosen,
The Classical Style (cf. note 4 above). For a revealing account of “circle”
vs. “arrow,” see Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay
on the Origins of Musical Modernity, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007. Berger argues that whereas the music of Bach presents time
as a self-enclosed, circular image of eternity (“God’s time”), that of
Mozart affirms an arrow-like progression that imitates “the temporal disposition of events” (179). Circle and arrow are central metaphors for Victor Zuckerkandl, who stresses the arrow-like movement of counterpoint.
He acknowledges, however, that the classical sonata combines “chain”
(arrow-like succession of phrases) with “circle”: “The whole [of a movement] is symmetrical: A—B—A; but within each section [exposition, development, recapitulation] the chain principle is dominant” (Victor
Zuckerkandl, The Sense of Music [Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1959], 96).
14. It is tempting to compare Tamino’s rising major sixth with the most
famous rising sixth in all of music—the minor sixth at the very beginning
of Tristan and Isolde. What do these sixths show us about the nature of
eros? Do they point to two different kinds of erotic love? Or are they two
sides of the one passion we call eros?
15. For a fuller discussion of Mozart’s shift of accent in the Magic Flute,
see again Erik Smith’s essay in Branscombe, Magic Flute, 120-124 (cf.
note 2 above).
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16. Hanslick stresses the perception of movement in music in his famous
definition of music’s content: “The content of music is tonally moving
forms” (The Beautiful in Music, 29). He does not, however, speculate on
the cause and nature of this movement.
17. On harmony as the third dimension of depth, see Victor Zuckerkandl,
The Sense of Music, 171-179. Throughout this essay, I use the term
“chord” loosely and without much reflection. It is in fact not easy to say
what a chord is, and hence what it means for harmony to be the movement
of chords. At one point in his discussion, Zuckerkandl asks: “Where is
the chord?” He answers: “the chord is not in the tones but, in a sense,
above them, more immaterial than the tones themselves” (ibid., 184). This
leads him to the fascinating assertion that a chord is “something like an
idea—an idea to be heard, an idea for the ear, an audible idea.”
18. The theory of tones as “dynamic qualities” is that of Zuckerkandl,
who develops the theory in three amazing books: The Sense of Music,
Sound and Symbol, and Man, the Musician (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959, 1956, and 1973 respectively).
19. It is worth noting that a deceptive cadence is not a sudden, disruptive
shock, but rather a musical surprise that makes sense to the ear. The reason is that the unanticipated chord has at least one tone in common with
the chord we expect. In the most common deceptive cadence, the V7 chord
goes to VI, which has two tones in common with the I chord. In the present case, the deceptive chord—the diminished-seventh chord built on Anatural—has in it the two tones common to I and VI (C and E-flat), but
adds the destabilizing tones A-natural and G-flat. That this tense unexpected chord arrives so naturally, and just as naturally leads to the V7 of
the key of E-flat, points to the marvelous fluidity and ordered freedom of
harmonic movement.
20. Wagner on Music and Drama, selected and arranged by A. Goldman
and E. Sprinchorn (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964), 214.
21. The psychologist Géza Révész writes the following about the musical
listener: “He is able to follow the composer’s intentions, even at times to
anticipate them. It is also characteristic of the musical person to sink himself into the mood of the music, and achieve a relation to it that has an effect on his whole spiritual being. He experiences the art work so inwardly
and so profoundly that he feels as though he were creating it” (Introduction to the Psychology of Music [New York: Dover, 2001], 133-134).
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22. One especially problematic aspect of the usual chord notation is that
it implies but does not emphasize the motion of the bass. The various
“positions” of triads—root, first inversion, second inversion, etc.—are
really ways of composing a bass line. In the present case, where the
chordal progression is I6, IV, I6/4, V7, vii5/6 of V, V7, the bass has a beautifully continuous ascent: G to A-flat to B-flat to B-flat repeated to C to D,
and finally to the E-flat, the root of the E-flat triad that begins Tamino’s
complementary phrase and the harmonic progression that culminates in
the perfect cadence to the 16-measure period. A good way to hear this
bass line, this voice in its own right, is to sing along with it.
23. Zuckerkandl, following the music theorist Heinrich Schenker, calls
this Tonwille, the will of the tones.
24. Schopenhauer is perhaps the only philosopher who attempts to explain
the intimate connection between music and the human self, and to explicate the classical idea according to which music is a form of imitation.
Music, he argues, is a copy of the will that is the source of all representation. This will, to which we are tragically enslaved, is an urge or desire
that is incapable of being satisfied. In music, we hear this urge as pure
striving detached from particular objects. This removal of determinate
objects permits us to enjoy the pleasant, aesthetic contemplation of the
tragic source of all things, and of ourselves. Through this enjoyment, we
gain momentary refuge from the suffering and curse that is human life.
See The World as Will and Representation, translated by E. F. J. Payne
(New York: Dover, 1969), Vol. I, 255-267, and Vol. II, 447-457.
25. See Charles Rosen on this point: “The greatest change in eighteenthcentury tonality, partly influenced by the establishment of equal temperament, is a new emphatic polarity between tonic and dominant, previously
much weaker” (Rosen, The Classical Style, 26). I have borrowed the term
“counter-pole” from Zuckerkandl, who uses it to characterize the role of
scale degree 5 in the major scale (The Sense of Music, 26).
26. The “history” of F in the piece tends to support my suggestion: the
initial emphasis by the clarinet at the first key change, the continued emphasis of F in the melody that follows, the peak of Tamino’s “Ja, ja!” and
the appoggiaturas that follow, the Fs that appear in various roles in the
development, and the appoggiatura Fs at the beginning of the recapitulation, which lean temptingly to E-flat, as if asking other tones to help it
make a final convincing close. (The harmonic move from II to I occurs
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in the second Act, where the key of F major, with which the Act begins,
returns right before the E-flat Finale.)
My suggestion about 3→2→1 as the underlying structural principle
derives from Heinrich Schenker’s notion of the Urlinie or “primordial
line.” See his Free Composition, translated and edited by Ernst Oster
(New York: Longman, 1979), 3-9.
27. Branscombe notes another important aspect of Pamina’s suffering:
“Without the advantage accorded to Tamino and Papageno of knowing
about the trials to be undergone, she survives her own trials”
(Branscombe, Magic Flute, 217).
28. Pamina shows her capacity for straight speech when Sarastro appears
at the end of Act I. Papageno anxiously asks her in C minor: “My child,
what now shall we speak?” The harmony intensifies his anxiety with the
extremely tense augmented sixth chord, an applied dominant to the V on
which the question hangs. Pamina responds with a soothing move to C
major: “The truth, the truth, even if it were a crime.” Charles Rosen observes that when Pamina sings “the truth,” “the music takes on an heroic
radiance unheard in opera before then” (Rosen, Classical Style, 319).
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Socrates, Parmenides, and the
Way Out
Judith Seeger
Before I begin, I would like to warn you that you must not
expect this lecture to present a definitive interpretation of
Plato’s Parmenides. Indeed, I am so far from being an expert
on Plato that I am somewhat amazed to find myself here behind the podium, where experts usually stand on Friday
nights. Furthermore, the Parmenides is perhaps one of Plato’s
most difficult dialogues—a fact that, curiously enough, gives
me comfort, for I have yet to hear or read an unambiguously
persuasive interpretation of it. In any case, as you know, the
lecture itself is only part of these Friday-night events. If I succeed in opening a discussion in which we all can participate
and learn, then I will have accomplished something. My goal,
you see, is modest.
The talk will consist of the following sections. First, I will
summarize the story for you, drawing your attention to the
character of the interlocutors as it is revealed through their
words and through the narrator’s observations. I will explore
in particular the character of young Socrates, and I will also
give some attention to Plato’s portrayal of Parmenides as
compared with what we know about the philosopher Parmenides. Then, I will consider the fundamental questions
raised by the dialogue, which are, I believe, put most succinctly: “What is philosophy?” and “Is philosophy possible?”
Finally, I will suggest that the dialogue not only raises these
questions, but also answers them favorably, though in such a
Judith Seeger is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture
was originally delivered on January 20, 1995.
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way that we are forced to look beyond the words themselves
and compelled to pursue the answers. That is, we are invited
to engage in philosophy ourselves.
I don’t remember where I was when I first read every dialogue of Plato’s, but I do remember where I was when I first
read the Parmenides. The year is 1990. It is the afternoon of
the day before seminar. I am sitting in my living room on the
dark blue loveseat between two windows. My back is to the
west wall, and, looking up, I can follow the sun’s slow sinking by observing the lengthening patches of brightness (cold
brightness, because it is a January afternoon) on either side
of me. They stretch toward the opposite wall, then reach and
start to climb it. Dust motes, drifting lazily in the sunbeams,
begin a crazed dance as the furnace fan kicks on. When the
fan goes off, the dance subsides.
Do you get the impression that I was having trouble concentrating on my reading? Actually, it was maddening. When
I reached the end of the assigned reading (which is partway
through Parmenides’ argument for the existence of the One,
after which we jump directly to the final statement) and managed, out of respect for the other dialogues in the volume, not
to pitch the book against that same wall the sunlight was
climbing, I was convinced that I had just read a very old joke,
which I was possibly the first one ever to “get” (for otherwise
why would we be wasting our time reading it?), but which
wasn’t really very funny. I was relatively new to philosophy.
But it seemed to me that Plato had been pulling our collective
leg for a long time.
That seminar conversation, and the one the following
year, when I read the dialogue for the second time, helped a
little; but neither one dispelled my conviction that the dialogue was, at best, seriously unbalanced, a feeling which became only more acute when one of my seminar co-leaders
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dismissed the last sentence of the dialogue as “nonsense.”
Parmenides concludes (in R.E. Allen’s translation): “Then let
this be said, and also that, as it seems, whether unity is or is
not, both unity and the others are and are not, and appear and
do not appear to be, all things in all ways, relative both to
themselves and to each other.” To which young Aristotle, who
has been Parmenides’ chosen interlocutor during the exercise,
replies “very true” (166c). Recall, also, that this particular
Aristotle, as we are deliberately told in the dialogue, later became one of the Thirty Tyrants, whose crimes Socrates speaks
about in the Apology (32d).
So Parmenides’ display of dialectical fireworks in the second part of the dialogue seems to be nonsense, and possibly
dangerous nonsense, to boot, if someone who is as thoroughly persuaded by it as young Aristotle seems to be grows
up to be a tyrant so ruthless as to try to implicate innocent
men, including Socrates, in the murder of other innocent men.
(Cf. Republic 537e-539d, on the dangers of teaching dialectic
to young men). Nonetheless, Parmenides’ dialectical exercise
follows an impressive presentation of young Socrates in the
beginning of the dialogue. Plato shows us what appears to be
Socrates’ first, sincere, if perhaps somewhat naive, account
of the Forms. And he shows us Socrates exploring one of the
difficulties raised by the concept of Forms: the so-called
problem of participation. Thus, a fundamental tenet (perhaps
the fundamental tenet) of Socratic and Platonic thought is
paired with what appears to be closely reasoned gobbledygook. This presents us at the outset with a formidable
dilemma. The Parmenides, like many other Platonic dialogues, but perhaps more blatantly than most, seems to have
a split personality, to be composed of two parts that fit together uneasily at best.
The problem of unity in this dialogue, then, part of which
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is at least ostensibly about the One, is striking, even on the
level of its organization. Questions arise which, like the problem of participation itself, will simply not go away. What is
the nature of this exercise Parmenides calls a “devious passage through all things” (136e), without which he claims the
mind cannot attain to the truth? How are we to read it? There
are several possibilities. One is that Parmenides’ tedious
“gymnastic,” with its nonsensical conclusion, is so far from
being a legitimate means of searching for truth that we might
read it as Plato’s example of exactly what not to do if you
want to pursue philosophy. The sort of reasoning we scornfully call logic-chopping comes to mind. In this reading, Parmenides is the consummate sophist, who can manipulate
words to mean anything he wants, with the inescapable outcome that ultimately they can mean nothing at all. If this Parmenides is really supposed to represent the philosopher by
that name, the sense of such an interpretation would be that
the older man has not only been displaced but has also been
made to discredit himself. He becomes an old fool, who
would be dangerous if we were foolish enough to take him
seriously.
There are, nonetheless, problems with this reading. It
does not take into account the care Plato apparently lavished
on this dialogue, or the respect with which Socrates seems to
regard the older philosopher. Parmenides claims that the exercise he performs regarding the One is necessary for
Socrates’ philosophic maturation; and young Socrates, so far
as we know, remains present and attentive throughout (although at least a few of the members of my preceptorial on
Parmenides thought that surely he must have silently departed—at least, that is what they would have done). It seems
not unreasonable to suppose that Socrates is learning something necessary, and before we decide that this necessary
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something is how not to proceed, the dialogue deserves a
closer look. So let us return to the first part of the dialogue to
examine its setting and characters and try to determine who
this Socrates is, who this Parmenides is, what the one might
have to learn from the other, and what we might have to learn
from it all.
The part of the dialogue before Parmenides begins his exercise comprises only a bit more than a third of the entire
piece. It is immediately evident that the dialogue is set in a
“present” which is very remote from the conversation among
Socrates, Zeno, and Parmenides that it recounts. Though we
are given no date, we may assume that all the participants in
the original conversation are dead, including Socrates, if only
because, had Socrates been alive, Cephalus, who is the firstperson narrator of the entire piece, would certainly have gone
directly to him rather than to a man who had acquired the
conversation second-hand. In the “present” (which is itself
actually a “past” recounted by the primary narrator to unnamed listeners who become us, the readers), Cephalus and
some of his fellow-citizens who are interested in philosophy
have come to Athens from Clazomenae in Ionia. They have
made this journey because they have heard that someone in
Athens has memorized that long-past conversation, and they
would like to hear it. This Cephalus, by the way, is not the
Cephalus of the Republic, a man who, you will recall, was
not sufficiently interested in philosophy even to stay in his
own home when Socrates was brought there (331d), much
less to go out of his way to seek out a dialogue from the distant past.
The opening scene of the Parmenides is, nevertheless,
reminiscent of the beginning of the Republic, both in the
name of its narrator and in the first sentence, which recalls
Socrates’ narration of his descent into the Pireaus. Cephalus
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begins, “When we arrived at Athens from our home in Clazomenae, we met Adeimantus and Glaucon in the Agora”
(126a). Unlike Socrates in the Republic, Cephalus is not
forcibly detained by eager questioners. Instead, Glaucon and
Adeimantus (who are those once-young men of the Republic)
welcome him cordially, and he tells them he has come to ask
a favor. He would like for them to take him and his friends
to their half-brother, Antiphon (who is also Plato’s halfbrother), who, he hopes, may be persuaded to recite from
memory the conversation held by Socrates, Zeno, and Parmenides that Antiphon learned from a student of Zeno’s
named Pythodorus, who was present at that encounter many
years ago. Antiphon—who was once sufficiently interested
in philosophy, if not to practice it, at least to memorize an exceedingly complex conversation—is now more interested in
raising horses. The others come upon him instructing a smith
how to make a bit. At first, Antiphon is reluctant to comply
with their request, for reciting the conversation will be, as he
says in words later nearly echoed by Parmenides himself, an
arduous task. But he finally allows himself to be persuaded
to perform, as Parmenides will later in the dialogue (and did,
earlier in time).
Since Antiphon was not present at the conversation he is
about to relate, he gives his listeners Pythodorus’s account.
As Pythodorus told it, Zeno and Parmenides once came to
Athens for the Panathenaia festival, and stayed outside the
walls in Pythodorus’s house. Parmenides was elderly at the
time, quite gray, and distinguished-looking. Zeno was about
40 years old, tall and handsome. It was said that Zeno had
been Parmenides’ favorite; the suggestion is of an erotic relationship. We do not know the age of young Socrates, but
the dialogue emphasizes that he was very young, though
older than Parmenides’ interlocutor Aristotle. Socrates, at the
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beginning of Pythodorus’s account, has been listening to
Zeno read a treatise, of which we readers hear nothing, for
Pythodorus had heard the treatise before, and, evidently not
caring to hear it again, enters the house with Parmenides only
after Zeno has finished reading. Socrates asks Zeno to read
the beginning again, and Zeno does; but the second reading
serves only to emphasize the utter unimportance of Zeno’s
text, for the narrator does not give it to us, even though he is
now present. We hear instead only Socrates’ summation of
it, which is this: “If things are many, then it follows that the
same things must be both like and unlike, but that is impossible, for unlike things cannot be like or like things unlike”
(127e). Zeno agrees that this summary is accurate, and
Socrates presses on: “Now, if it is impossible for unlike things
to be like and like things unlike, it is also impossible for there
to be many things; for if there were, things would undergo
impossible qualifications. Isn’t that the point of your arguments, to contend, contrary to everything generally said, that
there is no plurality? And don’t you suppose that each of your
arguments is a proof of just that, so that you believe that you
have given precisely as many proofs that there is no plurality
as there are arguments in your treatise? Is that what you
mean, or have I failed to understand you?” (127e). It appears
that Socrates is baiting Zeno, suggesting that he has become
mired in the contradiction of providing many arguments to
prove that there is no such thing as many. But Zeno, again,
graciously concedes that Socrates’ estimation of his work is
correct. Since innuendo did not work, Socrates now attacks
outright. Addressing not Zeno but Parmenides by name, he
accuses Zeno of saying much the same thing as Parmenides
himself while misleading his readers into thinking he is saying something different. Parmenides remains silent, and again
Zeno, clearly stung, replies, but quite mildly considering that
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he has just been accused of a kind of cheating. He protests
that this particular treatise was, in the first place, the work of
a young man written in a spirit of controversy, not of an older
man zealous for reputation, and, in the second place, that it
was stolen from him and published without his consent.
Though the effect of these disclaimers is less to enlighten us
than to cause us to wonder why he is reading the discredited
treatise of his youth now that he is older and presumably
knows better, Zeno continues to agree that Socrates did not
misrepresent his thesis. Parmenides, meanwhile, makes his
presence increasingly felt by saying not a word.
Socrates has tried both innuendo and direct accusation in
what appears to be an unsuccessful attempt to draw first Zeno
and then Parmenides into discussion. He plunges on. The paradox of unity and multiplicity raised by Zeno has a simple
solution, Socrates claims. The answer is the Forms, which
exist alone, by themselves. If someone could demonstrate to
him that Forms could change, that would be amazing,
Socrates asserts. But it is not at all remarkable that other sorts
of things should share contrary characteristics. Socrates uses
himself as an example. In order to say that he is many, that
is, partakes of multitude, all anyone would have to do would
be to consider his front, his back, his upper body, his lower
body, and so on. If, on the other hand, someone wanted to
say that he partakes of unity, that person would need only
consider him one of the seven—but remember that only five
are named—present at this particular conversation (129d).
With regard to the changeable things we perceive, plurality
and unity depend, in effect, on how you look at them. There
is no genuine paradox in this, only a manipulation of language. The tone of Socrates’ speech is aggressive. He seems
to be implying that Zeno is either a liar or a fool.
I have tried to capture something of Socrates’ tone in this
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summary. He has, of course, expounded his opinions at much
greater length than I just have. If you were reading it your
impression would likely be that this brash young man has indeed gone too far: he’s smart all right, but he is also rude and
offensive. That is, evidently, the feeling the reader is supposed to have, because suddenly we are recalled to Pythodorus, who, Antiphon says, expected Zeno and Parmenides
to become angry, and was surprised when instead they
glanced at each other from time to time as Socrates spoke and
smiled as if in admiration. Now, for the first time, Parmenides
speaks, and his words reveal that young Socrates, in flailing
away at Zeno, has been, in effect, setting himself up. Young
Socrates is about to meet his master.
First, Parmenides blandly commends Socrates on his talent for argument; then he asks if he himself was responsible
for the distinction between Forms and the things that partake
of them. Parmenides does not give Socrates time to reply to
this question, so I suppose we do not really know the answer.
Instead, he immediately becomes more specific. Is there, he
asks Socrates, a likeness apart from the likeness we possess?
Is there One? Is there Many? “Of course.” Then what about
the just, the beautiful, the good, and all such things? “Yes.”
Then are there Forms for such things as man, fire, and water?
Socrates has no answer. Within three simple exchanges, Parmenides has reduced him to a state of perplexity, that condition of ignorance which is discomfiting to say the least,
because anyone who is aware he is in it also knows that he
must escape from it, and there is, at least as far as Socrates
can see at this point, no way out.
This is a most important moment, for it is evidently the
first time that Socrates has realized that he is in the state to
which he will later try to reduce all those with whom he
speaks. The force of this image of aporia, recalling Zeno-
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phon’s use of it in the Anabasis (III.1.11-13), is of a desperate
need to escape from imminent danger, to find a pathway to
safety where none is apparent. If Parmenides had stopped
here he would have accomplished quite a lot, but he is not
yet finished with young Socrates. What about certain other
things, he asks, vile and worthless things, like mud, dirt, and
hair? At first Socrates seems to have returned to firm ground.
Not at all, he answers, in his previous assured manner. That
would be impossible. But then he stumbles a bit, driven to
face the abyss, I think, both by the questions of a man he
clearly respects and by a characteristic honesty as remarkable
as the intelligence and talent for argument he has already
demonstrated. “Still,” young Socrates says, “I sometimes
worry lest what holds in one case may not hold in all, but
when I take that stand, I retreat, for fear of tumbling undone
into depths of nonsense. So I go back to the things we just
said have characters, and spend my time dealing with them”
(130d). This is no way to escape from aporia. It may very
well be that there is a significant difference in kind between
justice, say, and hair, but a simple assertion of that difference
is not sufficient to make it so, and Socrates knows it. He is in
this position, Parmenides says, because he is still young and
philosophy has not yet taken hold of him. When he is older
and more experienced he will despise none of these things.
Now he still pays too much attention to what people think.
This reply is problematic for a sympathetic reading of
Parmenides, if it implies that he considers mud, dirt, and hair
equal in kind to justice, beauty, and the good. I do not think
that he does, if only because he calls them particularly vile
and worthless, but we will consider this further when I explore the question of who this Parmenides is. Whatever the
reading, it is clearly not Parmenides’ intent here to explore
what sorts of things have Forms. Rather, simply by raising
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the question, he has done this bright young know-it-all the
immense favor of reducing him to a state in which he has
been forced to admit perplexity and doubt, a state which we
know (because we have read dialogues in which the older
Socrates partakes, dialogues that were composed before this
relatively late one) is absolutely necessary for him to recognize if he is to understand that he is in danger and must search
for a way out—that is, he must pursue philosophy. At this
point in young Socrates’ education, concentrating on such
ideas as justice, virtue, and the good is a retreat, in so far as
it represents a failure to face the real dilemma inherent in the
notion of Forms. Furthermore, Socrates has confessed that
fear of falling into nonsense has caused him to turn away
from questions that had occurred to him before his encounter
with Parmenides. Parmenides, then, has forced the young
man to admit, first, that, despite his intellect and talent for argument, he is in a perilous situation; second, that he must
search for a way to escape from this danger; and, third, that
his fear has led to intellectual cowardice and laziness.
Whether there actually is a possible way of escape remains
to be explored, and this is the question to which Parmenides
immediately turns his attention.
Assuming with Socrates that Forms exist even though we
are not yet sure which of the things we perceive has a Form,
Parmenides directs the conversation to the problem of sharing. This in turn raises the dilemma of participation, which,
in its most general expression, has to account for the relationship between the Forms and the things that partake of them.
The effect of this conversation will be to reduce Socrates
once again to perplexity, and it will lead to a difficulty that is
more fundamental than the question about which of the things
we perceive partake of Forms. Parmenides readily agrees
with Socrates that there are unalterable Forms, but, through
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questioning, he compels Socrates to admit (and readers to
see) that if we cannot discover a relationship between the
things we see and the Forms—that is, if we cannot find a way
to escape from deceptive change into the reality of the absolute—there can be no knowledge and, hence, no philosophy.
How, Parmenides asks Socrates, can there be any relationship between the things we see and the Forms of which
they partake? More specifically, how can a Form be at once
in itself and in the others (that is, the things that partake of
it) without being separate from itself? Socrates has an ingenious solution to this problem: It might be like a day, he says,
which is in many places at once yet not separate from itself.
“Very neat,” replies Parmenides, flattering the young man,
“you mean like a sail spread over many persons at once.”
“Perhaps,” responds Socrates, apparently sealing his doom
in the discussion, since a sail really does not seem to be like
a day at all. Unlike a day, it is a material object, capable of
being cut into pieces, a characteristic Parmenides will exploit
in his refutation of the idea. Why does Socrates accept the
substitution? Is he being polite? He wasn’t very polite to
Zeno, but he obviously has more respect for Parmenides. Did
he succumb to the older man’s flattery? For whatever reason,
Socrates, perhaps with some reluctance, accepts the sail in
place of the day. Parmenides then raises the paradox of divisibility, with an argument that irrefutably concludes, to put
it briefly, that other things cannot partake of Forms either as
parts or as wholes. Next he raises the difficulty of infinite
regress. Using largeness as an example, he obliges Socrates
to agree that when we look at a number of things that are
large we believe there is the same Form of largeness in all of
them, and thus believe that Largeness is one. But then don’t
we need yet another largeness by which that one largeness
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can appear large, and then another, and another? The search
for the last largeness will never end. Socrates, trying to escape from this infinite regress, suggests that Forms are
thoughts (noēma, a word that is rare in the Socratic dialogues); but Parmenides parries that for a thought to be true
it must be a thought of something that is, and Socrates, if he
is not to be trapped in relativism, is compelled to concede.
Perhaps, then, he replies, the Forms exist in nature as paradigms, which other things resemble and imitate. But if this
is so, Parmenides counters, the Form must resemble the object that resembles it, in so far as that object resembles it, and
thus a third “entity” is called into being: that by participation
in which like things are made like. Again we are faced with
an infinite regress, a hall of mirrors.
All of these arguments, none of which Socrates can refute, lead to what Parmenides calls the greatest difficulty of
all: If we maintain that the Forms are separate, independent
beings, we are in danger of having to concede that they cannot be known, and the consequence of that is that there is no
way out of our difficulty. Aporia becomes absolute; philosophy is impossible. If this is our condition, Forms may or may
not exist; if they exist, they may have their nature relative to
themselves, and the things we perceive may have their nature
relative to themselves. But if the Forms and the things among
us have no relationship to each other, Parmenides and
Socrates agree that we can have no knowledge of truth. Put
another way, we cannot know any of the Forms because we,
by our nature, cannot partake of absolute knowledge. The
gods, on the other hand, by their nature, would have absolute
knowledge, but that would make no difference either to us or
to them, for if there is no connection, no path, between the
transient and the absolute, the gods could know our world no
more than we could know theirs, and we all might as well go
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raise horses.
This is not to say that Parmenides has given up. He asserts twice (133c and 135d) that there are ways out of this
dilemma, which are open to people of wide education and
ability who know how to seek them. Further, Socrates clearly
possesses the considerable natural gifts that will allow him
to seek a way out, and perhaps eventually to teach others to
do so. Parmenides knows this because he heard Socrates discuss these questions with young Aristotle the day before, and
he observed his noble and divine impulse toward argument
(logos), as well as his refusal to discuss problems in terms of
visible objects, appealing instead always to absolutes. The
problem is that Socrates is trying too soon, before he is properly trained. He must exercise and train himself in an art that
the many call idle talk if the truth is not to escape him. Parmenides approves of Socrates’ attention to the things that are
rather than the things that merely seem to be. But he claims
that Socrates lacks rigor; he must learn to examine the consequences that follow from each hypothesis, for example,
“should you hypothesize if likeness is, or if it is not, what
will follow on each hypothesis both for the very things hypothesized and for the others, relative to themselves and relative to each other” (136a). The same procedure must be
followed for anything that may be hypothesized as being and
as not being, and as undergoing any other affection whatever.
Before looking at the exercise in more depth, let us return
to several questions raised in the segment of the dialogue I
have just summarized. I would like, in particular, to explore
the characters of young Socrates and of Parmenides, as they
are presented in the dialogue, and the problem of participation as it is framed here, with the consequences it has for the
pursuit of philosophy.
Let us look first at Socrates. Much is made in the dialogue
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of the fact that he is young. Parmenides has remarked upon
his youth, and Pythodorus, too, as quoted by Antiphon, observes that he was very young. He seems in his interchanges
with Zeno to be exhibiting some of that controversial spirit
of youth to which Zeno, speaking of himself, alludes.
Socrates’ attacks on Zeno show that he has mastered argument; but his remarks are glib and aggressive, the over-confident assertions of someone who (in a contrast that could not
be more striking with the older Socrates) knows it all. Young
Socrates, a sort of philosopher warrior slashing away with a
sword of words, does not hesitate to take on the leading
philosophers of the day. Though it is not used, the word thumos (in the sense of spirit, heart, will) comes to mind. And,
as we have seen, both Zeno and Parmenides are delighted.
This is surely not because of the easily-avoided swipes
Socrates is taking at Zeno in his apparent wish to replace him
in the great man’s affections, but rather because of his eager
desire for logos and his conviction that there are absolutes.
Socrates is a young man of great gifts in dire need of a lesson
in directing those gifts if he is to find the true way of philosophy. And who better to give the lesson than Parmenides?
I know that this is a tricky question, for the character of
Parmenides in this dialogue is problematic. Respected commentators have argued that this Parmenides cannot be intended to be the philosopher by that name because the real
Parmenides could not possibly have spoken in the way this
Parmenides does; but I, at least at this point in my study, am
compelled to follow the more direct route of believing that
Plato meant this Parmenides to represent the great philosopher, while, of course, writing the character to suit his own
purposes.
Many of you probably have not read Parmenides’ poem
on being, and I do not have time here to give more than the
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briefest of summaries of a work which is very hard to summarize, both because of its inherent difficulty and because it
has survived only in widely scattered fragments and quotations which have been stitched together, leaving great gaps.
Parmenides of Elea would have been born around 515 BCE,
if we use Plato’s dialogue (about whose date, of course, we
can only conjecture) as a way of estimating his birth date. He
wrote a poem in the archaic hexameters of Greek epic poetry
whose first-person narrator is a youth of great thumos who
has undertaken a sort of mystic journey. Well-guided horses
pull the youth in a chariot whose axle glows and whistles
with heat along a wide road leading out of darkness into light.
Maidens, identified as daughters of the sun, escort him along
the road and through a mighty doorway into the abode of a
goddess. The maidens then persuade the goddess to give the
youth two accounts, one of which has been called the Way
of Truth and the other the Way of Seeming.
The Way of Truth states that being is and non-being is
not, and that only being can be thought or learned. Being has
certain characteristics, which the goddess lists for the youth:
It is ungenerated, imperishable, whole, single-limbed, untrembling, complete, indivisible, changeless, held in limits
by the chains of justice. Most mortals, she continues, do not
realize that only being is knowable; instead they wander, twoheaded, lost along the well-trodden but misdirected way,
thinking, mistakenly, that they can name and know opposites.
This mistaken way is the Way of Seeming, and its relationship to the Way of Truth is not completely clear in the poem.
What is clear is that being is one and absolute (though finite)
and that it can be truly known, while non-being, as it does
not really exist, cannot be known or even thought.
Now this is not quite the doctrine that Parmenides upholds in the dialogue. The Parmenides of the dialogue does
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still maintain the fundamental principle of the poem, namely,
that only absolute being can be known. Nonetheless, by accepting without question Socrates’ notion of Forms, he has
allowed multiplicity into being. So if the Parmenides of the
dialogue is the Parmenides of the poem, he has changed at
least part of his understanding of the nature of being. Furthermore, in the dialogue he raises that fundamental difficulty
which young Socrates has apparently not considered fully,
namely, the relationship of Forms to the things of this world.
This difficulty, as Parmenides sees it, has two parts. One part
is the question of which things in our world participate in
Forms, and the other concerns the nature of that participation.
The Parmenides of the dialogue is very concerned with the
relationship between seeming and being, a relationship which
is truly problematic in the poem, where, after stating that only
being can be known, the goddess provides a surprising
amount of information about seeming things, particularly
heavenly bodies and sex. Remember that we have no way of
knowing how much of the Way of Seeming has been lost, and
its reconstruction is particularly difficult because the fragments are so short and puzzling. If there is any connection
between the Way of Truth and the Way of Seeming in the
poem, we have to devise it ourselves; it is not given to us. In
fact, we have already seen that the poem tells us as plainly
as it tells us anything that one way is true and the other is
false.
So the poem and the dialogue concur that only being is
absolute and knowable, but in the dialogue we have a Parmenides who, unlike the author of the poem, has, in the first
place, accepted a plurality of absolutes (that is, the Forms)
and who, in the second place, considers the relationship between those absolutes and seeming things to be of utmost importance. Furthermore, he engages in an exercise that takes
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the form of dialectic, an interchange of a sort entirely absent
from the poem, whose young man remains silent, listening
(in a way reminiscent of Socrates’ encounter with Diotima in
the Symposium) to the teachings of the goddess.
These are three undeniably significant differences between the Parmenides of the poem and the Parmenides of the
dialogue. Our conclusion might be that these are different
men. It seems more fruitful to say that Plato has taken the
fundamental questions raised by Parmenides in the poem and
pushed them in the direction he felt they had to go if the approach to knowledge was to be anything other than a
metaphorical journey leading to a mystical vision. Who better
than the great philosopher himself to give his blessing to such
an enterprise, and to anoint young Socrates as the spirited
youth, the young hero, capable of pursuing it, if only he can
summon the courage to undertake such an arduous task? The
dialogue, in effect, resurrects the venerable authority and has
him declare, with Zeno’s approval, that Socrates is his true
heir.
Parmenides passes his legacy to Socrates in five ways.
First, the great philosopher who first asked the question
“What is Being?” has accepted the Forms as the answer to
that question. Second, he has repeatedly complimented young
Socrates on his ability and divine inclination toward logos.
Third, Parmenides has, by his questioning, forced Socrates
to recognize that he is in a state of aporia, by raising the question of the status of such things as mud, dirt, and hair—which
the author of the Way of Truth could never have valued any
more than Socrates ever will. Fourth, he has shown the young
man a possible way out of his aporia by instructing him in
the method that he will later adopt, that is, dialectic. And,
fifth, he has given him a demonstration of the courage that
young Socrates showed he lacked when he admitted he was
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afraid to face the possibility that mud, dirt, and hair might
partake of Forms.
Parmenides demonstrates courage to Socrates when he
allows himself, despite a fear that he voices several times, to
be persuaded to undertake the exercise of exploring the consequences, both for the One and for the others, of the existence and of the non-existence of the One. This is the most
difficult part of the dialogue to read. I have already raised one
possible interpretation: that the exercise is intended to
demonstrate how not to proceed if we are seeking truth. The
consequence of this reading, however, is that Parmenides becomes a buffoon, and I do not believe the dialogue supports
that contention any more than do later mentions of the
philosopher in the Theatetus, where Socrates, an old man
himself, refers to the nobility of Parmenides’ “reverend and
awful figure” during the encounter we are discussing (183e),
or in the Sophist, where, even though Father Parmenides is
killed by his own Eleatic follower, Socrates remembers the
magnificence of the arguments he employed in that long-ago
meeting (217c). Even allowing, as we must, for the possibility of irony, it is not at all clear what purpose would be served
by making a buffoon of the philosopher who first conceived
of being as unchanging and as capable of being known. More
consistent with the raising of Socrates into true philosophy
is the reading that makes Parmenides into a revered elder,
aware of his own limitations, but still able to inspire a spirited
youth to carry on the journey that, for an old man like himself, has become just another run around the track. No longer
a youth pulled by well-guided horses, but rather like an old
horse himself, Parmenides is nonetheless capable of recognizing a worthy heir and guiding him to pursue philosophy
along the correct route.
As I have observed, the novelty of the dialogue with re-
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spect to Parmenides’ poem as far as the practice of philosophy is concerned is the introduction of dialectic. Parmenides
in the dialogue has already shown a dialectical bent uncharacteristic of the poem in his questioning of Socrates. This
questioning is suggestively juxtaposed with Zeno’s reading
of an old essay—an essay that the author himself, when challenged, repudiates. And when Parmenides agrees to perform
his exercise, it is dialectical rather than expository; that is, it
is unlike the teaching of the goddess in Parmenides’ poem.
He then chooses the youngest one present, that is, young Aristotle, to be his interlocutor, giving three reasons. First, the
youngest will give least trouble; second, he will be most
likely to say what he thinks; and third, his answering will give
the older man a chance to rest. The first and third reasons indicate that Parmenides’ primary interlocutor in this exercise
will really be himself. This locates his demonstration of the
method closer to exposition than to dialogue. But the second
reason is interesting insofar as it recalls Socrates’ demonstration with the slave boy in the Meno; like the slave, who has
no reason to hold back from Socrates’ questioning, young Aristotle possesses a kind of pure outspokenness, a kind of fearlessness, that tends to be smothered by conventional thought
as a person ages. We can see that even the gifted young
Socrates has already fallen prey to convention if we read the
“perhaps” with which he accepts Parmenides’ substitution of
a sail for the day as a grudging acceptance of a substitution
he does not really admit. Whether he is being polite or he is
responding to the flattery Parmenides has just lavished on
him, Socrates, who contradicts Zeno so freely, seems unable
to contradict the admired older man.
The exercise itself is extremely difficult to read and understand, but it is carefully organized. (This is a feature that
is not evident in the truncated seminar assignment). Par-
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menides has said that he will consider the consequences both
for the One and for the others of the hypotheses both that the
One is and that it is not (135e-136c and 137b). I will repeat
the tangled conclusion he reaches:
Then let this be said, and also that, as it seems, whether
unity is or is not, both unity and the others are and are not,
and appear and do not appear to be, all things in all ways,
relative both to themselves and to each other (166c).
It is, as I said earlier, possible to read this as a demonstration
that nonsense is the only possible outcome of this particular
method of reasoning. In contrast, some commentators have
claimed that Parmenides’ exercise has indeed answered the
questions of participation that he raised in the first part of the
dialogue. Constance Meinwald, for example, argues ingeniously that it is possible to make sense out of the final statement, essentially (though, of course, this follows a complex,
book-length argument) by reading the verb esti, “to be” as
existential in some occurrences and predicative in others.1
According to this reading, the exercise would have explored
the possible pitfalls of language in general, and of that troublesome verb in particular. I would like, however, to argue
for a third interpretation. I believe that Parmenides has answered the questions he has raised, but that the answer is so
deeply buried that its very hiddenness begs to be explored.
Let us begin to do this by looking at the organization of the
argument in the light of Jacob Klein’s “Note on Plato’s Parmenides.”2 As its title suggests, Klein’s piece is no more than
a brief observation. The concern of the note is the “indeterminate dyad,” mentioned by Aristotle in the Physics and
Metaphysics.3 Aristotle’s contention is that the indeterminate
dyad was the substitute for the single “unlimited” or “indeterminate,” and, further, that this dyad consisted of “the Great
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and the Small.” Aristotle observes that the indeterminate dyad
is never explicitly mentioned by Plato. Klein believes, however, that there is a clear, if oblique, allusion to it in the Parmenides, specifically in Socrates’ apparently casual remark,
following Pythodorus’s observation that “many” others came
with him to hear Zeno’s reading. I mentioned earlier that
there were, in fact, seven men present at this conversation,
of whom only five are named. Parmenides also calls our attention to the group, without, however, numbering it, when
he agrees to engage in his laborious pastime. Klein suggests
that this equation of “many” with “two” is deliberate, and
that it is a veiled but unmistakable reference to what Aristotle
called the indeterminate dyad. Klein continues:
Zeno’s lecture (composed in his youth) was meant to show
that the consequences which flow from the assumption of
multiplicity in this world are even more absurd and ridiculous than the consequences which flow from the derided
Parmenidean assumption that “the One is” (128d). The
thesis of multiplicity, in Zeno’s presentation, seems to
imply the absence of unity, just as Parmenides’ assumption
divorces the One entirely from any multiplicity. It is noteworthy that, in the dialogue, Parmenides himself unfolds
before his listeners—young Aristotle acting as his dialectical partner—the contradictions involved both in the assumption and in the rejection of the “One” as the one and
only archē. There is an imbalance between Zeno’s thesis
and Parmenides’ performance: the denial of multiplicity is
not subjected to any scrutiny. What is lacking is a discussion of the consequences which flow from an explicit rejection of the many (cf. 136a).
Instead we are led by Parmenides and Aristotle to the
threshold of the insight that the root of the contradictions
concerning the “One” taken by itself is precisely the nonadmittance of another archē responsible for the “Many”
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and correlated with the “One.” The dialectic of the “One”
cannot avoid bringing this other archē, the “Other,” into
play. But its role within the framework of the dialogue is,
as it were, illegitimate. Still, its power is there, conspicuously, though silently present. The two undetermined men
in the audience represent it. They embody the elusive “indeterminate dyad” itself. This is their mimetically ironic
role.4
The structure of Parmenides’ exercise supports Klein’s
interpretation. Precisely what is lacking is what Klein has
called scrutiny of the denial of multiplicity. The structure of
the exercise is relatively simple.5 With one exception, it is divided into four sections, which follow Parmenides’ stated
plan. Two segments of the exercise consider (each one in two
parts) the consequences for unity and for the others if unity
exists. The other two (also each in two parts) consider the
consequences for unity and for the others if unity does not
exist. The opening argument, however, stands alone. Parmenides’ initial assumption is that the One is not Many. Of
course, young Aristotle agrees, for if anything is obvious, it
is that one is not many. Nevertheless, the outcome of this assumption is disastrous. Parmenides concludes that if the One
is not Many “then it cannot be named or spoken of, nor is it
an object of opinion or knowledge, nor does anything among
things which are perceive it,” and young Aristotle concurs
that none of those things can be true of unity (142a). Well, if
the One is not not-Many, does it then follow that the One is
Many? This is the balancing argument, which is missing. It
seems so absurd. There is no way in our everyday language
that the one can be many. There is no speakable way out of
this perplexity. And this is perhaps the crux of the indeterminate dyad, the manyness in the one that cannot be named but
which must somehow exist if we are to be able to link the
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Forms with the things of this world, that is, to practice philosophy. There is, then, a missing argument (and it could not
be otherwise, for the argument cannot be made with language
as we know it)—a fact that becomes apparent only when we
step back from the words and look at the structure of Parmenides’ exercise. This missing argument, necessarily absent,
is the one for the indeterminate dyad, the multiplicity within
the One, to which the presence of two unnamed men in the
first part of the dialogue points.
Let us look briefly once again at the principal questions
that the dialogue has raised and, I believe, answered. The first
is “What is philosophy?” In this dialogue Socrates is located
firmly within the Parmenidean tradition with respect to the
question of the nature of being: Only unalterable being is true
and knowable, and the philosopher seeks to know the truth,
that is, being. The second question—“Is philosophy possible?”—is no less important for human beings who would
seek to know. For if there is no way out of our perplexity—
and there is no way out unless the things we see can be related
to the things that are—then we are trapped in the world of
change, and the questions that philosophy raises are inaccessible to us. This is the difficulty with which Parmenides is
principally concerned in this dialogue; and the dialogue
shows us, if we know how to look at it, that there is a relationship between the things that are and the things that seem
to be. There is, in other words, a way out. That way is what
Aristotle called the indeterminate dyad, the multiplicity
within the One, and it must be sought in the dialogue as a
whole.
Let us return to the puzzling last sentence of the dialogue.
What are we to make of the stupendously unsatisfying conclusion to Parmenides’ exercise? If it is true that the dialogue
is seeded on various levels with covert allusions to the un-
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named and unnamable indeterminate dyad, the nonsensical
end of the dialogue may be a truly thumping clue that there
is a meaning here, and that the actual words are not where it
is to be found. This is a reading that takes us outside the text,
where we meet Socrates, who is, as it were, “in on it,” for he
is the one who alludes to the indeterminate dyad by mentioning that there are seven men present. Would Plato be capable
of performing such a trick—for our benefit, of course? I think
so. There is duality everywhere you look in this dialogue; and
furthermore, it is a duality that by its very ostentatiousness
implores us to attempt to forge a simple unity of it. Plato does
not coddle his readers, for one of his points is that philosophy
is hard work. We must be alive to the difficulties of reading
at every level of his intricately composed mimetic texts.
In conclusion I would like to recall a conversation I had
during a paper conference with one of the students in my Parmenides preceptorial, Adrienne St. Onge. She was troubled
by what she feared was an implication that only the young
had the spirit necessary to pursue philosophy. The initiate in
Parmenides’ poem is, after all, a young man, and in the dialogue, the point is made again and again that Socrates, the
spirited one, is very young. Zeno, a member of the generation
before Socrates, is frozen in time. Rereading old, repudiated
treatises, he is going nowhere. Indeed, if the significant difference between youth and age is the difference between zeal
for controversy and zeal for reputation, there is nowhere to
go. Parmenides, a member of the generation before Zeno’s,
provides an example that is not much better, comparing himself both to an aged lover and to an old racehorse reluctantly
running around in circles—that is, once again, going
nowhere. But as we talked we began to realize that this is the
beauty of the posthumous setting. Cephalus has come to
Athens because of what Socrates later became. And we read-
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ers know what Socrates became because we have read dialogues written earlier, but situated later in his life. We know
that Socrates never lost his desire for philosophy. We know
that he never confused truth with mud. Plato contrives to have
the venerable philosopher anoint and assist his heir, and what
that heir has become we already know.
Still, the “present” of the dialogue is troubling. It is true
that men have come from Clazomenae to hear the conversation, but the state of philosophy after Socrates’ death seems
perilous. I doubt that we ever expected Glaucon and
Adeimantus to become philosophers; but Antiphon, who in
this dialogue is the closest link to Socrates’ time, is shown
instructing a smith to make a bit for a horse. I can’t help but
read this as a discouraging allusion to the well-guided horses
pulling the young man’s chariot toward the light of truth at
the beginning of Parmenides’ poem. Antiphon is not a man
of philosophical desire or spirit. The text, as he recites it, is
trapped in time, as dead as Zeno’s treatise.
So is it only exceptional people who can become philosophers? We have Socrates, who surpassed his mentors, and
Plato, himself, who by implication may have surpassed
Socrates. But now what? The dialogue assures us that philosophy is possible, but it does not suggest that it is easy. On
the contrary, the philosopher must possess unending desire,
unusual intelligence, and divine devotion to truth. This is all
the more reason to wonder if Plato deliberately planted in his
dialogues hints that would not be accessible to the many,
those who despite everything and will always persist in traveling the wide and well-trodden, but wrong, way. Plato will
not do our work for us, for if he did we would not be moved
to philosophy. Both in this dialogue and more explicitly in
the Phaedrus, he warns us of the danger of dead texts. To
have meaning, the writing must somehow live. For more than
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two thousand years we have been trying to tease meaning out
of Plato’s texts, and the Parmenides has been among those
most resistant to our efforts. Manifestly, Plato would not expect such endeavors to lead everyone to philosophy, but insofar as our search for meaning has led us to seek a way out
of our perplexity, we have engaged in the only philosophy
Parmenides and Socrates (and, I think, Plato) would agree is
real: the living search for a path to knowledge.
NOTES
Constance Meinwald, Plato’s Parmenides (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991).
1
In Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays (Annapolis: St. John’s College Press, 1985), 285-87.
2
3
For references see Klein, 285.
4
Klein, Parmenides, 287.
I owe a debt of thanks to a student, Darcy Christ, for making this
clear to me.
5
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Elliott Carter at St. John’s College
Tutor, 1940-1942
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Rolling His Jolly Tub:
Composer Elliott Carter,
St. John’s College Tutor,
1940-1942
Hollis Thoms
Away went he out of town towards a little hill or
promontory of Corinth called (the) Cranie; and
there on the strand, a pretty level place, did he roll
his jolly tub, which served him for a house to
shelter him from the injuries of the weather.
—Rabelais
Elliott Carter, now one of America’s foremost living composers, was a Tutor at St. John’s College from 1940 to 1942.
This was a turbulent time both for the College and for Carter.
The College was still in the process of phasing out the “old”
curriculum and was trying to establish the “new” Great Books
curriculum. Then, just after the last students under the old
regime were graduated in 1941, World War II began to coopt
college-age men for the war effort. In Carter’s life, his recent
marriage, together with the lingering effects of Great Depression, made it imperative for him to secure an academic
position. At the same time, he was transforming his compoHollis Thoms is a composer and researcher from Annapolis, Maryland,
who received the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts degree from St. John’s
College in 2006. Many thanks are due to individuals at St. John’s who
facilitated research for this paper: Chris Nelson, President; Catherine
Dixon, Library Director; Cara Sabolcick, Public Service Librarian, Daniel
Crowe, Registrar; Jacqueline Thoms, Assistant Registrar; Eric Stoltzfus,
Music Librarian; and Mark Daly, Head of Laboratories. Thanks also to
Dr. Philip Allen, who edited the first draft.
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sitional practice, casting off traditional influences, and moving
in a radically new musical direction. The story of Carter’s
time at St. John’s is the story of two interlaced experiments:
the College’s experiment in higher education, and Carter’s
experiment in finding his vocation as a composer.
Elliott Carter, 1908-1940
Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. was born in New York on December
11, 1908 to lace-import businessman Elliott Cook Carter, Sr.
and his wife Florence, née Chambers. The young Elliott was
intended to succeed his father at the lace-import firm. As he
grew, however, his musical talents and interests led him away
from business and toward a career in music. The elder Carter
was openly contemptuous of such an impractical scheme
(Wierzbicki 2011, 5-6). But Clifton J. Furness, music teacher
at the Horace Mann School where Carter studied from 1920
to 1926, recognized and encouraged his student's talent. He
took the teenage Carter to avant-garde concerts, exposing him
to new music by composers such as Bartók, Ruggles, Stravinsky, Varèse, Schoenberg, and Webern. And he introduced him
to many New York musicians and composers, including
Charles Ives, the eccentric millionaire businessman and experimental composer. Ives often invited Carter to join him
and his wife in their Carnegie Hall box for performances by
the Boston Symphony, which, under the leadership of Serge
Koussevitzky, commissioned many new works by living
composers. Ives became a musical and intellectual role model
for Carter (Wierzbicki 2011, 7-9).
The distance between the younger Carter’s ambitions and
his father’s continued to grow during these years. When
Carter was sixteen in 1925, his father took him along on a
business trip to Vienna, where all his attention was focussed
on trying to acquire all the currently available scores of
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Schoenberg and Webern. Carter remembers going with his
father to a performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring,
which the father summed up with “Only a madman could
have written anything like that.” Yet that performance was
one of the experiences that inspired the young Elliot to become a composer (Edwards 1971, 40, 45).
So, contrary to his father’s wishes, Carter decided to
study music at Harvard. Ives wrote a letter of reference in
which he pointed to Carter’s artistic instincts:
Carter strikes me as rather an exceptional boy. He has
an instinctive interest in literature and especially
music that is somewhat unusual. He writes well—an
essay in his school paper—“Symbolism in Art”—
shows an interesting mind. In don’t know him intimately, but his teacher in Horace Mann School, Mr.
Clifton J. Furness, and a friend of mine, always
speaks well of him—that he’s a good character and
does well in his studies. I am sure his reliability, industry, and sense of honour are what they should
be—also his sense of humor which you do not ask
me about (Schiff 1983, 15-16).
He intended to major in music at Harvard in the fall of
1926, but lasted only a semester in that program. He remained at Harvard, however, but opted to spend his undergraduate years working on a degree in English literature. The
Harvard music department was not to his liking, since it
would have nothing to do with the new music in which
Carter was interested. Carter said that he “would have been
glad if somebody at Harvard had explained to me what went
on in the music of Stravinsky, Bartok and Schoenberg, and
had tried somehow to develop in me the sense of harmony
and counterpoint that these composers had” (Wierzbicki
2011, 11).
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Carter enjoyed his English literature experience, but, as
with music, he went further than the traditional literature offerings, which stopped with reading Tennyson. He preferred
reading more avant garde authors such as Gerard Manley
Hopkins, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, T. S.
Elliot, e. e. cummings, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence,
Gertrude Stein, and others. In addition to studying classics,
philosophy, and mathematics, he also studied German and
Greek—which, in addition to his fluency in French, made
him quite proficient in languages. Carter spent his undergraduate years pursuing the broadest possible education, for he
saw music not merely as a technical study, but as an art form
embedded in and intimately connected with the liberal arts.
He, did, nonetheless, participate in more traditional musical
activities during his time at Harvard, taking instruction in
piano, oboe, and solfeggio at the Longy School. He sang
tenor in the Harvard Glee Club and in a Bach Cantata Club.
He also spent time studying the scores of the past masters,
taking full advantage of the vast holdings of the Harvard
music library (Wierzbicki 2011, 15-19).
Carter’s youthful interest in the new music can be seen
in the repertory of works he performed with his old music
teacher Clifton Furness in a joint piano recital in Hartford,
Connecticut on December 12, 1928: the program included
pieces by Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Arnold Schoenberg, Francis Poulenc, Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco
Malipiero, Henry Gilbert, Charles Ives, Eric Satie, Paul Hindemith, and George Antheil (Schiff 1983, 15).
After Carter graduated, he went on receive an MA in musical composition at Harvard, because, when Gustav Holst
came as a visiting composer and Walter Piston returned from
studying in Paris, there was a new interest in contemporary
music at Harvard, so that Carter felt more at home in the al-
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tered the musical environment. Piston recommended that
Carter go to study with the well known teacher of composition Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique de
Paris, and Carter did so from 1932-1935. Carter’s fluency in
French made Paris a natural choice; and because both Piston
and Aaron Copland, whom Carter knew and admired, had
studied with her, he felt that it was a reasonable thing to do
(Wierzbicki 2011, 20-21).
Despite persistent financial worries while in Paris—his
father did not approve of the plan and cut his allowance in
half, though his mother continued to supplement the allowance—Carter thrived as a student of Boulanger, whom he
remembers with admiration for the way she illuminated both
the past and the future of music:
The things that were most remarkable and wonderful
about her were her extreme concern for the material
of music and her acute awareness of its many phases
and possibilities. I must say that, though I had taken
harmony and counterpoint at Harvard and thought I
knew all about these subjects, nevertheless, when
Nadia Boulanger put me back on tonic and dominant
chords in half notes, I found to my surprise that I
learned all kinds of things I’d never thought before.
Every one one of her lessons became very illuminating. . . . Mlle. Boulanger was a very inspiring teacher
of counterpoint and made it such a passionate concern
that all this older music constantly fed me thoughts
and ideas. All the ways you could make the voices
cross and combine or sing antithetical lines were
things we were involved in strict counterpoint, which
I did for three years with her—up to twelve parts,
canons, invertible counterpoint, and double choruses—and found it fascinating.” (Edwards 1971, 50,
55. Emphasis added.)
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Then also, when I was studying with Mlle. Boulanger
I began for the first time to get an intellectual grasp
of what went on technically in modern works. I was
there at a time when Stravinsky, who was of course
the contemporary composer she always admired
most[, was also in Paris]. . . . The way she illuminated
the details of these works was just extraordinary to
me. . . . I met Stravinsky, because he used to come to
tea at Mlle. Boulanger’s. . . . [W]hat always struck
me every time I heard Stravinsky play the piano—the
composer’s extraordinary, electric sense of rhythm
and incisiveness of touch that made every note he
played a “Stravinsky-note” full of energy, excitement
and serious intentness” (Edwards 1971, 51, 56. Emphasis added.)
Boulanger’s attitude toward music matched his own: in
his daily lessons, composition as a craft was combined with
composition as in the context of the liberal arts. Carter spent
three years studying with Boulanger, and as a result of her
tutelage, he gained both the musical craftsmanship and the
self-confidence to produce compositions that he considered
worth preserving. It was only “after Paris” that Carter “could
begin to compose” (Wierzbicki 2011, 24).
After his return from Paris, Carter immersed himself in
musical activities, groups, and composing, first in Boston and
then in New York. He wrote a number of choral works including one called “Let’s Be Gay,” a work for women’s chorus and two pianos based on texts by John Gay. It was written
for, and performed by, the Wells College Glee Club in the
spring of 1938, which was led by his friend Nicolas Nabokov,
who was to figure again in Carter’s career a few years later
(Wierzbicki 2011, 25).
The Great Depression made it impossible for Carter to
find a secure job, but he was able to become a regular con-
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103
tributor to Modern Music, a journal that had been founded in
1924 as the house organ of the New York-based League of
Composers. In the process of writing thirty-one articles and
reviews for the journal, he gained familiarity with current
compositional activity in New York, and he developed the
skills of a professional music critic (Wierzbicki 2011, 26-27).
In addition, he was hired as a composer-in-residence for
the experimental ballet company Ballet Caravan, formed in
1936 by Lincoln Kirstein, whom Carter had met in Paris. In
that same year, Carter wrote the piano score of a ballet for
the company, called Pocahontas, which premiered in 1939.
In June of 1940 the New York Times announced that an orchestral suite drawn from the ballet had won “the Julliard
School’s annual competition for the publication of orchestral
works by American composers.” This prestigious award finally launched Carter’s career as a composer at the age of 31
(Wierzbicki 2011, 27).
Shortly before the premiere of Pocahontas, on July 6,
1939, Carter married Helen Frost-Jones, a sculptor and art
critic, whom he met through his friend Nicolas Nabokov.
With the possibility of a family now on the horizon, Carter
redoubled his efforts to find employment. At Aaron Copland’s suggestion, he applied in the spring of 1940 for a
teaching position at Cornell University. Cornell was actively
considering him, but the school was not in a hurry to hire.
Carter, on the other hand, wanted a position for the fall. So
instead he accepted an offer to teach music, mathematics,
physics, philosophy, and Greek at St. John’s College in Annapolis (Wierzbicki 2011, 28).
The offer from St. John’s was also due to Carter’s friend
Nicolas Nabokov, who recommended Carter after himself
turning down the offer of a position for 1940-1941. In a letter
to Stringfellow Barr dated June 22, 1940, Nabokov ex-
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plained, first, that he could not accept the position for that
year because his wife was expecting a child and, since they
lived in Massachusetts, it would be too inconvenient to move
or to commute between the arduous new job and his family;
second, that the compensation offered at St. John’s College
was not adequate for him to take care of his new family; and
third, that he could not in good conscience leave Wells so
soon before the beginning of the fall term.
In declining the position, Nabokov recommended a substitute: “Mr. Elliott Carter of whom I spoke to you the other
day and more extensively to Mr. Buchanan would in my opinion fit perfectly into the St. John’s place of education. . . . Mr.
Carter as you will see from his curriculum vitae and the enclosed articles is a very thorough, serious and reliable man
and I recommend him to you very highly. . . . [H]e is very
anxious to undertake the job.” He suggested that Carter could
substitute for him for during the coming school year, and then
Nabokov himself would come to St. John’s the following
year. Nabokov did indeed arrive at St. John’s the following
fall to take over the teaching of music; but Carter did not
leave. Instead he spent a second year at St. John’s teaching
Greek, mathematics, and seminar (Nabokov 1940).
Carter’s decision to accept the position at St. John’s could
not have been easy to make. He was just beginning his career
as a composer, trying to develop a distinctive creative voice
in challenging financial circumstances, which were made
even more challenging by his recent marriage. This was certainly a turbulent time in his life.
He was to join the St. John’s community at a turbulent
time in its own history. The college had recently launched an
educational experiment unprecedented in American higher
education, the success of which was far from certain. The
prospect of teaching at the third oldest college in the nation
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105
(the direct predecessor of St. John’s, King William’s School,
was founded in 1696, after Harvard in 1636 and William and
Mary in 1693) might have seemed a more stable position than
anything the young composer could find in New York, but he
would soon discover a great deal of unstable dissonance in
the community he was to join.
St. John’s College in 1940: Turbulence
In 1937, St. John’s College found itself at a crossroads. In addition to a severe financial crisis, the physical plant was in
deep disrepair. A weak Board of Governors and Visitors had
appointed three new Presidents within nine years in an attempt to find someone who could remedy the situation. All
three had failed, however, and the College had lost its accreditation status with the Middle States Association of Colleges
and Schools. Demoralized faculty members were leaving.
(See Murphy 1996 and Rule 2009 for the facts in this section.)
The stronger members of the Board decided to take drastic action. They named Robert Hutchins, President of the University of Chicago, who had long been involved in attempts
to revive the liberal arts, to chair the Board. The Board also
hired two colleagues of Hutchins’ from the Committee on
Liberal Arts at Chicago as President and Dean, Stringfellow
Barr and Scott Buchanan. Their charge was to effect a complete transformation from a traditional college curriculum to
a radically “old” Great Books curriculum. There would no
longer be the traditional options leading to specialized degrees; the faculty would no longer teach only in their areas
of expertise, but in all areas of the curriculum; the college
would no longer participate in intercollegiate sports; there
would no longer be fraternities on campus.
Instead, the completely renovated curriculum, known as
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the “New Program,” consisted of two seminars (discussion
groups) per week on one of the books on the prescribed reading list, five tutorials (small classes) per week in mathematics, five language tutorials per week, at least one three-hour
laboratory period per week, and at least one formal lecture
per week. (Barr 1941, 44.)
In order to effect the change, the New Program was
phased in over a four-year period. Students entering in the
fall of 1937 were allowed to choose which curriculum they
would pursue. Thereafter, all incoming freshmen entered the
New Program. Carter arrived in the 1940-1941 school year,
the last year of the unsettled transitional period, at the end of
which the last graduates under the old curriculum were
awarded their degrees alongside the first graduates under the
New Program. By Carter’s second year, 1941-1942, the New
Program had completely replaced the old curriculum.
Clearly, the board was taking a risk by instituting such an
innovative and untried curriculum, and the risk paid off
slowly. On 1937 there were twenty freshmen who entered in
the New Program; in 1938, forty-six; in 1939, fifty-four; and
in 1940, when Carter arrived, there were ninety-three. The
total number of students held steady at around 170 during the
first four years, so the transition seemed relatively painless
from the enrollment point of view. But the exodus of faculty
members continued, since quite a few were not prepared to
give up their specialties to become co-learners along with
their students in an environment of cooperative learning in
all the liberal arts.
In his quarterly report to the board of April 1939,
Stringfellow Barr described the sort of student and the sort
of tutor that would thrive in the New Program. The students
would have to be able to think clearly and imaginatively, read
the most diverse sorts of material with understanding and de-
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107
light, distinguish sharply between what he knows and what
is mere opinion, have an affinity for first-rate authors and an
aversion to second-rate authors, derive great pleasure from
exercising his intellect on difficult problems, and desire to be
a thoughtful generalist rather than a highly proficient specialist. The tutors, on the other hand, would have to transcend
divergent intellectual backgrounds, be clear expositors, imaginative artists, and cooperative fellow seekers, know how to
teach and learn through discussion, and, above all, be intellectual treasure-hunters.
For unquestionably, the treasures our authors had
written were for our generation partially buried. We
needed men who wanted to help our students dig
them up. The best that we could do, the best indeed
that could be done, was to call for volunteers, volunteers for the treasure hunt, remembering for our comfort that this treasure hunt has never wholly ceased
during the intellectual history of our Western civilization (Nelson 1997, 52-59).
When Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan recruited Elliott Carter they were looking for a “treasure hunter.” They
found in him a kindred spirit who transcended intellectual
narrowness, thought clearly, and was an imaginative artist.
Their relationship continued long after all of them had left
St. John’s. Years later, in 1962, when Barr was invited to
nominate Elliott Carter for an honorary degree at Rutgers
University, Carter replied from Rome in a letter that testifies
to their enduring friendship. (Barr was affectionately called
“Winkie” by his close friends. Carter, 1962.)
Dec. 18, 1962
Dear Winkie —
I am sorry to say that I will not be back in New York
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until July — I do thank
you very much for thinking of me in connection
with the honorary degree
from Rutgers but again I
must beg off — to my sorrow — because as usual
my work seems to have
taken over and dictated
the plan of my life for me
— and I must stay here
until I finish my Concerto
— Merry Xmas and
Fig. 1: Letter to Scott Buchanan
Happy New Year to you (St. John’s College Library Archive,
and Tak [?] — And thanks
Barr Personal Papers, Series 2,
Box 10, folder 20)
for the suggestion Sorry
not to be able to accept it —
Affectionately, Elliott
1940-1941: Tutor and Director of Music
In the college catalogue of 1940-41, Carter was listed as
Tutor and Director of Music (St. John’s College Catalogue
1940-41). His responsibilities included supervision of the entire music program. According to the college newspaper, The
Collegian, which ran a long article in October about the upcoming year’s music program, Carter would plan and schedule a series of six concerts by visiting artists; he would give
a lecture the week before each concert to discuss the works
on the program; he would organize and direct student instrumental ensembles to appear in recitals and accompany the
Glee Club; he would conduct the Glee Club, which was to
rehearse three times per week and give numerous recitals during the year; he would lead a music discussion group on Saturday mornings for interested students; he would lead a
counterpoint, harmony, and composition class for interested
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students; he would supervise concerts of recorded music four
times per week; he would prepare the music room in the late
afternoon each day for students to listen to recorded music
(The Collegian, Oct. 19, 1940).
Carter seems to have taken to these duties enthusiastically, if the pictures in the 1941 St. John’s College Yearbook
give any indication. In the faculty section of the yearbook
there is a picture of Carter working assiduously at his desk,
and in the Glee Club section there is a photo of him directing
the singers with deliberation. The yearbook also provides a
positive evaluation of Carter’s work with the Glee Club over
the year:
The aims of the Club are primarily to foster competent group singing (not necessary concert competency), to gain a better understanding of choral music,
and . . . to let the ear hear what the voice does. To date
the criticisms received from the two mid-winter
recitals give encouragement to the feeling that the
Glee Club is headed in the right direction. Studies,
scholarship work, and talents turned toward other
interests have naturally
taken their toll of the initial
roster, but there still remains a group large
enough to work with the
music under consideration.
The members are from the
three lower classes, which
means that their return next
fall will leave only the task
of inducting freshmen and
learning new songs; this is
Fig. 2: Carter’s four-part setting
indeed a strong incentive
of “St. John’s Forever”
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for the club’s continuation and success (St. John’s
College Yearbook, 1941, 30).
And the work Carter did with the music program was indeed quite varied. For instance, on Saturday, December 20,
1940, the Glee Club performed, at the request of Scott
Buchanan, on the St. John’s College monthly radio broadcast
from WFBR in Baltimore. On that occasion they sang “St.
John’s Forever,” arranged especially by Carter for the broadcast. (A copy of this arrangement can be found in the St.
John’s College Music Library.) They also sang at “Miss
Alexander’s Christmas Party” on December 18. And Carter
assisted in making the musical arrangements for the end-ofterm variety show That’s Your Problem, which showcased the
vaudeville talents of both students and tutors (The Collegian,
Nov. 13 and Dec. 13, 1940).
When the first performance of the year’s concert series
was announced, The Collegian took the opportunity to explain the purpose of the lectures that Carter would give in
preparation for each concert:
While Mr. Carter plans to discuss primarily the program for each concert, the entire lecture series will
form a course in music appreciation. As Mr. Carter is
himself a talented musician, the course affords a
unique opportunity in musical education (The Collegian, Nov. 1, 1940).
The Collegian also reviewed each concert, and while the performances were sometimes panned, sometimes praised, there
was no criticism of Carter’s work in organizing the series and
lecturing on the pieces performed.
Things went less swimmingly with some of Carter’s other
duties. The counterpoint, harmony, and composition class
that had been announced in October was “on the verge of collapse” at the start of the second term because of waning at-
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tendance. The Saturday morning music discussion class was
considered to be “somewhat irregular”; nevertheless, in January the group had just finished an analysis of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and was starting to study Beethoven’s
Diabelli Variations (The Collegian, Jan. 31, 1941). In February it was announced that, “at the request of a small group
of students,” Carter would be offering a new class in eartraining and sight-singing on Saturday mornings (The Collegian, Feb. 14, 1941).
Taking into account the addition of this new class,
Carter’s teaching schedule for his first year at St. John’s
looked like this:
Elliott Carter’s Teaching Schedule, 1940-41
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
4-6
Sunday
Music
discussion
and ear
training
10-12
2-3
Saturday
Counterpoint
Music
Music
Room
Room
Music
Room
Music
Room
Counterpoint
Music
Music
Room
Room
Recorded Glee
Music
Club
Recorded
Music
Glee
Club
Glee
Club
6-7
7-8
Recorded
Music
In addition to his teaching hours, it seems that Carter was
responsible for writing several manuals relating to musical
studies during the fall 1940 term. Not surprisingly, he authored a “Manual of Musical Notation” explaining how to
read and write music, which was no doubt intended for the
use of students in his various music classes. But his name is
also attached to several manuals of musical studies that were
part of the Freshman Laboratory curriculum: “Musical Intervals and Scales,” “The Greek Diatonic Scale,” and “The Just
Scale and Its Uses” (Schiff 1983, 336). Another manual exists
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for a fourth laboratory unit called “The Keys in Music,”
which, though unsigned, must also have been devised by
Carter, because the musical examples are written in his distinctive musical script. (All the documents mentioned in this
paragraph can be found in the St. John’s College Library
Archives.)
All these manuals demonstrate Carter’s understanding of
the integration of music with the rest of the curriculum of the
New Program. The “Manual of Music Notation,” for instance, likens music to language, and musical notation to linguistic writing systems.
Musical notation is the method used to represent
graphically the patterns of sound which are the basis
of music. Like the writing which represents the language of words, it serves man to overcome his lapses
of memory by maintaining a more permanent record
and aids him in the transmission to other men of the
work of his mind as well in art as in thought.
The simplest kind of notation of music sounds indicates in a general way the prolongation or shortening
of the vowels of words and also the rise and fall of
the voice while it is sounding them (Carter 1941, 1.)
The comparison between music and language was a favorite notion of Scott Buchanan’s, and Carter seems to have
agreed with him. It is likely that the two discussed the matter
before Carter wrote this manual. There is a record from this
period of Buchanan’s thoughts on music—a three-page outline of the topic “Music” dated November 8, 1940 that shows
clear parallels to Carter’s formulation. The first page of the
outline contains these notes (Buchanan 1940, 1):
Voice—noise
Words
3 Dimensions of Words
Pitch
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113
Time
Accent-Rhythm
Other Dimensions
Expression
Music Without Words
Measurement and Words
Verbal Analogies
Figures of Speech
Metaphor
Simile
Analogy
Allegory
It appears that the two men were in agreement that music is
one of the writing and reading disciplines in the liberal arts
tradition, and that this view needed to be expressed somehow
in the New Program.
If Carter’s music-notation manual links the study of
music to the study of language, his laboratory manuals even
more clearly link it to the study of mathematics and physics.
In 1939-1940, the year before Carter’s revision of the music
element in the laboratory program, there was only one music
laboratory exercise during the entire year, and the text of the
manual for that exercise was a mere five pages that described
the design of a simple, two-string sonometer (sounding
board), gave instructions for duplicating Pythagoras’ experiments on musical ratios, provided directions for creating various musical scales, and posing questions to be answered in
laboratory reports. Carter’s four laboratory units brought the
total number of manual pages devoted to musical topics up
to sixty-eight, and the experiments he devised demonstrate a
wide-ranging knowledge of early music theory and mathematics. The lessons covered Pythagoras’ experiments, Euclid’s division of the canon, the music of Plato’s Timaeus,
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and Kepler’s notions of the musical relations among the planets; he had the students create eight- and thirteen-string
sonometers to explore the discovery and historical development of musical intervals, modes, scales, melodies, harmonies, and chord progressions from the most ancient
tunings through the experimental temperaments of the
Baroque and early Classical period to modern equal temperament. (The sonometer
in the accompanying
photo is located in the
St. John’s College
Music Library.)
Moreover, these
lessons were coordinated with the readings that students
were doing in matheFig. 3: Carter’s Sonometer
matics tutorial and seminar. According to the teaching schedule, the Freshman music
laboratories would have occurred during the fifteenth through
the eighteenth weeks of the school year, that is, probably in
December and January. These units therefore would have followed previous laboratory studies of physical phenomena
dealing with rectilineal angles, areas, weights and measures,
light, lenses, and circular motion, and mathematical studies
of polygons, simple ratios, compound ratios, and simple
quadratic equations.
Virgil Blackwell, Carter’s personal assistant, calls the two
years at St. John’s the “lost years,” because they have not
been much discussed by Carter’s biographers. He also told
me that Carter had a good laugh when he saw the image of
the sonometer I had sent via email (personal communication,
Nov. 6, 2011); he remembered that “the students made the
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115
sonometer” (personal communication, Nov. 8, 2011). These
remarks indicate that Carter approached the teaching of the
music laboratories in the participatory, exploratory, experimental spirit of the New Program. He and his students would
investigate the most complex concepts of tuning by means
of the sonometers they built with their own hands, by applying bridges, weights, rulers, wires, nails, rubber mallets,
bows, and resin to manipulate string lengths in an effort to
discover the mathematical underpinnings of the auditory phenomena.
While Carter thus set the foundations for the mathematical study of music at St. John’s, his initial designs began to
be modified in the very next school year. Since the program
of study at the college has always been under continuous revision, the music labs too went through changes over the
years, until Carter’s original contributions were all but forgotten. His four laboratory exercises lay neglected in the library archives, together with the drawings of the eight- and
thirteen-stringed sonometers. The seventy-year old sonometer, discovered some years ago in a basement storage room,
was tucked away as a curious relic in a corner of the music
library, its purpose and origin unknown.
1941-1942: Tutor of Greek, Mathematics, and Seminar
In the 1941-42 school year, Carter’s friend Nicholas Nabokov
arrived at St. John’s to take over the duties of Director of
Music. Nabokov expanded the music program considerably.
While the Glee Club continued, he added two new vocal
groups: a chamber choir and something called the “Vespers”
group. He also started a chamber ensemble and a community
orchestra.
Since Carter had relinquished his responsibilities to
Nabokov, he then took on the regular teaching schedule of a
tutor at the College. Initially it was difficult to determine ex-
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116
actly what he taught during his second year. After seventy
years, the original records of teaching schedules and tutor assignments had been lost. But the current Assistant Registrar
at St. John’s, Jacqueline Thoms, recently discovered some
ledgers detailing all the classes attended by each Senior in
the graduating class of 1945 during their four-your career, together with the names of their tutors. By compiling the
classes that these students attended during their Freshman
year, it was possible to identify the classes Carter taught during the 1941-42 school year, and the number of students in
each of his classes (Ledger 1941-42).
This research confirms the facts that were already known
about Carter’s teaching that year. He taught Freshman Greek,
Freshman Mathematics, and his four Freshman Laboratory units
when they came up in December or January. In addition, he coled a Freshman Seminar with fellow tutor Bernard Peebles.
Elliott Carter’s teaching schedule 1941-42
Monday
9-10
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
Tuesday
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
Wednesday
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
Thursday
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
Friday
Greek
Tutorial
9 students
10-11
11-12
Mathematics Mathematics Mathematics
Tutorial
Tutorial
Tutorial
9 students
9 students
9 students
Mathematics Mathematics
Tutorial
Tutorial
9 students
9 students
12-2
Laboratory
Freshman
Exercises 15-18
2-5
5-8
8-10
Seminar with
Peebles
18 students
Seminar with
Peebles
18 students
Although Carter’s responsibilities as Director of Music
were no doubt heavy, his responsibilities as a tutor were even
heavier. In addition to facilitating discussion in his Greek and
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ESSAYS & LECTURES | THOMS
Mathematics tutorials, he also had to set up, prepare, and lead
the laboratory exercises for the students. All these classes also
required him to read and respond to short papers and reports,
and to devise and correct occasional quizzes. In his Seminar
he had to complete the extensive required readings from the
Great Books, moderate the two-hour long seminar discussions twice a week, read longer papers, and conduct oral examinations. In addition, he also would have spent considerable
time advising students individually on their classwork, and
helping them to write, revise, and complete the required essays.
One can get an idea of the sheer amount of reading Carter
had to do for seminar alone from the schedule of readings
from the 1940-41 school year, which would not have changed
much during the following year:
September 26
September 30
October 3
October 7
October 10
October 14
October 17
October 21
October 24
October 28
October 31
November 4
November 7
Homer, Iliad, 1
November 11 Aeschylus, Choephoroe, Eumenides
Homer, Iliad, 2-4
November 14 Plato, Charmides, Lysis
Homer, Iliad, 5-10
November 18 Plato, Symposium
Homer, Iliad, 11-16
November 21 Herodotus, History, 1-2
Homer, Iliad, 17-24
November 25 Herodotus, History, 3-5
Plato, Ion, Laches
November 28 Herodotus, History, 6-7
Homer, Odyssey, 1-8 December 2 Herodotus, History, 8-9
Homer, Odyssey, 9-16 December 5 Plato, Gorgias
Homer, Odyssey, 17-24 December 9 Plato, Republic, 1-2
Plato, Meno
December 12 Plato, Republic 3-5
Plato, 3 works
December 16 Plato, Republic, 6-7
Plato, Phaedo
December 19 Plato, Republic, 8-10
Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Christmas Vacation
January 6
January 9
January 13
January 16
January 20
January 23
January 27
January 30
February 3
February 6
February 10
Plato, Cratylus
Plato, Phaedrus
Sophocles, 2 works
Aristotle, Poetics
Sophocles, 2 works
Euripides, 3 works
Plato, Parmenides
Plato, Theatetus
Plato, Sophist
Hippocrates, 4 works
Hippocrates, 5 works
February 13
February 13
February 20
February 27
March 3
March 6
March 10
March 13
March 17
March 20
Plato, Philebus
Plato, Timaeus
Aristotle, Categories
Aristotle, Prior Analytics
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics
Thucydides, History, 1-2
Thucydides, History, 3-4
Thucydides, History, 5-6
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Spring Vacation
March 31
April 3
April 7
April 10
April 14
April 17
April 21
April 24
April 28
Thucydides, History, 7-8
Aristophanes, 3 works
Aristophanes, 3 works
Aristotle, Politics, 1-4
Aristotle, Politics, 5-8
Plutarch, 5 works
Plutarch, 3 works
Nicomachus, Arithmetic 1
Nicomachus, Arithmetic, 2
May 1
May 5
May 8
May 12
May 15
May 19
May 23
May 26
May 29
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Euclid, Elements, Bks. 5, 10, 13
Aristarchus, Sun and Moon
Aristotle, Physics, 1
Aristotle, Physics, 2-3
Aristotle, Physics, 4
Archimedes, Works (unspecified)
Lucian, True History
(Barr Buchanan Series III, Curriculum in Motion, December 1940,
Box 2, Folder 25, St. John’s College Library Archives)
As we have seen, Carter’s remarkable education prepared
him well for his duties as a tutor at St. John’s. Nevertheless,
the new experience of teaching Freshmen, the pace of the curriculum, and the many hours spent meeting individually with
students must have kept him extraordinarily busy.
1940-1942: Elliott Carter, Composer
According to Virgil Blackwell, Carter says that his choral
work In Defense of Corinth was written during his time at St.
John’s College, and that he began working on the sketches
for his Symphony No. 1 immediately after leaving the college,
when he and his wife moved west to Arizona and New Mexico. Both works relate to our consideration of Carter’s career
at St. John’s.
In Defense of Corinth for speaker, men’s chorus and
piano four hands, was commissioned by the Harvard Glee
Club and performed by them on March 12, 1942, with G.
Wallace Woodworth conducting (Schiff, 329). The work has
many similarities to Stravinsky’s Les Noces, Schoenberg’s
Moses and Aaron, and Orff’s Carmina Burana. It is based on
a passage from “The Author’s Prologue” to Book Three of
Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (14951553). The text could be construed as a satirical commentary
on militarism and a mockery of war-hysteria. Carter’s work
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119
was composed close to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on
December 7, 1941. The satirical attitude toward war displayed in the piece did not, however, carry over into Carter’s
personal life: he attempted to enlist in military service as soon
as the United States entered hostilities, as did many of his St.
John’s students over the next few years. Because he had terrible allergies, however, he was rejected for active duty on
health grounds. Eventually, from late 1943 until June 6, 1944
he worked as a musical advisor for the U. S. Office of War
Information (Wierzbicki 2011, 29).
Whatever his personal political feelings, Carter’s In Defense of Corinth is a musical metaphor for his situation as
composer in a world made mad by war. The work is divided
into three distinct sections. In the first section, a speaker and
male chorus use the spoken narration, speech-song, and full
singing of a speaker and male chorus join with a four-hand
piano accompaniment to build up musical textures in imitation of the building up of the Corinthian war effort against
Philip of Macedon:
Everyone did watch and ward, and not one was exempted from carrying the basket. Some polished
corslets, varnished backs and breasts, cleaned the headpieces, mail-coats, brigandines, salads, helmets, morions, jacks, gushets, gorgets, hoguines, brassars and
cuissars, corslets, haubergeons, shields, bucklers, targets, greaves, gauntlets, and spurs. Others made ready
bows, slings, crossbows, pellets, catapults, migrains or
fireballs, birebrands, balists, scorpions, and other such
warlike engine expugnatory and destructive Hellepolides. They sharpened and prepared spears, staves,
pikes, brown bills, hailberds, long hooks, lances, zagayes, quarterstaves, eesleares, partisans, troutstaves,
clubs, battle-axes, maces, darts, dartlets, glaives,
javelins, javelots, and truncheons. They set edges upon
scimitars, cutlasses, badelairs, backwords, tucks,
rapiers, bayonets, arrow-heads, dags, daggers, mandou-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
sians, poniards, whinyards, knives, skeans, shables,
chipping knives, and raillons. . . . Every man exercised
his weapon. (Rabelais 2004, 265.)
Accompanying this relentless concatenation of weaponry, the
musical elements continue to pile up, steadily getting louder,
sharper, more percussive; the voices progress to confused
speaking and shouting, reaching a climax in pure noise.
Fig. 4: In Defense of Corinth holograph score
(Library of Congress, ML96.C288 [Case])
The brief second section is a quieter setting in which the
main character, Diogenes, seeing everyone around him so
hard at work making war while he is not employed by the
city in any way, contemplates what he should do. Surely this
must reflect Carter’s state of mind at the time: unable to join
the war effort because of his allergies, he finds himself surrounded by young men, including his students, preparing for
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | THOMS
121
and leaving for war. Like Diogenes, he must have been contemplating his situation, and what he should do next.
In the third section Diogenes, in a moment of sudden
awakening, is roused and inspired by the war effort going on
all around him. He leaves town, goes toward a little hill near
Corinth called Cranie,
and there on the strand, a pretty level place, did he roll
his jolly tub, which served him for a house to shelter
him from the injuries of the weather: there, I say, in a
great vehemecy of spirit, did he turn it, veer it, wheel
it, whirl it, frisk it, jumble it, shuffle it, huddle it, tumble it, hurry it, jolt it, justle it, overthrow it, evert it, invert it, subvert it, overturn it, beat it, thwack it, bump
it, batter it, knock it, thrust it, push it, jerk it, shock it,
shake it, toss it, throw it, overthrow it, upside down,
topsy-turvy, arsiturvy, tread it, trample it, stamp it, tap
it, ting it, ring it, tingle it, towl it, sound it, resound it,
stop it, shut it, unbung it, close it, unstopple it. . . . And
then again in a mighty bustle, he . . . slid it down the
hill, and precipitated it from the very height of Cranie;
then from the foot to the top (like another Sisyphus
with his stone) bore it up again, and every way so
banged it and belabored it that it was ten thousand to
one he had not struck the bottom of it out. (Ibid.)
This text is set with hocket imitation and short fugue-like segments, piling the words on top of one another, so that the result is quite similar to the raucous first section. And also like
the first section, it undergoes a steady crescendo until it
reaches a thundering climax.
At this point, the final section begins. The narrator speaks
the last few lines quietly:
When one of his friends had seen, and asked him why
he did so toil his body, perplex his spirit, and torment
his tub, the philosopher’s answer was that, not being
employed in any other charge by the Republic, he
thought it expedient to thunder and storm it so tempes-
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tuously upon his tub, that amongst a people so fervently
busy and earnest at work he alone might not seem a loitering slug and lazy fellow. (Ibid.)
It is not too far-fetched to imagine that Carter may have seen
himself in the role of Diogenes, and that composing this wild,
raucous piece was Carter’s way “tormenting his tub” in order
to avoid being seen as doing nothing while everyone around
him was consumed by the war effort. There is certainly no
doubt that the atmosphere on campus after the declaration of
war resembled the situation in Rabelais’ Corinth. The preparations for the war were both pervasive and intrusive. There
were military exercises on campus, information poured in
about military employment opportunities, new classes appeared on the mechanics of gasoline engines and the electronics of radio devices (The Collegian, various issues from
1942). Periodic lectures about the causes and progress and
status of the war were offered, and a rash of military enlistment by the students so depleted enrollment that by the war’s
end there war great concern that the St. John’s might have to
close its doors. In Defense of Corinth certainly reflected the
conditions that surrounded Carter while he composed the
work, and no doubt reflected his inner state as well.
Carter’s second major work of 1942 is his Symphony No. 1,
which he completed in Santa Fe, New Mexico, about six
months after leaving St. John’s. In the sketches for this work,
which are housed at the Library of Congress along with holograph score and the revised score from 1954 (Carter 1942),
it seems that Carter is again playing the role of Diogenes tormenting his tub; this time, however, the tub is the Symphony.
The 184 pages of sketches show beating, battering, slicing,
compressing, enlarging, twisting, and transforming of apparently innumerable musical ideas from all three movements
in the finished piece. There is an explosive vitality combined
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123
Fig. 5: Sketches for Symphony No. 1
(Library of Congress ML96.C288 [Case])
with a restless energy in the musical handwriting, which
seems almost thrown onto the pages in instants of creative
inspiration.
What is more, this material is not limited to musical notations. The sketches fall into ten categories: 1. Fragments of
one to many lines, some crossed out; 2. single-line drafts
worked out and developed; 3. two-part piano reductions of
sections in progress, for playing at the piano; 4. fair copies
of two-part part piano reductions, including one of the entire
first movement, 5. reductions of three to five parts, for working out complex ideas; 6. larger orchestral reductions with
instrumentation noted; 7. full-score drafts with instrumentation noted; 8. verbal notes, such as “add a few dotted
rhythms” or “avoid too many accents on the first beat”; 9.
letter designations for the various motives and themes, such
as “A,” “B,” “C,” and so forth; 10. verbal notes on the se-
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quential organization of musical elements within a section.
Out of all these disparate elements, Carter fashioned an
elegant, hand-copied full score of 149 pages on December
19, 1942. In this pre-xerox, pre-computer era, it must have
taken a considerable amount of time just to write out such a
meticulous manuscript. And if one adds to that the amount
of time that was clearly devoted to beating the tub while inventing, revising, discarding, reworking, drafting, and redrafting the thousands of sketches, it seems plausible to think
that Carter began working on the symphony while still at St.
John’s. Blackwell, however, indicated that Carter was “adamant”
about the fact that he began working on the piece only after
leaving St. John’s. If that is correct, then the explosive creative
energy displayed in the sketches suggests that his compositional urge had been suppressed by his intellectual and instructional responsibilities at St. John’s, so that once those
responsibilities were lifted, his musical imagination was able
to generate ideas profusely.
The Symphony No. 1 is a Janus-faced work, looking backward toward the influence of slightly older contemporaries
like Roger Sessions, Roy Harris, and Aaron Copland, but also
forward toward traits that would become characteristic of
Carter’s style—cross-accents and irregular groupings of
rhythms, interplay of tonal centers, fluidity in the shaping of
musical motives, a transformational approach to motivic development, evocative orchestral coloring (particularly in the
use of woodwinds), and simultaneous balancing of dissimilar
ideas (Schiff 1983, 117-121). The Symphony already shows
the continuous ebb and flow from sparseness to complexity,
from delicacy to brutality, from quietness to cacophony, from
simple textures to convoluted contrapuntal intricacy that
would appear fully developed in his masterpiece, the Concerto for Orchestra of 1969. One can see in the sketches and
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125
hear in the music that 1942 was a time of compositional turbulence for Carter. He must have been bursting with competing ideas from old and new sources, all pushing him toward
discovering his unique artistic voice. Whatever attractions
the undeniably novel environment of St. John’s held for him
as a curious, intelligent, inquisitive, and liberally educated
thinker, he must have felt that, in his heart, he was essentially
meant to be a composer. What else could he do but leave, so
that the potential composer within him could become actual?
Epilogue: Elliott Carter, Composer and Liberal Artist
In the years just after leaving to pursue his composing career,
Carter wrote two essays that relate to his tenure as a tutor at
St. John’s. The first, “Music as a Liberal Art” (Carter 1944),
which was written only two years after he left the college,
discusses the decline of music as a liberal art in America. Citing the fundamental importance of musical training in Plato’s
Timaeus and Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics, Carter laments
the fact that music has become a specialized and technical
discipline, divorced from the connection it once had to the
other liberal arts. At St. John’s, however, he says, “music has
actually been taken out of the music building. It is no longer
the special study of the specialist, of the budding professional. Instead it is examined in the classroom, seminars, and
laboratories, in an effort to give it a working relationship with
all other knowledge” (Carter 1944, 105). After describing in
greater detail the relations between music, mathematics, philosophy, and physics in the St. John’s curriculum, Carter
maintains that
[w]hen the student sees the interconnection of all these
things, his understanding grows in richness. And since
today no widely acepted esthetic doctrine unifies out
though on the various aspects of music, such a plan at
least conjures up the past to assist us; it helps to raise
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the various philosophical questions involved. In one
way or another these questions must be considered, for
it is not enough to devote all our efforts to acquiring
the technical skill essential to instrumentalists, composers, and even listeners. There must be good thinking
and good talking about music to preserve its noble rank
as a fine art for all of us, and the college is one of the
logical places for this more considered attitude to be
cultivated. (Carter 1944, 106).
As we have seen, Carter’s view of music education was
deeply attuned to the experimental approach being taken at
St. John’s. This alignment must have made his teaching in
the New Program a meaningful and rewarding experience for
him, and this article is evidence of how highly he regarded
the method of musical studies at St. John’s.
The second article, “The Function of the Composer in
Teaching the General College Student” (Carter 1952), reveals
a second aspect of Carter’s understanding of music as a liberal art. While it is certainly true that reconnecting music to
the other liberal arts provides students with a more profound
understanding of music than specialized musical instruction,
it is also true that connecting the other liberal arts to music
provides students with a more profound understanding of
their own inner life than specialized instruction in any discipline. In this article, Carter discusses the difference between
the “outer-directed” man, whose primary focus is on adapting
his inner life to the demands of society, and the “inner-directed” man, who primary focus in on adapting the demands
of society to his individual conscience and imagination. Both
the teaching scholar and the teaching artist, according to
Carter, are trying to “preserve that liveliness of the individual
mind so important to our civilization” (Carter 1952, 151). But
they go about it in different ways.
On the one hand, the teaching scholar of the general
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music student aims for the “all-embracing, the dispassionate
view of his subject” and “tries to find a harmonious and rationally explicable pattern in the past and present.” By contrast, the teaching artist is “only occupied with those aspects
of music most important to him as an individual”; his goal as
an artist is to create unique artworks that can move his audience and possibly shift societal demands. In short, he teacher
treats music objectively, the artist, subjectively. This basic
difference in attitude toward the subject gives rise to a difference in emphasis that marks the gulf between teaching
scholar and teaching artist: the scholar highlights the “pastness of the past,” and communicates to students the impassive
historicity of the subject matter, whereas the artist highlights
the “presentness of the past,” and communicates to students
the pliability of the past as material for the reshaping powers
of the creative individual. Carter admonishes higher education for its preference for teaching scholars, who give students “scraps of information” about the past; he praises the
teaching artist for “constantly trying to find a more powerful
method of making his students more culturally alive,” by reshaping the past into a living and vital present (Carter, 1952,
153-154). At present, Carter emphasizes,
we have got to help our students to realize that to enjoy
the arts creatively and imaginatively will be far more
rewarding to them as individuals in terms of stimulating vividness of thought and feeling, quickness of understanding, and ingeniousness in dealing with new
problems—far more rewarding than the mere passive
enjoyment which most mass-produced entertainment
invites (Carter 1952, 155).
The contemporary serious composer must be able to engage
students in the “presentness of the past,” must be able to absorb the musical past, sublimate its essence, and recast it into
new shapes that speaks movingly to the present while at the
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same time embodying what was most enduring in the music
of the past.
At this point in the article, Carter once again describes
the music program at St. John’s. Because the college wanted
to move away from the teaching scholar’s approach to music
toward a teaching artist’s point of view, “they called in a composer on the hunch that he would grasp the idea more than
other members of the musical profession, and a plan was
worked out from which it was hoped that students of widely
different musicality could make contact with art” (Carter
1952, 156). It was hoped that students might attain “esthetic
awareness” by studying music under the guidance of a composer, who could help the students see beyond the “pastness
of the past” to the “presentness of the past” by showing them
music history and the masterworks of the great composers
through the contemporary lens of his actively creative perspective.
But the teaching artist is not limited to exhibiting his
works to his students. On the one hand, by means of his compositions, the teaching artist “can give life to and express all
those things which, at best, he can but poorly indicate with
words.” On the other hand, “sometimes verbal teaching, that
is, the articulation of the principles and ideas he strives to
embody in his works, is a valuable part of his development
as a composer; and in this case he can be a useful member of
the academic world” (Carter 1952, 158). In this last circumstance, the artist can bring his students along into the internal
aspect of his creative process, and possibly stimulate them to
develop their own creative powers.
In this essay, as in much of his music, Carter seems to be
trying to hold together two complex and somewhat contradictory themes. It is simultaneously true not only that the
composer is the best teacher when he is writing music and
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indirectly teaching others, but also that his students, and the
composer himself as well, also benefit from his talking about
music and directly teaching others. The two truths conflict.
The working composer must be somewhat solitary; he must
spend time away from others pursuing his personal creative
projects. The teaching composer must engage in communal
life; he must bring “presentness to the past” by speaking with
others about listening to, performing, and creating music. For
the teaching artist, this counterpoint of competing activities
can enrich and deepen his creative life. But no one can do
both at the same time.
For Carter, his two years at St. John’s as a teaching artist
seem to have stimulated his already intense creative drive—
so much so, that he found it necessary to stop teaching in
order to focus on his art. Over the years, he has returned to
the role of teaching artist often, giving innumerable workshops, coaching prospective composers in academic and nonacademic settings, lecturing and writing essays about music
education for academic audiences. One could argue that it
was Carter’s decision to join the faculty at St. John’s that provided the opportunity for him to become an extraordinary
teaching artist, and that it was his decision to leave St. John’s
that provided the opportunity for him to create the many enduring artworks through which he could reach an ever widening circle of students with his teaching. Without both coming
and going from St. John’s, Elliott Carter could not have become Elliott Carter.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blackwell, Virgil. 2011. Personal email messages to and telephone conversations with the author in November.
Buchanan, Scott. 1940. “Music,” three-part handwritten note dated November 8, at Harvard University Libraries, MS Am 1992, No. 1547.
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Carter, Elliott. 1941. “Manual of Music Notation.” St. John’s College Library Archives.
———. 1942. Sketches for Symphony No. 1, Library of Congress Performing Arts Manuscripts, ML96.C288
———. 1950. The Defense of Corinth. Library of Congress Performing
Arts Manuscripts, ML96.C288
———. 1944. “Music as a Liberal Art,” Modern Music 22:1, 12-16.
Reprinted in Else Stone and Kurt Stone, The Writings of Elliott Carter
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 105-109.
———. 1952. “The Function of the Composer in Teaching the General
College Student,” Bulletin of the Society for Music in the Liberal Arts
College 3:1, Supplement 3. Reprinted in Else Stone and Kurt Stone, The
Writings of Elliott Carter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977),
150-58.
———. 1962. Personal letter to Scott Buchanan. St. John’s College Library Archive, Barr Personal Papers, Series 2, Box 10, folder 20.
The Collegian. (St. John’s College newspaper.) Various issues, 19401941, 1941-1942. Maryland State Archives, St. John’s College Special
Collection, MSA 5698.
Edwards, Allen. 1971. Flawed Words and Stubborn Sounds: A Conversation with Elliott Carter. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Ledger 1941-42. Large format class ledger. St. John’s College Registrar’s
Office Archives.
Murphy, Emily A. 1996. “A Complete and Generous Education”: 300
Years of Liberal Arts, St. John’s College, Annapolis. Annapolis, Maryland:
St. John’s College Press.
Nabokov, Nicholas. 1940. Letter to Stringfellow Barr, June 22, 1940. St.
John’s College Registrar’s Office Archive.
Nelson, Charles. 1997. Stringfellow Barr: A Centennial Appreciation of
His Life and Work, 1897-1982. Annapolis, Maryland: St. John’s College
Press.
Rabelais, Francois. 2004. Five Books Of The Lives, Heroic Deeds And
Sayings Of Gargantua And His Son Pantagruel, translated by Sir Thomas
Urquhart and Peter Motteux. Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing.
Rule, William Scott. 2009. Seventy Years of Changing Great Books at St.
John’s College. Educational Policy Studies Dissertations. Paper 37.
http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/eps_diss/37
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131
Schiff, David. 1983. The Music of Elliott Carter. New York: DaCapo
Press.
St. John’s College Catalogue 1940-41. St. John’s College Registrar’s Office Archives.
St. John’s College Yearbook, 1940-1941, 1941-1942. St. John’s College
Library Archives.
Stone, Else and Kurt. 1977. The Writings of Elliott Carter: An American
Composer Looks at Modern Music. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Wierzbicki, James Eugene. 2011. Elliott Carter. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
OTHER RESOURCES LOCATED AT ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE
In the St. John’s College Library Archives
Photo of Elliott Carter at desk
Musical programs from 1940-41
Carter’s Five Laboratory Manuals :
“Musical Intervals and Scales” (Laboratory Exercise 15, 1940)
“The Greek Diatonic Scale” (Laboratory Exercise 16, 1940)
“The Just Scale and Its Uses” (Laboratory Exercise 17, 1940)
“The Keys in Music” (Laboratory Exercise 18, 1940)
“Manual of Musical Notation” (1 March, 1941)
In the St. John’s College Music Library
Carter’s sonometer
Carter’s four-part setting of “St. John’s Forever”
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Talking, Reading, Writing, Listening
Eva Brann
I imagine that on Parents’ Weekend there might be some parents attending this once weekly occasion when the college assembles to hear
a lecture. By its very name, a lecture is read—but read out loud, delivered in the writer’s voice. Thus, the sequence goes: I thought, I
wrote, I read, I speak. Although this is the principal way of teaching
at institutions of higher education, it is a curious one. Here at St.
John’s, we show our respect for the possible profit we might derive
from it by requiring our students to come to a lecture every Friday
night—just when, elsewhere, it is prelude-time to party night. And we
express our suspicion of lecture-hearing by asking students to listen
to a lecture—but only once a week. So this one weekly hour of just
sitting and listening is mandatory, and about as enforceable as a
mandatory evacuation before a storm. (This simile appears here because this lecture was written in the dark during Hurricane Irene.)
The attendance that we do take utterly seriously is presence in
class—seminar above all. In seminar, no speeches are delivered. Instead we talk, in turn, to one another. So rather than call my lecture
“Speaking, Writing, Reading, Listening,” I have substituted “Talking”
for “Speaking.” Talk seems to denote a more conversational, almost
social mode of speech, less formal, more spontaneous, more participatory. And yet our seminar is a mandatory, scheduled class, with prescribed texts. Is that a setting for talk?
So I would like to think in public about our modes of being together, about the how and what of this college as a community of
learning. Since we, the tutors, collude with our students in making
them a little impatient with being talked at, I’ll sneak around that resistance, which I share. I’ll snaffle their good will (old books on rhetoric called this formal beginning of a speech the captatio benevolentiae,
This lecture was delivered at St. John’s College in Annapolis on the Friday
of Parents’ Weekend, November 4, 2011. Eva Brann is a tutor and former
Dean of the College.
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“the capture of benevolence”) by speaking about talking itself and
what it entails.
Your children, our students, will probably have told you now and
then that parents don’t know anything. Freshmen, on the other hand,
know everything. They are fresh, unimpaired in spirit—and also, perhaps, somewhat fresh in a now obsolete meaning of the term: cheeky.
Sophomores know a little less; their class name means “wise fools,”
as their knowledge of Greek will tell them; it is a combination of
Greek sophon, “wise” and moron, “foolish.” Juniors and the college
elders, the seniors, have reapproached their parents and become almost perfect in ignorance.
I am, in fact, being serious. The members of this community of
learning are not ashamed to own up to their own ignorance; indeed
we think better of this thoughtful confession than of a profession of
expertise. It’s why the teachers here call themselves “tutors,”
guardians of learning, rather than “professors,” authorities of knowledge, and it is why our students are to some degree our fellow-learners. Thus we are apt to think of even the most positive, content-replete
learning as a specification of our ignorance. It’s a fancy way of saying
that all our learning starts and ends in questions— a point to which I
will return as we go along. So this acknowledged ignorance is not
false humility, but a confident, even competent, way to conduct a college. Yet, of course, sub specie aeternitatis, “under the aspect of eternity,” as the philosophers say, we are, as limited beings, all
equal—equally diminutive before the infinitely distant ultimacies we
long for. This is cause enough for some personal modesty and even
occasional dejection.
I’ve been saying “we,” meaning the college of students and tutors.
Now I’ll mean mainly the tutors when I say that, although there’s
probably nothing we all agree must be true, there is something we all
agree must be done. Some of us, perhaps even most, think that the
Appearances before our senses bespeak a Being behind them; some
of us suppose there is a Ground in which all nature is rooted; and some
of us believe there is a realm of Divinity above us. Others see no reason to agree to any of these. But we all agree that, in regard to our ignorance about matters of most persistent importance to human beings,
we are close to our students, and that we are therefore guardians of
learning rather than transmitters of doctrine.
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We have a model for this unteacherly mode of teaching, presented
to us in the writings of Plato: Socrates. Not all of us, particularly freshmen, take to him. He describes himself now as a gadfly, stinging a
sluggish horse into wakefulness, now as a demon mediating between
earth and heaven (Apology 30e, Symposium 202d, ff.). So he is both
irritating and elusive. One moment he argues like a sophist, that is to
say, a trickster of the intellect; another moment he intimates his most
genuine relation to truth. He is both bully and benefactor. So when he
declares, often and insistently, that he is ignorant, we must suspect
irony. “Irony,” eironeia, is the Greek word for dissembling, pretending
to be what one is not. What then is this Socratic ignorance, which in
some of us engenders trust precisely by causing dis-ease?
We’ve all come across genuine inarticulate cluelessness, truly
dumb ignorance—though I think it is fairly rare in human beings. Socratic ignorance, on the other hand, is anything but dumb; it talks, and
that makes all the difference. For example, in the first philosophical
work our students read together, Plato’s dialogue Meno, Socrates
blames himself for knowing “nothing at all” about human excellence
(71b). That is why he can genuinely ask: What is it? But look what
this question involves. First of all it is an admission, actually an assertion, of self-knowledge. People who ask, know what they lack.
They know what they don’t know. Acknowledged ignorance is important knowledge about ourselves.
And second, it is a very precise negative knowledge of what we
are asking after. The word “comprehend” comes to mind; it means
“to get, to enclose, in one’s grasp.” Human thinking is wonderfully
prehensile. It can get at, wrap itself around, something it does not yet
really “get” in the sense of “understand.” In this dialogue, Meno is
Socrates’ “interlocutor,” which is learned Latin for “conversational
partner.” I use the term here because Meno—who, as we know from
other sources, was as bad a man as you’ll never want to meet—can’t
really be a partner, and certainly not a participant, in the sort of searching conversation Socrates cares about. In fact he tries to forestall such
talk by producing a clever argument. He has the clever ignorance that
defines human badness for Socrates. This obstructionist argument
turns that very wonder of question-asking, which I’ve described as
our ability to wrap our thought around what we haven’t yet got, into
an obstacle: If you know something why would you ask about it? If
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you’re ignorant of it, how would you recognize it if you did get it?
Socrates has a reply that has resonated down through the ages; it
bears on the essential character of talking, and I’ll come to it soon.
Meanwhile, there’s a third aspect to questions, shown in their very
asking. We ask ourselves in inner speech, but in the world, and in that
little world, the seminar, we ask each other. This asking presupposes
a sort of trust: the trust that we will be comprehended and met halfway
by our fellow learners. For a question is a sort of appeal: “Share my
perplexity; help me.”
A fourth trait of asking is one that Socrates, who claims to know
so little, claims to know for sure: To inquire, to seek by questions, to
search for what one does not know—that makes us better, braver, less
lazy than giving in to Meno’s clever sophism (86b-c).
And finally a fifth feature, which sounds odd but is central. I
know of only one subject in which Socrates claims outright to be an
expert: He says of himself that he “knows nothing else than matters
of love” (Symposium 177d). There are in the dialogues several examples of a wonderfully illuminating word-play: love, eros, and questioning, erotesis, sound very much alike (Symposium 199d, Phaedrus
234c); they are almost homonyms. The love in which Socrates is an
expert is the longing for knowledge, the “love of wisdom” which is
the English translation of the Greek word philosophia. But this longing, this pressure of desire is exactly what you might call the question-feeling. It transfigures apparently insoluble problems into
beckoning mysteries, where by a mystery I mean an ultimate problem
that attracts energizing reverence rather than dispirited resignation.
Our students’ much misused word “awesome” applies here, for once.
Thus genuine asking is the expression of a desire. For Socrates—
and for all of us—such question-desire is always close to real human
love. In fact Socratic love has a great penumbra of intermingling
loves, among them the affectionate delight that elders feel for the
young, the fond respect that colleagues—at their best—feel for one
another, and, best of all, that lifelong care which develops between
students who have spent many a night talking together. It’s a tutor’s
delight to hear the selfless admiration in the voice of a student who
tells of having found such a partner—admiration together with a very
proper and surely life-long pride in having accomplished such a
friendship. Here is half a line from Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” which, in
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137
Beethoven’s setting, our Freshman Chorus often sings:
Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein. . .
One who’s managed the great fortune
To become a true friend’s friend . . .
such a one is entitled to join in this ode to joy.
Schiller has it just right: Friendship is an effortful accomplishment
resting on great good luck. This school is its propitious setting: In the
talk that is a questioning, friends are found.
Aristotle, Plato’s true—that is to say resistant—pupil says
brusquely: “[Socrates] asked, but didn’t answer, for he claimed not to
know” (On Sophistic Refutations, 183b7).
Now ironic Socrates is surely unsettling, but no-nonsense Aristotle is often more so. Does he mean it? If I take him at face value,
then he is certainly wrong. Socrates does answer, probably always,
though often not in explicit words. His questioning doesn’t lead to the
levity of easy skepticism.
He does often begin by “questioning.” Light-minded talk about
higher education tends to fall into two camps. One camp thinks that
this education happens when authorities pour expertise into mostly
recalcitrant pupils. The other camp thinks this education occurs when
academics incite all too willing students to “question,” that is to test,
with the implicit intention of refuting, received wisdoms. Socrates
often does begin by showing that people’s opinions are wrong-headed
or incoherent, and, above all, not their own thought but some received
doctrine confidently proclaimed to the world but negligently adopted
within the soul. That is questioning in the somewhat hostile sense; it
is “interrogation.” But it is only done in order to clear the decks for a
second, more gracious question-asking, by which what ordinary people are really after is confirmed. Socrates is a horsefly to the lazy, to
wake them up, but a winged love-god to those ready to be impassioned.
I said Socrates gives answers. About present human life he proposes himself as a model that says to us, “Live to learn, and learn to
leave life, to be dead” (Phaedo 61c ff.). What he means, I think, is
this: Devote some of your time every day to reaching for what is behind, beneath, above the world we live in. Here many thoughtful peo-
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ple part company with him—and our students often do, understandably. About ultimate things he offers only working conjectures and
hypotheses, which he leaves to his companions to take up. And indeed
that is what happened; the thinking generations took him up. Alfred
North Whitehead—it figures here that an emigrant to America is
speaking to you—says that “the European philosophical tradition . . .
consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (Process and Reality, Ch.1,
Sec.1)—and that means largely Socrates as Plato pictured him speaking. I am about to leap into that two and a half millennia-long footnote
for help in thinking more precisely about our kind of talking.
Each seminar starts with a question, asked by a tutor. Framing
seminar questions is the one expertise a tutor might be said to develop.
Such a question might well have much thought behind it, but it shouldn’t be an invitation to guess the tutor’s pet theory. It could be a wideopen admission of puzzlement, but it shouldn’t be mushily vague. It
might take off from an inconspicuous but significant detail of the text
but it shouldn’t run the conversation up the creek of a side issue.
Why start with a question rather than, say, a tutorial interpretation? A question is, of course, the very embodiment of a teaching
mode devoted to eliciting thought rather than delivering thought-products. The reason lies in the five features of question asking I’ve mentioned, the most pertinent of these being that questions solicit
responses by evincing trust in the willingness and ability to respond
in those addressed in the question mode.
What then is responsive talk? Here I’ll go into the footnote mode.
In the Middle Ages, certain thinkers developed the notion of “intentionality.” In fact it had come to Europe through the Arabic philosopher Avicenna (c. 1000 C.E.). Most good ideas have their comeback
time, and intentionality has been brought back in modern times. It’s
probably not wrong to say that its beginning is in Socrates’ passion
for this question: What is it that is knowable in our ever-changing, illusion-rife world, and how is it that words can convey what things
are?
Intention is both a characteristic of thinking and a capability of
speaking (where it is called “imposition”)—one that we can ascribe
to nothing else in the world or out of it. Its meaning is the action of
“stretching towards,” of reaching for something. Its descriptive name
is “aboutness,” the action and the result of something laying itself
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about, of “comprehending” something. Perhaps words show more of
the stretching, reaching-toward motion, while thoughts are more like
embracing, enclosing structures.
Take an example of what intentional aboutness isn’t: a wrapped
gift. The gift paper is distinguishable from the box of nougats—and
so you can unwrap the candy—but it’s also of the same kind, material
stuff. What you can’t do is put the gift-wrap about your affectionate
wishes, as you can’t wrap your sentiments around the nougat—except
poetically. Now think a thought. Let’s not be particular about its exact
nature—whatever we mean when we say that we have something in
mind—an object, a relation, an idea, an interpretation—any thoughtthing. Then ask yourself, Can I unwrap my thinking from the thought?
When I say that I am thinking a thought, is my thinking separable
from the thought? Or it is rather that thinking (that is, a form of the
verb for which thought is the noun), is the same as the thought, so that
when I think of something, intend it, attend to it, my mind becomes
that thing? Do thinking and thought become one? If that’s what happens, then which element wins out—the mine-ness of my thinking or
the object-ness of the content? Do I taint it with my prejudices, do I
rectify it to my standards, or do I let it be what it is? When I think, it
is often about a material object in a worldly environment. What aspect
of things comes to or into my mind—a mental, quasi-visual image,
some ideal essence, or just their use? In what way, as I attend to the
world of objects, do they tend toward me? When my talk is for real—
that is, when it is about something—how do I begin? How do I get
my thoughts to collect themselves in words? Or does my acquired language in fact produce the mental state that feels like thinking, and by
its very grammar give me the sense that there are mental objects? How
are my words about objects? Do these offer labels that present themselves for me to read off insofar as I know the vocabulary of the world,
or do my words tend out from me to the objects, throwing from my
mind an ideal sort of lasso, a thinking-noose, that will cast itself about
them and snaffle them in a mental shape suitable for my mind?
This long litany touches the Socratic mysteries, which, I have
said, he started on their way along with some conjectured elucidations.
Not that, after all, it matters much who began. These questions, at
least, are now ours.
Questions about thinking and speaking must surely be central to
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the education of human beings, who, as even animal ethologists are
willing to admit, are the only animal that can ask questions rather than
solicit reactions. But my main point here was to establish one sure
thing about talking—that it has the capacity of aboutness, which turns
out to make a piece of life like the seminar possible to begin with.
Now in the world at large there is much talk that has the aspect
of serious, even sophisticated, meaning but that, like many a hard-tocrack nut, has no kernel. So too, in the seminar, there is twaddle—
quite a lot of it.
Twaddle has in fact a sort of squatter’s right in the seminar. Concern for spontaneity and respect for potential make us leery of suppressing it too soon. I can think of three kinds of seminar twaddle.
Some among us are so eager to capture attention that they utter words
before they have collected a thought. Others are so abashed by the insufficiency of their speaking that they go on for quite a while after
they have finished; in the hope of amending their fault they make it
worse. This happens to us all and is easily fixed. We just have to become aware of it, as we do of any minor habit.
The third kind of twaddle goes much deeper. All worthwhile activities have their specific nullifications, and twaddle is the negation
of intentional talk. It is the consequence of a curious negative ability
that human beings have: the ability to fashion well-formed sentences
that express none of their own thinking, but that sound comfortably
explanatory. Here is an inevitable example from the first freshman
seminar: Why is Achilles so unassuagably angry when Agamemnon
takes his woman away? Student answer: Because he feels dishonored,
and “in the culture of that time honor was important.” Tutor’s overt
follow-up question: What do you know more about, the culture of the
time of Homer’s epics (this time happen to be a fictional composite
of times) or about Achilles? Tutor’s suppressed internal question: How
did this most murky of notions—culture—come to seem like a handy
explanatory principle to generations of students? Equally silent answer: Because Socrates’ notion of opinion is so right. We all share in
the remarkable inclination to find satisfaction in surrendering our
minds to enticing terms of thought without reaching for the intended
thought itself. “Culture” is the most perfect cover-all, the universal
wet-blanket for glimmers of penetrating thought.
A somewhat impatient tutorial response to twaddle is thus, What
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are you talking about? And generally, what are we talking about in
seminar?
Books. We prepare for seminar by reading assignments, and then
we bring our readings to class. For my part, I don’t care how the readings are delivered. If students find graven stone tablets their medium
of choice, let them bring those, or if e-books, let them bring those,
provided they don’t get diverted and distracted by appended applications, and provided they can find their place. After all, one reason we
center seminar on books is so that we may all be on the same page.
Let me interrupt myself here for an observation. Our faculty recently had a long discussion about the question: Should e-books be
permitted in seminar? We sensibly decided to leave it up to the tutors.
In last year’s freshman seminar I was expecting an invasion of electronic tablets. Not a one of them appeared. Word was that upperclass
members were discouraging them as not in our spirit. The world’s
opinion is that the young thrive on novelty; the truth as I’ve experienced it is that, having found a place to cherish, they become its radical conservatives. I have much sympathy. The material book—be it
of papyrus, parchment, paper—has, besides its sensory pleasures, one
great advantage: it’s all there at once in real space. This is a handy
representation of one important characteristic of a text: it’s an all-present whole; it exists simultaneously with itself.
And now that I’ve used the word “text” let me explain this slightly
pretentious term. I use it, first, because it is broader than “book,”
which is usually composed of words. But we read, in a broad sense,
also compositions of notes (musical scores) and books containing
more diagrams and symbols than words (mathematical texts).
Moreover, “text” reminds us of two etymologically related words:
“textile,” a woven fabric, and Greek techne, “skill, craft.” Books are
artfully crafted, carefully coherent artifacts.
Well, not all books. The tutors of this college are pretty much at
one in thinking themselves not so much entitled as obligated to discriminate between great books and lesser books. St. John’s College
is, unpopular though that term may be with terminally egalitarian
souls, a great books school. Let me say right away that the not-sogreat but good books, as well as the mediocre ones, and even the outright shoddy stuff—all these have their saving graces. The best policy
is to read some of everything. (When I was a little girl I developed
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for a while a passion for reading product labels, especially the fractured instructions written by people for whom English was a second
language.)
But together we read great books, because, to use a gross
metaphor, these are the ones you can sink your teeth into, the ones
that stick to your ribs. There are statable criteria for them, of which
I’ll mention the ones most pertinent to the life of the seminar: Great
books are usually self-sufficient, so that no background information
or annotation is absolutely necessary to getting absorbed in the text;
the best context for them is another great book—perhaps, but not necessarily, its chronological predecessor.
Second, a great book, approachable as it is on one level the first
time around, is inexhaustibly new, so that on opening it a fifth time
you ask yourself, “Could I have read this before? Where was I, to miss
so much?”
Third, such books are endlessly artful—sometimes beautiful from
shapely depth and something ugly with significant contrivance.
And fourth, great truth-seeking texts of reflection are full of imagination and great imaginative works of fiction are full of reflection.
The former present universals corroborated by particular instances,
the latter represent particulars coruscating with universal application.
Thus philosophy and fiction go hand in hand. Take, for example that
famous first sentence of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike;
each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” What is it but an
applied version of Aristotle’s dictum in the Nicomachean Ethics:
“There are many ways of going wrong but only one way which is
right” (1106b28)?
So such texts are what seminar talk appears to be about. To prepare for seminar we all read the same book—students for the first, tutors for the umptieth time. Reading is, for us, a silent, solitary activity.
I say “for us”; Augustine in his Confessions (c.400 C.E.) tells with
amazement how his beloved bishop, Ambrose, read. As his eyes
moved down the page, “his heart sought out the meaning but his
tongue remained silent” (VI, 3). It was an inestimably great revolution,
this inward relocation of the written word, which, among other things,
made possible summary reading both divorced from and unconcerned
about precise wording. We are the heirs of this revolution.
This preparatory reading we do is a curious business, then. New
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readers actually mouth the words; more mature ones read silently but
subvocalize the text laryngeally; others let the writing glide directly
into the mind. They get the thought, but see rather than hear the words.
They register whole sentences through the eyes and turn language, the
business of the tongue, into sight-seeing, the work of the eyes. However they do it, they now have in their minds and hearts the words and
thoughts of someone else.
Our texts, then, are writings, for the most part. And surprise, surprise! Books are written before they are read. How does writing come
about? Here is how I do it myself and imagine it for others: Writing
comes after talking, in two ways. First, in my own personal history I
learned to speak way back, effortlessly, but to write later, with difficulty. I also know that in the larger history of human beings, writing,
especially the kind that records the sound of speech, alphabetical writing, did not, in fact, come to Greece until the late eighth century
B.C.E. (where in my early years as an archaeologist I had a chance to
publish some of the earliest graffiti—that is, scratched letter-words).
Second, before and as I write, I talk to myself, because speech is the
concretion of thought; it collects its misty pressure into concise sentences and utters them in sensory shape. It’s often said that the primary
purpose of speech is “communication.” The evidence seems to me
otherwise. I imagine that most of us say to ourselves in the course of
our day hundreds of words for every word we say to others. Speech
certainly begins that way. Listen to what students of child development call “jargoning,” that sweetest, most melodious gibberish of late
infancy, which issues from a lonely crib. Whether it is the antecedent
of adult twaddle or carries mental meaning no one knows.
This internal speech is what we write down. In “paper conferences” with students tutors can’t do better than to persuade them that
it is this talk with themselves that they ought to record, without dulling
rectification in the interest of a risklessly pompous formality. An author—the word means an originating “augmentor”—is a recorder of
an inner speech that improves upon the banal ordinariness of a relaxed
inner life by saying something original, either in the sense of “neversaid-before” or in the sense of going to the origin of things—or both.
This is practically a definition of what the authors of our great books
accomplish. They are the masters of pouring thought into the mold of
inner speech and of turning that mold out onto the expectant paper.
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I must add here that, although you’d scarcely believe it, both
claims—that books have authors and that speaking comes before writing—have been disputed in the later part of the last century. The former claim, that there is no originating authorship, is disputed because
whatever is said has been pre-shaped by predecessors and will be reshaped by readers. The latter claim, that writing precedes speaking,
is disputed on the ground (too sophisticated for presentation here) that
writing has a character more original than speech and in fact, subsumes it.1
Reading presupposes writing, and writing poses at least two dangers. The one I’ve just touched on is that in the interest of liberating
our students from being possessed by the opinion of others we in fact
subject them to four years of others’ very powerful opinions. Another
way to put this is that even—or especially—the devoted study of
books is not direct thinking, immediate aboutness. It runs the danger
of producing a commentator’s soul. I mean that to study books is not
quite the same as to think about things; it is to be attending to a secondary sort of aboutness. By thinking in a primary way I mean appropriating the cry of early modern scientists: “To the things
themselves!”—without mediating texts.
The other danger, really the complement of the first, is set down
in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus. Socrates tells approvingly of an Egyptian king who refused the gift of writing because, he said, those who
put trust in writing will learn to forget how to go into themselves to
recollect the truths within. Writing will then turn out to be no medicine
for memory, but merely a reminder (272c ff.). Writing is external
memory; we call on it to remind us now and then of baggage we do
not care to keep always with us. Whatever is readily accessible as a
filed record becomes storable stuff, a bit of fractured fact, related to
living thought as a cellophane-wrapped fish filet is to a frisky live
fish. It becomes information, which is as apt to wreck as to rectify
judgment. I think this is an up-to-date version of Socrates’ misgivings
about writing. However—you might call this Platonic irony—this
condemnation of writing is delivered to us in the most ravishing piece
of philosophical writing I know of, the work that drew me into phi1
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967),
Chapter 2. Derrida, the author of both claims, at one point instituted a suit
for plagiarism. Imagine!
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losophy as a graduate student. Evidently Plato thought of a way to
overcome the rigidification of writing—by incorporating conversation
into the text. We extend this trick by incorporating books into a living
dialogue, the seminar.
How do we then mitigate these drawbacks? Well, we get together,
come out of studious privacy, to talk with each other. In universities,
“seminar” means an advanced study group under the leadership of a
professor. Papers are written, read, and discussed. It is a place of
earnest, highly disciplined speech. Our seminars are serious, but perhaps not earnest, or at least not dead earnest, but live earnest—lively.
Walk through our corridors on seminar nights, and if you don’t hear
hilarity issuing from behind this or that door, you may conclude that
we’ve turned into the sitting dead, like the ancestral mummies the
Incas brought out to sit at their feasts. For laughter is the explosive
expulsion of breath that follows from having one’s equanimity pleasantly pinpricked by an acute incongruity—the result, in other words,
of a startling insight.
Laughter is the grace note of our seriousness. To be sure, the
books lie before us, well used, even marked up (which is why we
should buy, not borrow, seminar books), and they are the first focus
of our attention. But that is also a misapprehension. Books, texts, are
occasions, not ends. We don’t live in but through books. That formulation would be mere verbiage, were there not a way of study that
stays strictly with the text and in it. For instance, in graduate study,
say, in English or philosophy, all the student’s effort is really invested
in the text. The goal is to know the text accurately, to be acquainted
with scholarly opinions about it, to work out its arguments in detail,
all the while setting aside questions of truth-telling and personal illumination.
We encourage a different kind of reading—more direct, and if
you like, somewhat naïve. Because the author wrote about or expressed something, we feel entitled to pass through the text to that
something. We find it plausible sometimes to ask “What did the author
have in mind?” and sometimes “Does this representation agree with
our experience of life?” and sometimes “Can I corroborate this claim
in my own thinking?” Not that we ignore the literal words in their artfulness—not at all—but we regard them as a sort of come-on to catch
and hold us to the text until it gives up its meaning.
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Let me give an example from the freshman seminar that was
going on while I was writing this lecture —a wonderfully lively seminar. We asked: “Do the Homeric gods, in all their irresponsible levity,
look the same to Homer as to his heroes, does he have access to a view
of Olympus, transmitted to him by the Muses, that none of his humans
have?” We asked: “Is it in accord with our experience that gentle,
thoughtful Patroclus is transformed into a wildly impetuous warrior
just by wearing Achilles’ armor?” We asked: “Can we follow Socrates
in his claim that truth already lies in us and can be retrieved, ‘recollected,’ as he says, by the right questions?”
So to sum up our sort of reading: We pay careful attention to details for the sake of the text’s—the author’s—intentions, and we pay
attention to these for the sake of world and life. That effort requires
skills, namely, the arts of reading in the broad sense, the liberal arts.
We have the corresponding tutorials, where we practice dealing with
thought-laden words in the language class and with thought-structured
symbols in the mathematics class. We add to these the latest of the
liberal arts to appear on the scene, the art of making nature speak in
numbers; for that we have the laboratory class.
I’ve now talked in turn about talking, reading, writing. Now
comes the high point: listening. Among the boons of living within a
study program like ours—one that is stable and changes, though
steadily, yet slowly—is that truly new experiences can come to us tutors. For our students, it’s all new anyhow. By contrast, when so-called
innovation, that is, deliberate variation, is the universal background,
we may indeed be stimulated by novelty—the ever-diminishing frisson accompanying continual variety—but we can scarcely experience
newness, which is the poignant sensation of a substantial accession—
a real expansion of our psychic holdings. Under the influence of continual novelty our mind, as Shakespeare so tellingly puts it, “Like to
a vagabond flag upon the stream, / Goes to, and back, lackeying the
varying tide, / To rot itself with motion” (Antony and Cleopatra,
1.4.45-47).
Thus it was that through our way of acquiring truly new insights,
I belatedly discovered a philosopher—as it happens the very first one
whose writings we have. He was born around 540 B.C.E. I had often
glanced over, but had never made my way into, his sayings. He thinks
in aphorisms, that is, terse revelations. The most enticing one of these
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begins in this way:
Listen not to me but to the logos . . . (Heraclitus, D50).
Logos is one Greek work all our students are apt to have something
to say about. It had dozens of uses and more than one central meaning:
word, speech, saying, thinking, reason, ratio. Heraclitus’s saying goes
on to tell us what we must, in turn, say when we listen to the Logos,
the Logos with a capital L. This Logos is the principle that governs
everything, and it has something to say to us. I won’t go into the entirety of the world-informing thought that the Logos utters to Heraclitus, but I’ll attend to the first part of it. I think it has, and is meant
to have, several meanings—a fact that governs many of Heraclitus’s
sayings and makes reading him so pleasurably difficult. One of these
sayings, the one just quoted, is, as it were, made to be the principle of
our seminar. I’ll retranslate it:
Listen not to me but to my intention.
The civility of the seminar, expressed in our addressing one another by last names together with the honorific Ms. or Mr., goes much
deeper than a mere form of address. It makes for respectful distance.
It means listening past personalities to the thought-gist of our speaking. It enjoins us to try to hear what our fellow speakers intend us to
hear, even if we have to hear past the words they are actually, and
perhaps ineptly, saying. Of course, we take in each other’s looks, mannerisms, gestures. It is, after all, through these that the human being
to whose intention we are to listen appears to us. Of course, the “me”
Heraclitus wants us to listen past is unavoidably up front. We all, particularly tutors, whose business it is to form impressions of the candor,
seriousness, and preparation of speakers, observe the physical façade.
Any student who imagines that tutors don’t know, by such observations, whether they’ve done their seminar reading or are improvising—be it brilliantly, be it twaddingly—is living in cloud-cuckooland. The tutors’ version of Heraclitus’s injunction is the prospective
principle of hopeful pretense: Listen for the intention, for what the
speech is about, listen to all the speeches extendedly and intently, until
they are about something; help students frame what they mean or find
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out what they intended to say by evincing a staunch faith (even against
all evidence) that they did mean or intend something. What is for Heraclitus a call to hear the speech of Thought—capital T—itself, is for
us a pedagogic principle: Give respect even before it is due, so that it
may become due. Advise students with tacit benevolence as Hamlet
does his mother with demonstrative bitterness: “Assume a virtue if
you have it not” (Hamlet, 2.4.162). For Aristotle teaches that virtues
are acquired by being practiced before they are truly possessed (Nicomachean Ethics 1103a-b).
So also should students listen to each other in the Heraclitean
mode: Suppress animosities and aversions, go for the significant gist
in one another’s talk. The question “Did you mean . . . ?” is helpful
respect made audible.
After all, the seminar was intended to bring us out of the isolation
of studious reading and the rigidity of recorded, written speech, and
to introduce responsiveness into the life of learning. The underlying
hypothesis here, which we hold to through thick and thin, is that to be
human is, given a chance, to be intelligent. Now intelligence has this
feature, one that has been the millennial preoccupation of thoughtful
people: What we each think with is our very own intelligence—which
makes us interesting to one another—and that what the intellect is
about is common to us all—which makes it possible for us to hear one
another to begin with.
In my hurried summary of the liberal arts and the tutorials devoted
to them I left out the music tutorial and the chorus. Among the Greeks,
music stands near the apex of the liberal arts; it is the prime mode of
praising God for the Hebrews; and it stands close to theology for certain Christians. (See, e.g., Plato, Republic 530d ff.; Psalm 33:3;
Luther, “On Noble Music”). Our president recently put music at the
center of his convocation address, and then, to confirm his words, the
college sang. For as we are rightly called a talking college so we are
surely a music-making community. As words are to our thoughts, so
is music to our feelings. Without music our program would be radically incomplete; we would be neglecting the affective root of our nature, our sensibility, and our passions. We have been called a severely
intellectual college, and this could be an accusation rather than a compliment, if we did not also have a place in the program for cultivating
the very sense, hearing, that both takes in linguistic utterances ad-
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dressed to the intellect and also hears tonal structures calling to our
passions. In the music tutorial we learn how passions are informed by
number, not by the merely quantitative but by the wonderfully qualitative mathematics of tones in a scale. Moreover, we consider how
sounds and words respond to each other, and we attend to a relation
of sensation and thinking which we expect to carry over into all our
learning—that tenacious thinking is replete with feeling, that steady
passion is contoured by thought, and that the sensory surface itself,
be it conduit or last stop, is deeply questionable.
And finally, in Chorus, we are the singing college. In talking we
face toward each other and speak to each other, turn and turnabout,
vice versa—that is the very meaning of con-versa-tion. But we sing
with rather than to each other, and we do it mostly not in turn but simultaneously. We are together in the presence of something we are at
once hearing and doing, receiving and producing; we are absorptive
and responsive, listening to ourselves and to our fellow choristers. It’s
like hearing a heavenly lecture, for that’s how I imagine the angels
listen.
And that is the end of this merely earthly lecture, addressed to the
parents over our student’s heads, so to speak, but really meant for
them. So thank you all for listening.
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Caged Explorers:
The Hunger For Control
Howard Zeiderman
To achieve happiness and freedom you must desire
nothing else but what is entirely in your control—
and that is only your own thoughts and opinions.
—Epictetus, The Manual
The letter’s return address had a name, the letters MHC, and a number
next to it. I had no idea what it meant, but it was obvious from the
carefully lettered envelope and handwritten letter that great effort was
spent preparing it. The letter was a strange and bold request. It would
lead me to the gates of the Maryland House of Corrections, a high
medium/maximum security facility, the flagship of seven prisons surrounding a place in the Maryland landscape called Jessup, only a few
miles from Fort Meade, the home of the National Security Agency.
My first contact with the Maryland House of Corrections had occured sometime earlier, when I had received a request for some Touchstones materials to be distributed during an information fair at a
prison. Twice a year, the organizations that assist prisoners arrange
some contact with their families, and the many self-help programs
that are designed to encourage prisoners present their information in
a large activity area. Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, violence prevention programs, parenting advice, various Christian and Muslim ministries, and even the Junior Chamber of
Commerce send representatives with brochures. Touchstones is a program originally designed for pre-college students of all backgrounds
to overcome their passivity and enable them to collaborate and explore. It uses short seminal texts to initiate discussions in which students transform their thinking and their behavior toward others and
themselves. Since at that time my work with Touchstones was primarily in schools, I sent the first high school volume of texts along with
Howard Zeiderman is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, and President
of the Touchstones Discussion Project. This account is dedicated to the memory of Brother Robert Smith, who wished that it be shared with the St. John’s
College community.
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the accompanying guide explaining how leaders should utilize these
materials. I thought nothing of this until two months later when I received the letter.
The letter was from Marvin, a prisoner serving, he said, “life plus
30.” The language was simple and direct. “Dear Professor,” the letter
began, “I’ve been looking at your books. They’ve been in the Legal
Clinic office for a while. Two days ago I started reading them. First I
was confused. But now I see how the leader’s guide can help you run
the meetings. But we need someone to help us get started. Would you
come meet with us? I talked to a few of the guys. We all think this
would be good here. Nothing they give us here makes any sense. But
last night six of us were sitting around. I read out loud the story about
the old man asking for his dead son back. And we talked about it. We
were thinking about it. How brave the old man was to face his son’s
killer and what pain he felt.” I was startled as I read his account of a
text in our Volume I—a text from Homer’s Iliad, in which the old king
Priam begs the young warrior Achilles for the return of the dead body
of his son Hector. He went on to say he hoped we could talk about
how such a program might work in a prison.
Though I was stretched in my commitments with Touchstones’
efforts in public schools, with my normal teaching at St. John’s, and
with an executive group of investment bankers, CEOs, lawyers, and
journalists up in New York, I couldn’t think of a sufficient reason to
say no. In addition, I knew of a pilot program that had been tried at
the New Mexico State Penitentiary, where the ghastly riot had occurred in 1981. I was intrigued by the idea of working with prisoners,
and I had hoped we could find a location closer to home
Each type of group we work with is unique. Each group brings
specific talents to the program as well as specific needs. Each new effort is therefore a collaboration. The program that Marvin reviewed
was designed for high school students, both for the gifted and for those
who couldn’t read. For that reason, it was a good first step. It seemed
wrong not to answer the request.
But in spite of my desire, I was hesitant. I was influenced by what
the media reported about prisoners. I had the images of countless
movies and memories of the hostages at Attica in my imagination. I
remembered the atrocities, the disembowelments, at the New Mexico
prison outside of Santa Fe. I’m afraid I must admit that often in the
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early days I went into the prison because I couldn’t think of a way to
avoid going in without embarrassing myself. So in September of 1995,
I took the thirty-minute drive to Jessup and entered a vast structure
that from a distance looked like an ancient nineteenth-century Liverpool textile mill, but on closer inspection was revealed to be a fortress
designed to keep two worlds entirely separated from one another. It
was a Tuesday evening when I crossed the barriers of double steeland-glass doors and razor wire to meet the nine men who would embark with me on the exploration of a world that none of us knew
existed. I was reminded of Plutarch’s description of England as seen
by the Romans before they crossed the water from Gaul: a land that
existed only in myth and legend. Over the next two years we would
take the first steps together into unknown territory.
I would later realize that my entry on that day was remarkably efficient. My name was listed on a count-out document at the first control booth and I was moved quickly through sets of double doors
where I saw chains, handcuffs, and shotguns in a glass-enclosed watch
area. I walked nervously past interrogation rooms and holding cells
to what was called the Main Control Area: a large, cubical, steelbarred enclosure filled with guards. Unlike other such enclosures in
the prison, this one contained the only exit to the outside world. A corrections officer announced through a loudspeaker that we were leaving
the cage—which, ironically, was the Main Control Area—and entering the actual prison. We were now on the inside, surrounded by tiers
of cells and the sound of the movement of a thousand men. I was escorted by a guard up a flight of stairs past a hundred men descending
from their cells. At moments I was lost in the crowd, but with great
effort I moved upstream through the confusing mass of people. After
a brief and nervous wait at a landing, a metal door opened into a large
space, perhaps thirty by seventy feet, in which another guard sat at a
small desk.
The meeting took place in a small room at the edge of this large
activity area where we would eventually hold all our sessions, amid
the 100-decibel noise of the prison and the rival claims for space of
the Nation of Islam and the Jessup Jaycees. Around the open area were
a number of these rooms, allocated to the use of various prisoner organizations. There was the writer’s club, the prisoner newspaper, the
Colts—a sports club whose allegiance now focused on birds—Orioles
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and Ravens—instead of horses. There were the rooms for AA and NA,
and the fifteen-by-ten-foot area where men who had expressed themselves through crime now used brushes and paints. We met in the room
of the most important prisoner organization—the Legal Clinic. This
was where the men came for advice from other more experienced prisoners on how to represent themselves, since, whether guilty or innocent, their previous defenses had rarely warranted the name.
It was significant that we met here, since this was where prisoners
most felt the distance between themselves and the world outside the
walls. This was where they experienced most acutely their helplessness in the subtle labyrinth of our society’s legal system. Five of the
men I met were the high priests of this order. They were the officers—
present and past—of the Legal Clinic. They held the keys to helping
others at least attempt to control their futures. The four others were
equally important. They were presidents of other prisoner organizations. These were all older men, men who had somehow survived the
years of indignity and abuse and isolation. The youngest was in his
late thirties, and all but one were serving at least one life sentence,
whereas most were serving multiple such sentences either concurrently or in succession. These were men for whom prison was to be
their world and not merely an interlude before reinserting themselves
into ours.
I was clearly nervous as I entered, and they had me sit in a part of
the small room where I was no longer seen by the guard in the main
area. The meeting began awkwardly. I thought they knew what they
wanted from my visit, but in fact some were only vaguely aware of
why they were meeting. Marvin began by having us go around the
room and state who we were. I said I was a teacher, and others spoke
briefly about themselves. They never said it explicitly, but each said
enough for me to infer that I was sitting with nine men convicted of
murder, in a small room concealed from a guard. When we finished,
Marvin took the lead again. “Why don’t you tell us about the program,” he said in a voice filled with suspicion. I had thought that he
would be my ally in this alien world but his tone was distant, as if he
now wished to appear that he had played no part in my coming into
the prison. From the introductions, it became clear that half were invited to this meeting to hear about the program for the first time. I
could see a couple of the men whispering to one another and even
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heard one ask—to no one or to all—why I was there. Rather quickly
the roles had become reversed. Instead of being asked to come to respond to their request, it seemed that I had to convince them that they
should become involved.
I could feel control slipping away from me. Perhaps it was implicitly a test to see if one more white volunteer could offer something
they really wanted, or perhaps it was an exploration they were undertaking to find out what they needed. When they asked me to describe
the program, I did a very poor job. I kept speaking in ways that were
either too abstract or too rudimentary. I hoped to interest them in probing the conceptual presuppositions and biases of our culture though I
didn’t describe it in quite those words. Such an exercise hardly moved
them, however, since their incarceration incorporated the presuppositions and biases of our culture. Of all the men I met in prison, very
few asserted their innocence. Yet most felt that they were political
prisoners—prisoners on account of our country’s politics stretching
back to the very origins of the European conquest of the New World.
They didn’t offer this as an excuse, but merely reported it as a fact.
They saw their crimes as pretty much along the lines of infractions
against their masters on the plantations. Nor were they particularly
engaged by the prospect of increased skills. The skills they needed
were quite specific, and it wasn’t clear how Touchstones could help
them overturn a conviction.
While I was speaking, becoming more uneasy as I felt their eyes
glued to me, a short, heavily tattooed prisoner interrupted. “These
guys,” he said, referring to the authors of the texts in the collection
he had in his hands, “are all white.” I was taken aback by his claim.
In regard to the specific volume I had sent in, he was correct. I again
started trying to explain that this program was very different from
classes they had in school and that the Eurocentrism of this particular
collection of texts wouldn’t affect what we discussed. But they looked
skeptical. The meeting seemed to be going nowhere until Marvin
looked up from fingering the book of readings. “It could help us think
for ourselves,” he said calmly. “That’s something they can’t control.”
Immediately, I could see their faces change as if they finally heard
something that might be useful or even important. “You think that?
Say more,” said Lee, the president of the Legal Clinic whose great
knowledge earned him the respect of everyone in spite of a terrible
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stutter. “Yeah, it’s like when we talked about that dead guy. That Trojan. And you asked us how we would mourn a friend. There was no
one to tell us who was right and what to say. We were all thinking.” A
few of the most senior nodded agreement and the others—even the
tattooed critic—seemed to concur. That remark finally penetrated to
the core of their concerns. Perhaps Marvin had sensed this in the description of the discussion format. Perhaps these experts in the omnipresence of arbitrary control sensed an opportunity for the first time
to undertake the pure act of thinking. Perhaps my own inability to supply an answer allowed them the leisure to determine what they needed.
In their eyes, I was no longer a professor or a teacher of the kind they
had previously experienced. I was merely a technician who could help
them create the structure through which their own thought would take
shape.
“Thinking for yourself” was not an offhand expression for them.
Within that phrase was lodged the full intensity of their suffering. In
prison, all control and initiative was stripped from them. After one session in which we discussed a passage from Martin Luther King’s Letter
from Birmingham City Jail and why we need the stability of laws,
Eddie, a lifer who had served 25 years, took me aside out of the hearing
of the others. “Here you’ve got to be careful. Yeah, even you. They
change the rules every day. And they never tell you. That way they
control all of you.” To supply the desperate need they felt to establish
a realm in which they were not entirely passive, they had two options.
He took me further aside as if to confide a great truth about his life.
“We try to fight it. We work out with weights in the yard or in the gym.
That way we at least control how we look. Or we control the fags and
the slaves.”
A rigid hierarchy of keepers and kept transects the prison. The
keepers tell the kept what to do, how to act, and what to think. The
thoughts of the kept are as imprisoned as their bodies, since the constant pressure of others establishes a tyranny that overrides the distinctions between guard and prisoner. Control in its rawest form flows
everywhere in the prison, and it was their horror at this that these men
felt our programs might transform. The task was now clear: to go
about establishing the conditions for prisoners to reassert their freedom, their ability to become human again, by bestowing significance
on their lives through the mere act of thought.
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By the end of the meeting certain things had been settled. I had
committed to coming in every Friday evening for two hours, though
we never had that much time. Security always dictated how long it
took to enter. Sometimes I would be held in a control area for an hour
only to be told the paperwork couldn’t be found. This was always exasperating; however, when I once complained to the group about it,
they just laughed. Roderick, one of the older prisoners, explained,
“We were hopin’ it would happen. It’s good for you. It’ll help you understand something about here.” From then on I sometimes even savored the delays, because they revealed in a trivial and temporary way
what the prisoners experienced continually. I began to grasp what it
meant to be no longer a person but only a thing. These men had no
control over their lives. I too felt that lack of control every time I entered the facility. It was as if I had entered another world in which I
had no standing and no say about what might happen to me. It was a
separate world, dimly lit, and chaotic. Anything could happen in those
dark passageways as I walked past the correctional officers and groups
of prisoners. My only security was the hope that it wasn’t worth their
effort to interfere with me.
Control as it is implemented and experienced in our prisons is a
uniquely modern construct. In contrast to ancient prisons, our prisons
reduce prisoners to beasts through control and dehumanization. Although ancient prisons were dark and oppressive places where vermin,
neglect, and disease dominated, prisoners were not dehumanized.
Those vast ancient structures held people of various sorts, often in accommodations that suited their relative rank. Prisoners still retained
respect, and, in some cases, the accoutrements of their position in society. The ranks the prisoners held were part of them and could not be
stripped from them whatever their crime or infraction. This began to
change as religion and science struggled for our souls. Prisons, in a
temporary compromise, became penitentiaries, places where fallen
human beings would do penance and assert their humanity again.
These prisoners were not yet considered fundamentally different from
those who would confess their sins in prayers during church services.
The distinction was only that they required a more intense regimen of
prayer in places where there were fewer distractions from the work
of their salvation. As religion lost its primacy to scientific technology,
however, the penitentiary became the house of correction.
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Some of the group, a few who had served over forty years in prisons in many different states, could actually remember this change.
Once, when we were considering a drawing as a text, we suddenly
heard the story first-hand. The text was a drawing by Kathe Kolwitz,
Prisoners Listening to Music. The three prisoners depicted are skeletal, with hollow eyes—and all seemingly gripped by something. The
session was not going very well, and I regretted trying to use a text
that connected too vividly with their situation. A number of the
younger members were clearly repulsed by the drawing. When I asked
why a few who often spoke were being silent that evening, Larry answered. “It’s scary looking at them. I don’t want that to be me.” As he
finished, another prisoner, Craig, a man almost seventy years old who
first served time more than fifty years before, laughed. “You don’t understand nothing. They’re not dying. They’re gettin’ past their
hungers. It’s the music that makes them pure—like angels. Listen—
when I was young down south we had a chaplain. Every day he would
play music for us. Old music, beautiful. At first we couldn’t listen to
it. We never heard nothing like it. Sometimes a song would last a long
time, no words. But then we started to love it. We would listen like in
the picture, and we’d remember things. And we’d cry. Sometimes you
could hear ten men cry. And sometimes the priest would cry too. We
were all together in it. But then he retired and a new chaplain came.
He was different. He wanted us to see the doctors and counselors, the
caseworkers. They would ask us questions about ourselves and make
us go to classes, programs. They were working on us and the music
ended. It was different. It was them against us.” Correction, as Craig
sensed, is entirely different from penance.
This is one reason why the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic, one of the most powerful Touchstones readings for any group,
is especially fertile in a prison. The status of the modern prison as its
own self-enclosed world became explicit during a discussion about
this text. It is the story of people who are themselves prisoners in a
barely illuminated cave, and who believe that the shadows they see,
cast by objects that move behind them, are reality. Eight weeks into
the program I decided use this text to encourage the prisoners for the
first time to speak explicitly in the group about their own situations
as prisoners. For a while they argued about details of the allegory, but
finally Thomas, a serious and highly intelligent prisoner, moved the
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discussion to their own reality. He started to consider how a freed prisoner from Plato’s cave who saw the reality outside would communicate, if he were to reenter the cave, with those who were still
underground. To make his point about the difficulty of communication, he began to describe his own return to prison. “When I came
back in,” he said, “I thought I’d find my old friends, and I’d talk to
them. But I couldn’t. Nothing I said made any sense. I had to learn a
new language.” Ken, who had been silent, agreed. “Nothing here
makes sense out there. Nothing you would do out there works in here.
It’s like going from earth to Pluto. They make us into aliens, animals,
and then they wonder why we end up coming back to the barn.”
It was into this highly controlled and dehumanizing space that I
had entered in response to an appeal from nine lifers attempting to
reestablish themselves as men who had committed crimes rather than
as members of a separate species, a criminal class. Like the priest who
played the music and cried with his prisoners, perhaps like Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima crying for himself as much as for them, I was
joining them on a journey we would have to undertake together.
Soon, the nine men decided to involve another ten so we would
have a group of about twenty. They had to explain our goal to the others as best they could. The goal was a rare one in the prison. I would
undertake to turn over control of the program to them so they could
spread the program throughout the facility. In short, I wasn’t—like
other teachers or volunteers—coming to do something for them.
Rather, I would try to make it possible for them no longer to need me.
That is what all teachers want, but here it was essential that they not
feel indebted to me. The program would only work if they felt it was
also theirs—that they had collaborated in its creation. However, I
knew that it would be as difficult for me to surrender control to them
as it would be for them to accept it. I created the program they would
learn. I felt I knew better than they what would work and what structure was best. Yet to succeed I would have to enable them to collaborate with me actively in shaping the program for prisons. I was
worried that I might not be able to achieve this act of surrender. And
would they be able to forget who I was and allow me to be involved
without feeling I was judging them, that I was the expert and therefore
in control of the situation? Here we were touching on some of the
deepest issues of our culture, issues that pervaded both the prison and
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also our own lives—questions about the need for control, the fear of
surrender, and the very ownership of one’s words.
Every discussion group confronts the same set of barriers to a
genuine collaborative activity. There are always initially the issues of
control, power, and expertise. This initial stage is followed by competition among groups or individuals—in other words, factions—who
struggle with each other to assert dominance. The next barrier is the
problem of listening without imposing our own thoughts on one another. After overcoming these impediments, there is the effort one
must make to evolve a type of leadership and responsibility that is
shared among all the participants. These issues raise the most complex
human problems and questions irrespective of culture. The culture determines how the group approaches these problems, but not what the
barriers are.
In addition to these problems, there are others that characterize a
group as a unique collection of people immersed in a specific institutional or social environment. These problems concern all of us in some
measure, but specific groups face certain peculiar problems that pervade their lives and their circumstances. They have special expertise
in dealing with the particular problems they must continually face,
problems that the rest of us share to a lesser and more occasional extent. They can therefore become a resource for us all as they struggle
in the discussion environment to overcome the barrier that uniquely
affects them and shapes their lives. The prisoners had their own specific and complex needs, needs that centered on the issue of control
and their attempt to overcome the passivity imposed by their violent
and arbitrary environment. They had a hunger for control. But in order
to create a genuine group, they would have to transmute this desire
into a form that enabled them to surrender control in its customary
forms. It was with regard to such issues that they could most clearly
be a resource for others.
Prisoners also certainly need the intellectual skills and the skills
of cooperation to better equip them to enter society as employable
people. The needs expressed by these prisoners, however, had a different urgency. These nine men were to spend their lives in prison,
and their needs dealt not with the future but with the environment in
which they all lived. Their needs were threefold.
The first involved the fact that MHC, like all prisons, was over-
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crowded. There was a certain freedom of contact and movement simply because there was not enough space to keep prisoners separated.
This mobility, of course, increased the possibility of collisions among
prisoners or gangs of prisoners. Through spreading Touchstones in
the prison, the men aimed gradually to change the environment where
they all lived. A modest success was recounted one evening after one
of the discussions. We had just discussed the opening scene of Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the “invisible” narrator collides with a
white man and comes close to killing him. During the session they
had mostly considered their prejudices, their assumptions about one
another. But near the end of our time, Alan, a white man, spoke up
more personally about James, a black man who sometimes attended
our sessions. “This happened yesterday. I was on line at lunch, carrying my tray. James was in front of me. Don’t know how, but I bumped
into him. His lunch fell. Three months ago he would have hit me hard,
maybe killed me. But he didn’t, and we cleaned up the mess. And
other people gave him some of their food. That’s never happened here
before.” Lee, one of the leaders, seemed to speak for all of them, when
he commented on this incident. “They try to make us savages. And
before we started talking to one another, we used to believe them.” In
short, their startling goal was to humanize their world—a world in
which they were viewed, and viewed themselves, as barely human.
Their second need involved a peculiar paternal attitude toward
the younger men. These men were old timers, men who had survived
years of abuse and indignity from guards and other prisoners. They
knew how to remain alive. They were the wisest of the wise. Each of
them was unique, and the only image that captured their stature for
me was a comparison with the Greeks and Trojans of the Iliad: Ajax,
Sarpedon, Patrocles, Achilles, and Hector. These men hoped to influence the young ones, seventeen-to-twenty-five-year-olds, who came
for two or three years and then graduated, as if they had attended a
college course in how to commit crimes. These young felons never
grasped that they too might spend their lives behind these walls. The
group of lifers felt that speaking directly wouldn’t work. They hoped
that their words would carry more weight after having worked together in these more neutral, though important, discussions.
The third need was the one that affected each of them most intimately. It wasn’t just a matter of their environment or a concern for
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those who would follow the paths these men regretted having themselves pursued. Rather, it was the sense that they too, even in these
hostile and precarious and dehumanizing conditions, were capable of
contemplating the deepest issues that confront all of us. This became
vivid to me and to them one Friday evening. The text was a short passage by Kant on morality. He claims that we are moral only when we
act from duty and not because we want to. Most of the group considered him crazy. They gave example after example of helping others—
family, friends, even enemies—because of pity or affection. Finally
Sam interrupted. “You guys really don’t get it. He’s saying that what
you’re talking about is only like eatin’ when you’re hungry. That’s no
big deal. It’s only when it’s hard, when it hurts, and you do it anyway
that you can respect yourself. Then you know you’re a man.” As he
spoke, I and others nodded in agreement. The intensity of Sam’s
thought, exploring an idea that no one had been able to consider, enabled me and others to take Kant’s claims more seriously. In these
sessions they felt they could finally exercise control over their own
thoughts—they could, as Sam did, think for themselves. This they
sensed would once again make them fully human in their own minds
and capable of respecting themselves as well as others.
The task that we set ourselves was to create a group of about ten
discussion leaders, each of whom would eventually be able to conduct
groups for other prisoners. The ultimate aim for the men was to involve as many prisoners as possible in the programs and to make these
discussions part of the ongoing life of the institution. In addition, a
collection of texts was to be selected and tried out for use both in this
prison and possibly in others as well. In this program and the other
programs I have designed, the texts are understood as tools, as touchstones. Though they are sometimes—like the Kolwitz drawing—specific to particular groups, most texts selected, like Ellison’s or Kant’s,
touch so deeply on our habits, our expectations, and our past cultural
and historical inheritance that they are useful for a wide variety of
groups. In the case of the prison population, we needed to determine
which texts would enable the participants to consider the issues of real
concern to them. At the same time, the process should not force them
into areas that they would only want to approach in their own time.
So it became necessary both to explore the problems these leaders
would face and to understand why certain kinds of texts were used.
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In other words, for the men to learn to lead a group, they would have
to grasp, to a certain extent, the underlying structure of the program.
The men in the group were therefore a core of nine who had committed to the project together with a varying group of others who
would join only as participants. These latter were sometimes known
to the other participants, though prisoners sometimes appeared for one
or two meetings who were not known to the main participants. In certain cases we knew that prisoners were asked to attend in order to inform prison officials and to monitor what was happening. I never
knew who these other occasional participants were. I never knew if
they were sent to disrupt the session, either by another prisoner organization that objected to what was happening, or by the prison administration, or simply by another prisoner who might be angry at one
of the participants or upset by the idea of changing the status quo of
the institution. Uncertainty is built into the nature of the discussion
process, and these visitors exacerbated the uncertainty surrounding
our work. This ongoing uncertainty also made it clear to me that, in a
real discussion, no one is ever in control. Both participants and leaders
are dependent on one another. And consequently a genuine discussion
cannot be an event that is isolated from the environment or culture or
organization in which it occurs.
The first stage of our work was to give the men the experience of
genuine discussion. I used texts from the Touchstones series, nine
graduated volumes ranging from works for third- and fourth-graders
up through high schoolers and beyond. These volumes, especially
those of the middle and high school series, are also perfectly suitable
for adults. In a school setting, the volume a group uses is rarely a function of reading level, since the program can be done orally, but is
rather a matter of experience with discussion. In high schools, our
goal during the first year of participation is for the participants to understand each stage of the process itself and, after twenty to twentyfive sessions, to begin conducting the classes themselves. This became
the model for our prison group. Each session was filmed, the video
was copied, and one of the copies was returned to the men. A typical
session would involve my passing out a text which was read aloud,
followed by preparatory individual and small-group work. The whole
group would then reunite, and I would lead the discussion. This would
last about fifty to sixty minutes. Then I would break the discussion,
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and for the last thirty minutes we would analyze what had occurred.
This was the procedure we followed week after week. Often the
analysis of the discussion process would revert to the text or revive
the topic of the main discussion. Once, after a discussion of the short
essay “About Revenge” by Francis Bacon, one of the prisoners named
James interrupted an argument between two very assertive men about
whether there had been dominance in the session. “Hey,” he asked in
an innocent tone, “did anyone take revenge during the meeting?” For
a few moments no one responded, though a number of eyes turned to
Michael, the man James had seemed to address. Then Lee acknowledged that he had been tempted to respond to what he had taken as a
slight—but didn’t. Finally, Michael spoke up. “I did. What Vaughn
said rubbed me wrong and I thought he knew that—so I went at him.
It was stupid.” The group then recurred to the text on revenge: Michael
and Lee discussed how they had reacted in different ways, why one
tried to get even while the other didn’t, and how they felt about their
actions.
This sort of event was common in the post-discussion analysis
sessions. The process of the discussion freqauently echoed the text.
In order for this to happen, texts must be selected that exemplify the
structures and attitudes of our society and institutions. The discussion
then becomes a unique kind of cultural exploration, in which the presuppositions of the culture can be made visible, and new forms of
thinking and behavior can be explored.
The entire history of slavery was continually present in the prison.
Jessup, like most American prisons, is filled primarily with black
men—the descendants of slaves once again in something very like
slave quarters. Not only are their cramped cells and chains reminiscent
of slavery, but, as the states increasingly involve prisons in various
commercial enterprises, we are once again witnessing the use of what
is essentially slave labor. The entire drama and stage setting of incarceration duplicates the four hundred year history of slavery on this
continent. Slavery and the complete lack of control over one’s decisions, one’s future, and one’s life were clearly the issues that should
be probed by these men. They have an expertise that the rest of us
don’t have and yet sometimes need in our own lives—an expertise in
surviving while facing the passivity imposed on us.
It is part of the aim of these discussions ultimately to enable the
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participants to discuss the most vital and volatile issues. But no one
is prepared to undertake this without the skills that the program develops. It is only quite late in the process that texts are dispensed with
and topics themselves confronted. When that occurs prematurely, the
result is mere conflict, or a series of monologues. It requires great discipline to undertake a genuine discussion of what one cares deeply
about. Thus, though slavery was at least one of the main concerns of
this group, its discussion as a topic would not occur until much later.
We would approach it through the mediation of specific texts until the
group became more skilled. Every group has certain issues like this,
and these will come up in the process itself, in the experiences the
group has in their lives, and in the institutional structure within which
they live.
I therefore selected texts at various stages which would push aspects of the issue of slavery to the surface. The choice of a passage
from Epictetus’s Manual was a first attempt. The passage is a terse
statement of stoicism, a very abstract claim about slavery and freedom
which holds that we are all enslaved, and that only by desiring what
is completely and entirely in one’s control could anyone be free.
Epictetus goes on to claim that only our thoughts and opinions are entirely in our control. This, he argues, is because all people for whom
we might feel love or affection and all property we possess or desire
could be lost through some unpredictable event. The discussion of this
text occurred about two months into the program.
The group was large that Friday night—about thirty—so the
shape of the arrangement of chairs had departed far from from the
customary circle into a very elongated ellipse. The configuration of
the chairs often plays a key role in a discussion, since everything in a
format like this has significance. I wanted to modify the shape of the
ellipse and make it more uniform but I hesitated. I always felt I should
accept the circumstances that presented themselves in the prison as
much as possible. Whether one manipulates the seating arrangement
depends on the setting, the group, and the leadership role. Leading a
discussion is not a uniform task. There is not one model that all must
adhere to in every situation. The goals remain the same across groups
of the same kind but how one achieves them can vary considerably.
I was at pains to make few demands on the situation and on the
men in it. I didn’t wish to be perceived as part of the organizational
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structure that moves them from place to place. When a prisoner would
run the group, he would exercise much more control and direction
than I did. It makes sense for that approach since he needs to demarcate himself as an expert in the initial phases whereas I wanted to minimize that status. This is the great issue confronting this effort to create
a genuinely collaborative activity. People want an expert who will
take control and yet wish to be free of that very desire. So the question
is how one should share leadership and authority. That of course is a
problem that will face all of us in every aspect of life. These discussions therefore are a laboratory in which the new directions to be pursued in our society can be explored and worked out.
I sat on the long side of the ellipse where I could best see all the
men. Many of them were new. There were three foci to the discussion.
One group was led by a large man named Karem, who sat at one of
the endpoints of the major axis—a dominant place in such a configuration. Karem agreed with Epictetus. He contended that the prison had
enslaved his body but his mind was free. He argued that they couldn’t
enslave that. “No one can chain my mind,” he boasted. “Though my
body is locked in this sewer, my mind can roam everywhere.” He
spoke in such a forceful way that many men, in spite of themselves,
agreed. Kevin, on the other hand, violently disagreed. The officers
didn’t just control his body. By controlling that, they controlled him.
They determined when he could move and where he could be. And
these decisions controlled his life, his desires, his thoughts, and his
dignity. While Karem held that he still felt free, Kevin vividly described what had happened to all of them—a need to urinate while
waiting somewhere in the prison. “And,” said Kevin, “they take their
damn time. They know what’s happening. They can read our faces,
and we’re forced to humiliate ourselves. They turn us into children or
animals.” Kevin went on to claim that such an indignity can happen
at any moment, and that to deny one’s feelings about it is not to be
free but rather to be less than human.
Karem tensed at this point. It was as if someone had said the
words that exactly characterized the situation all of them were in, and
which they were all striving to change by their own efforts. Sometimes
it is difficult to lead a discussion because what is said grips everyone
with the reality of the lives of some of the participants. Even with experienced leaders, when a discussion becomes intensely personal to
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the participants, it is difficult for the leader to focus on the long-range
goals of the project. Here I was listening to a discussion of Stoicism
by people who weren’t merely speculating and imagining what it
would be like to practice it. These were people whose very survival
and sanity often depended on their living that way. Some people in
that room were in fact stoics and could speak to Epictetus as if they
were colleagues. on the same path. Others knew well the temptation
of stoicism; perhaps they had tried it and abandoned it.
It is this aspect that gives such power to discussions that are designed to use text and experience to echo one another. This productive
tension between the experience of the group and the text reveals how
such discussions differ radically not only from education in the traditional sense—in which an idea or text is explored and but also from
therapy—in which what is at issue is the experience of the particular
participant. In discussion, personal experience is mediated by a text
that is often the seminal source of a concept or institutional structure;
yet, because of the difference betwwen text and personal experience,
the participants can view themselves from a distance. In fact, this very
issue itself came up in the discussion on Epictetus and soon became
the main focus. One of the men—Eddie, a former Black Panther who
was a lifer but always proclaimed his innocence—brought this home
to all of us. “None of us are free. We’re all enslaved,” he said, breaking
into a brief moment of silence between Kevin and Karem. “And not
just those like us in prison. Yeah, we’re held in place by bars and wire,
but that’s not all. Our minds themselves are enslaved. And not just
ours, Howard’s too and everyone out there. Our thoughts aren’t our
own. They’re just the ones we grew up with. How can we be free when
how we think is our prison?”
This took everyone aback. Everyone realized this was an important thought that we would have to continually consider and struggle
with. Eddie’s remark defused the tension between Karem and Kevin
by revealing how this issue of our slavery was the struggle we all had
to face. The men bounced all these ideas around as if they were in a
three-sided tennis match. No one changed an opinion, but each gave
the others the chance to speak. And this session was decisive for the
group because they finally recognized, as Eddie implied, that I had
nothing more to offer on this subject than they had, and in fact less.
After an hour I broke off the discussion so we might evaluate what
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had just happened.
In order to encourage people to emerge briefly from the prisons
in which Eddie claimed we were all captive, I wanted the men to
spend time with prisoners they didn’t know. I asked the men to count
to four and get into small groups according to number. That would effectively separate friends from one another, and I instructed them to
consider what they felt were the strong and weak points of the discussion. When these groups reported their analyses, most of the groups
agreed. They felt there had been a presentation of views but no discussion. As Vaughn said, “no one changed an opinion, and no one
looked at what they themselves were saying. We were just stating our
minds.” But Thomas responded: “That isn’t so terrible. At least we
could finally say what we really thought. And the rest of us listened
even if we didn’t react. That was important. Others listening—we get
some dignity that way,” he claimed. A number of men agreed.
But then Karem, who had been listening with a clear expression
of discomfort, interrupted. “But that means you need others to be free.
And how could this Epictetus be right about being free in your
thoughts when we need one another for our own self-respect? And
don’t you need self-respect for freedom?” It was there in the metadiscussion that the real discussion finally occurred. It was when they
had made the claims of stoicism visible to themselves in their very
activity that they could seriously consider the implications. The discussion did in fact act as an experiment for discerning new forms of
activity.
There was no official status in my position, and the men received
nothing for their participation. There was nothing concrete they would
gain. I therefore had no power to bestow anything obviously useful
or valued in that environment. The men came because they were allowed to think. The excitement of thinking and knowing that they too
were capable of this activity drew them into the group. They weren’t
here to learn from a book but to explore, together with me, both themselves and this new terrain we were bringing into being. Discussion
is possible only when there is no agenda. I had no agenda in terms of
the conclusions we would reach or the paths we would take, though I
clearly had a goal. I wanted to tailor the program to this institution.
This meant I would try out texts, and explore the means by which I
could turn over the responsibility for the program to these men. Often
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they would ask me about our other programs and I would tell them
about the possibilities and the difficulties we faced in the program
with Palestinians in Gaza, or indentured children in Haiti, or CEOs at
the Harvard Club, or middle school students, or senior citizens, or
plebes at the Naval Academy, or my students at St. John’s. I think it
was very important to these men to realize that what they were doing
was identical in some of its fundamental principles with attempts
being made throughout the world by people who were willing to risk
high levels of uncertainty to undertake the effort to change themselves.
It was the start of a sort of community where, we—there in the
bleak activity area of a nineteenth-century prison, in the third floor
private meeting room at the Harvard Club in Manhattan, in senior citizen centers, and in Haitian churches—were taking steps to explore a
world which, though continuous with strands of all of these disparate
worlds, nonetheless revealed glimpses of other forms of life and new
ways of being and thinking. It happened sporadically, but often
enough to hint at the outlines of a new possibility. The men knew that
they were exploring in an unfamiliar territory of human experience.
The trips to space were not the successors of the trips of Columbus
and Magellan. Those early explorers needed to change their fundamental conception of their world in order to make room for what they
saw. The astronauts merely solved the comparatively trivial problem
of how to get from one visible and relatively known place to another,
though the scale of their journey was immense. The problem we faced,
on the other hand, was not going from here to there, but from now to
then. It was exploration into a future that would no longer be a consequence of our pasts.
These men serving life sentences for serious crimes felt part of
the small bands of people making these journeys, and they sensed they
were bringing a perspective that was uniquely theirs but necessary to
all the others. This sense, I think, caused them to hae some respect for
me, in spite of the fact that I was merely one more among them—although I knew a bit more than they did about sketching a rough map
of our explorations, and had an instinct for recognizing apparent harbors that were only the temptations of sirens. Neither I nor they, however, could give a detailed account of this new terrain. Sometimes I
thought we were on solid ground and in a familiar region, when suddenly the ground would open up and I found myself, as in the con-
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ventional dream, falling endlessly with nothing to grab onto. And then,
just as suddenly, the scene would change, and I could see that we were
in a bucolic valley and the sense of falliing had been an illusion. I constantly had to seek my bearings along with the men, and that made
vivid the reality of our mutual dependence.
Up to this point I had led the discussions, selected the texts from
the Touchstones series, and designed the meeting format. But since
our goal was for the core group to develop the skills necessary to lead
discussions with other prisoners, I knew at some stage I would have
to turn over the responsibility to them. I must say I kept postponing
the step. I kept worrying that I hadn’t communicated enough to
them—and this remained a concern despite my understanding that one
cannot prepare for every eventuality in any complex activity, let alone
in a genuine discussion, which, if properly engaged in, changes from
moment to moment with a life of its own. Nonetheless, I also recognized that these were merely excuses I was using in order to avoid
surrendering control, and I was finally able to overcome my resistance
because of what the prisoners were able to do. We were approaching
the stage of the program in which the group must begin to observe
and judge itself.
In all the programs I have developed, the text, the experience of
the participants, and the dynamical issues arising in the process all interpenetrate and echo one another. To prepare the way for self-judgment and self-criticism of the group we first discussed a worksheet
that asked the men questions about how they judged others on first
meeting them. They were asked if they did so at first glance by clothing, by posture, or by eye-contact. In a prison, judging correctly at
first meeting is very important: one needs to be able to distinguish between a newcomer who poses a threat and one who does not.
Two men sharply disagreed on the best way to make such judgments. Idrus asserted it was by the person’s posture, whereas Eddie
focused on the eyes as the most revealing trait. This exchange went
on for a few minutes, and we could see Eddie becoming increasingly
impatient. Idrus was wearing dark glasses and Eddie, annoyed, finally
said what he had been thinking: “What’s behind those glasses?” In response Idrus tensed, started to rise, but then remained seated and
replied. “You’ve known me here for twenty years and you’ve never
seen that.” The moment was explosive and I quickly moved to the text
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for that day to re-establish control. They reconsidered this issue of
self-observation and self-judgment by discussing two self-portraits of
Rembrandt, one in which he concentrates on his eyes, and another in
which he elaborates his clothing while the eyes are in almost impentrable darkness. The discussion got past that moment of tension to
consider how Rembrandt had changed the manner in which he depicted himself.
The next week, Idrus—the prisoner who had shaded his eyes for
twenty years—came to the session without his dark glasses. We were
all stunned. All of us spoke haltingly as the session began, hardly able
to absorb the momentousness of his action. He had taken such a monumental step that I felt I should follow suit. I immediately changed
what I had planned for the session, and resolved that I would surrender
control to the group the following week. To begin that process immediately, I decided to explore with them what we would discuss in the
next session; that is, I began encouraging them to think through the
issues involved in leading a group.
A discussion leader always comes to a session with a goal. The
goal can be a topic that is essential for the group discuss, or a problem
the group must overcome—such as dominance by a few—or an opportunity for the group’s development, or a part of the text that seems
particularly important. The leader might well have to surrender this
goal immediately if it becomes clear that the group will not go along
with it, or that they are ready for a different goal. In this case it was I,
the group’s leader, who was finally ready for something more significant.
After almost a year of hesitation, I was finally ready to collaborate
with them, to surrender control. I therefore asked them to consider
what topic we as a group should discuss. For an hour they suggested
various subjects but the main one was “What is God?” Some claimed
that this was far too personal and sensitive too discuss, others claimed
that the group was capable of attempting it. Some then claimed it
wouldn’t be a discussion where one might change one’s mind. Instead
they would simply state their opinions, indifferent to what the others
might say. But in spite of their reservations, they were willing to attempt it. At the end of the session we chose a text that we could use
to focus our exploration, a selection in a Touchstones volume: the
story of the sacrifice of Isaac from the book of Genesis. The session
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had been so penetrating in examining what constituted a discussion,
what role texts can play in channeling the exploration, and how to
avoid having it turn into an empty ping-pong match of quotations and
scattered opinions, that I also decided the next session for the first
time would be led by one of the prisoners.
I could have chosen any of the group, but Michael volunteered.
A thirty-five-year-old prisoner, he had been serving a life sentence
since the age of fourteen when he was sentenced as an incorrigible
offender. Michael began quietly. He asked: “What sort of God would
make such a request?” There was silence for a few moments and then
first Eddie and then Thomas and then Lee all plunged into the discussion to shed light on the mystery of God’s purposes. For ninety minutes, Michael led a discussion on the difference between sacrifice and
murder and the role of God in our lives with a group of men all of
whom had either committed murder or were at least convicted of it.
And they identified even more closely with Abraham. As another of
the prinsoners, Vaughn, pointed out, “We here must constantly ask
ourselves just what Abraham must have asked himself during that
three-day trip to Mt. Moriah: why me, God, why me?” Though there
was a text, it was impossible to tell whether this was a textual or nontextual discussion. They had finally achieved that intermediate point
in which the distinction breaks down. The following week we spent a
good part of the session discussing what had occurred and whether
their expectations were satisfied. Had it been possible to discuss these
subjects or were they simply presenting monologues? Everyone
agreed that their worst fears had not materialized. In fact, the discussion was a great surprise even to those who expected that we would
be able to pursue it. As one of the men said, “It was like a wheel, it
just moved round and round.”
These men were discussing the issue most personal to them—the
murder of another human being. Yet they had the discipline to depersonalize their own experience and allow others to participate in a discussion. They could surrender control of what was most intimate, and
yet at the same time they never made it an abstract discussion. They
were able to fuse a textual exploration with one in which their own
experience lent credibility to their comments.
The session on the sacrifice of Isaac was a decisive moment for
the group. It was a great success, far greater than I or they or anyone
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could have imagined. They felt that with some advance preparation
one of them had been able to conduct a session. It was in fact a session
on a topic—what is God?—that most felt they wouldn’t be able to
handle. But even more, it was a discussion of the very crime for which
they were serving life sentences. The discussion was thoughtful and
probing, without self-pity and without avoidance of self-examination.
Once we began this process we decided to continue. The next week
we decided we would have another leader and would go in rotation
until each of the nine men had practiced with this group. This was a
major step. I also thought it was better to allow the leader to know in
advance and for him to be able to select the text and the approach.
The next volunteer was Vaughn, who had played a very strong role in
the last discussion. Michael, who had led the discussion, had the best
sense of how to keep himself out of the way. I knew others would have
more difficulty.
It is always a challenge to lead a group. Leading has little to do
with whether you enjoy discussions yourself. In fact often the worst
leaders are precisely those who want to be participants. However,
there is no one model for conducting a discussion. One has to discern
one’s strengths and determine how to use them in the new environment. Vaughn’s great strength as a participant would in fact, I expected, cause him problems as a leader. There was great seriousness
and intensity in Vaughn. In a discussion he often took the group to
new levels by his passionate thinking about a problem. In the Abraham
discussion, when the discussion was becoming fragmented, Vaughn
focused it on what we all knew we should talk about. He imagined
Abraham during those three days journeying with Isaac. He uttered
what everyone in the group was asking about Abraham and about
themselves, “God, why me, why me?” It was Vaughn who could suddenly transform a meandering route into one of deep engagement. As
one prisoner at a different prison said of a discussion on the Iliad, at
some point it left the streets of Troy for those of Baltimore. Vaughn
could effect that translation too. But this very power could also cause
problems.
It is wonderful when a participant deepens a discussion. But when
a leader does it, the group can become dependent on his enthusiasm
or it can become defensive and even go into opposition. A leader must
show that he respects others and feels that the issues they have raised
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are serious. Vaughn, however, was not generally attentive to the needs
of others in the group. He was not vain at all, but simply so engaged
by the question or topic that he would lose a sense of where the others
in the group were in their thinking. Each of the men had different
kinds of issues they would have to face as leaders, but Vaughn’s was
one of the most difficult. He would have to subordinate his own ideas
and help others to bring out theirs. He would have to surrender control
of the content and focus on his responsibility to others. If anyone had
to learn service it was he. My difficulty at the time was that I had to
let him choose the text.
What he selected startled me, and and was even more troubling
than the fact that he would lead the discussion. It was a piece by an
eighteenth-century ex-slave about what owning slaves does to the
slave owner. In one sense it was potentially useful because it at least
took a perspective that the group would not immediately relate to, but
would have to infer. But because it touched so directly on the topic of
slavery, it seemed beyond the ability of this group—much more so
than the question about God. I was amazed that this was the text chosen, yet I had resolved that I would do nothing to change it. They had
to learn to select texts for a specific group at a specific time in their
evolution and this was at least a start. And I had to learn to surrender
my position and become a participant in the group. Though I was convinced that the discussion would fail, I hoped we could analyze it afterward in order at least to decide why it failed. The analysis would
present an opportunity to explore the role of texts and how one selects
them.
I decided I would sit next to Vaughan, thinking that I might be
able to control, at least to some extent, how much he spoke. Though
the previous week had been so disciplined, this discussion collapsed
within moments. The first question took us far from the text into a
dispute about why white people enslaved black people. All the issues
surrounding enslavement and abuse came up immediately, and the
group could hardly sustain any exchange at all. Within minutes I
sensed that we were near an abyss. The few white men in the room
tried to speak, but were not taken seriously. Some got up and left the
circle, angry at what was happening. Most eventually returned and sat
down again, however, since there was no place else for them to go.
Even the others began to attack one another. All the alliances that had
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developed over time broke down. I felt I had no idea where we were
going, no idea whether the group could hold together for the hour or
whether I would have to break it off if they allowed me. At that moment I was certain that all the effort of the past year had been wasted,
and the apparent progress had been an illusion. The session became
electric when a prisoner nicknamed “Shaka” said that in 1975 he was
born a slave in Baltimore and his life would be devoted to becoming
free. I remained silent, unable to speak after my one contribution was
ignored.
After an hour, Vaughn suddenly broke off the conversation, saying we had to move on. I was relieved that we had all survived this
experience, and was ready to pack up and depart feeling that I had
failed in this entire effort. But before I could close out the session, in
a very steady voice Vaughn asked each person to reflect on the activities of the previous hour—what were the strong and weak points, was
it a discussion, was it a success or a disaster, and how could it have
been improved? I was startled both at what Vaughn had attempted at
this stage and also at how the men responded. They were very circumspect and considerate in their comments. Both the white prisoners
and the black prisoners spoke calmly about what had transpired, and
they were even able to discuss the reason why some had felt compelled to leave the circle. At the end of the main discussion I hadn’t
expected that we could ever revive the discipline they had attained
the previous week. But during the analytical conversation everything
changed. The men began to reflect on other aspects of the issue once
they no longer felt that they were expected to defend their respective
races.
After about fifteen minutes during which they considered how
Vaughn had conducted the session, someone abruptly broadened the
issue. Stuttering, Lee asked whether anyone had ever tried to enslave
someone in the prison, or even whether that had happened during the
discussion. There was a long silence and I could see many moving
nervously in their chairs. Finally Thomas acknowledged both. And
within moments, as if finally given the freedom to speak openly, all
entered the discussion as if they were no longer just the victims but
also the perpetrators. They began to describe the complexity of their
emotions as slave owners. They recounted how when they first enslaved someone on the tiers they felt a power and sense of victory.
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They no longer felt imprisoned but human again. But then they began
to feel the enslaved person to be a burden. Instead, only the free prisoners interested them. Their slaves were servile, willing to say or do
anything they felt would ease their lot. These men here, all of whom
were acknowledging themselves as slavers, wanted respect. They said
they didn’t want it from their slaves but from others—from one another. All felt that the moment they enslaved someone his respect was
worthless and their own self-respect diminished. And others would
not respect them for such pointless conquests. After their first moment
of euphoria, they said they felt debased and less human. And they
began acting that way. It was through reflecting on themselves and
their discussion that the text Vaughn had chosen was finally explored.
As I drove back to Annapolis that evening, I finally had occasion
to reflect on what I had just experienced. In the prison I had encountered the genuine reality of a critical section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—the section on Lordship and Bondage. Unlike the
obscure and illusive abstractions in the Phenomenology, the prisoners
had actually lived through the failures described so speculatively by
Hegel. They too, as Hegel points out about all of us, felt the deep and
fundamental urge to be recognized as human, to be acknowledged as
beings who were different from the rats and insects that populated
their world. And they struggled for this even in their most heinous
acts. These men, enslaved by their past and by their world, used others
in their attempts to break free; they tried to display their humanity
through acts of conquest; they were willing to die in order to assert
themselves as lords over a cell block or over a part of the yard. And
in the moment of success, in the moment of attaining complete control
over a space and its inhabitants, they acknowledged feeling their sense
of themselves slipping away into emptiness. In addition, the very men
whose submission and recognition was meant to guarantee their own
mastery and control showed to them the futility of seeking that recognition. By succumbing, the vanquished prisoners showed that they
couldn’t appreciate what the victor truly was, and therefore couldn’t
offer genuine acknowledgement and recognition. And so the victors
began to recognize themselves as slaves even in their moment of conquest. In Hegel’s story of the progress of human consciousness toward
complete self-awareness, the master who conquers is a dead end. The
story continues through the trials and struggles of the slave. And it is
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self-discipline that points the way to Hegel’s all too joyous conclusion
at the end of what he called the path of despair.
Here too was despair, here in these yards and in the echoing corridors—and yet these men had showed a self-discipline that I hadn’t
expected of them. They had gone farther than I could have imagined,
farther than I could go myself. They no longer needed a text to mediate
themselves. For a brief hour, they had raged about their pain and anger
and humiliation, and then, in a remarkable display of self-awareness,
they reflected objectively on their own strengths and weaknesses.
Though the road they had taken was not directed toward Hegel’s auspicious culmination of history, their exercise of self-discipline had
nonetheless revealed the path to the self. As Shaka—who considered
himself a slave even though he had been born in 1975—said, it was
in these discussions that he found his voice for the first time. These
men had attained more than anyone could give them, something that
any act of bestowal would itself destroy. These men had to find their
own voices. They had to surrender the idioms of their age and class
and race and gender, and for the first time risk hearing themselves.
Together they had to break free from the prison that, as Eddie pointed
out, they and I and all others inhabit. These prisoners thanked the discussions for making that possible. Perhaps that was true, but it was
also true that they had created the discussions. The discussions weren’t
there waiting for them. And suddenly I realized what it meant for me
to surrender control. The most that I had been able to do was to set
the stage for acts of courage that I could admire, but might never have
the privilege to display. I left the prison realizing that for a brief moment I had seen, in men confined to cells for their entire lives, a
degeree of mutual respect and recognition—of freedom—that the rest
of us rarely achieve.
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POETRY
The Love-Song of the Agoraphobic
Elliott Zuckerman
O sing a song
of standing alone
on the steppes of central Asia
and celebrate when thinly dressed
the stark surrounding white
of arctic ice.
Tell me these are Patagonian seas
and I’ll sing louder.
Have you noticed that the deck-chairs
tame the ship-board
by cutting off the terrible full circle?
Every market-place
is emptiness.
I cannot count the ears
of the endless rows
in the Iowa of my imagination.
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�REVIEWS
179
Henry Kissinger on China:
The Dangerous Illusion of
“Realist” Foreign Policy
A Review of Henry Kissinger’s On China.
New York: Penguin, 2011. 608 pages, $49.95.
Joseph A. Bosco
Henry Kissinger, an avid student and admirer of the “realist” statecraft
of Machiavelli, Metternich, and Mao, is viewed (not least by himself)
as the archetypical practitioner of Realpolitik in America’s foreign
policy establishment. His latest memoir, On China, describes how he
and Richard Nixon established American relations with the People’s
Republic of China in 1971-72, after nearly a quarter-century of mutual
isolation, suspicion, and hostility. He touts the China opening as
demonstrating the putative success of their “pragmatic” and “non-ideological” approach, and he makes the case with his customary erudition, aplomb, and Churchillian use of the English language. The book
is also a richly detailed account of the personal and sometimes philosophical interactions among the four key players: Nixon, Kissinger,
Mao Zedong, and Zhou-En-lai.
In an earlier book, Kissinger wrote that the China initiative
“marked America’s return to the world of Realpolitik.”1 Despite
China’s horrific human rights record and aggressive behavior since
the Communists took power in 1949, Washington sought rapprochement, convinced that it was “central to the establishment of a peaceful
international order and transcended America’s reservations about
China’s radical governance.”2 Kissinger can justifiably claim at least
partial results in one important objective of the strategy—relations
with Moscow: “[T]he Nixon Administration managed to create a
major incentive for Soviet moderation” that led to a brief period of
detente and a series of strategic arms control agreements,3 though it
Joseph A. Bosco served as China country desk officer in the office of the Secretary of Defense, 2005-2006, and previously taught graduate seminars on
China-Taiwan-U.S. relations at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.
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was soon followed by one of the most fraught periods in Soviet-U.S.
relations.
But pursuit of the other immediate goal sought by the NixonKissinger diplomacy—China’s cooperation in terminating the Vietnam War on “honorable terms” for America—ended in ignominious
failure. “We made the withdrawal of our military forces from Taiwan
conditional on the settlement of the Vietnam war.”4 Kissinger blames
the outcome in Vietnam on Congress’s unwillingness to enforce the
Paris Peace Treaty. He says that he and Nixon foresaw Hanoi’s “massive violations” of the Treaty, but he signed it nevertheless because,
if necessary to ensure compliance, the use of air power to enforce the
agreement was never ruled out, either in the minds of members of the
Nixon Administration or in its public pronouncements.5 Obviously,
Hanoi was not deterred by the administration’s warnings that “we will
not tolerate violations of the Agreement.”6 As North Vietnam’s main
army forces poured over the 17th Parallel into the South, the Treaty
collapsed along with South Vietnam. Kissinger earned a Nobel Peace
Prize for having negotiated the agreement along with North Vietnam’s
Le Duc Tho, who declined the Prize.
Hardheaded realism requires that the overall China engagement
policy be examined over the long-term. Did it attain the peaceful international order Kissinger described as its goal? In this regard, the
results of Kissinger’s Realpolitik with China—which Nixon enthusiastically endorsed but also regarded as a “strategic gamble”—may
well be judged as one of the greatest miscalculations in American
diplomatic history.
Kissinger, of course, does not see it this way. He seems still to
revel in the momentous negotiations that shook the world, even
though its aftershocks grow increasingly ominous as time goes by.
The Shanghai Communiqué, drafted by Kissinger and Zhou En-lai,
was the seminal document in the new Sino-U.S. relationship. It clearly
stated the premise of the U.S. position: “[I]mproving communications
between countries that have different ideologies . . . lessen[s] the risks
of confrontation through accident, miscalculation, or misunderstanding.”7
Kissinger looks back with satisfaction over the ensuing four warfree decades, during which he continued to play influential roles—
often simultaneously—as a successful commercial entrepreneur in
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181
China and as an unofficial strategic adviser to both the American and
Chinese governments. His personal longevity, intellectual vigor, and
ongoing involvement in international affairs have enabled him to consult on an intimate basis with each of the four men who have led China
since the creation of the People’s Republic (and now with Xi Jinping,
the designated fifth-generation leader), as well as with the eight American presidents who have largely carried out Kissinger’s policies. “Despite occasional tensions . . . [i]n the forty years since [the Communiqué]
was signed, neither China nor the United States has allowed the issue
[of human rights] to interrupt the momentum of their relationship.”8
Yet during that period the United States and China have experienced their third Taiwan Strait Crisis; several dangerous clashes at
sea; the EP-3 incident; two separate nuclear threats against American
cities by Chinese generals; Beijing’s undermining of American objectives on nonproliferation, on North Korea, and on a range of rogue
state issues; and China’s creation of an alternative development model
that violates international standards of accountability, transparency,
and good governance. Kissinger’s massive volume does not do justice
to these events, where it mentions them at all. To demonstrate how
far U.S.-China relations have progressed since the historic opening,
Kissinger writes: “Nixon had to overcome a legacy of twenty years
of American foreign policy based on the assumption that China would
use every opportunity to weaken the United States and to expel it from
Asia.”9 He gives short shrift, however, to China’s contemporary demands, backed by their historically unprecedented military strength,
that the U.S. curtail its activities in international waters like the Taiwan
Strait, the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea, and the South China Sea.
He sees Chinese “triumphalist” rhetoric as unreflective of official Chinese policy and merely a hypothetical danger. At a recent meeting
with South Korea’s defense minister, which occurred too late for inclusion in On China, the chief of the People’s Liberation Army’s general staff, General Chen Bingde “issued an unusual and caustic tirade
against . . . America’s hegemonic attitudes toward other countries.”10
Such Chinese accusations are not unusual, never having disappeared
despite Kissinger’s rosy assessment of the achievements of the Shanghai Communiqué. Given the longevity of such Chinese views of
Washington’s motives, coupled with China’s economic and military
surge, it is no wonder that, thirty years after his historic opening,
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Nixon worried, “We may have created a Frankenstein.”11 Kissinger,
however, remains untroubled over his role in establishing and perpetuating the framework for U.S.-China relations, and unconcerned about
what that undertaking has produced. James Clapper, the Director of
National Intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2011
that China now presents “the greatest mortal threat” to the United
States.12
On China, together with the author’s extensive promotional interviews for the book, may well be Kissinger’s last concerted attempt
to establish a favorable historical record for the landmark oopening
to China. It is certainly a vigorous defense of Realpolitik in the crucible of U.S.-China relations. But even on its own realist terms the
book ultimately fails in its mission of vindication. This is partly because the story is not over and indeed is worsening as China’s economic and military power continue to grow. But the evidence of
long-term strategic failure is now sufficient to conclude that Nixon’s
strategic gamble has already failed—nearly a half-century after the
opening, the two powers should not still be seriously contemplating
scenarios for going to war with each other. But we are.
The issue that had always stymied Sino-U.S. relations until the
Nixon-Kissinger overture was the status of Taiwan. As Kissinger approvingly recalls, Washington initially lost interest in Taiwan after
Mao’s Communists defeated the Nationalists in 1949, during which
the U.S. remained on the sidelines. “Having conceded the mainland
to Communist control and whatever geopolitical impact this might
have, it made no sense to resist Communist attempts to occupy Taiwan.”13
Secretary of State Dean Acheson and General Douglas MacArthur
effectively reflected that thinking in late 1949 and early 1950, when
they publicly delineated U.S. strategic interests in Asia and excluded
both Taiwan and South Korea from America’s security perimeter. In
his book, Kissinger criticizes Acheson’s National Press Club statement
in January, 1950: “To the extent deterrence requires clarity about a
country’s intention, Acheson’s speech missed the mark.”14 Actually,
Acheson was, if anything, too clear in indicating, as MacArthur had
done a month earlier, that Washington did not intend to use military
force to defend Taiwan or South Korea. No wonder, then, that Kim
Il-sung, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong thought they had a U.S. green
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light to pursue aggressive unification. But after North Korea’s attack
on South Korea converted hypothetical danger to stark reality, a
shocked foreign policy establishment changed its perception of the
Asian Communist threat: “When American policymakers came faceto-face with an actual Communist invasion, they ignored their policy
papers.”15 President Truman mobilized a United Nations defense of
South Korea and sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait to prevent a Chinese attack there, frustrating Mao’s openly stated intentions
to do just that. As Kissinger put it regarding the Korean War, “The
United States did not expect the invasion; China did not expect the
reaction.”16
After the war ended in a military and negotiated stalemate, President Eisenhower signed Mutual Defense Treaties with both South
Korea and Taiwan in 1954. The U.S. military presence maintained the
peace for the next decade and a half. Nevertheless, Kissinger expresses disdain for the sterile Sino-U.S. impasse over the island’s status that kept the two governments isolated from each other during that
period: “China would discuss no other subject until the United States
agreed to withdraw from Taiwan and the United States would not talk
about withdrawing from Taiwan until China had renounced the use of
force to solve the Taiwan question.”17 At that point Nixon and
Kissinger entered the scene wielding the sword of Realpolitik. They
cut the Gordian knot—simply acceding to China’s position. Washington informed Beijing that the Seventh Fleet—the primary obstacle to
a Chinese attack on Taiwan—was leaving the Taiwan Strait forthwith
and all American forces would be withdrawn from Taiwan in stages.
The fact that these commitments were made even before the start
of the official Sino-U.S. dialogue violated one of the Nixon-Kissinger
realist admonitions against making advance concessions and appearing overly eager to please. “We have a tendency to apply our standards
to others in negotiations. We like to pay in advance to show our good
will, but in foreign policy you never get paid for services already rendered.”18 As Nixon instructed his adviser, “We cannot be too forthcoming in terms of what America will do [by saying] we’ll withdraw,
and we’ll do this, and that, and the other thing.”19 But U.S. actions
had already conveyed the impression that Washington craved the rapprochement far more than did Beijing. Any fair-minded realist would
have to say that this impression weakened American negotiating lan-
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guage, strategic clarity, and deterrence in perpetuity. As Kissinger
takes justifiable pride in noting repeatedly, seven subsequent administrations have followed the Nixon-Kissinger approach. For more than
four decades, consequently, Beijing has taken full advantage of that
Western indulgence, deriving the benefits from the international system while enjoying wide latitude in its domestic and international behavior.
Kissinger has presented confusing, and even contradictory, accounts of the origin of the Sino-American “understanding” on Taiwan
established during Nixon’s historic meeting with Mao. In On China,
he writes: “[A]fter decades of mutual recrimination over Taiwan, the
subject in effect did not come up” except for some sarcastic banter
about Chiang Kai-shek.20 A few pages later, he reaffirms that “Mao
had omitted any substantive reference to Taiwan.”21 To bolster this
point, Kissinger reports his own conversation with Mao a year after
the Nixon meeting: “[T]o remove any element of threat Mao explicitly
delinked the issue of Taiwan from the overall U.S.-China relationship.”22 Although Mao warned that he did not believe China and Taiwan would be able to effect a peaceful transition,23 as far as
China-U.S. relations were concerned, “Mao made his principal
point—that there were no time pressures of any kind.”24 Mao also told
him, “I say that we can do without Taiwan for the time being, and let
it come after one hundred years.”25 Kissinger explains that Mao actually had two principal points of equal importance: First, “that Beijing
would not foreclose its option to use force over Taiwan—and indeed
expected to have to use force someday.”26 Second, “for the time being
at least, Mao was putting off this day.”27
Kissinger’s account of the Mao-Nixon the discussion in On China
is consistent with Nixon’s own description of the meeting in his 1978
memoir.28 Inexplicably, however, Kissinger told the story quite differently in two books he wrote between Nixon’s Memoirs and his own
On China. In 1979 and again 1994, Kissinger put Mao’s talk of delay
in Taiwan’s demise not in a one-on-one meeting with him, but in
Mao’s meeting with Nixon, at which Kissinger was also present:
“[T]he Chinese leader wasted no time in assuring the President that
China would not use force against Taiwan: “We can do without them
for the time being, and let it come after 100 years.’”29 In these earlier
accounts, Kissinger saw Mao’s statement to the President as a mani-
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festation of large-minded statesmanship: “Mao asked for no reciprocity for the assurance America had been seeking for twenty years.”30
Whichever version is accurate, Kissinger’s perception that Mao
was making a major unilateral concession is astoundingly innocent.
Nixon and Kissinger had already given Mao the quid for his quo—a
commitment to withdraw U.S. forces on and near Taiwan. Indeed,
they had already given Mao much more. Kissinger remarks that
“Nixon and his advisers . . . deemed diplomatic contact with China
essential” and, as early as 1969, had publicly committed the United
States to defend China’s independence against a Soviet attack—a
unique security guarantee from an American president to a hostile
Communist government.31 Moreover, Kissinger did not even seem to
regard Taiwan as a strategic bargaining chip. He once expressed bemused incredulity to Mao that China would wait so long to take Taiwan: “Not a hundred years,” he remarked. Mao responded: “It is hard
to say. Five years, ten, twenty, a hundred years. It’s hard to say.”32 Despite the shifting target dates, Mao’s comments about Taiwan consistently made clear that China would use force to take it: “[W]e are
going to fight for it.”33 So, Nixon and Kissinger, the two hardheaded
practitioners of Realpolitik, knowingly traded a concrete action China
wanted—permanent U.S. withdrawal from Taiwan—for a vague and
temporary expression of the action Washington had sought—China’s
commitment not to use force against Taiwan. It is worth noting that
on none of the occasions when Mao affirmed China’s intention to attack Taiwan did Kissinger raise any question or objection. Nor did he
suggest that the United States would feel compelled to defend Taiwan
on the basis of its “interest in a peaceful settlement” as stated in the
Shanghai Communiqué. Nixon, Kissinger, Mao, and Zhou, who might
be called the Gang of Four Realists, all understood that American public opinion and the U.S. Congress would not tolerate abandonment of
Taiwan to Communist China at that time. After a decent interval, however—in Nixon’s expected second term—the deed would be done.34
China would get its “full meal.” While Nixon shared wholeheartedly
in that original Realpolitik cleverness, his view significantly evolved
as Taiwan itself moved from dictatorship to democracy; unlike
Kissinger, he concluded that democratic Taiwan is now permanently
divorced from Communist China. (See discussion below.)
On China suffers from surprising historical inaccuracies and glar-
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ing omissions on some pivotal events in China-U.S. relations.
Kissinger recounts the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, which began in July
1995 when China fired missiles toward Taiwan to protest a U.S. visit
by Taiwan’s appointed president, Lee Teng-hui. China then conducted
military exercises in the Strait during the period leading up to Taiwan’s
parliamentary elections in December. Chinese officials, clearly intent
on avoiding North Korea’s 1950 miscalculation, put the crucial question directly to their American counterparts during a November visit
of Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Nye: How would the U.S.
respond if China attacked Taiwan? Here was an ideal opportunity for
supposedly realist Washington to provide the strategic clarity and deterrent message Kissinger found lacking in Acheson’s Press Club
speech.
But Nye, even as he cited that earlier Korean experience, answered equivocally: “We don’t know and you don’t know; it would
depend on the circumstances.”35 Understandably wary of signaling an
Acheson-style green light, Nye erred in failing to red-light China’s
ambitions by a plain commitment to Taiwan’s defense. Instead, he
gave China a yellow light—what came to be known as “strategic ambiguity”—and it worked for that moment as China decided to proceed
with caution for the time being. When asked the same question by
American interviewers weeks later, Defense Secretary William Perry
enthusiastically adopted Nye’s statement, and it has been Washington’s official stance ever since. Curiously this pivotal incident does
not appear in On China, and neither Nye nor Perry is mentioned in
the book. Equally surprising is Kissinger’s failure to note the extraordinary threat conveyed by a Chinese general to an American scholar
at that time: “You care more about Los Angeles than about Taiwan.”36
Within a month of Nye’s statement, the Nimitz carrier group
passed through the Strait—the first such transit in the 23 years since
Nixon had removed the Seventh Fleet. After China protested, Washington explained that this passage was merely a weather diversion,
not a warning or a signal of commitment to Taiwan’s defense—
thereby undermining the impact of “the most significant American
show of force directed at China since the 1971 rapprochement.”37
Kissinger fails to note the missed deterrent opportunity for the United
States: having sent the ships through the Strait, it could have reminded
Beijing matter-of-factly that no U.S. explanation or Chinese indul-
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gence was required for the exercise of America’s freedom of navigation rights in international waters.38
Kissinger’s account also misstates the date and context of the
Nimitz Taiwan Straight passage. He places it not in December 1995,
when it actually occurred, but three months later in March 1996, prior
to Taiwan’s first presidential election, when China tested the U.S.
again by resuming its missile firings across the Strait. On that second
occasion in March, President Clinton deployed both the Nimitz and
the Independence to the area. But when Beijing threatened a “sea of
fire” if the ships entered the Strait, they changed course and avoided
the Strait. As a result, Washington’s attempt to signal deterrence was
trumped by Beijing’s message of counter-deterrence. This compounded the garbled strategic signals in December. A former senior
U.S. official who had been in office at the time later described the
1995-96 confrontations as the Clinton administration’s “own Cuban
missile crisis,” and said they had “stared into the abyss.”39 Kissinger
uses similar language to describe the crisis: “Approaching the
precipice, both Washington and Beijing recoiled.”40 But his failure to
note the mismanaged U.S. messaging during this critical period is surprising given his lifelong career focus on the roles of ambiguity and
clarity in international diplomacy generally and in the famously complex and nuanced U.S.-China relationship in particular.41
Nor does he remark on the significant lessons China learned from
the tense episode. According to subsequent Defense Department reports on China’s military power, after 1996 Beijing resolved to develop the capacity to deter or delay U.S. intervention in any future
Taiwan crisis. It has done so by deploying a formidable arsenal of
“area denial” and “anti-access” weapons, including advanced attack
submarines and the world’s first ship-killing ballistic missiles.
Kissinger takes no notice of these ominous developments. Nor does
he mention the existence of the congressionally mandated Pentagon
reports on China’s dramatic military advances.42
On China also ignores President George W. Bush’s abortive attempt in 2001 to restore the clarity of America’s commitment to Taiwan’s security that prevailed from 1950 until the Nixon opening to
China in 1972. The president said he would do “whatever it took” to
defend Taiwan now that it had become a democracy.43 Shocked China
experts within and outside the administration scrambled to walk that
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statement back, restoring the ambiguity of the earlier, presumably
safer policy. But it was the attacks of September 11, 2001 that put the
Taiwan issue on the back burner as Washington managed to convince
itself that Beijing was now on the same side with the U.S. in the war
on terrorism, counter-proliferation, and even controlling North
Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
Notwithstanding Kissinger’s omissions and historical errors, On
China offers an illuminating account of the similarities and differences
between Kissinger and Nixon on China policy. The two clearly agreed
on the compromises and ambiguities that enabled the China opening.
They also agreed that their successors should continue the engagement
policy because abandoning it would entail seriously adverse consequences. They parted company, however, over the future of Taiwan
and the attendant prospects for Sino-U.S. conflict.
Nixon recalled how “the Shanghai Communiqué negotiated by
Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai brilliantly bridged the differences
between the two governments.”44 But he also wrote:
Realistic reappraisals of U.S. relations with Taiwan,
and of the relations between the governments in Beijing and Taipei, are overdue. . . . The situation has
changed dramatically since then. . . . China and Taiwan publicly have irreconcilable differences. The
separation is permanent politically, but they are in
bed together economically.45
He advocated that the two sides simply accept their mutual dependency, and he also recommended that the United States strongly support
Taiwan’s membership in international economic organizations. He
exhorted Washington to “begin extending to Taiwan government officials the diplomatic courtesies that the leaders of one of the world’s
major economic powers deserve.”46 And he expressed optimism for a
long-term peaceful outcome: “The Chinese will not launch a military
attack against Taiwan as long as Beijing knows such an attack would
jeopardize their relations with the United States.”47
Kissinger assesses the situation differently. He still believes, as
Nixon did, that the “ambiguous formula” he inserted in the Shanghai
Communiqué was masterful: “ambiguity is sometimes the lifeblood
of diplomacy.”48 Unlike Nixon, however, Kissinger believes that
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China will use force against Taiwan unless it accepts “peaceful reunification through peaceful means,” as Premier Wen Jiabao put it to
President Bush in December 2003.49 But Kissinger recalls a 2001 conversation with President Jiang Zemin, in which he mentioned the possibility of military action against Taiwan. Kissinger took the remark
seriously enough that he “felt obliged to reply to this threat of force”
by saying, “In a military confrontation between the U.S. and China,
even those of us who would be heartbroken would be obliged to support our own country.”50 Kissinger did not predict that the U.S. would
in fact defend Taiwan, and he makes clear in his book that he doubts
it will: “The crucial competition between the United States and China
is more likely to be economic and social than military.”51 Given the
state of Sino-U.S. economic interdependence and the dramatic increase in China’s military power, it is unlikely Kissinger would find
a U.S. defense of Taiwan more palatable today than it was in 1949,
when the PLA was a lot weaker. This is why he has publicly urged
Taiwan to exercise the “peaceful” option and come to terms with Beijing before China feels compelled to resort to force. This is also the
reason Kissinger warns Washington about continued arms sales to Taiwan: “It would be dangerous to equate [China’s] acquiescence to circumstance with agreement for the indefinite future.”52 Nixon believed
that war over Taiwan could be avoided by self-interested Chinese selfrestraint; Kissinger believes that peace can be assured only if Taiwan
and the United States accept Taiwan’s unification with China—
thereby consummating the deal he made with Zhou En-lai in 1972.
“[The] series of ambiguities [that] sustained much of normalization
for forty years . . . cannot do so indefinitely.”53
It may be that Kissinger has fallen victim to the ancient realist
principles he admires in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, teachings that anticipate Realpolitik in emphasizing “subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage.”54 This sort of approach
involves “building a dominant political and psychological position,
such that the outcome of a conflict becomes a foregone conclusion,”55
for “strategy resolves itself into a psychological contest” that sometimes requires “subterfuge and misinformation.”56 Like Sun Tzu,
“Mao believed in the objective impact of ideological, and above all,
psychological factors.”57 Mao and Zhou applied these principles
adeptly in their interactions with Nixon and Kissinger, and their suc-
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cessors have continued the tradition. For example, despite his dissatisfaction with Washington’s continued arms sales to Taiwan, Deng Xiaoping skillfully managed his relations with Washington so that, as
Kissinger concedes, “the People’s Republic achieved another decade
of American assistance as it built its economic and military power.”58
Kissinger also uses On China to warn against too much emphasis
on China’s human rights record. Once called “the American Metternich,” Kissinger espouses the realist position that national interest
must be based on seeing the world as it is, not as we would like it to
be, and certainly not with an over-emphasis on human rights and democratic values (which he calls crusading moralism) important as they
are to America’s national identity. The best way to influence China
on human rights, he informed Fareed Zakaria in a recent televised interview, is to leave it to himself and a few others who have earned the
trust and confidence of China over the years and can broach the subject in private rather than embarrassing its leaders in public. But the
record of the past forty years reveals that his realist approach has proved
to be decidedly unrealistic. That is because, contrary to Kissinger’s
teaching, the counterpoint to realism is not always idealism or excessive morality. Clearheaded pursuit of the national interest can also be
clouded by sentimentality, wishful thinking, illusion, grandiosity, even
self-delusion. Kissinger long ago convinced himself that he and Chinese leaders shared a hard-nosed pragmatism based on mutual selfinterest. “I could not have encountered a group of interlocutors more
receptive to Nixon’s style of diplomacy than the Chinese leaders.”59
He was comfortable in his assumption that the Chinese perceived their
own self-interest as he believes he would have seen it if he were in
their place. So he constantly projected onto Beijing his views of their
self-interest. It is a variation of a phenomenon Kissinger often decries:
American diplomats sometimes contracting what has been called clientitis. They become the policy captives of the countries to which they
are posted and end up advocating that government’s views to Washington instead of the reverse. But Kissinger, with characteristic intellectual complexity, takes clientitis to a new level. He sympathetically
presents to his American audience not merely the official Chinese position, but also his own imaginary conception of what the Chinese position would be if they were as rational as he is. Kissinger has written
that in “our opening to China . . . [o]ur objective was to purge our for-
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eign policy of all sentimentality.”60 It may be that he and Nixon only
replaced one form of sentimentality with their own, though Nixon,
unlike Kissinger, apparently recovered his perspective enough to predict a future Taiwan free of Chinese Communist domination.
Some passages in On China suggest Kissinger’s knowing psychological susceptibility to China’s advances. Kissinger fully recognizes how “Chinese statesmen historically have excelled at using
hospitality, ceremony, and carefully cultivated personal relationships
as tools of statecraft.”61 His chapter on the history of China’s relations
with the outside world contains an interesting passage from the Han
Dynasty: “For those who come to surrender, the emperor [should]
show them favor [and] personally serve them wine and food so as to
corrupt their mind.”62 A few hundred pages later, Kissinger describes
the lavish banquets his Chinese hosts bestowed on him—and includes
in his book a photograph showing Zhou En-lai using his chopsticks
to place food on Kissinger’s plate.
Whether Kissinger has been beguiled and seduced by a series of
Chinese leaders, or has merely invested so much of his life in vindicating the original flawed Sino-U.S. understanding that he can no
longer deviate from his own orthodoxy, the consequences are the
same. Or perhaps the explanation for Kissinger’s vulnerability to Chinese influence is more geostrategic and less psychological. Intellectually and professionally, Kissinger’s, and Nixon’s, strong anti-Soviet
background doubtless predisposed them to align the United States
with China, Moscow’s chief adversary at the time. (“The enemy of
my enemy is my friend.”) Kissinger probably exaggerated his own
neutrality when he described the debate within official national security and foreign policy circles over which way American policy should
tilt. He recalls that there were “Slavophiles,” “Sinophiles,” and those
who advocated Realpolitik. “Not surprisingly,” he writes, “I was on
the side of the Realpolitikers.”63 Richard Nixon’s seminal thinking on
the need to open relations with China was set forth in his October
1967 article in Foreign Affairs, in which he wrote: “[W]e simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there
to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, and threaten its neighbors.”64
When, in 1994, Kissinger reviewed the consequences of his approach to China, he concluded that “[t]he certitudes of physical threat
and hostile ideology characteristic of the Cold War are gone.”65 But
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three years earlier, Deng Xiaoping—supposedly the un-Mao, who had
already ordered China’s military to “shed some blood”66 in Tiananmen
Square—gave fair warning of what lay ahead for the world: “hide our
capacities and bide our time.”67 Given the present state of Sino-U.S.
relations, the danger of conflict over Taiwan, North Korea, the South
China Sea, Beijing’s essentially subversive role on proliferation and
third world governance, and a myriad of other issues, it is fair to ask:
Who are the true realists?
As he again surveyed China-U.S. relations recently in the context
of increasing Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea and elsewhere, Kissinger warned: “Care must be taken lest both sides analyze
themselves into self-fulfilling prophecies.”68 The problem is that there
has been too little reflection and fresh thinking in the West regarding
Communist China’s long-term motives. We are now being forced, belatedly, to reexamine long-held premises and assumptions. Kissinger’s
On China provides abundant evidence of the reasons why reassessment
is needed—now more than ever.
NOTES
1. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1994), 724.
2. Henry Kissinger, On China, (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011), 447.
3. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 719.
4. Kissinger, On China, 249.
5. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 696.
6. Ibid.
7. Joint Communiqué of the People’s Republic of China and the United States
of America, February 28, 1972, reprinted in Richard Nixon, Speeches, Writings, Documents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 225.
8. Kissinger, On China, 272.
9. Ibid., 216.
10. Miles Yu, “Inside China,” The Washington Times, July 20, 2011.
11. William Safire, “The Biggest Vote,” The New York Times, May 18, 2000.
12. Testimony of James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, before the
Senate Intelligence Committee, March 10, 2011.
13. Kissinger, On China, 119.
14. Ibid., 125.
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15. Ibid., 129.
16. Ibid., 132.
17. Ibid., 159.
18. The Diane Rehm Show, Interview with Henry Kissinger, WAMU-FM,
April 7, 1994. Emphasis added.
19. Kissinger, On China, 266.
20. Ibid., 258.
21 Ibid., 279.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., emphasis added.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 280.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset
and Dunlap, 1978), 561-564.
29. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), 1062; and Diplomacy, 727. Emphasis added).
30. Ibid.
31. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 723-724.
32. Kissinger, On China, 307.
33. Ibid.
34. Kissinger, On China, 271. “[Nixon’s] intention, he affirmed, was to complete the normalization process in his second term.”
35. Joseph Nye, The Boston Globe, February 7, 1996, 6.
36. William Perry, The New York Times, January 24, 1996, 1.
37. Ibid., 476.
38. After China complained about a Strait transit by the Kitty Hawk in 2007,
Admiral Timothy Keating, the Pacific Commander, replied: “We don’t need
China’s permission to go through the Taiwan Straits. It is international water.
We will exercise our free right of passage whenever and wherever we choose
to.” “Sino-American Showdown in Taiwan Strait: Chinese Navy Confronted
USS Kitty Hawk,” Global Research, January 16, 2008. Kissinger does not
mention the incident.
39. Off-the-record Washington speech by a former U.S. official.
40. Kissinger, On China, 477.
41. Kissinger is decidedly ambiguous on the role of ambiguity in statecraft,
at least as it is practiced by others. Critical of Acheson’s lack of deterrent
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clarity in 1950, he takes great pride in his own “one China” formulation in
the Shanghai Communiqué, which could be a model of ambiguity as “the
lifeblood of diplomacy.” But then he criticizes President Reagan’s Third
Communiqué on Taiwan arms sales because it “is quite ambiguous, hence a
difficult roadmap for the future.” Kissinger, On China, 383.
42. See, e.g., Annual Report to Congress: The Military Power of the People’s
Republic of China, 2005, Office of the Secretary of Defense.
43. David E. Sanger, “U.S. Would Defend Taiwan, Bush Says,” The New York
Times, April 26, 2001.
44. Richard Nixon, Beyond Peace (New York: Random House, 1994), 133.
45. Ibid., 134. Emphasis added.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Kissinger, On China, 356.
49. Ibid., 492.
50. Ibid., 484.
51. Ibid., 525.
52. Ibid., 385.
53. Ibid., 356. To Chinese readers of Kissinger’s book, the title words On
China may look very much like “One China.”
54. Ibid., 23.
55. Ibid., 26.
56. Ibid., 29.
57. Ibid., 101.
58. Ibid., 386.
59. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 726.
60. Kissinger, White House Years, 191.
61. Kissinger, On China, 237.
62. Ibid., 21. Emphasis added.
63. Kissinger, White House Years, 182.
64. Richard Nixon, “Asia After Vietnam,” Foreign Affairs, 46.1 (1967): 121.
65. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 835.
66. The New York Times, June 4, 2010, 1.
67. “Deng Initiates New Policy ‘Guiding Principle,’” FBIS-CHI-91-215,
quoted in Kissinger, On China, 438.
68. “Avoiding a U.S.-China Cold War,” Henry A. Kissinger, The Washington
Post, January 14, 2011. See also “Our Fraught Place with China,” Joseph A.
Bosco, The Weekly Standard, January 21, 2011.
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REVIEWS
Everything is One
A Review of Eva Brann’s The Logos of Heraclitus: The First Philosopher of the West on
Its Most Interesting Term. Philadelphia: Paul
Dry Books, 2011. 160 pages, $16.95.
David Carl
The Greeks had but one word, logos, for both speech and
reasoning; not that they thought there was no speech
without reason, but no reasoning without speech; and the
act of reasoning they called syllogism, which signifieth
summing up the consequences of one saying to another.
—Hobbes, Leviathan I.iv.14
What is the relationship between what we say and what we think, or
how we think? In her new book Eva Brann demonstrates that these
questions are among the oldest (and most interesting) questions taken
up by Western philosophy, and that they find their origin in the Logos
of Heraclitus. This Logos, however, is not initially something spoken,
but something heard, and much hinges on the content and the nature
of Heraclitus’s hearing.
What Heraclitus heard was the Logos, for the Logos speaks (is a
Speaker) and the philosopher is one who hears. Heraclitus is “that
aboriginal listener to the Logos” (87).* But this is the beginning of the
mystery, not its solution; and teasing out the implications, the ambiguities (or ambivalencies), the paradoxes and possibilities of what the
Logos says is the primary task of Ms. Brann’s book. How exactly did
he hear what the Logos said? To whom or what was he listening? How
did he learn to hear so well? And how will he share, across the centuries, the timeless truth of what he heard?
Brann begins her account of Heraclitean hearing by introducing
us, by means of an analysis of Raphael’s School of Athens, to the figDavid Carl is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
*
Page numbers in parentheses refer to Eva Brann’s Heraclitus.
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ure of Heraclitus, and briefly relates the history of logos, as distinct
from the Heraclitean Logos. She then turns her attention, over the
course of four closely reasoned pages, to a detailed consideration of
a two-line fragment from Heraclitus’s lost treatise known as On Nature, D-K 50:1
To those hearing not me but the Saying, to say the same is
the Wise Thing: Everything [is] One. (16)
Through consideration of etymological detail informed by an imaginative intimacy with the history of Western philosophy and literature,
an understanding of this fragment emerges which highlights the stakes
of Heraclitus’s hearing: the Logos is a “Wise Thing,” and it is wise
for us to have knowledge of it “since it governs the relation of all
things to everything” (19). As we will see, the key word in this understanding is “relation.”
Seeing as Hearing
In the next sections of her book, Brann leads her reader towards an
appreciation of how the Logos both embodies and reveals the unity
“of all things to everything.” She first shows us that Heraclitus is particularly interested in the within and without of the cosmos, and that
he looks within in order to understand the without: “no one has ever
listened harder to the Logos within!” (87). This is not an unconscious
mixing of metaphors: this looking that is a form of listening is part of
the essential doubleness of Heraclitus’s thinking—a doubleness which
is as apparent in his form and style as it is in the content of his writing.
Brann’s discussion of fragmentation (“his inherent fragmentariness
entails a certain philosophical completeness” [93]), metaphor, and
Heraclitean punning is illuminating in this regard.
Twenty-five hundred years after Heraclitus composed the writings
we know as his Fragments, Wallace Stevens observed that “[t]he
world about us would be desolate except for the world within us,”2
and “it is a violence from within that protects us from a violence from
without.”3 Brann shows us that this salutary tension between the
within and the without, together with Stevens’ notion of violence, is
essential to the way Heraclitus listens to the Logos. Indeed, as we will
see, salutary tension is at the heart of Heraclitus’s understanding of
the cosmos.
His hearing will constantly merge with metaphorical forms of see-
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ing, for Heraclitus pays a great deal of attention to the physical world
around him. (“[O]f what there is sight, hearing, learning—these I
honor especially” [75].4) Moreover, the Logos he hears “is not audible
to the ears but to the soul” (76), nor is the cosmic Fire he sees visible
to the physical eye. For Heraclitus the eye and the ear are both
metaphors for forms of knowing, namely, listening and seeing. There
is deliberate, salutary tension in a mixed metaphor, and the harmony
at the core of Heraclitus’s view of nature is driven by tension—the
kind of tension that goes into stringing a bow or tuning a lyre. This is
why Heraclitus says that “[a]ll things come to be by strife” (106).5
Because of this strife, wrestling is another illuminating metaphor
in Heraclitus’s “tautly vital, twangingly alive, strainingly static cosmos”—a cosmos “locked in inimical embraces” that displays “a mode
of being that is a harsh, ever-unfulfilled striving” (90). On the way toward understanding how Heraclitean harmony (“there is a Unity relating Everything and All Things” [18]) arises out of this notion of
strife and tension, Brann treats us to insightful observations about Heraclitus’s relationships with Aristotle, Parmenides, Pythagoras and the
Milesian “proto-physicists”; she discusses the importance of metaphor
and ratio (“the Greek name for ratios is logoi, and logoi are the cosmic
unifying relations” [124]); she interprets Heraclitus’s notion of Fire
(“that pervasive quasi-material that allows all the elements to enter
into quantitative ratio-relations with each other” [44]); and she delves
into the etymological details of Heraclitus’s Greek in a revealing and
delightful way that is free of pedantic stodginess.
Ratios and Fire are both ways of putting things into relation with
one another. Relation “bonds two terms without merging them” (38),
and this is the key to understanding Heraclitus’s notion of the Logos.
Brann’s claim is a radical one, startling and yet compelling: she suggests that Heraclitus not only pondered what made “the multifarious
world one” (perhaps an inevitable question for a philosopher), but also
went on to posit that The Logos (as distinct from logos) was “all at
once the relater of all relations, beyond and within them, a maker of
the world-order and himself that order, a world governor, and also the
world—a doer, a sayer, and perhaps himself a listener” (42). Thus
Brann reveals the extreme possibilities of a Heraclitean “world-order,”
an order that is coherent and unified—a (contentiously) harmonious
and beautiful order—but also mysterious and enigmatic, for “non-
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sensory logoi govern the sensory world” (43). It is consequently an
order that demands a careful listening. But how do we listen to the
non-sensory? By developing the faculty that is capable of hearing
what Thinking itself has to say, both to us and about itself.
At this point Heraclitus sounds like something of a mystic. But
Brann’s book grounds Heraclitus’s thinking so firmly and compellingly in the context of musical ratio, chemistry, and physics that
the potential vagaries of mysticism are firmly left behind (“I don’t
think so ultimately uncompromising a philosophical physics ever
again comes on the scene” [89]). More importantly, Brann shows us
how Heraclitus’s thought transcends such distinctions as “mystic/rationalist” or “poet/philosopher” by taking us behind the screen of such
divisions. “One : Everything” [21] is the ultimate expression of the
Heraclitean philosophy. Heraclitus speaks to us from a time before
the distinctions between philosophy, science, and religion had been
so starkly delineated. For Heraclitus, investigating the cosmos was
the work of an entire human being, and understanding it required an
understanding of how “One : Everything” makes sense. This understanding requires us to grasp the relationship between the human and
divine as well as between man and nature. Thus Brann’s book ranges
through discussions of painting, sculpture, music, mathematics, theology, poetry, philosophy, and physics to reveal the prismatic aspect
of Heraclitus’s thought. It is not mysticism, but a way of thinking that
precedes the division between mysticism and rationalism. It is not science, but a mode of inquiry that antedates the schism between science
and philosophy.
Fire
Not surprisingly, in Brann’s account Fire is the key to the Heraclitean
system. What is surprising is how coherent a picture of the cosmos
Brann reveals behind the enigmatic darkness of Heraclitus’s fragments. Aristotle may have called him, “the obscure one,” but for
Brann the Heraclitean view is unified and eminently comprehensible
because it is rational. And because it is rational, it is measurable. The
measurability of everything is at the heart of Brann’s radical interpretation of Heraclitean unity, and it is Fire which makes this possible:
“Fire enables the Logos to inform the cosmos with the most determinate relationality thinkable, that expressed in number-ratios” (63). For
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a long-time reader of Heraclitus, this claim hits like a stunning revelation. Suddenly the possibility of a coherent Heraclitean system
emerging from those “darkly oracular sayings” (68)—sayings that
Socrates claimed it would require a Delian diver to understand6—
seems not only possible, but positively inevitable. Through her discussion of ratio and measure Brann carries us down to the bottom of
Heraclitus’s dark sea, and she reveals the hidden treasures buried
there.
Brann’s account of the Heraclitean notion of fire has something
in common with the following lines from Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia:
Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within
us. A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too
little after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres,
and to burn like Sardanapalus, but the wisedom of funerall Laws found the folly of prodigall blazes, and reduced
undoing fires unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein
few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a
mourner, and an Urne.7
Browne would have agreed with Brann’s description of fire’s double
nature “as being one element among elements and as acting like a
principle through them all” (69). Again we see in “One : Everything”
a union of poetic imagery and suggestiveness with a deep philosophic
insight into the nature and workings of the cosmos.
Other revelatory (and controversial) statements in Brann’s book
include the claims that he is the first philosopher in the West as well
as the first physicist (that is, the first to give an account of the conservation of matter); that he is the “discoverer of transcendence” (99);
that scholars have deformed a central aspect of Heraclitus’s thought
be replacing the ratio aspect of his thinking with various forms of the
copula “is,” thereby misunderstanding the importance of relation to
the Logos; and that he is not the infamous and perplexing philosopher
of flux many of us have long considered him to be—especially those
of us who formed an early impression of Heraclitus from our encounters with Nietzsche.
Tension vs. Flux
Brann’s argument that Heraclitus is not a relativist is easy enough to
accept. That he is also not the enigmatic philosopher of flux, however,
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is a more disconcerting, but equally well-supported thesis of Brann’s
book.
Brann does not resolve all of Heraclitus’s “paradoxes and contradictions” (68), nor would she care to; for paradoxes are “the expressions precisely adequate to his world-order” (86). Moreover,
“Heraclitus speaks paradoxically because that is how the world is”
(88). Paradox is a form of verbal and logical tension—and tension,
for Heraclitus, is the source of harmony. Tension is “Heraclitus’s most
remarkable physical notion” (78), and this notion replaces the more
familiar notion of Heraclitus’s flux. It is tension that makes the fundamental ratio “One : Everything” cohere. Brann explores the idea of
this unifying tension through discussions of war and wrestling, music
and harmony, punning, paradox, and metaphor.
In a consideration of the way in which Heraclitus uses metaphor
(helpfully set out in contrast to the way Homer uses metaphor), Brann
observes that “Heraclitean aphorisms are meant to be unsettling”
(71)—but not therefore unintelligible. Unlike Homer’s often consolatory or comforting metaphors, Heraclitus employs metaphors that
highlight the “antagonistic opposition” (72) of his terms. Understanding how Heraclitus’s metaphors express this antagonistic opposition
helps us to comprehend the role that tension-dependent harmony plays
in the overall ratio-based ordering of the cosmos. (The famous image
of stringing the bow and the lyre in D-K 51is a perfect example of
this sort of metaphor.)
The cosmic ordering based on the ratio “One : Everything” is the
touchstone to which Brann’s book constantly returns. However far her
reasoning or examples wander, she always comes back to this fundamental way of understanding how tension holds the Heraclitean account of the cosmos together, and how the “pervasive mutuality of
force is the principle of oneness—of coexistence in a force-community” (79).
“The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.”8
And at times the book does wander far, but it is a wonder-full wandering. Brann’s book, divided into five sections of unequal lengths,
considers the figure of Heraclitus, the history of logos, Heraclitus’s
unique Logos, the afterlife of the Logos, and the Soul of Heraclitus.
Along the way, and especially in the “afterlife” section, there are brief
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but fruitfully provocative accounts of Euclid, Homer, John the Evangelist, Nicholas of Cusa, Descartes, Galileo, Newton (she calls Newton’s Third Law “the dynamic formulation of Heraclitus’s world”
[79]), wrestling, war, Hegel, Baudelaire, Heidegger, the coining of
money, logic, Force, matter, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Zoroaster, Plotinus, and perhaps most surprisingly of all, co-author of The Federalist
James Madison.
Brann’s claim that Madison’s theory of faction (developed in The
Federalist, No. 10) is Heraclitean and that therefore “the Founders’
classical liberalism . . . honors the Heracliteanism of the world” (121)
may be the most delightfully audacious moment in the book. Yet she
presents her case with such calmly reasoned grace that even her most
spectacular suggestions seem obvious. It had never occurred to me,
before reading Brann’s book, that there was such a thing as “the Heracliteanism of the world,” and certainly not that it found expression
in the Founding Fathers’ notion of liberalism. But her argument presents us with convincing reasons for both hypotheses.
In the “afterlife” chapter, Brann considers not so much the disciples of Heraclitus as those figures who have contributed to the ongoing development of the Heraclitean Logos, figures like Plato, Aristotle,
Hegel, Nietzsche, and Madison. I would like to briefly consider another such figure here—an author who may never have read a word
of Heraclitus and yet whose work seems to express in twentieth-century terms the “Heracliteanism of the world” that Brann reveals in the
works of earlier writers and thinkers.
The connection with Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa was suggested to me by a footnote in which Brann says that Heraclitus was
one who “declined to travel—except within himself” (151). I was reminded of a passage from Pessoa’s mysterious prose work The Book
of Disquiet. Pessoa refers to himself as a “nomad in my self-awareness”9 and exhorts his reader to be “the Columbus of your soul.”10
And he also wrote of the Logos: “there are also, in prose, gestural
subtleties carried out by great actor, the Word, which rhythmically
transforms into its bodily substance the impalpable mystery of the universe.”11 Pessoa’s “great actor” is a descendant of Heraclitus’s Logos,
performing the Heraclitean act of transforming “impalpable mystery”
into “bodily substance.” Even the fundamental ratio “One : Everything” finds expression in Pessoa’s writing:
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And so, in order to feel oneself being purely Oneself, each
must be in a relationship with all–absolutely all–other beings, and with each in the most profound relationship possible. Now, the most profound relationship possible is that
of identity. Therefore, in order to feel oneself being purely
Oneself, each must feel itself being all the others, absolutely consubstantiated with all the others.12
Reading this passage in light of Brann’s emphasis on relationality as
the key to understanding Heraclitus’s view of the cosmos one is reminded of D-K 10: “Out of everything one and out of one everything”
(56).
One and/or Many
One of the most intriguing parts of Brann’s book is her account of the
relationship between Parmenides and Heraclitus—a relationship that
will be characterized by tension, and thus ultimately be more Heraclitean in its nature than Parmenidean. These thinkers are usually understood as presenting us with a clear choice: being or becoming.
Brann’s reading is more nuanced, and if her book deprives us of the
romantic notion of Heraclitus as the wild philosopher of chaos and
flux and the bête noire of formalists, systematizers and the methodologically hidebound (“the picture of Heraclitus as the philosopher of
ultimate instability, of radical mutability, is just ludicrous” [100)]),
then she gives us something much richer in return.
By rejecting the picture of Heraclitus as “a fluxist all the way
down” (102) and as a “philosophical whirling dervish” (104), Brann
allows his thinking to enter into provocative relation with that of Parmenides. Brann places Heraclitus and Parmenides “into a time-and
space-indifferent dialectic” (102). While Heraclitus will appeal to
those who “are gripped by the strife-locked unity of the physical cosmos” (102) his view is nevertheless no longer presented as an either/or
alternative to Parmenidean being. Instead Brann poses for us what
may well constitute the most interesting question of Western philosophy: What is the relation between Logos and Being? Tracing the
forms that this question has taken in epistemology, metaphysics,
ethics, and aesthetics over the past 2,500 years would be a massive
undertaking, but Brann opens the question up for us in a few pages,
starting with the provocative claim that “Being is largely mute sub-
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stance, Logos mostly talkative relationality” (103). Brann finds common ground for Heraclitus and Parmenides in the claim that “they
both see the same, a Whole, an All, a One, and search out its nature”
(104). The nature of this “One” is different for each of them, but the
fact that they are both intent on searching out the nature of what is
and how it is unites them in a common philosophic endeavor.
Whether what is is Being itself or the tension-unifying Logos
(“the Logos works in self-opposing ways” [106]) is a millennia-old
philosophical question. By analyzing brief passages from the two writers and focusing on their uses of pan, “all,” and panta, “everything,”
Brann reintroduces her reader to the timeless immediacy of philosophical investigation.
Soul
Throughout her book, Brann reveals Heraclitus as psychologist,
philosopher, poet, proto-chemist, and physicist (“the first modern scientist” [46]). In the unity of these various modes of inquiry the fundamental ratio of the Logos, “One : Everything,” is embodied in his
own work. Brann constantly revisits Heraclitus from the different perspectives that characterize his work: the human side, the cosmic side,
and the divine overview that unifies the immanent and transcendent
aspects of the first two perspectives.
The final chapter of The Logos of Heraclitus sums up, steps back,
and takes a swing at what, along with Logos and Being, may be the
most perplexing of Western philosophic categories—that of Soul.
Brann’s distinction between logos—what, at the human level, is
“the more or less thoughtful utterance of our mind and its mindfulness”—and Logos—“which is divine but perhaps not a nameable
deity” and which “governs and pilots the cosmos” (123)—reminds
us that in terms of the ordered relations that constitute and govern
the cosmos it is the Logos “as cosmic fire” that makes sense of the
“One : Everything” relation, even when it comes to understanding
the relation between the human and the divine. Even here some form
of rigorous measurement is possible.
At the end of her book, Brann returns to her thesis that “Logos is
both nature and its language, and it expresses itself in measures”
(125). All ratios are forms of measurement, and measurement is an
essentially scientific way of approaching the cosmos. She raises the
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question that has been looming since we first heard of Heraclitus’s
enigmatic hearing: “how does Heraclitus himself come to know and
understand this language?” (126). In exploring this question, Brann
suggests an answer to the question, “What is the soul?” Her answer
begins with D-K 101: “I searched myself.” Heraclitus’s searching
ranges across the dual realms that Stevens referred to as “the world
about us” and “the world within us,” because for Heraclitus there is
no understanding that does not encompass and unify these worlds.
There can be no distinction between outer and inner; harmony requires
tension, but not chaos; unity requires conflict, but not dissolution.
“Heraclitus walks the ways of his soul, which are boundless,” and
Brann is our guide on this exploration of “the never-ending ways of
an enormously capacious inner place” (126). She offers us a conception of the soul as “a mirror of the cosmos”; yet the journey she leads
us through remains mathematical and grounded in measurement (“this
world soul is a concatenation of compounded ratios” [127]), so that it
avoids the abyss of vague mysticism. There is no flabbiness in this
inner journey. If Heraclitus is to remain a mystical thinker he will have
to do so on the most rigorous of terms, and only by unifying mysticism
with a scientific account of the cosmos—another unifying tension in
Heraclitus’s thought.
Personal Knowing
Heraclitus’s accomplishment—the most radical form of fulfilling the
Delphic injunction to “know thyself”—is open to anyone. Unlike Parmenides, he was not specially chosen to be a unique human passenger
in a god’s chariot. Heraclitus’s conveyance is not a magic carpet; it is
rigorous introspection aimed both at self-knowledge as a form of cosmic awareness and at cosmic understanding as a form of self-knowing.
This is serious thoughtfulness, engaged, sustained, and maintained.
Thoughtfulness by means of the Logos is available to anyone, as Heraclitus says in D-K 113: “Common to everyone is thinking.” Brann
points out the pun on xynon, “common,” and xyn nooi, “with mind,”
that appears in several of Heraclitus’s fragments (129-30). In D-K
107, he excludes only those with “barbarian souls” from participation
in this common cognition, for they are “the speechless souls of those
who are incapable of hearing and agreeing with the Logos and of employing logoi, rational expressions” (76).
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Brann’s investigation of Heraclitus is witty, personal, insightful,
and scholarly; but she remains on guard against the pitfalls of traditional academic scholarship. She is right to interpret D-K 40 as saying
that “heaps of learning lead to knowing everything and nothing. It
drowns out the Logos” (27). And she is also right to approach Heraclitus as she does: as a fellow eavesdropper and co-conspirator in his
investigations rather than as a stuffy academic parading out an impressive knowledge of Greek grammar and the Western tradition to
show us how much she has read. Brann’s book does not drown out
the Logos; it strives to clear a space for its greater resonances. Her
take on Heraclitus is a personal one, and therefore an intimate and revealing one. The Logos of Heraclitus shows us by example how to be
“keenly and extensively observant” (27), and leaves us, as inspired
and excited readers, to determine for ourselves the quality and nature
of what we see and what we hear.
There is an overarching perspective from which “human beings
have the life of divinity within them” (136). “Gods may always have
some touch of mortality in their nature and humans may become immortal in time” (82). This is the most inclusive perspective that Brann
reveals to the reader, a perspective from which the paradox of fathoming man’s relation to the divine and the relation of divinity to the
human are equally puzzling, and equally necessary to our own fullest
self-understanding. Attaining this perspective is the task of the Heraclitean philosopher, the person determined to understand how “everything is one.” But Brann does not rest content with mere understanding.
The final fragment to which she turns her attention completes the
bridge between saying (a form of the logos) and doing (a form of
being). “What does it mean to do true things?” she asks (138). This is
the note on which Brann chooses to end her book, the note that completes the hearing of Heraclitus, who learned how to listen to the cosmos. But he learned to listen in order to do what? That question
remains to be taken up by the reader.
NOTES
1. The fragments of Heraclitus’s text, which survive mostly in the form of
quotations in the works of later authors, were compiled and numbered in Die
Fragmente der Vorskratiker, translated by Hermann Diels, edited by Walter
Kranz, Vol. I (Berlin: Weidman, 1903; reprint of 6th ed., Munich: Weidman,
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1992). This book has become the standard text for citing the fragments, which
are usually referred to by “D-K number”; for instance, the passage cited here
is known as D-K 50.
2. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1942), 169.
3. Ibid., 36.
4. This is Brann’s translation of D-K 55.
5. Brann’s translation of D-K 8.
6. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. Robert Drew
Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925; reprint with an introduction by Herbert Strainge Long, 1972), II.22.
7. Thomas Browne, Hydrotaphia, Urne-Buriall; or, A Brief Discourse on
the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in Norfolk (London: Henry Brome, 1658),
80-81.
8. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (New York:
Penguin, 2001), 112.
9. Pessoa, Disquiet, 101.
10. Ibid., 400.
11. Ibid., 198.
12. Fernando Pessoa, Always Astonished, translated by Edwin Honig (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 30.
�
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 54, Number 1 (Fall 2012)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Deziree Arnaiz
The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean,
St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;
Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.
Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s College, P.O. Box 2800, Annapolis, MD 21404-2800.
©2012 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
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ISSN 0277-4720
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The St. John’s Communications Office
Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available online at
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�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�Contents
Essays & Lectures
The Dispassionate Study of the Passions ..............................1
Eva Brann
On Biblical Style .................................................................17
Tod Linafelt
What is the Surface Area of a Hedgehog?...........................45
Barry Mazur
Some Reflections on Darwin and C. S. Peirce ....................87
Curtis Wilson and Chaninah Maschler
Poem
The Laws of Physics .........................................................124
Marlene Benjamin
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�ESSAYS & LECTURES
1
The Dispassionate Study
of the Passions
Eva Brann
Plato’s dialogue Gorgias ends with a long speech culminating
in a rousing cry by an aroused Socrates. He is speaking to
Gorgias’s student Callicles about his swaggering opinionatedness and their common uneducatedness. The words he uses
are neanieusthai, ‟to act like a youth,” to behave like a kid,
and apaideusia, ‟lack of teaching,” ignorance. And then he
concludes with a condemnation of Callicles’s whole ‟way of
life”—tropos tou biou—‟to which you summon me, believing in it”—hōi su pisteuōn eme parakaleis. esti gar oudenos
axios, ō Kallikleis—‟For it is worth nothing, Callicles!” My
fine 1922 edition of the Gorgias by the classicist Otto Apelt
rightly translates the address O Kallikleis, jingling in the Gorgian manner with parakaleis, as ‟My Callicles,” for there is
a curious, straining intimacy in Socrates’s peroration.1 The
rest is silence. It is a favorite question of mine to ask our
freshmen at St. John’s College, who all read this dialogue,
what happened that night at home, when Callicles was, perhaps, by himself.
Now some of you may have heard of the late Seth Bemardete, a student of Leo Strauss and a brilliant classicist at
New York University. In our youth we traveled together, and
Seth once imparted to me the following wild conjecture.
‟Plato,” it was said, was a nickname given to him because
of his broad shoulders.2 His real name was Aristocles: Callicles, Aristocles—he of noble fame, he of good fame; kalos
Eva Brann is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture was
presented to the graduate students of the School of Philosophy at the
Catholic University of America on March 30, 2012.
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k’agathos was the Greek way of denominating what Chaucer
calls ‟a verray parfit gentil knicht,” a good and noble knight,
a perfect gentleman.3 So Plato represents himself in this dialogue as a noble yet rudely unregenerate youth in his moment
before conversion, a conversion accomplished by a usually
imperturbable Socrates impassioned to speak, for once, extendedly and hotly.
Do I believe this clever combination of clues? Not really.
Plato was, after all, of good family and a writer of tragedies
before Socrates captivated him, and the swaggering surly
youth Callicles has little of the high-bred, suave poet about
him, a poet who was, moreover, probably already philosophically involved when he met Socrates.4
Nonetheless, this anecdote about a conjecture seems to
me thought-provoking. Here, for once, Plato permits us to
see the spectacle of rational Socrates in a passion, un-ironic,
touched to the quick—surely this is not a mere mean anger
at being dissed by a Gorgiastic know-it-all.
Many of you are already teachers, though perhaps young
in comparison to Plato (b. 427 B.C.E.) when he wrote the
Gorgias (c. 387 B.C.E.). He was probably forty, and his
Socrates (b. 470) was probably about the same age at the dramatic date of this dialogue (shortly after 429, the year of Pericles’s death, which is mentioned as a recent event in 503c).
You will have experienced the unbalancing sense that the
stakes are high and souls are to be pierced and that passion,
or an exhibition of it, is in order. It is, to be sure, a wonderful
question about the nature of passion whether deliberate
demonstrativeness or disciplined reticence, either in the
speaker or the listener, does more to nourish it or to dampen
it, and how spontaneity and artfulness play into the effect.
But we do know that Aristotle believed Socrates’s display in
the Gorgias was effective. He tells of a Corinthian farmer
who was inspired by his reading of the dialogue to leave his
vineyard to its own devices, to join the Platonic circle, and
henceforth to make his soul the ‟seedbed,” that is, the seminar, of Plato’s philosophy.5
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
The Gorgias is, therefore, a good reference for beginning
to talk about the affects as an object of study. Not merely because it documents, so to speak, that people concerned with
the soul have in fact plenty of temperament—be it sober
Socrates or meek Jesus (e.g., Matt. 21:12, Jesus wreaking
havoc in the temple)—and that they don’t leave their affect
at the entrance to their inquiries or preachings. I don’t, of
course, mean the little negative furies that Socrates calls
‟eristic,” the eruptions of the contentious desire to win arguments, but I’m thinking of a large positive passion.
So this is where I zero in on my particular problem for
this talk. I have read my way through a tiny fraction of the
huge mass of contemporary writing on the emotions. I’ve
come away with the cumulative—documentable—impression that there is a thoroughgoing misapprehension about a
putative pagan rationalism and a supposed Western tradition
for which it is held responsible and which breaks out with insidious virulence in the Enlightenment. This view owes
something, I suppose, to Nietzsche’s brilliantly skewed portrait of the ‟despotic logician,” Socrates, the monster with
the ‟one, great Cyclopean eye,” in whom “the lovely madness of artistic enthusiasm never glowed.”6 The attribution of
monocular Cyclopeanism—i.e., vision without depth, carrying with it the charge of despotic sobriety—implies thought
unravished by beauty. All this imputed to a man who thought
that our soul contained a world that we could recover by
going within,7 and believed that true poetry requires a
Dionysiac frenzy inspired by the Muses, one cognate in kind
to the philosophical longing for beauty!8 All this ascribed to
a man who, attending a drinking party, bathed for once and
wearing shoes, slyly paints a verbal picture of Eros that is in
fact a self-portrait—Socrates looking at himself from a distance and recognizing the unwashed and unshod god!9
So much for the picture of Socrates the rationalist. And
something similar holds for Aristotle the intellectualist. His
great work, the founding book of institutionalizable philosophy (since it pre-sets the problems to be solved in Meta-
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physics III), begins with an appetite, a root passion, which,
in the form of the desire to know, is humanly universal and
culminates in a passionate portrait of the ultimate object of
appetition. This ultimate object is a divinity that attracts,
without returning, love—an object that satisfies, that fulfills,
by its mere actuality, by its unadulterated energeia (Metaphysics II; XII.7), as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94:
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
unmoved . . .
except that the pure energeia of the divinity is the very opposite of the practically complete inertia of those unaffectable
human objects of attraction, these beautiful but hyletic lumps
of mere resistance that the speaker of the poem is excoriating.
Would it be too much to claim that this is the difference
between the philosophical Greeks and the God-regarding Hebrews, more significant than Homer’s anthropomorphic polytheism, which is in any case more characteristic of the poets
and the people than of the philosophers? I mean the lack of
reciprocity between adoring human and worshipped divinity:
The Socratic forms are great powers (Sophist 247e), but even
when they come on the comic stage in visible shape—which
they do in Aristophanes’s Clouds where they appear as
wordily nebulous beings, as shaped mists—they don’t do a
thing for their summoning worshipper, Socrates. In fact they
abandon him to possible suffocation in his thinkaterion—the
play leaves this uncomic outcome open—and exit satisfied
with their ‟temperate” performance (Clouds 269, 1509). The
Aristotelian divinity, Nous, is similarly unresponsive, an object of uninvolved attraction. The God of the Jews, on the
other hand, is beneficently or banefully involved with his
people, and when a certain Jewish sect grows into a great religion, He becomes caring outreach itself, namely, Love (e.g.,
Exodus 20:1-6, I John 4:8, 16).
Why am I dwelling first on the pagans and on the Chris-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
tians in talking to you about the study of the passions, when
the contemporary writers on the emotions simply drown out
these earlier voices by their volume? It’s not that I have much
faith in the explanatory power of chronology or in those longitudinal studies by which a genetic history is attributed to
ideas, and which tend to develop more arcane information
than illuminating depth. I can think of a half-dozen reasons
for my distrust, which there is no time to set out at the
podium, though we might talk about the implied historicism
of such studies in the next few days. Moreover, it is probably
less necessary at a Catholic university than at any other to try
to induce respect for the tradition. There is, however, a particular way in which I think that emotion studies should begin
with, or pick up at some point, the great ancient and medieval
works—of the latter, above all, Thomas’s ‟Treatise on the
Passions,” which he placed in the very center of the Summa
Theologiae, for this monk knew—God knows how—everything about human passion.
I think these pre-modern works should be studied for their
shock value, for the news they contain for us. Such a reading,
a reading that places them not in the bygone superseded past
but in a recalcitrantly unfashionable present, requires a difficult and never quite achievable art, one that graduate students
should certainly be eager to acquire: first, the art of summing
up, with some credibility, what a philosopher is really and at
bottom about (I don’t mean ‟all about,” a hand-waving locution, but the compact gist of his intention); and second, the
art of discerning how the particular part on which you mean
to focus is, or fails to be, properly derivative from that central
intention. Then, opposing gist to gist and consequence to consequence, there will emerge a coherent and discussable
schema both of the general notions that preoccupy the
denizens of modernity willy-nilly and of the sophisticated
twists that studious scholars and trendy intellectual elites
have given them. Approached in this way, emotion studies
seem to me as necessary to our self-understanding as any subject can be—necessary to us as human beings with a contem-
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porary affectivity.
So now let me give you some, perhaps vulnerably sweeping, observations about more recent emotional studies, particularly in English-speaking lands. The groundbreaking
works for us were English; I will name Errol Bedford (1956)10
and Anthony Kenny (1963).11 But the American father of this
field is Robert Solomon with his book The Passions (1976).12
The Solomonic beginning and its consequences are full
of oddities. (I am avoiding the harsher term ‟self-contradictions.”) The thesis of the book is ‟to return the passions to
the central and defining role,” snatched from them by
Socrates, and ‟to limit the pretensions of ‘objectivity’ and
self-demeaning reason that have exclusively ruled Western
philosophy, religion, and science” since his days.13
Well, I guess we’ve read different works of Western philosophy. But now comes a surprise. How will this salvation
from two and a half millennia of despotic rationalism be
achieved? We must recognize that ‟an emotion is a judgment.”14 Of course, this dictum runs into difficulties concerning the meaning of non-rational judgments. Indeed, Solomon
eventually accepted that his claim is actually a cognitive theory. As such, he says rightly, it has ‟become the touch-stone
of all philosophical theorizing about emotions.” He could, in
any case, hardly escape this cognitivist denomination, since
it turns out that we become responsible for our emotions by
adopting this very theory of cognitive emotion. For as the
theory works its way into our unconscious volitions, it will
become true, and our emotions will indeed be as much in our
control as our judgments;15 so control is what it’s—after all—
about.
The Stoics are the moderns among the ancients. Their
cognitive theories, the first truly representational theories, are
more future-fraught than any others in antiquity that I know
of; they dominate modernity until Heidegger’s Being and
Time. The Stoics are hard to study, because the deepest of
them, belonging to the so-called Early Stoa, exist only in
fragments. But we have an extended text on Stoic passion
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
theory, the third and fourth books Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. Some of you, who have read the work, will recognize
that the modern dictum ‟an emotion is a judgment” is pure
Neostoicism. Neostoicism has, in fact, dominated modern
emotion studies. One major work in this vein is Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions
(2001).16
But how strange! The Stoics meant to reduce emotions
to mistakes, to diseases, to pathologies, of judgment. An emotion is a false appraisal, a perturbed opinion about what matters: an ‟upheaval of thought.” It is a deep and complex
theory underwritten by the Stoics’ fearless physicalism, their
notion of a material substratum, the pneuma, on whose
ground the psychic capacities can morph into one another.
But there is no question that, taken summarily, rationality
trumps affect. How odd, then, that modem theories so largely
save the emotions from rationalism by rationalizing them.
And I’ll list associated oddities.
First is the pervasive fear for the emotions, the sense that
we moderns have suppressed and demeaned them, that they
need saving. What teacher of the young (as scholars by and
large are) or observers of the world (as some of them may
be) could possibly think that that was what was troubling the
nations, cities, neighborhoods!
Second is a curtailed sense of thought in the West. I think
I’ve given some prime examples of the interpenetration of
thought and affect, even of the primacy of appetition in the
human soul in antiquity. When the ancients fight the passions
it is because they are so alive, experientially alive, to the
meaning of the word pathos, ‟suffering,” and the effect of its
licensed reign, its invited tyranny. It is really, I think, a modern idea of emotion that is at work here, among our contemporaries, one which pits its softness against hard reason.
Inherited Enlightenment terminology indeed conveys this
sense that our passions are attenuated, all but quelled by reason. The pivotal figure here is Hume. In his Treatise of
Human Nature, the term ‟passion” begins to be displaced by
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‟emotion.” He uses both, mostly interchangeably. But emotion is the word of the future. Solomon’s book is entitled The
Passions, but the key word inside is ‟emotions.” Your own
conference called for papers on ‟Emotion.”
‟Emotion” derives from e-movere, Latin for ‟to move
out.” The significance of this substitution of emotion for passion is powerful. Ancient pathos, passion, was an affect emanating from an object; the object elicited the responsive
affect, from the outside in. Modern emotion comes from inside out; it emphasizes expression; subject prevails over object. It is the Romantic worm eating its way out of the
Enlightened apple.
At the same time, the non-affective, the rational part of
the subject becomes mere reason. Hume, famously, says:
‟Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of passions, and
can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey
them.”17 He can say that because Humean and enlightened
reason is not deeply affective, not driven by love, and so its
relation to emotion may indeed be one of subservience, standoff, or finally, enmity. I need hardly add that with this transformation of the appetitive, longing, loving, intellect into
manipulative, instrumental, willful rationality, philosophy
loses its proper meaning and becomes a profession. My brush
here is broad, but, I think, it has some good overlap with the
case. So my second oddity is the severely foreshortened view
of the capabilities of passionate thought.
Now a third curious notion, the oddest one of all: the unreflective launching of an enterprise which is, on the face of
it, like embarking on a destroyer with the idea of going swimming. The vessel of war displaces, cleaves, churns up the element, but, absent a shipwreck, the sailor stays dry. So the
student of emotion banishes perturbations, analyzes wholes,
whips up terminology, and, unless melancholy seizes him,
sails high and dry over the billowing depths of feeling, with
much solid bulkhead keeping him from immersion in the element to be apprehended. This not very elegant simile is just
a way of expressing my surprise at the fact that emotion stud-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
ies tend to precipitate themselves into a dispassionate subject
without much thought about how such a subject can come to
be—about how emotion can be subjected to thought without
being denatured in the process.
Here, incidentally, lies, it seems to me, the best reason
why cognitive scientists, and those philosophers who like to
be on solid ground, are by and large physicalists and might
well regard the Stoics as their avatars.18 What matter-and-itsmotions has in its favor in emotion studies is that in this spatial form the different motions of the mind appear not to
occlude each other; spatio-temporal events, laid our in extension and sequence, have patency. However, since cognitive
brain studies, including the emotion research, depend on prior
conceptualization and introspective protocols, it is hard to
think of them as independent of a philosophical phenomenology.
Therefore, in the unavoidable preparatory philosophical
exploration, the perplexity of thinking about feeling remains
a vexing one, the more so since it appears to me to be a variant of the greatest quandary, now and always: How is thinking about any form of our consciousness even conceivable?
How is it—or is it, indeed—that thought about awareness
does not collapse into a union, as does ‟thinking of thinking,”
the noēsis noēseōs of the Nous?19 How can we know that
thought about itself or its fellow internalities does not transform its object out of its true being?
Just this latter eventuality makes emotion studies problematic. Study does have its own affect, one of the most interesting in the list of feelings, namely, interest itself. The
word—from interesse, ‟to be in the midst of”—signifies what
student parlance calls ‟being into it.”20
To study is to bring to bear received learning and native
analytic and combinatory capacities on a determinate object.
If study is of a high quality, it is preceded and accompanied
by its opposite, leisure—free time for meditating or musing,
during which original questions rise up and take shape. But
the business itself focuses on problems such as Aristotle first
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10
set for himself and left for his successors. Nowadays it’s the
dissertation advisor’s job. Now all the questions become formulated as demands for reasoning, and under reasoning all
things turn to reason—as under studious production all thinking turns to footnoted paper-writing.
It is indeed curious that this fact is not more of a perplexity to students of the emotions. Yet on second thought, it is
perhaps not so surprising that emotion studies seem so desiccated—perhaps they are not really more so than serious
scholarship ever must be. Robert Browning has his lovingly
respectful students sing at the “Grammarian’s Funeral”:
Learned we found him.
Yea, but we found him bald, too, eyes like lead,
Accents uncertain:
‟Time to taste life,” another would have said,
‟Up with the curtain!”
This man said rather, ‟Actual life comes next?
Patience a moment!
Grant I have mastered learning’s crabbed text,
Still there’s the comment.”
Here is the picture of interest raised to the pitch of passion. There is a sort of pure, dry, professional love (Browning’s grammarian’s passion was for Greek syntax, the
particles in particular) that can capture the loving admiration
of students. I know this from my own student days. But I
doubt that it suits philosophy, and, in particular, philosophizing about the emotions. Here another poem expresses our
condition more aptly: Wordsworth’s ‟The Tables Turned.” It
begins:
Up! up! my Friend and quit your books;
and this is its seventh verse:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
11
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
To be sure, there are now less intrusive ways of getting
inside Nature. Yet the conceptualizing of feeling will ever
and always be an abstraction in the basic sense—a removal,
a drawing away, from life. And in respect to the affects, this
sort of abstraction is doubly dubious. For in ordinary abstraction, the concept incarnate in concrete things is, by a specifically human cognitive operation, separated off from them.
But it is simply a premature, a prejudicial notion that the affects ‟stand under” (to use Kantian diction) abstractable concepts in the same way as do things.
It might follow that to view as problematic the dispassionate, studious study of the affects—be they impositions
from without or stirrings from within—is a sine qua non for
beginning rightly. I think it does follow.
There are early bonuses. I’ll give you in turn a suspicion,
a conjecture, and a figure. The suspicion is that we really are
partite beings, so that our affective and our thinking capacities are terminally distinct, structurally and dynamically heterogeneous. The conjecture is that it is this very disjunction
in their being which makes possible their conjunction in
thought and action, their effective complementarity. Here I’ve
written a sentence that I don’t even quite understand as I’m
reading it to you, and yet I have some faith in it. Finally, my
figure is that our affective capacities lie deeper in our nature
than our reflective powers.
To be sure, neuroscientists also say that certain brain
structures expressly subserving the emotions are located
deeper within the brain and appeared early in evolutionary
history, but that is not dispositive: What is biologically primitive might, after all, not be humanly primary. What I mean,
rather, is that affectivity has a certain abysmal, incomprehensible character that makes it feel—I don’t know how else to
put it—submersed; affects touch us (‟to feel” is related to the
Latin palpare, to pat) in intimate, that is, ‟innermost” regions,
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while articulable thought-activity intends, ‟stretches toward,”
emerges, towards comprehension of objects. We might be
constitutionally bipolar, extended between emotional depth
and thoughtful height. Perhaps an original question might be
formulated from this figure. It is something we could discuss
later, if you like.
Wordsworth’s lines imply that the murderous dissection
is performed on a lovely, living object. I must tell you that
emotion studies sometimes—too often—read as if they were
carried out on a latex-injected corpse that suffers every cut
with supine springiness. This is, as I’ve tried to show, a partly
inevitable result of making affectivity a ‟subject,” a thing
lying still under thought, literally ‟thrown under” its wheels.
Nonetheless, I feel tempted, by way of an ending, to say
how I think we can mitigate the dilemma, for if we can’t think
about our feelings, we’ll come apart. I’ll try to be practical.
First, then, you can’t study emotions at even the kindliest
advisor’s prompting. They are a subject that requires experiential urgency, some pressure for the relief of confusion. In
brief, you not only have to be a feeling being—as are we
all—but also a being enticingly oppressed by the enigma of
emotionality, the arcanum of affectivity. Some topics are well
approached in the brisk spirit of pleasurable problem-solving.
Not this one, I think.
Second, listen to what Socrates says in the Apology. He
does not say, as is often reported, that ‟the unexamined life
is not worth living.” What he really says is, I think, something
stronger: that such a life is ‟not livable for a human being,”
ou biōtos anthrōpōi (38a), is not a possible life, not a lived
life. That is what the -tos ending of biōtos signifies: ‟livable
or lived.” He means, I think, that experiences, passions
among them, that are not internally re-viewed, introspectively
re-lived, are in effect unlived—an unexamined experience is
not yours. A nice corroborating illustration comes in Thomas
Mann’s Magic Mountain, whose hero—meant to be a paradigm of simple humanity—engages in an introspective discipline he calls regieren, “ruling, regulating,”—in short,
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
13
digesting, appropriating his affects and images.21 For as experimental emotion research requires protocols drawn from inner
experience, so conceptual emotion studies cannot do without
introspection. And unlike egocentric self-analysis, which is a
spontaneous sport, disciplined self-inspection is an art learned
by practice. So now I seem to have contravened everything I’ve
just said, which was that feeling is choked by thinking.
Here, then, is my last attempt at being practical about our
problem as students: how to keep feeling before ourselves while
bringing thought to bear on it. Or, more learnedly put: how to
turn what is, regarded in itself, the most subjective element of
our being, perhaps our very subjectivity itself, into an object. (I
will get myself into a word muddle here, unless I remind you
that before the eighteenth century “subject” meant just what we
now call “object”—for example, the being that arouses passion,
and we still use it in this way, as in “the subject to be studied.”
But by means of an inversion that is only partial, “subject” is
now used for the host of the emotion rather than for its object,
and “subjective” signifies a feature of emotional affect.)
Deliverance from the quandary of objectifying the essentially subjective seems to me to come from our great representational faculty, the imagination. Mental images are summoned
by feeling, arouse feeling and are, famously, affect-fraught, feeling-laden. There are those who deny that we have analogue images before an inner eye, but they are in retreat. The cognitive
scientist Stephen Kosslyn (the prime defender of mental analogue images),22 lay persons in general, and most students of
the imagination are convinced by their own inner experience of
imaginative vision and its affectivity—and what claim could
possibly override such personal, one might say, eye-witness
knowledge? (I might add here that the very latest neuroscience
seems, though incidentally, to clinch the argument for mental
visuality; mental images are directly machine-retrievable.23)
These affect-laden sights can indeed be held in mind, and
thinking can turn to them, play over them, study them. So, it
seems to me, emotion studies require an imaginative life. Here
is a practical consequence: Your profession requires you to read
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scholarly articles, but your mission needs you to read works of
fiction, particularly novels. For these not only stock your minds
with visualizable scenes of passion on which to dwell while you
think, they also school you in the adequately expressive diction
with which to articulate what you discovered. For, my fellow
students, if you speak of feeling either in flabbily pretentious or
technically formalizing diction, your papers will be worth—
well, next to nothing.
NOTES
1. Platons Dialog Gorgias, ed. Otto Apelt (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1922),
166. This is the very end of the dialogue, at 527e.
2. Debra Nails, The People of Plato (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 243.
3. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Middle-English edition, Prologue, l. 72 (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), 5.
4. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book III, Chapter 5, “Plato,” trans. R. D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library 184 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925).
5. This anecdote is found in a fragment from Themistius in the so-called
Akademie-Ausgabe of Aristotle’s works edited for the Prussian Academy
of Sciences by Immanuel Bekker (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1870), 1484b. The
fragment is translated in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, Vol. 12
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 24. The story is translated in its original
context in Robert J. Penella, The Private Orations of Themistius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 122.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, section 14: “das eine große
Zyklopenauge des Sokrates . . . in dem nie der holde Wahnsinn künstlerischer Begeisterung geglüht hat.”
7. Plato, Meno, 81c.
8. Plato, Phaedrus, 245a, 249d.
9. Plato, Symposium 203d.
10. Errol Bedford, “Emotions,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
LVII (1956-57), 281-304.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
15
11. Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion, and Will (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1963).
12. Robert Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life
(New York: Doubleday, 1976).
13. Solomon, The Passions, xiv.
14. Ibid., 185.
15. Ibid., 188ff.
16. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
17. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), 2.3.3. Emphasis
added.
18. See, for example, Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 275.
19. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII, Chapter 9.
20. See Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, 4 vols. (New
York: Springer, 2008), Volume I, Chapter 10, “Interest–Excitement,” 185202.
21. In Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Chapter 6, “Of the City of
God and of Evil Deliverance.”
22. See, for example, Stephen Kosslyn, Image and Brain: The Resolution
of the Imagery Debate (Boston: MIT Press, 1996).
23. Francisco Pereira et al., “Generating text from functional brain images,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5 (August, 2011): Article 72.
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On Biblical Style
Tod Linafelt
The western tradition has not focused much attention on the
literary style of the Bible. Although it is true that the classical
literary critic Longinus (or “Pseudo-Longinus”), writing in
the first century C.E., makes a brief but famous reference to
the opening lines of Genesis in his treatise On the Sublime,1
the context for the reference is his treatment of “greatness of
thought” rather than any strictly literary qualities. More typical of pre-modern literary attitudes toward the Bible is Augustine’s judgment that biblical literature exhibits “the lowest
of linguistic style” (humillimum genus loquendi), and had
seemed to him, before his conversion, “unworthy of comparison with the majesty of Cicero.”2 Of course, readers have
not traditionally gone to the Bible in search of literary artfulness but rather for its religious value—that is, primarily as a
source for theology or for ethics. For Augustine, as for so
many religious readers after him, the Bible’s theological
truths and ethical teachings won out over its literary art or
lack thereof.3 But the fact is that the Bible—and my concern
here is more particularly with the Hebrew Bible or Christian
Old Testament—presents to the reader distinctly literary narrative and poetic works that both demand and reward expressly literary attention. Not only can we speak about the
literary style of the Bible, then, but we can and ought to speak
more precisely about its narrative style or poetic style, since
biblical narrative and biblical poetry each work with a very
different set of conventions and techniques—with different
Tod Linafelt is professor of biblical literature in the Theology Department
at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
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literary toolkits, we might say. Reading the Bible “as literature,” then, means more than just close reading, as it is often
understood. It also means becoming familiar with and attending to the distinctive and specific workings of narrative texts
and poetic texts. It seems clear that the ancient authors were
very much aware of the differing conventions and possibilities associated with narrative and with poetry, respectively,
and that their audiences would have responded differently to
these two primary literary forms. The better we understand
these forms, the better readers we will be.
I. ANCIENT HEBREW NARRATIVE
One must admit that Augustine was not entirely wrong. It is
hard to deny that from a certain angle the Bible is among the
most “unliterary” works of literature that we have. Working
as it does with a very limited vocabulary and often repeating
a word several times rather than resorting to synonyms, biblical Hebrew narrative exhibits a style that can seem simple,
even primitive, in comparison with the classics of world literature. (Things are very different with biblical poetry, as we
will see below.) Its syntax too seems rudimentary to modern
ears, linking clause after clause with a simple “and” (what
the linguists call parataxis) that reveals little about their syntactical relation, instead of using complex sentences with subordinate clauses (hypotaxis). Notice, for example, the dogged
repetition of “face” and the run-on syntax in the following
very literal translation of Genesis 32:21 (where Jacob is sending ahead of him a very large gift to his estranged brother
Esau, in hopes that Esau will be placated over Jacob’s earlier
stealing of his blessing): “For he said, ‘Let me cover his face
with the gift that goes before my face and after I look upon
his face perhaps he will lift up my face.’” Although modern
translations tend to obscure these features, even in translation
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one is bound to notice the paucity of metaphorical description, the brevity of dialogue, the lack of reference to the interior lives of characters, the limited use of figural
perspective, and not least the jarring concreteness with which
God is sometimes imagined to be involved in human history.
Many of these features are elements of biblical literature’s
economy of style, or essential terseness. We may compare,
for example, Homer’s use of sometimes startling metaphors
in describing a scene with the practice of biblical authors (all
of whom are essentially anonymous), who by and large avoid
such elaborate figurative language. Contrast this description
in the Iliad (16.480-85, Fagles’ translation) of the death of a
single, obscure Trojan charioteer:
Patroclus rising beside him stabbed his right jawbone,
ramming the spearhead square between his teeth so hard
he hooked him by that spearhead over the chariot-rail,
hoisted, dragged the Trojan out as an angler perched
on a jutting rock ledge drags some fish from the sea,
some noble catch, with line and glittering bronze hook4
with the blunt recounting in Genesis 34 of the massacre of
an entire city by two of Jacob’s sons: “Simeon and Levi,
Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and came against the city
unawares, and killed all the males. They killed Hamor and
his son Shechem with the sword” (Gen 34:25-6). This brief
passage is typical of the tendency in biblical narrative to
avoid description of any sort, metaphorical or otherwise. The
principle applies, with some exceptions of course, not only
to physical description—so that we are rarely told what either
objects or people look like—but also, and more importantly,
to the inner lives, thoughts, and motivations of characters in
the narratives. It would be a mistake, however, to take this
economy of style as an indicator of the Bible’s essential sim-
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plicity or primitiveness as a work of literature. In fact, it is
primarily this terseness that lends biblical narrative its distinctive complexity as literature.
In beginning to think about the workings of biblical
narrative one could do no better than to read Erich Auerbach’s
“Odysseus’ Scar,” the opening chapter of his book Mimesis,
in which he compares biblical narrative style with Homeric
epic style.5 Auerbach offers the first and best modern articulation of how the austere terseness of biblical narrative is not
just the absence of style but is in fact a distinctive and profound literary mode in its own right. Auerbach describes Homeric style as being “of the foreground,” whereas biblical
narratives are by contrast “fraught with background.” In other
words, in the Iliad and the Odyssey both objects and persons
tend to be fully described and illuminated, with essential attributes and aspects—from physical descriptions to the
thoughts and motivations of characters—there in the foreground for the reader to apprehend. But with biblical narrative such details are, for the most part, kept in the background
and are not directly available to the reader. So, as noted
above, we are very rarely given physical descriptions of either objects or people in the biblical narrative.6 What do
Adam and Eve look like? We do not know. Abraham? Sarah?
Moses? We do not know. As Auerbach puts it in his comments on Genesis 22, where God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, it is unthinkable that the servants, the
landscape, the implements of sacrifice should be described
or praised, as one might expect in Homer: “they are servingmen, ass, wood, and knife, and nothing else, without an epithet.”7 Occasionally a certain quality is ascribed to some
person or object: we are told that Eve perceives that the tree
of knowledge is “a delight to the eyes” (Gen. 3:6), and likewise we are told that Joseph is “handsome and good-looking”
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(Gen. 39:6). But as a rule such minimal notations are given
only when necessary to introduce some element that is important to the development of the plot. In the present cases
the attractiveness of the tree of knowledge leads, of course,
to the eating of its fruit (But what kind of fruit? We are not
told, the long tradition of the apple notwithstanding), and
Joseph’s attractiveness leads, in the next verse, to the sexual
aggression of Potiphar’s wife, and thus indirectly to Joseph’s
imprisonment. And even here one notices that we are not told
what it is that makes the fruit lovely to look at or what exactly
makes Joseph so beautiful.
Beyond a lack of physical description in the biblical stories, descriptions of personal qualities are also largely absent.
That is, characterization is rarely explicit, but rather must be
teased out of the narrative based on what characters do and
say (on action and dialogue, in other words, rather than on
direct evaluation by the narrator). The presentation of Esau
and Jacob in Genesis 25 illustrates this nicely. We are told
that Esau is “a man skilled in hunting, a man of the field” (v.
27), but the essential characterization of Esau as impulsive
and unreflective, indeed almost animal-like, is conveyed by
action and dialogue. Thus, coming in from the field to discover that his brother Jacob has prepared a stew, Esau inarticulately blurts out, “Let me eat some of that red, red stuff,
for I am famished” (v. 30). Robert Alter notes that Esau “cannot even come up with the ordinary Hebrew word for stew
(nazid) and instead points to the bubbling pot impatiently as
(literally) ‘this red red.’”8 And then, after agreeing to trade
his birthright to Jacob in exchange for some of the stew,
Esau’s impetuous, action-oriented character is suggested by
the “rapid-fire chain of verbs”: “and he ate and he drank and
he rose and he went off.”9 The character of Esau is starkly
contrasted in the story with the character of Jacob. If Esau is
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all instinct and action, Jacob is all calculation and deliberateness. The stew is prepared and waiting for the return of Esau
from the field, and one cannot fail to notice the businesslike
manner in which Jacob first suggests, and then demands formal confirmation of, the trading of the birthright: “And Jacob
said, ‘Sell now your birthright to me.’ And Esau said, ‘Look,
I am at the point of death, so why do I need a birthright?’ And
Jacob said, ‘Swear to me now’” (vv. 31-33). These initial
thumbnail characterizations of Esau and Jacob will be
fleshed-out further two chapters later, in Genesis 27, where
the blind Isaac is deceived into bestowing his blessing on
Jacob rather than the intended son Esau. The elaborate ruse
carried out by Jacob with the invaluable help of his mother
Rebekah, in which he impersonates Esau, confirms his calculating ambition even as it adds outright deceit to his resume
of character traits. Jacob will become a consummate trickster
as the story proceeds—though he will also, as an elderly man,
be tricked by his own sons (ch. 37)—but he is never actually
described by the narrator as tricky or deceptive, in the way
that Odysseus is described repeatedly in terms of his resourcefulness or Achilles in terms of his rage, for example,
but instead has his character revealed by what he says and
what he does. Esau, for his part, will play a lesser role in the
narrative that follows, although his reappearance in Chapter
33 is striking and in some ways unexpected, but both his inarticulateness and his utter lack of calculation are revealed by
his response upon hearing that Jacob has stolen his blessing:
“he cried out with an exceedingly great and bitter cry and he
said to his father, ‘Bless me, me also, Father’” (v. 34); and
again, a few verses later, “‘Do you have but one blessing my
father? Bless me, me also, Father.’ And Esau lifted up his
voice and wept” (v. 38). By not directly revealing the qualities of character of the actors in the narrative, the narrator
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puts the onus of interpretation on the readers, who must work
out on their own—albeit with hints given—what they think
of these characters. To repeat, this is not the absence of characterization, but is a certain mode of characterization, and in
fact a fairly complex mode at that.
We may best see the complexity of this mode of characterization, and indeed of the Bible’s economy of style more
generally, when it comes to the inner lives of the characters.
Readers are often used to having access in one form or another to the thoughts, feeling, and motivations of the characters about whom they read. Again, Auerbach on Homer:
“With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even
passion does not disturb, Homer’s personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they
speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it.
Much that is terrible takes place in the Homeric poems, but
it seldom takes place wordlessly.”10 And so, for instance, the
tragic death of Hector at the hands of Achilles near the end
of the Iliad (in book 22) has devoted to it, in the Greek, fourteen lines of lament by Hector’s father, seven lines by his
mother, and fully forty lines by his wife Andromache. We
may compare this with the brief notations of grief in biblical
narrative. On the death of Sarah: “And Sarah died at KiriathArba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan, and Abraham
went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her” (Gen. 23:2).
On the death of Moses: “And the Israelites wept for Moses
in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the period of mourning
for Moses was ended” (Deut. 34:8). One might object that
since both Sarah and Moses had lived long and fruitful lives
their deaths lack the tragedy of noble Hector being cut down
in his prime over the affairs of his less-than-noble brother
Paris, so that their deaths inspire less intense expressions of
mourning. But even with more obviously tragic deaths we
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see in biblical narrative the restraint of the narrator, who acknowledges the grief of the survivors but refrains from allowing them full expression of it. We noted above, for
example, Jacob’s response to what he takes to be evidence of
the death of his young, beloved son Joseph: “A vicious beast
has devoured him, Joseph torn to shreds!” (Gen. 37:33). In a
scene that seems intended to characterize Jacob as an extravagant mourner, the narrator goes on to describe Jacob as rending his clothes and donning sackcloth and refusing to be
comforted by his other children: “‘No, I shall go down to
Sheol to my son, mourning.’ Thus his father bewailed him”
(37:35). Yet even here the few scant lines in Hebrew do not
come close to matching the sixty lines of direct lament over
the death of Hector, not to mention the extended scene in
Book 24 of the Iliad where Hector’s father Priam goes to the
tent of Achilles to beg for the return of his son’s much-abused
corpse.
Consider also the notoriously ambiguous story in Leviticus 10 of the burning Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron.
The reader is told that the two young priests brought “strange
fire” or “alien fire” (‘esh zara) before the Lord, “and fire
came out from before the Lord and consumed them, and they
died before the Lord” (10:2). Moses very quickly offers a sort
of cryptic theodicy, cast in verse form, in the face of the
shocking event: “This is what the Lord spoke, saying,
‘Through those near me I will show myself holy / and before
all the people I will be glorified’” (10:3). No more laconic
response could be imagined, both to the death of the young
men and to Moses’ extemporaneous theologizing, than that
attributed to Aaron: “And Aaron was silent.” Surely we are
to imagine Aaron’s grief as real and deep—indeed, a few
verses later Moses forbids Aaron and his other sons to go
through the public rituals of mourning while they are conse-
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crated for service in the temple (10:6-7)—and yet all we are
given is his silence. Unless one imagines this silence to indicate a complacent assent to what has just been witnessed, the
narrator gives us, to borrow from Auerbach again, “a glimpse
of unplumbed depths.” It is, in short, a silence that is “fraught
with background,” a silence that demands interpretation on
the part of the reader. Is Aaron feeling pure shock? Overwhelming sadness? Anger at God? Confusion or despair? Is
his silence a rejection of Moses’ statement of God’s intent?
And if so, on what basis? The fact is that we are given no access whatsoever into the inner life of Aaron, and because we
do not know what he is thinking we also do not know what
motivates his silence.
It is with regard to this latter issue, the question of character motivation, that we may see the importance of recognizing the distinctively terse mode of biblical narration. As I
noted above in considering the story of Jacob and Esau, the
narrator reveals very little about the inner lives of characters,
instead reporting mainly action and dialogue, what the characters do and what they say. If we are given little or no access
to the thoughts and feelings of the characters about whom we
read, then it follows that the motivation behind what they do
and say is also largely obscure. The importance of this obscurity of motivation can scarcely be overstated for any literary reading biblical narrative, since it more than anything
else is what gives the literature its profound complexity as it
forces the reader to negotiate the many possible ways of
imagining the characters’ inner lives. Let me try to justify this
claim with reference to the literature itself.
A classic example of the ambiguity of character motivation in the Bible may be seen in Genesis 22. In a story that
has never failed to engage the imagination of interpreters ancient and modern, God commands Abraham to take his son
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Isaac and sacrifice him as a burnt offering. Although a few
chapters earlier we have seen Abraham challenge the justness
of God’s decision to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, here
Abraham says nothing in response. Instead, there is the narrator’s terse report: “So Abraham rose early in the morning,
saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him,
and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and
set out and went to the place in the distance that God had
shown him” (vv. 3-4). Abraham’s silent obedience here is
often taken to be motivated by an untroubled and unquestioning faith in God, which, depending on one’s perspective, may
be seen positively as an expression of ultimate piety, or negatively as an expression of unfeeling religious fanaticism. But
both interpretations fail to recognize the fundamental literary
convention of the refusal of access to the inner lives of characters. The fact that we are not told of Abraham’s inner, emotional response to the demand that he slaughter his son does
not mean that he has no inner, emotional response. Surely we
are to imagine that he does, but rather than describing it for
us or allowing Abraham to give voice to it the narrator leaves
us guessing as to what that response might be and thus also
as to his motivation for his actions. Now, it is possible to fill
that gap left by the narrator with an inner calm that reflects
absolute faith, but it is equally possible to imagine that Abraham is feeling anger, disbelief, and even disgust. (With God
for demanding the slaughter? With himself for not protesting?) And however one fills the gap of Abraham’s inner life
initially, surely it is complicated by Isaac’s calling out to him
in v. 7, “Father!” and by the plaintive question that follows,
“The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a
burnt offering?” It is precisely because we do not know what
Abraham is thinking or feeling that his brief response to
Isaac’s question (“God will see to the lamb for the offering
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my son,” v. 8) takes on a deeply ironic double meaning. On
the one hand, it may be read as a ruse, if not an outright lie,
to deflect any suspicions that may be dawning on the son; on
the other hand, it may be read as a straightforward statement
of faith that a sheep will indeed be provided. It may even be
the case here that the author makes use of the ambiguities of
Hebrew’s seemingly rudimentary syntax in order to signal
the potential irony to the attentive reader. For there is no
punctuation in the Hebrew text and one may also construe
the syntax to mean: “God will see to the lamb for the offering:
namely, my son.”
To go back to Abraham’s initial response to Isaac, we
may see how what at first instance looks like wooden repetition may in fact be a subtly modulated use of a key word or
theme. When God first calls out to Abraham to begin the
episode, Abraham’s response is “Here I am”; when Isaac calls
in the middle of the episode, on the way to the place of sacrifice, Abraham’s response is, once again, “Here I am, my
son”; and when, at the climactic moment when the knife is
raised over the boy, the angel of Lord calls out “Abraham,
Abraham!” (22:11) his response is again “Here I am.” In each
case the single Hebrew word hinneni, “here I am” or “behold
me,” is repeated by Abraham. To substitute a synonym for
the sake of variety, as for example the JPS Tanakh does in
translating the second occurrence as “Yes, my son,” is to lose
a concrete expression of what is certainly a central theme for
the story, namely the anguished tension between the demands
of God and the ethical demands of another human being
(Abraham’s own child no less!). Surely every ethical impulse
demands that Abraham not kill his son, and yet precisely this
is what God demands that he do. He responds “Here I am”
to both God and Isaac, and yet he cannot be fully “there,”
fully present, to both equally. It is only with the third, very
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late, repetition of “Here I am” that the tension is resolved and
Abraham is no longer caught between these opposing demands on his loyalty. One might say that Abraham’s threefold
response provides the underlying armature for the story,
marking in a classically Aristotelian way the beginning, the
middle, and the end. Although the single word hinneni is literally repeated each time, it acquires a new depth of meaning—and certainly a new tone—with each repetition. And to
the end of the story it remains the case that we are never quite
sure what Abraham is thinking as he first travels in silence,
then responds to his son, then binds and raises the knife, and
finally sacrifices the ram instead.
If we do not know what motivates Abraham in Genesis
22, it is also the case that we do not know what motivates
Isaac to make his enquiry as to the whereabouts of the sheep
or what he is thinking as his father binds him and lays him
on the makeshift altar. But by this point we are not surprised
by this fact, since we have begun to see that the biblical authors make use of this convention in order to allow for depth
of character and depth of meaning. It is perhaps somewhat
more surprising to note that this convention applies to God
too, who is, after all, a character in these narratives as well,
and so the literary art of biblical narrative has distinct theological implications. What motivates God to demand the sacrifice of Isaac? The narrator refuses to tell us, though for any
reader, religious or not, this must certainly be a compelling
question. We are told that “God tested Abraham” (22:1); but
this does not give us an answer to our question. The sense of
the word “test” (Hebrew nissah) is something like “trial” or
“ordeal,” and so God decides to put Abraham through an ordeal, presumably to test his mettle. (A comparison with the
opening chapters of Job is apt.) But why, and to what end? Is
it to find out how strong Abraham is under pressure? To see
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whether he values his son more than he values God? Does
God genuinely learn something new about Abraham, about
humanity, or about God’s self through this test? (“Now I know
that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me
your son, your only son” [22:12].) Without knowing what
motivates God or what God is thinking as the knife is raised,
we cannot finally even know whether Abraham has passed
or failed the test. Most readers assume that he has passed, but
a few have dared to suggest that God wanted not blind obedience from Abraham but bold resistance—after all, such resistance was honored when Abraham argued on behalf of
Sodom and Gomorrah—and that in failing to argue with God,
Abraham failed to show the strength of character that God
hoped to see.11 This reading may seem to go against the grain
of the narrative, especially in light of 22:16-17: “By myself
have I sworn, said the LORD, for because you have done this
thing, and have not withheld your son, your only son: That
in blessing I will bless you, and in multiplying I will multiply
your seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is
on the sea shore.” But the fact that such a reading is nonetheless possible—if only just—witnesses to the profound but
productive ambiguity of Hebrew literary style, which exploits
to great effect its distinctive economy of style.
There is very much more that could be said about the literary art of Hebrew narrative, especially about the patterns
or structures that authors and editors have used to construct
both individual stories and larger blocks of material, but before moving to consider poetry, I want to point out one final
way in which the literary and the theological are bound together. I mentioned at the beginning of this essay the jarring
concreteness with which God is sometimes imagined in the
Bible as active in the world: God walks in the garden of Eden
and enjoys the evening breeze; God shows up at the tent of
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Sarah and Abraham to promise them offspring; God destroys
Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea; God inscribes with God’s
own hand the tablets of the covenant at Sinai; and in the final,
poignant scene of the Torah at the end of Deuteronomy, God
buries Moses after allowing him a vision of the promised land
that he is not finally to enter. But if the Hebrew literary imagination is relentlessly concrete in its workings, including its
imaginings of God, it does not follow that it is without craft
or nuance. In fact, divine agency and human agency are almost always imagined in these narratives as being inextricably but ambiguously bound together in such a way that
neither agency is autonomous or effective in and of itself.12
And so, God announces to Rebekah in Genesis 25 that the
elder of her twins (Esau) will serve the younger (Jacob); but
two chapters later, when the time has come to deliver the
blessing to the proper son, God has apparently left the matter
to Rebekah to work out, which she does with great effectiveness (see ch. 27). In Genesis 50, Joseph may declare to his
brothers, who had sold him into slavery thirteen chapters and
many years earlier, that “Even though you intended to do
harm to me, God intended it for good”; but the story also suggests that it is largely his own wits and talent, rather than any
supernatural intervention, that allows him to survive and
prosper in Egypt.
Even in the Exodus story, where God’s salvific power
seems more tangible than anywhere in the Bible, the divine
plan requires human agents for implementation. And so, after
a flurry of first-person active verbs by which the Lord resolves to liberate Israel from slavery (“I have seen . . . , I have
heard . . . , I have come down to rescue . . . , I will bring them
up [3:7-8]), God shifts unexpectedly to the second person,
saying to Moses, “And now, go and I will send you to
Pharaoh, and you will bring my people the Israelites out of
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Egypt” (3:10). Moses quite naturally responds, “Who am I,
that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring out the Israelites from Egypt?” God’s answer is telling with regard to
the interdependence of divine and human agency: “I will be
with you” (v. 12). Who is it that liberates Israel—God or
Moses? It is both. But even that answer is too simple, since
the liberation of Israel requires not only the cooperation of
God and Moses but of Israel as well. Thus, Moses dutifully
announces to the enslaved Israelites God’s plan to liberate
them, which is again stated in a surge of first-person verbs:
“I will take you out . . . , I will rescue you from bondage . . . ,
I will take you . . . , I will be your God . . . , I will bring you
to the land I promised” (Ex. 6:6-8). The response? “They did
not heed Moses because their spirits had been crushed by
cruel slavery.” The point would seem to be a sociological one:
that the people cannot be liberated before they are ready, and
after generations of bondage and hard labor it will take more
than promises to get them ready. Only after seeing the very
real power of Pharaoh broken by repeated plagues are the Israelites able to summon the energy to come out of Egypt.
Pharoah himself is also a locus for this fundamental tension—in this case it is paradoxical—between divine sovereignty and human agency. On the one hand, God claims
responsibility for “hardening” Pharaoh’s heart so that he refuses to allow Israel to leave (Ex. 7:3; 14:4); but on the other
hand, Pharaoh is said by the narrator to have hardened his
own heart (8:11, 28). At other times a passive voice is used,
so that Pharaoh’s heart “was hardened” or “became hard”
(7:14; 8:15; 9:4)—thereby leaving the agency behind the
hardening unclear. This shifting of agency allows the narrative to retain a sense of God’s sovereign activity in history,
while at the same time affirming the moral culpability of
Pharaoh, whose repeated failure to fulfill his promise of free-
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ing the Israelites represents rather realistically the psychology
of a tyrant. Logically, we readers may want to know, Which
was it? Did God harden Pharaoh’s heart, or did Pharaoh
harden his own heart? But the story refuses to settle the question, giving us a “both/and” that reflects a pronounced trend
in biblical narrative to render not only the inner lives of both
humans and God, but also creation and history itself, as unfathomably complex and finally unresolvable mysteries.
II. ANCIENT HEBREW POETRY
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,”
Emily Dickinson once wrote, “I know that is poetry.”13 Dickinson was, of course, somewhat more than averagely tuned
in to the effects of poetry. In truth, poetry—even great poetry—often fails to take the top of one’s head off, and even
sometimes goes unrecognized as poetry. There is no more
striking example of this than the Bible, which contains a distinctive body of poetry that has been, for two thousand years,
only rarely and inconsistently represented on the page in the
form of verse rather than prose. Though some passages are
lined out in the ancient and medieval manuscript traditions,
these include not only ones that we would now recognize as
poetry but also lists of names that are clearly not poetry (in
the same way that the phonebook is not poetry just because
it is lined out). And printed Bibles from Guttenberg on, until
the twentieth century, represent most of the poetic sections
of the Bible as blocks of text indistinguishable from prose.
The question of whether biblical poetry even exists has
been around since ancient times, and it has been exacerbated
by the fact that our primary models for what counts as poetry
are drawn from the highly metrical verse found in classical
literature. Already in the first century C.E., Jewish intellectuals like Philo and Josephus, feeling the need to defend their
cultural heritage in terms of Greek and Roman ideals, went
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looking for iambs and hexameters in the Torah. And they
were followed in this task by later Christian writers such as
Origen (in the early third century) and Jerome (in the fourth
and fifth centuries), who also assumed that if poetry existed
in the Bible then it must exist in metrical form. The search
for meter in biblical literature has been revived on occasion
in the modern period as well, but it has never amounted to
much, for the simple fact that ancient Hebrew verse is not
metrical. This lack of conformity to classical standards—as
well as to virtually all poetry in the West until the nineteenth
century—has no doubt been a major factor in the tradition’s
lack of appreciation for biblical poetry, but so has the Bible’s
status as religious literature. Attention to literary form has
been a low priority for interpreters of the Bible, eager as they
have been to move to the content or the meaning of any given
passage. There has been very little allowance in biblical interpretation for the possibility that, as Wallace Stevens puts
it, “poetry is the subject of the poem.”14
A major breakthrough in understanding biblical poetry
came with Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of
the Hebrews, first delivered in association with Lowth’s chair
in poetry at Oxford and then published in 1753. Lowth’s most
lasting contribution, for good and ill, was his identification
of parallelismus membrorum, or parallelism of lines, as the
primary structuring principle of ancient Hebrew verse.
“Things for the most part shall answer to things, and words
to words,” Lowth writes, “as if fitted to each other by a kind
of rule or measure.”15 From Psalm 114, for example:
The mountains skipped like rams,
the hills like lambs.
Or from the Song of Songs:
Love is strong as death,
jealousy harsh as the grave.
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Notice how “mountains” matches “hills,” and how “rams”
matches “lambs.” And notice the strict parallelism of
“love//jealousy,” “strong//harsh,” and “death//grave.” Lowth
admitted that many lines of biblical poetry did not display
the same equivalence of terms that we see here, but nonetheless the recognition that lineation was based on the matching
of two or three short lines in a couplet or triplet form, which
did not depend on meter, opened the way for more sustained
attention to such poetry as poetry, rather than just repetitioussounding prose.
For 200 years after Lowth nearly all attention to biblical
verse was on this phenomenon of parallelism, and most especially semantic parallelism (or parallelism of meaning),
which too often was reduced to the idea that the second or
third line in a couplet or a triplet simply restates the basic
idea from the first line. But recent scholarship has shown that
the relationship between lines is more intricate and more interesting than this. Adele Berlin, Michael O’Connor, F. W.
Dobbs-Allsopp and others have shown that that parallelism
involves not only semantic features but also grammatical,
syntactical, and phonological patterns (generally not apparent
in translation), and that there are complex syntactical constraints that underlie the ancient Hebrew poetic line, which
are not in the end reducible to “parallelism.”16 Moreover,
Robert Alter and James Kugel have shown that even when
the relationship between lines looks to be semantically parallel at first glance, there is often a subtle dynamism in which
the second line moves beyond the language or imagery in the
first by making it more concrete, more specific, more intense,
or more emotionally heightened.17 Thus, in the matched lines
quoted above from the Song of Songs: jealousy is a more specific emotion associated with love; harsh heightens and intensifies the connotation of strong; and the grave serves as a
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concrete symbol of death.
Beyond the question of line structure, however, the cluster of other features that typify biblical verse has mostly been
overlooked by scholarship of recent decades. But one can get
a much richer sense of the distinctive workings of biblical
poetic style by recognizing these features—features that can
be seen more clearly when compared with the workings of
biblical prose narrative. As we saw above, ancient Hebrew
authors developed a prose style that was especially suited for
narrative (or storytelling) and that prefigured in important respects the style and techniques of both modern novelistic fiction and history-writing. Virtually all other long narratives in
the ancient world—from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Babylonian Enuma Elish to the Canaanite epics to the Iliad and
the Odyssey—take the form of verse, reflecting the oral origins of the epic genre. By casting their stories in the form of
prose, biblical authors pioneered a “writerly” form of narrative that did not depend on the rhythms of oral poetry and
that allowed for the development of a genuine third-person
narrator, whose voice could be distinguished from the direct
discourse attributed to characters within the narrative. It also
allowed for a depth-of-consciousness and an opaqueness in
its literary characters, so that, as we saw above, readers are
seldom told what characters are thinking or feeling at any
given moment, even though it is often vitally important to
characterization and to plot development.
Stylistically, however, biblical poetry works very differently. There are in the first place the formal differences that
mark the poetry as verse (instead of prose): not only lineation,
but also a compressed syntax that tends to drop particles and
pronouns in order to achieve the conciseness of the poetic
line. (Unfortunately, such syntactical structures are mostly
invisible in translation.) And biblical poetry is, to borrow
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Terry Eagleton’s vague but appropriate characterization of
poetry in general, much more “verbally inventive” than biblical prose narrative.18 The terse, straightforward style of biblical narrative means that it tends to avoid elevated diction or
figurative language. But the poetry is filled with figurative
language, from the mostly conventional imagery found in the
psalms, for example, to the more inventive imagination of
the book of Job, to the double entendres of the Song of Songs.
Thus, the troubled fate of the psalmist is, often as not, imagined in terms of “the pit” that threatens to swallow or “the
flood” that threatens to overwhelm; and God is imagined as
a “rock,” a “fortress,” or a “shield.” As the suffering Job
imagines blotting out the day of his birth, he both personifies
and eroticizes it, imagining night longing for day which, in
his counterfactual curse, never arrives:
Let the stars of its dawn be dark;
let it long for light in vain,
and never behold the eyelids of morning. (Job 3:9)
Later, Job imagines God’s enmity toward him in terms of the
ancient grudge between God-as-creator and the chaotic force
of the personified Sea:
Am I the Sea, or the Dragon,
that you set a guard over me? (7:12)
Answering Job, thirty chapters later, God returns to this
image, but redefines and re-personifies the chaotic Sea not
as an enemy combatant but as an infant to be nurtured:
Who is it that contained the Sea
as it emerged bursting from the womb?—
when I clothed it in clouds,
and swaddled it with darkness. (38:8-9)
The Song of Songs, erotic poetry set in the alternating voices
of two young lovers, prefers a lush, bodily-based array of
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metaphors. For example, the male voice proclaims:
Your breasts are like two fawns,
twins of a gazelle,
that feed among the lilies. (4:5)
Or this, from the female voice:
Like an apple tree found in the forest
is my beloved among the youths;
I delight to sit in his shade,
and his fruit is sweet to my taste. (2:3)
If line structure and other formal markers are enough to
establish the presence of verse in the Bible, they still do not
tell us much about its use or function. Again, a comparison
with biblical prose is instructive, since one of the most striking features of biblical poetry is that it is relentlessly nonnarrative. Once ancient Hebrew culture had developed the
flexible prose form that gets used for recounting stories, both
long (e.g., Genesis, 1 and 2 Samuel) and short (e.g., the books
of Ruth and Esther), it seems that verse was reserved for more
specialized, highly rhetorical uses. For example, the prophets
are most often represented as casting their messages in poetic
form. Note the parallelism and figurative language in, for example, Amos’ well-known cri de coeur,
Let justice roll down like the waters,
and righteousness like a mighty stream. (5:24)
This familiar parallel structure is combined with hyperbole
and a striking visual imagination (both very much lacking in
biblical narrative, though common in the ancient epic tradition)19 in the prophet Isaiah’s utopian vision of the future:
The wolf shall live with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. (11:6)
Verse also seems to have been the preferred form in ancient
Hebrew, as in so many languages, for the aphorism—the
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pithy and often didactic observation on the nature of the
world—which, like poetry more generally, aims for a maximum of meaning in a minimum of words. The book of
Proverbs is filled with such aphorisms in verse form, such as,
A soft answer turns away wrath;
a harsh word increases anger. (15:1)
For more skeptical versions of such aphorisms, one can turn
to the book of Ecclesiastes, as in
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is never filled . . .
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing. (1:7)
or
With much wisdom comes much grief;
to increase knowledge is to increase sorrow. (1:18)
But one of the most interesting uses of biblical verse is
as an early form of what will later go by the name of “lyric
poetry,” that intensely subjective, non-narrative and non-dramatic form that has dominated modern poetry at least since
Wordsworth. This early form of lyric foregrounds two final
characteristics of biblical poetry, both of which further distinguish it from biblical prose narrative. First, biblical poetry
is invariably presented as direct discourse, the first-person
voice of a speaking subject (a precursor of the modern “lyric
I”). Again, ancient Hebrew narrative separates the third-person narrator from the dialogue spoken by characters, which
is grammatically marked (by expressive forms and deictics,
to use the technical terms) as direct discourse, whereas the
narrator’s voice is not.20 Biblical poetry is also marked in this
way; it is, in other words, always presented as if it were dialogue. So, for example, the biblical narrator will never be represented as speaking in poetry, but characters can be, as in
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the deathbed blessing of Jacob near the end of the book of
Genesis or the Song of Deborah in the book of Judges.
The second way that biblical lyric poetry distinguishes itself from narrative is in its willingness to give access to the
inner lives of its speakers. If biblical narrative trades in
opaqueness of characterization, biblical poetry fairly revels
in the exposure of subjectivity. When biblical authors wanted
to convey feeling or thought, they resorted to verse form. Obvious examples of this formal preference include poetic
books like the Psalms and the Song of Songs, where the expression of passion, whether despairing or joyful, is common.
We find also in narrative contexts briefer poetic insets that
serve to express or intensify emotion. Take, for example,
Jacob’s reaction to the bloodied robe of Joseph, which as
Alter has pointed out is rendered as a perfect couplet of Hebrew poetry: hayya ra’ah ‘akhalathu / tarof toraf yosef (“A
vicious beast has devoured him, / torn, torn is Joseph!”).21
The book of Job serves as an example on a much larger scale.
It begins in the narrative mode and gives precious little insight into Job’s thoughts or feelings. But when the story
moves to Job’s anguished death wish (“Blot out the day of
my birth, / and the night that announced, ‘A man-child is conceived’”), narrative gives way to the passionate but finely
modulated poetic form of chapter 3, followed by many chapters in verse containing Job’s impassioned defense of his integrity.22
T. S. Eliot’s pronouncement that “when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not
another thing” might seem like a truism, but it’s a sentiment
that sometimes needs repeating.23 This is especially true when
it comes to considering the poetry of the Bible, which has so
often been treated precisely as “another thing”—traditionally
as theology or as ethics, but more recently, under the guise
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of literary criticism, as narrative. By the latter, I mean that
even in recent “literary approaches” to the Bible, critics often
look for things like plot or characterization in biblical poetry,
categories more appropriate to narrative texts. But biblical
poetry is, in both the simplest and the most complicated ways,
poetry. To consider a biblical poem as poetry is to pay attention to its line structure, to its status as direct discourse, to
the sort of speaking voice it presents, to its diction and imagery, and to its willingness to express inner thought and
emotion as biblical narrative rarely does. It is, in other words,
to attend not only to what the poem means but also to how it
means.
NOTES
1. Longinus, On Sublimity, trans. D. A. Russell, in Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations, ed. D. A. Russell and M.
Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 470: “Similarly,
the lawgiver of the Jews, no ordinary man—for he understood and expressed God’s power in accordance with its worth—writes at the beginning of his Laws: ‘God said’—now what?—‘Let there be light,’ and there
was light; ‘Let there be earth,’ and there was earth.”
2. Confessions, VI.v and III.v, respectively.
3. So for example, C. S. Lewis, The Literary Impact of the Authorized
Version (London: The Athlone Press, 1950), 4: “There is a certain sense
in which ‘the Bible as literature’ does not exist. It is a collection of books
so widely different in period, kind, language, and aesthetic value, that no
common criticism can be passed on them. In uniting these heterogeneous
texts the Church was not guided by literary principles, and the literary
critic might regard their inclusion between the same boards as a theological and historical accident irrelevant to his own branch of study.” It is
not as clear as Lewis suggests that literary principles played no role in
the formation of the biblical canon; but even if one conceded the point
that does not mean that literary qualities are absent from the Bible, as this
essay endeavors to show.
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4. Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1991), 426.
5. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature (trans. Willard R. Trask; Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1953), 3-23.
6. This contrasts with non-narrative cultic or liturgical prose texts where,
for example, we are given quite detailed descriptions of the tabernacle
and its furnishings; see, e.g., Exodus 25-27.
7. Ibid., 9.
8. Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1996), 129.
9. Ibid., 131-32.
10. Auerbach, Mimesis, 6.
11. Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends (New
York: Summit, 1976), 93-94; Danna Fewell and David Gunn, Gender,
Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1993), 52-54.
12. In a related vein, see Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New
York: Basic, 1981), 33-34, who writes of the dialectic between “God’s
will” and “human freedom.” For Alter, the “refractory nature” of human
freedom is imagined primarily as working against God’s will, whereas to
my mind that is not always the case.
13. Emily Dickinson, Letter 342a (to Thomas Wentworth Higginson), in
Selected Letters (ed. Thomas H. Johnson; Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 208.
14. Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems
(New York: Knopf, 1937), 22.
15. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, translated from the Latin by G. Gregory (London: Thomas Tegg, 1839), 205.
16. M. O’Connor, Hebrew Verse Structure (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1980); Adele Berlin, The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp,
“Poetry, Hebrew,” New Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 4
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006).
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17. James Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and its History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Robert Alter, The Art
of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic, 1985).
18. Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 25.
19. This visual quality is what Aristotle might refer to as enargeia (Poetics
1455a; Rhetoric 1410b) or “vividness.” So also Demetrius, On Style, 209220. On enargeia in classical poetry, see Egbert J. Bakker, “Mimesis as
Performance: Rereading Auerbach’s First Chapter,” Poetics Today 20:1
(1993), 11-26, who ties it to the nature of orally performed epic; also Andrew Ford, Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1993). On vividness in epic poetry more generally, see Suzanne
Fleischman, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); and in classical
history writing Andrew D. Walker, “Enargeia and the Spectator in Greek
Historiography,” Transactions of the American Philological Associaton
123 (1993): 353-377. This quality of vividness, present also in biblical
Hebrew poetry, is largely absent in biblical Hebrew narrative.
20. On this phenomenon, see Robert Kawashima, Biblical Narrative and
the Death of the Rhapsode (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2004), ch. 3.
21. Alter, Genesis, 215.
22. Chapters 1 and 2 and then 42:7-17 of the book of Job take the form
of prose narrative, but the long central section of the book in 3:1-42:6 is
in verse form. Modern scholarship has mostly taken this as an indication
of different authors (though recent years have seen a rethinking of this),
without recognizing that the shift in literary form can be understood as
motivated by the differing literary resources offered by Hebrew prose and
Hebrew poetry. By convention, verse form allows the necessary access
to Job’s inner life in a way that prose does not, and it also allows for the
sometimes extravagant figurative language that we find in the poetic section of the book.
23. T. S. Eliot, Preface to the second edition of The Sacred Wood: Essays
on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1928), viii.
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45
What is the Surface Area
of a Hedgehog?
Barry Mazur
Well, I don’t know the answer to the question of the title and
no hedgehog will be harmed, or even mentioned again, until
the very end of my lecture.
Eva Brann suggested tonight’s lecture might address the
question, What is area? I’m delighted to do this, and I’m delighted to be here, and to be among people—you, the St.
John’s community—with whom it will be such a pleasure to
contemplate this question.
In this lecture I’ll discuss the concepts of
• area—how it is familiar to us, and how when we
push it to the limit we get some surprises;
• length—since, at least at first impression it is a
more primitive “prior” concept— seemingly simpler than area;
• proportion—crucial to the understanding of both
length and area;
• invariance—as a way of characterizing length and
area;
• quadrature—as a crucial “format” for expressing
profound area relationships in geometry.
And I’ll conclude by alluding to Archimedes’ wonderful “mechanical method” in which he transmutes the problem of
computing area into the problem of computing something
akin to weight1 and thereby achieves the quadrature of the
Prof. Barry Mazur is the Gerhard Gade University Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. This was the annual Steiner Lecture, delivered on Friday 30 September 2011 at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
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parabola. This offers us a glimpse of the power of analogy,
and the use of the thought-experiment as already practiced in
ancient mathematics.2 It also gives us the opportunity to touch
in passing on broader issues in mathematical thought such as
analogy, heuristic, paradox, invariance, and something I’ll
call characterization (a version of axiomatization).
1. AREA AS FAMILIAR
We all know what the word area signifies. It often refers to a
territorial cordon, as in restricted area or hard-hat area or
even area studies. It sometimes comes as a number, but always with a unit attached, such as square miles, square feet,
square inches, acres, or if it’s a bed area you’re interested in,
you can ask for it to be King-size or Queen-size, or a size of
lesser nobility.
Fig. 1
If you want to approximate the area of the enclosed shape in
Fig. 1 on a grid with a mesh of one-foot by one-foot squares,
you might count the number of one-square-foot patches that
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47
comprise a union of squares that completely cover the figure
(in the above case it is 81) and count the number of onesquare-foot patches that the figure covers completely (in the
above case it is 39). Then you know that the area of the figure
in units of square feet is squeezed between these two numbers; that is, the area is smaller than the first number (or equal
to it), and bigger than the second. In the above case, we
would have
81 square feet ≥ area of figure ≥ 39 square feet.
If you want a better estimate, do the same thing with oneinch by one-inch squares.
If any of us were asked to calculate the square-footage of
this auditorium we’d come up with some figure or other, confident that we could refine it to any degree accuracy required.
And you may be painfully aware of the area of your dorm
room. So, what else is there to say?
Fig. 2
2. HOW GOOD ARE YOU AT COMPARING AREAS?
I’m not very good. Here’s an example. The area of the two
shaded triangles in Fig. 2 are equal.
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I know this thanks to Proposition 37 of Book I of Euclid’s
Elements. All of you either know that proposition now, or will
after your freshman year. This is the proposition that says that
triangles with the same base and height have the same area.
Proposition 37 of Book I will be a recurring theme in my lecture; it is a marvelous piece of mathematics that demonstrates
many things, including the maxim that to be profound and to
be elementary are not mutually exclusive virtues.
But if I simply compared those figures visually—without
either explicitly remembering or somehow “internalizing”
Euclid’s proposition—I would probably grossly underestimate (if that’s a possible phrase) the area of the spiky triangle
in comparison with the seemingly fat one. In a sense, then,
Euclid’s proposition–embedded in my central nervous system
as it is—has improved (a tiny bit, not much) my ability to
make off-the-cuff judgments and rough comparisons. Our native intuition, combined with a data bank of geometric experiences, determines our effectiveness in making judgments
about all sorts of attributes belonging to objects that we see.
I’m guessing that our eyeball comparisons are more reliable
in relation to straight-line lengths than in relation to curved
lengths,3 and much more reliable than our ability to estimate
area and volume, given the variety of possible configurations.
In teaching Euclid’s Elements, one often emphasizes “logical
thinking” as the great benefit that students take away from
learning geometry. But I also see a type of pre-logical—if I
can call it that—or intuition-enriching benefit as well. This
is hard to pinpoint, but it comes out as a general sharpening
of faculties in regard to thinking about, guessing about, negotiating, comparing, and relating geometric objects.
Such a benefit is very different from the other valuable
reward just mentioned—that is, being able to actually argue
the proof of Proposition 37 of Book I by making the elegant
construction shown in Fig. 3.
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Fig. 3
To continue our review of how good our intuitions are, let’s
pass to a slightly deeper basic geometric comparison authored by Archimedes that astonishes me now just as it must
have astonished Archimedes’ contemporaries. We will get
into this in more depth later on,4 but consider the following
striking way of recreating the area of any circle: the area of
any circle is equal to the area of a right-angle triangle defined
by the property that the two of its sides making the right angle
have lengths equal to the radius of the circle, and to the length
of the circumference of the circle, respectively. (Fig. 4)
Fig. 4
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Here, as in the previous example, I “see” it not visually (if
this can be said), but only with the help of my memory of its
proof. (I will say more about this below).
Let us push a bit further. The two examples we’ve just
reviewed are examples of nicely enclosed, finite figures. We
are even poorer in intuition when faced with planar figures
(no matter how smooth and simple their boundaries seem to
be) that “asymptote” off to infinity. It may be quite difficult,
even if given long chunks of such a shape, to extrapolate and
guess by eyeball alone whether it extends out to a figure with
infinite area or finite area.
For example, consider Fig. 5, which was drawn as accurately as possible. I wonder whether you can guess if the area
bounded by the blue curve or the pink curve has finite area.
My point is that there’s no reason why you should be able to
do it no matter what talents of visual acuity you may possess.
Fig. 5
But, just in case you are wondering, if you continued tracing the curved regions ad infinitum in the manner smoothly
begun by the sketch—meaning that the pink curve is the
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graph of the function y = 1/x and the blue curve is the graph
of the function y = 1/x2—then the (infinite) red-bounded region happens to have infinite area while the (infinite) bluebounded region has finite area. As a side issue, many calculus
students are amazed to find that if you “construct” an infinite
“trumpet” by rotating the red curve of the above figure
around the x-axis, then its surface area is infinite, even though
the volume it subsumes is finite. To put it in colloquial, but
misleading, terms: you can fill this trumpet with a finite
amount of paint, but you need an infinite amount of paint to
paint it.
This phenomenon illuminates much, especially for people
who know calculus, and could be the subject of a question
following the lecture. But I won’t dwell on this; I mention it
as a hint that there are things to dwell on here.
3. PUSHING TO THE LIMIT
You might wonder what is to be gained by asking questions
about infinite area versus finite area, or by considering the
concept of area in various extreme contexts. Mathematics
often does that sort of thing: it is a useful strategy to examine
a concept when it is brought to its limit, in the hope that the
strains inflicted on the concept will reveal important facets
of it that would be hidden in less stressful situations. If you
push a concept to its extreme border, you may see things that
would otherwise be overlooked if you remain in the comfortable zones. For example, you can learn what its precise borders are. Some of the most beautiful mathematics—and the
deepest—has emerged by seeking the extremes.
The issue we have just addressed, areas of infinitely extended regions, can be broadened, for it raises the question:
exactly how many subsets of the plane deserve to have a
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well-defined area? Do all subsets have a reasonable notion
of area?
4. AREA AS PARADOXICAL
To get the blood circulating, let’s contemplate something that
is evidently impossible: Can you
(1) take a square S in the Euclidean plane, cut it (say,
with a scissors) into four pieces A, B, C, D of equal
area—so no two of these pieces overlap, and the four of
them cover the square?
In standard notation:5
S = A ! B ! C ! D;
(2) and now can you throw away two of the pieces (say
C and D) and move the other two (A and B) around by
Euclidean motions to get congruent shapes Aʹ, Bʹ in the
plane so that these two pieces cover the exact same
square again, i.e.,
S = Aʹ ! Bʹ ?
The answer, of course, is No, you can’t do this. Certainly not
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if the concept of area has the properties that we expect to
have. By “properties” I’m referring to these two self-evident
axioms:
(1) the area of a union of non-overlapping figures is
the sum of the areas of each of the figures; and
(2) the area of a figure is preserved under Euclidean
motion.
For if you could do this, then our two formulas for S displayed above will give contradictory answers to the question,
What is the area of S?
With this in mind, consider the following strange fact
about spherical rather than Euclidean geometry. Let S be the
surface of a ball (that is, what mathematicians call the twodimensional sphere). There is a way of separating S into four
sets A, B, C, D, no two of which overlap, such that each of
these sets are—in an evident sense—congruent to any of the
others. (This means that, for example, there is a way of rotating the sphere that brings A precisely to the position that
B occupied (before that rotation)—and similarly, there are
ways of rotating the sphere to bring A to B and to C and to
D. Nevertheless, you can throw two of them away (say, C
and D) and find a way of rotating the sphere so that A is
brought to a set A′ and a (different) way of rotating the sphere
so that B is sent to a set B′ and these maneuvers have the
strange property that A′ and B′ together cover the sphere; i.e.,
S = A′ ! B′.
This is called the Banach-Tarski Paradox. Despite first appearances this is not actually a paradox although there is indeed a subtlety lurking in the way in which I worded things.6
It is merely a para-dox, that is: something contrary to expected
opinion.
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I brought this apparent paradox up not to confuse you but
rather to point out, at the very outset, that
• even though area is a concept we tend to feel perfectly
at home with, to get closer to its essence is to appreciate more keenly its complexity, and so
• in our discussion about area we had better start from
the very beginning, by noting that
• despite its reputation for having what are called
“proper foundations,” mathematics doesn’t seem to
have a “beginning.”
5. LENGTH IN EVERYDAY LIFE
Nevertheless, let’s begin with something seemingly a bit simpler than area: plain old lengths of straight line-segments. I
say “seemingly” because as often happens in mathematics,
the simpler-seeming concept (in this case, length) contains,
in a more visible form, lots of the essential aspects of its complicated companions (e.g., area and volume).
We all know what is meant when someone says “a ten
foot pole.” This is a relative statement, comparing the pole
to some foot-long ruler, and claiming that we can lay ten
copies of our measuring device onto the pole, covering it
completely with no overspill or overlap. Usually, of course,
the speaker of this phrase has something on his mind other
than this length-measuring thought-experiment.
In slight contrast, when we are told that the circumference
of this cup is eight inches long and we want to verify this directly, we must set aside our rigid, calibrated, ruler and use
something like a tape-measure, wrapping it around the rim
of the cup.7 Of course, there is also a well-known indirect
way of verifying this measurement which starts by using our
rigid ruler to calculate the diameter of the cup—but this indirection already involves a certain amount of mathematical
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experience with π.
In even greater contrast, when we are told that the star
cluster NGC 1929 within the Large Magellanic Cloud (a
satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way shown in Fig. 68) is
179, 000 light-years away from us, other measuring devices
are required, and—given relativistic issues—what distance
means is already a subtle business.
Fig. 6
6. EQUALITY [OF LENGTH] IN EUCLID
The concept length occurs—in a somewhat cryptic form—
early in the Elements. It appears as mēkos in the definition of
line (Def. 2):
A line is breadthless length.
The concept reappears as diastēma (translated often as distance but meaning, more specifically, interval or gap) as
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something of a surprise. Euclid slips it into the discussion in
Book I in the definition of circle (Def. 15), which is described
as—and I’ll put it in modern vocabulary—a figure bounded
by a curve the points of which are equidistant from a given
point.
Thanks to this definition and the ability we have—given
to us by Postulate 3—of drawing a circle with any center and
any radius, we can begin to construct many line segments
that, in Euclid’s terms, are “equal” (meaning, are of equal
length). Even better, we are supplied with tools for establishing equality. Euclid wastes no time making use of these tools:
the very first proposition (Proposition 1 of Book I, see Fig.
79) goes straight to the task of constructing, on any line segment, an equilateral triangle, that is, a triangle in which all
three sides are “equal.” And we’re off and running, at least
as far as understanding equality of length goes.
On the facing page you see it in its full glory, ending with
a triumphant hoper edei poiēsai—i.e., “as was to be constructed.”
When later mathematics takes on the issue of length,
things proceed quite differently from the way Euclid proceeded. Modern mathematics throws a spotlight on transformations in a way that ancient mathematics did not.
Nowadays, as we introduce a new concept or new type of
structure, often—at the same time—we make explicit the
types of transformations or mappings between exemplars of
this structure that we are willing to consider (or rather, that
we are willing to allow). These allowed transformations are
the ones that respect the inner coherence of the structure we
are studying. In Euclidean geometry, the allowed transformations are the mappings of the Euclidean plane onto itself
that preserve the notion of congruence. They consist of rotations about points in the plane, translations, and also those
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transformations that can be viewed as the composition of a
“flip,” (that is, a symmetry about some straight line) with a
translation or rotation. In one of the modern formats, the concept of Euclidean length and the collection of the allowed
transformations of Euclidean geometry are yoked concepts,
working in tandem:
• The allowed transformations are precisely those transformations that preserve length of all line-segments,
while
• two line-segments have equal length if and only if
there are allowed transformations bringing any one
of them onto the other.
In effect, these notions—“length between points in Euclidean geometry” and “the transformations that preserve Euclidean geometry”—are yoked, chicken-and-egg style, in that
each can be used to begin the discussion and characterize
(that is, explicitly determine) the other. Think of it this way:
We could invoke each of these concepts to provide the vocabulary for a system of axioms in a geometry, and the other
concept would then be one of the many features of that geometry. You can have length as your basic concept and stipulate
the transformations that preserve your geometry to be those
that preserve length, or you may start with the stipulation of
transformations of your geometry and derive length as one
of its invariants—in effect, deriving the entire geometry from
its group of symmetries. (The second viewpoint represents a
celebrated shift of emphasis, known as the Erlangen Program.) But there is also an important difference of mood between “axiomatization,” which sets up a theory starting from
one direction or the other, and presenting things in a balanced
way, where each concept “characterizes” the other.
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7. PROPORTIONS
Length is, at bottom, a relative concept: that is to say, “length
compared to what?” is a bona fide question. What are the
units? Inches? Feet? Miles?10 That is, when we deal with
length, we are dealing—unavoidably—with a proportion.11
This puts us in the mood of Euclid’s Book V, a work that
deals exclusively with proportions among magnitudes.
Say we are interested in the length of our ten-foot pole P.
We compare it to our one-foot ruler F, we might emphasize
the proportional aspect of length by recording the answer
symbolically this way:
(*) P : F “=” 10 : 1
I’ve put quotation-marks around the equality sign to emphasize that it is indeed a serious abbreviation of thought, turning
what began as an analogy (P is to F as 10 is to 1) into an
equality (the relationship that P has to F is the relationship
that 10 has to 1)—turning an as into a straight is. This is a
curious transition. The older notation for equality sign in quotation marks is a double-colon,
(**) P : F :: 10 : 1,
capturing equally well, I believe, the “as” aspect of the relationship. That a proportion of lengths is interpretable as a
proportion of numbers may well be self-evident, but that it is
an interpretation is worth bearing in mind.
The legacy of the Pythagoreans offers us yet another interpretation for the versatile notion of a proportion of lengths:
As the length is to the length,
So the heard tone is to the heard tone.
After this discussion it is safe to remove the quotation
marks in formula (*) displayed above, and write
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P/F = 10/1.
We thereby see arithmetic in geometry (that is, by going from
left to right in the above equation). In other words, we have
an “arithmetic” (of proportions of straight line segments) that
mirrors “ordinary” arithmetic (of ratios of numbers). For example, you can add proportions of lengths of line segments:
A· − − − − − − ·B· − − − − − − − − − − − − − − ·C
D· − − − − − − ·E
AB/DE + BC/DE = AC/DE
and multiply proportions of lengths of line segments:
A· − − − − − − ·B
C· − − − − − − − − − − − − − − ·D
E· − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − ·F
AB/CD × CD/EF = AB/EF
and we have a natural interpretation of inequalities between
these proportions. These behave formally “just like fractions,”
as the notation indicates, and we have a veritable algebra of
geometrical proportions.
8. COMMON MEASURES, AND UNCOMMON MEASURES
All this makes perfect, and natural, sense and conforms to
the most elementary basic ideas we have about arithmetic as
long as we treat proportions of lengths that “admit a common
measure.”
That is, imagine that you are given two intervals,
A· − − − − − − ·B
C· − − − − − − − − − − − − ·D
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and you know that there is a certain unit measure, say given
by another interval EF,
E· − − ·F
such that AB and CD are measured by (whole) number multiples of EF. For example, say AB is seventeen EFs long and
CD is four hundred ninety one EFs long; so we may write:
AB/EF = 17/1 and CD/EF = 491/1.
We then say that EF is a common measure for the line segments AB and CD. And, in this particular case, we then comfortably write
AB/CD = 17/491.
But the fun, as I think you all know, is already there at
the very outset of geometry for one of the most fundamental
of geometric proportions—that between the diagonal and the
side of a square
the diagonal AC / the side AB
—was shown to have no common measure,12 and nevertheless
the proportion AC/AB (alias √2/1) was still regarded as a genuine object of study, with the consequence that it forced us—
by the analogy between proportions of lengths and proportions
of numbers—to extend our very idea of what it means to be a
number. It is worth thinking about what it means for geometry
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to guide us in our evolving concept of number.
For all this is a beginning of one of the great analogies,
arithmetic ↔ geometry,
in which each profoundly influences the other. This type of
thinking goes against a view held by Aristotle (a view often
referred to as purity), namely:
We cannot, in demonstrating, pass from one genus to another.
We cannot, for instance, prove geometrical truths by arithmetic.13
9. THE UBIQUITY OF “ANALOGY” IN MATHEMATICAL THOUGHT
In the previous section we have been working through the
idea that straight line segments stand in relation to each other
“just as” numerical quantities stand in relation to each other;
that is, we are now faced with—as we’ve mentioned—one
of the primordial analogies between geometry and arithmetic.
That this “just as” relation is an analogy and not a direct
equality takes some convincing. A curious phenomenon occurs with many mathematical analogies once they get embedded in our thought. If A is seen to be analogous to
something else, B, there is the impetus to think of A and B
as, somehow, special cases of, or aspects of, a single more
encompassing C; and somehow to rethink the analogy as
equality. This switch is a form, but not the only form, of abstraction that is indigenous to mathematical sensibility. Versatile switching of viewpoints is one of the reasons for the
power of a mathematical frame of thought. This replacement
of a pair of analogous contexts for a single encompassing
context occurs so often that people with experience in mathematics have this type of thought engrained in them as second
nature.14
As I mentioned, replacing the two parts of an analogy by
a common generalized concept is powerful and occurs often
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in mathematics, but in other contexts of thought it might seem
a strange thing to do. One rarely does this kind of generalizing with analogies and metaphors that occur in literature:
when thinking about the metaphorical comparison in
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
do we conceive of a more general entity that encompasses
“thee” and “summer’s day” as instances?
10. LENGTH AND STRAIGHT LINE SEGMENTS
You may have noticed that, although I’ve gone on at some
length, I never defined straight line segment. Now, you can
postpone talking about straight line segments if you phrase
things in terms of distance. That is, for any two points P and
Q on the Euclidean plane, if you have a notion of the distance
between P and Q—denote it by dist(P, Q)—you can pick out
the points on the straight line segment between P and Q as
precisely those points X such that
dist(P, Q) = dist(P, X) + dist(X, Q).
But the ancients seem not to have defined straight line segment this way. Euclid’s definition (Def. 4 of Book I) is elegantly enigmatic:
A straight line is a line which lies evenly with the points on itself.
This is reminiscent of Plato’s definition of a straight line segment as “whatever has its middle in front of its end” (Parmenides 137e). Here, Plato seems to be taking his straight
line segment up to his eye to view it as you would look
through a telescope, noting that the only thing he sees is its
endpoint. In effect, a straight line is a line of sight.15 A much
later take on the matter defines a straight line segment with
endpoints P and Q as the unique curve joining P and Q such
that among all curves joining P and Q it is the one having
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the shortest length.16 But to make sense of this you must
know, at the very least, what it means for a curve to have a
length. Hence . . .
11. LENGTHS OF SMOOTH CURVES
Nowhere in Euclid’s Elements is the length of a curve that is
not a straight line, or polygonal, segment discussed. The first
nonpolygonal curve whose length was considered (in the
texts that I know) is the circumference (called the perimeter)
of a circle, as studied in Archimedes’s The measurement of
the circle.17 And there the length of the circumference of a
circle enters the mathematical discussion in the context of the
elegant statement about area18 that we have already briefly
discussed in Section 2.
Here it is as Proposition 1 of Archimedes text:
Proposition 1: Every circle is equal to a right-angled
triangle, whose radius [R] is equal to one of the [sides]
around the right angle while the perimeter [i.e., circumference T of the circle] is equal to the base [of the
triangle].
This is proved by approximating the circle by a regular polygon with a large number of sides, and arguing appropriately.
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This is an amazing theorem, of course, but the more specific
reason I’m mentioning it is that it exemplifies the general rule
that the computation of the length of any curvy curve depends—perhaps very indirectly—on relating it to the length
of approximating polygons. This is (quite directly) Archimedes’s method here. He makes use of a result about polygons analogous to Proposition 1, where the polygons in
question will be made to approximate the circle. For a slightly
more extensive sketch of Archimedes’s argument, see the Appendix, Section 20 below.
12.
LENGTHS
OF
CRINKLY CURVES
It has been said that there
is no way to measure the
length of the coastline of
Scotland.
It is just too crinkly,
and the length you find
yourself computing depends on how fine a grid
of measurements you
make—the result getting
longer and longer as the
measurements
grow
finer. Mathematicians
can easily model such an
effect, the most famous
construction being something called the Koch snowflake.
This is a closed curve obtained by taking the limit of an infinite sequence of crinkle-operations. Start with an equilateral
triangle and on an interval one-third the size of each side construct a small equilateral triangle. Here are the first few stages:
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At each stage you are faced with a longer curve, and in the
limit, you have seemingly contained a curve within a finite
region that is so crinkly so as to have—in effect—infinite
length.
13. WHAT IS AREA?
We’ll be interested primarily in the areas of figures in the Euclidean plane. Given our discussion of length it won’t be a
surprise to learn that we will be dealing, again, with proportions; in this case, the proportion of (the area of) one figure
to (the area of) another. Nor will it be much of a surprise to
find that just as straight line segments played a fundamental
role in all discussions of length, so too polygonal figures will
play such a role in our treatment of area.
Euclid is again very helpful here. The first time he discusses area, it is—in his vocabulary— parallelogramatic
area: Proposition 34 of Book I tells us that the diagonal of a
parallelogram bisects the (area of) the parallelogram. He fol-
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lows this up with the propositions (including the beautiful
Proposition 37 I’ve alluded to already) stating that two triangles with the same base and height have the same area, as do
two parallelograms with the same base and height.
And once we have these tools, we are in good shape to
deal with areas of polygonal figures. We can even go further,
as we saw in Section 11 above with Archimedes’s proof that
transforms the area of a circle into the area of a triangle by
means of polygonal figures. (As I’ve said, we will discuss
more in the Appendix, Section 20 below.)
14. AREA AS AN “INVARIANT”
Here is an exercise: make a (short) list of “axioms” that (you
guess) characterizes the concept of ratios of areas for a large
class of (plane) figures. You’ll surely include a number of
basic properties of the intuitive concept of area as hinted at
in section 4 above. But let me start the game by insisting that
one of your axioms be this:
Axiom of Invariance under Euclidean motions:
If A, B are a pair of plane figures for which you
have defined the ratio
area of A / area of B
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(or, for short, A/B) and if A′ is the image of the
figure A under a Euclidean transformation, then
we have the equality:
area of A / area of B = area of A′ / area of B
This is worth thinking about, but this is just a start, and
note that in your personal “theory of area,” part of the chore
is to make precise exactly what class of figures you are going
to be assigning a well-defined area. This might be a bit of
fodder for discussion following the lecture. This exercise was
solved elegantly and in somewhat astounding generality before World War II by the Hungarian mathematician Alfréd
Haar.
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15. SHEARS AND SIMILARITIES
Given a well-working “theory of area,” certain properties will
follow as consequences. For example, here are two basic features—two further invariance properties for the concept of
area.
(1) Shears
By a horizontal shear transformation let’s mean a transformation of the Euclidean plane to itself that keeps every
horizontal line in place, but moves it by a translation that is
dependent on the “height” of that line above the x-axis. That
is, for any point (x, y) in the plane it keeps the y-coordinate
fixed but allows the x coordinate to change by a rule:
x ↦ x + F(y)
where F(y) is some civilized (e.g., continuous) function of y.
This type of motion of the plane keeps all lines parallel to the
x-axis intact, but translates them by different amounts depending on their height. By a general shear transformation
let’s mean an analogous transformation, but with respect to
lines parallel to any fixed line: the line needn’t be the x-axis.
The area of figures is preserved by shears!
Now we’ve actually seen examples of this in our previous discussion: think of Proposition 37 of Book I of Euclid’s Elements. One way of revisiting the content of Proposition 37 is
to note that any two triangles with the same base and same
height can be brought one to another by a shear.
The three-dimensional version of this (where the question
is about volume rather than area) is sometimes referred to as
Cavalieri’s Principle, and is illustrated, for example, by the
following picture, where Cavalieri’s Principle would state
that the two stacks of coins on the next page occupy the same
volume.
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(2) The behavior of area under similarity transformations.
If
• A and A′ are in the class of figures for which you have defined the ratio
area of A / area of A′
and if
• P, Q are points in the figure A with P′, Q′ the corresponding
points in the similar figure A′,
then the square of the ratio
length of PQ / length of P′Q′
is equal to the ratio
area of A / area of A′
This square relation tells us that we are dealing with a twodimensional concept.19
Dimensionality as a concept opens up a host of marvelous
questions to explore, not the least of which is the grand idea,
initially due to Hausdorff, that the full range of possible geometric figures admits a continuous gamut of dimensions—
not just dimensions 0, 1, 2, 3, . . .
That such strange figures possessing non-whole-number
dimensions may have some bearing on questions in the nat-
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ural sciences, economics, and finance—let alone pure mathematics—is the energy behind Benoît Mandelbrot’s wellknown fractals.20
16. I NVARIANCE
AS FEATURE ;
I NVARIANCE
AS CHARAC -
TERIZATION
I have been alluding to the invariance properties of length
and of area. Here is a summary and comparison.
Euclidean Length and the collection of Euclidean motions
suit each other’s needs perfectly:
• The (Euclidean) concept of length is invariant under the
Euclidean motions (i.e., translation, rotations, symmetries
about straight lines, and compositions of these). That is,
these transformations preserve Euclidean distance.
• Any distance relation between points that satisfies certain
natural axioms and that is invariant under any Euclidean
motion is (after appropriate rescaling of its values) equal
to the (Euclidean) concept of length.
• Moreover, any transformation that preserves length between any two points in the plane is a Euclidean motion.
In contrast to length, the invariance properties of (Euclidean) concept of area is stranger:
• The (Euclidean) concept of area is invariant under Euclidean motions, of course— but it is also invariant under
a much greater collection of transformations. For example, any of the shear transformations we have discussed
in the previous section (Section 15) preserves area.
• But as for characterizing this concept by invariance properties, things go the other way: area is characterized (up
to a mere change of scale) by its invariance under translations alone—that’s all the invariance you need invoke
to pinpoint this concept!
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It is quite fitting, then, that Euclid inserts his Proposition
37 in Book I, very early in his discussion of area: the proposition is, of course, a critical tool in establishing the simplest
arguments regarding area—but from a modern perspective,
it also points to one of the deep properties of the concept visà-vis invariance: there is a huge collection of transformations—far more of them than just Euclidean motions—that
preserve area.
17. CLASSICAL QUADRATURE PROBLEMS
The phrase quadrature of . . . loosely refers to the problem
of finding the area of . . . , which usually means expressing—
as some simple numerical ratio—the proportion of the area
of one figure to another figure.21 First, here is a simple example related to Euclid’s Proposition 37 in Book I of the Elements that we discussed earlier, and whose proof can be
found by putting together propositions in Book I of Euclid’s
Elements:22
Proposition: Let P be a parallelogram and T a triangle, such
that P and T have the same base and the same height. Then
P : T = 2 : 1.
This proposition follows the format of what I’ll call a
“Classical Quadrature Problem,” which I want to mean to be
a statement that the proportion of areas (or lengths, or volumes) of two geometric figures, all described entirely in clear
general geometric terms,23 is equal to a specific numerical
ratio.
There are quite a number of classical problems that fit
this mold, that is, problems expressing the proportion of the
areas of two figures, or volumes of two solids (described in
general terms) in terms of specific rational numbers. For example, Proposition 10 of Book XII of Euclid’s Elements tell
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us that
the ratio of the volume of a cone to a cylinder
that have the same base and the same height
is 1 : 3.
This “1 : 3” reoccurs as the ratio of the volume of a conical solid built on any base to the cylindrical solid built on
the same base, and of the same height. The earliest text I
know that “explains” the “1 : 3” in this more general context
is Arithmetica Infinitorum by John Wallis, who did his work
before the full-fledged invention of Calculus; for the people
who know Calculus, this is an exercise.24
As with much of Archimedes’s work there are stories that
surround it. In one of his treatises,25 Archimedes showed that
the ratio of the volume of a sphere to that of
the cylinder that circumscribes it is 2 : 3.
and according to legend, this being his favorite result, he had
it engraved as a sculpture for his tomb.
The most intriguing, and thorny, of the ratios of elementary areas or volumes are the proportion relating the area of
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a circle to that of the square that circumscribes it, and the proportion relating the volume of a sphere to that of the volume
of the cube that circumscribes it. The story of the many attempts to understand these ratios leads us in interesting directions. For example, Hippocrates of Chios in his attempt to
square the circle studied classical quadrature problems relating the areas of lunes (which are figures consisting of the
outer portion of a small circle when superimposed on a larger
one, as in the figure below26)
to areas of triangles constructed in relation to those lunes. He
proves, for example, that the area of the lune (defined as the
region between E and F in the figure above) is equal to the
area of the triangle ABO. His results, however, go significantly beyond this.27
18. WEIGHING AREA
A famous example of a classical quadrature problem is
Archimedes’s “Quadrature of the parabola” and this is dealt
with in not one, but two of his treatises in quite different
ways:
• Propositions 14-16 of The quadrature of the parabola, and
• Proposition 1 of The Method.
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The aim is to “find” the area of a segment of a parabola
bounded by a chord.
We know, of course, that this means finding a proportion
between the red area of the above kind of figure and the area
of some other figure.
This problem is especially illuminating in that Archimedes
offers two approaches to it. The method in The quadrature of
the parabola is via exhaustion, i.e., approximation by polygons—which is a method similar to the one we have already
seen in the Measurement of the circle. This actually does
prove what he wants. But the more curious method is the one
that he himself refers to as a mechanical method—a mode of
reasoning to which he does not give the full authority of
proof: it’s an example of a heuristic28—perhaps the first example of such a not-quite-a-proof of which we have any
record.
A major tool Archimedes uses in this heuristic is his famous “law of the lever,”29 which proclaims that if weights W
and w are placed on the plank that is the lever, at opposite
sides of the fulcrum but at distances D and d from the fulcrum
respectively, then the lever will balance if and only if
D·w=d·W
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“Now what in the world does this have to do with area?” you
might ask. The answer is that Archimedes is engaged here in
an ingenious thought-experiment, where the rules of the game
are dictated by some basic physical truths, and the link to
area (he will also treat volume problems this way as well) is
by a profound analogy. In the figure below, imagine the point
K as the fulcrum of a lever. The plank of the lever is the line
segment HK. Archimedes will construct a triangle FAC deployed onto the plank as shown, and will be weighing (yes,
weighing) the parabolic segment P by weighing in a laminar
manner each line in the parabolic segment parallel to the diameter of the parabola against corresponding lines in the triangle FAC placed at an appropriate distance (at H) on the
other side of the fulcrum. Archimedes is thinking that you
can view the parabolic segment and triangle as swept through
by a continuum of line segments, and the area of these figures
is somehow distributed as slivers dependent on the varying
lengths of these line segments. So he uses his “law of the
lever” to find the balance, thereby concluding his heuristic
argument.
We can discuss this at greater length after the lecture if
you like, but here—a bit more slowly—is a recap of what
I’ve just said, broken up into the steps that Archimedes uses.
In the figure below, which is taken from one of the diagrams for Proposition 1 in the traditional text for The Method,
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the chord is AC and the parabolic arc we are to study is the
curve bounded by A and C. We are interested in the area of
the parabolic segment—let us call it P. Specifically, P is that
region bounded by that chord AC and the parabolic segment
that joins with it. For this task, the figure will give us all the
constructions necessary.
(1) The lever and fulcrum: We are going to weigh things
and balance thing so we need some apparatus. Don’t
mind that it is on a slant; but the straight line through C
and K is going to be our lever, and K will be our fulcrum.
(2) The tangent line: We draw the line CF through C tangent to our parabolic arc at C (I’ll say what F is in a
moment).
(3) Let D be the bisector of AC and construct a straight line
through D parallel to the diameter of the parabola. (Para-
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bolas do have well defined “diameters.” In simple English,
if we draw the full parabola, rather than the piece of it as
occurs in the above figure, the diameter is that straight
line piercing the parabola around which the parabola is
symmetric: in other words, flipping about the diameter
preserves the parabola.) This straight line will intersect
CF at a point that we’ll call E, and the parabolic arc at a
point B. So we can call the line ED.
(4) The basic triangle: Draw the lines AB and BC to form
the basic triangle ABC (which I’ll also call T).
(5) Note that T sits neatly in the parabolic segment P.
Clearly the area of P is bigger than that of T, but how
much bigger? The upshot of this proposition, after
Archimedes finishes proving it, is that we get an exact relationship, namely, P : T :: 4 : 3.
(6) Laminating by lines parallel to the diameter: The line
ED is parallel to the diameter. In the figure above, you
find a couple of other labeled lines parallel to the diameter: MO, and FA. What Archimedes wants to do is to think
of the family of all lines that are parallel to the diameter
and how they slice the figure as they sweep across it.
(Think of them as forming a moving family). We will
refer to any member of that family (and there are finitely
many of them!) as a laminar slice. In a moment we will
be slicing two figures by the lines of this family.
(7) The big triangle: This is FAC, built with edges the line
FA parallel to the diameter and the chord AC. Simple
geometry shows that FAC : T = 4. So, thinking of the formula above, we want to prove that P : FAC = 1 : 3.
(8) Weighing slices on the balance beam: Archimedes
hangs the big triangle FAC from its center of gravity, W,
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on the balance bar HK, as indicated in the figure. He then
considers laminar slices of it, comparing them to laminar
slices (by the same line parallel to the diameter) of the
parabolic segment ABC. He proves that to put each laminar slice of the big triangle FAC in equilibrium with the
corresponding slice of the parabolic segment ABC you
have to “hang” the laminar slice of the parabolic segment
ABC at the point H on the other side of the fulcrum. This
uses, of course, his law of the lever.
(9) Weighing the figures themselves: He then says that he
has hung the parabolic segment at point H and the big triangle at point W and, again, the law of the lever gives the
proportions of their areas.
There is a great amount of geometry that one can learn
by considering this result. First, note that we do indeed have
here an example of what I described as a “classical quadrature
problem” in that (a) we specified each of our figures merely
by generic prescriptions (take any parabolic, and cut it with
any chord, etc.), and (b) we asserted that the proportions of
these figures are given by a fixed rational ratio (4:3). That
alone deserves thought.
You might wonder: how many other interesting generic
geometric proportions can one come up with that have a fixed
rational ratio? Or, perhaps, a fixed ratio involving, say,
surds?30
What is gripping here is how we, using Calculus, could
immediately convert into a genuine theorem what Archimedes
does with his “method,” and how a dyed-in-the-wool Euclidean could also come to terms with this by offering an appropriate menu of axioms and common notions. Each of these
revisions of Archimedes’s work—via Calculus, or via appropriate axioms—would have the effect of reframing
Archimedes’s mechanical analogy by encompassing it with
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something non-analogical that has, perhaps, the authority to
explain more. And yet for me, the lesson offered by The
Method lies—to return to the issue of purity I mentioned previously in Section 7 above—in the unconstrained impurity
of the ideas behind it. The Method works on the strength of a
correctly guiding, but nevertheless difficult to justify, analogy
combining previously disparate intuitions that had originated
in somewhat different domains—the experience one has with
a certain weighing apparatus and the intuition one has via Euclidean geometry.
This type of thinking (working with profound analogies
and relating them to, or turning them into, equalities) is today,
as it was in Archimedes’s time, the source of much of the
most powerful mathematics.
19. HEDGEHOGS AGAIN
We have largely talked about areas of figures in the plane,
except for our excursion in the spherical geometry with the
Banach-Tarsky Paradox. This deserves more discussion,
which I hope will happen in the upcoming conversation period.
20. APPENDIX: SKETCH OF A PROOF OF ARCHIMEDES’ MEASUREMENT OF THE CIRCLE.
To describe Archimedes’s argument succinctly, we need some
vocabulary. Define the radius of a regular polygon to be the
length of a line interval that is obtained by dropping a perpendicular to any side of the polygon from the center N of
the regular polygon. Define the perimeter (or circumference)
of a polygon to be the length of its perimeter, i.e., the sum of
the lengths of the sides of the polygon. If the polygon is a
regular M-gon, then the circumference is M times the length
of any side.
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Here is “my” version of Proposition 1 for regular polygons,31 which is analogous to Archimedes’s Proposition 1 for
circles:
Archimedes’s Proposition 1 adapted to regular
polygons: The area subsumed by a regular polygon
is equal to the area subsumed by a right-angled triangle for which the two right-angle sides are of lengths
equal to the radius and the circumference (respectively) of the polygon.
In contrast to the actual Proposition 1 of the Measurement of
the Circle, this “polygon-version” of Archimedes’s Proposition 1 is now nicely within the scope of Euclidean vocabulary; its proof is within the scope of Euclid as well.
Some comments:
(1) Both this “polygon-version” and Archimedes’s Proposition 1 deal with a right-angled triangle whose base is
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the circumference and whose height is the radius of the
figure to which this triangle is being compared. One
could rephrase these propositions by omitting the requirement that the triangle be right-angled.
(2) A visual proof of this polygonal proposition can be
effected simply by cutting and “straightening out to a
line” the perimeter of the polygon, and then arguing that
this paper-doll figure has the same area as the triangle
displayed below.32 (In the figure below we illustrate this
with a 3-gon, otherwise known as a triangle, which produces, when cut-and straightened-out, the three triangles
in a line labeled A,B,C. Each of these triangles have the
same area as the three triangles that make up the large triangle in the lower figure, which has as base the perimeter
and as height the radius.) This relies only the fact that the
area of a triangle depends only on its base and height.
NOTES
1. Since you read Archimedes’s On the equilibrium of planes in Freshman
Laboratory, this may not come as a complete surprise.
2. I am grateful to Paul Van Koughnett who drew most of the figures, and
to Paul Dry for helpful and incisive comments about early drafts of these
notes.
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3. Straight-limbed geometry;
In her arts’ ingeny
Our wits were sharp and keen.
From “Mark Antony,” a poem by John Cleveland (1613-1658). See The
Best Poems of the English language: From Chaucer through Robert
Frost, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 154-55.
4. A sketch of its proof is in the Appendix, Section 20 below.
5. The ∪ (“cup”) notation means “union.” That is, if X and Y are sets, then
X ∪ Y is the set whose members are either members of X or members of
Y or members of both X and Y.
6. For people who are familiar with group theory, a fairly complete description of what is going can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach–Tarski_paradox.
7. A delightful book that discusses calculations of this sort, and of more
theoretical sorts, is John Bryant and Chris Sangwin, How Round is Your
Circle? Where Engineering and Mathematics Meet, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011.)
8. The composite image in Fig. 6 was created by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The X-ray component was produced by NASA/CXC/U.Mich./
S.Oey; the Infrared component by NASA/JPL, and the optical component
by ESO/WFI/2.2-m.
9. Fig. 7 is drawn from Euclid’s Element of Geometry, an edition of the
Greek text with new English translation by Richard Fitzpatrick (Austin:
Richard Fitzpatrick, 2007), 8.
10. Two cowboys:
A: “My ranch is so big I can ride Old Paint from morning to night
and still not cover it.”
B: “I know exactly how you feel. My horse is like that too!”
11. This issue is taken up by Kant from a slant perspective. (That’s typical
for Kant.) In Book I, Sections 25 and 26 of The Critique of Judgment, in
discussing what he calls the mathematical sublime, he points out that in
comprehending in our imagination a specific magnitude (say, this pole is
ten feet long) one is engaging in two acts, of different natures: there is
the mathematical one of counting a number of feet (and comprehending
that act of counting) and then there is the essentially aesthetic one of comprehending—or internalizing in some way or other—what a foot is. From
Kant’s perspective, then, considering a proportion, per se, is an act that
extracts the purely mathematical aspect of “comprehension of a magni-
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tude” from the underlying, and otherwise unavoidable, aesthetic aspect:
comprehending the unit. Of course, it is the latter that interests him.
12. At least if we insist that both intervals be measured by a whole number
of multiples of the chosen “common measure.”
13. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 75a29-75b12.
14. Here is an important example of this that originated over a century
ago, and is everywhere to be seen in modern mathematics: numbers are
analogous to functions. There are whole branches of mathematics
where these concepts are treated as not merely analogous, but as particular exemplars of a larger encompassing concept.
15. See, for example, the marvelous essay on this subject in Euclid: The
Thirteen Books of the Elements, ed. Thomas Heath, 3 vols. (Mineola, New
York: Dover Publications, 1956), 165-69.
16. This property distinguishes straight line segments as geodesics in
modern terminology.
17. For source material, various translations, commentary, and more related texts, please go to:
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k53966
(which is on the “Teaching” page of my web site).
18. That the ratio of the area of a circle to the length of its circumference
is a simple expression in terms of its radius is what is behind the beauty
of Proposition 1. This is a phenomenon that proliferates in higher dimensions; e.g., the ratio of the volume of a sphere to its surface area is, similarly, a simple expression in terms of its radius. This is worth pondering.
19. But neither of the above “invariance properties” need be, nor should
be, included as axioms, for they will follow from your list of axioms (if
you’ve formulated them correctly).
20. See Benoît Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1982).
21. Quadrature is the basic topic in the oldest existent Greek text, that of
Hippocrates of Chios.
22. Or better, by doing it yourself.
23. This is admittedly a bit vague, but I hope the examples convey the
kind of problem I’m referring to.
24. Hint: ∫ x2 dx = ⅓ x3 when evaluated over the interval 0 to x.
25. On the Sphere and Cylinder I.
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26. This figure can be found online at:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Lune.svg
27. I think that there are truly interesting (entirely mathematical, not historical) issues that lurk in this, and it is one of my plans to understand it
in depth.
28. This is especially fitting since it comes from the pen of the celebrated
shouter of “Eureka,” which derives from the same root.
29. There is an extensive earlier tradition of discussion about equilibrium
and disequilibrium on a balance, and on the action of levers of all sorts.
For example, this observation from Part Seven of Aristotle’s On the motion of animals: “A small change occurring at the center makes great and
numerous changes at the circumference, just as by shifting the rudder a
hair’s breadth you get a wide deviation at the prow.” I want to thank Jean
de Groot for conversations about this; I look forward to her forthcoming
commentary on Aristotle’s Mechanics.
There is also, to be sure, an extensive later tradition on this topic—
notably, Ernst Mach’s marvelous critique of the “law” itself, in the Introduction and first few chapters of his wonderful book The Science of
Mechanics (Chicago and London: Open Court, 1919.)
30. That is, square roots. This is not an idle question.
31. I say “my” version because, even though it is—in my opinion—implicitly invoked in Archimedes’s text, it isn’t dwelt on.
32. I’m thankful to Jim Carlson for this suggestion.
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ESSAYS & LECTURES
Some Reflections on Darwin
and C.S. Peirce
Curtis Wilson and Chaninah Maschler
Introduction
On a Saturday morning in the mid-1950s, I attended a St.
John’s faculty seminar on a selected reading from Darwin’s
Origin of Species. What chiefly remains in memory is an
overall impression: the discussion was halting and desultory,
failing to get airborne. In those days the available edition of
the Origin was the sixth and last (1872); compared with the
first edition of 1859, it suffers from excessive backing and
filling, Darwin’s attempts to answer his critics. Yet, even had
our text been from the sprightlier first edition, I doubt our
discussion would have got off the ground. After one spell of
silence a senior tutor spoke up to ask: Isn’t it [Darwin’s theory]
just a hypothesis? The implication, I thought, was: Can’t we
just ignore the whole idea?
The short answer to that second question is: we can’t, because Darwin’s theory is the grand working hypothesis (yes,
it’s a hypothesis!) of biologists everywhere, and as aspirant
generalists at St. John’s, we need to seek out its meaning. The
search can be exhilarating as well as disquieting.
Major features of Darwin’s theory are contained in his
phrase “descent with modification through natural selection.”
The descent of present-day organisms from organisms of preCurtis Wilson was a long-time tutor, and twice Dean, at St. John’s College
in Annapolis. Sadly, he passed away on 24 August 2012, shortly after this
article was completed. Chanina Maschler is tutor emerita at St. John’s
College in Annapolis. The Introduction, in the form of first-person reminiscences, was written by Mr. Wilson. Part 1 is by Ms. Maschler. The last
three parts were worked out by the two authors jointly.
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ceding generations is obvious; Darwin requires us to keep
this fact in focus. The offspring inherit traits from their parents, but some variation occurs. Since far more offspring are
produced than can survive and reproduce, the variants best
suited to surviving and reproducing are the ones that win out.
Relative to a given environment, the surviving form will be
better adapted than the forms that failed. Darwin saw this
process as leading to diversification of kinds, or speciation,
as indicated by the title of his book, On the Origin of Species.1
Darwin opened his first notebook on “Transmutation of
Species” in July, 1837. In a sustained effort of thought from
1837 to 1844, he constructed the theory. The empirical evidence consisted chiefly of the biological specimens that he
had observed and collected during his tour as naturalist
aboard H.M.S. Beagle, from Dec. 27, 1831 to Oct. 2, 1836.
(This voyage was sent out to chart the coasts of South America and determine longitudes round the globe; taking along a
naturalist was an after-thought of the captain’s.)
At the beginning of the Beagle voyage, Darwin was a few
weeks short of his twenty-third birthday. So far in his life he
had had no clear goal. Enrolled in medical school at age sixteen in Edinburgh, he dropped out, unable to endure seeing
patients in pain. His father (a physician, skeptical in religion)
then sent him to Cambridge with the idea that he might fit
himself out to become a country parson, but young Darwin
found the course of study uninteresting. He completed the
A.B. degree, but later acknowledged that his time at Cambridge was mostly wasted. A chance by-product of it was a
friendship with John S. Henslow, the professor of botany.
Henslow it was who arranged Darwin’s being offered the post
of naturalist on the Beagle. Darwin’s father flatly rejected the
idea at first, but Josiah Wedgewood, young Darwin’s maternal uncle, persuaded him to change his mind.
In hindsight, we can say that young Darwin was ad-
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mirably suited to his new post. From boyhood he had been a
persistent collector of a variety of objects, from stamps to
beetles. As a naturalist he would prove to have an unstoppable drive toward theoretical understanding, seeking to connect the dots between his numerous observations. The voyage
of the Beagle, proceeding first to the coasts of South America
and the nearby islands, could not have been more aptly
planned to yield observations supporting the theory that he
would develop. The observations were chiefly of three types.2
Fossils from South America were found to be closely related
to living fauna of that continent, rather than to contemporaneous fossils from elsewhere. Animals of the different climatic zones of South America were related to each other
rather than to animals of the same climatic zones on other
continents. Faunas of nearby islands (Falkland, Galapagos)
were closely related to those of the nearest mainland; and on
different islands of the same island group were closely related. These observations could be accounted for on Darwin’s
theory; on the opposing theory of fixed species they remained
unintelligible.
But why the uproar over Darwin’s Origin, and why does
it still today produce uneasiness? It is not merely that it appears contrary to the creation story in Genesis. As John
Dewey put it in 1910:3
That the publication of the Origin of Species marked an
epoch in the development of the natural sciences is well
known to the layman. That the combination of the very
words origin and species embodied an intellectual revolt
and introduced a new intellectual temper is easily overlooked by the expert. The conceptions that had reigned in
the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand
years, the conceptions that had become the familiar furniture of the mind, rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final; they rested upon treating change
and origin as signs of defect and unreality. In laying hands
upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the
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forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species
introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound
to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.
More recently Ernst Mayr has characterized Darwin’s
new way of thinking as “population thinking,” and the mode
of thinking prevalent earlier as “typological thinking”:
Typological thinking, no doubt, had its roots in the earliest
efforts of primitive man to classify the bewildering diversity of nature into categories. The eidos of Plato is the formal philosophical codification of this form of thinking.
According to it, there are a limited number of fixed, unchangeable “ideas” underlying the observed variability,
with the eidos (idea) being the only thing that is fixed and
real, while the observed variability has no more reality than
the shadows of an object on a cave wall. . . .
The assumptions of population thinking are diametrically
opposed to those of the typologist. The populationist
stresses the uniqueness of everything in the organic world.
What is true for the human species—that no two individuals are alike—is equally true for all other species of animals and plants. . . . All organisms and organic phenomena
are composed of unique features and can be described collectively only in statistical terms. Individuals, or any kind
of organic entities, form populations, of which we can determine the arithmetic mean and the statistics of variation.
Averages are merely statistical abstractions, only the individuals of which the populations are composed have reality. The ultimate conclusions of the population thinker and
of the typologist are precisely the opposite. For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion,
while for the populationist, the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking
at nature could be more different.4
Mayr’s abruptly nominalist “take” on the nature of
species is not required by Darwin’s theory, nor do all biolo-
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91
gists espouse it.5 One thing the theory does require is a new
attention to individual differences. Species may result from
processes that are fundamentally statistical, and yet be real.
For young Darwin, gentleman naturalist, noting individual
differences came naturally. His curiosity about connections
may also have been natural to him, but he developed it into a
powerful drive toward unifying theory.
Before coming to St. John’s in 1948, I had taken undergraduate courses in zoology and embryology in which Darwin’s theory was referred to; I accepted the theory as established. An
occasion for reading Darwin’s Origin had not arisen. On becoming a St. John’s tutor, I immersed myself chiefly in problems of the laboratory on the side of physical science, to
which my interests inclined me and for which my more recent
graduate studies in the history of science to some degree prepared me.
In multiple ways, during my early years at St. John’s, I
took my cue from Jacob Klein. My admiration for him was
unbounded. I respected him for his scholarly knowledge,
shrewdness, and sharp discernment. It was he who drew the
College community out of its 1948-49 leadership crisis and
communal slough of despond in the wake of Barr’s and
Buchanan’s departure, and he did so single-handedly and
spiritedly. During his deanship (1949-1958), he gave the College a new lease on life, a new stability, and an incentive to
move forward: testing, selecting, and improving the Program.
Our debt to him is incalculable.
As dean, Mr. Klein in the opening lecture each year undertook to address the question of what we were doing here,
what liberal education was. It was with trepidation, he told
us, that he addressed this question. Typically, his lecture took
a Platonic turn, as when he described the metastrophē, or turning round, of the prisoner in the cave of Plato’s Republic. The
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former prisoner had to be brought to recognize that the shadows he had previously taken for truth were in fact only images of conventional images. Getting at the truth was a matter
of penetrating beyond that scrim of images.
During the academic year 1954-55 I was co-leader with
Mr. Klein (“Jasha” as we tutors called him) of a senior seminar. On one evening the assignment was from Darwin’s Origin—this was perhaps the only place in the program where
Darwin’s theory was addressed in those days. I recall nothing
of the discussion, but at its end Jasha asked the students: Did
they consider Darwin’s book important to their lives? One
after another they replied with a decisive “No!”—a flood of
denial.
Though failing to lodge a protest, I thought the indifference to Darwin a mistake, and I was disappointed by Jasha’s
standoffishness with respect to it. My opinion was reinforced
in conversations I had at the time with Allen Clark, a Ford
Foundation intern at the College in the years 1954-56.6 Clark
had done graduate studies at Harvard on American pragmatism, reading widely in the writings of C.S. Peirce, William
James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and the Harvard-educated
Spanish émigré George Santayana. He was especially attracted to the writings of Peirce, who had been both a working scientist and a close student of philosophy, and had set
himself to making philosophical sense of natural science.
Peirce had embraced Darwin’s theory and interpreted it.
Attempting to catch up with Clark in philosophy, I began
reading such writings of Peirce as were readily available.
These were two collections of essays, the earliest assembled
by Morris R. Cohen under the title Chance, Love, and Logic,
and a later one due to Justus Buchler, The Philosophy of
Peirce. There were also the six volumes of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, published by Harvard Uni-
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versity Press in 1931-35 under the editorship of Hartshorne
and Weiss, but these were formidable, leaving the inquirer
puzzled as to where to get a leg up or a handhold.
My enthusiasm for Peirce was challenged one summer
evening in the later 1950s. During an informal discussion of
a Peirce essay at Jasha’s home, Jasha took exception to
Peirce’s “Monism,” the doctrine that the world is made of a
single stuff. Jasha saw this doctrine as contradicted by the intentionality of human thought. What was that?
The doctrine had been put forward by the Austrian
philosopher Franz Brentano in 1874.7 According to Brentano,
to think is to think of or about something. Analogously, to
fear or hope entails that there are objects (Jasha sometimes
called them “targets”) of these modes of consciousness. Their
objects need not be existents in the empirical world. I can
think of a unicorn, or imagine riding like Harry Potter on a
broom stick, or fear an imagined bogeyman in a closet.
Brentano therefore spoke of “intentional inexistence,” meaning that such an object is somehow contained in the thought
(cogitatio à la Descartes!) of which it is the object. Brentano
sought to make Intentionality definitive of the mental. He
concluded that mind, because of its intentionality, is irreducible to the physical.
Edmund Husserl, one of Jasha’s teachers, had been a student of Brentano. For Husserl, Brentano’s idea of intentionality became the basis of a new science which he called
Phenomenology. Husserl followed Brentano in treating intentionality as coextensive with the mental, and in asserting
the impossibility of a naturalistic explanation of intentional
acts. Jasha’s rejection of Peirce’s Monism, I am guessing,
stemmed from his acceptance, at least in part, of Husserlian
philosophy.8
Jasha may have been unaware that what he regarded as
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Peirce’s Ontological Monism was an application of the
maxim Do not block the road of inquiry. Dualism, as Peirce
saw it, drew a line in the sand; naturalistic explanations were
guaranteed to be impossible beyond this line. The line in the
sand inevitably becomes a dare.
But I was still far in those days from understanding how
the various parts of Peirce’s thinking held together—or failed
to. A major difficulty with the Cohen and Buchler collections
and with The Collected Papers was that they did not present
Peirce’s papers in their order of composition. The editors did
not sufficiently appreciate that Peirce’s ideas developed over
time. Throughout his life, Peirce’s thought (like science as he
understood it) was a work in progress.9 When he died in 1914
he had not completed any single major work. During his last
active decade, however, he succeeded in resolving certain
major difficulties in his earlier philosophizing. A chronological edition of his work—published papers, lectures, and unpublished notes and correspondence—has now been
undertaken by Indiana University Press. Of these post-1950
developments I was made aware only recently. And their full
import did not dawn on me until encountering a book by the
Chairman of the Board of Advisers to the Peirce Edition Project, Thomas Short. It is Peirce’s Theory of Signs.10
Parts 1 and 2 of our essay provide an account of Peirce’s
pragmatism and of his progress from Kantian idealism to scientific realism. In Parts 3 and 4, with the help of Short’s
analysis, we shall indicate how Peirce accounts naturalistically for the emergence of intentionality and conscious purposefulness in the course of evolution.
Part 1. Peirce and Pragmatism
Peirce is the man through whom the word “pragmatism” enters upon the world scene as a philosophic term. According
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to his own recollection,11 confirmed by the report of his friend
William James,12 this happened in the early 1870s, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, amongst a group of young Harvard
men, who used to meet for philosophical discussion. Later in
the 1870s the opinions Peirce had defended viva voce were
issued in print in two articles, “The Fixation of Belief” (1877)
and “How to Make our Ideas Clear” (1878).13 The first of
these two essays prefigured what Peirce would in the course
of a life-time come to say about science as an enterprise of
ongoing inquiry rather than a collection of upshots of investigation.14 The second was sent into the world, as the title indicates, as advice on how to go about gaining greater
intellectual control over one’s ideas than is furnished by the
ability correctly to apply, or even verbally to define them.
The advice runs as follows: “Consider what effects, which
might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the
object of our conceptions to have. Then our conception of
these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”
Note that the first person plural is out front. Also, that conceiving remains irreducible!
Peirce never became a full-time professor. Not even at
Johns Hopkins, where John Dewey was briefly a student in
his logic class. But just about every major American author
in professional philosophy—William James, Josiah Royce,
John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, C.I. Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars—acknowledges being profoundly indebted to Peirce’s
teachings, pragmatism being one of these.
Pragmatism is, in itself, no doctrine of metaphysics, no attempt to determine any truth of things. It is merely a
method of ascertaining the meanings of hard words and of
abstract concepts. All pragmatists of whatsoever stripe will
cordially assent to that statement. As to the ulterior and indirect effects of practicing the pragmatistic method, that
is quite another affair.15
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Some of the Cambridge friends whom Peirce initially
persuaded to try bringing a laboratory scientist’s “let’s try it
and see” approach to bear on the study of “hard words,” particularly those used in metaphysics, suggested that he call
what he was offering “practicism” or “practicalism.” No,
Peirce responded, he had learned philosophy from Kant, and
in Kant the terms praktisch and pragmatisch were “as far
apart as the poles.”16 Praktisch belongs to the region of
thought where no mind of the experimentalist type can make
sure of solid ground under his feet. Pragmatisch expresses a
relation to some definite human purpose. “Now quite the
most striking feature of the new theory [is] its recognition of
an inseparable connection between rational cognition and
human purpose.”17
Here are two more statements of what pragmatism
amounts to:
I understand pragmatism to be a method of ascertaining the
meanings, not of all ideas, but only of what I call “intellectual concepts,” that is to say, of those upon the structure of
which arguments concerning objective fact may hinge. Had
the light which, as things are, excites in us the sensation of
blue, always excited the sense of red, and vice versa, however great a difference that might have made in our feelings,
it could have made none in the force of any argument. In
this respect, the qualities of hard and soft strikingly contrast
with those of red and blue. . . . My pragmatism, having
nothing to do with qualities of feeling, permits me to hold
that the predication of such a quality is just what it seems,
and has nothing to do with anything else. . . . Intellectual
concepts, however, the only sign-burdens that are properly
denominated “concepts”—essentially carry some implication concerning the general behavior either of some conscious being or of some inanimate object, and so convey
more, not merely than any feeling, but more too than any
existential fact, namely, the “would-acts” of habitual behavior; and no agglomeration of actual happenings can ever
completely fill up the meaning of a “would be.”18
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Again,
Pragmaticism19 consists in holding that the purport of any
concept is its conceived bearing upon our conduct. How,
then, does the Past bear upon conduct? The answer is selfevident: whenever we set out to do anything, we “go upon,”
we base our conduct on facts already known, and for these
we can only draw upon our memory. It is true that we may
institute a new investigation for the purpose; but its discoveries will only become applicable to conduct after they
have been made and reduced to a memorial maxim. In
short, the Past is the sole storehouse of all our knowledge.
When we say that we know that some state of things exists,
we mean that it used to exist, whether just long enough for
the news to reach the brain and be retransmitted to tongue
or pen or longer ago. . . . How does the Future bear upon
conduct? The answer is that future facts are the only facts
that we can, in a measure, control. . . . What is the bearing
of the Present instant upon conduct? . . . There is no time
in the Present for any inference at all, least of all for inference concerning that very instant. Consequently the present object must be an external object, if there be any
objective reference in it. The attitude of the present is either
conative or perceptive.20
Part 2. Peirce’s Transition from an Initial Idealism
to Scientific Realism
As Peirce has told us, he learned philosophy from Kant. Yet
from the start there was one Kantian doctrine he could not
stomach: the doctrine of “things-in-themselves” (Dinge an
sich) somehow standing behind the objects we meet with in
experience—inaccessible beings of which, Kant says, we
must always remain ignorant. In papers of the late 1860s,
Peirce insisted that all of our cognitions are signs, and that
each sign refers to a previous sign:
At any moment we are in possession of certain information, that is, of cognitions which have been logically de-
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rived by induction and hypothesis from previous cognitions which are less general, less distinct, and of which we
have a less lively consciousness. These in their turn have
been derived from others still less general, less distinct,
and less vivid; and so on back to the ideal first, which is
quite singular and quite out of consciousness. The ideal
first is the particular thing-in-itself. It does not exist as
such.21
According to Peirce at this stage, all thoughts are of one
or another degree of generality, each referring to an earlier
thought, and none immediately to its object. Only if a cognition were immediately of its object, could it be certain, hence
an intuition. Our lack of intuition, as thus argued by Peirce,
was his initial ground for rejecting Descartes’ Cogito, ergo
sum. The real, as Peirce conceived it at this time, was an ideal
limit to a series of thoughts, a limit to be reached in the future:
The real . . . is that which, sooner or later, information and
reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore
independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very
origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits.22
Peirce here conceived all conceiving as in an infinite sequence of thoughts, stretching backward toward the non-existent
thing-in-itself (an external limit) and forward toward the real, to
be achieved at some future time (a limit located within the
thought sequence). A consequence was that any individual, considered as an “it” other than the universals true of it, is unreal.
With this consequence of his late-1860s theory of knowledge, Peirce was uncomfortable. If the aim is to get outside one’s
head and find a purchase on reality, it is indeed disastrous.23
Peirce at last found a way out in his “The Fixation of
Belief” of 1877:
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To satisfy our doubts . . . it is necessary that a method
should be found by which our beliefs may be caused by
nothing human, but by some external permanency—by
something on which our thinking has no effect. Such is the
method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis . . . is this:
There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect
our senses according to regular law. . . .24
In “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), Peirce combined the hypothesis of real things on which our thinking has
no effect with his earlier notion of indefinite progress toward
human knowledge of the real:
Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic
views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a
force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion. . . . The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed
to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth,
and the object represented in this opinion is the real.25
In the years 1879-1884, Peirce was a part-time lecturer
in logic at the Johns Hopkins University, and he and his students O.H. Mitchell and Christine Ladd-Franklin (independently of Frege in Germany) introduced quantifiers into
predicate logic and the logic of relations. Thus the familiar
universal and particular propositions of Aristotelian logic,
“All S is P,” “Some S is P,” come to be replaced by
(x)(Sx ⊃ Px) [read: For all x, if x is S, then x is P], and
(Ǝ x) (Sx·Px) [read: There is an x such that x is S and x is P],
where we have used a notation now standard. Note that the
“x” denotes an individual in whatever universe of discourse,
fictional or real, we have entered upon, without any presumption that the essence of this individual is known to us. In relational logic, which is needed for mathematics, indices are
crucial for representing dyadic, triadic, n-adic relations, e.g.,
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Rxy (read: x bears the relation R to y). All our thinking, according to Peirce in the 1880s and later, is laced with indexical elements, tying discourse to the world we’re in. The
index asserts nothing; it only says “There!” Like such words
as “here,” “now,” “this,” it directs the mind to the object denoted.
The discovery of the nature and indispensability of indices led to a vast extension of Peirce’s understanding of
signs and significance (the science of semeiotic he was seeking to build). An index is anything that compels or channels
attention in a particular direction. The act of attention responding to an index does not have to be a component of a
thought. For instance a driver, on seeing a stoplight go red,
may brake automatically without thinking; he thus interprets
the red light as a command. Therefore the effect of a sign, in
triggering an interpretation, need not be a thought; it can be
an action or a feeling. The extension of semeiotic to nonhuman interpreters is now in the offing, as will become apparent
in Part 4 below.
At the same time, Peirce has burst out of the closed-in
idealism of his earlier theory of knowledge. The result is what
we may call Scientific Realism.
Part 3. Anisotropic Processes
Just twelve years after the first copies of Origin of Species
landed in the U.S.A., Peirce wrote:
Mr. Darwin proposed to apply the statistical method to biology. The same thing had been done in a widely different
branch of science, the theory of gases. Though unable to
say what the movements of any particular molecule of a
gas would be on a certain hypothesis regarding the constitution of this class of bodies, Clausius and Maxwell [had
been able, eight years before the publication of Darwin’s
immortal work], by the application of the doctrine of prob-
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abilities, to predict that in the long run such and such a proportion of the molecules would, under the given circumstances, acquire such and such velocities; that there would
take place, every second, such and such a number of collisions, etc.; and from these propositions [they] were able
to deduce certain properties of gases, especially in regard
to their heat relations. In like manner, Darwin, while unable to say what the operation of variation and natural selection in any individual case will be, demonstrates that in
the long run they will adapt animals to their circumstances.26
Thus Peirce took explanation in both statistical mechanics
and Darwinian natural selection to be statistical. He meant,
Short argues, irreducibly statistical, and not mechanistic.27
Analyzed logically, a mechanistic explanation starts from a
particular disposition of certain bodies at some time, and by
applying general laws of mechanics, gravitation, chemistry,
electromagnetism, or other general theory, derives the particular disposition of these bodies at a later time. “Particular”
here is opposed to “general.” The explanations of Celestial
Mechanics are of this kind. The celestial mechanician, starting from the positions and velocities of the bodies in the solar
system at one instant, and assuming gravitational theory,
computes the positions and velocities of these bodies at a later
instant. If we should propose to ourselves a similar calculation for molecules of a gas confined in a container, we would
find it impracticable. The number of molecules is too large
(in a cubic centimeter of gas at one atmosphere of pressure
and 0°C. that number is about 2.7 × 1019, or 27 quintillion).
Ascertaining the positions and velocities of all these molecules at a specified “initial” instant is humanly impossible.
Moreover, the motions are not governed by a single law like
gravitation, but involve collisions of the molecules with each
other and the walls of the container; these introduce discontinuities that are difficult to take into account.
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But the crucial conclusion is this: even if such a computation were possible, it would not yield the conclusion for
which statistical mechanics argues. Statistical mechanics
seeks to establish that notably non-uniform distributions of
molecules in the gas will in time be replaced by a more uniform distribution, with reduction in the spread of velocities
amongst the molecules. The statistical argument invokes
probability.
How to understand probability in this context is by no
means settled, and we shall give only a rough indication of
the type of solution that is believed necessary.28 Consider a
system of n molecules of gas contained in a volume V. Let V
be divided into a large number m of equal cells, m being less
than n (if n is in quintillions, m could be in the millions or
billions). If the molecules were distributed with perfect uniformity throughout V, then each cell would contain n/m molecules. This distribution is a particular microstate—an
extremely special one, hence unlikely. We would expect that,
in most imaginable distributions, the numbers of molecules
in different cells would be different. To take this likelihood
into account, consider microstates in which the number of
molecules in all cells falls within the range n/m ± e, where e
is much less than n/m. Let the class of all microstates thus
characterized be called C, and let the complementary class,
or class of all microstates in which the number of molecules
in some cells falls outside the range n/m ± e, be called Cʹ′.
In the work of the earlier theorists, distinguishable microstates compatible with the overall energy of the gas were
assigned equal probabilities, since no reason presented itself
for assigning different probabilities to different microstates.
Later theorists sought grounds other than “equal ignorance”
for assigning probabilities to microstates. Whatever the mode
of assigning probabilities, the outcome must show the gas
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progressing from less uniform to more uniform distributions,
both spatially and with respect to the spread of velocities. For
that is the empirical result: a quantity of gas under high pressure, when let into an evacuated chamber, spreads out
through the chamber and is soon more homogeneously distributed, with a uniform temperature and pressure lower than
the original temperature and pressure.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics extends this kind
of reasoning to all natural systems. It says that in any closed
system the processes have a direction: they progress toward
greater homogeneity and reduced capacity to do mechanical
work.29 For processes that are directional in time, Short uses
the term anisotropic (a-privative + iso, “equal” + tropos, “direction”). Anisotropic processes are defined by the type toward which they progress. We shall see that there are
anisotropic processes other than those that instantiate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. All such processes, however,
differ from mechanical processes, which proceed from a particular configuration to a particular configuration.
Whether the universe is a closed system we do not know,
but everywhere in the observable world we see the effects of
the Second Law, the “degradation of energy.” Nevertheless,
we also see that new forms of order, though improbable,
sometimes emerge. They are produced in open systems that
absorb energy from, and discard unused matter and energy
to, the environment. Ilya Prigogine has described such forms
of order, calling them “dissipative systems.”30 Locally, in the
newly created form, the second law appears to be violated,
but if account is taken of the exhausted fuel and other waste
materials ejected to the environment, the second law is found
to hold. Higher forms of order come to be at the expense of
a decrease in order elsewhere, an increase in homogeneity
and a lessened capacity to produce novelty.
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The first coming-to-be of living forms in the universe presumably occurred in the manner of Prigogine’s “dissipative
systems.” Such is the hypothesis generally accepted by scientists today. Living systems differ from the cases studied by
Prigogine in their greater complexity and in having the capacity to self-replicate. In 1953 the graduate student S.L.
Miller under the guidance of H.C. Urey circulated a mixture
of methane, ammonia, water vapor, and hydrogen through a
liquid water solution, and elsewhere in the apparatus continuously passed an electrical discharge through the vaporous
mixture. After several days the water solution changed color,
and was found to contain a mixture of amino acids, the essential constituents of proteins. Since then, most if not all of
the essential building-blocks of proteins, carbohydrates, and
nucleic acids have been produced under conditions similar to
those obtaining when the Earth was young (the atmosphere
needs to be free of oxidizing agents such as oxygen). The sequences of conditions and chemical pathways by which these
building-blocks may have been assembled into a living cell
remain matters of speculation.
Darwin’s evolutionary theory, taking the existence of living things as given, goes on to show how, chiefly but not
solely by means of natural selection,31 biological evolution
can occur. Our little word “can” here goes to signal what
Nicholas Maistrellis calls “the highly theoretical, and even
speculative character” of Origin chapter 4, dedicated to expounding that and how Natural Selection “works.”
We should not expect a series of examples of natural selection designed to win us over to his theory on purely empirical grounds. Even if Darwin had wanted to proceed in
that way, he could not have done so, for such examples do
not exist—or at least were not known to Darwin. . . . Notice
that all the examples of natural selection in this chapter are,
as Darwin repeatedly acknowledges, imaginary ones.32
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Contemporary readers of Darwin have sometimes become so blasé about the shocking idea that order may emerge
out of disorder that they don’t notice how subtle, complex,
and distributed the over-all argument of Origin is. We have
found C. Kenneth Waters’ “The arguments in the Origin of
Species,” along with the other essays included in Part 1: Darwin’s Theorizing of The Cambridge Companion to Darwin,
particularly conducive to waking us up.
Peirce wrote, in A Guess at the Riddle (1887):
Whether the part played by natural selection and the survival of the fittest in the production of species be large or
small, there remains little doubt that the Darwinian theory
indicates a real cause, which tends to adapt animal and
vegetable forms to their environment. A remarkable feature
of it is that it shows how merely fortuitous variations of
individuals together with merely fortuitous mishaps to
them would, under the action of heredity, result, not in
mere irregularity, nor even in statistical constancy, but in
indefinite progress toward a better adaptation of means to
ends.33
A little later in this same manuscript Peirce sums up the basic
idea of Darwinian selection as follows:
There are just three factors in the process of natural selection; to wit: 1st, the principle of individual variation or
sporting; 2nd, the principle of hereditary transmission . . . ;
and 3rd, the principle of elimination of unfavorable characters.34
Darwin and Peirce lacked the benefit of a workable theory of inheritance. Nothing like our genetics was available
to them. We today single out genetic make-up as the causally
significant locale of “sporting,” And Peirce’s phrase, “elimination of unfavorable characters,” is replaced in more recent
neo-Darwinian formulations by the phrase “relative reproductive success,” meaning, the having of more numerous off-
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spring. The process is statistical: If one variant of a species
has more numerous offspring than do others, and if in addition these offspring survive to reproduce, the original variant,
possessed of one or more genetic alleles (alternative forms
of a gene), is more successful in propagating its genome to
later generations.
The hypothesis of Natural Selection confers little in the
way of predictive power. Its chief value is to provide a posthoc explanation of what has occurred. For example, visual
acuity is crucial to the survival of both predators and prey.
Evidently predators are better off with eyes in the front of
their heads as they pursue prey, and potential prey are better
off with eyes on the sides of their heads to detect predators
coming from any quarter. Another example: Flowers evolved
as a device by which plants induce animals to transport their
pollen (hence sperm) to the egg cells. The evolutionarily
older plants had been pollinated by the wind. The more attractive the plants were to an insect, the more frequently they
would be visited and the more seeds they would produce.
Any chance variation that made the visits more frequent or
made pollination more efficient offered immediate advantages.35
We can only guess at the detailed processes by which such
adaptations have been brought about. What Darwin gives us
is a heuristic for research, not a set of biological laws.36 Partly
on this account, because Darwinian explanation does not fit
the model of explanation in mechanics, it has taken a long
time before philosophers of science became willing to award
a comparable degree of intellectual dignity to Darwinian as
to Galilean and Newtonian science. The books listed in the
Bibliography appended to Maistrellis’s Selections help overcome the physics envy that stands in the way of appreciating
Darwin. Particularly helpful have been Sober’s persevering
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efforts to clarify and show the interconnections amongst the
fundamental concepts of Fitness, Function, Adaptation, and
Selection, while steadily reminding us of the ineliminably
probabilistic character of most of the theorizing of modern
evolutionary biology.
One of Sober’s helps into the saddle is his distinction between selection for and selection of:
Selection-for is a causal concept. To say that there is selection for trait T in a population means that having T
causes organisms to survive and reproduce better (so having the alternative(s) to T that are present in the population
causes organisms to survive and reproduce worse). In contrast, to say that there is selection of trait T just means that
individuals with T have a higher average fitness than do
individuals who lack T.37
Here is an illustration of the contrasting terms being put to
use:
Worms improve the soil, but that does not mean that their
digestive systems are adaptations for soil improvement;
rather, the worm gut evolved to help individual worms survive and reproduce. The benefit that the ecosystem receives is a fortuitous benefit—a useful side-effect
unrelated to what caused the trait to evolve. The gut’s ability to extract nutrition for individual worms is what the gut
is an adaptation for.38
To balance our earlier quotation from Maistrellis stressing
the not strictly empirically encountered character of Darwin’s
examples in his chapter about natural selection-at-work, notice that Sober feels quite comfortable about urging against
the philosopher Jerry Fodor, a critic of Darwinism, that “biologists often think they have excellent evidence for saying
that agricultural pests experienced selection for DDT resistance, [or] that there has been selection for dark coloration in
moths.”39
Short adopts Sober’s selection of/selection for contrast
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and, integrating it with Peircian ideas of explanation by final
causes, adapts it to new uses. The context is as follows. He
asks us to distinguish four kinds of physical process:
Mechanical processes that proceed from one particular
configuration to another and are reversible.
The processes described by statistical dynamics, which
are anisotropic and result in an increase in entropy and disorder.
The non-equilibrium processes studied by Prigogine,
which are also anisotropic, but produce open systems that
have increased order and diminished entropy. The dissipative structures can sustain themselves in the given environment for a time. Living things, we assume, are of this
kind—complex open systems that metabolize and have an
apparatus for replicating themselves.
With living things, a third sort of anisotropic process
comes into play: Natural Selection, the selection of characteristics for types of effect that conduce to reproductive
success.40
Given living things and their struggle for existence, given
heritable variability, given phenotypic features that in a given
state-of-its-world enhance a creature’s relative chance of producing fertile offspring, a new kind of directional process
comes into being, natural selection. And with it, the possibility of purpose comes on the scene.
Not that anything is a purpose or has a purpose in biological evolution before the actual occurrence of a mutation
that happens to be selectively retained because of some advantage that it confers. Only at that time, that is, when a
feature is selected for its effect, does the effect, say visual
acuity, become a purpose. There was no purpose “visual
acuity” or “adaptedness” or “survival” hanging around
waiting for an opportunity. But once eyes with adjustable
lenses become a feature of mammals, then it would only
be mechanicalist prejudice that could keep us from saying
that eyes exist for the purpose of seeing.41
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Sober’s polar terms selection of/selection for are perhaps
worked harder and a little differently than they were previously:
It is because lenses and focusing increase visual acuity that
genetic mutations resulting in lenses and focusing were retained in subsequent generations; in fact, that happened in
independent lines of animal evolution. The selection in
those cases was for the visual acuity and of concrete structures (or the genes that determine them) that improved visual acuity in specific ways. . . . The of/for distinction is
relative to the level of analysis, but the object of ‘for’ is always an abstract type and the object of ‘of ’ is always
something genetic or genetically determined, hence concrete. . . . As the type selected-for is essential to explanation
by natural selection, such explanation is like anisotropic
explanation in statistical mechanics [in that] both explain
actual phenomena by the types they exemplify. Hence it is
not mechanistic. . . . It is qua adaptation—hence in that aspect—that [an adaptive feature, say S] is explained by natural selection. S could also be explained, had we knowledge
enough, as a product of a complicated series of mechanical
events. But, then, S’s enhancing reproductive success
would seem a surprising coincidence, a bit of biological
luck. S’s being an adaptation would not be explained.42
The “aptness” of organisms is one of the facts of life
that the Darwinian program of explanation seeks to account
for. Having had some success in this explanatory endeavor,
we easily forget that there is no guarantee that evolution
will bring about an increase in complexity or intelligence
or other quality that we admire. Overstatement here, Short
warns us, is common, and disastrous.43 Notice too that natural selection was not itself selected, and therefore does not
have a purpose. It just occurs.
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Part 4. The Emergence of Intentionality and
Conscious Purposes
Cleverly joining Peircean reasoning to the more recent formulations of neo-Darwinian theory, Short’s Theory sketches
a narrative that strives to make intelligible the eventual emergence of the possibility of deliberately produced tools and
self-controlled action out of advantageous anatomy and biologically useful animal behavior. Here one must go slow and
notice that it is as the world comes to hold new kinds of entity
that new kinds of explanation become applicable.44 Short is
not reducing biological explanation to chemical explanation.
Nor will he assimilate human discourse to animal signaling.45
The last three chapters of his book are given over to exploring the implications of applying Peirce’s ideas of sign-action
(= semeiosis) to distinctively human language, thought, and
life. But unless we work from the bottom up, there is no explaining of emergents.
“Working from the bottom up” means for Short that he
must develop so general an account of Peirce’s semiotic triad
Sign-Object-Interpretant that it will be applicable both to
infra-human sign-interpretation—end-directed animal responses to stimuli—and, duly amplified, to distinctively
human life and thought. For Short, this behaviorist interlude
is in the service of Peirce’s Synechism:46 If successful in his
defense of Peirce’s ways, he will have warded off both Cartesian dualism and Reductionism.47
Among social animals, group behavior is determined by
mechanisms that cause one individual to respond to another.
A forager bee, for instance, having located nectar, returns to
the hive and there exhibits what look like dances. The bees
in the hive react to these dances as signaling the direction and
distance in which the nectar will be found. Ethologists have
instructed us that there is an immense variety of animal be-
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haviors that operate as though they were intended as communicative signs. By what criteria one determines the intendedness
of a bird- or monkey-cry the emission of which tends to result
in fellow-birds or fellow-monkeys reacting with behavior that
makes sense for the creatures in question (e.g., escaping in
an appropriate way from a certain kind of predator, or overcoming reluctance to approach more closely) has been a topic
for ethological investigation. But every parent is familiar with
the fact that infant wailing and screaming is not, in the earlier
phases of its life, an expression of the infant’s intention to
rouse its protectors. Yet when the infant is a little older its
jealous brother may justly complain: “She is not crying for a
reason. She’s crying for a purpose!”
We have deliberately introduced the word “intend” in its
ordinary sense before returning to the topic of intentionality
in Brentano’s scholastic and technical sense. (Unhappiness
about the lack of a non-dualist treatment of Intentionality was
what initially motivated our exploration of Short’s book on
Peirce’s semeiotics.) Unlike many semioticians, Short follows in Peirce’s footsteps by beginning with interpretive behavior, not with the sending of signs.48 This permits him to
take off from responses. For instance:
The deer does not flee the sudden noise that startled it, but
a predator; for it is to evade a predator that the deer flees.
The instinct to flee is based on an experienced correlation
of sudden noises to predators; the correlation is weak, but,
unless the deer is near starvation, it is better for it to risk
losing a meal than to risk being one. If no predator is there,
the deer’s flight is a mistake, albeit justified. Mistaken or
not, the flight interprets the noise as a sign of a predator.
A response is not merely an effect if it can be mistaken. It
ranks as an interpretation.
In what manner and measure this idea of mistake is available to infra-human animals is a hard question. When the dog
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that was, in some human observer’s estimation, “barking up
the wrong tree,” corrects itself and, redirecting its bark to the
neighboring tree, glimpses the spot where the cat in fact now
is, does the dog think to itself, “Now I’ve got it right”? Consider two other examples of interpretive responses, both reported by the ethologist Niko Tinbergen: male sticklebacks,
during the breeding season, tend to adopt a “threat posture”
toward potential rivals.
When the opponent does not flee . . . the owner of the territory . . . points its head down and, standing vertically in
the water, makes some jerky movements as if it were going
to bore its snout into the sand. Often it erects one or both
ventral fins.49
Tinbergen’s Plate I is a photo of a Stickleback exhibiting this
posture to its own reflection in a mirror! We know this fish is
making a mistake. Does he?
Lorenz reports . . . an incident which demonstrates the
power of [some varieties of Cichlid] to distinguish between
food and their young. Many Cichlids carry the young back,
at dusk, to a kind of bedroom, a pit they have dug in the
bottom. Once Lorenz, together with some of his students,
watched a male collecting its young for this purpose. When
it had just snapped up a young one, it eyed a particularly
tempting little worm. It stopped, looked at the worm for
several seconds, and seemed to hesitate. Then, after these
seconds of “hard thinking,” it spat out the young, took up
the worm and swallowed it, and then picked up its young
one again and carried it home. The observers could not
help applauding.50
The antelope that fled from a lion that wasn’t there, the stickleback that threatened a rival that wasn’t there, did they interpret something heard, something seen, as to-be-run-from,
to-be-ousted? Their behaviors, while in error in the particular
cases, were appropriate. And this holds true whether or not
these individual animals “knew what they were doing.”
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Something like this is, we take it, what Short meant when he
wrote: 51
The purposefulness of interpretation accounts for the significance of that which is interpretable. In particular, as
that which has a purpose may fail of its purpose, the purposefulness of interpretations accounts for the possibility
that what is signified is not. Because what is signified
might not be, significance exemplifies Brentano’s idea of
intentionality, which he defined as having an “inexistent
object,” i.e., an object that is an object independently of its
existing. Brentano asserted that intentionality is unique to
human mentality, but the argument of [Short’s] book is that
sign-interpretation occurs independently of conscious
thought and, hence, that Peirce’s semeiotic applies to phenomena well beyond human mentality. Thus it provides for
a naturalistic explanation of the mind. But that is possible
only if purposefulness can occur without consciousness.
Peirce’s doctrine of final causation c. 1902 provides a defense of that assumption. For it identifies causation with
selection for types of possible outcome, regardless of
whether that selection is conscious. And it does so consistently with modern physics and biology.52
But the question that arose when we considered the dog
that eventually managed to bark at the cat is still with us: The
dog, in our judgment and in fact, “corrected itself.” And we
know that learning, in the sense of an individual’s behavior
being shaped “for the better” by its experience, is a constituent of the lives of very many (all?) animals. But did the
dog know that it corrected itself? Consider Lorenz’s much applauded Cichlid father, which had its worm and its baby too.
Mustn’t it have had some sort of “inner representation” of the
alternative courses of conduct between which it chose?
We seem at last to have reached the question of when and
how conscious purpose, planning, and self-control emerge.
Short’s entire book, not just the chapter bearing the name
“Semeiosis and the Mental,” is in pursuit of it. Given that
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
114
Peirce regarded thought to be internalized discourse, and that
an individual’s power of discourse is a skill that could not
have been acquired had that individual’s “instinct to acquire
the art” (as Darwin put it) not been activated in the course of
apprenticeship to speakers, Short and Peirce are clearly right
that “the capacity to think for oneself and to act in despite of
society is . . . social in origin.” He adds: “Individual autonomy and varied personality are further examples of the irreducibility of new realities to their preconditions.”53 Among
such “new realities” are not only new means to accomplish
existing purposes but also new purposes.
Because Short, under Peirce’s tutelage, is wholehearted
about accepting the Reality of purpose and purposiveness and
is unembarrassed about following Darwin in naturalizing
man, his investigation of how purpose can and has become
“emancipated” from biology has real content.54
Conclusion
We have seen that, according to Peirce, both statistical mechanics and Darwinian natural selection entail anisotropic
processes, defined by the type of result they lead to. The
“population thinking” that Darwin and later biologists introduced into biology was aimed at accounting for the emergence of biological types or species. The new thinking
differed from the typological thinking of pre-Darwinian times
in that the types or species arose in time.
Among the virtues of Short’s presentation of Peirce is that
he gives a sufficiently detailed description of Peirce’s Categories (in Ch.3) for readers to be supplied with opportunity
to become persuaded that Peirce’s trinitarian categorial
scheme accommodates Individuals and Kinds as mutually irreducible. Here is, however, not the place to exhibit or argue
the point.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
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Why was the reception of Darwin at St. John’s so lukewarm in earlier days? The theoretical physicist’s impatience
with fussy descriptive details such as are dwelt on in Origin
(and must be by natural historians) was probably a contributing factor; and one that would have been exacerbated if the
assigned selection from Origin was pedagogically haphazard.
But vague apprehensions about the moral and philosophical
import of Darwin’s theory may have contributed more heavily to avoiding serious intellectual engagement with it.
Darwin himself anticipated this reaction. He explains (in
the Introduction to Descent of Man) that it was in order not
to stand in the way of the reading public’s making fair trial
of his general views that he allowed himself just one tiny
paragraph, on the final pages of Origin, that makes direct
mention of man:
In the distant future . . . psychology will be based on a new
foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown
on the origin of man and his history.
Twelve years later, in Descent of Man, the scope of Darwin’s intellectual ambition is made manifest. In Ch.3 he takes
on Kant:
“Duty . . . whence thy original?” . . . As far as I know, no
one has approached [this great question] exclusively from
the side of natural history.
So “approaching it,” Darwin writes:
The following proposition seems to me in a high degree
probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed
with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire
a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.55
His plan is to show how, granted the rest of our mental at-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
tributes and the world’s make-up, the human species does
better with than it would without morality. Otherwise morality (sense of duty, conscience) and the instruments for its acquisition and maintenance could not have become “selected.”
But isn’t there something topsy-turvy about an explanation that subordinates, as means, something better, namely a
creature competent to have a sense of duty, to an end less
good, namely, mere comparative fitness for producing fertile
offspring? The complaint, we urge, limps, because it fails to
register that when something is fruitful and multiplies or fails
to, it is as a creature possessed of certain attributes that it
does so. Darwin freely ascribes sociability, intelligence, and
emotions (sympathy, jealousy, ennui, curiosity, courage, maternal affection, and so forth) to, for instance, domestic animals.56 Nevertheless, he reserves morality for human beings:
As we cannot distinguish between motives, we rank all actions of a certain class as moral, when they are performed
by a moral being. A moral being is one who is capable of
comparing his past or future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them. We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity;
therefore when a monkey faces danger to rescue its comrade, or takes charge of an orphan monkey, we do not call
its conduct moral. . . . It cannot be maintained that the social
instincts are ordinarily stronger in man than, . . . for instance, the instinct of self-preservation, hunger, lust. . . .
Why, then, does man regret . . . and why does he further
feel he ought to regret his conduct? . . . Man, from the activity of his mental faculties, cannot avoid reflection. . . .
Whilst the mother bird is feeding or brooding over her
nestlings, the maternal instinct is probably stronger than the
migratory; but . . . at last, at a moment when her young ones
are not in sight, she takes flight and deserts them. When arrived at the end of her long journey, and the migratory instinct ceases to act, what an agony of remorse each bird
would feel if, being endowed with great mental activity, she
could not prevent the image continually passing before her
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
117
mind of her young ones perishing in the bleak north from
cold and hunger. At the moment of action, man will no
doubt be apt to follow the stronger impulse. . . . But after
their gratification, when past and weaker impressions are
contrasted with the ever enduring social instincts, retribution will surely come. Man will then feel dissatisfied with
himself, and will resolve with more or less force to act differently for the future. This is conscience; for conscience
looks backwards and judges past actions, inducing that kind
of dissatisfaction which, if weak, we call regret, and if severe remorse.57
Darwin seems to have come upon Aristotle late in life and
recognized a soul-mate in him. He would, we believe, have
been in delighted agreement upon reading Aristotle’s observation in History of Animals, Book 1, 488b24, that we are the
only creatures capable of deliberating (bouleutikon):
Many animals have the power of memory, and can be
trained, but the only one that can recall past events at will
(dunatai anamimnēskesthai) is man.
Where are we then? Conscience, says Darwin in the
opening sentence of Descent of Man, Ch.3, is the chief mark
of distinction of the human race. Conscience cannot come
into existence or operate without the power of recollection.
The power of recollection (though no texts come to mind
where anyone of our three authors says this expressly) depends upon the power to learn and employ not just a communicative medium but an articulate language.58 Beings of
this sort, Peirce the logician will come to argue ever more
strenuously as he ages, are capable of acting not just in a motivated way, but in accordance with an ideal:
Every action has a motive; but an ideal only belongs to a
line of conduct which is deliberate. To say that conduct is
deliberate implies that each action, or each important action, is reviewed by the actor and that his judgment is
passed upon it, as to whether he wishes his future conduct
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
118
to be like that or not. His ideal is the kind of conduct which
attracts him upon review. His self-criticism followed by a
more or less conscious resolution that in its turn excites a
determination of his habit, will, with the aid of sequelae,
modify a future action; but it will not generally be a moving
cause to action.59
Permit us to conclude with an anecdote. A recent movie
presented a small group of adults with the situation of a male
high-school teacher accepting seduction by one of his beautiful girl-students. Ever intent on discussing la difference, one
of the men in the group of movie watchers asked “Do you
blame the teacher?” “Yes,” was the answer, “because although it may indeed be true that it is harder for young men
than for young women to resist sexual arousal, the teacher
knowingly entered upon a profession that he could foresee
would present him with such situations as he was now in. He
should, taking advantage of the human power of imagination,
have rehearsed inwardly how he would act if the world presented him with an opportunity that he should turn down.”60
With Peirce’s help, and instructed by Short, we hope to
have shown in this essay that nothing in Darwin interferes
with acknowledging the emergence of organisms competent
to entertain and criticize ideals. This is the kind of organism
we human beings are.
NOTES
1. According to Ernst Mayr in his One Long Argument: Charles Darwin
and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1991), what later authors think and speak of
as “Darwin’s Theory” is a combination of four or five strands—evolution
as such, common descent, multiplication of species, gradualism, and natural selection.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
119
2. See Ernst Mayr’s Introduction to Charles Darwin, On the Origin of
Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1972), xii.
3. John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (New York:
Henry Holt, 1910).
4. Ernst Mayr in Evolution and Anthropology (Washington: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1959), 2; also given in Mayr’s Introduction to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile, xix-xx.
5. See Elliott Sober, “Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism,”
Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, ed. Elliott Sober, (Boston:
MIT Press, 2001).
6. In the seminar described at the beginning of this essay, Clark was the
sole participant to speak up in defense of Darwin’s theory.
7. In his book Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Leipzig:
Duncker und Humblot, 1874).
8. Jasha spoke with admiration of Husserl’s repeated efforts to start all
over again from the beginning, in formulating the archai of philosophy.
Husserl’s notion of sedimentation in the sciences—our tendency to take
earlier achievements for granted—was a theme that Jasha took up in his
studies of the origins of algebra and of the work of Galileo. Seeking to
understand Jasha’s Husserlian antecedents, I read a good deal of Husserl
during the years I was reading Peirce. A lecture I gave in September, 1959,
was based on Husserl’s Erfahrung und Urteil.
9. The importance of this fact was first established by Murray Murphey,
in The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1961.)
10. Thomas L. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs (Cambridge: Cambridge Universty Press, 2007). I was introduced to this book by Chaninah Maschler.
11. The Essential Peirce, edited by the Peirce Edition Project, 2 Vols.
(Bloomingdale, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998), Vol. 2, 400. In
further references to this publication will be abbreviated to EP.
12. Ibid., 516.
13. These articles are reprinted in EP, Vol. 1, 109-123, 124-141.
14. Thomas L. Short, in a forthcoming second book about Peirce, gives
a detailed defense of this Peircean understanding of the sciences.
15. EP, Vol. 2, 400. Italics added.
16. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Of the Canon of Pure
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Reason,” A800 = B828 ff. Kant there explains, “By the practical I mean
everything that is possible through freedom.”
17. EP, Vol. 2, 333.
18. Ibid., 401.
19. Peirce eventually (as here) made the name of the -ism ugly, “to keep
it safe from being kidnapped.” Consider what Peirce writes about how his
thinking does or doesn’t differ from that of William James, EP, Vol. 2, 421.
20. EP, Vol. 2, 358f. For a lucid brief description of Peirce’s later “subjunctive” version of pragmatism, one which acknowledges that “modern
science . . . is practice engaged in for the sake of theory,” see Short,
Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 173, second paragraph.
21. EP, Vol. 1, 52.
22. Ibid.
23. For other difficulties with his theory in the 1860s, see Short, Peirce’s
Theory of Signs, ch. 2.
24. EP, Vol. 1, 120.
25. EP, Vol. 1, 138-139.
26. EP, Vol. 1, “The Fixation of Belief,” 111; for the square bracketed
emendations, see ibid., 377.
27. Cf. EP, Vol. 1, 289f.
28. See Paul Ehrenfest and Tatyana Ehrenfest, The Conceptual Foundations of the Statistical Approach in Mechanics (New York: Dover, 1958.)
29. Cf. EP, Vol. 1, 221.
30. Ilya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1980). See also Stuart A. Kauffman, “Antichaos and Adaptation,”
in Scientific American, August 1991, 78-84.
31. See the concluding sentence of the potent last paragraph of Darwin’s
Introduction to On the Origin of Species. Gould and Lewontin, in their
famous protest against unrestrained Adaptationism (“The Spandrels of
San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptionist
Programme,” in Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, ed. Elliott
Sober, [Boston: MIT Press, 2001]), cite this sentence and add an approving reference to George. J. Romanes’s essay “The Darwinism of Darwin,
and of the Post-Darwinian Schools” (in The Monist 6:1 [1895], 1-27).
Romanes would join Gould and Lewontin when they write: “We should
cherish [Darwin’s] consistent attitude of pluralism in attempting to ex-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
121
plain Nature’s complexity” (82).
32. Selections from Darwin’s The Origin of Species: The Shape of the Argument, ed., Nicholas Maistrellis (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2009), 43.
33. EP, Vol 1, 200. For a correction of this overly cheerful scenario of inevitable progress see, e.g., Elliott Sober, “Selection-for: What Fodor and
Piattelli-Palmarini Got Wrong,” 11. This essay is available on the internet
at the following URL:
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/Fodor%20and%20Piatelli-Palermini%20april%209%202010.pdf
34. EP, Vol. 1, 272. Cf. Darwin, On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile,
127.
35. Helena Curtis, Biology (New York: Worth, 1979).
36. Equally important, perhaps, is the inspiration of Darwin’s intellectual
attitude—omni-observant, persevering, sober—to which Maistrellis calls
attention.
37. Elliott Sober, The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984).
38. The example stems from Williams via Elliott Sober and David Sloan
Wilson, “Adaptation and Natural Selection Revisited,” in the Journal of
Evolutionary Biology 24 (February 2011), 462-8. In this article, the authors are “revisiting” George C. Williams’s book on adaptation in order
to make sure the world knows that the book was a landmark in the development of evolutionary theory.
39. Elliott Sober, “Fodor’s Bubbe Meise Against Darwinism,” in Mind and
Language 23 (February 2008), 43. (Bubbe meise is Yiddish for “old wives’
tale.”) This article is also available on the internet at the following URL:
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/fodor's%20bubbe%20meise%20published.pdf
40. When Herbert Spencer attempted to explain evolution on mechanical
principles, Peirce countered that the endeavor was illogical. See EP, Vol.
1, 289. Among Peirce’s arguments was this: the law of conservation of
energy implies that all operations governed by mechanical laws are reversible. Whence follows the corollary that growth is not explicable by
those laws, even though they are not violated in the process of growth.
41. Private communication from Thomas Short, March 19, 2012.
42. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 130. Italics in last sentence added.
43. Ibid., 145
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
44. Ibid., 144-145.
45. As Allen Clark wrote in a manuscript never published (“The Contributions of Charles S. Peirce to Value Theory,” 4), “No philosopher . . .
would be less inclined than Peirce to minimize the tremendous importance of the transformation that occurs when inquiry [or any other adaptive behavior] rises from the unconscious to the conscious level. For it is
at this second stage that man transcends the animal faculty of merely responding to naturally given signs, those perceptual clues furnished by nature; he begins to make signs, and to respond to signs of his own making,
and thus learns to provoke his own responses.”
46. “Synechism is Peirce’s doctrine that human mentality is continuous
with the rest of nature,” writes Thomas Short in his exchange with the
critics of his book, “Response,” in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society 43 (Fall 2007), 666.
47. Ibid. Dewey’s essay of 1896, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (Psychological Review 3 [July, 1896], 357-370) is offered in the
same, perhaps Hegel-inspired, spirit of synechism. (This article is available on the internet at the following URL:
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Dewey/reflex.htm.) But a more instructive
comparison would be between Thomas Short’s account of Peirce and the
life-long work of James J. Gibson, for instance, The Senses Considered
as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1966) and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,
1979.).
48. See Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 156f.
49. Niko Tinbergen, Social Behavior of Animals, Methuen’s Monographs
on Biological Subjects, Vol. 1 (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1953), 9.
50. Ibid., 45. The following anecdote of Darwin’s in his chapter comparing the mental powers of lower animals with human mental powers seems
to be to the same effect: “Mr. Colquhoun winged two wild ducks, which
fell on the opposite sides of a stream; his retriever tried to bring over both
at once, but could not succeed; she then, though never before known to
ruffle a feather, deliberately killed one, brought over the other, and returned for the dead bird.” Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981), 48.
51. Further clarifying remarks on Intentionality are given by Short in
Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 174-177.
52. Elliott Sober, “Fodor’s Bubbe Meise Against Darwinism,” 669.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WILSON AND MASCHLER
123
53. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 147.
54. Ibid., 148.
55. Darwin, Descent of Man, 71.
56. See Charles Darwin’s 1872 book Expression of the Emotions in Man
and Animals, ed. Paul Ekman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
57. Darwin, Descent of Man, Ch.3, 88-91.
58. Ibid., Ch.2, 54.
59. EP, Vol. 2, 377. Survey the Index to EP, Vol. 2 under “self-control.”
60. The answer is inspired by Peirce’s report of his childhood memory of
his younger brother’s having prepped himself in imagination for preventing the spread of a small fire. See EP, Vol. 2, 413.
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
124
The Laws of Physics
Marlene Benjamin
In Memoriam
People say that the Laws of Physics
Are immutable,
Beyond the reach of hopes and dreams,
Immune to wishes,
And entirely indifferent to desire.
They say that the Laws of Physics
Are as solid in their abstractness as the materials
Whose movements they describe,
Whose broad encompassing axioms
Place with near precision all heavenly bodies,
All rocks and debris,
All breathing creatures—even us,
With all our singularity—
Within the vastness of this complicated
And wholly relational world,
Measuring all places with a confidence
In basic principles (as if some genius had bestowed upon
them personality)
The rest of us admire but so rarely can attain.
There is beauty in the Laws of Physics,
The beauty and elegance of those simple Euclidean equations
I struggled over long ago,
The amazing loveliness of a singularly striking accomplishment.
Marlene Benjamin is Associate Professor Emerita at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, and now lives in California. She is currently working on a
book entitled The Catastrophic Self: Philosophy, Memoir, and Medical Trauma.
�POEM
125
And yet this question haunts us:
Why should we not believe as Greeks believed?
Why should we not believe
That what we now call myths are really legends,
Embellished, we agree, yet legends nonetheless . . .
Why should we not have the confidence with which the
Greeks were blessed,
And take some tales of ordinary people, whose lives were touched
By strange and unexpected happenings, as legends of our own,
So that the Laws of Physics or Biology
Or of all the Natural Philosophies
Were not, as we believe, constraining,
But rather showed us ourselves as god-like,
Whose dreams inscribe upon the world what pleases us,
Able, like Athena, come full blown out of Zeus’s head
To enact the Laws of Physics to suit ourselves?
Then would you come walking back
To family and friends,
But especially, most especially, to wife and daughter;
All your molecules and atoms shaped perfectly again
Into your singularly recognizable form,
Striding purposefully and with that grin of yours
And, as on any ordinary day,
There would you be,
Arriving home,
Whole and un-bloodied,
Back into the life you should be living still.
�
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 54, Number 2 (Spring 2013)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
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Frank Hunt
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John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Unbecoming Conduct in the Reign of Tiberius ....................1
According to Tacitus
David Appleby
Dionysus: The Therapeutic Mask .......................................35
Richard B. Carter
Fields, Particles, and Being .................................................57
Dylan Casey
Miracles and Belief .............................................................89
Joseph Cohen
The Question of Questions ...............................................115
Michael W. Grenke
Review
The Rehabilitation of Spiritedness ....................................135
Book Review of Gary Borjesson’s Willing Dogs
and Reluctant Masters: On Friendship and Dogs.
Eva Brann
��1
ESSAYS & LECTURES
Unbecoming Conduct in the
Reign of Tiberius According to
Tacitus
David Appleby
Besides, there is a great difference between doing what one does not approve of
and feigning approval of what one does:
the one is the part of a weak man, but the
other belongs only to the habits of a valet.
—De Tocqueville1
1. INTRODUCTION
One of the few positive characteristics Tacitus attributed to
Tiberius was an interest in public moderation: the proper, the
decorous, and the fitting. A memorable example occurs in 22
AD, a year of peace abroad but anxiety in Rome about possible measures to curb rampant luxury. Aware of the princeps’
old fashioned frugality, and in view of widespread neglect of
the existing sumptuary law, the senate simply referred the
matter to Tiberius. He had often remarked in private that attempting to limit these excessive appetites might not be worth
the indecency (indecorum) of trying and failing, or succeeding through coercive measures and bringing great men into
dishonor and ill-repute (ignominiam et infamiam). He answered the senate in a letter decrying shameful luxury: vast
houses and domestic retinues, rich furnishings and ornament,
foppish attire for men, exotic gems for women, over-the-top
banquets. All were symptoms of an illness of the soul, one
that harms the state even as it ruins great families. “May decency (pudor) change us for the better—the poor because they
must; the wealthy because they have had enough.”2
The Annales make it clear that self-interest, ambition, and
David Appleby is a tutor at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula,
California.
�2
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
vice led Tiberius to present himself as an enemy of unbecoming conduct. By contrast, Tacitus’s own concern for decorum
was deep and sincere. The obligation to speak and behave
with dignity and seemliness, with the attendant imperative to
avoid unbecoming conduct, was a principle of his moral and
social world-view. I shall argue that one of his greatest objections to the new regime under the Caesars was that it created a climate in which members of the senatorial order,
Roman society’s natural leaders, were induced to behave in
disreputable ways. When the public arena in Rome became
a sort of theater in which great men routinely presented themselves in ways that were false, unworthy, and ridiculous, not
only individuals and their families were disgraced, but the
whole class was placed in an unflattering light. In Tacitus’s
judgment, this was one of the most unforgiveable effects of
the tyranny.
Why did Tacitus take such an interest in seemliness? Two
main reasons present themselves, the first more obvious than
the second. In the first place, Tacitus was keenly aware of
style and its effect upon readers. As we shall see, an important
aspect of decorous speech and behavior was paying attention
to how others perceive one’s words, gestures, and facial expression. Educated Romans knew that identifying what is
seemly involves anticipating how one’s interlocutors will perceive one’s words and appearance. As annalist, historian, biographer and ethnographer, Tacitus represented reality in a
highly personal and even idiosyncratic manner. But his words
seem always to have been chosen for their likely impact upon
readers. He created the effects that he sought through vivid
description, asymmetrical construction, oblique narration,
and epigrammatic brevity, disposing readers not only to behold the spectacle in a certain light, but to judge along with
the author. Anticipated impact upon his reader seems to dictate word choice, sentence structure, and narrative strategy.
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What he described—wars and mutinies, plots and murders,
above all the gloomy sense of impending dread under the
Julio-Claudians—is memorable in large part because of the
way he described it.3
His arresting style tends to obscure the second reason for
his interest in seemliness, namely his practical experience as
magistrate and orator. The son of a senatorial family in southern Gaul or northern Italy, Tacitus belonged to a privileged
social order whose members felt entitled to honor their ancestors by exercising authority and generally playing the
leading roles in affairs of state. Along with this came an obligation to present oneself in word, gesture, and deed in conformity with one’s social standing. With this innate sense of
duty and appropriateness, he began an official career under
Vespasian (r. 69-79), continued it during the difficult reign of
Domitian (r. 81-96), and in 97 became consul under Nerva
(r. 96-98). Under Trajan (r. 98-117), Tacitus delivered an important funeral oration, joined his friend Pliny the younger
in a high profile prosecution, and served as proconsular governor of Asia. He was known as an impressive speaker, and
around the year 100 he published a treatise on style and various sorts of oratory. In short, as man of action no less than
as man of letters, Tacitus was attuned to appearance and how
one is perceived.
2 DECORUM
Before investigating seemliness in the Annales, it is worth
considering the idea in the tradition within which Tacitus
worked and in the pages of one of his distinguished Roman
predecessors. The noun decorum refers in the first place to
the beauty or pleasing appearance of a thing or person; it applies secondarily to non-visual beauty, elegance, charm, and
distinction; and then it opens onto other things that are appropriate, seemly, and fitting in ways that attract honor and
approval. Like to prepon, its Greek counterpart, decorum is
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hard to render consistently with one word in English because
of its range of aesthetic, histrionic, forensic, and moral meanings. In the rhetorical tradition to prepon had been a principle
since Aristotle and Theophrastus, and by the time of Quintilian (d. ca.100) decorum applied to invention, style, arrangement, and delivery. Quintilian owed an immediate debt to
Cicero (106-43 BC) whose remark in De oratore that “by action the body talks, so it is all the more necessary to make it
agree with the thought”4 bears some relation to the subject at
hand.
Cicero’s expansive account of decorum as a moral concept in Book I of his De officiis helps us to approach the intellectual milieu of the Annales; for Tacitus, while not himself
a Ciceronian, still wrote for, and belonged to, a class that understood itself as embodying the urbanity and standards of
conduct that Cicero assumed as normative.5 The discussion
of what is honorable that occurs in Book I of De officiis includes a consideration of the four cardinal virtues as the
source of all moral goodness, and hence the source of all that
is honorable.6 Decorum and the duties it entails spring from
the broader virtue of moderation.7
Decorum consists in thinking, saying, and doing what one
should, and in appearing to be as morally well ordered as one
is. Since the decorous is neither deficient nor excessive, it reflects moderation, and this is understood not only with respect to particular objects or actions, but as the overall
balance, order, and harmony of the soul, and as the beauty of
the life of one who enjoys such moral equilibrium. Cicero
presents decorum as the outward manifestation of the soul’s
integrity, the moral analogue of physical beauty.8 Decorum
is thus the perceptible aspect of moral goodness; every act of
moral rectitude, whether in thought, word, or deed, reveals
some element of propriety. Just as the beauty of the body reflects bodily health, decorum reflects moral virtue.9
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Cicero also emphasizes the social aspect of decorum: the
good person’s speech, actions, and appearance make his
moral virtue discernible to others; and the good person has
modesty (verecundia)—that is, he shows consideration for
the sensibilities of others. Much of the discussion of decorum
in De officiis aims at instilling in the reader a greater awareness of the impression he makes upon others. Cicero explains
that playwrights have just this aspect of decorum in mind
when they craft words and actions to express the qualities of
a particular role (persona).10 The audience knows the characters in the play only by what it can infer from their words,
expressions, gestures, and deeds. As a sort of playwright outside the theater, nature assigns us the parts (personae) of consistency, moderation, and self-control, but also teaches us to
have respect for others and to attend to how we appear to
them. Once again comparing decorum to physical beauty,
Cicero says that just as the order and symmetry of the limbs
of a body attract the eye and please the viewer, decorum,
which illuminates the whole life, is an order, consistency, and
moderation of every word and deed that attracts the approval
of the people among whom we live.11
According to Cicero, the duties associated with propriety
are rooted in nature. This means, in the first instance, submitting the appetites to the control of reason, especially in
one’s pastimes, joking, and pleasures. One thereby avoids the
vulgarity and sensuality of an uncontrolled, irrational, or bestial life, and instead lives with the self-control and steadiness
appropriate to man’s rational nature.12 These are fundamental
matters of decency, but are not the only duties associated with
propriety.
Specifying these other duties is hard, not only because
propriety is assessed with respect to circumstance, occasion,
and context, but because it is also inextricably linked to one’s
personality and character. Cicero explains that nature clothes
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each of us in two roles (personae), one common and universal, the other individual and proper to each. Our common
human role provides us with our dignity as rational beings,
our moral goodness, and thus our decorum; we must use our
rationality to control our appetites and observe at least minimal standards of decency and consideration.13
The particular role that nature has assigned each one of
us accounts for the other duties associated with propriety.
Just as one person differs from another in bodily size and
physical constitution, so too we find diversity of manner,
temperament, and aptitude. While harmless in themselves,
these differences have to be taken into account when determining what is fitting and proper for each person. Cicero explains that, within the limits set by universal human nature,
the gentleman will attend carefully to his own particular nature in order to determine what is proper and seemly: “nos
studia nostra nostrae naturae regula metiamur.”14
On the other hand, just as nothing is so becoming as to
find the way of life suited to one’s own nature and then to
follow it in a steadfast and consistent way, the inconsistency
of a moral lightweight is highly indecorous.15
Decorum of the sort Cicero described stayed on the minds
of educated Romans during the principate. Lucius Annaeus
Seneca (d. 65), for example, pictured the happy life of the
self-consistent man in terms reminiscent of Cicero’s account.16 Again, the correspondence of the younger Pliny
shows that in its general outline Cicero’s view of decorum
was still influential during the lifetime of Tacitus. Although
these letters adhere to a different formality than that of the
philosophical manual or discourse that Cicero and Seneca
had written, the elements of upper-class seemliness nevertheless appear frequently.17
3 PRINCEPS AS TONE-SETTER
Like Cicero, Tacitus was aware of decorum and its social di-
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mension, and like him Tacitus accepted it as a principle of
civilized conduct. But as moralist and political philosopher,
Cicero concerned himself with action as it should be, with
theory more than practice. As historian, Tacitus reported how
people actually behaved, which in many cases fell far short
of the norms and ideals of the theorist. Perhaps there had once
been a time when prominent citizens had conformed to standards of decency and comportment rooted in nature and discovered by reason. What Tacitus saw in his own generation,
and what he could learn of the reign of Tiberius, however,
was that the princeps himself more and more became the
axial pole of decorum; that is, the place that Cicero had attributed to nature and reason in determining the criteria of
decorous behavior, Tacitus found, in practice, had been taken
over by the princeps himself. This is not to say that Tacitus
knew nothing of nature as norm, or of reason as the guide to
understanding nature. Indeed, as we shall see, the men he
praised had moral strength and good character consistent
with, if not explicitly related to, natural law. But for many
prominent Romans the preponderance of the first citizen
eclipsed any view of a natural standard. For them it seemed
more expedient to conform themselves to his perspective and
his way of doing things than to an abstract ideal of natural
virtue. The reason they used to determine their behavior was
the prudence involved in first trying to discern the expectations of the princeps and then attuning themselves accordingly.
The princeps came to set the standard of decorous behavior because of the character of the regime. Force and political
inequality lay at the root of the principate, but its day-to-day
aspect was the tone set by the princeps himself. Augustus
himself had established the pattern of effective autocracy tacitly juxtaposed with republican institutions and the semblance
of liberty for the senatorial elite. He took the lead in matters
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of public behavior, holding or declining certain magistracies
and official posts, nominating friends as candidates for others. Sometimes setting the tone meant giving direct advice
and instructions, but more often it involved modeling this or
that behavior, enacting or showing how things were to be
done. The poetry of Virgil and the histories of Livy reflect
the classicizing and patriotic outlook of Augustus and his circle. So do buildings and statues like the Ara Pacis and the
Augustus of Prima Porta.18 Even Augustus’s epitaph, which
he composed for himself, has a calm tone, evokes a sense of
its author’s modesty, and presents an image of strength in
service of the common good.19
Noble Romans accommodated themselves as best they
could to the example or standard of the first man. As Tacitus
puts it, “with political equality gone, everyone looked to the
commands of the princeps.”20 They did this for various reasons. Tacitus is aware that people often unconsciously emulate their superiors, and sometimes this urge to get into line
(amor aemulandi) is more effective than the threat of punishment in promoting conformity of mores and behavior.21
Other people realized that the new social and political order
presented opportunities for advancement or enrichment to
those who could adapt properly. But apprehension and outright fear were more important incentives to conformity. Augustus had dealt harshly with his opponents in the civil war
and afterwards, and from the outset it was evident that
Tiberius was not a man to cross if one could avoid it.
But how was one to avoid crossing him? Conformity was
bound to be difficult insofar as the standard to which people
sought to conform kept shifting. A mutable standard of propriety was to some extent endemic to the new regime. Always
in the principate there was disparity between appearance and
reality, between the appearance of liberty of a republic restored by the first citizen and the fact of one man’s hege-
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mony.22 The norm of behavior always tended to oscillate between the image of liberty and the reality of domination, because such oscillation reflected the nature of the regime itself.
A princeps whose public character was affable, fair, and
steady might minimize this oscillation and thereby make it
easier for others to attune themselves. He would moderate
his own speech and behavior in ways the leading men could
decipher and respond to with as much dignity as the circumstances of the autocracy would allow. But a weaker princeps
might not.
Whether Tacitus judged Augustus to be a better ruler, less
tyrannous than Tiberius, is not clear. There are signs that he
viewed the regime’s founder with irony and skepticism.23 But
at least Augustus had presented a consistent figure and a
steady face. This made it possible to live with the new order
and its master. According to Tacitus, life was more difficult
under Tiberius because of the dissonance between his public
mask and his real thoughts and intentions.
Tacitus’s censure and disapproval of Tiberius are open,
though at first somewhat muted, for he mentions that the
tyranny emerged in stages, as the man’s character gradually
showed itself. Before the death of Tiberius’s son Drusus in
23, business had been conducted in the senate, where there
was still some free discussion. The princeps himself had discouraged flattery, and tried to make sure that offices and magistracies went only to those whose birth, merit, and distinction
made them worthy. Taxes and provincial administration were
handled equitably. After 23, with Drusus out of the way, Sejanus, Tiberius’s sinister lieutenant, gained greater influence,
with the consequence that moderate policies were dropped,
and Tiberius eventually withdrew from the city.24 Another
turning point came in 29 at the death of the Augusta,
Tiberius’s mother. Livia, who had been a match for her
smooth and voluble second husband, Augustus, was also
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equal to the secretiveness and dissimulation of her son. She
had exercised a moderating influence upon Tiberius and Sejanus, but once she was dead, they openly took action against
those they perceived to be enemies of the government.25
The depth of Tiberius’s corruption may have become
more apparent over the years, but all along he had been hard
to deal with because he was cryptic and obscure, cruel and
vindictive. Even before he assumed overall power, he was
secretive and prone to dissemble. When Augustus grew old
and ill, speculation as to his successor quickly brought
Tiberius into consideration. He had the maturity and the military experience necessary to rule but suffered from the congenital arrogance of the Claudian family, and “many signs of
a cruel character broke out, try though he might to control
them.” His time spent on Rhodes, which was called retirement but was in fact exile, had been filled with anger, deceit,
and hidden passions.26
The first notable deed of Tiberius’s principate was one of
violence and deception. He ordered the murder of Postumus
Agrippa, grandson of Augustus and possible rival for
supreme power, and then pretended his father had commanded it.27
In his treatment of the senate and the magistrates Tiberius
was also hard to read. Immediately after the death of Augustus, he acted “as though the republic still existed and as
though he was doubtful about taking up command: even the
edict by which he summoned the senators to assemble was
issued in virtue of the tribunician power that he had accepted
from Augustus. The words of the edict were few and very
modest.”28 But in sharp contrast to the edict and his apparent
concern for republicanism were his actions. He had armed
guards at the court, soldiers in the forum, soldiers in the senate house; he sent letters to the army as a veteran leader
would, and never showed hesitation except when he spoke
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in the senate.29 Tacitus reports that the main cause of
Tiberius’s fear was the thought that his nephew, Germanicus,
who commanded a large army and was extremely popular at
home, might prefer to have rule instead of just waiting for it.
Also, Tiberius wanted to make it seem that he had been called
and chosen by the state rather than forced on it through his
mother’s ambition in getting Augustus to adopt him. Tacitus
adds that it later became known that Tiberius pretended to
hesitate in order to ferret out the intentions of the senators,
carefully remembering what he took to be their expressions
of hostility so that he could eventually exact revenge.30
At times it seemed that Tiberius was reserved and cryptic
because he suspected treachery. Certainly he had enemies,
some open, others camouflaged. Germanicus, Agrippina, and
their supporters he considered rivals, and mistrusted.31 Augustus was said to have given Tiberius a list of men to
watch.32 In public or private, he was capable of receiving insult with apparent equanimity, but he did not forget a slight,
storing up his anger even over a period of years.33 Sejanus
knew Tiberius’s suspicious and credulous (suspicionum et
credendi temeritas) character, and after the princeps’ withdrawal to the island of Caprae in 28 he supplied information
carefully selected to arouse and channel it.34 People even
wondered about the quality of the relationship between
Tiberius and his mother, which looked amicable on the surface but which included unmistakable indications of bitterness.35
Misdirection was a tactic for Tiberius, as, for instance, in
16 when he showed favor and friendship to Marcus Scribonius Libo Drusus, who had been denounced privately for treasonous plotting. In private conversation with Libo, “Tiberius
could have halted all his words and deeds, but he preferred
to know them.”36 But in the sequel the utility of concealment
was less apparent. Once Libo came to trial before the Senate,
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he directed supplications to Tiberius who listened with a
blank expression, and Tiberius read out the charges and
names of the accusers in a moderate tone of voice that
seemed neither to minimize nor exaggerate the charges.37
At other times, shame caused Tiberius to avoid the public
gaze. Tacitus reports that Tiberius’s son Drusus led a life of
frivolity—theater and arena by day, banquets by night—pursuing the pleasures often sought by young men. His father,
by contrast, kept to himself and led a joyless life of dark
watchfulness and malevolent undertakings.38 Tacitus suspects
that Tiberius withdrew permanently from Rome in 26 not
only because of the influence of Sejanus and an aversion to
his mother, but to lead his vicious and licentious life in secret.39
Quite aside from their utility, however, opacity and concealment seemed to suit Tiberius. He prized dissimulation as
his own greatest virtue, clinging to it all his life.40 He projected his personal preference for secrecy onto the divine
when in 15 he rejected a proposal to open the Sibylline books
to seek guidance in responding to recent destructive flooding
of the Tiber.41 He habitually mingled jest and earnestness,42
and routinely spoke in euphemisms.43 Only shock or crisis
provoked outbursts of frankness, and these could be dangerous, as when anger toward personal enemies caused lapses
in his prudent moderation.44 Even when advanced age and
illness brought him close to death, Tiberius pretended (simulans) to be healthy, and Tacitus remarks that dissimulation
(dissimulatio) was the last power to leave him.45
Although the speeches of Tiberius often carried a double
meaning,46 sometimes they were simply inscrutable. After the
funeral of Augustus, his address to the senate was so uncertain and ambiguous that his intended meaning was impossible
to understand.47 Again, in 20, at the trial for treason, magic,
and adultery of Lepida from the illustrious gens Aemilia,
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Tiberius “mixed signs of anger and clemency,” and intervened in the proceedings in ways that some considered nonautocratic, but others saw as prejudicial to the defendant.
Lepida was condemned and exiled.48
Doubt often enshrouded the real thoughts and feelings of
Tiberius, but it must have been apparent to all that he was
watching. The more they looked to him for clues of his expectations, the more they were aware of being under scrutiny.
He and his friends and informers attended to their words and
actions, their gestures and appearances.
He watched the senators carefully, twisting their words
and facial expressions into criminal significance, and storing
them away in his memory, as was mentioned earlier.49 Even
at a distance Tiberius was informed not only about the actions
of important men, but about their appearance and comportment. While Germanicus toured Egypt, word reached
Tiberius of the manner of his dress and behavior, that it was
disagreeably informal and Hellenic, comparable to that of
Scipio Africanus while he was in Sicily.50 Thus, finding themselves under scrutiny, those around him sought to make sense
of Tiberius’s thoughts and desires so as to conform themselves to his expectations.
4. VARIETIES OF CONFORMITY
People who came into contact with Tiberius behaved in ways
that reflected not only the opacity of the princeps but also
their own fear, ambition, corruption, and sometimes even
moral strength. That is, in most—but not all—cases their
words and comportment mirrored not a Ciceronian standard
of nature and reason but their more or less accurate reading
of how best to save themselves, or how best to profit in the
prevailing climate. Here I shall survey the main varieties of
conformity as Tacitus presents them.
Those who were most like Tiberius accommodated themselves best to him. Men like the astrologer Thrasyllus51 un-
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derstood him, and so were able to conform their behavior to
his expectations. It is no accident that the two people Tacitus
presents as most successfully attuning themselves to him
were the villainous Lucius Aelius Sejanus and Gaius Julius
Caesar Germanicus. Sejanus was an equestrian whom
Tiberius appointed commander of the Praetorian Guard and
then came to depend upon to carry out his policies in the Senate, especially after retiring to the island of Capreae. To Sejanus alone Tiberius disclosed his secret designs in an
unguarded way. Decent outwardly, inwardly Sejanus was
consumed with lust for power.52 He hounded the adherents
of Agrippina in a series of treason trials, but his hope to marry
into the imperial family came to nothing, and he was eventually purged for aiming at the principate itself. Ominously, it
was Gaius, or Caligula as he was called, the grandson and
terrible successor of Tiberius, who came to mirror the mood
and even the words of Tiberius more closely than any other
person Tacitus mentions.53 His reign began with the murder
of Tiberius.
Those who were not like Tiberius, or less like him, found
life challenging. Most conformed in more or less indecorous
and shameful ways. Some went beyond disgrace to the active
commission of crimes. Some refused to conform and usually
perished before their time. A few managed to serve and lead
public careers worthy of their ancestors almost as though the
free republic still existed. All experienced a public discourse
that was “narrow and slippery under a princeps who feared
liberty but hated flattery.”54
From the outset many dishonored themselves by composing their appearance and words in false, and therefore indecorous, ways. When the news arrived in Rome that Augustus
was dead and Tiberius in charge, “consuls, senators, and
knights rushed headlong into servitude; the more noble were
also more false and hasty, with expression carefully arranged
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to appear neither happy at the death of the princeps nor sad
at the accession, they mingled tears and joy, lament and flattery.”55
People tried to read the meaning behind Tiberius’s words,
and then to articulate responses that mirrored well enough—
but not too clearly—what the listener thought Tiberius was
getting at. The results were always dishonorable, sometimes
absurd, and occasionally dangerous.
In 14, after the funeral of Augustus, Tiberius ostentatiously refused the leading role. The senators, who were
afraid to show that they saw he wanted to be asked and to be
persuaded to accept power, poured out tearful prayers to him,
reaching toward the gods, the statue of Augustus, Tiberius’s
knees. Declining to bear the whole burden of government,
Tiberius expressed a willingness to accept whatever part was
entrusted to him. Gaius Asinius Gallus then made the mistake
of asking what part of the government Tiberius wished to be
given. Tiberius registered his annoyance with a dark look and
protracted silence, but then reiterated his preference to be excused altogether, and said he refused to pick and choose. Gallus tried to smooth over his blunder, saying that he had only
tried to get Tiberius to acknowledge that rule could not really
be divided at all. This and further flattery failed to allay
Tiberius’s irritation with Gallus, who was also the object of
hostility for having married Tiberius’s ex-wife, Vipsania.56
Flattery took the form of undeserved civil or military honors.57 An ironic example occurred in 29 when, seeking a remedy in flattery (remedium adulationis) for the fear generated
by the wave of treason trials, the senators voted to erect altars
to Mercy and Friendship, the latter flanked by statues of
Tiberius and Sejanus.58
Flattery often shaped elections, as in the year 21, when
Tiberius recommended two men to the senate for consideration as governor of Africa, one a distinguished noble, the
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other the uncle of Sejanus. It was assumed that the latter was
the approved candidate. While both men begged to be excused, Sejanus’s uncle was less convincing, and a chorus of
flatterers urged him to accept.59
Flattery also led men beyond disgrace into active wrongdoing. In the year 22, the new consul, Decimus Haterius
Agrippa, proposed death as the fitting punishment for the
equestrian author of scurrilous verses about Tiberius’s son,
Drusus. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus countered by proposing a
lesser sentence better proportioned to the offense. All but one
of the senators, Gaius Rubellius Blandus, supported Haterius,
and the equestrian was immediately put to death. Tiberius rebuked the senate, but with enough ambiguity not to preclude
similar punishments in future. Lepidus and Blandus had been
unable to prevent shameful adulation from becoming outright
injustice.60
Although at first it seemed a means of attaining safety,
flattery quickly became equivocal, for in an environment of
corrupt mores, express servility could be dangerous by its
presence as well as its absence.61 This fact may have intensified the search for new strategies to protect the frightened,
and new strategies of advancement for the ambitious.
Servitude rapidly assumed the colors of liberty. In the
year 14, when Marcus Valerius Messalla Messallinus proposed in the senate that the oath of allegiance to the new princeps be repeated annually, Tiberius asked him to
acknowledge that he had not put him up to that proposal.
Messalla said that when it came to public business, he would
express his own thoughts, no matter who took offense. The
historian’s terse judgment is that this was the only sort of flattery left.62
Again, in 22, Lucius Ennius, an equestrian, found himself
before the senate charged with treason for melting down a
silver statue of the princeps. In response to Tiberius’s inter-
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cession on behalf of the accused, Gaius Ateius Capito made
a show of independence, urging that the senate’s power of
judgment ought not be diminished, and pointing out that the
offense had serious public implications, even if Tiberius was
willing to overlook the injury to himself personally. Tacitus
remarks that Capito’s behavior was all the more infamous because, as a civil and religious jurist of note, he dishonored
these arts as well as himself.63
Shameful displays of independence became competitive.
In 16, the senators Gaius Asinius Gallus and Cnaeus Calpurnius Piso disagreed over whether the senate should conduct
business during the absence of Tiberius. Piso claimed the
“speciem libertatis” by asserting that it would be worthy of
the republic that senators and equestrians could continue their
official work even in the absence of the princeps. Gallus answered that nothing would be more illustrious or worthy of
the Roman people than to do business only in the presence
and under the eyes of Caesar. Tiberius listened in silence to
these undignified invocations of the dignity of the state. No
action was taken.64
Unbecoming conduct grew worse. Just as the treacherous
path of public discourse led great men to competitive adulatory assertions of liberty, so too did compliance and obsequiousness gradually degenerate into wickedness, as
members of the aristocracy turned informer.65
A remarkable instance occurred in 16, when Firmius
Catus, a senator eager for advancement, and Lucius Fulcinius
Trio, a well-known prosecutor who hoped to increase his notoriety, brought Marcus Scribonius Libo Drusus to trial for
conspiracy against the princeps. The charges were trumped
up; Libo’s consultations of astrologers and necromancers
were inept and pathetic, not threatening. But Trio presented
the matter as “res magna et atrox,” and by the time the case
came before the senate, Catus and Trio had been joined by
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Fonteius Agrippa and Gaius Vibius Serenus. Libo anticipated
the guilty verdict by taking his own life. His property went
as reward to the accusers, along with the rank of extraordinary praetor to those of the senatorial order.66
Libo’s posthumous condemnation triggered a flurry of
sycophantic proposals and resolutions in the senate. Tacitus
omits nothing: Cotta Messalinus moved that the image of
Libo be barred from the funeral processions of his descendants; Cnaeus Cornelius Lentulus proposed that no Scribonianus should bear the cognomen of Drusus; Lucius
Pomponius Flaccus suggested that days be set aside for public thanksgiving; Lucius Munatius Plancus, Gaius Asinius
Gallus, Marcus Papius Mutilus and Lucius Apronius voted
thank-offerings to Jupiter, Mars, and Concord, and they
moved that 13 September—the date of Libo’s death—should
be a public holiday. Two astrologers were executed, and the
senate ordered that the rest be expelled from Italy. The historian’s explicit purpose in cataloguing all this is to make
known how early the public disgrace began.67
Some of the doings of spies, informers and accusers were
ludicrously outrageous. In 28, four senators hoping for advancement sought to please Sejanus by prosecuting an illustrious equestrian friend of Germanicus, Titius Sabinus,
ostensibly on charges of treason, but really because of the enmity between Sejanus and Agrippina, the widow of Germanicus. Tacitus records the names of the four, and explains how
one of them, Latinius Latiaris, lured Sabinus into his confidence and induced him to complain about Sejanus and
Tiberius. To strengthen their case, the others hid between the
roof and the ceiling with their ears pressed to holes and cracks
while Latiaris conversed with Sabinus in the room below
about recent hardships. Then in a letter to Tiberius, the four
detailed their findings as well as their disgraceful (dedecus)
ploy.
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This was material better suited to the comedian or satirist
than to the historian, but the unfortunate truth was that the
main actors were among the most prominent members of the
senatorial order. Sabinus was immediately condemned and
put to death. Tacitus reports this event’s chilling effect upon
public life: fear emptied the roads and squares; conversation
ceased even among friends; people eyed the very walls and
ceiling with suspicion; it was assumed that Tiberius was tightening the noose on Agrippina and her son.68
Since they were entitled to claim a part of the property of
those condemned for treason, accusers had strong incentive
to file charges. The grotesque results went beyond injustice to
impiety, as son accused father and brother sister.69 The senate
was filled with informers; friends turned against one another;
no place, public or private, was safe for open conversation. It
was like a plague in the city.70
Those foolish or honest enough to speak their minds were
at risk, as Agrippina discovered. After the poisoning of
Drusus, son of Tiberius, there was widespread but secret rejoicing at the prospect of one of Germanicus’s sons eventually succeeding Tiberius. While the senate and people
“concealed their joy with expressions of sorrow,” Agrippina,
widow of Germanicus, concealed her hope less effectively,
and thereby brought down a quicker ruin, when Sejanus, who
had planned the murder of Drusus and had imperial ambitions
for himself, was able to point to Agrippina’s hope and her
popularity in order to intensify Livia’s animosity toward the
sons of Germanicus.71 It seems likely that the brutal Sejanus
would have targeted these boys whether or not their mother
had disguised her thoughts more effectively. But according
to the historian her failures to dissemble and conceal her true
thoughts at least hastened (adceleravere) their destruction.
Another example of the high cost of open expression is
the outspoken and independent-minded Lucius Calpurnius
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Piso. He openly registered his disgust with the corruption and
aggressive tactics of prosecutors, and was bold enough to
bring charges against a protégée of Livia. Although he announced his withdrawal from public affairs and resolved to
leave the city, he apparently did not leave, and a few years
later was charged with treason. Piso’s timely death, whether
by suicide or natural causes, prevented the case from coming
to court.72
In the year 25, the historian Aulus Cremutius Cordus
faced the senate charged with treason for praising the assassins of Julius Caesar in his own Annales. Because his accusers were minions of Sejanus, and judging by the grim
expression (trux vultus) of Tiberius, the outcome of the case
was not in doubt. Knowing that death was near, Cremutius
defended himself with dignity, calmly adducing examples
from the Roman tradition of legitimate free expression. Cremutius was allowed to starve himself to death. The senate
voted to have his books burned.73
Because Tacitus’s Annales contain many examples of the
danger of openness and candor, we suspect irony when he reports candor going unpunished. In the wake of Sejanus’s fall,
the backlash that engulfed his associates prompted most people to pretend they had not been his friends. But the equestrian Marcus Terentius was unapologetic. He had been the
friend of Sejanus, who was himself the friend of Caesar; it
was more fitting for an equestrian to obey than to challenge
the policies of his superiors; and his friendship with Sejanus
had ended when Tiberius’s did. Terentius escaped punishment. His accusers suffered exile or execution. Tacitus cannot
have missed the irony that the only person saved by telling
the truth in a brave speech (constantia orationis) was an associate of Sejanus.74
Although he admired their refusal to accommodate themselves to the expectations and tone set by the autocrat, Tacitus
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did not give his highest praise to those who courted death
through outspoken opposition. Whether what bothered Tacitus about these men was the jarring quality of their extreme
dissonance or their failure to benefit the state in a more sustained way, he did not say. But it is clear that he reserved his
highest admiration for those who managed to have dignified
and honorable public careers despite the princeps. Doing so
under Tiberius was very difficult—but not impossible.
Marcus Aemilius Lepidus was praised as dignified and
wise because he so often managed to reduce the harm done
by flatterers, and because he possessed enough moderation
to stay on working terms with Tiberius. His case even led
Tacitus to wonder whether fate and chance of birth control
men’s destinies, or whether their own decisions allow some
men to find a safe course between dangerous insubordination
and ugly servility.75 In 17, Marcus Furius Camillus, the proconsular governor of Africa, revived his family’s ancient reputation for military glory (decus militiae) by defeating the
Numidian leader Tacfarinus. Tiberius praised him in the senate, and he was voted an honorary triumph which he lived to
enjoy, Tacitus comments, because of his modest behavior.76
We read of some others who also lived in a manner worthy
of their great family and died peacefully.77
In the Annales, references to distinguished men in the
reign of Tiberius who managed to avoid the extremes of base
conformity and perilous honesty but still have careers of public service are few and not presented in much detail. To see
clearly portrayed the career and record of the sort of man Tacitus most admired, one may turn to his own father-in-law,
Gnaeus Julius Agricola (40-93), about whom Tacitus composed a Vita.78
The son of a senator from Gallia Narbonensis (the modern Provence), he had an impressive administrative and military career. His extensive military campaigns in Britain
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occurred during the reign of the tyrannical Domitian (81-96),
and Tacitus admired his ability to distinguish himself on behalf of the state without incurring the lethal wrath of the princeps.79 When confronting the notoriously hot-headed
Domitian in person, Agricola softened him with his prudence
and moderation, and refrained from seeking renown and a
swift end by open defiance and the useless assertion of liberty.80 “Let those who habitually admire disobedience know
that even under bad rulers there are great men, and that a decent regard for authority, if backed by hard work and military
toughness, is even more praiseworthy than the death-seeking
perilous course, of no use to the state, through which some
became famous.”81 In short, Tacitus praised Agricola for his
noble public service under difficult circumstances. Avoiding
both craven compliance and ostentatious martyrdom, Agricola played his part with a seemliness worthy of his forebears. He might have lived longer but could not have lived
better.82
5. CONCLUSION
With few exceptions, then, the Tiberian books of the Annales
are as somber as the reign they chronicle. Tacitus was aware
of this, and expressed regret over the tedious character of the
ills he catalogued,83 and in general over the narrow and inglorious scope of his project (in arto et ingloriosus labor).84
The times he chronicled were infected and dirty with servility
(infecta et adulatione sordida). But the historian had a moral
purpose, to record the virtue of those who had measured up,
and the disgrace of those who had fallen so short of the dignity of their family and order. The wicked might be deterred
by the certainty of posthumous infamy.85 Even when the
books of historians are burned, it is folly to imagine that the
power of today can snuff out the memory of the future. Quite
the reverse, for repressed thought grows in prestige, and conquerors, together with those who behave as brutally as con-
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querors, only achieve dishonor (dedecus) for themselves and
renown for their victims.86
Besides its moral aim, Tacitus mentioned one other value
of the work. Admitting that the dossier of minor events centered on the princeps makes tedious reading, Tacitus insisted
that such a history is useful for examining “matters that seem
trivial at first glance, from which the movements of great
things often arise.”87 Here, the modern reader might anticipate a reference to patterns of group behavior that set in motion impersonal and potentially disruptive social forces.
Persistent dishonorable behavior of the leading men might
bring their entire order into disrepute. In turn, questions about
the possible disjunction between reality and appearance in
the leading order could easily provoke tremors of doubt about
social hierarchy. In such a scenario, decorum would be not
only a matter of the self-respect of a few score senators, it
would also ultimately be linked to something elemental and
tectonic in Roman society itself. Whether Tacitus thought
along these lines is not clear. But he wrote that, since the balanced and mixed form of government is seldom found in
practice, and is short-lived even when it is found, the prudent
man will familiarize himself with the leading actors in whatever form of government happens to prevail currently: the
rule of the best men, of the many, or, as in Tacitus’s time, of
the autocrat. For most people, the best way to learn how to
behave effectively and honorably is to study the experience
of others.88
Half a century ago Ronald Syme remarked that as “a form
of government the principate was essentially equivocal, and
the nobilitas was called to play a false role therein, forfeiting
power but ostensibly retaining honour and prestige.”89 False
the part might have been, but at least under a morally and
psychologically steady princeps one could play it with some
dignity. As de Tocqueville saw, weakness might compel one
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to play a false part, but one who feigns approval of that false
part is truly base. Under Tiberius, however, the quest for security or advancement led men to guess at, and conform to,
his desires and expectations. They gradually attuned themselves to a standard far removed from any persona nature
might assign or reason discern. It was Tacitus’s somber genius to recognize that the danger of such attunement was that
a man might become the person he pretended to be, thereby
confirming the contemptuous judgment of Tiberius himself
that the senators were “men fit to be slaves.”90
NOTES
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000),
246. For their helpful comments on drafts of this essay, I am grateful to
Bob Haynie, John Goyette, and Meghan Parker. I dedicate the article to
Mark Morford, my teacher and friend.
2. Cornelii Taciti Annalium ab excessu divi Augusti libri, ed. C. D. Fisher
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906), 119-120. (Hereafter abbreviated
Annales.) For comments on Tacitus’s views within the context of Roman
thought about luxury, see Christopher Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 67-70. See also Annales, 92-95 for Tiberius’s statement
about decorous and moderate public mourning.
3. As Ronald Syme put it, “men and dynasties pass, but style abides.”
Ronald Syme, Tacitus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958),
Vol. 2, 624. Still worthwhile for understanding Tacitus’s literary strategies
are Einar Löfstedt, “On the Style of Tacitus,” Journal of Roman Studies
38 (1948): 1-8, and Uwe Rademacher, Die Bildkunst des Tacitus
(Hildesheim: Olms Verlag, 1975). Francesca Santoro L’Hoir, Tragedy,
Rhetoric, and the Historiography of Tacitus’ Annales (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006) draws attention to the influence of Greek
drama upon Tacitus.
4. Cicero, De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. 349 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1942), 178: “Est
enim actio quasi sermo corporis, quo magis menti congruens esse debet.”
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5. That Tacitus wrote for “elite males of senatorial and equestrian status,”
is demonstrated in S. H. Rutledge, “Trajan and Tacitus’ Audience: Reader
Reception of Annals 1-2,” Ramus 27.1 (1998): 141.
6. Cicero’s view of decorum occupies a place within a longer moral tradition that reached back at least as far as Panaetius of Rhodes (second
century BC), whose own treatise, On Duty, was a main source for Cicero’s De officiis. See the editorial introduction to Cicero: On Duties, ed.
M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
xix-xxi.
7. Cicero, De officiis, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. 30 (Boston: Harvard
University Press, 1913), 182.
8. Cicero, De officiis, 14-16.
9. Cicero, De officiis, 98.
10. Cicero, De officiis, 97; see also Cicero, De oratore, Loeb Classical
Library, Vol. 348 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1942), 378, for another example of the convergence of theatrical and oratorical decorum.
11. Cicero, De officiis, 100.
12. Cicero, De officiis, 102-108. Still illuminating for a discussion of Cicero’s place within the history of doctrines of natural law is Felix Flückiger, Geschichte des Naturrechtes: Altertum und Frühmittelalter (Zurich:
Evangelischer Verlag, 1954), 221-238.
13. Cicero, De officiis, 108.
14. “We may judge our activities by the measure of our own nature.” Cicero, De officiis, 112. In connection with discerning what is right for oneself, Cicero mentions two more personae that we must play, one imposed
by chance or circumstance, the other a matter of our own choice. See De
officiis, 116-118; and for discussion see Christopher Gill, “Personhood
and Personality: The Four-Personae Theory in Cicero, De Officiis 1,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 6 (1988): 169-199.
15. Cicero, De officiis, 122 and 126-128.
16. Seneca, Letter 120 in Epistola, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb
Classical Library, Vol. 77 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1925), 386
and 388. On this passage within a larger context see Christopher Gill, The
Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 163. See also Seneca, De constantia sapientis, Loeb
Classical Library, Vol. 214 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1928), 102
and 104.
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17. Pliny praises those who manifest constantia, dignitas, verecundia, or
decor in word, deed and appearance; his disapproval attaches to their opposites. For a careful study of the letters see Stanley Hoffer, The Anxieties
of Pliny the Younger (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1999).
18. See Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).
19. See Res gestae divi Augusti: The Achievements of the Divine Augustus, ed. P. A. Brunt and J. M. Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1967), 34-36.
20. Tacitus, Annales, 3: “omnes exuta aequalitate iussa principis aspectare.”
21. Tacitus, Annales, 121: “obsequium inde in principem et aemulandi
amor validior quam poena ex legibus et metus.”
22. Two examples from the reign of Tiberius should suffice to illustrate
a characteristic that Tacitus attributes to the regime as a whole. When
Tiberius speaks of free elections open to men of talent, Tacitus (Annales,
47) comments: “speciosa verbis, re inania aut subdola, quantoque maiore
libertatis imagine tegebantur, tanto eruptura ad infensius servitium”
(“things attractive in speech, but in fact meaningless or deceptive, and
the more they were represented in the figure of freedom, the more they
were preparing to break out into more dangerous subjection”). In a different context, Tacitus remarks (Annales, 122): “Sed Tiberius, vim principatus sibi firmans, imaginem antiquitatis senatui praebebat postulata
provinciarum ad disquisitionem patrum mittendo.” (“But Tiberius, while
establishing the power of the principate in himself, was keeping up the
image of the old senate by sending the demands of the provinces to be
dealt with by the senators.”)
23. For evidence and discussion see Syme, Tacitus, Vol. 1, 397-416.
24. Tacitus, Annales, 135-136. Note the turning point that occurs with the
words “Tiberio mutati in deterius principatus initium ille annus attulit”
(“that year brought for Tiberius the beginning of the principate’s change
for the worse”) and “donec morte Drusi verterentur” (“until things
changed with the death of Drusus”).
25. Tacitus, Annales, 177: “Ceterum ex eo praerupta iam et urgens dominatio” (“But from that point on there was precipitate and acute despotism”). For another statement of the gradual disclosure of Tiberius’s real
character, see Annales, 211.
26. Tacitus, Annales, 3: “sed vetere atque insita Claudiae familiae super-
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bia, multaque indicia saevitiae, quamquam premantur, erumpere. . . ; ne
iis quidem annis quibus Rhodi specie secessus exul egerit aliud quam
iram et simulationem et secretas libidines meditatum” (“but the old and
innate arrogance of the Claudian family, together with many indications
of cruelness, although repressed, burst forth. . . ; not even during the years
he passed in exile on Rhodes under the cover of retirement was he meditating anything but anger and dissimulation and concealed lust”). Even
Augustus acknowledged objectionable irregularities in Tiberius’s deportment, dress, and habits; see Annales, 8: “Etenim Augustus paucis ante
annis, cum Tiberio tribuniciam potestatem a patribus rursum postularet,
quamquam honora oratione, quaedam de habitu cultuque et institutis eius
ieceret quae velut excusando exprobraret.” (“Even Augustus a few years
earlier, when he was once again requesting from the senators the tribunician power for Tiberius, although speaking approvingly, let fall certain
indications about his attitude, dress, and manners of which he disapproved, even though he was excusing them.”)
27. Tacitus, Annales, 4: “Nihil de ea re Tiberius apud senatum disseruit:
patris iussa simulabat.” (“Tiberius discussed nothing of this with the senate: he pretended it was the father’s command.”) Again, for the murder
of Sempronius Graccus in 14 Tiberius tried to shift blame from himself
onto the proconsul of Africa. See Annales, 31: “Quidam non Roma eos
milites, sed ab L. Asprenate pro consule Africae missos tradidere auctore
Tiberio, qui famam caedis posse in Asprenatem verti frustra speraverat.”
(“Some have said that these soldiers were not sent from Rome, but by L.
Asprenas, proconsul of Africa, at the urging of Tiberius, who had hoped
in vain that the blame for the murder could be pinned on Asprenas.”)
28. Tacitus, Annales, 5: “. . . tamquam vetere re publica et ambiguus imperandi: ne edictum quidem, quo patres in curiam vocabat, nisi tribuniciae
potestatis praescriptione posuit sub Augusto acceptae. Verba edicti fuere
pauca et sensu permodesto.”
29. Tacitus, Annales, 5: “nusquam cunctabundus nisi cum in senatu loqueretur” (“never hesitant except when he was speaking in the senate”).
30. Tacitus, Annales, 5: “Postea cognitum est ad introspiciendas etiam
procerum voluntates inductam dubitationem: nam verba vultus in crimen
detorquens recondebat.” (“Afterwards it was recognized that the hesitation was also put on in order to observe the intentions of the leaders: for,
twisting a look, he would store up insults.”)
31. For example, Tacitus, Annales, 36 and 40-41.
32. Tacitus, Annales, 10.
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33. Tacitus, Annales, 144, in relation to the slight of Lucius Calpurnius
Piso, several years earlier: “Quae in praesens Tiberius civiliter habuit:
sed in animo revolvente iras, etiam si impetus offensionis languerat,
memoria valebat.” (“And at the time, Tiberius took these things courteously: but in his mind, which ruminated over resentments, the memory
was intense, even if its initial force had dissipated.”)
34. Tacitus, Annales, 170.
35. Tacitus, Annales, 125.
36. Tacitus, Annales, 60: “Atque interim Libonem ornat praetura, convictibus adhibet, non vultu alienatus, non verbis commotior (adeo iram
condiderat); cunctaque eius dicta factaque, cum prohibere posset, scire
malebat.” (“And meanwhile he granted Libo the praetorship, invited him
often to parties, neither unfriendly in his appearance nor excited in speech
[so completely he had concealed his anger]; and Tiberius could have
halted all his words and deeds, but he preferred to know them.”)
37. Tacitus, Annales, 60: “Mox libellos et auctores recitat Caesar ita moderans ne lenire neve asperare criminia videretur.” (“Next Caesar read out
the complaints and the accusors, controlling himself so that he seemed
neither to soften nor harshen the charges.”)
38. Tacitus, Annales, 112: “Solus et nullis voluptatibus avocatus maestam
vigilantiam et malas curas exerceret.” (“Alone and withdrawn from all
pleasures he was engaged in gloomy vigilance and wicked plans.”)
39. Tacitus, Annales, 165 and 170.
40. Annales, 173: “Nullam aeque Tiberius, ut rebatur, ex virtutibus suis
quam dissimulationem diligebat: eo aegrius accepit recludi quae premeret.” (“Tiberius, so he thought, liked none of his virtues as much as
dissimulation: all the more angrily, then, he took the disclosing of the
things he concealed.”)
41. Tacitus, Annales, 44: “Renuit Tiberius, perinde divina humanaque
obtegens.” (“Tiberius refused, thus keeping hidden both things divine and
things human.”)
42. Tacitus, Annales, 181: “Tiberius tamen, ludibria seriis permiscere solitus.” (“Tiberius, however, customarily mixed jests with serious matters.”)
43. Tacitus, Annales, 143: “Proprium id Tiberio fuit scelera nuper reperta
priscis verbis obtegere.” (“It was characteristic of Tiberius to cover over
recently invented crimes with long venerated formulas.”)
44. Tacitus, Annales, 15: “Haec audita quamquam abstrusum et tristissima
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quaeque maxime occultantem Tiberium perpulere.” (“These things coming to his attention impressed him deeply, although he remained reserved
and kept secret everything that was very sorrowful.”); see also Annales,
44, where Tiberius gets angry enough to break his customary taciturnity,
and Annales, 128: “prudens moderandi, si propria ira non impelleretur”
(“skilled at observing moderation, if his own anger was not incited”).
45. Tacitus, Annales, 208: “in patientia firmitudinem simulans” (“in suffering simulating good health”) and 210: “Iam Tiberium corpus, iam
vires, nondum dissimulatio deserebat.” (Now his body was forsaking
Tiberius, now his strength, but not yet the power of dissimulation.”)
46. Tacitus, Annales, 30: “magis in speciem verbis adornata quam ut penitus sentire crederetur” (“more embellished with words for show than so
that he might be believed to feel it in his inmost heart”).
47. Tacitus, Annales, 9: “Plus in oratione tali dignitatis quam fidei erat;
Tiberioque etiam in rebus quas non occuleret, seu natura sive adsuetudine,
suspensa semper et obscura verba: tunc vero nitenti ut sensus suos penitus
abderet, in incertum et ambiguum magis implicabantur.” (“There was
more grandeur in this sort of speech than credibility; either by nature or
by custom, halting and unintelligible language was Tiberius’s style even
in things he was not trying to hide: but then, when he was striving to conceal his meaning entirely, it got even more wrapped up in uncertainty and
obscurity.”)
48. Tacitus, Annales,103: “Haud facile quis dispexerit illa in cognitione
mentem principis: adeo vertit ac miscuit irae et clementiae signa.” (“It
was not easy for anyone to discern the mind of the princeps at this trial:
so much did he interchange and mingle the signs of anger and clemency.”)
Also “Quod alii civile rebantur . . . quidam ad saevitiam trahebant.”
(“What some thought considerate . . . others took for cruelty.”)
49. See note 30.
50. Tacitus, Annales, 78: “Tiberius cultu habituque eius lenibus verbis
perstricto . . . increpuit.” (“Tiberius remonstrated a bit in mild terms about
his bearing and attire.”)
51. Tacitus, Annales, 192. Although Tiberius believed Thrasyllus was a
true oracle, Tacitus presents his real skill as that of reading Tiberius.
52. Tacitus, Annales, 132: “Mox Tiberium variis artibus devinxit adeo ut
obscurum adversum alios sibi uni incautum intectumque efficeret.”
(“Soon he subdued Tiberius by various means, so much so that he made
him—so covert toward others—open and sincere with himself alone.”)
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Also, “palam compositus pudor, intus summa apiscendi libido” (“outwardly all propriety, inwardly the greatest lust for acquisition”).
53. Tacitus, Annales, 192: “Qualem diem Tiberius induisset, pari habitu,
haud multum distantibus verbis.” (“Whatever humor Tiberius put on, his
attitude was the same, and his speech not very different”). See also Annales, 207 for the observation that Gaius had learned dissimulation
through contact with Tiberius.
54. Tacitus, Annales, 91: “Angusta et lubrica oratio sub principe qui libertatem metuebat adulationem oderat.”
55. Tacitus, Annales, 5: “Ruere in servitium consules, patres, eques.
quanto quis inlustrior, tanto magis falsi ac festinantes, vultuque composito
ne laeti excessu principis neu tristiores primordio, lacrimas gaudium,
questus adulationem miscebant.” For another example of false mourning,
see the public response to the death of Tiberius’s son, Drusus, in the year
23, Annales, 138-139: “Senatus populusque habitum ac voces dolentum
simulatione magis quam libens induebat, domumque Germanici revirescere occulti laetabantur.” (“The senate and the people put on the attitude and the tone of mourners insincerely rather than willingly, and they
rejoiced secretly that the house of Germanicus was reviving.”)
56. Tacitus, Annales, 9-10.
57. Tacitus, Annales, 116: “Dolabella Cornelius dum antire ceteros parat
absurdam in adulationem progressus.” (“Dolabella Cornelius, while trying to outdo the others, went forward with a ludicrous bit of flattery.”)
Quintius Haterius gained infamy in 22 (Annales, 122) through a “most
disgustingly servile” proposal that the senate’s resolution honoring
Drusus should be recorded in gold letters. The same Haterius had narrowly escaped death in 14 (Annales, 10) when, shamefully groveling, he
accidentally tackled Tiberius. In 34 (Annales, 195), the senate voted
thanks to Tiberius for allowing Agrippina to die in exile instead of having
her strangled.
58. Tacitus, Annales, 175.
59. Tacitus, Annales, 111.
60. Tacitus, Annales, 117-118.
61. Tacitus, Annales, 142: “[adulatio], quae moribus corruptis perinde anceps, si nulla et ubi nimia est” (“flattery, which, when mores have been
ruined, is just as dangerous when there is none and when there is too
much”).
62. Tacitus, Annales, 8: “Ea sola species adulandi supererat.”
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63. Tacitus, Annales, 128-129.
64. Tacitus, Annales, 64. Tacitus presents Cnaeus Calpurnius Piso as
standing up to Tiberius at Annales, 44, not so much because of republican
sentiments as from a sense of his own worthiness to rule. That insubordination ran in the family; see Annales, 69. As for Gallus, Tacitus records
another public disagreement with Tiberius that, perhaps inadvertently,
penetrated to the very heart of rule (Annales, 64): “Eam sententiam altius
penetrare et arcana imperii temptari.” (“This motion penetrated more
deeply and made an attempt at the secrets of the imperium.”) Tiberius,
however, managed to turn this to his own advantage.
65. Tacitus, Annales, 126: “Paulatim dehinc ab indecoris ad infesta transgrediebantur.” (“After this they gradually passed over from shameful
deeds to outrageous ones.”)
66. Tacitus, Annales, 60-61.
67. Tacitus, Annales, 62: “Quorum auctoritates adulationesque rettuli ut
sciretur vetus id in re publica malum.” (“I have reported the motions and
the flatteries of these men so that this old evil in the state might be recognized.”)
68. Tacitus, Annales, 171-173.
69. Tacitus, Annales, 147 and 149. See also Annales, 149, where it
emerges that even the property of those who anticipate a guilty verdict
by suicide is subject to confiscation and division among the accusers.
Also at Annales, 170, there is an accusation within an extended family.
70. Tacitus, Annales, 184.
71. Tacitus, Annales, 138-139; see note 55 above, which comments on
the hypocrisy of the many. The rest of this chapter discusses Sejanus’s
effort to magnify Livia’s hatred. In another instance during the year 32,
Tacitus records that a mother was condemned and executed for weeping
for her executed son (Annales, 186).
72. Tacitus, Annales, 144.
73. Tacitus, Annales, 151-152.
74. Tacitus, Annales, 185-186.
75. Tacitus, Annales, 143-144: “Hunc ego Lepidum temporibus illis
gravem et sapientem virum fuisse comperior: nam pleraque ab saevis adulationibus aliorum in melius flexit. neque tamen temperamenti egebat,
cum aequabili auctoritate et gratia apud Tiberium viguerit. unde dubitare
cogor fato et sorte nascendi, ut cetera, ita principium inclinatio in hos,
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offensio in illos, an sit aliquid in nostris consiliis liceatque inter abruptum
contumaciam et deforme obsequium pergere iter ambitione ac periculis
vacuum.” (“I am convinced that this Lepidus was a serious and wise man
for those times: for he turned very many things arising from the cruel flatteries of others to better effect. Nor did he lack moderation, since he retained steady influence and esteem with Tiberius. Hence I am compelled
to doubt whether, as with other things, the favor of leading men toward
some and their disfavor toward others is from the fate and chance of birth,
or whether it is something within our own purvue, and one has the freedom to pursue a course between severe autonomy and base servility that
is also free from dangers.”). His obituary in the year 34 (see Annales,
196), praises his moderation and wisdom, presenting him as a worthy
member of a family rich in good citizens (“genus fecundum bonorum
civium”).
76. Tacitus, Annales, 74: “Quod Camillo ob modestiam vitae impune
fuit.” (“And this was safe for Camillus because of his unassuming conduct in life.”)
77. Tacitus, Annales, 167, mentions Marcus Asinius Agrippa, a man
“claris maioribus quam vetustis vitaque non degener” (“with distinguished rather than ancient ancestors, and not ignoble in his way of life”),
who died in 27.
78. Tacitus, Cornelii Taciti de vita Iulii Agricolae liber (hereafter abbreviated as De vita Agricolae), ed. M. Winterbottom and R.M. Ogilvie, in
Cornelii Taciti Opera Minora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
79. Tacitus, De vita Agricolae, 29: “Ceterum uti militare nomen, grave
inter otiosos, aliis virtutibus temperaret, tranquillitatem atque otium penitus hausit, cultu modicus, sermone facilis, uno aut altero amicorum comitatus, adeo ut plerique, quibus magnos viros per ambitionem aestimare
mos est, viso aspectoque Agricola quaererent famam, pauci interpretarentur.” (“Moreover, to moderate his military renown—which is imposing
for civilians—with other virtues, he yielded completely to tranquility and
leisure, dressing simply, conversing affably, accompanied by just one or
two friends, so much so that most people, whose custom is to judge great
men by their ostentation, having seen Agricola and scrutinized him, would
wonder about his good repute, but few could comprehend it.”)
80. Tacitus, De vita Agricolae, 30: “Domitiani vero natura praeceps in
iram, et quo obscurior, eo inrevocabilior, moderatione tamen prudentiaque
Agricolae leniebatur, quia non contumacia neque inani iactatione libertatis
famam fatumque provocabat.” (“Now Domitian’s nature was inclined to
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33
anger—and the more disguised, the more implacable—nevertheless it
was mollified by the guidance and judgment of Agricola, because he did
not provoke public opinion or fate by arrogance and empty displays of
personal liberty.”)
81. Tacitus, De vita Agricolae, 30: “Sciant, quibus moris est inlicita mirari, posse etiam sub malis principibus magnos viros esse, obsequiumque
ac modestiam, si industria ac vigor adsint, eo laudis excedere, quo
plerique per abrupta, sed in nullum rei publicae usum ambitiosa morte
inclaruerunt.”
82. Tacitus, De vita Agricolae, 31: “Et ipse quidem, quamquam medio in
spatio integrae aetatis ereptus, quantum ad gloriam, longissimum aevum
peregit. Quippe et vera bona, quae in virtutibus sita sunt, impleverat, et
consulari ac triumphalibus ornamentis praedito quid aliud adstruere fortuna poterat?” (“And he indeed, although snatched away at the midpoint
of a complete life, he completed the longest possible course of life in regard to honor. Since, in fact, he had acquired the real goods which depend
on virtues, what else could fortune add to someone who had received the
distinctions of the consulship and several military triumphs?”)
83. Tacitus, Annales, 185.
84. Tacitus, Annales, 149-150.
85. Tacitus, Annales, 126.
86. Tacitus, Annales, 152: “Quo magis socordiam eorum inridere libet
qui praesenti potentia credunt extingui posse etiam sequentis aevi memoriam. nam contra punitis ingeniis gliscit auctoritas, neque aliud externi
reges aut qui eadem saevitia usi sunt nisi dedecus sibi atque illis gloriam
peperere.” (“One is disposed to laugh all the more at the folly of those
who believe that, using their present power, they can extinguish the memory of the following generation. For on the contrary, when natural superiority is penalized, its influence flares up, and foreign kings or those who
have acted with the same sort of cruelty have generated nothing but dishonor for themselves and renown for the others.”)
87. Tacitus, Annales, 150: “illa primo aspectu levia ex quis magnarum
saepe rerum motus oriuntur.”
88. Tacitus, Annales,150.
89. Syme, Tacitus, Vol. 2, 573.
90. Tacitus, Annales, 126: “homines ad servitutem paratos.”
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35
Dionysus: The Therapeutic Mask
Richard B. Carter
Part I
Myths in General and
the Myth of Dionysus in Particular
One of the best accounts of the essence of myth occurs in
Jacob Klein’s unpublished explanation of Aristotle’s concept
of coming-to-be, or generation. In relation to Nature’s great
cycles—the seasons, birth and death, and the like—Klein
writes:
The old myths tell this story over and over again. In fact,
genesis is the very soul of any myth. To understand the
world, the story of its genesis has to be told. To understand the gods, the study of their genesis has to be told.
Cosmogony and Theogony are the primary subjects of
any myth. To understand properly any event in human
life, or character of a people or a city, this event and this
character has always to be related, it seems, to its mythical origins. To tell the myth of something means to tell
how this something came to be. An enterprise of this kind
does not make much sense unless one relates everything
ultimately to beginnings, which make any genesis possible. These are precisely the mythical origins. They contain, of necessity, these two elements: the Male and the
Female. And however distant the sobriety of Aristotle is
from the exuberance of those ancient tales, still the same
aspect of the world as a chain or as cycles of generation
dominates his thought.1
In accordance with Klein’s account, I intend to uncover the
thing itself of which the myths tell the origins, keeping in
Richard Burnett Carter is now retired from over forty years of teaching
as a professor of philosophy. He has written on Descartes’s invention of
mechanistic medicine, and has recently published several novels as well
as a book explaining key terms in the language of Zen.
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mind that the Greek word for the plot of any story or play
was the word mythos.
The principal mythical roles of Dionysus are these:2 He
is the patron deity of the theater and the god of drunken revel.
He is also the god of manic possession of women, who under
his influence, butchered baby animals and their own infants
while suckling the young of deer and lions, wore poisonous
snakes around their waists under their clothing to prevent
men from raping them while they lay senseless in the wake
of their mad mountain revels. He was also known as dendrites—tree-like—and indeed we find representations of him
as a post with a mask tied to it. In a different key, one ancient
source tells us that Dionysus was identical with Hades, claiming that Dionysus is both the god of the dead and the god in
whose honor processions of drunken revelers carry huge
leather phalluses and sing filthy songs.3
Comparing the various collections of myths, we find
eight distinct elements that describe the conception, birth,
death, resurrection, and subsequent deeds of Dionysus.
1. He was the child of Zeus and the mortal Semele,
a princess of the royal house of Thebes. Semele
was destroyed when she looked at Zeus in his full
glory, and, as she was being consumed in the
flames, Zeus rescued the fetus from his mother’s
womb and inserted it into his own leg, where the
child was nurtured and came to term. According
to this myth, Dionysus is thus twice-born—once
from the womb of his mortal mother, Semele, and
again from the leg of his divine father, Zeus.
2. After Dionysus was born the second time,
Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera, set Titans upon the newborn babe, who tore it into countless fragments.
The pieces were subsequently gathered together,
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reassembled, and resuscitated by the Titan, Rhea,
the mother of the newer gods.
3. Dionysus was then reared on Mt. Nysa by
nymphs, among whom were three of special note:
Erato, Bromie, and Bacche. He cultivated wine
there, and then he subsequently traveled around
the world teaching people how to plant vines and
make wine. When people opposed his missionary
efforts, his punishments were ghastly—for instance, he flayed some alive. For a period during
these travels he was driven mad by the ever-jealous Hera, but he then regained his sanity.
4. Known as Bromius after the nymph Bromie
who raised him on Mount Nysa, he led a large
band of women through Asia and around the
Mediterranean basin spreading vine-culture, winemaking, and wine-drinking. His attendants then
were called Bacchae after his nurse-nymph, Bacche. Lycurgus, the king of Edonia, resisted the
proselytizing of Dionysus. They fought, and the
king drove Dionysus into the sea. Lycurgus then
killed many of the Bacchae with an ox-goad. The
vengeful Dionysus drove Lycurgus mad, so that he
mistook his son for a grapevine, killed him with a
pruning knife, and then pruned off his ears and
nose. Lycurgus himself was later torn apart by wild
horses.
5. Dionysus eventually made his way to his
mother’s city, Thebes. There, King Pentheus, his
uncle, rejected him. For this insult, he was torn
limb from limb by the Bacchae. His head was
ripped from his body his own mother, Agave, who
had joined with nearly all the Theban women in
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following Dionysus into the mountains.
6. When women rejected the worship of Dionysus,
their punishment was to be driven into delirium,
so that they would tear their own nursing children
limb from limb. Sometimes they would even devour the dismembered corpses, not recognizing the
parts as belonging to their own infants.
7. One myth tells us that Dionysus married Ariadne of Crete after she had been abandoned by
Theseus of Athens.
8. Other women who rejected his worship seem to
have been punished by being made to kill and devour their own babies; but, when they repented,
and when their menfolk and their kings accepted
Dionysian worship, these women joined his joyful
band of singers and dancers who continued to rend
asunder fully grown lions and oxen and deer in the
mountains where they held their revels. They are
sometimes pictured as suckling the young of all
these animals, and even the young of poisonous
snakes.
This is enough to show that Dionysus is something of a
protean figure. From the evidence of the myths, Dionysus
was the god of wine and the god of the dead, of spring growth
and of magic possession. He acquired other characteristics
after the main myths had been created. For instance, he seems
to have become the god of theater by association with the
satyrs who worshipped him, and who were also thought to
be the originators of play-acting. Homer imputes diametrically opposed qualities to Dionysus, calling him both “raging” (mainomenoio, Iliad 6.132) and “joy of mortals”
(charma brotoisin, 14.325). Dionysus had his own oracle at
Delphi, who was considered just as important as the oracle
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39
of Apollo. Indeed, the Dionysian oracle may have been the
original oracle of Delphi: Plutarch, himself a priest at Delphi,
says that the oracle speaks mainomonoi stomati, with raging
mouth, and this reference to Homer’s “raging” may indicate
that Dionysus is the divine power behind the oracle’s pronouncements.
If we recall Klein’s notion that myths are always about
beginnings, this almost bewildering list of different attributes
accruing to Dionysus forces us to ask, With the genesis of
what in particular—that is, with the very first “pre-historic
beginnings” of what—are the myths of Dionysus concerned?
Modern attempts to address such questions are characteristically anthropological in nature. Ultimately, this viewpoint
will not be sufficient to help us understand the originary significance of Dionysus. To show this, let me begin the investigation by explaining some of the things that Dionysus did
not represent.
Part II
What Dionysus was not
In his Dionysus: Myth and Cult,4 Walter Otto critiques what
seem to be the two principal schools of interpreting ancient
myths in relatively modern times: the anthropological school
and the philological school. The first group uses the methodologies developed by academic anthropology starting in the
late nineteenth century. The second group is comprised of literary analysts who are also classics scholars. We can gain
some insight into what Dionysus is not by listening to Otto’s
criticism. Discussing one of the leaders of the philological
school, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf,5 Otto says:
His attacks on the views and methods of the “anthropologists” were so sharp and, indeed, frequently so bitterly
scornful that we had the right to expect to find in his own
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presentation an entirely different answer to the basic
questions involved. But we were disappointed. It became
clear that the philological school, for which he could
speak as a legitimate representative, actually agrees completely—in all its crucial points—with its opponents.
Both apply the biological concept of evolution in exactly
the same way.6
Otto then goes on to explain what he means by the expression, “the biological concept of evolution.”
Just as biology thought it was justified in believing that
a line of constant development leads from the lowest to
the highest organisms, so these two schools also place
so-called “simple” concepts at the beginning of an evolution of religious thought out of which are to grow,
through gradual change, the forms which the great deities
assume at their peak. To be sure, in the course of time biology itself had to become a little more modest and had
to acknowledge sudden new creations where it had formerly seen only continuous processes. Yet this is not the
crucial objection to the methods used in our study of religion. When biology talked of evolution, it always put
an organism at the beginning—an organism which still
had to have, in every instance, no matter how simple it
was thought to be, the main characteristic of an organism: it had to be a self-established whole. Only that
which is alive is capable of developing. But in the dialectic advanced by the study of religion, evolution does not
proceed from a simple form of life to a more complex
and higher form but from the Lifeless to the Alive. For
the elements of faith which this study considers primal
are nothing but conceptual systems from which life is
completely lacking.7
Otto then gives a striking example of the character of the sort
of thinking he is criticizing, in which the analysts attempt to
base a vital religious belief on an empty concept:
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | CARTER
In origin, the god Hermes is supposed to have been nothing more than a protector, and the stone pillars and heaps
of stones in front of farm houses point to his presence.
But all the features which define his character—the paradox of his guiding and his leading astray, the sudden
giving and taking away, the wisdom and cunning, the
spirit of propitious love, the witchery of twilight, the
weirdness of night and death—this diverse whole, which
is inexhaustible and yet nowhere denies the unity of its
being, is supposed to be only a complex of ideas which
had gradually developed from the way of life of the worshippers, from their wishes and inclinations, ideas enriched by the love of story telling.
For the primal and solely true belief, there is left, according to Wilamowitz, only the thought of a protecting
and helping god, in short, the idea of an X which lends
assistance but which has no other properties except, perhaps, the power necessary for help.
At the beginning of the process called evolution
there is, then, a mere Nothingness, and the concept of
evolution has consequently lost its meaning. For, a god
like the one assumed here has no real substance, and that
which has no essence is nothing. . . . That which should
be respected as the most sacred object of belief turns out
to be “not there” the first time it is tested, and the objection which Wilamowitz himself raised against Usener’s8
theory—“no man prays to a concept”—applies to Wilamowitz’s theory as well. . . .
As for the “Vegetation Deity,” the “Death God,” and
similar generalities into which we now like to dissipate
living deities as if we had in them the primal concepts of
religious consciousness—these too are nothing but lifeless ideas. How could they ever have fulfilled the demands of devotion, lifted up the spirit, elicited the
powerful forms of cultus? No life proceeds from a concept, and if the great forms of the gods, which could motivate the creative spirit of a culture of highest genius,
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are to be understood historically, then there would be no
more unproductive application imaginable than this.9
One final quotation from Otto reveals the reason why the
philological and anthropological approaches are insufficient
for understanding the essence of a god or for entering the
realm in which such a being has its life:
[O]ur fragmented, mechanistic thinking knows nothing
of such realms of Being, nothing of their unity. How,
then, could it understand their divinity? It examines belief in deity with an astounding naiveté, dissipating its
forms only to place them together again artificially to fit
the pattern of a historical process. . . . That it is suspiciously like our dynamic way of thought is a serious
charge against it.10
In short, human begins are not so constructed, nor have they
ever been so constructed, that they could worship anything
like the pallid verbal constructs described as deities by the
anthropological school and the philological school. The
essence of Dionysus is not an empty concept.
Part III
What Dionysus might have been to
some of his ancient followers
The evolutionary, synthetic approaches used by modern
physics and biology does not and cannot explain the belief
in deities who are almost always characterized by a large
number of mutually contradictory powers. Otto insists that it
is precisely the inability of an evolutionary view of religion
to construct a deity with numerous conflicting powers that
most strongly justifies rejecting the evolutionary accounts of
the anthropological and philological schools of interpreting
religion. How could the same primary concept, such as a
power signified by a pile of rocks on the roadside, grow into
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43
a great god by the gradual addition of powers that were mutually contradictory to one another? On what grounds could
a people choose to relate contradictory elements in order to
construct a synthetic whole? To Otto, the most outstanding
evidence that the ancients believed in gods as truly existing
substances of some sort—rather than as unconsciously synthesized psychological projections of fears and hopes—was
precisely that one and the same deity did have so many conflicting powers. The Hermes of the ancients did not grow into
Hermes gradually. On the contrary, there first had to be a belief in a single, truly existent deity. Only an existing deity
could be the ground a diverse collection of mutually conflicting attributes. Hermes was not built up out of his many different qualities; rather, he was the vessel into which the
attributes could be poured, the container that could hold a
true mixture of the attributes within its substantial unity.
But what are we to think about these different, often contradictory, powers and attributes? Are they merely different
facets of one and the same god, as though the divinity were
a gem that revealed different colors depending of the angle
of the incident light? Is Dionysus the baby-killer merely another manifestation of the same Dionysus who is also the
giver of joy to mortals? If so, it would seem to follow that
the ultimate meaning of baby-killer is identical to the ultimate
meaning of giver of joy to mortals. And this would seem to
mean that Dionysus was conceived by his most fervent
votaries as being both of these identically in his inmost
essence. In the context of psychological anthropology, the
consequence of these considerations would imply that the
human psyche is constructed in such a way that it takes deep
delight in the most ghastly of butcheries; that the horrifying
rituals of child-murder answer a deep need in the human soul;
and that this need is at root identical with the tender love of
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a mother for her child.
But is this true? Are nurturing and destroying really only
“symbolic” expressions of a single underlying unity? If so,
then the absence or presence of such manifestations are must
be merely different modes of expression, different symbolic
representations of an essence in which there is no fundamental distinction. In this view, however, the issue of whether one
mode of expression or another comes to the fore becomes
merely a cultural and historical matter, not a psychological
or anthropological one, since the structure of the psyche is
not reflected in the mode of expression. The appearance of
different symbols is purely relative to time and place.
Moreover, this view of symbolic expression does not address the question, Does every in the psyche have its own
particular expression? Or are we to think that one and the
same thing in the psyche can have distinctly different symbolic expressions? If so, we find ourselves committed to an
anthropology in which all the expressions of inner drives or
impulses would be theoretically reducible to a single drive
or impulse.
Inasmuch as Otto appears to hold this view of symbolic
relativism—for he never even raises this rather obvious problem—it seems that he may have agreed fundamentally with
the cultural anthropologists he attacked so forcefully.
In any case, the approaches of the philologists and the anthropologists are insufficient for us. Let us begin, instead, by
approaching the myths directly. Since drunkenness is deeply
associated with the cult of Dionysus, we will begin our own
analysis of this question by asking about the relationship between drinking and the worship of Dionysus.
Part IV
Dionysus and drunkenness
Different levels of intoxication give rise to different degrees
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45
of visual impairment. The sober person sees things clearly.
Moderate inebriation leads to distorted vision. In this condition, a person sees just what he sees when sober, but with all
sorts of errors, such as double vision and shaky vision. Extreme intoxication, however, induces delusions. In this condition, a person sees things that are not there, experiences
hallucinations, and falls into delirium. Delirium, the result of
extreme drunkenness, was Dionysus’s punishment for the
women who refused to worship him. His proper votaries,
however, were only moderately drunk, and in this state, liberated a bit from the strictures of sobriety, they were lighthearted and joyful.
It might seem at first glance that moderate drunkenness
is a mean between sobriety and delirium, but this is not the
case. Delirium withdraws a person entirely from the world
of shared experience that characterizes sobriety and moderate
intoxication. Hence, moderate drunkenness is not a mean between the two extremes: on the contrary, it groups itself together with its cousin sobriety. Nevertheless, we tend place
people into one of three categories in relation to their state of
inebriation: the sober, the moderately drunk, and the delirious.
Now what if we ask, How drunk must a worshipper of
Dionysus be in order to perceive one and the same god as
being both a baby-killer and a bringer of joy to mortals? Attitudes toward this question would differ depending on the
category of the person hearing it. The sober, for whom the
contradiction is anathema, would think that only a delirious
person could imagine such blasphemies. The delirious, for
whom the contradiction is not a difficulty, would think that
only a blind person could raise such a doubt. And the moderately drunk—who have loosened the bonds of sobriety
enough to entertain the question but, not being delirious, have
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not settled the matter—would be regarded negatively by both
the other groups. The sober person regards even the moderately drunk person as addled for not keeping the distinctions
clear, whereas the delirious person regards him as cloddish
for breaking up an obvious unity. Thus, the moderately drunk
seem to be opposed in different ways to the other two groups.
To the moderately drunk, on the other hand, both of the other
groups appear to be delirious: the sober because in their literalness they can make nothing of anything; the delirious because in their associative fugue they make anything of
nothing at all. Both extremes are mistaken in not making the
right things of the right things.
The attitude of the moderately drunk, therefore, is open
to the possibility of transformation, to the possibility that distinctions might become unities or vice versa. Hence the importance in the cult of Dionysus of the image of the serpent,
which remains what it is although it continually sheds its own
form. But does this idea come too close to imputing to the
votaries of Dionysus the empty abstraction of the philologists
and anthropologists, namely, the idea that Dionysus is the single, constant entity underlying the many symbolic manifestations he throws off, just as the snake is the single, constant
entity underlying the many skins it throws off?
Part V
The Masks of Dionysus
Fortunately, another Dionysus steps forward to block this line
of thought. Dionysus of the theater was surely a master of
images, and so he certainly knew what any child dressing up
in costume knows—that the essence of an image is to present
itself as just what it is not. The serpent’s shed skins need not
be interpreted as different manifestations thrown off by a single, constant entity; they could instead be the remnants of
what the serpent is not. Of course, this would mean that each
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47
skin showed the serpent as what it was not even while the
serpent was wearing it. Or, translating this idea into the realm
of theater, the different aspects of Dionysus, each one an
image left behind after a transformation, are just so many
masks, just so many presentations of what he is not. If this is
the case, then one of the central teachings of the cult of
Dionysus must be this: To unmask is not to know.
Dionysus’s different masks, then, cannot be merely disguises. They cannot be coverings worn by a single, self-same
being of false fronts intended to hide the identity of a single,
self-same being from onlookers. And yet, isn’t that what
masks are? Perhaps not. Perhaps we need to think more radically about the concept of a mask.
Masks are essentially superficial. They belong in the
realm of externalities, of surfaces, of things-as-they-present
themselves. Curiously enough, this makes them similar to
solid bodies, which likewise manifest themselves to us as “all
surface.” If we carve away the surface of a wooden block,
for instance, we reveal a new solid that presents itself to us
in a new way. But the new solid was not “contained by” the
original one, except perhaps in a metaphorical sense. This
point may be easier to grasp by means of a negative example.
A box with another box fitting snugly inside it is not a solid.
That is why there is room in it for the second box. Solids, on
the contrary, do not have space for containment within them,
and thus they cannot contain other solids. Nor do they contain
some sort of originary object that remains the same through
every alteration of surface. Each solid has only one surface,
each surface is the surface of only one solid, and two different
solids have two different surfaces. Similarly, each mask, because of its essential superficiality, cannot mask another
mask, let alone some originary object that remains the same
through every change of mask.
The multiple masks of Dionysus, then, cannot be thought
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of as containing one another; they are not a set of nested
boxes in which the outermost box conceals those within.
Each mask presents itself as a distinctly different thing with
an identity of its own, just as the carved wooden block presents itself as distinctly different from the block from which
it was carved. Nor do his masks contain some originary being
that remains the same through transformations of the masks,
any more than solids contain originary objects. Consequently,
the masks of Dionysus are not disguises: nothing is concealed
within them, neither other masks nor an originary being. So
trying to penetrate his masks in order to unmask a wearer is
clearly a pointless task. It may not be quite so clear at this
point that this task is also perilous.
Part VI
Masks, Shame, Orgies, and Horror
If we continue to view a mask as a sort of disguise, we continue to think of it as a sort of magic shield of invisibility, a
ring of Gyges. Wearing a mask as a disguise seems to be a
way of hiding one’s identity, of concealing what one really
is with a surface that presents what one really is not. The
wearer of a disguise seems unaccountable for his actions, and
hence free to do things that he would be ashamed to acknowledge in his own person. But since, as we have seen, a mask
is not in fact a disguise, we should expect that the attempt to
hide one’s identity with a mask should fail, should show itself
as impossible in some way. And so it does: the unaccountable
masked person is not at all the same as the unmasked person.
The one does things that the other will not do. The one has
shame, the other does not. It is simply a mistake to think that
the masked person is somehow identical with the unmasked
one. Looking aside from this error for the time being, however, we can see that the notion of a mask understood as a
disguise raises the issue of shame, and this brings us to another central aspect of Dionysus and of his cult: the orgy.
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The word orgy comes from the Greek orgia, which is related to the word ergon, a deed, a task, or something accomplished. In classical usage, an orgy is not a celebration of
wildly licentious sexual abandon—this meaning appears in
English only in the seventeenth century—but rather an enjoined task, specifically of a religious character. It refers to
religious rites such as the rites of Demeter, of Orpheus, and,
most frequently, the rites of Dionysus. An orgiastic act, then,
is like that part of a religious service in which every word
and gesture of the officiating priest is ordained by preset ritual—as opposed to, say, a sermon, in which the officiating
minister can speak in his own name.
Another example of an orgiastic act in classical times was
the presentation of a play by actors, in which the speeches
had been ordained by the play’s author and—as we know was
the case with the actors of Dionysus’s theater—the masks
worn by the actors were ordained by tradition. The orgies of
the cult-worshippers of Dionysus dramatize—that is, act out
in prescribed word and deed—the great myths of the deity.
The drama is portrayed by masked actors who are precisely
what their masks show them to be, and who can be so because all their speeches and actions are prescribed to be exactly the speeches and actions belonging to the mask.
Conversely, at the same time, the actors’ masks are precisely
the surfaces appropriate to them in their character as worshippers of Dionysus in the orgiastic performance. And this
relationship is very strict: thus, no single actor presents two
different characters with the same mask or the same character
with two different masks. (If the latter should happen, as with
Oedipus before and after he blinds himself, it indicates that
the character has changed radically.)
These characteristics of orgiastic performance teach us
about the nature of Dionysus, the god of play-acting. His
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manifestations, on the one hand, as the god of baby-killing
and, on the other hand, as the god who brings joy to mortals
must not be understood as two different masks of the selfsame deity. The dreadful mask of the baby-killer, the amiable
mask of the joy-giver—these indicate simply that masks
exist. They do not reveal any persisting entity behind the
masks. Moreover, the plays that embody the orgiastic tradition tell us that our insistence on trying to unmask the nonexistent entity behind the mask is not just pointless, but
dangerous. And indeed, that is what we should expect, since
all attempts to put mistaken beliefs into practice can only
meet with tragic consequences. In the plays, the raving characters represent those who try to unmask others. Agave—
who claimed that Semele had become pregnant with
Dionysus by a mortal rather than by Zeus—attempted to unmask Semele as a liar. Pentheus—who was certain that the
rites of Dionysus were wild, unsanctioned, and licentious
rather than prescribed religious performances—tried to unmask Dionysus himself. Their delirium is a symptom, as we
saw earlier, that they have left the realm of shared experience.
The proper votaries of Dionysus do not rave; madness belongs to those who are outside communal awareness, and
thus outside of the celebration—as Euripides saw so clearly.
And the punishment for the attempt to unmask is terrible:
first, it leads to raving, since the person making the attempt
is trying the impossible, namely, to make something out of
nothing by reducing two different masks to expressions of
one nonexistent entity; second the raving leads to self-destruction as the person tries to act on the basis of delusion.
Thus Agave is led to dismember her own son and Pentheus
is compelled to dive headlong into the bevy of Bacchae who
will tear him apart. The attempt to unmask comes to grief,
because unmasking is impossible.
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This is what the myths of Dionysus are trying to tell us:
We human beings are masked. The baby-killer is a mask just
as much as the nurse or mother is a mask. If the nurse or
mother mask is transformed into the baby-killer mask, this is
not because the bloodier mask is another version of the more
pleasing one, and certainly not because it is the true being
concealed by the pleasing mask. On the contrary, the bloody
mask is the consequence of trying to unmask at all. The attempt to unmask is the cause of the bloody mask that is found
“underneath” the pleasant mask. The lesson of the dreadful
myths of Dionysus is that, as we tear off our masks, each successive mask will be a bloodier, more horrifying result of the
attempt to tear off the previous mask. On this view, Otto was
right inasmuch as he thought that the various contradictory
aspects of Dionysus point toward a sort of unity, but he was
wrong in believing this unity to be a substance of some kind.
The masks of Dionysus point toward a unity in the sense that
they show us the self-same process repeating itself in the successively more horrifying masks that come into being from
each previous attempt to unmask.
We can relate this insight to our daily lives in this way:
In contemporary terms, we describe the attempt to unmask
in various ways—to “find ourselves,” to “act on our true feelings,” to “be our authentic selves,” and so on. The myths of
Dionysus teach us, however, that we are masked actors in an
orgiastic performance. The grief we suffer for rejecting this
insight, and for trying to unmask ourselves in spite of it, is
that we flay our own faces in the attempt to unmask ourselves. By tearing off our mask, we rend the flesh, leaving a
bloody layer of pulp that had previously been protected by
the mask. The original face, the mask, was not disguising the
horror that appears after removal; the horror comes into existence only as a result of the attempt to unmask.
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Part VII
The therapeutic mask
In what we have said up to this point, there are some indications that moderate drunkenness, with its openness to transformation, might be preferable to the anti-Dionysian
literalness of absolute sobriety and the anti-Dionysian madness of delirium. What does this tell us about everyday existence? What might be the analogue of moderate drunkenness
in our daily lives? What would it mean to live in such a way
that we are neither utterly sober nor intoxicated to the point
of delusion? Here we will benefit from two other aspects of
the deity we are studying: Dionysus as the god of marvels
and Dionysus as the god of the dead.
As the patron of theater, Dionysus is the god of the marvelous, the miraculous, and the wonderful. He is in the first
instance, then, the patron of comedy, the genre in which a
marvelous turn of events—such as the appearance of a deus
ex machina or an unexpected savior or a startling revelation—brings about a change from imminent bad fortune to
good fortune. This last consideration also shows the link between comedy and tragedy: if the marvel does not occur, imminent bad fortune comes to pass. And this too is wonderful
in a different way: we wonder why the marvel did not occur,
why the bad fortune was not averted, why the suffering had
to be. Dionysus is in the second instance, then, also the patron
of tragedy.
For the moment, we are going to set aside Dionysus as
the patron of comedy and tragedy to investigate yet another
side of the god. As we saw very early on, Dionysus was also
identified with Hades, the god of the dead, and was worshipped by drunken revelers carrying leather phalluses while
singing lewd songs. The connections among the ghosts of the
dead, leather phalluses, and filthy songs will reveal one more
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aspect of Dionysus to us, which will, in combination with
Dionysus’s role as the god of theater, teach us the final lesson
that can be drawn from the myths of Dionysus.
We begin by asking, What do the leather phalluses and
filthy songs have to do with the worship of the god of the
dead?
We know from many sources that in Athens in early
spring, during the month Anthesterion, a three-day festival
of flowers included two days of Dionysian merry-making followed by a third day, called the Chutroi, the feast of pots, a
festival of the dead at the end of which ghosts were exhorted
to leave the city.11 But, during this very somber third day,
comedies—represented in parade as outsized phalluses and
dirty songs—were presented. It appears that the Athenians
regarded theater performance as suitable either for entertaining the benevolent ghosts, or for distracting the malevolent
ghosts, who walked abroad during the festival. In either case,
Dionysus the god of theater was the appropriate deity for laying ghosts to rest. Dionysus thus begins to come to light as
the god of rest, as the deity who blesses leisure. And this is
not very surprising. After all, are not drinking and theater
both acts of leisure? Perhaps the most all-encompassing of
Dionysus’s aspects is that he is the god of leisure.
But leisure presupposes trust. No one can rest comfortably without trusting in a multitude of protective guardians
and helpers, from family members to neighbors to policemen
to public service providers to soldiers. When we are made to
question this trust—when one of these protective figures violates our trust—our sense of complacency is disturbed, and
our ability to experience leisure evaporates. Violation of trust
is, therefore, the supreme sin. It undermines the faith that humans need to feel safe in their own lives. Perhaps this is why
Dante, in the Divine Comedy, places Brutus, Cassius, and
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Judas—exemplars of treachery—in the gnashing jaws of
Satan himself—also a traitor—at the heart of Hell, which is
the Christian version of Hades. If violation of trust is the destruction of faith and the leisure that depends on it, Dionysus
the god of leisure must be opposed in all ways to treachery.
He must be the guardian of guardianship and of all forms of
protective care. Indeed, the female worshippers of Dionysus
were called by the honorific title tithēnai, that is, nurses. The
worship of Dionysus involves nurture and guardianship,
without which leisure is impossible.
As we said, theater is also a leisure activity. Hence we
should also expect it to relate in some way to nurture and
guardianship. This relationship is found in the realm of sight:
theater cultivates and civilizes vision for sake of increasing
trust, and thus securing leisure. The epitome of self-involved
vision is solitary dreaming. In our dreams we are drawn into
a self-contained world into which intrude only phantoms
from our shared, waking life. Theater borrows these intruders, as it were, and introduces them to the companions of our
shared life for their approval or disapproval. Theater civilizes
our dreams by teaching us to distinguish between things that
belong only to our solitary reverie and those that belong to
our shared life with others. In doing so, it transforms our selfcontained consciousness into shared, civil consciousness.
This civil consciousness is conscience. Conscienceless
theater is anti-theater. Conscienceless theater tries to undo
the transformation of our dreams by tearing off what seems
to be their civil mask, and recklessly presenting our solitary
consciousness to the prying eyes of strangers. Conscienceless, unmasking, theater is pornographic theater. It demands
of its spectators that they publicly unmask and share all their
dreams—the more private the better. But we have seen the
consequences of the attempt to unmask, and those conse-
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quences can be expected to occur if unmasking theater is not
checked: waking life will become a nightmare. Dionysus the
god of theater reminds us that conscience, the mask of consciousness, is also its nurturer and its guardian.
Dionysus is, therefore, the guardian deity of civilized
consciousness. His dual realm is the underworld of solitary
dreaming together with the portion of it that can be seen in
civil consciousness. Human beings see the light of day only
when they are masked. It is only as masked that we humans
see the true light of day. Unmasked, we live in nightmare.
Without our masks, we are as insubstantial as dreams; we are
phantoms whose thinness is proved by the fact that they cannot withstand the light of day. Ultimately, then, the mask of
Dionysus is the mask of conscience, the mask that allows
some of our dreaming visions to be seen communally in the
light of day. Dionysus, finally, is the god of that which is
properly visible, the god of the properly shared, the god of
civility.
NOTES
1. Unfortunately, the source of this quotation—most probably one of
Klein’s many lectures delivered at St. John’s College—is not known.
2. The stories of the Greek Gods are described in exhaustive detail in
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (New York: Penguin, 1960).
3. Heraclitus, Fragment 15. See Heraclitus, Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981),
17.
4. Walter Otto, Dionysos: Mythos und Kultus (Klostermann: Frankfurt
am Main, 1933). References in these notes will be to the English translation by Robert B. Palmer, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965).
5. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf (1848-1931) was an expert on the
literature of ancient Greece. He championed the notion that surviving an-
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cient manuscripts, besides being objects of literary history, could also be
mined for biographical, political, and general historical information.
6. Otto, Dionysus, 8.
7. Otto, Dionysus, 8-9.
8. Hermann Usener (1834-1905) was a philologist and historian of religion, and a teacher of Wilamowitz. The statement made here seems to be
Wilamowitz’s version of something Usener used to say, not a quotation
from a publication.
9. Otto, Dionysus, 9-11.
10. Otto, Dionysus, 11.
11. See, for instance, Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.15,
and Aristophanes, Acharnians, 1076.
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Fields and Particles and Being
Dylan Casey
1 Introduction
Particles and fields, broadly speaking, describe two basic accounts of what the world is made of. The particle is the quintessential ball, grain of sand, or individual. It contains the
notion of individuation—the very criterion of distinguishing
this from that. The field is an expanse, a continuous entity
that occupies space, has shape, contour, and variation, but
these qualities are always reflected back onto the field itself.
The rolling, wheat-covered hills comprise a field. These two
options correspond to two claims about the world in general:
that it is discrete, like particles, or continuous, like fields. As
with all good arguments, there are respectable proponents
on both sides, each offering a little twist on the common
theme.
For example, Lucretius, on the face of it, is a particle
guy. Accordingly, he writes:
All nature, then, as it is in itself, consists of two things;
for there are bodies and the void in which they are located
and through which they move in different directions.1
The world is full of a variety of fundamental particles zipping around in an otherwise empty container, colliding with
one another making all that we see. I should mention that
there is the possibility of intrinsic self-motion—the
swerve—of these particles (or at least one of them) in addition to the motion imparted by collisions, but that would lead
to a different lecture.
Dylan Casey is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture
was originally delivered on 22 April 2011 as part of Mr. Casey’s tenure
as the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair in Modern
Thought. It has been modified slightly for publication.
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Newton, more or less, is also a particle guy. For him, light
is corpuscular—a view that might be considered prescient
given the photonic understanding of light that appeared over
two centuries following his work. The action-at-a-distance
interpretation of his gravitational theory also implies a particle
view of the world in which each particle acts on the others,
not just through collision, but also directly and instantaneously. In the end, action at a distance is a refinement of the
Lucretian world of colliding particles to account for remote
actions like magnetism and gravity.
I should note that Newton had grave misgivings about action at a distance:
That one body may act upon another at a distance through
a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and
through which their action and force may be conveyed
from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent
faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.2
Roughly in the field camp, Descartes gives us the plenum.
He insists that the world be full and continuous. There are no
essential entities, but rather amorphous extension combined
with swirling vortices. Descartes expected the world to be a
self-contained whole—motion and extension together—
though he might have conceded that the ball needs to start
rolling at some point.
Also standing in the field camp, in his own way, is Leibniz. His world is full as well, but his monads are discrete, essential entities colliding in a motion ultimately governed from
the outside by God. While agreeing with Descartes about the
necessary fullness of the world, Leibniz takes issue with
Descartes’s inability to account for individuation. The monads go some way toward keeping the notion of individual entities in a full world.
Obviously, the preceding accounts are just sketches of the
ideas of the authors. And I do not intend to give the impres-
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sion that all particle views and all field views are the same.
They’re not. But all particle views emphasize certain features
and address certain questions in common, as do all field
views. For the particle guys, the emphasis is on distinction
and difference. Their ultimate standpoint is that there must
be, somewhere, essential differences that are ineradicable,
maybe even eternal. There is something naturally attractive
about this view. One of the manifest features of the world is
the distinction between this and that. The individuation that
underlies the simple act of counting presumes boundaries between things as a precondition for counting them. Furthermore, we break up individual things into smaller individuals
all the time, and many of them have natural boundaries. Like
a ball or a grain of sand, such things maintain their integrity
over time. Extrapolating to smaller pieces and to elementary
particles is a straightforward exercise of the intellect: the
smallest things ought to embody (or even exemplify) the distinctions that are manifest to us everyday.
If individuation is a common feature of particle views,
then the void is a common problem. The void seems to be
an amorphous nothing that functions as a container for
everything that exists—and, of course, speaking of nothing
is difficult. Similarly, the genuine separation of individual
entities that characterizes particle theories gives rise to the
problem of action at a distance. There are certainly phenomena, like magnetism, in which it is difficult to explain how
separated individuals interact with one another when action
between those individuals isn’t easily attributable to simple
collision. If you dispense with the void, you are left asking
what fills it up.
For the field guys like Descartes and Leibniz, the emphasis is on wholeness and continuity—on the fullness and completeness of the universe. This emphasis on oneness doesn’t
seem incidental. Rather, it seems fundamental to scientific
activity to assume a whole with respect to which measure-
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ments are made. For measuring to work at all, one needs a
whole. Once the whole is assumed, however, the problem of
distinction and identity is ever-present. One is left wondering
about the cause of differences between individuals, or questioning whether such differences aren’t necessarily illusions.
This is particularly true of Leibniz. By filling the universe
with monads, he creates the appearance of individuality that
is characteristic of the particle view. Since the monads fill the
world, it seems that it might be possible to sidestep the void.
But in the end, the monads form a whole in which their independence is utterly illusory. Rather, each monad is a mirror
of the whole universe through its internal connection with
everything else in the universe.
Here is an image of a physical system that highlights
these problems and tensions: two conducting spheres, each
hanging from a string, each holding some net negative
charge. Since like charges repel and the two spheres are relatively close to one another, they push each other away. We
can tell this is happening because the strings from which the
spheres hang are neither parallel nor plumb, but angled away
from each other. If we push on one of the spheres, we see the
other move away, and if we move one sphere around, the
other moves as well. Now this is not an everyday sort of observation. We don’t usually have charged spheres hanging
around near us. But, it isn’t difficult to arrange and, nowadays, isn’t likely to surprise many people. It’s so easy, in fact,
that we do very similar demonstrations in our Junior Laboratory classes with pith balls hanging from threads. An initial
account of this phenomenon might go like this: charges exert
electromagnetic force on each other and, since the charges
are confined to the spheres, that force overcomes the uniform
downward tendency of the spheres due to gravitation. The
relative angle of the strings reflects the net force acting on
the spheres.
This system of hanging charged bodies incorporates the
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most important questions about fields and particles, about
wholes and parts, about the continuous and the discrete. What
is happening between these spheres? This is, in short, the
field question. Second, how do I understand these spheres
themselves? This is, in short, the particle question.
2 Classical Fields
Although Descartes and Leibniz laid the foundations for field
theory with their emphasis on continuity and the fullness of
the universe, it was the work of Michael Faraday that marked
the beginning of our modern notion of the field. During his
research into the nature of electricity and magnetism, he
coined the term field to refer to the interstitial action between
charged parts of matter and between magnetized parts of matter. In his experiments he had located and measured charges,
confirmed the discreteness of charge, and demonstrated that
changing magnetic forces induce electric currents in nearby
wires. These electric and magnetic forces could penetrate
matter and persist in a vacuum. The effects of charges on one
another, as well as the effects of magnetism and electromagnetic induction, seemed like instances of action at a distance,
and all of them could be described by contemporary mathematical formulations.
Faraday didn’t buy it. For him, something had to travel
between the charges and between the magnetic poles. Ultimately, the world had to be full, and action couldn’t happen
without touching. Although one might call this a metaphysical predisposition on Faraday’s part, he nevertheless searched
tirelessly for the smoking gun that would reveal the presence
of a field as the medium through which separated pieces of
charged matter could touch. First of all, he considered the
time required for electrical action to occur as evidence of the
presence of a field. Using a very long wire, he could measure
how long it took for electricity to travel through a circuit. The
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fact that such action was measurably non-instantaneous revealed that there was a moment when the action of one
charged particle was “emitted” but not yet felt by another
charge. If the whole long electrical interaction takes any time
at all, the smallest communication of action must also take
time. At some moment, therefore, the action was somewhere
in between the two charges.
For Faraday, this amounted to direct evidence against an
action-at-a-distance account of electrical and magnetic force.
The action between the charges must be contained within a
field, within a continuous entity that was not confined by a
particle of matter. The action of one charge on another had
to occur through time and through space, of course, but it
needn’t itself be particle-like in nature. By hypothesizing the
existence of the field, Faraday imagined a new type of substance in the world.
In holding this view, Faraday put himself at odds with a
well established camp of believers in action at a distance who
denied the necessity of a continuity of action from here to
there. In their minds, each bit of charge acted directly on
every other bit of charge. This notion was similar to Newton's
account of gravity, in which each bit of matter exerted an instantaneous gravitational pull on every other bit of matter,
with the strength of that force decreasing as the square of the
distance between the bits.
(As an aside—and this probably reveals my own disposition on the subject—I would note that the sensitivity to distance in action-at-a-distance theories is puzzling at the outset,
if action is supposed to take place entirely between one particle and another. How do the particles sense the distance between them in order to regulate the force? Even if the
information took no time to propagate, which creates a new
problem concerning instantaneous transmission of anything,
this sort of action at a distance still requires a radical sensitivity of each part to the global arrangement. It cannot be the
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case that the action is determined by only the two bits in
which we happen to be interested; each part must know
where every other part is within a larger context. In a funny
way, action at a distance presumes a radical wholeness of all
things due to the instantaneous activity of the putative parts
upon each other.)
Faraday’s field idea reaches fruition in James Clerk
Maxwell’s reformulation that is eventually embodied in his
equations for the electromagnetic field. Maxwell adds mathematical clarity and refinement to Faraday’s initial notions
of the field. Among his greatest clarifications was rendering
Faraday’s field as a mathematical quantity whose value depends upon spatial locations. This is how the field is continuous: it has a value at all points in space. Temperature is a
good and typical example of a field. Each point in the room
has a temperature and the mathematical function in three spatial directions that describes the temperature is called the temperature field.
Maxwell’s account of electromagnetism invokes electrical and magnetic fields that persist throughout all space. If
we return to our two hanging charged spheres, Maxwell
would say that there is an electrostatic field—electrostatic
because we don’t have to account for any magnetism in this
system—between the two spheres and that the field is described by a field strength at each point between the spheres.
It’s worth noting that the mathematical form of an electrostatic field is richer and more complicated than a temperature
field. For instance, the electrostatic field is represented mathematically at each point in between the spheres by three components corresponding to the field strength in each of three
spatial directions. And each of those components depends on
three coordinates of position as well. That makes it what is
called a vector field, but it’s still a field, which is to say, an
extended whole in between two things. (The simpler temperature field would be called a scalar field, since each point is
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represented by a number and not a vector.)
Following Maxwell, we can refine the system of our
hanging spheres in this way: The spheres are aggregates of
charge and the force between them is the action of a connecting electromagnetic field. Each charge is the source of an
electromagnetic field that pushes the other. In this way of seeing things, the world consists of particles floating on an ether
sea in which the motions of the particles touch off waves of
force that act on other particles.
This, in large part, is the ontology of classical fields: there
are, on the one hand, particles that are sources and recipients
of disturbance, and, on the other hand, fields which communicate the disturbance between the sources. And one of the
most amazing aspects of Maxwell’s theory is the consequence that these disturbances become the manifestation of
light. Light itself is revealed as electromagnetic action born
out of the motion of charges.
This unifying character of the field, its ability to communicate action between charges, was a wonder to Maxwell.
Here is just a taste of his enthusiasm from his article “On Action at a Distance”:
The vast interplanetary and interstellar regions will no
longer be regarded as waste places in the universe, which
the Creator has not seen fit to fill with the symbols of the
manifold order of His kingdom. We shall find them to be
already full of this wonderful medium; so full, that no
human power can remove it from the smallest portion of
space, or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity. It extends unbroken from star to star; and when a
molecule of hydrogen vibrates in the dog-star, the
medium receives the impulses of these vibrations; and
after carrying them in its immense bosom for three years,
delivers them in due course, regular order, and full tale
into the spectroscope of Mr. Huggins, at Tulse Hill.3
Now stipulating a field as a new kind of entity that acts
as the mediator of action between particles doesn’t settle the
discreteness/continuity problem. What is a field anyway? Is
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it like water connecting one shore to another in such a way
that the waves from a dropped stone lap upon the other side,
dislodging stones there? This is exactly the sort of image that
comes to mind when we think about point charges moving
in the continuous field that propagates vibrations at the speed
of light. If this is the case, then what is the field made of?
Does it have parts, as water surely does? Is it composed of
particles? If it is, what holds those particles together? Some
of these questions arise from the very notion of extension. It
is difficult to see how any extended thing can exist without
being made up of “sub-things.” Any successful account of
things will need to address these questions about extension
and its sub-structure.
On the other hand, what is a particle? Where are its
boundaries? How is it distinguished from the force field of
which it is the source? Where would one cross from charge
to field? These questions of crossing and transformation from
one thing to another are at the root of discreteness, difference,
and individuality. Looking for an elementary particle is looking for a fundamental “this” that is clearly distinguishable
from some different “that.”
Behind all these questions lurk the nagging problems I
mentioned at the outset: the problems associated with the attempt to come to terms with the distinctions between continuity and discreteness. A satisfying understanding of fields
and particles ought to reveal some resolution of the tensions
between these two accounts of world. To obviate the need for
the void, we need a full universe. To articulate identity, we
need ways of isolating individuals from the whole while
maintaining connections so that we still have a whole.
Maxwell’s field theory is looks like marbles and goo: the particles—the marbles—are point sources of mass and charge;
the field—the goo—sticks all the particles together, communicating their separate actions to one another.
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3 Quantum Field Theory
While Faraday and Maxwell pioneered the notion of the field,
its ultimate expression is found in modern quantum field theory, which represents our best current account of the structure
of all matter. This account is called the Standard Model. If
the name evokes for you a simultaneous sense of elevation
and dreariness, you feel much the same way as most particle
physicists, for whom the Standard Model is both a triumph
and an affliction.
In the Standard Model, the world contains elementary
particles like electrons, neutrinos, and up quarks, which interact with one another by means of four forces: the electromagnetic force, which holds together everything from atoms
to asteroids, and is the mediator of all chemical interactions;
the strong force, which holds together the nuclei of atoms;
the weak force, which doesn’t hold together anything, but mediates some forms of radioactive decay; and the gravitational
force, which holds together planets, stars, solar systems,
galaxies, and so on. Gravitation doesn’t really fit in the Standard Model very well right now. This is regarded as an acceptable dilemma, because particle physicists still need jobs
in this struggling economy.
The Standard Model contains sub-theories associated
with each of the forces. The part dealing only with electromagnetism is called QED, an acronym for “quantum electrodynamics.” The part dealing with the strong force is called
QCD, for “quantum chromodynamics.” The part dealing with
the weak force is an extension of QED called the “electroweak” theory. All of these are quantum field theories and
anytime you hear or read things like “quark,” “lepton,”
“QED,” “W and Z Boson,” or “Higgs Boson” you’ve wandered into the land of quantum field theory.
It is completely uncontroversial that quantum field theories are the most successful accounts ever devised about the
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structure of the world. By “successful” I simply mean that
they are the most precise accounts verified by experiment.
Calculations of phenomena based on the Standard Model
agree more closely with our best measurements than any
other physical theories that we have. The best example of this
is the value of something called “the fine-structure constant,”
which is a number that characterizes the strength of electromagnetic interactions. The quantum-theoretical value of this
number agrees with the physical measurement to 10 decimal
places—better than one part in one billion. As an experimentalist, I would like to point out that it is a pretty wicked measurement that has an uncertainty of one part in a billion!
Now, quantum field theory is kind of a crazy thing to try
to cover in my remaining time. To do so succinctly, I would
have to present you with some challenging, but extremely
beautiful mathematics. But rather than try your patience in
that way, I’ll attempt to describe as much of the theory as I
can in plain English. I’ve provided a short annotated bibliography for those of you who would like to study some of the
details in more depth.
For now, I’m going to try to present some of the salient
points of quantum field theory and talk a bit about what it requires us to think about the world. So let’s begin with this
question: What do we buy when we buy a quantum field theory?
3.1 Relativity and Quantum Mechanics
First and foremost, quantum field theory is a complete synthesis of special relativity and quantum mechanics that attempts to account for the physics of the entire universe.
Because it incorporates special relativity, quantum field theory is “relativistically invariant,” which means that all the results of all calculations remain unchanged under a Lorentz
transformation. This tells us that two identical experiments
will get the same results even if one lab was here on earth
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while the other was hurtling through space at nearly the speed
of light. A physicist would say “all the physics in two systems
is the same regardless of the relative speed between them.” For
our purposes, there are two salient consequences of this fact:
1. All positions and times are determined relative
to each other. There is no absolute now and then,
no absolute here and there. And there is no simultaneity.
2. Mass and motion are aspects of the same
thing—energy. Mass and motion can be converted
into each other and, together, they embody the
total energy of the system. Energy rules.
Quantum field theories also encapsulate all of the ideas
of quantum mechanics. Maxwell’s account of a world of
charges communicating motion through vibrations in a field
fails miserably in its attempts to account for the structure of
the atom. Quantum mechanics solves those problems, but it
entails certain consequences. For one thing, fundamental
quantities like energy and angular momentum are discrete,
which means that they come in little units that are the smallest
amounts possible; or, as the physicists say, these properties
are quantized. For another thing, certain quantities, like position and momentum, don’t admit of being determined simultaneously. (This is the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle). Third, the fundamental quantity in a quantum mechanical system is called a “state,” which has a configuration
that depends upon how it is selected. And fourth, all predictions are made in terms of likelihoods and probabilities—not
because we are making estimates about large numbers of objects like, for example, the number of molecules in a container of gas, but because nothing in the quantum world is
determinate. Probability is intrinsic and goes all the way
down to the states, which are themselves sums of a number
of possibilities.
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3.2 The Lagrangian and Minimization
In any serious discussion about quantum field theory you’ll
very quickly run into the term “Lagrangian.” Joseph Louis
Lagrange was an eighteenth-century mathematician who developed the calculus of variations, in which differential equations are solved by taking into account the possible
constraints on the internal parameters to determine a global
solution. In physics, the term “Lagrangian” refers to a mathematical relation describing the dynamics of a system. First,
you write an equation that describes the internal dynamics of
the system fully, and then you integrate it over the whole time
during which the system is in motion, thus producing an expression for the total action of the system. If you then minimize that expression (that is, find the least possible action
that the system could possibly have used to get from its starting state to its ending state), you produce a differential equation expressing that least possible action terms of the
Lagrangian. Classical mechanics and electrodynamics can be
formulated in terms of minimizing action in cases for which
the Lagrangian can be identified as the difference between
the system’s kinetic energy and its potential energy.
As an example, consider the path of a projectile under the
influence of gravity—a potato, perhaps, launched from a potato cannon. Such a contraption looks pretty much like a cannon made of PVC pipe. To load it, the potato is pushed down
the muzzle to the edge of the firing chamber. Propulsion is
provided by igniting aerosol hair spray in the combustion
chamber using a sparking device. (I, myself, through trial and
error, have found that Aquanet® provides the biggest kick
per dose by far.) The kinetic energy of the potato is given by
its mass and speed, the latter of which depends upon position
and time. The potential energy of the potato is given by its
mass, the constant force of gravity, and its height, which also
depends upon position and time. The Lagrangian function
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would be the difference between the function for kinetic energy and the function for potential energy. Now, in principle
there are many possible paths between the starting point and
the landing point for the potato, each with its own action. For
instance, it could travel in a parabola. Or, it could fly up for
a while and do a few loop-the-loops before landing. Each of
these paths has an associated action given by adding up the
difference between the kinetic energy and the potential energy at all the points along the path. In the end, the path corresponding to the physical path—the path actually traced out
by the potato—is the one with the least total action.
One can perform a similar calculation in classical electrodynamics considering the motion and configuration of
charged spheres or even of electrons. Considering their total
kinetic and potential energies, the principle of least action
stipulates that their configurations and motions will always
be such that the action is minimized. All of the dynamics of
the system is contained in the Lagrangian, and all calculations
regarding the system would ultimately go back to that Lagrangian. Minimizing the action allows us to pick out which
arrangement of dynamics will be followed by actual physical
objects.
In quantum field theory, there are two important twists
on this classical principle. First, the Lagrangian is not in any
simple way the difference between the kinetic energy and the
potential energy; it is mathematically much more complicated
than that. Second, the dependent quantities are field configurations, not paths. In classical formulations the minimization
of the action is obtained by considering different paths
through spacetime, as in my potato example. In quantum field
theory, the minimization is obtained by considering different
field arrangements.
I don't have time to say more about least action here. But
I do want to emphasize that the Lagrangian is the key to the
physics of any system. For instance, when physicists speak
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of invariances under transformation (as they do in regard to
special relativity), they are implicitly saying, “the Lagrangian
doesn’t change under that transformation.” This amounts to
the claim that the Lagrangian contains all possible information about the system. In other words, the Lagrangian “holds
all the physics.”
3.3 Quantum Fields
So, as a structural matter, when you buy quantum field theory,
you are buying quantum mechanics, special relativity, and
least-action principles formulated in terms of a Lagrangian
function. Now for the fields. In quantum field theory, all of
the fundamental entities are space-permeating fields which
are themselves physically manifest as discrete quanta. These
fields is not made of anything else. They are their own entities, just as the fields of Maxwell and Faraday were their own
entities. The quanta of these fields are the so-called elementary particles, but the fields are prior to, and necessary for,
the existence of the particles. The particles are resonances,
modes of the field. Crudely put, the particles are vibrations.
All quantum mechanical entities are vibrations.
You can never touch a quantum field per se—it becomes
manifest only when there is a discrete interaction. Bumping
up against a quantum field means bumping up against a quantum of that field. Now there are two classes of fields—matter
fields and interaction fields, the latter also known as force
fields. A good example of an interaction field is the electromagnetic field, whose quanta are photons of light. A good example of a matter field is an electron field, whose quanta
are—you guessed it—electrons. A less familiar example of
an interaction field would be the strong nuclear field, whose
quanta are gluons (eight of them) that connect to quark fields
whose quanta are up and down quarks.
The earlier image of the two charged spheres can be refined a bit to reflect these fields. In Maxwell’s case, each
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sphere is a bundle of charge and the force that angles the support strings is communicated by the electromagnetic field
joining the charges. In the electron field, for instance, each
sphere is rendered as an individual electron, itself a quantum
of an electron field, and the electromagnetic force between
the two electrons is rendered as a photon, the quantum of the
electromagnetic field. The angle of the strings represents the
exchange of photons between the electrons.
Now, this is a bit of a conundrum, and you may well feel
like I’ve pulled a fast one. It’s quantum field theory, after all,
not quantum particle theory. How exactly did this particlerabbit get pulled out of that field-hat? The short answer (and
really the long answer too) is that the particles and fields
come together. In a quantum field, the quanta, the particles,
are the manifestation of the fields. There is no getting around
this stipulation in quantum field theory. The particles arise
out of the quantization of the field. The field holds all the
possibilities—that is to say, all the energy—for the particles.
The particles are the manifestation of the field. In this
way quantum field theory makes a choice that Maxwell’s
field theory does not. Maxwell’s theory has point sources that
are distinct from fields—charges that are independent of the
forces between them. In quantum field theory there is no distinction of this sort between source and force. Both are rooted
in continuous fields which become manifest as particles.
There are a few features of quantum fields that are worth
emphasizing:
1. The particle types associated with each field are
the same everywhere. All electrons, for instance,
are the same, because they are all quanta of the
same field.
2. The field endures, but particles can come and
go, transforming one into the other. There are constraints to the transformations, but, as a general
rule, “anything that can happen, will happen.” As
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in ordinary quantum mechanics, probabilities for
transformations can be assigned, but any given
transformation is undetermined. I can tell you the
possible final states for the decay of a muon and
on average how long it will take to decay, but I
can't tell you when it will happen. No one can.
The available possibilities for transformation
increase dramatically with increased energy. As a
typical example: colliding a high-speed (and therefore high-energy) electron and positron, one might
easily end up with showers of particles containing
ten pi mesons, a proton, and an antiproton.4 Together, those particles weigh thirty-thousand times
more than the original electron and positron. So
mass is not conserved, but rearranged with the
available energy. This is a direct consequence of
special relativity.
Such a collision is also a genuine transformation. The particles that resulted from the collision
of the electron and the positron just mentioned
were not hidden inside the electron and the
positron, just waiting to be unleashed by the force
of the collision. The electron and positron disappear and the available energy in the fields becomes manifest as the particles of the final state. I
also can’t tell you which final state particles will
appear in a given collision any more than I can tell
you when a muon will decay. The best I can do is
outline the possibilities.
A corollary is that impossible transformations
don’t happen. For all experimental purposes, the
muon is a heavy electron—all of its quantum numbers are the same as an electron, except that it’s
two hundred times heavier. And, it spontaneously
decays into an electron plus some other particles.
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The electron never decays. It is the end of the line.
The only account of this I know is that there is no
where for the electron to go, because there is no
smaller package in which energy prefers to manifest itself.
3. The quanta don’t constitute the field. The field
is not made up of quanta. The electromagnetic
field does not contain photons. It is not a bag of
marbles, nor a stack of blocks. The field has its
own motions, its own resonances, and these are
photons of various energies. Physicists use the
analogy of the vibrating string to try to explain this
fact: Just as a vibrating string has its overlapping
series of normal modes, the up quark, the down
quark, and the Z boson are all resonances in an underlying, undulating field.
4. For quantum fields, all interactions are pointlike, occurring at a specific point in space-time and
involving specific combinations of field quanta. In
other words, all interactions are discrete. Every interaction is broken down into individual interactions between individual quanta. And these quanta
are manifestations of the energy present in the underlying continuous field.
4 Interactions and Local Symmetry
So, what’s the big picture? We have a world filled with fields,
all of which are manifest only by particles, all interacting with
one another. But what does “interaction” mean? How are
these fields/particles related to their interactions? Considering
this brings us to the notion of invariance, the notion that despite the appearance of change, things stay the same. Physicists apply invariances by insisting that “the physics” of a
system doesn’t change under certain transformations. The use
of invariances (and the related notion of conservation) has a
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long history in physics, and in the sciences generally. One
might consider the story of physics as the search for the true
invariances within the world.
This is the idea that Huygens leverages in “Motions of
Colliding Bodies,” which we read here at St. John’s in the
Junior Laboratory. In that work, Huygens considers two balls
colliding with one another, and he works out the general kinematics of hard collisions. Here is the beginning of the proof
of his first proposition. (I’ve made minor edits that obviate
the mathematical proportions and variables):
Figure from Proposition 1 of Huygens’s
Motion of Colliding Bodies
Imagine that a boat near a bank is carried along by the
current, so close to the bank that a passenger standing in
it can stretch out his hand to a friend standing on the
bank. Let the passenger hold in his hands . . . two equal
bodies . . . suspended on strings, and . . . by bringing together his two hands with equal motions, understood in
relation to himself and the boat, until they touch, he thus
makes the two balls collide with equal speeds. The balls,
therefore, must necessarily rebound from their mutual
contact with equal speeds . . . in relation to the passenger
and the boat. Moreover, suppose that in the same time
the boat is carried to the left with . . . the same speed with
which the left hand . . . was carried toward the right. It is
therefore clear that the passengers [left] hand has remained motionless in relation to the bank and to his
friend, but that [his right hand], in relation to the same
friend was moved with [double the] speed. . . . Therefore,
if the friend on the bank is supposed to have grasped,
with his own [right hand], the passengers [left hand], together with the end of the string which supports [one
ball], but with his other [left hand] the passengers [right
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hand], which holds the string from which [the other ball]
hangs, it is apparent that while the passenger makes [the
two] balls strike one another with a speed equal in relation to himself and the boat, the friend on the bank, in
the same time, shoved [one ball against the other ball,
one at rest and the other with a speed double that of the
boat] in relation to the bank and to himself. And it is evident, however, that as for the passenger, who, as was
said, makes the two balls move, it makes no difference
that his friend on the bank has taken his hands and the
ends of the strings, since he only accompanies their
movement and doesn’t hinder them at all. For the same
reason, the friend on the bank who makes [one ball]
move toward the [motionless ball] is not disturbed at all
by the fact that the passenger has joined hands with him.5
Huygens determines the laws of collision by requiring
that the collision itself remain the same, even if it may seem
different to different viewers. Even though different viewers
would obtain different results for the speeds and directions
of the colliding bodies, Huygens presumes that all such views
would be ultimately commensurable, and that they could be
transformed into one another if we know the parameters of
the transformation. Indeed, this difference is plain, since the
passenger on the boat moves his arms at the same speed,
while his friend on the shore keeps one arm still and the other
rushes along at twice the speed of the boat. The leverage
Huygens has in this analysis is the presumption that the collision for the passenger and the collision for his shore-bound
friend are one and the same; indeed, it certainly seems that
there is only one collision, not two. Huygens reinforces our
presumption about this by having them touch hands in such
a way that the hands are in the same place, with the same motion, but neither pair disturbs the other. The difference in relative speed between the observers—that is, between the
passenger and his friend on the shore—cannot make a genuine difference to the physical laws involved, because then
there would be two collisions rather than one. Any distinction
between the two observers must be accounted for by a trans-
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formation that may render the component details different,
but must leave the collision alone. Huygens’s assumption of
invariance preserves the identity of the collision as a single
event, and this identity consists of a single interaction in a
particular place at a particular time.
The sort of leverage Huygens employs is very powerful
and is used over and over in physics. As an intellectual activity, it presumes that, in some articulable way, the world is
unchanging and that distinctions are variations that fill up that
unchanging whole. This is sensible and reasonable. In fact,
it is rational in an explicit way. The shapes of the parts and
the distinctions among them are measured with respect to the
whole. Physics articulates difference by means of ratio, that
is, by means of comparison. One might well say that the root
activity of all physics is the art of comparison: the physicist
hunts for invariances in order to articulate distinctions that
make a genuine difference.
There are many sorts of invariances in physics. For instance, there is invariance with respect to translations in location or time. The criterion of such an invariance is that the
equation describing the dynamics of the system, namely, the
Lagrangian, is unchanged after some transformation. If we
say, to give an example, “the physics of this system is invariant with respect to translations in location,” we mean that if
any increment is added to the variable for location in the Lagrangian, when we work out the algebra, the new Lagrangian
simplifies back into the original one.
Now this kind of invariance has a very special consequence. If a Lagrangian has an invariance, there is an associated conserved quantity and vice versa. In other words, if the
physics has an invariance something is conserved, and if
something is conserved there is an invariance. So space-translation invariance (invariance with respect to increments in
spatial locations, also called space-translation symmetry) implies conservation of momentum. Time-translation invariance
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(invariance with respect to increments in time, also called
time-translation symmetry) implies conservation of energy.6
The reverse is also true: momentum conservation implies
space-translation symmetry and energy conservation implies
time-translation symmetry. Conservation principles turn out,
therefore, to indicate symmetries in the physical world. Momentum conservation points at a fundamental homogeneity
in the universe: here and there aren’t different from the perspective of physical laws. Similarly, energy conservation indicates the same thing about time: now and then aren’t
different from the standpoint of physical laws.
These symmetries are not restricted to kinematical quantities, like momentum, associated with the motion of physical
objects. They can also be associate with the state functions
of quantum field objects; that is to say, there can be internal
symmetries in the different quantum fields and in the particular quanta that belong to them. One such internal symmetry
is called phase symmetry. In quantum mechanics, all the
states of any system have an associated phase, because the
mathematical descriptions of the states are very complex
wave functions, and every wave has a phase. Now phase isn’t
a very complicated idea; it’s just the marker of a repeating
motion. Imagine sitting in a boat on a lake as a wave passes
underneath, lifting and lowering the boat (and you with it)
over and over. If you were next to a dock, you might go from
looking at the barnacles under the dock while the boat is in
the wave’s trough to looking over and across the dock at your
neighbor’s yacht while the boat is riding at the wave’s crest.
And you would repeat this up-and-down trip with every complete cycle of the wave beneath your boat. This repeated upand-down motion is circular in nature: you go up a certain
height from trough to crest, then down again through the
same distance, then up again, and so on. You could even track
your relative position on the wave by marking out your position on the up and down cycle on the face of a clock, so that
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one turn around the clock corresponds to one cycle of upand-down motion. Assigning your highest point above the
dock to the twelve-o’clock mark, you’d descend to dock level
at quarter past, bottom out at half past, ascend to dock level
again at quarter to, and return to your highest point again
when the hand returns to noon. (Notice that you can choose
any point in the up-and-down motion to be the start of the
phase. You can assign the twelve-o’clock mark to the lowest
point of the motion, or to the point that is level with the dock
if you wish. Your boat will always be back at the same place
when the hand goes all the way around.) These points on the
clock, as well as all those in between, mark your phase,
which is the clock position that corresponds to your height at
any moment within one cycle of the wave’s motion.
Now consider your neighbor’s yacht on the other side of
the dock. Assuming that the wave lifts your boat first, travels
under the dock, and then lifts your neighbor’s boat, his boat
will also rise and fall. And depending on the phase of each
boat—that is, depending on the location of each boat in the
wave’s cycle—the relative motion of the two boats will be
different. If the boats are in phase, then both of them will go
up and down together. If the boats are completely out of
phase, and your boat will be at its highest point when your
neighbor’s is at its lowest point.
Quantum states are a bit like these boats, each moving up
and down, each having its own phase, akin to a hand sweeping around the face of a clock. (As a technical matter, this
phase is part of the complex number-value of a quantum mechanical wave function.) And, just as the starting point of the
phase doesn’t matter for the boats, it also doesn’t matter for
the quantum state. No measurement can reveal the absolute
value of the phase. In the end, only differences in phase between systems can ever be revealed experimentally. This is
akin to being able to know only the difference in the relative
heights of your boat and your neighbor’s, but not being able
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to know his height or your height absolutely. (Presumably,
this means that there is no reference point analogous to “sea
level” in the world of quantum fields. On the other hand, we
could be wrong in thinking that “sea level” is a useful reference point.)
Now, let’s consider some possible symmetries associated
with phase. One possibility would be to demand that physics
doesn’t change if all the phases in the whole universe are
modified by the same amount. This amounts to saying that
the results of my experiments won’t change if every internal
clock is modified by the same amount. Imagine moving all
the start times for all the clocks by the same amount. (This
is done mathematically by multiplying every state by the
same value.) Such a property would be a global symmetry
that reflected a global invariance. Global symmetry (or
global invariance; we will use the terms interchangeably,
since one implies the other) is good because it establishes a
closed system. For instance, it would be very nice if charge
were globally invariant: that would mean that charge is conserved, and that would be reflected in no net change of
charge in the universe at all. Conversely, global invariance
is bad because the closed system that it establishes is necessarily the entire universe, not just the one point in the universe where an interaction occurs. Global invariance
over-constrains the physics by tying the activity of the system at any given point to the activities happening at all other
points; it implies that every point in the universe is instantaneously sensitive to all the others. The problem with global
invariance is that the arbitrariness of the phase for each state
isn’t preserved; that is, it doesn’t allow me to arbitrarily decide where to start my phase clock. Under global invariance,
I am able to set the clock arbitrarily for one state, but doing
so fixes the phase for all other states—instantaneously,
everywhere. This is just the kind of action at a distance to
which Faraday objected, because it makes the entire the uni-
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verse one gigantic causal connection.
A better alternative, which neither violates special relativity nor implies action at a distance, is local invariance or
local symmetry. Mathematically, this means that the physics
doesn’t change if states are modified depending on their position in space-time. On the one hand, local invariance is an
even stronger restriction than global invariance, because we
are requiring the physics to be the same regardless of location—something that global invariance does not require. On
the other hand, local invariance liberates states from the
tyranny of the whole universe, subjecting them instead to the
less all-encompassing tyranny of their space-time locations.
Being tied to conservation, invariance is a whole-defining
or system-defining feature. Conserving momentum and energy, for instance, is a fundamental criterion for having a
closed system at all. A ball rolling across a table slows down
and stops due to friction. Such a system is non-conservative—the momentum at the beginning is not equal to the momentum at the end. Friction is like a sinkhole into which
flows all the energy and momentum of the ball. In the end,
non-conservative systems leak. The most basic ambition of
fundamental physics is an account of the world with no leaking. Any description of a fundamental system will need to
exhibit global invariance as a precondition for being satisfactory, but it’s really too coarse a requirement because it forces
us to look at the whole universe every time we want to look
at an interaction. Local invariance actually does more for us,
because it implies integrity in the parts that make up the
whole, and it requires a whole system at each space-time
point.
Now you don’t get local symmetry requirements for nothing; there are consequences to be met. To illustrate them,
consider a single free electron. Such a particle would be one
quantum of an electron field. It would be characterized by
having a particular momentum and energy. As a quantum
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state, this electron can have any phase at all—the hand on the
clock can be at any location. Now, stipulating global phase
invariance implies that the charge of this electron is conserved in the universe. And since my system has only one
charge, my physics will be constrained always to have a total
of one net charge in the universe. Now, if you go through the
mathematics, you'll find that the Lagrangian for the free election, which determines its physics, won’t be invariant under
a local phase transformation—that is, the physics won’t exhibit local symmetry. However, you can make the system be
locally invariant by adding two terms to the Lagrangian, one
term that corresponds to the electromagnetic field and its
quantum, the photon, and another term that corresponds to
the point coupling between the two fields. The upshot is that
making phase locally invariant requires that there be both
electrons and photons—and consequently both electron fields
and electromagnetic fields—in the world, together with all
their mutual interactions.
This sort of local phase symmetry is the underlying feature of all the quantum field theories comprising the Standard
Model. Indeed, each force is associated directly with an underlying local symmetry that individuates both the quanta of
the matter fields and the quanta of the force fields and joins
them in a local interaction. Local symmetry operates much
like Huygens’s assumption that there is a single collision to
which the parts can be related: the interactions among field
quanta become the primary source of connection and unification. So the electron and photon always and only come together as a single interaction called a vertex. This example
belongs to the theory of quantum electrodynamics—the oldest of the quantum field theories. The other parts of the Standard Model include different interactions. QCD has
quark-gluon vertices, electroweak theory has neutrino-W
boson vertices. Each kind of vertex is characteristic of the
type of interaction.
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This move from global to local invariance makes quantum field theories philosophically satisfying in a way that
older physical theories are not. As I’ve said, part of the problem with global invariance is that it smacks of action at a distance and feels like an imposed constraint. Such an invariance
amounts to a box for the activity inside, a box that is affected
in no way by the motions inside it. In this containerized
world, the problems of relating parts and wholes never come
up. Generating these boxes in order to gain leverage on understanding physical systems has long been a feature of fundamental physics. On the other hand, part of the intellectual
trajectory of fundamental physics has been to search immediately for ways to remove external constraints once they
have been characterized. This describes the reductionist activity of physics, epitomized by looking for new particles beneath the peeled-back skin of the current crop of fundamental
particles. First there were molecules, then atoms, then electrons and nuclei, then protons and neutrons, and now there
are quarks—and we’re just waiting for the next step down in
size.
Here lies the central difficulty of any kind of foundationalism: as we uncover the foundations we also experience the
disquieting realization that the foundations must rest on
something else. The solution to this problem, both physically
and philosophically, is to sort out a whole that is internally
constrained so as to allow individuation; to show how the internal characteristics serve to constrain the thing as a thing.
This is the effect of local invariance. In this sort of foundation, there can be fundamental things that are not marble-like
particles, but intrinsically active quantum mechanical states.
Furthermore, any account of the fundamental things that
includes individuation must also account for the way a connection is made to the rest of the world. Locally symmetric
quantum field theories provide an example of an account in
which the part maintains integrity while also being inextri-
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cably embedded within the whole. The solution in quantum
field theory is that the individual parts must interact with one
another in forming a dynamic whole. We see in quantum field
theory the ontological reflection of the necessary characteristics of self-constraint: internal variability and the fundamental coexistence of things unified by their interactions.
Indeed, in the end, the truly fundamental thing may in fact
be the interaction.
The structure of quantum field theories with local invariance provides individuation through local symmetry requirements, but requires interactions between localities if we are
to preserve the invariances essential to wholeness. The invariances are conditions of intelligibility and conditions of
individuation; there is no distinction possible without wholeness. Wholeness without distinction is possible, though completely amorphous. Individuation, however, isn’t possible
without appealing to something within which the individual
lies. Quantum field theories incorporate this relation into their
very structure through local invariance.7
5 Things, fundamental and otherwise
Are electrons and electron fields fundamental entities? Is one
properly prior to the other? There are at least two ways to answer this question: an answer from within the account and answer from outside the account.
Let’s try to answer from within the account first. The activity of science is generally very pragmatic, and the starting
point is to assume the essential integrity of the objects at the
scale under consideration. Thus, the fact that all the atoms and
molecules in the baseball are constantly in motion does not
bear on considering the baseball a thing that has its own properties—its own weight, shape, and so on. At this scale of examination, the baseball is the integral thing, the individuated
thing, to which we pay attention. Why? The individuation of
the baseball is, among other things, manifest by invariances
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of its motion with respect to other things in the world. For the
physicist (and the baseball player), the baseball’s collective
motion individuates it. The physicist considers it a whole by
ignoring the possibility that there may be tiny pieces flying
off of it or being absorbed into it. If we looked at a larger scale,
say the motion of the earth, we would ignore the motion of
the baseball. Similarly, if we looked on a smaller scale, say
the motion of an electron around a hydrogen atom attached to
one of the organic molecules in the leather of the baseball, we
would ignore the motion of the whole ball. This notion of
scale and relative individuation is natural in physics, and is
part of the pragmatic nature of the activity. And when I say
that we ignore some of the motions, I don’t mean to imply that
we are choosing to make some sort of approximation for the
sake of convenience. I mean to say that ignoring such motions
is the same as looking for the invariances that are the signs of
actual things.
So answering the question What is fundamental? from
within quantum field theory yields this result: the fields and
the quanta are certainly elementary, and priority is given to
the fields, even though it is only as quanta that fields ever
manifest themselves.
Now let’s try to answer the question from outside of the
account. Here we have to wonder whether the inside answer
can’t be undermined by seeing the situation from a wider perspective. One way to adopt that perspective would be to revise
the question slightly: Are fields and particles really fundamental—as in “at the bottom of things”—or will the unitary electron of today’s physicists become a composite like a water
molecule for tomorrow’s physicists?
To the extent that electrons are simply smaller that water
molecules and are constituents in making, say, a hydrogen
atom, it is natural to consider electrons elementary in comparison to hydrogen atoms. In some ways, it’s the same as saying
that hydrogen atoms have electrons inside them, therefore
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electrons must be more elementary than hydrogen atoms. On
the other hand, the deep result of local symmetry in quantum
field theory is that the constituents and their interactions are
naturally and irrevocably coexistent as a condition for having
a coherent whole. Such a whole is now a coherent activity of
parts with internal invariances characteristic of those parts.
This criterion applies to water molecules, baseballs, and oak
trees as much as it does to electrons and photons, and this
makes us wonder whether the electron is really fundamental
in relation to the water molecule. The elementary bit of water
doesn’t naturally seem to be an electron, but rather a water
molecule. The action of the water arises out of the interactions
of its constituent parts, each of which has its own activity—
which is to say, a proper activity bound up with certain invariances. Furthermore, the characteristic sizes and distances of
interactions within liquid water are given by the water molecule, not by the electrons that make up that molecule. Indeed,
it isn’t at all clear that the integrity of the electron and the
water molecule—the feature by which I individuate them
from each other and call them different things—isn’t essentially the same. Each is a zone of stability surrounding amorphous activity. Distinction itself, particleness, arises out of this
amorphous activity in the form of stability of activity characterized by an insensitivity to internal activity.
The question of whether the electron has substructure in
the way that an atom has substructure is, as my undergraduate
advisor in physics said to me years ago, “a research project.”
For now, the electron is a best candidate for a fundamental or
elementary particle. But it cannot be regarded as a building
block, as something subsisting by itself that can be stacked
with others like it to construct something larger, like a brick.
On the contrary, quantum field theory tells us that electrons
are parts of a self-constrained world in which their individual
existence always arises out of, and within, a whole. There is
no “fundamental particle” apart from a “fundamental field.”
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NOTES
1. Lucretius, De rerum natura, Book I, lines 419-421.
2. Isaac Newton, letter to Richard Bently, 25 February 1693.
3. James Clerk Maxwell, “On Action at a Distance,” in The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. W. D. Niven, 2 vols. (Cambridge: At
the University Press, 1890), Vol. 2, 322.
4. This particular numerical example is borrowed from the beginning of
Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification
of Forces (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
5. The entire text is available online here:
http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/texts/huygens/impact/huyimpct.html
6. This deep result is called Noether’s Theorem after the prolific German
mathematician Amalie Emmy Noether (1882-1935).
7. For the experts: I know that I’ve left out renormalization and that it
bears on the question of individuation. There is only so much I can fit
into such a small space.
Appendix:
Annotated Bibliography for Further Reading
I. J. R. Aitchison. “Nothing’s Plenty: The Vacuum in Quantum Field Theory.” Contemporary Physics 26 (1985): 333-391. A fine, detailed discussion of the vacuum in quantum field theory.
P. W. Anderson. “More is Different.” Science 177 (1972): 393-396. A famous article arguing that fundamental structure doesn’t correspond to
scale.
Sunny Auyang. How is Quantum Field Theory Possible? London: Oxford
University Press, 1995. A serious philosophical encounter with quantum
field theory.
William Berkson. Fields of Force: The Development of a World View
from Faraday to Einstein. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. A
history of the idea of the field, focussing on classical fields, with an attention to philosophical ideas.
I. J. R. Aitchison and A. J. G Hey. Gauge Theories in Particle Physics: A
Practical Introduction. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press, 2012. A firstrate graduate-level quantum field theory text, focussed on the Standard
Model.
Robert B. Laughlin and David Pines. “The Theory of Everything.” Pro-
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ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97 (2000): 27-32. In line
with P. W. Anderson’s article and containing many physical examples.
Bruce Schumm. Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle
Physics. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. A
thoughtful, detailed presentation of the Standard Model, emphasizing
symmetry issues.
Steven Weinberg. “The Search for Unity: Notes for a History of Quantum
Field Theory.” Daedalus 106.4 (1977):17-35. A excellent overview of the
problems and solutions in QFT, set in a historical progression.
Steven Weinberg. “Newtonianism, Reductionism, and the Art of Congressional Testimony.” Nature, 330 (1987):433-437. A discussion of what
is meant by “fundamental physics.”
Frank Wilczek. The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification
of Forces. New York: Basic Books, 2010. A popular science book, wellwritten, that emphasizes mass and QCD.
The articles by Anderson, Laughlin and Pines, and Weinberg’s “Newtonianism” are all included in the recent collection Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science, ed. Mark A. Bedau and Paul
Humphreys. Boston: MIT Press, 2008.
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Miracles and Belief
Joseph Cohen
Is belief in miracles compatible with
a scientific understanding of the world?1
The idea for this lecture grew out of a philosophy tutorial in
which the assignment for one meeting was to read and discuss two philosophic arguments on the topic of miracles.
They were the chapter entitled “Miracles” in Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (1687) and the chapter
entitled “Of Miracles” in David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding (1748).
I asked the class to consider whether the arguments of
Spinoza and Hume constituted a refutation of the possibility
of miracles, and if so, in what way such a refutation might
affect a belief in divine providence, or religious belief in general.
The students found these questions provocative and challenging, but were also troubled and perplexed by them. Why
should the presumed impossibility of miracles occasion such
difficulties? I propose this suggestion.
Let us assume as an appropriate and accurate starting
point that miracles are understood to be: (1) phenomena
which are contrary to and cannot be explained by the established laws of nature; and (2) caused by the intentional acts
of a Divine Agent.
Since the existence of miracles implies the existence of a
God who is their cause, an argument against the possibility
Joseph Cohen is a Tutor Emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis,
Maryland. This lecture was first delivered at St. John’s College in
Santa Fe, New Mexico on June 30, 2010. It has been revised slightly
for publication.
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of miracles further implies either the non-existence of this
God, or the absence in God of the attribute of providential
care and concern for particular individuals or peoples. It is
only by virtue of possessing this attribute that God would be
presumed to produce the intentional acts called miracles.
Therefore, to the extent that an argument against miracles is
persuasive, this would diminish the degree of certainty of a
belief in the existence of such a God or in God’s providential
care and concern.
Among the students who said they found persuasive and
worthy of acceptance the two philosophic arguments against
miracles, some volunteered that although they agreed that the
arguments were persuasive, they did not want to or were not
able to relinquish their belief in a providential God. Their
feelings and their faith committed them to this belief. Their
position seemed to be either that there was no real inconsistency in holding these apparently opposed convictions, or that
the inconsistency didn’t bother them.
The aim of this lecture is to explore further these questions and various responses to them. It has two parts: Part I:
Spinoza and Hume, and Part II: C. S. Lewis and Francis
Collins.
Part I: Spinoza and Hume
Spinoza
To place Spinoza’s discussion of miracles (Chapter 6) in the
context of the larger aims of his Treatise, it will be useful to
comment briefly on what precedes that discussion.
The peculiarly hyphenated title, Theological-Political
Treatise, makes us wonder what the connection of theology
and politics might be. On the title page, there is a subtitle that
summarizes Spinoza’s overall aim:
Containing some dissertations by which it is shown not
only that the freedom of philosophizing can be granted
while saving piety and the peace of the republic, but that it
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cannot be removed unless along with that very piety and
peace of the republic.
The Treatise is thus presented as a work of political philosophy, whose aim is to show how freedom, piety and peace
are necessarily interconnected within the framework of that
form of political organization known as a republic. Its argument as a whole can be divided into two parts, the theological
and the political. In order to achieve the aims of the political
part, Spinoza must first confront and overcome the claims of
the theologians and of the sacred texts from which they claim
their authority.
In the Preface, Spinoza reveals his motive for writing, describes and denounces the pervasive evils produced by superstition and prejudice, and sketches the main themes and plan
of organization of the Treatise.
The first sentence of the Preface, and hence of the Treatise,
declares:
If human beings could rule all their affairs with certain
counsel, or if fortune were always favorable to them, they
would not be bound by any superstition.2
With this, Spinoza launches a direct and sustained attack
against superstition, exposing its causes and tracing its pernicious effects. Superstition has its roots in fear (or dread)
and ignorance, joined with immoderate desires for the goods
of fortune and the incapacity of human beings to control either the turns of fortune or their own desires for her favors.
Being ignorant of the operation and order of Nature and fearful of supernatural powers, the people or their rulers place
their trust in those who claim to be able to interpret, and possibly to control, the course of events, whether determined by
fortune, or natural causes, or the will of the gods. Thus they
seek guidance from seers or prophets. In this way, superstition becomes associated with prophecy and religion.
Spinoza initially uses the examples of Alexander the
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Great and, closer to his own time, the empire of the Moslem
Turks, to highlight the pervasive and pernicious effects of
superstition. He then shifts the scene to the religious and political world dominated by Christianity. He declares he had
often wondered that those “who boast that they profess the
Christian religion—that is, love, gladness, peace, continence,
and faith toward all” should engage in such bitter hatred and
persecution of others. He finds “the cause of this evil” to be
the abuses arising from the admixture of religious belief and
political ambition, namely, the political abuse of religion and
the religious abuse of politics.
The Church has become an entrenched ecclesiastical and
political institution concerned with accumulation of honors,
privileges, and power, and “faith is now nothing else but
credulity and prejudice.” Reason is despised as being by nature corrupt, and the free judgment of each person to discern
the true and the false is impeded. Spinoza attacks this unholy
theological-political admixture, which makes it “seem as
though [it has] been intentionally devised for extinguishing
the light of understanding.” He therefore resolved “to examine Scripture anew in a full and free spirit,” contriving a
method of interpretation which would “admit nothing as its
teaching which was not taught by it very clearly.”3
As indicated in the Preface, the plan of organization of
the Treatise is keyed to a series of questions that guide the
course of argument of the following twenty chapters. The
questions pertaining to the chapter on miracles ask “whether
miracles happen contrary to the order of nature, and whether
they teach God’s existence and providence more certainly
and more clearly than do the things we understand clearly
and distinctly through their first causes.”4
How do human beings come to know “first causes”? Is
there more than one source available by means of which
knowledge can be acquired? In Chapter 1 (Prophesy) and
Chapter 2 (Prophets), Spinoza begins to explicate his account
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of natural knowledge as grounded in reason and experience,
in contrast to knowledge claimed through prophecy or revelation as grounded in imagination and faith.
Chapter 1 begins as follows:
Prophecy, or Revelation, is certain knowledge (certa cognitio) of some matter revealed by God to human beings. A
Prophet, moreover, is one who interprets the revealed things
of God to those who are unable to have the certain knowledge of the matters revealed by God, and so can only embrace the matters being revealed by mere faith.5 (Emphasis
added.)
Drawing on this definition, Spinoza then claims, “it follows that natural knowledge can be called Prophecy (cognitionem naturalem prophetiam vocari posse). For the things
we know by the natural light depend solely on knowledge of
God and of his eternal decrees.”6 (Emphasis added.)
What then, for Spinoza, is “natural knowledge”? How is
it distinct from the “certain knowledge” which prophets may
claim for themselves? And how does knowledge obtained by
the natural light differ from the certain knowledge revealed
by the prophetic light?
He begins to answer these questions in remarks that take
the form of an argument.7
1. “[N]atural knowledge is common to all human
beings—for it depends on foundations common to
all human beings.”
2. However, this kind of knowledge “is not well regarded by the vulgar [the multitudes], who are always panting after what is rare and alien to their
nature . . . ; when they speak of prophetic knowledge, they want this [natural] knowledge excluded.”
3. Nevertheless natural knowledge “can be called
divine (divina vocari potest), as can any other
knowledge, whatever it may be . . . . Yet in respect
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of the certainty that natural knowledge (cognitionem naturalem) involves and the source from
which it is derived (namely, God),” it is in no way
inferior to prophetic knowledge (cognitione
prophetica).
4. “Yet though natural science (scientia) is divine,
its propagators still cannot be called Prophets.” For
what the teachers of natural science impart to others can be grasped by them, not by faith alone, but
with a certainty and entitlement equal to that of the
teachers.
5. “[S]ince our mind . . . has the power to form
some notions explaining the nature of things and
teach the conduct of life, we can deservedly state
that the mind’s nature . . . is the first cause of divine
revelation.”
6. “[T]he idea and nature of God dictates everything we clearly and distinctly understand, not in
words but in a far more excellent mode, which best
agrees with the nature of the mind—as anyone
who has tasted the certainty of understanding has
without a doubt experienced within himself.”
These six steps lead to Spinoza’s powerful conclusion:
7. “For everything is done through God’s power.
Indeed, since Nature’s power is nothing but God’s
power itself, it is certain that we do not understand
God’s power to the extent that we are ignorant of
natural causes.”8
In this last statement, Spinoza reveals his deepest and
most comprehensive insight, namely, the fundamental unity
of God and Nature. Although the phrase “God or Nature” is
explicitly used in the preface to Part IV of Spinoza’s Ethics,
the application of this insight runs through the Treatise and
forms the constant backdrop for its unfolding argument.9
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It is often debated whether Spinoza’s use of the phrase
“God or Nature” is to be understood as a deification of Nature
or as a naturalization of God. In either case, the term “supernatural” is drained of its meaning. For Spinoza the understanding and explanation of the phenomena of the world must
be attained through the acquisition of natural knowledge
alone. It is from this perspective that Spinoza’s philosophic
position can be called Naturalism, in opposition to the theological point of view called Supernaturalism.10
Spinoza fully develops his naturalistic position in the
Ethics. Its central teaching is that Man is necessarily a part
of Nature, that striving (conatus)11 is the essence of Man, and
that our supreme good and highest happiness can be attained
by means of striving toward what he calls “the intellectual
love of God.” In the light of what will be discussed later,
Spinoza’s account of the active emotion (or affect) of intellectual love can be construed as among the “spiritual rewards” experienced by those who seek to understand the
mind of God through understanding the system of Nature.
In Chapter 3 of the Treatise Spinoza employs this “God
or Nature” point of view when he restates the idea of God’s
providence in terms of God’s direction, God’s external and
internal help, God’s choosing, and fortune. He writes:
By God’s direction, I understand the fixed and unchangeable order of nature, or the chaining together of natural
things. For . . . the universal laws of nature, in accordance
with which everything comes to be and is determined, are
nothing but God’s eternal decrees, which always involve
eternal truth and necessity. Accordingly, whether we say
that everything comes to be in accordance with the laws
of nature, or that everything is ordered on the basis of
God’s decree and direction, we are saying the same thing.12
Turning now to Spinoza’s analysis of miracles in Chapter
6, we see that the heart of the opposition between revealed
and natural knowledge comes to light in the questions con-
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cerning what miracles are and whether they are possible.13
He begins his discussion by stating “the opinions and
prejudices of the vulgar [i.e., the many] concerning nature
and miracles.” He notes that the vulgar call divine any knowledge that surpasses their understanding, especially works of
nature whose causes are unknown. These works of nature, of
whose causes they are ignorant, are also called works of God
or miracles. They believe that God’s existence, power, and
providence are most clearly established if they imagine that
God is the direct cause when something happens in nature
which is contrary to their opinion of how nature works. This
is because they assume that God and nature are two distinct
powers, and that if one of these powers is responsible for an
event, the power of the other must be excluded or suspended.
So that “partly out of devotion and partly out of a desire to
oppose those who cultivate natural science, they desire not
to know the causes of things, and they think that those who
seek to understand these so-called natural events deny God’s
existence, or at least God’s providence.”14 Thus, in the vulgar
view, a miracle is a providential act intended for human benefit to achieve a result that would be contrary to the ordinary
operations and power of nature.
Drawing on conclusions earlier established: (a) that the
power of nature is the same as the power of God; (b) that the
actions of God are eternal, necessary, and immutable; and (c)
that God’s will is identical with God’s intellect, Spinoza argues that miracles are not possible within nature.
Nor can miracles be understood as supernatural events
directly referred to God’s providential intervention in nature’s
established processes, for such an intervention by God would
contradict the principle that God acts from the necessity of
His own nature.
Moreover, since nature’s power is nothing but God’s
power, and God is understood to be infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, so also is nature’s power. Whatever may be the
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limits of nature’s power is the necessary consequence of its
own laws. On this account, there is no way to distinguish the
natural from the supernatural; there is no conceptual space
outside of Nature in which a supernatural Divine Agent, intending to produce a miraculous intervention, could act.
Spinoza’s argument can be summarized as follows. If
God is a supernatural agent distinct from nature, and has created and established the laws of nature, then a contradiction
would arise if God, acting from the necessity of His own nature, could act both according to and contrary to the laws of
nature. If God’s fixed and unchangeable order of nature is
suspended to accomplish a supernatural purpose, which is
what the vulgar call a miracle, then the processes of nature
are not fixed and unchangeable, and everything is subject to
doubt, including God’s fixed nature and existence.
Thus contrary to the vulgar view that miracles most
clearly affirm the existence and power of God, Spinoza argues that the incoherence of their view undermines the conclusion they wish to establish; it is rather this vulgar view
which leads to atheism.15 If, on the contrary, God is identical
with nature, then there are not two distinct and opposed principles; miracles, therefore, could not be supernatural events,
the cause of which is outside of and contrary to nature and
reason.
Further, if one nevertheless believes or supposes that
there is a transcendent supernatural God distinct from the system of nature, and that such a God is utterly mysterious, hidden and unknowable, the consequence of this supposition is
that human beings would not be able to distinguish the ordinary acts of nature from the so-called supernatural acts which
are the cause of miracles. Neither the principle of causality
nor any of the categories or aspects of human rationality
could be supposed to apply to such an utterly unknowable
Being.
Spinoza therefore understands and defines a miracle to
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be nothing else but an event whose natural cause cannot be
explained by the person who narrates it or who believes the
event to be supernatural and surpasses human understanding.
The designation of an event as a miracle is merely a way of
saying that we are ignorant of its cause, which, though
presently unknown, may not be unknowable.
Spinoza’s overall philosophical conclusions, the answer
to the questions posed in the Preface, are: (a) God’s existence
and providence cannot be known through miracles, but these
conclusions are far better established and understood from
the principle of the fixed and unchangeable order of nature;
and (b) the very idea of a miracle “whether contrary to nature
or above nature is a mere absurdity.”16
Hume17
In Section X of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,
“Of Miracles,” Hume is not directly concerned with the metaphysical question, Do miracles exist or are they conceivable
within the order of Nature as a whole? Rather, he is concerned with the epistemological question, How can one know
or prove that a particular event is a genuine miracle, and not
merely the effect of excessive imagination, superstition, or
wishful thinking?
Necessarily involved in this epistemological question are
certain assumptions about the nature of belief and about what
it is reasonable for a person to believe. These assumptions
involve the meaning and use of such concepts as evidence,
proof, fact, probability and truth. In short, what is ultimately
at issue in any discussion about the possibility of miracles is
the concept of “rational belief.”
In pursuing the inquiry into miracles, Hume wastes no
time searching for a definition. It is already at hand. A miracle, he says “is a violation of the laws of Nature,” to which
he adds that “as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very
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nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. . . . Nothing is esteemed a
miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of Nature. It
is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should
die on a sudden. . . . But it is a miracle that a dead man should
come to life; because that has never been observed in any age
or country. There must therefore be a uniform experience
against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would
not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience
amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from
the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle;
nor can such a proof be destroyed, or the miracle rendered
credible, but by an opposite proof which is superior.”18
In a footnote to this paragraph, Hume refines and restates
his definition: “a miracle may be accurately defined, a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the
Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.” How
does this condition, that the cause of the miracle be attributed
to “a particular volition of the Deity,” affect our ability to
know that the alleged miracle is genuine? The answer is provided in Part 2 of this Section where he states:
Though the Being to whom the miracle is ascribed, be in
this case, Almighty, it does not upon that account, become
a bit more probable; since it is impossible for us to know
the attributes or actions of such a Being, otherwise than
from the experience which we have of his productions in
the course of nature.19
Thus Hume’s “direct and full proof” against the possibility of miracles is based on the well founded assumption of,
and the belief in, the regularity and uniformity of nature and
of its laws. This belief, in turn, is grounded in his philosophical analysis of human experience: he believes that we generate ideas and, within limits, acquire knowledge of nature
by means of a sustained application of the methods of the experimental sciences.
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In this same Section, Hume then proceeds to undermine
any and all claims of reported miracles, even those whose
pedigree is historically recent and bears the testimony of a
large number of highly placed political and ecclesiastical figures. Having previously supposed that the testimony in favor
of a miracle “may possibly amount to an entire proof,” he
then retracts this supposition: “[I]t is easy to shew that we
have been a great deal too liberal in our concession and that
there never was a miraculous event established on so full an
evidence.”20
To support this conclusion he offers a range of evidence
based on experience and well established principles of human
nature. He mentions such phenomena as self-delusion, a desire to deceive others, and the tendency of people to accept
as fact what is “utterly absurd and miraculous.” The cause of
this, he says, is that “the passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion,” gives rise to
pleasurable affects. Hume is especially harsh in condemning
those cases in which “the spirit of religion joins itself to
the love of wonder.” In these circumstances, “human testimony . . . loses all pretensions to authority.” Citing various
examples of “the strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and marvelous,” he asks rhetorically whether it
is not such passions which “incline the generality of
mankind to believe and report, with the greatest vehemence
and assurance, all religious miracles.”21
Although Hume has labored to undermine all rational
belief in the possibility of miracles and in the veracity of
those who testify to them, what finally is the purpose of his
labors? He states that “the method of reasoning here delivered . . . may serve to confound those dangerous friends or
disguised enemies to the Christian religion, who have undertaken to defend it by the principles of human reason.”
He believes, it seems, that it is a deep disservice to the
Christian religion to defend it on those principles. To elim-
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inate the desire or the need to defend Christianity on rational
grounds, he then asserts: “Our most holy religion is founded
on Faith; and it is a sure method of exposing it to put it to
such a trial as it is, by no means, fitted to endure.”22
In what is surely one of the most striking passages in the
book, Hume ends his essay on miracles by commenting:
Upon the whole, we may conclude, that the Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even
at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person
without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of
its veracity: and whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it,
is conscious of a continuous miracle in his own person,
which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and
gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary
to custom and experience.23
Given Hume’s disbelief in all claims of reported miracles,
we may wonder: How can this concluding statement be construed to serve the interests of the Christian religion, or to be
a defense of the Christian faith?
Part II: C. S. Lewis and Francis Collins
C. S. Lewis
The arguments of both Spinoza and Hume against the possibility of miracles assumed a certain perspective regarding the
knowledge of nature’s processes and the existence of its laws.
This perspective has often been called naturalism. This means
that explanations of all phenomena must be sought within the
scope of natural knowledge as grounded in reason and experience, without recourse or appeal to explanations in terms
of supernatural causes or agents. The knowledge thus obtained by adhering to the principles and methods of the sciences yields conclusions, in the form of provisional laws of
nature, which are open to being tested, confirmed or disconfirmed, and corrected.
The alternative to this naturalistic perspective can be
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called supernaturalism.
These are exactly the pair of terms used by C. S. Lewis
in his book Miracles: A Preliminary Study.24 Lewis’s aims
are to confront the reader with the choice between naturalism
and supernaturalism, to show the limitations of the former
and the superiority of the latter, and to lead the reader to adopt
the particular form of supernaturalism supplied by Christianity.
Regarding naturalism, he concedes that “if Naturalism
is true, then we do know in advance that miracles are impossible: nothing can come into Nature from the outside because there is nothing outside to come in, Nature being
everything.”25
Therefore, in order to provide an affirmative answer to
the question of whether miracles can occur—that is, in order
to show that miracles are indeed possible—Lewis says that
he must first settle what he calls “the philosophical question.”26 Since the philosophical question at issue here is
whether miracles can occur, and since miracles are not possible if naturalism is true, he must either show that naturalism
is not true or he must argue that the opposite perspective—
supernaturalism—is true.
However, according to Lewis, an argument attempting to
show the possibility of miracles cannot be based on experience or history or the examination of biblical texts. This is
so because the evidence obtained from each of these sources
“depends on the philosophical views which we have been
holding before we even began to look at the evidence. The
philosophical question must therefore come first.”27 Lewis’s
general argument seems to be directed, initially at least,
against those who reject the possibility of miracles because
“we know in advance what results they will find for they have
begun by begging the question.”28
Does Lewis himself think he can settle this “philosophical
question” without any begging of the question? To avoid this
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result, he would have to confront and overcome the position
of those who accept the principles of naturalism as broadly
interpreted and applied. In particular he would have to show
that it is impossible for naturalism to fulfill its claim to provide
the best and fullest explanation of the whole range of phenomena constituting human experience. Let us see whether he succeeds in this undertaking.
Although different chapters of this book present various
aspects of his position, his overall argument in behalf of the
truth of supernaturalism seems to depend on at least the following premises or assumptions:
1. Nature is not the whole of reality. Rather it is
merely a partial reality embedded within a higher supernatural reality which constitutes a total reality.
Lewis agrees that “all reality must be interrelated and
consistent.”29 To find the grounds of this interconnection between the partial and the total reality, one must
go back to their common origin, the Creator God.
With this supernatural assumption of a Creator God,
plus the premise that this God might wish to intervene
in or interrupt the order of Nature, miracles can
occur.30
2. The system of Nature can only be partial. What it
essentially lacks is the spiritual element contained in
the Christian and Jewish doctrines which “have always been statements about spiritual reality.”31 What
these doctrines mean is that “in addition to the physical or psychophysical universe known to the sciences,
there exists an uncreated and unconditional reality
which causes the universe to be, [and] this reality has
a positive structure or constitution.”32 To distinguish
the Christian from the Jewish understanding of the
meaning of spiritual reality, he adds that this reality is
described “though doubtless not completely, . . . in the
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doctrine of the Trinity; and that this reality, at a definite point in time, entered the universe we know by
becoming one of its own creatures.”33
3. In order to tell the story of Christianity, supernaturalism is necessary because it is the realm in which
miracles find their being. In the Christian religion,
“the Miracles, or at least some Miracles, are more
closely bound up with the fabric of belief than in any
other.”34 Further, miracles, after all, are “precisely
those chapters in the great story [of Christianity] on
which the plot turns. Death and resurrection are what
the story is about.”35
4. To tell the Christian story, Lewis must also tell the
story of mankind. But from what perspective should
this story be told? To tell the story of Man is to give
an account of Man’s nature. Nature and human nature
are complex things, and as Lewis himself points out,
“the kind of analysis which you make of any complex
thing depends on the purpose you have in view.”36
Since his purpose is to give an affirmative answer to
the question whether miracles are possible, the story
of mankind must be told from the supernatural perspective.
When we are considering Man as evidence for the fact that
this spatio-temporal Nature is not the only thing in existence, the important distinction is between that part of Man
which belongs to this spatio-temporal Nature and that which
does not. . . . These two parts of a man may rightly be called
natural and supernatural. . . . [T]his “Super-Natural” part is
itself a created being—a thing called into existence by the
Absolute Being and given by Him a certain character or
“nature.”37
Thus, in order to argue for the truth of his Christian supernaturalism, Lewis assumes the very perspective according
to which the concept of Nature is arbitrarily narrowed and
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excluded from any connection to the moral or rational development of human beings. He thereby renders the naturalist
perspective incapable of explaining the most basic features
of human nature. Indeed, in the chapter entitled “Nature and
Supernature,” he separates Reason from man’s nature and asserts that “rational thought is not part of the system of Nature.”38 He then adds that “human minds are not the only
supernatural entities that exist. They do not come from
nowhere. Each has come into Nature from Supernature: each
has its tap-root in an eternal, self-existent, rational Being,
whom we call God. Each is an offshoot, or spearhead, or incursion of that Supernatural reality into Nature.”39
In short, from the supernaturalist perspective, the existence of each human being having the capacity to reason is
itself a miracle.
Lewis himself has emphatically asserted the elementary
logical point that “a proof which sets out by assuming the thing
you have to prove is rubbish.”40 Does he think he has somehow
avoided an enormous begging of the question?
Francis Collins
One strongly affected reader of C. S. Lewis is Francis Collins,
who is currently the Director of the National Institutes of Health
and previously the head of the Human Genome Project.
In his book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents
Evidence for Belief,41 Collins’s primary aim is to provide “the
possibility of a richly satisfying harmony between the scientific and spiritual world views.”42 That these world views are
often said to be in opposition is expressed by such phrases as
“the ‘battle’ between science and religion”43 and “the conflicts between science and faith.”44
Note that, in presenting their opposition in these terms,
Collins consistently and freely substitutes the words “religion” and “faith” for the word “spiritual,” thus treating these
three terms as equivalent when set in opposition to “science.”
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In the introduction to his book, Collins poses the question
whether “the scientific and spiritual world views are antithetical.” His own answer to this question is:
No. Not for me. Quite the contrary. For me, the experience
of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this
most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific
achievement and an occasion of worship.45
From this answer we see that at least in his own heart and
mind the dichotomy of “science” on one side, and “religion,”
“faith” and “the spiritual world” on the other is only apparent.
But when he further says: “Science’s domain is to explore
nature, God’s domain is in the spiritual world, a world not
possible to explore with the tools and language of science,”46
the antithesis appears to harden. We now have on one side of
the dichotomy Science and Nature, and on the other side Religion, Faith, Spirit, and God. Since in his own terms each
side occupies a separate and distinct “domain,” it is not immediately evident how these two sides can come together.
On the religious or spiritual side, the book is the personal
story of Collins’s journey from atheism to wholehearted acceptance of the fundamental tenets of the Christian religion,
with its mysteries and its miracles, all centering on the person
of Jesus Christ: his Virgin Birth, his Divinity, his Death and
Resurrection.
On the side of science and nature, he discusses with elegance and insight, and with similarly wholehearted acceptance, the scientific view of the understanding of the natural
world. He writes:
Science is the only legitimate way to investigate the natural
world. Whether probing the structure of the atom, the nature of the cosmos, or the DNA sequence of the human
genome, the scientific method is the only reliable way to
seek out the truth of natural events. Yes, experiments can
fail spectacularly, interpretations of experiments can be
misguided, and science can make mistakes. But the nature
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of science is self-correcting. No major fallacy can long persist in the face of a progressive increase in knowledge.47
So the question continues: does Collins see and treat the
two world views as essentially separate, distinct and antithetical, or is their opposition only apparent and capable of being
harmonized?
Although Collins undoubtedly has a great love of science
and has attained a high level of achievement and satisfaction
through the understanding of natural phenomena, that way of
pursuing the truth is insufficient. For him “science is not the
only way of knowing. The spiritual world view provides another way of finding truth.”48 But Collins also thinks that
“each person must carry out his or her own search for spiritual truth.”49 What he desires for himself is a “way of seeking
fellowship with God,” of being able “to communicate with
Him.”50 What Collins also desires are answers to the questions that cannot be answered by science, the “eternal questions of human existence.” These are questions such as: Why
did the universe come into being? and What is the meaning
of human existence?51
But since these kinds of questions cannot be answered by
science, one must go beyond science, go beyond the natural
world and into the realm of supernaturalism and the transcendence of a creator God. Or as Collins puts it:
As seekers, we may well discover from science many interesting answers to the question “How does life work?” What
we cannot discover through science alone are the answers
to the questions “Why is there life anyway?” and “Why am
I here?”52
Collins finally finds the answer to such questions, including the question of the possibility of miracles, in the language
of the Christian Bible, in the texts of the four gospels, the
central figure of which is Jesus, the Christ. These texts revealed to him “the actual account of His life, . . . the eyewit-
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ness nature of the narratives, and the enormity of Christ’s
claims and their consequences.”53 He writes:
[I]f Christ really was the Son of God, as He explicitly
claimed, then surely . . . He could suspend the laws of nature
if He needed to do so to achieve a more important purpose.54
In attempting to understand God’s purpose, Collins wrestled with impenetrable theological conundrums, and again
found answers in the writings of C.S. Lewis. Through these
writings, Collins was persuaded of spiritual truths the logic
of which had previously seemed “like utter nonsense.”55 But
now that he has become “a believer in God,”56 this logic
seems to him compelling.
Although Collins’s Language of God is wonderfully clear
in explaining much of the reasoning and evidence supporting
the scientific conclusions of cosmology and biology (as in
Chapter 3, “The Origins of the Universe,” Chapter 4, “Life
on Earth: Of Microbes and Man,” and Chapter 5, “Deciphering God’s Instruction Book: The Lessons of the Human
Genome”), I find his language about “truth” to be at the least
fuzzy and puzzling.
On the one hand Collins speaks of faith as a “search for
absolute truth,”57 and says that “each person must carry out
his or her own search for spiritual truth.”58 Yet he praises the
truth-gathering methods of science as “the only reliable way
to seek out the truth of natural events” and asserts that “the
nature of science is self-correcting.”59 So at least some claims
regarding scientific truth, and the beliefs based on those
claims, are thereby discovered to have been false. But if each
person’s search for spiritual truth is a search for what most
satisfies his or her longing for fellowship with the Divine, by
what shared criteria can these private beliefs and spiritual
truths be judged to be either true or false? Is the search for
spiritual truth self-correcting in the same way and in the same
sense as the search for scientific truth?
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Perhaps what is called spiritual truth is a genuinely private matter, involving each person’s sense of the divine and
of what constitutes an adequate relationship to the divine. No
doubt such private thoughts and feelings are full of meaning
which can be shared with other like-minded persons. It is evident, however, that not everyone needs a belief in miracles
to achieve their sense of fellowship with the Divine. We have
already noted the example of Spinoza, and we would certainly have to include other philosophers or scientists or seekers after truth who find their spiritual satisfaction within the
horizons of a naturalistic world view without having to posit
another level of reality called “supernatural.”
Collins says that science and faith “fortify each other like
two unshakable pillars, holding up a building called Truth.”60
But there are good reasons to think that (1) the logical ground
on which each of these pillars stands is essentially different,
and (2) the paths toward scientific truth and spiritual truth,
as well as the human capacities required to pursue these, are
not the same.
Should we not conclude, therefore, that there is not one
but two very different buildings called Truth, the foundations
of which are laid in two separate realms in the landscape of
the human mind? If, as Collins himself describes, there are
two distinct world views, the scientific and the religious, and
if each relies on its own conception and criteria regarding the
truth, how is it possible, as he urges, to “seek to reclaim the
solid ground of an intellectually and spiritually satisfying
synthesis of all great truths?”61 (Emphasis in the original.)
Recalling for a moment the theological-political theme,
perhaps Collins’s desire for harmony can be understood in
light of his role as a preeminent scientist who heads a national
government agency. In this role one can understand that his
goal is to bridge the deep divisions in this country concerning
major biomedical issues such as stem cell research, cloning,
and the search for genetic cures to a wide spectrum of dis-
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eases, issues which often are polarized along both religious
and political lines. It is this goal which is reflected in his
“Final Word”:
It is time to call a truce in the escalating war between science
and spirit. The war was never really necessary. Like so many
earthly wars, this one has been initiated and intensified by
extremists on both sides, sounding alarms that predict imminent ruin unless the other side is vanquished. Science is
not threatened by God; it is enhanced. God is most certainly
not threatened by science; He made it all possible.62
In response to Collins’s “final word” on this problem, let
us pose instead two “final questions.” First, how is it possible
to harmonize the truth claims of religious believers and the
truth claims of the scientific community without equivocating
on the meaning of the term “truth”? And second, if a truth
claim, in general, is understood to require a correspondence
between what is said or thought and some assumed objective
reality—call this the requirement of corresponding to reality—then how is it possible to establish with certitude that
this requirement has been met?
NOTES
1. This question is a narrowly formulated aspect of the larger perennial
question of the relation of reason to faith. Three relatively recent books
which argue for the compatibility of this relationship are: C.F. Delaney,
ed., Rationality and Religious Belief (Notre Dame, Indiana: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1979); Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff,
eds., Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame, Indiana: University Notre Dame Press, 1983); and Joshua L Golding, Rationality and Religious Theism (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing,
2003).
2. Preface, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1. In the following notes, all references
to the Theological-Political Treatise (referred to as TTP from its Latin
title Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) will be to Spinoza’s Theologico-
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111
Political Treatise, trans. Martin Yaffe (Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Philosophical Library, 2004). Citations to the text will be in accordance with
Yaffe’s system of citations explained on p. viii of that edition. For example, in a subsequent footnote, TTP, 1.1.1-2 refers to Chapter 1, Paragraph 1, Sentences 1 and 2. “P” preceding Arabic numerals refers to the
Preface.
3. Partial summary of Spinoza, TTP, P.1.1 to P.5.l.
4. Spinoza, TTP, P.5.6.
5. Spinoza, TTP, 1.1.1-2.
6. Spinoza, TTP, 1.2.1-2.
7. The following statements numbered 1-6 summarize Spinoza’s sentences from TTP, 1.2.3 to 1.4.1. Statement number 7 quotes from TTP,
1.22.6.
8. In Chapter 2, Spinoza further distinguishes the certainty obtained
through the natural light versus the certainty obtained through the
prophetic light, finding the difference to be based on the prophets’ more
vivid power of imagining. He argues that “since simple imagination does
not of its own nature involve certainty, as every clear and distinct idea
does . . . it follows that by itself prophecy cannot involve certainty.” (TTP,
2.3.1). What is required to obtain the certainty of clear and distinct ideas
upon which natural knowledge is based is nothing other than the power
of reasoning itself.
9. Earlier in the Ethics (Part I, Proposition 29) Spinoza had introduced
the distinction between the active and passive expressions of Nature’s allcomprehensive dynamic system: natura naturans and natura naturata,
translated as Nature naturing and Nature natured.
10. As we will see below, these are the terms of the dichotomy proposed
by C. S. Lewis.
11. Conatus, translated as “striving” or “endeavor,” is Spinoza’s general
term, which includes as aspects “will,” “appetite,” and “desire.” See,
Ethics, Part III, Proposition 9, Scholium.
12. Spinoza, TTP, 3.3.1- 3.
13. Spinoza says that his treatment of this subject is explicitly philosophical; that is, his conclusions about miracles are drawn solely from the
principles of nature and reason. This procedure contrasts with earlier
chapters that treat of prophecy and prophets, which are theological matters, where he drew his conclusions from the text of Scripture alone.
14. Spinoza, TTP, 6.1.90-91.
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15. Ibid., 6.1.34.
16. Ibid., 6.1.31, 35.
17. References will be to sections, parts and page numbers in David Hume,
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Anthony Flew
(Chicago: Open Court, 1988). It is noteworthy that both Spinoza and
Hume—proponents of the philosophic point of view called Naturalism—
also share a common ground of political principle. Each quotes and adopts
the political ideal stated by Tacitus: “to be able to think what we please
and say what we think” (Histories, I.1). For Spinoza, see TTP, P 5.18, and
the content and title of Chapter 20: “It is shown that in a Free Republic
each is permitted both to think what he wants and to say what he thinks.”
For Hume, see A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an attempt to introduce
the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Maral Subjects, in which the
quotation from Tacitus serves as the epigraph both for Book I, “Of the Understanding,” and for Book II, “Of the Passions.”
18. Hume, Enquiry, X.l, p.148.
19. Ibid., X.2, p.164.
20. Ibid., X.2, p.150.
21. Ibid., X.2, pp. 151-52.
22. Ibid., X.2, p. 165.
23. Ibid., X.2, p. 166.
24. C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). Lewis is also the author of many popular works of fiction
such as The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe (1950), and The Chronicles of Narnia (seven volumes between
1950 and 1956). The greatest influence on Lewis’s fiction seems to have
been the Scottish author George MacDonald, a preacher and Christian
apologist, who was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, and fairy
tales. When Lewis was sixteen, he chanced upon MacDonald’s most famous novel Phantastes and was enchanted by his prodigious imagination.
The book was Lewis’s favorite, and he returned to it often throughout his
life. See Michael White, C. S. Lewis: A Life (New York: Carroll and Graf,
2004), 103-104.
25. Lewis, Miracles, 14-15.
26. Ibid., 2.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 4.
29. Ibid., 96.
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30. Ibid., 96-98.
31. Ibid., 124.
32. Ibid., 125.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 108.
35. Ibid., 157.
36. Ibid., 275.
37. Ibid., 276.
38. Ibid., 41.
39. Ibid., 43.
40. Ibid., 18.
41. Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006). Francis Collins is connected to St. John's College by virtue of being the godson of Robert Bart,
a long time tutor both in Annapolis and Santa Fe and also Dean of the College in Santa Fe. Collins was one of the speakers at the memorial service
for Robert Bart held in McDowell Hall in Annapolis, February 3, 2001.
In a personal communication, Collins wrote: “As I recall, I spoke about
the remarkable role he played in my own education. He was my godfather,
and no godfather ever took that role more seriously—he gave me many
precious gifts as I was growing up, all of which had artistic, religious, or
intellectual significance and led to deep conversations. . . . I also remember
him assisting me with a particularly thorny calculus problem, and marveling that this sophisticated professor of humanities was also awfully
good at integrating by parts. Such was the St. John’s way!"
42. Collins, The Language of God, 6.
43. Ibid., 4. See also 272: “The current battles between the scientific and
spiritual worldviews need to be resolved.”
44. Ibid., 84.
45. Ibid., 3.
46. Ibid., 6.
47. Ibid., 228.
48. Ibid., 229.
49. Ibid., 225.
50. Ibid., 220.
51. Ibid., 6.
52. Ibid., 88.
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53. Ibid., 221.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 223.
56. Ibid., 118.
57. Ibid., 227. See also 271: “Given the uncertain ethical grounding of
the postmodernist era, which discounts the existence of absolute truth,
ethics grounded on specific principles of faith can provide a certain foundational strength that may otherwise be lacking.”
58. Ibid., 221.
59. Ibid., 228.
60. Ibid., 210.
61. Ibid., 234.
62. Ibid., 233. For readers wanting to pursue a comprehensive critique of
Collins’s book, see George Cunningham, Decoding the Language of God:
Can a Scientist Really be a Believer? A Geneticist Responds to Francis
Collins (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2010). For readers
wanting to pursue further the topic of Truth, see the recent collections of
essays in Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmonds, eds. Truth, Oxford
Readings in Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), and
Kurt Pritzl, ed., Truth: Studies of a Robust Presence, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010).
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The Question of Questions
Michael W. Grenke
What is involved in really asking a question? What is the
most important question a human being can ask? Tonight I
want to try to consider, along with you, these two questions
in the challenging and connected manner in which Martin
Heidegger presents them, especially in his Introduction to
Metaphysics.
If we try to rise to Heidegger’s challenge of really asking
these questions, then we face serious obstacles in our ordinary modes of living, thinking, and talking to one another.
Heidegger characterizes us “modern” human beings as people “who scarcely respond, and then for the most part emptily,
to the simplicity of the essential” (IM, 98).* But is not the essential that which is sought in all real questioning? And can
a minimal and mostly empty response be what is appropriate
to the object of real questioning? Later in his argument, when
considering the standards of discourse exemplified in contemporary books and newspapers, Heidegger laments “the
paralysis of all passion for questioning that has long been
with us. The consequence of this paralysis is that all standards
and perspectives have been confused and that most men have
ceased to know where and between what the crucial decisions
must be made” (IM, 143).
Lest we too readily exempt ourselves and our community
*Key to citations: IM = Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). BT = Being and Time,
trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: HarperCollins,
2008). Page numbers for Being and Time are keyed to the seventh German
edition, noted marginally in the English translation. In some instances
translations have been altered slightly for the sake of accuracy.
Michael Grenke is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. This lecture was originally delivered on 7 November 2008.
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from these criticisms as though they are leveled only at “modern” men, not those who study great books, and only at the
discourse found in books and periodicals that we do not allow
ourselves to read here, we should consider what Heidegger
calls “idle talk” in Being and Time. “Idle talk” is discourse
that seeks to tone down the stakes of conversation and to keep
the responses of the interlocutors within well-prescribed and
familiar bounds. Instead of containing and conveying a “primary relationship-of-Being towards the being talked about”
(BT, 168)—a relationship of the kind that might deeply excite
or disturb the speaker and the listener, a relationship that
might move a human being as much as the thing in question
can move a human being—idle talk just passes words around
in the fashion of gossip. The worst part is that it pretends to
be real discourse, and in this pretending it hinders attempts
at real discourse. Surrounded by such discourse that says very
little while pretending to say all there is to say, the average
understanding “will never be able to decide what has been
drawn from primordial sources with a struggle and how much
is just gossip” (BT, 169). Heidegger finds this idle talk that
belongs to everyday average human life to be almost everywhere and to dominate almost everything about human discourse, both spoken and written. We should not pat ourselves
too readily or casually on the back and blindly assume that
this idle discourse goes on only outside our community or
only on the weekends and never in our classrooms. Idle talk
“discourages any new questioning and any confrontation”
(BT, 169). But might not all real questioning be, in a way,
new and confrontational?
In order to try to get free from the realm of idle talk and
really to ask questions, to question questions—die Fragen
fragen, as the Germans say—we must try to situate ourselves
in a realm of thinking and discourse that is not saturated with
the sense, the assurance, that whatever is to come next will
be comfortably like that which has already come before. Per-
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haps we can start to get a feeling for this in a slight observation of a feature of the text of the Introduction to Metaphysics
that might tend to frustrate us with Heidegger, or even make
us distrust him. The book asks a question in its very first paragraph, and it makes explicit the difficulty of really asking that
question. A large portion of the discussion on the pages that
follow is devoted to a discussion of that question and its asking. Nine pages in, Heidegger proclaims, “We have not even
begun to ask the question itself” (IM, 9). If the reader’s patience has not worn thin after nine pages, it may be getting
frayed at twenty-nine pages in, where Heidegger says, “We
still know far too little about the process of questioning, and
what we do know is far too crude” (IM, 29). In a way, the
saga of really asking a question goes on throughout the entire
book, all the way to the very end, where Heidegger suggests
that real questioning may be a matter that takes a whole lifetime.
I am not calling attention to these matters to complain
about the way Heidegger seems to avoid or defer satisfaction
of the desires he has aroused in his readers. The more generous and fruitful way to look at this, regardless of its accuracy,
is to think that Heidegger is really making a high demand
upon himself and upon his intended readers. He is not settling
back into the easy and comforting conviction that he already
knows how really to ask questions and that he already is asking real questions.
What would it take for us to follow Heidegger’s example?
In thinking about Heidegger’s challenge, I have been trying
to ask myself whether I have ever been involved in real questioning myself, and I have been continually struck by how
hard it is to make that a real question. Can you ask yourself
in a real way, in way that does not presuppose an answer, in
a way that does not let you shrug off, turn away from, or deny
the question, whether in our classes—and especially in those
most avowedly devoted to questions, our seminars—whether
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any real questioning has been going on? I do not ask this
question to satisfy any savage and lingering resentment you
might have over a seminar gone wrong; rather I mean it to
stir concern in you about your own questioning.
The Question of Questions
Now that you are stirred up, let us turn to a more detailed
look at what Heidegger has to say about questions. A brief
glimpse at Being and Time might help lay some groundwork.
In the second section of the book, Heidegger begins the task
of trying to “formulate”—or rather reformulate—the question
of Being, the question that is the leading question of the
whole work, and the question that Heidegger presents as the
question that is first in rank. The reformulation of the question is undertaken explicitly to “revive” the question, to make
it a matter of living concern again. In order to reformulate
this question, Heidegger tries to “explain briefly what belongs to any question whatsoever” (BT, 5). The following
scheme of three elements emerges: “Any question, as a question about something, has that which is asked about. But
every question about something is somehow a questioning of
something. So in addition to what is asked about, a question
has that which is interrogated. . . . Furthermore, in what is
asked about there lies also that which is to be found out by
the asking; this is what is really intended: with this the question reaches its goal” (BT, 5).
In fitting his leading question into the scheme that belongs to any questioning, Heidegger announces that Being is
what is asked about, even though Being is not a being, which
is to say Being is not a thing like other things. He then announces that the meaning of Being is what is to be found out
by the asking. And then he turns to the middle element of his
scheme—“that which is interrogated.” Since Being is the
Being of beings, the interrogation is to be directed at beings
themselves. Perhaps because many beings would seem to be
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rather unresponsive to interrogation, Heidegger notes, “When
we come to what is to be interrogated, the question of Being
requires that the right way of access to beings shall have been
obtained and secured in advance” (BT, 6). Method matters,
even if the motto of Heidegger’s phenomenal approach is “To
the beings themselves!” “Thus to work out the question of
Being adequately, we must make one being—the questioning
one—transparent in its own Being. The very asking of this
question is one being’s mode of Being; and as such it gets its
essential character from what is inquired about—namely,
Being. This being which each of us himself is and which includes questioning as one of the possibilities of its Being, we
shall denote by the term ‘Dasein’” (BT, 7). Dasein, “Being
there,” is Heidegger’s technical term for the kind of being
that is human being. Because human beings have a special
relationship to Being, because they are beings that ask the
question of Being, the rest of Heidegger’s Being and Time
occupies itself with an analysis of the structure of human
being.
In the Author’s Preface to the seventh edition, Heidegger
admits to the unfinished character of Being and Time. He admits that a promised second “half” of the book has not been
delivered, and he says that the first half, which is the book as
he has left it to us, would have to be newly presented if the
question were to be carried further. Heidegger then suggests
that in order to shed some light on this the reader should look
at his Introduction to Metaphysics, published in the same year
as the seventh edition of Being and Time.
The beginning of Introduction to Metaphysics focuses attention on the fundamental question of metaphysics and on
the difficulty of asking it.
Individuals and peoples ask a good many questions in the
course of their historical passage through time. They examine, explore, and test a good many things before they
run into the question “Why are there beings rather than
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nothing?” Many men never encounter this question, if by
encounter we mean not merely to hear and read about it
as an interrogative formulation but to ask the question,
that it, to bring it about, to raise it, to feel oneself in the
state of being compelled to this question (IM, 1).
Although this is a somewhat different question than the
leading question of Being and Time (IM,18-19), both are put
forth as the fundamental question and as the question that is
first in rank. Also because Heidegger asserts that the second
clause of the question, “rather than nothing,” is not superfluous, and because it reveals that the scope of the question aims
at the ground of beings (IM, 24), it is very close to being the
question of being. Does what Heidegger says here at the beginning of Introduction to Metaphysics serve, then, to help
us understand what he means in Being and Time when he
calls human being the being that asks the question of Being?
Also, what does this initial statement tell us about really
asking this (or any) question? What does it mean to “encounter” a question if it does not mean to hear it or to read
it? Heidegger’s gloss here on asking the question is that it involves bringing a question about, placing or “putting” the
question, and finding oneself in the state of feeling the necessity for the question. This suggests that the asking of a
question is very different from becoming aware of a question
or from “finding” a question. The relationship of the questioner to the question is more intimate and more essential than
the relationship of an uninterested, passive observer to an observed object. With respect to the fundamental question, Heidegger goes so far as to say “if this question is asked and if
the act of questioning is really carried out, the content and
the object of the question react inevitably on the act of questioning” (IM, 5). What is this reacting? Is it similar to what
Heidegger means when he says in Being and Time that the
being that asks the question of Being “gets its essential character from what is inquired about—namely Being”? Heideg-
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ger extends this thought here in Introduction to Metaphysics
in the context of its fundamental question—“this question
‘why,’ this question as to the being as such in its entirety, goes
beyond mere playing with words, provided we possess sufficient intellectual energy to make the question actually recoil
into its ‘why,’ for it will not do so of its own accord” (IM, 5).
Really asking this question means making the question
recoil into its why. This questioning of the question searches
for the grounds of the questioning itself. It asks “Why the
why?” And in so doing, it turns its attention toward the being
that questions. This “privileged question ‘why’ has its ground
in a leap through which man thrusts away all the previous security, whether real or imagined, of his life. The question is
asked only in this leap; it is the leap; without it there is no
asking” (IM, 6).
If this leap, without which there is no asking, involves
thrusting away all the previous security of life, it may be objectively impossible to determine when such a leap has been
made. “Let us be clear about this from the start: it can never
be objectively determined whether anyone, whether we, really ask this question, that is, whether we make the leap, or
never get beyond a verbal formula” (IM, 6). This might seem
to mean we can never know whether a question has really
been asked. But the sentence that follows this statement
seems to point to history as the obstacle to our objective determination. “In a historical setting that does not recognize
questioning as a fundamental human force, the question immediately loses its rank” (IM, 6).
The paragraph that immediately follows would seem to
be an example of such a historical setting. In that paragraph,
Heidegger considers those who hold the Bible to be divine
revelation and truth. For those believers, there would seem
to be a clear and immediate answer to the question “Why are
there beings rather than nothing?” They have this answer before the question is even asked. Heidegger says that such be-
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lievers cannot really ask the question. “One who holds to
such faith can in a way participate in the asking of our question, but he cannot really question without ceasing to be a believer and taking all the consequences of such a step. He will
only be able to act ‘as if’” (IM, 7). Thus Heidegger seems to
point to a situation in which he feels confident that the question is not really being asked. This is because he thinks he
can recognize a “historical setting” where questioning is not
recognized “as a fundamental human force”; rather, “[f]rom
the standpoint of faith our question is ‘foolishness’” (IM, 7).
Heidegger goes on to identify philosophy with this foolishness. He then says “Really to ask the question signifies a
daring attempt to fathom this unfathomable question by disclosing what it summons us to ask, to push our questioning
to the very end. Where such an attempt occurs there is philosophy” (IM, 8). Is Heidegger going so far as to suggest that
where there is no philosophy there is no real questioning?
Would that in turn lead so far as to suggest that where there
is faith there is no real questioning of anything? Does the
need for philosophy constitute some part of the obstacle to
the objective determination of whether a leap into real questioning has been made? For the historical is not the objective,
the historical is subject to “its own law,” not the universal
law. And Heidegger conceives of philosophy as historical, so
that “there is no way of determining once and for all what the
task of philosophy is” (IM, 8).
What I have presented so far has followed, with some
principle of selection, what Heidegger has to say about really
asking questions in the beginning pages of Introduction to
Metaphysics, up to page nine. You will recall that on page
nine Heidegger announces that, “We have not even begun to
ask the question itself.” What still stands in the way of our
really asking a question (or the question)? What needs to be
seen, done, or suffered?
The question of questions dies down in the text for about
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ten pages. Then it is resumed explicitly with a series of statements that might seem unnecessary. First Heidegger tells us
that “questions and particularly fundamental questions do not
just occur like stones and water. Questions are not found
ready-made like shoes and clothes and books. Questions are,
and are only as they are actually asked” (IM, 19). Heidegger
seems to fear that we might not yet be thinking properly about
questions. He feels the need to tell us questions are, that is
they have some kind of being. And he feels the need to point
out that questions do not have the kind of being that we might
tend to ascribe either to natural beings (stones, water) or to
artificial beings (shoes, clothes, books). This difference is
amplified when Heidegger claims, “A leading into the asking
of the fundamental questions is consequently not a going to
something that lies and stands somewhere; no, this leading
must first awaken and create the questioning” (IM, 19).
What kind of being, then, should we think that questions
have? Heidegger seems to think we might be tempted to think
that questions have the kind of being belonging to a particular
kind of sentence—the kind that ends with a question mark.
So next he tells the reader, “To state the interrogative sentence, even in a tone of questioning, is not yet to question.
To repeat the interrogative sentence several times in succession does not necessarily breathe life into the questioning”
(IM, 20). Is the task, then, to breathe life into our interrogative
statements? What can that mean? Heidegger makes it clear
that this is not a rhetorical move that can be accomplished
through repetition or through variation in tone.
Heidegger next considers the experience of listening to a
question. He points to a way in which one could mistake a
question to be a mere assertion about the questioning state of
the speaker. But if that is how you hear my question, then
“you do not join me in questioning, nor do you question yourself. No sign of a questioning attitude or state of mind is
awakened.” This consideration of what is involved in hearing
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a question as a question seems to reveal for Heidegger the
questioning state of mind. “Such a state of mind consists in
willing to know. Willing—that is no mere wishing or striving.
Those who wish to know also seem to question, but they do
not go beyond the stating of questions; they stop precisely
where the question begins. To question is to will to know. He
who wills, he who puts his whole existence into a will, is resolved. Resolve does not shift about; it does not shirk, but
acts from out of the moment and never stops” (IM, 20-21).
So a question is not a sentence uttered in the right tone,
but a sentence uttered with the right (rather extreme) attitude
or state of mind? It turns out that Heidegger also cuts off this
notion that a question is a certain kind of sentence uttered
with a certain kind of attitude. “So much the less will the interrogative sentence, even if it is uttered in an authentically
questioning tone and even if the listener joins in the questioning, exhaustively reproduce the question. The questioning,
which is still enclosed, wrapped up in words, remains to be
unwrapped. The questioning attitude must clarify and secure
itself in the process, it must be consolidated by training” (IM,
22).
In the case just described, the questioning done by the
speaker and shared in by the listener is not to be found wholly
in the sentence uttered or in the tone in which it is uttered.
The questioning would seem separable from the words; perhaps the questioning could be carried out with other words,
or even without words. The questioning attitude seems not to
be a thing of the moment, nor something finished and static.
This attitude needs clarifying, securing, and consolidating.
By what process or training might a questioning attitude be
properly developed? That attitude is characterized by a resolved will to know. What that will aims to know is the truth.
Under Heidegger’s analysis of the meaning of the word truth,
truth is “unconcealment.” This is to be distinguished from
thinking of truth as correspondence. And late in Introduction
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to Metaphysics, Heidegger asserts, “Unconcealment occurs
only when it is achieved by work” (IM, 191). Heidegger gives
many examples of intellectual work on the intervening
pages—especially in his laborious excursions into the primordial etymologies of important terms in Western thought—
and one might profitably attempt to consider much of what
he does in Introduction to Metaphysics as an attempt to begin
training a questioning attitude.
The Question of Questions
Let us turn now to look at Heidegger’s claims as to which
question is the most important question a human being can
ask. “Important” is my term. Sometimes Heidegger says
“fundamental,” or “first,” or “first in rank,” or “worthiest.”
We can try to discipline our conception of the most important
question by keeping in mind our observations regarding really asking a question—that questioning extends beyond specific verbal formulae and that a questioning attitude requires
work and training,. The most important question is not an object sitting somewhere. I cannot sell you a map with which
you can locate it in order to wonder at it. The most important
question is not a sentence written on a page in some rare
book, available to be read by anyone who can afford to purchase the book. I give you the most important question now
as Heidegger expresses it as a sentence. But to hear it properly, we must not get too caught up in its wrappings.
“The question ‘Why are there beings rather than nothing?’ is first in rank for us first because it is the most farreaching, second because it is the deepest, and finally because
it is the most fundamental of all questions” (IM, 2). Heidegger explains that this question is the most far reaching, the
widest, because it “confines itself to no particular being” and
thus “takes in everything” (IM, 2). The question is the deepest
because it “aims at the ground of what is insofar as it is” (IM,
3). It “penetrates to the ‘underlying’ realms and indeed to the
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very last of them, to the limit” (IM, 3). This question is the
most fundamental question because “it breaks open the
ground for all authentic questions and thus is at the origin of
all of them” (IM, 6).
From the standpoint of really asking questions, the asking
of this question stands out as special. “For through this questioning the being as a whole is for the first time opened up as
such with a view to its possible ground, and in the act of questioning it is kept open” (IM, 4). This statement about the fundamentality of this question—that it opens up a ground of
possibility and keeps that possibility open—might also be
taken as a statement about what it means really to ask this
question. Does really asking a question always involve asking
fundamental questions? This might explain Heidegger’s big
claim that “Our question is the question of all authentic questions, i.e., of all self-questioning questions, and whether consciously or not it is necessarily implicit in every question. No
questioning and accordingly no single scientific ‘problem’
can be fully intelligible if it does not include, i.e., ask, the
question of all questions” (IM, 6).
Pretty quickly, however, Heidegger finds an obstacle to
his pursuit of this question of questions and to his claims
about its importance. Heidegger finds he must confront a long
intellectual tradition that has found Being “unfindable, almost
like nothing” (IM, 35). Heidegger cites Nietzsche’s claim that
the highest concepts, “like Being,” are the “last cloudy smoke
of evaporating reality” (IM, 35). as both the final expression
and the culmination of this tradition, which holds being to be
an error, a mere word, empty of meaning. Heidegger feels the
need to confront Nietzsche, and through him the tradition,
because if Nietzsche is right, “the only possible consequence
would be to abandon the question” (IM, 35).
In order to respond to Nietzsche’s claim, Heidegger sets
out to show that the word being does have meaning. Heidegger gives a series of examples of ways we mean being when
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we use the word “is.”
We say “God is.” “The earth is.” “The lecture is in the
auditorium.” This man is from Swabia.” “The cup is of
silver.” “The peasant is to the fields.” “The book is
mine.” “He is of death.” “Red is the port side.” “There is
famine in Russia.” “The enemy is in retreat.” “The plant
louse is in the vineyard.” “The dog is in the garden.”
“Over all the summits, there is rest” (IM, 89).
Heidegger observes that in each of these cases the word “is”
is meant differently.
“God is”; i.e., he is really present. “The earth is”; i.e., we
experience and believe it to be permanently there. “The
lecture is in the auditorium”; i.e., it takes place. “The
man is from Swabia”; i.e., he comes from there. “The cup
is of silver”; i.e., it is made of . . . . “The peasant is to the
fields”; he has gone to the fields and is staying there.
“The book is mine”; i.e., it belongs to me. “He is of
death”; i.e., he succumbed to death. “Red is the port
side”; i.e., it stands for port. “The dog is in the garden”;
i.e., he is running around in the garden. “Over all the
summits, there is rest”; that is to say??? (IM, 90).
(There is no account given of the famine, the retreat, or
the infestation.) Heidegger gets a bit confused by the last example and tries out a number of meanings, without being satisfied by any of his own suggestions. This occurs perhaps,
Heidegger suggests, because the last example is a bit of poetry written by Goethe in pencil on a window frame. Be that
as it may, what Heidegger claims to have shown with these
examples is that “the ‘is’ in our discourse manifests a rich diversity of meanings” (IM, 91). This rich diversity is possible
because the word “being” is empty in the sense of being indeterminate enough to encompass all the various meanings
Heidegger presents in all his examples. But the word “being”
is not empty in the sense that what is meant in each particular
example is quite determinate and distinct (except perhaps for
the case of the quotation from Goethe). So Heidegger claims
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this evidence proves that being is not an empty word. “If
being thus represents what is most unique and determinate,
the word “being” cannot be empty . . . . There is no such thing
as an empty word; at most a word is worn out, though still
filled with meaning” (IM, 79).
In replying to Nietzsche, Heidegger has been moved to
consider the kind of understanding of being to which human
beings already and always lay claim whenever they use the
word “is,” or any of its other inflectional forms. Heidegger
finds in this usage a word that is at once unique and determinate and indeterminate. Might this revelation about the ways
in which the word “being” is meant not suggest that being is
a realm uniquely suited to a questioning unwrapped from
words and a questioning attitude in need of development?
Questioning is the authentic and proper and only way of
appreciating that which, by its supreme rank, holds our
existence in its power. Hence no question is more worthy
of being asked than the question of our understanding of
being, unless it be the question of being itself. The more
authentic our questioning, the more immediately and
steadfastly we dwell on the most questionable of all questions—namely, the circumstance that we understand
being quite indefinitely and yet with supreme definiteness (IM, 83).
Is there a kind of fit between the mode of being that belongs
to human beings, the questioning beings, and the determinate
indeterminacy with which being manifests itself? Is the
human relation to being more than the merely “happy” accident that we happen to ask the question of being? As the questioning being, is human being a fit mirror for being itself? I
find it suggestive that Heidegger notes in passing in Being
and Time that “the idea of Being in general is just as far from
being ‘simple’ as is the Being of Dasein” (BT, 196).
Human Being and Questioning
I feel like I have been holding my usual critical judgment in
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abeyance in much of what I have said so far. I have done this
in order to try to think Heidegger’s thought as genuinely as I
can on its own terms. That entails the abandonment of much
of our traditional sense of evidentiary criteria. For Heidegger
claims to be thinking about and writing about matters that are
more fundamental than our traditional notions of truth as correspondence, and more fundamental than our idea of argument as a progression of inferences that follow one another
according to the rules of logic. As Heidegger suggests, “Perhaps the whole body of logic . . . is grounded in a very definite answer to the question about the being” (IM, 25).
But still, isn’t Heidegger wrong about Nietzsche? Isn’t
he misstating the main point of Nietzsche’s claim? When Heidegger cites Nietzsche as saying that the highest concepts,
including Being, are “last cloudy smoke of evaporating reality,” Heidegger is referring to a passage in section 4 of Twilight of the Idols, called “Reason in Philosophy.” Being is not
mentioned in section 4, but is discussed in the following section as a concept that is derived by means of abstraction from
the concept of the I involved in willing. In section 4, the highest concepts are not said to be empty, rather they are said to
be emptiest. Therefore Heidegger’s overcoming of Nietzsche
by means of proving that being is not an empty word is no
real overcoming at all. Moreover, Heidegger’s treatment of
this passage seems to be silent about Nietzsche’s main point,
which is that the so-called highest concepts are actually the
last concepts, not the first; they are derivative concepts, not
first things. To address Nietzsche’s real point, Heidegger
would have to try to show that Being is available to human
beings in some primary—I am tempted to say “direct”—experience and that this primary experience contains the kind
of rich diversity that, as Heidegger demonstrates, belongs to
our use of the word “being.” I do not think Heidegger tries
to show this by means of argument, although at times he
seems to claim that it is the case; it may be, in fact, that Hei-
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degger would claim that such a primary experience of being
could never be shown in argument.
How would Heidegger respond, then, to the claim that he
got Nietzsche wrong? One possible type of response might
be found in a passage where Heidegger raises the complaint
on the reader’s behalf that Heidegger himself is misreading
Parmenides. Heidegger admits that “our interpretation of the
fragment must appear to be an arbitrary distortion. We are accused of reading into it things that an ‘exact interpretation’
can never determine. This is true” (IM, 176). Heidegger does
not leave the matter at a rather matter-of-fact “Very well, you
caught me.” Instead, he turns the complaint about his own
inaccuracy, his own making things up, into an opportunity to
transform the criteria of truth. He asks, “Which interpretation
is the true one, the one which simply takes over a perspective
into which it has fallen, because this perspective, this line of
sight, presents itself as familiar and self-evident; or the interpretation which questions the customary perspective from top
to bottom, because conceivably—and indeed actually—this
line of sight does not lead to what is in need of being seen”
(IM, 176).
Whether we should find this a slippery and discreditable
evasion of intellectual integrity, or an example of a very serious way to maintain intellectual integrity, or something in
between, I shall leave for you to ponder. Rather than trying
to resolve the matter, I will instead point out the way in which
Heidegger’s response to the question of the intrusion of his
own creativity into his interpretations of the texts connects
to the way in which he thinks about really asking questions.
Immediately after suggesting that his creative interpretation
has a right to be considered “true” interpretation, Heidegger
directly connects true interpretation to questioning—“to give
up the familiar and go back to an interpretation that is also a
questioning is a leap. In order to leap one has to take a proper
run. It is the run that decides everything; for it implies that
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we ourselves really ask the questions and in these questions
first create perspectives” (IM, 176).
But how does really asking questions “create” and how
are “we ourselves” really involved? In Being and Time, Heidegger presents the kind of being of human beings that he
calls Dasein as always having its own “there.” One might say
crudely that a human being is its own “there” and makes its
own “there” but also makes a “there” for other kinds of beings. Heidegger suggests in one early passage of Introduction
to Metaphysics that the way a human being both is itself and
is a “there” is transformed by real questioning. “In this questioning we seem to belong entirely to ourselves. Yet it is this
questioning that moves us into the open, provided that in
questioning it transform itself (which all true questioning
does), and cast a new space over everything and into everything” (IM, 29-30). The human “there” is not some kind of
cloud of spatiality and temporality that follows each of us
around as we go about our day, like the personal clouds of
gloom one sometimes sees in comic strips. Rather, Heidegger
presents the human “there” as the projection of a human
being’s own self onto the given possibilities of a particular
historical circumstance. Usually this projection of self is not
a human being’s genuine self, but the projection of a universal, non-individuated self that belongs to the kind of average
way of being human that gives rise to “idle talk.” But it looks
like Heidegger wants to suggest that when questions are really asked, the questioner projects a self that is really his own.
The projection of one’s own self involves a more intense
set of possibilities of relating to beings than the projection of
just “someone.” Heidegger locates the most intense human
relations to beings in what he calls the primordial. In a way,
Heidegger seems to use the intensity of human affective relations to beings as the measuring stick of the primordiality
of those relations. Intensity seems to become the measure of
the truth. This would seem to lead philosophers to seek the
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intensity found in the primordial. Thus Heidegger claims,
“The ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force
of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself” (BT, 220). Note here that Heidegger does not say
philosophers try to “find” the force of the most elemental
words, rather they try to “preserve” that force.
Why is philosophy, which, as we saw earlier, is associated
with really asking questions, also burdened with the task of
preserving the force of primordial modes of expression? For
Heidegger, it is because every human experience, however
seemingly inactive, is some kind of human doing, that is, a
projection onto a possibility. It is possibilities that emerge
into the truth as unconcealment; but whatever force or power
is available in such possibilities is only available in the form
of some human action, and this very action depletes the possibility’s original intensity. “A beginning can never directly
preserve its full momentum; the only possible way to preserve its force is to repeat, to draw once again more deeply
than ever from its source. And it is only by thoughtful repetition that we can deal appropriately with the beginning and
the breakdown of truth” (IM, 191). The repetition of a possibility is always an act, and in order to access again the original affective intensity of that possibility, the “repetition”
cannot be exactly the same act. Remember, real questioning
is not to be achieved through the repetition of an interrogative
sentence.
This idea about the nature of the repetition of possibilities, then, is the defense of Heidegger’s creative, “inexact”
interpretations. This idea also seems to guide his sense of
what is involved in really asking questions. “Men can retain
basic truths of such magnitude only by raising them constantly to a still more original unfolding; not merely by applying them and invoking their authority” (IM, 145). It is
perhaps a corollary of this idea that “in principle, philosoph-
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ical questions are never dealt with as though we might someday cast them aside” (IM, 42).
These considerations may also help us to understand the
rather cryptic statement that very nearly ends Introduction to
Metaphysics: “To know how to question means to know how
to wait, even a whole lifetime” (IM, 206). Waiting is not just
sitting there. Waiting has to be a dynamic passivity. Waiting
must mean a creative holding-open of the humanly affective
and ontologically revelatory potential in possibilities. Questioning, then, becomes repeating those possibilities again and
again, each time differently.
*****
Whatever we might now think of Heidegger as I have presented him—whether we think he is an untrustworthy interpreter, whether we think he fails to give us sufficient
argumentative proof, whether we think he lacks sobriety and
has a dangerous proclivity toward the extreme, whether we
think what we know about his biography says all that need
be said—must we not agree that his thinking about questions
helps us to think about questions? If we can agree on that
much, then I want to pose one last question: Does what Heidegger shows us make us want really to ask questions?
We do not have to ask the fundamental question. We do
not have to ask any question in a real manner. Nothing urgent
or practical pushes us to it. “To be sure, the things in the
world, the beings, are in no way affected by our asking of the
question ‘Why are there beings rather than nothing?’ Whether
we ask it or not, the planets move in their orbits, the sap of
life flows through plant and animal” (IM, 5). But if the other
things that we always find alongside us in the world do not
make us want really to ask questions, what does? Has Heidegger managed somehow to convey to us a questioning attitude? And if we do find ourselves wanting really to ask
questions, can we ask ourselves why we want to do so?
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135
The Rehabilitation of
Spiritedness
Gary Borjesson, Willing Dogs and Reluctant Masters: On Friendship and Dogs. Philadelphia: Paul
Dry Books, 2012, x + 251 pages. $14.95.
Book Review by Eva Brann
This book is a delight to read and a profit to ponder. It is a dog
story, a human story, a lesson book (for dog owners), and a philosophical meditation (for anyone). It is learned, but lightly so, and
it has a powerful thesis gently imparted.
I loved it, but my credentials for reviewing it are even better
than that: I don't like dogs. They slobber, shed and speak not a word
of English—none of which facts is denied in this account of friendship between dogs and humans. (In my defense: among the alogoi,
the wordless, I do feel friendly toward dolphins, who luckily live
in another element, and toward babies, who are both incarnations
of potential rationality and cute—for which the animal ethologist’s
term is “care-soliciting.”) Moreover, I have no idea whether Gary
Borjesson’s fundamental claim is true: that real—not in-a-mannerof-speaking—friendship between dog and human is possible. My
old friend Ray Coppinger, a dog evolutionist and breeder (he found
the Jack Russell terrier that inhabits the Assistant Dean’s office at
St. John’s College in Annapolis), whose expertise figures in this
book, thinks otherwise. He once said to me that attributing friendly
feelings rather than self-serving instincts to dogs is pure “anthropomorphizing.” So I’m starting out severely objective in several
respects.
Yet I’m captivated by the author’s account of his life with the
two dogs who are the principals in this story, Kestra and Aktis. His
claims rest on acutely attuned and prolonged observation of his
own dogs, and, peripherally, other people’s dogs. This affectionate
attention is at once trust- and doubt-inspiring. It makes an enchant-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ing story, but it might also be self-confirming, producing the illusions of mutual love. For example, his dogs often smile at him,
though I’ve read that animals with fangs don’t smile, that the evolutionary origin of the human smile is the wolfish snarl. So I’m
one of the author’s acknowledged dog-skeptics—or rather, one half
of me is. With the other half, I’m totally persuaded that the friendship view is the better hypothesis for dog, man, and world.
For not only is it a more coherent and a more friendly universe
if the friendship hypothesis proves out, but it is also a more interesting world, since this position rests on postulates that modulate
some current reductionist dogmas concerning beast and man, both
in themselves and together. There are thought-provoking lessons
here both for intra-species and inter-species relations.
Gary Borjesson’s philosophical reading continually underwrites and illuminates his meditations. Sometimes it’s almost as if
this dog-and-man tale came into its own as a corroboration of Aristotle’s, Plato’s, and Hegel’s insights into animate nature—especially Aristotle’s. Thus the epigraph to the second chapter, on the
spirit of friendship, is part of a passage taken from Aristotle’s Politics. Let me quote the whole, which I’ve always found puzzling,
but which becomes very satisfactorily clear in this book:
Spirit (thumos) is what makes friendliness. For it is the very
power of the soul by which we feel friendship. And here’s the
sign: Spirit, when it feels slighted, is roused more against intimates and friends than strangers (Politics, 1327b40-41).
And Aristotle mentions the Guardians, Plato’s warriors in the
Republic, who are friendly to those they know and savage to those
they don’t know, and whose nature Socrates compares—here’s
serendipity!—to that of a noble young dog (Republic, 375a-376b).
Spirit, spiritedness, passionate temperament, as a middle and
mediating aspect of the human soul, is a Socratic discovery. Sometimes it is obedient to reason, sometimes it in turn masters lust;
these latter are respectively the highest and lowest parts of our soul.
Why should spirit be the enabler of friendship? It is a working
postulate of Borjesson’s book that Aristotle is simply right: spiritedness is the condition of friendship. The argumentation is of the
�REVIEW | BRANN
137
best sort, the sort that starts in a variety of quarters, but from which
all roads lead to Athens: The high road, however, connecting spiritedness to friendship, is the desire to be recognized, attended to,
praised, and the corresponding recoil is the shame of being misconstrued, ignored, or disrespected.
By the intra-species hypothesis, dogs have spirit; it might even
count as an oblique proof that some dogs have a lot and others but
little, and even the latter have a sense of injury. One of the pleasures of this book is the interweaving of dog anecdotes and human
reflection, and the principal subjects of the often poignant stories—
never shaggy—are Gary Borjesson’s own two dogs. Kestra is
sweet-tempered, a little passive, and, for all her lovableness, a little
unkeen, but even she has an acute sense of her trust in her master
being betrayed.
If, then, people and dogs have common ground of a higher
order than animal needs, it must be in the territory of the spirit. For
the author is far from committing the philosophical solecism of attributing reason to dogs. Spirit, however, is, just as Aristotle says,
where friendship is at home. Now among us humans, this capability of the spirit is both an accomplishment and a work in progress,
and so it is if one of the friends is a dog.
This book is full of observations about friendship—discerningly borrowed and observantly original; it is a credible descendant
of those wonders of human perspicacity, Aristotle’s books on
friendship (Nicomachean Ethics, Books 8-9). One of those borrowed observations is that “the point of being friends is to charm
each other”; I love that, because I once long ago phrased it similarly to myself, sailing the Aegean with a friend: “The motor of
friendship is mutual delight.” It doesn’t have Aristotle’s gravity,
but he would not repudiate it. Applied to dogs, it does, however,
imply that what Aristotle considers the highest kind of friendship—
that of beings of intellect in increasingly deep, mutually satisfying
conversation—is not a necessary option (and indeed not available)
to a dog/man pair of friends.
And that indefeasible fact means that friendship as a work in
progress takes on a very different shape for this inter-species pair.
Here the work of friendship is obedience training, where man is
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
master, dog subject! As the title of the book declares, dogs, the
good ones, are willing. Not that they are called good because they
like to obey, but they obey because they are good. They have in
them that which can listen—“obey,” from Latin ob-audire, means
“to listen and really to hear.” That is just what Socrates thinks of
spiritedness: It is pride able to listen to reason. They are, one might
say, a-rationally rational. They understand, and so they accept the
superiority of their masters.
Here is where Gary Borjesson’s book becomes topical and
controversial. The second part of his title is “Reluctant Masters.”
He analyzes out this component of our modernity: the reluctance
to act with authority, to accept the charge of mastery, be it in childrearing or dog-training. The result of this abashment—often moralizing—in the face of asserting the control of superior reason is
spoilage: spoiled children, ruined dogs. The book is full of funny
and sad examples; some are reports of outrage expressed by spectators watching the book’s author at work being a master.
One result of the failure of rational mastery is loss of dignity
on both sides, and with it, of equality. For, at its best, friendship is
mutual and so a relation of peers. Some of the most poignant passages of the book are about mutuality, the balanced equality of dog
and human in the territory of spiritedness. Indeed, in the controlled
competition that characterizes the play between these two spirited
animals from different species, the dog often wins—to the man’s
delight. The result of mastery accepted is an equality at once properly delimited and invaluable.
Aristotle, one last time, says that happiness is the soul fulfillingly at work in accordance with its own goodness (Nichomachean
Ethics, 1098a13-16). The willing master of this book really means
to train his dog to happiness. He (or she—the author’s favorite dog
trainer is Vicki Hearne) teaches the young dog to obey, first as parents habituate a child, by gentle and consistent compulsion, even
fear. That training produces the inner control that in us is called
self-determination, freedom. Within these bounds the dog has
scope to fulfill his dog-nature as a competitive pursuer and predator
of minor wild life and as a cooperative playfellow of humans and
�REVIEW | BRANN
139
dogs. The descriptions of these play-episodes induce sympathetic
joy.
I’ll now take it on faith, the writer’s faith, that dogs, domesticated wolves, may be happy under—no, may be made happy by—
human mastery. But that humans, uncircumventably the masters
of domesticated nature, can be exhilaratingly happy, and also better, more thoughtful, and more just in their friendly companionship
with dogs—that’s proven beyond doubt by this lovely book.
�
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Sachs, Joe
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Williamson, Robert B.
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Sachs, Joe
Appleby, David
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 55.1 (Fall 2013)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Deziree Arnaiz
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Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s
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ISSN 0277-4720
Desktop Publishing
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
Tocqueville’s Worst Fears Realized? The Political Implications
of Ralph Waldo Emerson’sTranscendental Spiritualism .............1
Bryan-Paul Frost
“At the Very Center of the Plenitude”: Goethe’s Grand Attempt
to Overcome the 18th Century; or, How Freshman Laboratory
Saved Goethe From the General Sickness of his Age ..................40
David Levine
Special Section: Justice
Editor’s Note .....................................................................................70
The Actual Intention of Plato’s Dialogues on
on Justice and Statesmanship .......................................................71
Eva Brann
Reflections on Justice in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov..............................................................80
Chester Burke
Peaceniks and Warmongers: The Disunity of Virtue
in Plato’s Statesman......................................................................89
Peter Kalkavage
Raskolnikov’s Redemption ...............................................................99
Nicholas Maistrellis
Justice in Plato’s Statesman ............................................................110
Eric Salem
Reviews
Getting to Know Kierkegaard Better
Book Review of Richard McCombs’s
The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard. ..............119
James Carey
Plato’s Political Polyphony
Book Review of Plato: Statesman,translated by
Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem. .........................134
Gregory Recco
�THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
�Tocqueville’s Worst Fears Realized?
The Political Implications of
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Transcendental Spiritualism
Bryan-Paul Frost
It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters
at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science
fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess
wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once
the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.
But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is
Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism—a faith that
equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious
communion with the natural world. . . .
If this narrative sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism
has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation
now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he
went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven
through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose
mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the
galaxy together.”
Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. . . . A recent
Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs
about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that
would fit right in among the indigo-tinged Na’Vi.
As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming.
—Ross Douthat, “Heaven and Nature,”
New York Times, December 2009
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville delivered a blunt
verdict on the increasing popularity, in democratic countries, of pantheism: “Among the different systems with whose aid philosophy
Bryan-Paul Frost is the Elias “Bo” Ackal, Jr./BORSF Endowed Professor of
Political Science and adjunct professor of Philosophy at the University of
Louisiana at Lafayette.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
seeks to explain the universe, pantheism appears to me one of the
most appropriate to seduce the human mind in democratic centuries;
all who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should
unite and do combat against it.” For a writer whose moderation and
nonpartisanship are well known, these remarks are a heavy indictment indeed. Why did Tocqueville believe that pantheism is both
so alluring and so debilitating to democratic peoples? And whom
precisely did he blame for the seduction? The second of these questions is easier to answer. Tocqueville singles out the Germans and
the French for introducing pantheism into philosophy and literature, respectively. The editors of one of the most recent translations
of Democracy in America indicate that Tocqueville probably has
in mind philosophers such as Leibnitz, Fichte, and Hegel, on the
one side, and writers such as Alphonse de Lamartine and Edgar
Quinet, on the other side.1
Since Tocqueville found the democratic urge to be particularly
strong in the United States, one is naturally led to wonder whether
there might not be some American authors whose writings exhibit
the same worrisome tendencies. This paper will enlarge on Tocqueville’s critique by studying an American essayist who, probably
unwittingly, revealed in more concrete detail the full extent of Tocqueville’s fears about pantheism: Ralph Waldo Emerson.
At first glance, Emerson seems an unlikely mark for such a
charge. After all, in such inspirational essays as “Self-Reliance,”
he seems to champion “human individuality” and greatness, and
is a severe critic of majority tyranny, intellectual apathy, and the
slavish pursuit of wealth and reputation—all of which Tocqueville
too denounced as unhealthy extremes to which democracy is prone.
On the other hand, Emerson was also a founding member of, and
chief spokesperson for, the American Transcendentalist movement,
and his religious convictions had strong strains of Neoplatonic and
pantheistic spiritualism. Emerson’s transcendentalism had no little
impact on his political and ethical writings: indeed, his unique
brand of spontaneity, intuition, and creativity was based upon an
individual hearkening to the voice of God within him, a God that
permeated all nature and with the aid of whom one sought to act
in conformity with one’s unique calling. Emerson’s thought, it
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | FROST
3
turns out, despite its apparent support for individual greatness, rests
on spiritual principles that eventually corrode, and ultimately undermine, both genuine human nobility and healthy democratic
ethics. In what follows, we will attempt to uncover the political
implications and effects of Emerson’s spiritualism—a spiritualism
whose basic tenets, as the preceding epigraph makes clear, are still
very influential today.
Easy Answers, Unmoored Souls:
The Debilitating Effects of Pantheism and Fatalism
Tocqueville’s brief treatment of pantheism (DA 2.1.7, 425–26) occurs as part of his discussion of the “Influence of Democracy on
Intellectual Movement in the United States.” The purpose of this
section is to articulate how the mind of a democratic people is influenced and shaped by democracy itself. This is an especially important topic in relation to democracy; for, as Tocqueville points
out earlier in the book, democrats rely only on their own reason
when judging or evaluating, and not on such factors as age, experience, tradition, class, and so on—precisely because, as egalitarians, they bow to no superior authority (DA 2.1.1, 403–4). One
might say this about the philosophic method of Americans, who
closely follow Cartesian precepts, Tocqueville says, without ever
having read Descartes themselves: in America, Je pense, donc je
suis means “I am the only one who can be relied upon to judge
things which are of concern to me.”
Of course, Tocqueville knows that democrats are not all
equally capable of making wise and informed decisions on their
own, and they will thus turn to sources of authority and intellectual
devices that will not offend their pride or undermine their fundamental belief in equality. In fact, Tocqueville argues, democrats
turn to an anonymous but omnipresent public opinion to supply
convenient answers and ready-made beliefs. He identifies the
source of this behavior in what he calls “the theory of equality applied to intellects”: “The moral empire of the majority is founded
in part on the idea that there is more enlightenment and wisdom in
many men united than in one alone” (DA 1.2.7, 236). Indeed, democrats are particularly susceptible to rely on and trust public opin-
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
ion inasmuch as egalitarianism isolates and atomizes individuals
from one another; consequently, to go against public opinion leaves
one feeling small, feeble, and helpless (DA 2.1.2, 408–9). Moreover, Tocqueville explains why democrats have a tendency for general ideas and over-simplifications: these tools make thinking and
judging easier, even if they inevitably compromise accuracy. This
ease in thinking passes for skill, and so, overlooking the sloppiness
introduced by generalities, democratic peoples become prouder of
their intelligence even as they become lazier in their thinking (DA
2.1.3 and 4, 411–16).
Tocqueville notes, however, that there is at least one area in
which dogmatic or fixed opinions and general ideas are salutary
for democratic peoples, namely, in matters of religion. Religion
provides the necessary counterweight to the ill effects of individual
isolation or atomization and love of material pleasure—the twin
dangers to which democrats are most prone. By raising one’s mind
to the heavens, and by inculcating duties to one’s fellows, religion
imposes obligations and responsibilities that are contrary to the desires democrats would likely pursue if left to themselves (DA 2.1.5,
417–19). It is in this context that Tocqueville turns to pantheism,
and in this context it appears to be the culmination of his critique
of democratic thought.
Democrats are attracted to pantheism for two principal reasons.
In the first place, pantheism feeds the democratic prejudice to reject
all traditional sources of authority and rely exclusively on one’s
own reason. As everyone is part of the same, undifferentiated
whole (God included!), no claim to superiority or authority can
hold: human particularity or individuality is obliterated in universal
homogeneity. But it is precisely the elimination of particularity or
individuality that, while being so attractive to democrats, is also
so dangerous. Democrats are further atomized and enfeebled as
everyone is swallowed up in the whole, which encompasses all
Being. As Tocqueville explains: “As conditions become more
equal and each man in particular becomes more like all the others,
weaker and smaller, one gets used to no longer viewing citizens so
as to consider only the people; one forgets individuals so as to think
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | FROST
5
only of the species” (DA 2.1.7, 426). We are, quite literally, withdrawn into our own little world, and this leaves democrats all the
more susceptible to the crushing and deadening weight of public
opinion: indeed, public opinion might become ever more despotic
as pantheism takes hold, for there is nothing—not even God Himself—that can stand as a bulwark against its dictates and demands.
To use language Tocqueville will use later in part 2 of the same
Volume (DA 2.2.2, 482: “On Individualism in Democratic Countries”): while democracy fosters the creation of atomized and isolated individuals, pantheism then eliminates the particularity of the
individuals thus created.
In the second place, pantheism appeals to the desire for unity,
general ideas, and single-minded explanations—indeed, it satisfies
this desire as no other religious or philosophic doctrine can. By reducing all Being—God and man, visible and invisible, change and
continuity—into a single whole, which alone is eternal and true
and real, democrats generate remarkably crisp, easy, and pleasing
answers when it comes to those first questions about human existence which trouble the soul (cf. DA 2.1.5, 418). By the same
token, however, this easy solution has deleterious effects on the
(already limited) intellectual capacity of democratic peoples: pantheism “nourishes the haughtiness and flatters the laziness of their
minds” (DA 2.1.7, 426) in the same way as all general ideas do.
But pantheism is more problematic than this. By collapsing the
material and immaterial world into a single whole, pantheism inadvertently collapses, or even eliminates, the tension between the
duties and obligations we owe to others and to heaven, on the one
hand, and the earthly desire for material well-being and pleasure,
on the other hand. Tocqueville is hardly so sanguine as to believe
that this tension could ever be overcome. He cautions religions that
they should neither try to uproot the desire for well-being (the implication is that this desire is generally stronger than the desires
proper to religion) nor try to provoke unnecessary conflicts with
generally accepted public opinions. Nevertheless, by keeping this
tension alive and well, democratic society is able to enjoy the salutary effects of religion and avoid the spiritual degradation to which
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
democracy is prone. In sum, pantheism both exacerbates the worst
effects of what Tocqueville describes as “individualism” and undermines the salutary effects of religion on a democratic people.
One peculiar aspect of Tocqueville’s discussion is that it is not
quite clear whether pantheism is a philosophic doctrine or a religious system, or both, or neither. Tocqueville describes pantheism
as both a “doctrine” and a “system,” and in the latter case, he once
indirectly implies that it is a “philosophic system.” He never states,
however, that it is a “religious” doctrine or system. Nonetheless,
Tocqueville also seems to oppose pantheism to philosophy per se,
as when he says that the “Germans introduce [pantheism] into philosophy,” and that “[a]mong the different systems with whose aid
philosophy seeks to explain the universe, pantheism appears to me
one of the most appropriate to seduce the human mind in democratic centuries” (DA 2.1.7, 425–26). Could it be that pantheism is
a sort of secular religion, a sort of middle ground between Christianity and atheism? And if this is true, then would not the growing
strength of pantheism be one indication that a people are moving
away from religion properly speaking? In this respect, it is important to note that Tocqueville concludes the chapter preceding his
discussion of pantheism, “On the Progress of Catholicism in the
United States,” with this prediction:
It is one of the most familiar weaknesses of the human
intellect to want to reconcile contrary principles and to
buy peace at the expense of logic. Therefore there always have been and always will be men who, after having submitted some of their religious beliefs to an
authority, want to spare several others and let their
minds float at random between obedience and freedom.
But I am brought to believe that the number of these
will be smaller in democratic than in other centuries
and that our descendants will tend more and more to
be divided into only two parts, those leaving Christianity entirely and others entering into the bosom of the
Roman Church (DA 2.1.6, 425).
To the extent that pantheism is not a religion—to the extent that pantheism signifies the near absence of true religious conviction—then
a people embracing pantheism will be prone to moral and political
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | FROST
7
servitude, as Tocqueville tried to show a bit earlier in the text.
When religion is destroyed in a people, doubt takes
hold of the highest portions of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others. Each becomes accustomed to having only confused and changing notions about matters
that most interest those like him and himself; one defends one’s opinions badly or abandons them, and as
one despairs of being able to resolve by oneself the
greatest problems that human destiny presents, one is
reduced, like a coward, to not thinking about them at
all.
Such a state cannot fail to enervate souls; it slackens
the springs of the will and prepares citizens for servitude.
Not only does it then happen that they allow their
freedom to be taken away, but often they give it over.
When authority in the matter of religion no longer
exists, nor in the matter of politics, men are soon frightened at the aspect of this limitless independence. This
perpetual agitation of all things makes them restive and
fatigues them. As everything is moving in the world of
the intellect, they want at least that all be firm and stable in the material order; and as they are no longer able
to recapture their former beliefs, they give themselves
a master (DA 2.1.5, 418).
Since pantheism appears to loosen religious sentiment, the widespread acceptance of this “doctrine” among a democratic people
might well indicate that they are becoming enervated and susceptible to bondage in the form of political salvation. Thus, although
Tocqueville claims that new religions cannot be easily established
in democratic times (for no one is willing to submit to an “intellectual authority” which is “outside of and above humanity” [DA
2.1.2, 408]), pantheism can be established, precisely because the
source of its belief is not outside of humanity, but within it, and
because it is not really a religion as Tocqueville understands the
term.
We can round off our consideration of Tocqueville’s ideas
about the effects of democracy on the thought of its citizens by
looking briefly at his discussion of the tendencies of democratic
�8
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
historians, a topic he said he would discuss at the beginning of the
chapter on pantheism. Democratic historians, he says, are prone to
underestimate or ignore the role of particular causes—that is “great
men”—in the course of history. He finds the root of this tendency
in democracy itself.
When . . . all citizens are independent of one another,
and each of them is weak, one finds none who exert a
very great or above all a very lasting power over the
mass. At first sight, individuals seem absolutely powerless over it, and one would say that society advances
all by itself—by the free and spontaneous concourse of
all the men who compose it (DA 2.1.20, 470).
Historians who adopt this attitude tend to think that history has a
sort of inevitable motion that cannot be regulated by human
agency.
When any trace of the action of individuals on nations
is lost, it often happens that one sees the world moving
without discovering its motor. As it becomes very difficult to perceive and analyze the reasons that, acting
separately on the will of each citizen, in the end produce the movement of the people, one is tempted to believe that this movement is not voluntary and that,
without knowing it, societies obey a superior, dominating force (DA 2.1.20, 471).
Such a force seems nearly impossible to resist, and belief in it leads
first to the conclusion that human freedom is illusory, and then to the
deduction that individuals are not responsible even for their own actions, let alone for the actions of their nation.
Even if one should discover on earth the general fact
that directs the particular wills of all individuals, that
does not save human freedom. A cause vast enough to
be applied to millions of men at once and strong enough
to incline all together in the same direction easily seems
irresistible; after having seen that one yields to it, one is
quite close to believing that one cannot resist it (DA
2.1.20, 471).
If the notion of such an irresistible force were to gain widespread
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currency in the thought of a democratic people, society would simply grind to a halt due to the general belief that no one is strong
enough to take any action that matters, any action that can push
back against the tide of history. The very possibility of human
greatness would fade out, because the freedom that nourishes that
possibility would no longer present itself to the mind.
Historians who live in democratic times, therefore, not
only deny to a few citizens the power to act on the destiny of a people, they also take away from peoples themselves the ability to modify their own fate, and they
subject them either to an inflexible providence or to a
sort of blind fatality. . . .
If this doctrine of fatality, which has so many attractions for those who write history in democratic times,
passed from writers to their readers, thus penetrating the
entire mass of citizens and taking hold of the public
mind, one can foresee that it would soon paralyze the
movement of the new societies (DA 2.1.20, 471–72).
In summary: Tocqueville understood that living in democratic
times could lead to modes of thought that would be highly detrimental, both for the freedom of the individual and for the freedom
of the whole people. In particular, the doctrines of pantheism and
fatalism dispose people to subservience: the first because it enhances individualism and weakens the moral force of religion; the
second because it eliminates the feeling that the individual has any
agency in, or responsibility for, the course taken by events. If Tocqueville is right, then anything that assists the spread of pantheism
and fatalism will present a danger to democratic societies.
Emerson’s Transcendental Spiritualism
In order to understand the political implications of Emerson’s spiritualism, and to see if that understanding leads to precisely the
consequences that Tocqueville feared, it is first necessary to lay
out Emerson’s views on transcendentalism, in particular, and on
Christianity, in general. Our effort here will be focused on showing
that Emerson’s spiritualism is remarkably similar to Tocqueville’s
pantheism.
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Although Emerson is often referred to as one of the principal innovators of American Transcendentalism, in his essay “The Transcendentalist” (1843), he denies that transcendentalism is a new or
original school of thought. In fact, he says, the roots of transcendentalism—which he also calls idealism—are as old as thinking
itself, and it is one of only two modes of thinking.
As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects,
Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on
experience, the second on consciousness; the first class
beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say,
The senses give us representations of things, but what
are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist
on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration,
on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of
thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that
his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all
that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense,
admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then
asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that
things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says,
affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts
which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their
first appearance to us assume a native superiority to
material facts, degrading these into a language by
which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only
needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every
materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never
go backward to be a materialist (RE 81).2
Whereas a materialist (e.g., John Locke) acknowledges the independent existence of an external world accessible through sense
impression and confirmed through experience, a transcendentalist
or idealist (e.g., Immanuel Kant) privileges his own consciousness
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and intuition, arguing that the “external world” is mental or spiritual, and is only apprehended or revealed through an individual,
self-conscious mind. The transcendentalist does not dispute that
objects are perceived by the senses; rather, he questions whether
sense perception is an accurate, complete, and final representation
of the object in itself.
After arguing that the materialist’s confidence in the solidity
of facts and figures is ill founded, Emerson makes the following
comparison:
In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one
product of that. The idealist takes his departure from his
consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance.
The materialist respects sensible masses, Society, Government, social art and luxury, every establishment,
every mass, whether majority of numbers, or extent of
space, or amount of objects, every social action. The
idealist has another measure, which is metaphysical,
namely the rank which things themselves take in his
consciousness; not at all the size or appearance. Mind
is the only reality, of which men and all other natures
are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history,
are only subjective phenomena. . . . His thought—that
is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold
the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing
perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a
subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid
Unknown Centre of him (RE 82–83).
While Emerson’s transcendentalist appears at first glance to be
wholly sovereign and self-determined, he is also open to influences
or forces from without—albeit influences of a certain sort:
The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of
spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light
and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He
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wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to
demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications
to the state of man, without the admission of anything
unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus the spiritual measure of inspiration is the
depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he
resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures
onthe spirit than its own (RE 84).
In order to develop a more detailed image of the transcendentalist, we must attempt to concretize Emerson’s elliptical remarks
about “spirituality.” What—or who—is this “Universe” which
“beckons and calls” the transcendentalist from inactivity “to
work,” which issues him the “highest command,” and with which
he seeks some sort of “union” (RE 91 and 95)? Emerson refers to
this deity or highest principle in a variety of ways with no discernable difference in meaning: in the essay “The Over-Soul” (1841)
alone, he uses the terms “Unity,” “Over-Soul,” “the eternal ONE,”
“Highest Law,” “Supreme Mind,” “Maker,” “Divine mind,” “Omniscience,” and “God” quite interchangeably. All of these terms
seem to refer to a transcendent spiritual force that permeates and
animates all existence—both human and non-human nature, organic and inorganic—and that binds and unites everything together
in a pure and sublime oneness or wholeness.
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise
silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and
particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this
deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is
all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing
seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one (RE 237).
Every individual is contained within this whole, and although the
ultimate source of both our being and the whole is unknown or hidden, before its power our soul is laid bare and we are revealed for
who we are.
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The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the
present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is
that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the
soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul,
within which every man’s particular being is contained
and made one with all other; that common heart of
which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which
all right action is submission; that overpowering reality
which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains
every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his
character and not from his tongue (RE 237).
13
Our communion with and access to this deity is through our own
soul, which Emerson states is neither an “organ,” nor a “function,”
nor a “faculty”: the soul is the unpossessed and unpossessable
“background of our being” which transcends time and space. If a
man is the “facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good
abide,” the soul would be a light shining from within or behind this
facade, illuminating all and giving direction to our will and intellect; and when we allow the soul to “have its way through us,” intellect becomes genius, will virtue, and affection becomes love (RE
238–39).
The perception and disclosure of truth in and through the
soul—“an influx of the Divine mind into our mind”—is what
Emerson calls “revelation.” Although revelation varies in both its
intensity and character—from the transfiguring to the tepid, from
the prophetic to the prosaic—all persons have the capacity to be
so moved, and all persons who are so moved belong to the same
general class of individuals, whether they be a Socrates or a St.
Paul. One reason for this vast resemblance among “prophets” is
that the “nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of the absolute law” (RE 243–44). Unfortunately, the precise
content of this law is not articulated—indeed, it cannot and should
not be articulated. Revelation does not occur through words, nor
does it respond to our questions.
Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes. In
past oracles of the soul the understanding seeks to find
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answers to sensual questions, and undertakes to tell from
God how long men shall exist, what their hands shall do
and who shall be their company, adding names and dates
and places. But we must pick no locks. We must check
this low curiosity. An answer in words is delusive; it is
really no answer to the questions you ask. . . . Men ask
concerning the immortality of the soul, the employments
of heaven, the state of the sinner, and so forth. They even
dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak
in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the
soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated.
Jesus, living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding only the manifestations of these,
never made the separation of the idea of duration from
the essence of these attributes, nor uttered a syllable concerning the duration of the soul. It was left to his disciples to sever duration from the moral elements, and to
teach the immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences. The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already fallen. . . .
These questions which we lust to ask about the future
are a confession of sin. God has no answer for them.
No answer in words can reply to a question of things
(RE 244–45).
We must apparently rest content with Emerson’s assurances that,
if we “forego all low curiosity” and live in the infinite present of
today, these questions will somehow be answered or resolved
through the silent workings of the soul. The key to existence is an
almost child-like innocence, simplicity, and authenticity, complete
honesty with oneself and with others, utter openness to the OverSoul and consequently all creation through it; being insincere, sophistic, or double in any way indicates disharmony in the soul and
distance from God.
These remarks naturally raise the question as to whether
Emerson’s deity is a caring or providential being. To begin with,
in what sense would one pray to this entity? Certainly, Emerson
does not understand prayer in any ordinary or traditional sense.
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He describes his notion of prayer in “Self-Reliance”:
In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which
they call a holy office is not so much as brave and
manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign
addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses
itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and
mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life
from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a
beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes
dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As
soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He
will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the
farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the
rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true
prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends
(RE 147–48).
Those who pray or beg to attain some selfish end (material goods
or worldly success) falsely assume a separation between themselves and the divine; those who express regret or recite creeds display an “infirmity” of the will or intellect (RE 148). Properly
speaking, prayer is the act of a healthy, self-reliant individual contemplating or celebrating the existence of God within his soul, and
it can be manifested in the simplest actions.
Nonetheless, Emerson’s deity is more than a transcendent spirit
animating existence, for he also affirms that God the “Maker of all
things and all persons stands behind us and casts his dread omniscience through us over things” (RE 242–43). This supreme creator,
however, is not the God of the Old Testament, but the divine mind
or soul of Plotinus and the Neoplatonists: the world is an emanation
or overflow from the divine mind; all creation is contained within
this whole, and all the variety in nature is encompassed within this
unity (RE 18ff., 118–19, 252ff., 293). Although the divine maker
can apparently choose to inspire specific individuals, and although
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he sent Jesus into the world (albeit not in the sense of his being the
son of God), God does not perform miracles in any ordinary or traditional sense of the word. Christianity’s moral doctrines and not
its miracles are what move Emerson to belief, and the attempt to
convert others through miracles is a spiritual abomination: genuine
conversion comes through genuine instruction, and this is strictly
a matter of free internal acceptance, without any external compulsion whatsoever (RE 67–69, 106–8, 237). The greatest miracle of
all would seem to be the shattering and transfiguring beauty of the
universe as well as the immutable natural laws that govern its operation. At all events, whatever the precise character of this personal and mystic union with the Over-Soul, it seems ecstatic,
ineffable, and utterly compelling; it is much more a matter of the
heart than the intellect; and it does not rely on traditions, institutions, and rituals.
Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the
soul. The simplest person who in his integrity worships
God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of
this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It
inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing
to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place,
effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments!
When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased
from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart
with his presence. . . .
Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and all
thought to his heart; this, namely, that the Highest dwells
with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind,
if the sentiment of duty is there. But if he would know
what the great God speaketh, he must ‘go into his closet
and shut the door,’ as Jesus said. God will not make himself manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself, withdrawing himself from all the accents of other
men’s devotion. Even their prayers are hurtful to him,
until he have made his own (RE 248–49).
Although much more could certainly be said about Emerson’s transcendentalism, it seems clear from this overview that, at least from
Tocqueville’s perspective, Emerson’s “religious” system or doc-
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trine exhibits precisely those characteristics Tocqueville had described about pantheism: the material and immaterial world is encompassed in an undifferentiated unity or whole to which we are
inextricably and inexplicably linked.
Having briefly discussed Emerson’s transcendentalism, let us
now turn to the question of whether it exhibits some of the dangerous characteristics that Tocqueville feared. Does Emerson’s
spiritualism, for example, nourish “the haughtiness” and flatter
“the laziness” of our minds in the same way that all general ideas
do? A strong indication is Emerson’s doubt, in “The Over-Soul,”
about whether everyday language can capture the deity’s essence:
Every man’s words who speaks from that life must
sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same
thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My
words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and
cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold!
their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal
as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane
words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven
of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected
of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law (RE 237–38).
Clearly, Emerson thinks that language, unaided by divine inspiration, cannot convey divine insights. In fact, he suggests in the Harvard Divinity School Address of 1838 that the very attempt to
communicate religion has an inherently corrupting effect. Historical Christianity, for example, has fallen away, he says, from the
true message of Jesus.
Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the
doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells,
with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.
The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no
preferences but those of spontaneous love (RE 68).
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Similarly, in “Self-Reliance” (1841) he also faults “all philosophy”
in its attempt to inquire into the divine source of such entities as
life, being, justice, and the soul.
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes
us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When
we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we
ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul
that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its
absence is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates
between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary
perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so,
like day and night, not to be disputed (RE 141–42).
It would seem that certain subjects are off-limits to philosophical
speculation because to communicate one’s findings profanes the
subject matter and is thus a sacrilege. Ultimately, Emerson’s religious understanding might be ineffable or untranslatable because
it rests on an entirely individual, and therefore inherently subjective, communion or experience. Emerson’s religious system or
doctrine is sweepingly comprehensive, but he relieves us from having to think about its specifics by cutting off all philosophic discussion. Thus Emerson forces his spiritual ideas to be extremely
simple and general.
But it is precisely this generality which, while appealing to
lazy minds, also leaves people without any real answers to those
fundamental questions of human existence that Tocqueville sees
as critical in religious dogma. Without answers to those questions,
democratic intellects expose themselves to all sorts of dangers. Although Emerson claims that questions concerning the immortality
of the soul, providence, and the afterlife are not properly asked of,
or answered by, his deity, Tocqueville has warned us that the democratic soul will become enervated or even paralyzed over time by
seeking answers to all these deep questions, and then become ripe
for political and moral enslavement.
Indeed, one wonders whether Tocqueville would even consider
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Emerson’s spirituality to be a religion at all inasmuch as it refuses
to provide answers about primary questions. At the very least, by
collapsing the tension between the material and immaterial world,
Emerson seems to have undermined what Tocqueville sees as the
salutary effect of religion on a democratic ethos, namely, promoting duties to others and limiting the unbridled pursuit of wealth.
Of course, there is nothing in Emerson’s spiritualism that encourages the opposite tendencies, and Emerson says on more than one
occasion that the mere pursuit of wealth is slavish. Nevertheless,
absent any sort of “divine sanction” or “divine punishment” to
deter those who might be tempted to forego their obligations to
others, one wonders how Emerson’s transcendentalism, over the
long run, could fully support a healthy democratic ethos when
democratic passions run so clearly in the opposite direction.
Unitarian Christianity
This assessment of Emerson’s spiritualism needs some amplification. After all, Emerson was (however briefly) a Unitarian minister,
and therefore his rather “unorthodox” transcendentalism must be
understood in the context of his more “orthodox” Christianity. Certainly any complete account of Emerson’s religiosity must give
due weight to his understanding of Christ and Christianity; but, as
we shall see, even when this is taken into account, it is difficult to
reach conclusions that differ much from our previous assessment.
Let us begin with Emerson’s sermon called “The Lord’s Supper,” delivered on Sunday 9 September 1832, in which Emerson
argues that a close reading of the New Testament indicates Jesus
never intended the Eucharist to become a permanent institutional
ritual of the Church; and even if he did intend it, the ritual is actually harmful to the genuine religious sentiment Jesus intended to
instill (RE 99–109).3 But even aside from these claims, Emerson
finds the most persuasive case against the Eucharist in the aversion
which he has to the symbolism of the bread and the wine, which
he refers to as “the elements”:
Passing other objections, I come to this, that the use of
the elements, however suitable to the people and the
modes of thought in the East, where it originated, is
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foreign and unsuited to affect us. Whatever long usage
and strong association may have done in some individuals to deaden this repulsion, I apprehend that their use
is rather tolerated than loved by any of us. We are not
accustomed to express our thoughts or emotions by
symbolical actions. Most men find the bread and wine
no aid to devotion, and to some it is a painful impediment. To eat bread is one thing; to love the precepts of
Christ and resolve to obey them is quite another.
The statement of this objection leads me to say that
I think this difficulty, wherever it is felt, to be entitled
to the greatest weight. It is alone a sufficient objection
to the ordinance. It is my own objection. This mode of
commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is
reason enough why I should abandon it. If I believed
that it was enjoined by Jesus on his disciples, and that
he even contemplated making permanent this mode of
commemoration, every way agreeable to an Eastern
mind, and yet on trial it was disagreeable to my own
feelings, I should not adopt it. I should choose other
ways which, as more effectual upon me, he would approve more. For I choose that my remembrances of him
should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him
as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship,
and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do those
whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a
moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of
love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true
commemoration (RE 106–7).
Because every religious ritual has the potential to impinge upon
the autonomy and independence of the soul—upon its freedom to
choose the manner and method of worship—no ritual or form can
ever be declared inviolate and sacrosanct.
Freedom is the essence of this faith [i.e., Christianity].
It has for its object simply to make men good and wise.
Its institutions then should be as flexible as the wants
of men. That form out of which the life and suitable-
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ness have departed should be as worthless in its eyes
as the dead leaves that are falling around us (RE 108).
To hold onto outmoded rituals is to betray the very purpose of
Christ’s crucifixion, for Jesus was sent to deliver mankind from
religions in which ritual forms are more important than personal
transformation.
That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that
for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end
that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who
have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal
religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul. The whole world was full of idols
and ordinances. The Jewish was a religion of forms; it
was all body, it had no life, and the Almighty God was
pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach men
that they must serve him with the heart; that only that
life was religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke, and forms were shadows (RE 108).
In the end, Emerson himself will judge the worthiness of all traditional ceremonies, conventions, and customs—even those that
Jesus might have specifically ordained.
Emerson’s departure from the traditional institutions and doctrines of Christianity is even more pronounced in his Harvard Divinity School Address, in which he identifies two fundamental
errors in the administration of the Christian church. He describes
the first in this way:
It [historical Christianity] has dwelt, it dwells, with
noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The
soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand
to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. But by this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence and
fear have built, the friend of man is made the injurer of
man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with
expressions which were once sallies of admiration and
love, but are now petrified into official titles, kills all
generous sympathy and liking (RE 68).
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The Church’s obsession with the personality of Jesus distorts and
vulgarizes his teaching by claiming that he was the son of God.
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He
saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by
its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived
in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to
what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates
himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take
possession of his World. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, ‘I am divine. Through me, God acts;
through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see
thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.’ But what
a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the
same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no
doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by
the Understanding. The understanding caught this high
chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age,
‘This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill
you, if you say he was a man.’ The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the
place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes (RE 67–68).
The Church fails to understand that Jesus was a prophet not because he was divine, but because he alone saw the divinity of all
men. 4
The second great error of the Church is a consequence of the
first: by regarding Jesus and his message as an historical figure
who established the religion in the far distant past, the living spirit
is extinguished from present worship. By failing to make the soul
in all its glory the foundation of religious instruction, contemporary
preachers (unintentionally, to be sure) smother the joyous temperament in their congregations that characterizes genuine piety. This,
in turn, corrodes the faith of the nation as a whole. Rehearsed rather
than inspired, doctrinaire rather than personal, formal rather than
uplifting, monotone rather than celebratory, “historical Christianity
destroys the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the ex-
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ploration of the moral nature of man” (RE 73). Emerson offers his
auditors a vivid sampler of the sorts of “moral” subjects whose absence in American churches causes people to think twice about
participating in public worship:
In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me,
is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that
the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he
is drinking forever the soul of God? Where now sounds
the persuasion, that by its very melody imparadises my
heart, and so affirms its own origin in heaven? Where
shall I hear words such as in elder ages drew men to
leave all and follow—father and mother, house and
land, wife and child? Where shall I hear these August
laws of moral being so pronounced as to fill my ear,
and I feel ennobled by the offer of my uttermost action
and passion? The test of the true faith, certainly, should
be its power to charm and command the soul, as the
laws of nature control the activity of the hands—so
commanding that we find pleasure and honor in obeying. The faith should blend with the light of rising and
of setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird,
and the breath of flowers. But now the priest’s Sabbath
has lost the splendor of nature; it is unlovely; we are
glad when it is done (RE 71).
The power and the beauty that Emerson demands from vital religion are missing from most modern Christianity.
What does Emerson recommend to repair this situation?
I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus
with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith
makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own
forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold
as the new worship introduced by the French to the
goddess of Reason—to-day, pasteboard and filigree,
and ending to-morrow in madness and murder. Rather
let the breath of new life be breathed by you through
the forms already existing. For if once you are alive,
you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The
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remedy to their deformity is first, soul, and second,
soul, and evermore, soul (RE 77–78).
Emerson thus does not advocate the creation of “new rites and
forms” but the spiritual reinvigoration of those forms already at
hand. As for the current generation of preachers, they must stride
forward in a spirit of fierce independence from all traditional authority, maintain the most rigid personal integrity and virtue, and
be open to the sublime wonder and limitless potential in man—
which is the true gospel of Christ, and is as alive today as ever (RE
75–78). Emerson’s views were so unorthodox that many of the faculty members at Harvard publicly denounced the speech. He was
not invited back to speak at his alma mater for some thirty years.
Two features of Emerson’s heterodox Unitarianism are particularly significant in the context of the questions we are pursuing.
First, his absolute reliance on his own judgment exemplifies the
practice he recommends to everyone: the individual alone is the
sole judge in matters of religious doctrine and form. What the individual determines to be satisfactory is necessarily so, and that
judgment is sufficient in itself. Second, Jesus’s fundamental message, according to Emerson, fully supports transcendentalism (and,
we maintain, pantheism): we are to find and worship the god within
all of us.
What sort of religious reform could proceed from Emerson’s
appeals? He may have wanted spiritual revival within the Church,
but achieving that revival on his terms would require the rejection
of so many aspects of traditional, orthodox Christianity that one
wonders just what sort of “church” would remain. All things considered, Emerson’s iconoclastic Unitarian Christianity imparts a
unique flavor to his pantheistic spiritualism, but since it remains
pantheism at bottom, it still promotes the dangerous effects that
Tocqueville feared.
The Individual as Supreme Lawgiver
The foregoing discussion has concentrated on the first aspect of
the Tocquevillian critique of Emerson’s spiritualism—how its generality and simplicity flatters the democratic intellect. We must
now ask about the second aspect: What effect does Emerson’s spir-
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itualism have on individuality and the capacity of individuals to
remain free? We approach this question by examining Emerson’s
teaching about the source of individual actions and judgments—
especially moral and ethical judgments.
Throughout his writings, Emerson insists that the transcendentalist is a self-legislating individual: there is no law or commandment that is unconditionally binding upon him. And there is no
institution—no government, no church, no society—that is worthy
of his respect and allegiance unless, as is said in “The Transcendentalist,” it “reiterates the law of his mind” (RE 83). The transcendentalist’s conduct is not governed by deliberation or experience,
but by intuition, spontaneity, and trusting one’s instincts—even, it
seems, when one can give no rational account of them. Only spontaneous action—which is receptive to and motivated by the
prompting of the divine voice within—is genuinely obedient to
God. By becoming the channel through which the divine makes itself manifest, we shed all gross vanity and pretension while simultaneously solidifying and strengthening our own character.
A little consideration of what takes place around us
every day would show us that a higher law than that of
our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple,
spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting
ourselves with obedience we become divine. Belief and
love—a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of
care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the
centre of nature and over the will of every man, so that
none of us can wrong the universe. It has so infused its
strong enchantment into nature that we prosper when
we accept its advice, and when we struggle to wound
its creatures our hands are glued to our sides, or they
beat our own breasts. The whole course of things goes
to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance
for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the
right word. Why need you choose so painfully your
place and occupation and associates and modes of action and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible
right for you that precludes the need of balance and
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wilful election. For you there is a reality, a fit place and
congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the
stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom
it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth,
to right and a perfect contentment. Then you put all
gainsayers in the wrong. Then you are the world, the
measure of right, of truth, of beauty (RE 176).
By keeping our soul open to the ebb and flow of the Over-Soul,
we will be made privy to the truth; we will become genuinely
moral by attentively listening to the poetry of our own heart, which
is itself a reflection of the poetry of the universe and its animating
spirit. Emerson replaces the ancient injunction “know thyself” with
“trust thyself,” because the latter contains or is the means to the
former (RE 133).
Emerson’s celebration of individual intuition, integrity, and
spontaneity is stated perhaps nowhere more succinctly and powerfully than in his most famous and inspirational essay, “Self-Reliance” (1841). Like Moses, Plato, and Milton, we must learn to
heed the flash of genius when it ignites within us, trusting, almost
child-like, that God has a purpose in our work and that divinity
does not traffic in counterfeit forms. But if God urges us to listen
to our heart, society does not, and the more we become accustomed
to the ways of the world, the more our native light of genius grows
dim (RE 132–34). Two problems arise from this tension between
God and society: conformity and consistency. Regarding conformity, he considers it nearly impossible to resist:
[T]he discontent of the multitude [is] more formidable
than that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough
for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage
of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation
of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor
are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies
at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it
needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it
godlike as a trifle of no concernment (RE 137–38).
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Regarding consistency, Emerson downplays its importance, and
argues that sincerity, over the long run, will exhibit its own logic
and integrity: “Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing” (RE 139).
Emerson highlights these two problems because they, more
than anything else, undermine the self-trust necessary to act spontaneously or instinctively. Self-trust is the source of all spontaneous
and ingenious action.
The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who
is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a
universal reliance may be grounded? . . . The inquiry
leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of
virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.
We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all
later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last
fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find
their common origin. For the sense of being which in
calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not
diverse from things, from space, from light, from time,
from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously
from the same source whence their life and being also
proceed. We first share the life by which things exist
and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and
forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that
inspiration which giveth man wisdom and which cannot
be denied without impiety and atheism (RE 141–42).
To those who might argue that overstressing individual self-reliance
in this way could well have injurious effects on society’s necessarily
collaborative structures—such as government and the family—and
could delude a person into committing atrocities in the name of “intuition” and “spontaneity,” Emerson’s response in this essay is unaccommodating: So be it.
I remember an answer which when quite young I was
prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont
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to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the
church. On my saying, “What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?”
my friend suggested—“But these impulses may be
from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not
seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I
will live then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred to
me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names
very readily transferable to that or this; the only right
is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what
is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence
of all opposition as if every thing were titular and
ephemeral but he (RE 135).
Emerson holds that we must give expression to the unique incarnation of the divine within us. We must not continue to be the predictable herd animals that we are at present: conformity—not
self-reliance—is the real threat to a vibrant political and civic life.
Indeed, ignoring the divine voice within us, since it is the sacred
source of all life and wisdom, is true atheism and impiety. Self-reliance thus turns out to be God-reliance—if by “God” is meant the
divine voice within as you interpret it (RE 141–45).
It is here, with all probability, that Tocqueville would find the
most dangerous implications of Emerson’s spiritualism: he forthrightly rejects any moral guidance that comes from without and demands that individuals judge for themselves. Of course, it is
precisely this celebration of individual autonomy that causes many
to classify Emerson as a staunch “individualist”—not in Tocqueville’s derogatory sense as applied to someone withdrawn into
himself, but in the complimentary sense of someone who, opposing
mass opinion and fashionable trends, stakes out his own ground.
Emerson is certainly aware, as we have seen, of the force exerted
on the individual by majority opinion. But he does not believe, as
Tocqueville does, that individuals left to be their own moral legislators and lawgivers become atomized and isolated in society, leaving them more susceptible to the tyrannizing and homogenizing
effects of public opinion. To Emerson’s mind, individuals must rely
on themselves rather than on traditional sources of authority if they
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are going to be genuinely moral and have the strength to withstand
mass opinion.
Notwithstanding Emerson’s contagious optimism, one question persists throughout his discussion of the individual as judge
and executor of his own laws: How does one distinguish between
inspiration and madness? Even if we are all part of a greater whole,
what standard can be employed to determine whether someone has
correctly “received” and spontaneously acted upon the moral law?
Why could someone not simply claim that his subjective experience points to an entirely different philosophical system than
Emerson’s? How would Emerson refute such a claim?
In the first place, Emerson suggests that everyone knows the
truth of what he is saying in the depths of his own heart. If we
would be honest with ourselves, if we would return to our better
thoughts and listen intently to the sublime whisperings of the soul,
we would understand as he understands, and act authentically as
he acts authentically.
If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave
to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not
selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest,
and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt
in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day?
You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as
well as mine, and if we follow the truth it will bring us
out safe at last.—But so may you give these friends
pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power,
to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their
moments of reason, when they look out into the region
of absolute truth; then will they justify me and do the
same thing (RE 146).
In the second place, Emerson refers several times to a moral sense
or sentiment in all men which commands and forbids actions, and
which is rooted in or is coextensive with the Divine Mind. But while
Emerson acknowledges the existence of a conscience, it neither
seems to be in command, nor are its laws capable of articulation. For
Emerson, the moral universe is accessible by all of us subjectively,
but it cannot be formulated into any sort of objective ethical code:
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The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the
presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this
homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem
foolish details, principles that astonish. The child amidst
his baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human life, love,
fear, justice, appetite, man, and God, interact. These
laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be
written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. They
elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly
in each other’s faces, in each other’s actions, in our own
remorse. The moral traits which are all globed into
every virtuous act and thought—in speech we must
sever, and describe or suggest by painful enumeration
of many particulars (RE 64).
And finally, in the third place, Emerson claims that spontaneous
action is so compelling that its example almost compels imitation:
by being law unto oneself, one becomes a universal legislator.
A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True,
as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he
stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt
them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun,
journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium
of the highest influence to all who are not on the same
level. Thus men of character are the conscience of the
society to which they belong (RE 331).
If this is true, however, it is hard to square with Emerson’s insistence on autonomy. How can individuals be true to themselves by
following someone else’s law? If the law were universal, then it
would make sense to follow the example of a virtuous person. But
this contradicts Emerson’s belief in the individual divine voice that
speaks to each person uniquely.
By having us be our own lawgivers, by asserting that “[o]ur
spontaneous action is always the best” (RE 264), is Emerson not
unwittingly advocating indulgence in our worst passions? In the
essay called “Circles,” he tries to defend himself against this
charge:
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And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader
exclaim, you have arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, at an
equivalence and indifferency of all actions, and would
fain teach us that if we are true, forsooth, our crimes
may be lively stones out of which we shall construct
the temple of the true God!
I am not careful to justify myself. . . . But lest I
should mislead any when I have my own head and
obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am
only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on
what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if
I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle
all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane;
I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at
my back (RE 260).
This very convenient disavowal of setting an example sidesteps
the effect of Emerson’s teaching on others; he does not want to
take responsibility for the behavior that might be unleashed or justified by his doctrine of self-legislation. Not everyone’s spontaneous impulses and private intuitions would lead to the sort of
fortunate and moderate choices that Emerson seems to make.
If we return now to Tocqueville’s democratic man seeking
moral guidance in an egalitarian society, we see that Emerson has
nothing to offer him. The evaporation of human individuality in
the Over-Soul, the directionless invocation to look to one’s own
inner divinity, and the refusal to take responsibility for one’s example in the world all leave democratic man in the lurch. It is no
wonder that he turns to public opinion for moral guidance.
The Ambiguity of Politics
One way to temper the debilitating effects of majority opinion, in
particular, and the spiritual trajectory of the principle of equality,
in general, is through political activity. Over and over again, Tocqueville shows us how civic engagement at the local level can help
to cure the ills to which democracy is prone. In respect to the particular issues of this essay, civic participation and institutions help
to prevent our slide into individualism. We are unable to withdraw
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into our own world of family and friends when we must take part
in various community activities. Civic engagement also tempers
our rage for general ideas: when we are practically engaged, we
see the necessary limitations of such ideas. Emerson, however, in
many ways discourages political activity—and perhaps necessarily
so. The rapturous inner life of the transcendentalist likely makes
all political activity seem paltry and pale.
In “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson observes that these individuals are both solitary and lonely. They are solitary because nothing that society can offer appeals to them: whether it is popular
entertainment or commercial competition, they see most of what
excites society as little more than drudgery and thoroughly degrading in comparison to their talents. They are lonely because the
human fellowship they seek is so acute and fervent that few persons could satisfy or endure the demands of such a relationship:
tolerating neither frivolity nor hypocrisy, they are seen by most
persons as rude, shallow, or simply ridiculous (RE 87–90). But if
Emerson’s transcendentalist is indifferent toward such things as
the accumulation of riches and wealth, so too is he indifferent toward politics in almost all its manifestations. From the great political debates of the day to the building of empires to the prospect
of rule, the transcendentalist finds little in this petty arena to tempt
him from his solitude.
But their solitary and fastidious manners not only withdraw them from the conversation, but from the labors
of the world; they are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwillingly they bear their part of the
public and private burdens; they do not willingly share
in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in
the enterprises of education, of missions foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance society. They do not even like to vote. . . .
What you call your fundamental institutions, your
great and holy causes, seem to them great abuses, and,
when nearly seen, paltry matters (RE 90).
Emerson does not deny that there are great and holy causes—albeit
far fewer than most imagine—but by the time a potentially worth-
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while cause reaches the political arena, it has been prepackaged and
predigested for public consumption. Since the transcendentalist attitude is a blanket critique of political life, Emerson rightly concludes
that this outlook will strike society as threatening. The disdainful
aloofness from the world of those who hold such beliefs, together
with their willingness to abjure the public burdens that make community possible, seem like a direct accusation of society; and society
will not remain indifferent, but will retaliate against this challenge to
what it holds dear. But despite the fact that society treats these individuals as outcasts, and despite the fact they seem to perform no useful occupation, Emerson insists that they are the moral touchstones
by which to judge whether “the points of our spiritual compass” are
true. Society therefore has an interest in them and a duty to “behold
them with what charity it can” (RE 95).
To the extent that Emerson hopes to improve American society,
he directs his appeals for moral reform at the individual and not the
group: there is little or no salvation through political activity unless
the individual himself has first been spiritually transformed. In the
essay “New England Reformers” (1844), he points out two problems
in attempting the former before or without the latter. First, all political reforms tend to be partial:
I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and
the indication of growing trust in the private self-supplied powers of the individual, to be the affirmative
principle of the recent philosophy, and that it is feeling
its own profound truth and is reaching forward at this
very hour to the happiest conclusions. I readily concede
that in this, as in every period of intellectual activity,
there has been a noise of denial and protest; much was
to be resisted, much was to be got rid of by those who
were reared in the old, before they could begin to affirm and to construct. Many a reformer perishes in his
removal of rubbish; and that makes the offensiveness
of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the
work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault
on the kingdom of darkness they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and
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power of benefit. It is of little moment that one or two
or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but
of much that the man be in his senses (RE 406–7).
In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst
of abuses, in the heart of cities, in the aisles of false
churches, alike in one place and in another—wherever,
namely, a just and heroic soul finds itself, there it will
do what is next at hand, and by the new quality of character it shall put forth it shall abrogate that old condition, law, or school in which it stands, before the law
of its own mind (RE 408).
Emerson here disparages piecemeal efforts at social change as futile or misguided given the enormity of the task. By contrast, “a
just and heroic soul” will be able to abolish the old condition
through the force of his character and actions in the here and now.
Second, reformers overestimate the power of associations or
numbers. Groups are no better or worse than the individuals who
make them up, and unhealthy individuals make unhealthy groups:
indeed, the more united and efficacious a group is politically, the
more it will require its members to compromise their unique individuality, forcing out those of superior talent (RE 407–10).
These new associations are composed of men and
women of superior talents and sentiments; yet it may
easily be questioned whether such a community will
draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the good;
whether those who have energy will not prefer their
chance of superiority and power in the world, to the
humble certainties of the association; whether such a
retreat does not promise to become an asylum to those
who have tried and failed, rather than a field to the
strong; and whether the members will not necessarily
be fractions of men, because each finds that he cannot
enter it without some compromise. Friendship and association are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of
the best of the human race, banded for some catholic
object; yes, excellent; but remember that no society can
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ever be so large as one man. He, in his friendship, in
his natural and momentary associations, doubles or
multiplies himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one (RE 408–9).
Thus, Emerson’s aim is not political but private, an attempt to
unify our presently disharmonious souls. “The problem of restoring
to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption
of the soul” (RE 38). “This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of
the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man” (RE
55–56). How this domestication will occur without radical political
changes (e.g., in the education system [cf. RE 410–11]) is not clear.
In sum, it would seem that Emerson’s rapturous spiritualism casts
a long shadow over politics and political activity: civic engagement
is neither an Aristotelian fulfillment of our nature nor a Tocquevillean means to maintain its health.
A Corrective to Democratic Historians
In conclusion, it is necessary to point out that there is at least one
area where Emerson’s philosophy is in harmony with Tocqueville’s,
namely, in his deep appreciation for the power of great individuals
and individual action. In his essay on Abraham Lincoln and the
Emancipation Proclamation, or in his address commemorating the
anniversary of the end of slavery in the British West Indies, one
does not read about immutable and unseen forces propelling men
ahead on the unstoppable current of history. In this respect, at least,
Emerson’s celebration of the individual is the same as Tocqueville’s.
Nonetheless, this celebration of individual initiative and independence is coupled with yet another potentially worrisome aspect
of Emerson’s writings. Just as he conceives the individual as the
standard in judging the rectitude of an action and the worth of an
institution, so too he conceives of the new American nation as a
standard in judging its own needs. America must emancipate itself
from the tyrannizing effects of a slavish veneration of the “mind
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of the Past” (RE 46)—especially Europe’s aristocratic past—in all
its incarnations: history, philosophy, art, architecture, and literature.
Although this call for originality can already be seen in the opening
paragraph of Emerson’s first book Nature (1836), perhaps the most
stirring expression of this sentiment is his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa
address, “The American Scholar” (1837), which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes called “our intellectual Declaration of Independence”
(RE 3, 846). The moment some form of the past is declared perfect
or inviolate, then the present generation will atrophy and cease
thinking and creating—it will become a satellite of the past rather
than its own solar system. The genius of an age is lost when it passively accepts the dogmas of the past and does not actively seize
upon and articulate its own creative principles: “The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized [sic] now for two hundred years”
(RE 47). Indeed, we must not subordinate our own thinking to the
thinking found in books:
Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be
sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s
idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is
too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of
their readings. But when the intervals of darkness
come, as come they must—when the sun is hid and the
stars withdraw their shining—we repair to the lamps
which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to
the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we
may speak (RE 48).
Books should be used to guide the scholar back to the light of his
own inspirations.
Emerson is not rejecting the past outright. His frequent praise
of past philosophers and authors and poets demonstrates this. Instead, he wants to challenge what he calls the backward—that is,
conservative—tendency of all institutions to defend some ancient
authority and to use this as an excuse for not moving forward.
The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or
creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of
here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every
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man. In its essence it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop
with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say
they—let us hold by this. They pin me down. They
look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his
hindhead: man hopes: genius creates (RE 47).
37
The past must come alive for the present and speak to its concerns
and circumstances. If it fails to do this, then it need not be studied
and must not be revered. Discard the relics of the past or reanimate
them—if Greece or Rome or Constantinople or Paris or London
do not speak to us, we need not worry: someone or something else
will (RE 115–17, 120, 130–31, 140, 150–51, 272–73).
Emerson sees some encouraging signs of intellectual liberation
in the growing prevalence of “the near, the low, the common” as a
new subject of literature (RE 57). He saw that contemporary writers and artists were beginning to expand the range of their interest
beyond traditional high subjects to include the more mundane:
The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the
philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life,
are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a
sign—is it not?—of new vigor when the extremities are
made active, when currents of warm life run into the
hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote,
the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is
Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the
low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the
antique and future worlds. What would we really know
the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the
pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the
glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body;
show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me
the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the
polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and
the shop, the plough, and the ledger referred to the like
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cause by which light undulates and poets sing; and the
world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumberroom, but has form and order; there is no trifle, there
is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the
farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench (RE 57–58).
Because the lowest objects are bursting with the same sublime soul
as the highest, they can be made the focal point of a literary and
spiritual renaissance appropriate for this new era and new nation.
At the end of the day, Emerson applauds the fact that the same
egalitarian political movements, which both raised the “lowest
class in the state” and gave new dignity and respect to the “individual,” are now fostering an appropriate egalitarian literature (RE
43, 57–58). Emerson here reveals what Matthew Arnold calls his
remarkable “persistent optimism” (RE 846) in the potential of each
and every individual to become a fully realized human being: he
repeatedly affirms that all men have “sublime thoughts” (RE 76);
that all possess a “native nobleness” (RE 242); that all are wise;
that all are latent prophets; that all have the potential greatness of
George Washington and Julius Caesar; that all carry within a
“miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal
History” (RE 267). Even genius is less a matter of innate ability
and more a matter of art and arrangement, and of giving free reign
to the divine, which is in all of us (RE 411ff.). As Henry David
Thoreau rightly said in his journals about his friend: “In his world
every man would be a poet, Love would reign, Beauty would take
place, Man and Nature would harmonize” (RE 847). We are left to
wonder, however, whether Emerson’s suspicions of the past, coupled with his new emphasis on “the near, the low, the common” in
literature will, over time, help to sustain his celebration of genuine
human greatness, or eventually undermine and distort it in a predictable but unhealthy democratic fashion.
NOTES
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey
C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000), 425–26, hereafter cited in the text as DA, followed by volume,
part, chapter, and page number. In general, I have used this translation
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39
throughout, although I have checked it against the French original for accuracy. See also the four-volume, bilingual, historical-critical edition of
the same, ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010).
2. References to Emerson’s works are from The Essential Writings of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library,
2000), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as RE. All emphasized
words in quotes are contained in the original. For details on his life and
times, readers may consult with profit Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson:
A Biography (New York: Viking Press, 1981).
3. Emerson was ordained as the Unitarian pastor of the Second Church
of Boston in 1829. In June 1832, his grave reservations concerning the
sacrament of communion reached a crescendo, and he asked the Church
if he might stop administering it in its present form. After considering his
petition, the members of the Church were unable to grant it. Because
Emerson would “do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart” (RE
109), he judged it best to resign as pastor, and he stated his reasons for
doing so to the congregation in the sermon we are about to discuss. Although Emerson continued to give sermons to various churches throughout his life, his service at the Second Church was his first and last
appointment as a permanent pastor.
4. Emerson also suggests the likely cause of this error. It was only natural
that a soul as “great and rich” as Jesus’s, falling among a “simple” people,
was bound to overwhelm them. They were thus not able to see that Jesus’s
true message was that they needed to discover and make manifest the gift
of God in their own soul and not that Jesus was the son of God Himself
(RE 69). Given the simplicity of the “primitive Church,” Emerson is very
hesitant to adopt any of its doctrines or practices. The early Christians
not only refused to shed their “Jewish prejudices” but they were rarely
enlightened by the example of Christ himself. Emerson thus concludes
that “[o]n every other subject succeeding times have learned to form a
judgment more in accordance with the spirit of Christianity than was the
practice of the early ages” (RE 105).
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“At the Very Center of the Plenitude”:1
Goethe’s Grand Attempt to Overcome the 18th Century;2
Or,
How Freshman Laboratory Saved Goethe
From the General Sickness of his Age
We have failed to restore to the human spirit
its ancient right to come face to face with nature.
—Goethe3
Nature has become the fundamental word
that designates essential relations . . . to beings.
—Heidegger4
Goethe teaches courage . . . that the disadvantages
of any epoch exist only to the fainthearted.
—Emerson5
1. Incidental Thoughts, Fruitful Life
To everyone: Welcome! To our freshman in particular: a special
Welcome!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: We know him first as a poet and
playwright—seniors will read his Faust next week. Yet there is another Goethe that is less well known but who, from his own point
of view, is of equal, if not greater consequence,6 the Goethe who
spent his life studying nature—botany, zoology, geology, meteorology, theory of color—and is known, in this regard, for his work
in morphology. I would like to speak about this lesser known
Goethe tonight.
There are two subtitles to this evening’s lecture “At the Very
Center of the Plenitude.” The first is given to it by Friedrich Nietzsche, the second, my own curious invention. The first is “Goethe’s
Grand Attempt to Overcome the 18th Century.” As we will see,
from Nietzsche’s perspective Goethe was a philosophical thinker
of the highest order who inherited, as we all do, ideas from previDavid Lawrence Levine is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Santa
Fe, New Mexico. This lecture was originally presented as the annual Dean’s
Lecture to open the thirty-seventh academic year at the Santa Fe campus.
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ous generations and thinkers, ideas that he thought were ill conceived and needed to be rethought. Thanks to these ideas, we had
become, according to Goethe, “blind with seeing eyes.”7
Similarly the second subtitle, “How Freshman Laboratory
Saved Goethe from the General Sickness of his Age.” This clearly
reflects our unique studies here at St. John’s. Here too we see
something of greater moment than we might first have seen. Here
we will have a chance to see that his life’s work studying nature—
as seen in the paper that we read in freshman laboratory—has a far
greater significance than just “science,” great though this is in its
own right.8 For Goethe the study of nature was the necessary antidote to a growing tendency—“sickness” he called it—that needed
to be countered for the sake of our lives and health.
Goethe’s thinking, though philosophical, is not systematic, and
that means there’s no one place where his deepest thinking is to be
found. Just the opposite, his profoundest thought is to be discovered throughout his works, and not just in his major works, but
minor ones too, often just jottings here and there, on slips of paper,
in the margins of books, the corners of newspapers, in brief letters,
in short wherever occasion found a suitable surface for pen and
ink to secure for a time his emergent thoughts. These were often
then collected into “maxims and reflections,” sometimes inserted
as the thinking of one of the characters of his novels, sometimes
collected under his own name.
These occasional thoughts will provide much of the material
for tonight’s talk. But incidental thoughts are not necessarily insignificant thoughts.9 Not unlike flotsam and jetsam, thoughts appear throughout our day. Are these daily musings ‘distractions of
the moment’ or ‘disclosures of moment’? Such irrepressible
thoughtfulness and imagination gives added dimension to the thin
linearity of time. A day punctuated by the wondrous, sparked by
light, is not just another day. Daily discovery is meat not spice,
nourishment, not just flavoring. And its joy is invigorating. The
mundane is thereby transformed. Thinking happens.
One such collection of thoughts is a book of selected conversations by his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann, a man of no
small talent, who took it upon himself to record for posterity per-
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sonal conversations he had with his world famous employer during
the last nine years of his life. These are intermittently and imperfectly recorded, often self-conscious, sometimes seem contrived,
and are frequently without a definite outcome. There we find observations about passing acquaintances, deliberations about the
wine list for the evening dinner, plans for journeys to be taken, personal estimates about famous and not so famous authors and statesmen, latter-year reflections and regrets about his youthful writings,
plans for the reconstruction of the local theater that had burned
down, conversations with his patron the Grand Duke of Weimar,
observations about his wife and children, expressions of hope and
disappointment about friends, frustrations about works of his that
had been overlooked or were under appreciated. But throughout
the rich array, there emerge as well recurrent themes and persistent
questions of consequence.
The same author mentioned above, Nietzsche, says the following: “Apart from Goethe’s [own] writings, and in particular
Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann, the best German book
there is, what is there really of German prose literature that it would
be worthwhile to read over and over again?”10 “The best German
book there is,” worth “reading over and over again”? Hardly on
the face of it.
Though perhaps prone to hyperbole and “philosophizing with
a hammer,” Nietzsche was not prone to misrepresentation. What
could he mean by such exaggerated praise? Perhaps what is remarkable is not the book per se, but what is portrayed therein? Perhaps what is notable is not its ultimate literary value—the book is
not on our program—but the attempt to record a life that is in no
way ordinary? Indeed, even through Eckermann’s eyes we glimpse
new possibilities for a human life that aspires to what is extraordinary, a fullness of possibility rarely seen. We glimpse a paradigm
of a fully engaged, ever creative, wholesome fecundity. In short,
we see philosophy as a way of being in the world, not as a book
bound between leather covers.
2. “Everything Nowadays is Ultra”
In 1825, late in life, Goethe wrote a letter to his friend, the composer Zelter, in which he reflected on the character of life as it had
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come to be lived in their lifetime:
Everything nowadays is ultra, [he writes] everything is
being transcended continually in thought as well as in action. No one knows himself any longer; no one can grasp
the element in which he lives and works or the materials
that he handles. Pure simplicity is out of the question; of
simplifiers we have enough. Young people are stirred up
much too early in life and then carried away in the whirl
of the times. Wealth and rapidity are what the world admires. . . . Railways, quick mails, steamships, and every
possible kind of rapid communication are what the educated world seeks but it only over-educates itself and
thereby persists in its mediocrity. It is, moreover, the result of universalization that a mediocre culture [then] becomes [the] common [culture].
He then adds ruefully: “We and perhaps a few others will be the
last of an epoch that will not soon return.”11
According to Goethe, a radical transformation of our way of
being has taken place: 1) a change in the character of human thought
and action, 2) a change in our knowledge of ourselves, 3) a change
in our sense of place, and finally, 4) a change in the character and
efficacy of education.
“Everything nowadays is ultra”: As early as the beginning of
the nineteenth century, what was coming to characterize human
life—and thereby change the face and depth of human experience—was the speed (die Voloziferishe) at which life was lived, a
hitherto unheard of, dizzying and disorienting pace such that young
people—but not only—could only be caught up in “the whirl of
the times.” “Being caught up” means living some other life than
one’s own, being inauthentic.
“Railways, quick mails, steamships”: Ever faster communication changes the lived dimensions of life: time quickens, distance
collapses. There is no delay between an event and its hearing. “It’s
as if we were right there.” A leisurely walk is replaced by a carriage
ride, thereafter by a train ride, then a jet plane, and now by . . . a
transporter (or at least in our imaginations). The wait for “news”
from the pony express, a telegram, a phone call, a pager continues
to shrink. Our e-mail pings or our blackberry vibrates: we hear about
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an event “as it happens” no matter the distance. Life, in short, is lived
in fast forward. Goethe asks “Who can possibly keep up with the
demands of an exorbitant present and that at maximum speed?”12
This matter of life’s ever accelerating pace in not a philosophically indifferent one for Goethe. “The greatest misfortune [Unheil]
of our time,” he says elsewhere, “which let’s no thing come to
fruition, is that one moment consumes the next.”13 While the speeding up of things may assist us in “keeping informed” and “staying
in touch,” it also subtracts from other essential dimensions once
thought definitive of human life. It makes certain things more difficult, if not impossible, specifically those things that take time, for
example, those that require slow assimilation and acclimation,
above all human learning and experience. It takes time away from
thoughtful reflection and other possibilities of human carefulness.
For time and leisure (skolē) are the proper gestational home of reflection, philosophy and human care.
We hear too that our thought processes are affected: “everything is transcended in thought [as well as in action].” We have
somehow been made to think differently. We live at a new level of
abstraction, beyond the immediate, simple, obvious, primary
world, such that we no longer even understand “the element in
which we live.” What could this mean?
And most curious of all, Goethe says “No one knows himself
any longer.” How is this even possible? Elsewhere he says: “Learning fails to bring advancement now that the world is caught up in
such a rapid turnover; by the time you have managed to take due
note of everything, you have lost your self.”14 Are we not always
the same no matter our circumstances?
Education too is thereby affected. It is suggested that we might
even become “over-educated,” mis-educated, that education itself
has become, somehow, distorted. He reflects: “For almost a century
now the humanities have no longer influenced the minds of men
engaged in them.”15 Rather than distinction, we have mediocrity;
rather than a high culture, we have an ordinary one. What then of
the rewards of “perspective,” “balance” and “excellence” once
thought the outcome of an ennobling education?
The “whirl of the times” has only accelerated many, many fold
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since 1825. The author could not possibly have envisioned the pace
at which we live our lives today. To be sure, on first hearing, one
might be inclined to take the above observations as the grumbling
of a man seeing the world pass him by (empty biographism). We
might, however, also take this as notice to think better about the
character of our lives in our ultra-ultra world.
3. “The General Sickness of the Age”
Life is our lot rather than reflection.
—Goethe16
Goethe’s exclamation that “nowadays . . . no one knows himself
any longer” clearly needs further consideration. How could this
be? Don’t we know ourselves?
Throughout the modern disciplines—the physical sciences,
history, even poetry and literature—was a growing trend, evident
to Goethe, to what he called “subjectivity.” Juniors and seniors will
remember, in the Discourse on Method, Descartes’s identification
of the “ego” as the primordial truth about which we alone can be
immediately “certain.” The immediate evidence of this self-intuition then provides the standard of truth for all else, now thought
true only if “clearly and distinctly” conceivable to us. Odd though
this may sound, this new self-certainty leads to our world being
reconceived as “the external world,” about which we can now have
only a small measure of certainty and that of its radically stripped
down mathematical qualities. To be sure, this made a “modern science” of such a world possible, yet it gave us a new definition and
sense of self that was problematic.17 This excessively polarized and
reduced view of the ego as “subject”—understood as standing
“over against”18 some bare objective world—is what Goethe meant
by “subjectivity:” polarized, withdrawn, exiled to its own interior
world, and thereby alienated from any sense of world in which it
could feel itself integrated or at home.19
For Goethe the consequences of this influential (nay, fateful)
redefinition of self are nowhere better seen than in his own vocation, poetry. We have all heard the caricature of the modern “romantic” poet: a suffering recluse, retreating to his Paris garret,
whose only truth is his inner pain. But for Goethe there is, unfor-
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tunately, an element of truth to be found therein: He observes: “All
the poets [today] write as if they were ill and the whole world were
a lazaretto [leper colony]. They all speak of the woe and misery of
this earth and the joy of a hereafter: all are discontented. . . . This,”
he adds, “is a real abuse of poetry.”20 “I attach no value to [such]
poems.”21
From Goethe’s perspective, “whoever descends deep down
into himself will always realize he is only half a being,”22 and being
half will discover there limited resources for creativity. “A subjective nature has soon talked out his little internal material and is at
last ruined by mannerism [that is, excessive affectation],”23 he
notes regretfully. “Such people look at once within; they are so occupied by what is revolving in themselves, [that] they are like a
man in passion, who passes his dearest friends on the street without
seeing them.”24 With reduced openness to the world around them,
they have become “blind with seeing eyes.” This excessive onesidedness, and consequent risk of self-absorption, Goethe named
“the general sickness of the present age [heutigen Zeit],”25 and led
Doctor von Goethe to his famous diagnosis: “What is Classical is
healthy; what is Romantic is sick.”26 Sick? Unhealthy, unproductive, foundationless, and ultimately untruthful. We lose our fullest
selves.
Goethe thus found himself standing at the point of the divide
where, for all our efforts to think about each separately, subject
and object were being ever more pulled apart. This experiential
breach was of fundamental concern because, when either is overpolarized—when the soul is diminished as an isolated, worldless
ego (psyche), res cogitans or when the world is diminished as external, even foreign, barren res extensa—both subject and object
are diminished for want of their natural correlate. If I may indulge
in a somewhat dramatic image: like a man standing between two
horses pulling him apart, Goethe found that—for the sake of
health27—he had everything he could handle to keep himself and
the world whole.28
Goethe himself thus resisted being “caught up in his time;”
he was not a “romantic.” As he said, “my tendencies were opposed
to those of my time, which were wholly subjective; while in my
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objective efforts, I stood alone to my disadvantage.”29 His “objective efforts”? How could he resist the subjective tendency?
4. “The Element in which we Live”
In all natural things there is something wonderful. . . .
So we should approach the inquiry . . . without aversion,
knowing that in all of them there is something
natural and beautiful.
—Aristotle30
Surprising though it may seem to some, the answer is nature. Thus
it is apt that the Goethe we first meet is not the poet but the Goethe
who spent his whole life researching “the element in which we
live,” that is researching into nature. It is this “objective” involvement that saved him from the excesses of his—and our—time, not
to mention giving him “the most wonderful moments of his life.”31
So, what is nature?—OK, a simpler question.—What is a
plant? Which grammatical form best names its being, a noun or a
verb (or a gerund, a verbal noun)? By plant do we intend a static
state or an activity alive with change, something that has grown or
some process of growth?32 Clearly we need to name both—form
that is also in the process of self-formation. “Growth is the point
of life.”33
For us here in the Southwest, sumac, oak, aspen, pinõn, mallow and mullen are different kinds of plants. The principle at work
is the same throughout the stages of the life cycle of a mallow, for
instance, from seedling to flowering, fructifying plant. Hence we
name it one thing—a mallow—despite all these various stages and
differing formal manifestations.34
But it is not only this individual plant that is before us, so is
the species “mallow,” and even further so is the kingdom “plant,”
and these, as Goethe will insist, not as abstract concepts in the mind
but somehow in the living instance itself. Thus Goethe sought to
account for plant life as such, despite the dizzying fact that they
take infinitely many and wondrously different shapes. Sumac,
aspen, mallow are in “inner essence” still “plants.”35 What is
needed in this view is to identify the unifying principle at work
(not “underlying”) in each and every form at whatever stage of
growth and complexity they might be. But how to do so? And how
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to find a language that captures this universally active principle of
forms forming themselves?
To do so Goethe had to depart radically from his contemporaries and from their analytical approach. But in so doing this departure brings him closer to us. We can see this at the outset of the
Metamorphosis of Plants that we read in freshman laboratory,
where he appeals, not to results of the latest scientific journals, but
to our own untutored experience. He begins: “Anyone who has paid
a little attention to plant growth. . . .”36 This means that we, ordinary human beings, still have access to a realm of primary significance, one not to be diminished as “pre-scientific,” if what is
meant thereby is “pre-insightful.” Rather we, you and me, have
deep access into what is before us.37
Indeed he is critical that, with all our education and learning,
we may on the contrary be closing ourselves off from this primary
level of our experience. He often referred to a passage in one of
his early plays to illustrate this eclipse of experience by theory:
[A]s it is said in my Goetz von Berlichingen, that the
son, from pure learning, does not know the father, so
in science do we find people who can neither see nor
hear, through sheer learning and hypothesis. Such people look at once within; they are so [pre-] occupied by
what is revolving in themselves, that they are like a
man in passion, who passes his dearest friends in the
street without seeing them. [Rather] the observation of
nature requires a certain purity of mind that cannot be
disturbed or preoccupied by anything. . . . It is just because we carry about with us a great apparatus of philosophy and hypothesis, that we spoil all.38
“Like a man in passion”: Ideas, no less than passions, can take hold
of our minds, preventing us from seeing what might otherwise be
evident and thereby preventing us from attending to our primary
experience.39 So overwhelming are our present-day theoretical preoccupations that—in one of his most shocking statements of all—
Goethe claims that we no longer even concern ourselves with
nature. “That nature, which is our [modern] concern, isn’t nature
any longer,” he says.40 Extraordinary!
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What has been lost, in Goethe’s view, is a sense of the wholeness of wholes and the interrelatedness and integration of all things,
in short, Nature (capital N). This loss is the necessary consequence
of any approach wherein wholes are but “by-products”41 of uncoordinated, underlying, isolated forces and elements (“matter in the
void”). Looking at things in terms of their parts—elements, simples, particles, atoms—analytical ways of thinking stumble in the
face of the Humpty Dumpty problem: how to put the whole back
together again.42 If we begin with parts, we end up with reconstituted conglomerates, aggregates, bunches, but the wholeness of
things, the integral reality, remains a secondary phenomenon, a
mystery, if not an accident.43 Here too we’ve become “blind with
seeing eyes.”
Juniors are soon to read and seniors will remember Descartes’s
famous experiment with the wax at the end of Meditations II. There
Descartes places a piece of fresh bees wax near a burning candle,
whereupon it melts and loses its original color and smell, texture
and shape (i.e. primary as well as secondary qualities), that is loses
all its original properties but res extensa, mere extension (though
this changes too). This experimental method is designed to bring
us to see what is “elemental” (if not fundamental). Descartes then
proceeds to claim that by “an act of intuition of reason” he—and
we—would know this transmogrified, charred lump in front of us
to be the same thing as before his infernal experiment. He asks,
who would not so conclude thus? (Aristotle, for one) Well . . . if
that were a plant, and not an amorphous hunk of bees wax, who
would concur with Descartes that what remains is the same as what
was put to the flame?44
The analytical flame dissociates or separates what originally
was together. It “kills.” So this method.45 The disfigured, deracinated, blackened carcass of the plant is anything but, the living
whole, nowhere to be found. The mass of matter lying before
Descartes is “the same” only if life and death are not different, and
if form is not an active principle but a derivative by-product. With
this “lethal generality”46 we lose—and lose sight of—“the spirit of
the whole,” as Goethe would say. For this reason, he claimed as
well that the modern approach—subjectively predisposed to take
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the objects of our experience in such a reduced way—loses its
claim to “objectivity.”47
The question for Goethe—and for us—is whether and how we
can recover the whole. Is it still possible to begin elsewhere, think
differently such that the whole is retained along with its manifold
parts? Can we yet begin where we naturally begin, with what is
“first for us” (Aristotle), with integral wholes?
5. Our Ancient Right
The spirit of the actual is the true ideal.
No one who is observant will ever
find nature dead or silent.
—Goethe48
Goethe thus sought “another way,” in order, as he said, “to restore
to the human spirit, its ancient right to come face to face with nature.” 49
He asks: “What does all our communion with nature amount
to . . . if we busy ourselves with analyzing only single portions,
and do not feel the breath of the spirit that dictates the role of
every part and restrains or sanctions all excess through an immanent law?”50 Thus “phenomena once and for all must be removed
from the gloomy empirical-mechanical-dogmatic [torture] chamber [Marterkammer],” he said, “and [be] submitted [rather] to the
jury of [common human understanding].”51 But how are we to do
this, to return to “common human understanding”?
Since apparently we can live in more than one world, Goethe
makes his bid—“naively” yet knowingly52—to reclaim nature as
our home-world. “If we are to rescue ourselves from the boundless multiplicity, atomization and complexity of the modern natural sciences,” he says, “and get back to the realm of simplicity,
we must always consider [this] question: how would Plato [or
any non-modern] have reacted to nature, fundamentally one
unity as it still is, how would he have viewed what may now appear to us as its greater complexity?”53 We need to remove what
“now” stands in the way.54 We need somehow to shuck off our
modern predisposition to see all things as artificially reconstituted55 and see our world, rather, as one might whose vision was
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not so refracted. But how?
Mindful that “the first stages of a discovery leave their mark
on the course of knowledge,”56 Goethe first seeks to reorient us.
To begin with, “anyone who has paid a little attention” has to acknowledge that our primary and original experience of things is
otherwise than we’ve been brought to conceive. “In nature,” he
said, “we never see anything isolated: everything is in connection
with something.”57 Any account, then, of our experience must
begin here with the unity and interrelatedness of all things.
Herein lays Goethe’s unified field theory: “I abide by what is
simple and comprehensive,” he says.58 (This he also calls his
“stubborn realism.”59)
As we heard, a certain kind of undisturbed purity of mind—
clarity, breadth of survey, attention to manifest differences—is
the pre-requisite to any genuine openness. In the garden, along a
path, in the laboratory, we need first to see the things themselves,
to recognize the ways and means that the plant [or whatever our
object] uses,”60 “to follow it carefully through all its transitions,”61 in short, “to follow as carefully as possible in the footsteps of nature.”62 “In the process,” he says, “we become familiar
with certain requisite conditions for what is manifesting itself.
From this point of view everything gradually falls into place
under higher principles and laws revealed not to reason through
words and hypotheses, but to our intuitive perception [Anschauung] through phenomena.63” In this way, our relationship to
things is not at first “speculative,” but what Goethe calls “practical,” that is grounded in the concrete experience of individuals
and the real.64 (Here have we a model of openness and extreme
care that will serve us well, not only in the laboratory, but
throughout our work at the college.)
Given this, given observation that is undertaken with a “truly
sympathetic interest,”65 a remarkable transformation can then
begin. We can be moved to insight. In an often quoted passage
from the Introduction to his Outline of a Theory of Color, Goethe
addresses this process of natural ideation. He writes:
An extremely odd demand is often set forth but never
met . . . that [bare] empirical data should be presented
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without any theoretical context. . . . This demand is
odd because it is useless to simply look at something.
Every act of looking [naturally] turns into observation, every act of observation into reflection, every act
of reflection into the making of associations: thus it is
that we theorize every time we look carefully at the
world. The ability to do this with clarity of mind, with
self-knowledge, in a free way, and (if I may venture
to put it so [he adds]) with irony, is a skill we need in
order to avoid the pitfalls of [modern scientific] abstraction.66
Nature converses with us. Like any organic transition, thought is
the natural and continuous outgrowth of its prior condition, the
fruit of concrete experience. As such we are naturally led to a
higher integration through “the practical and self-distilling
processes of common human understanding.”67 “We theorize every
time we look carefully at the world.”
When we are able to survey an object in every detail,
grasp it carefully and reproduce it in our mind’s eye [he
reflects, then] we can say we have an intuitive perception [Anschauung] of it in the truest and highest sense.
We can [rightfully] say it belongs to us.... And thus the
particular leads to the general [as well as] the general
to the particular. The two combine their effect in every
observation, in every discourse.68
As much as we take the lead in inquiry, then so too are we led
by what we are inquiring into. Experience is bi-directional. Subject-object; object-subject. True sympathetic observation results
in the recapitulation in our summary imagination of the originating principle. The object becomes for us as it is in itself. In this
way the object “belongs” to us as much as we, in communion, belong with it. Our natural correlation is thereby reestablished, the
Cartesian subjective reduction of experience is offset, if not reversed, and a kind of renewed originality is returned to human experience, widening and opening our purview69, whereby we might
be thought once again to come “face to face” with nature. Our ancient right is thereby restored.
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6. The Original World
. . . the sublime tranquility which surrounds us
when we stand in the solitude and silence of nature,
vast and eloquent.
—Goethe70
A living thing cannot be measured
by something external to itself.
—Goethe71
This reunion of observer and world—we should say union—is possible because of a unique human faculty—one out-rightly denied72
or at least overlooked by other modern thinkers—but to which
Goethe again and again returns our attention. As we read: “When
we are able to survey an object in every detail, grasp it carefully
and reproduce it in the mind’s eye, we can say we have an intuitive
perception of it in the truest and highest sense.” This capacity for
concrete, summary “intuition,” intuitive perception, Anschauung,
is our faculty for experiential wholes wherein the actively unifying
principles at work in the world manifest themselves. Deny it and
we have no wholes. They are not deduced, inferred, or synthesized.
We do not have to go beyond or behind73 the phenomena to see
these at work. These are made known to us at the level of our primary experience. We “see” them.
There’s a famous story: At a meeting of the Society for Scientific Research in Jena there was a “fortunate encounter” between
Goethe and the poet Friedrich Schiller—whose poetry at the time
Goethe thought too romantic, too subjective. Goethe sought to explain to him his own attempt to articulate such a principle whereby
the natural plenitude of plant life might be accounted for. His
“idea” was, he admits, “the strangest creature in the world,”74
wherein the whole range of plant formation might be seen as
“stemming” or “derived” from an aboriginal form that was in this
regard the formal progenitor of the whole kingdom. Goethe named
this the Urpflanze,75 the original or originary plant.76
Schiller’s first response to this suggestion reflected his philosophical background, in particular his indebtedness to Kant. “This
is not an observation from experience,” he said, “This is an idea.”77
Schiller could not see what Goethe claimed he saw. He was disin-
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clined—as we may be—to grant that this was anything but a “regulative idea” constructed by reason to help it organize its experience, not a principle at work in the world organizing the
phenomenal array of plant forms. It was merely an idea, merely
“subjective.” For him and for Kant, it couldn’t be anything more,
as in their view phenomena are themselves constituted by consciousness and are thus not things in themselves.
Convinced, rather, that he had identified the objective generative source of all plant forms, Goethe replied: “Then I may rejoice
that I have ideas without knowing it, and can even see them with
my own eyes!” For Goethe, perception and reason, as moments of
a natural process, are not disparate faculties, but continuous. Thus
this, and all other Ur-phenomena, immanent and at work throughout our experience, are real and hence must be available to us on
the primary level of common human understanding.78 He wonders:
“Why should it not also hold true in the intellectual area that
through an intuitive perception of eternally creative nature we may
become worthy of participating spiritually in its creative process?”
He thus insisted that he could see with his eyes something to which
others seem to have become blind.79 (Despite this fundamental difference, the two became close friends.)
But more needs to be said about this “strangest” of all creatures
that holds, in Goethe’s words, “the secret of the creation and organization of plants” (or any family of phenomena). As we mentioned earlier, Goethe’s interests were vast and not restricted to
botany; he also did research in osteology or bone formation. Indeed
it was Goethe who discovered the role of the intermaxillary bone,
the missing link that allowed zoologists to connect man and ape
anatomically. In a passage from his work On Morphology, we see
most clearly the point of origination of his thinking concerning Urphenomena:
The distinction between man and animal long eluded
discovery. Ultimately it was believed that the definitive
difference between ape and man lay in the placement
of the ape’s four incisors in a bone clearly and physically separate from other bones. [Goethe provides the
link.] . . . Meanwhile I had devoted my full energies to
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the study of osteology, for in the skeleton the unmistakable character of every form is preserved conclusively and for all time. 80
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The developmental history of an organism is not past; rather the
history of successive generational transformations is preserved
and encapsulated in the fullness of any present form. Just as osteogeny can now be seen to recapitulate phylogeny, so more generally can any such morphological account. This “pregnancy”81
of the present form allows of a new kind of thinking to uncover
the Ur-principle at work, a reverse thinking that “traces the phenomena [back] to their [empirical] origins.”82 (This is the first
methodological principle of the new science of morphology83).
In another context he reflects on this Ur-principle, now also
called an “archetype”: “an anatomical archetype will be suggested here, a general picture containing the forms of all animals
as potential, one which will guide us to an orderly description
of each animal.”84 The Ur-principle is thus a kind of omni-potential in conversation with its environment and out of which the
whole polymorphic metamorphosis issues. “All is leaf.” As such
these are not ideas in the usual sense of Plato or Kant, neither
separate nor abstract. Rather they are like ideas in enabling us to
give an account of the unifying principles at the origin of the
plenitude. They are like ideas, as well, in that they might serve
as a kind of “formula” providing a way to generate new forms—
if only in imagination.85 The “derivation”86 is not of hypothetical
but real possibilities. Though they are more like the eidos in Aristotle, an active principle embodying the manifold fruitfulness
of nature, here however “the secret of the creation and organization” of the family of forms. (He sometimes called it entelechy.87)
Thus whatever the family of phenomena—botany, osteology, geology, meteorology, color—Ur-phenomena emerge. We
come to see the unifying principle, the spirit “that dictates the
role of every part and restrains or sanctions all excess through
immanent law.” From this “empirical summit,88” all things can
be seen as unified. Thus we have order out of chaos,89 integration where we might otherwise have discontinuity. The plenitude is comprehended.
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Therefore when you pick up Goethe’s Metamorphosis of
Plants to read, or any of his other writings on nature, do not close
yourselves off when hearing its foreign language, rather attempt
to hear its new voice and direction for the understanding of nature, “the element in which we live.” Whether, indeed, Goethe
has bequeathed us a fruitful path by means of which our ancient
right might be restored or whether it is but a false portal, is for
each of us to determine for ourselves.
7. Against Self-knowledge
Everything that liberates our mind
without at the same time imparting
self-control is pernicious.
—Goethe90
Where are we, then, in the midst of all this? Is there a lesson to be
learned about ourselves from this “other way of studying nature”?
As we’ve seen there are two unities that are reestablished by
Goethe’s way of thinking: there’s the unity of wholes that had been
fragmented, and the unity of observer and world that had been
alienated. Let us think more about the latter.
This unity of observer and world means that, like any organism, man cannot be known, nor know himself, apart from his
world—his environment— which sustains him and of which he is
an integral part. Given the polarized, inauthentic, and diminished
sense of self that is the consequence of the divorce of the “ego”
from its world in modern thought, it is understandable, then, that
to Goethe “no one knows himself any longer.” This led him to his
famous—if at first shocking—remark concerning the Delphic oracle: “I must admit,” he said, “that I have long been suspicious of
the great and important sounding task: ‘know-thyself.’ This has always seemed to me a deception practiced by a secret order of
priests who wished to confuse humanity with impossible demands,
to divert attention from activity in the outer world to some false
inner speculation.”91 Self-knowledge—or what we take to be
such—can be misleading, indeed disabling.
But how can we make it truthful . . . and enabling? As we
would expect, for Goethe the success of our efforts to know ourselves depends on the degree to which we are willing to extend
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ourselves beyond ourselves. “Man is by all his senses and efforts
directed to externals—to the world around him ,92” he stresses, and
thus “the human being knows himself only insofar as he knows the
world; he perceives the world only in himself and himself only in
the world.”93 This brings to mind his earlier observation: “Whoever
descends deep down into himself will always realize he is only half
a being;” this thought was then completed with “let him find . . . a
world . . . and he will become whole.”94 In short, that we might be
drawn out of our overly self-polarized existence, we need to
reestablish ourselves once again as worldly beings, fully engaged
with and in our natural correlate “the outer world.”
Thus he answers the question “How can we learn self-knowledge?” in this way: “Never by taking thought but rather by action.”95
This reply should not surprise us, for it was our history that our very
attempts to think about ourselves and the world brought us to this
unnatural polarization. Thus it is “activity in the outer world” alone
that is necessary to restore a balanced polarity and healthy equilibrium. We see this in Goethe’s own “objective activity”:
Without my attempts in natural science, I should never
have learned to know mankind [including himself] as
it is. In nothing else can we so closely approach pure
contemplation and thought, so closely observe errors
of the sense and of the understanding, the weak and
strong points of character. All is more or less pliant
and wavering . . . but nature understands no jesting; she
is always true, always serious; always severe . . . the
errors and faults are always those of man. The man incapable of appreciating her, she despises; and only to
the apt, the pure and the true, does she resign herself
and reveal her secrets.96
Here we see Goethe learning lessons from nature that once were
thought the fruit of introspection and the study of the human sciences. The book of nature, as other texts, can serve as an occasion
for self-reflection. “The apt, the pure, and the true” learn about
themselves and other human beings as they self-critically open
themselves up to new fields and methods. The earlier passage, “For
almost a century now the humanities have no longer influenced the
minds of men engaged in them;” comes to mind. It is followed by:
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“it is a real piece of good fortune that nature intervened, drew the
essence of the humanities to itself and opened to us the way to a
true humanitarianism from its side.”97 The study of nature can thus
be a liberating study, freeing us from the burden of blinding conceptions and enabling us to return to our original worldliness
wherein we, once again, can open ourselves to our fullest possibilities. In this way, the study of nature is properly a liberal art.
8. The Grand Attempt
Where do we meet an original nature?
Where is the man with strength to be true,
and to show himself as he is?
—Goethe98
Finally, certain questions emerged earlier about our modern way
of life. How are we, given the “demands of an exorbitant present,”
not to get “caught up” in the whirl of our times and to reclaim a
sense of productive leisure? For Goethe the answer is . . . nature,
whose rhythms, it was once thought, could not be accelerated, and
through our study of which intimations of timeless self-sameness
might prove a refuge and shape our own being in the world. How
are we to regain a footing “where everything is in flux of continual
change”? Here too, the answer for Goethe is nature, our home
world, whose inherent lawfulness, as evidenced in the unities of
life forms, can thus provide a secure base upon which to take our
next steps. How are we to know ourselves more completely? Nature is especially needed here to offset our tendency to over selfinvolvement and to return us to our original fullness of being. And
how are we to educate ourselves more truthfully? Since modern
education only brought us, in Goethe’s view, to become “blind with
seeing eyes,” he sought in nature a complement—not to mention
an antidote—whose truthfulness would bring us “to see with seeing eyes” that fullness of view, perspective and measure that is the
proper fruit of serious study. Our question: can our own sustained
reflection on these questions, beginning with freshman laboratory,
lead to lessons such as these as well?
By way of conclusion I would like to quote Nietzsche one last
time. Toward the end of his life (1889), he himself tried to capture
in one of his aphorisms “the European event” that was Goethe.
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This distillation lives up to his well-known boast that he “wrote
whole books in one sentence,”99 though in this case he is somewhat
more loquacious, for it took him a whole paragraph to epitomize
this extraordinary life:
Goethe—not a German event but a European one: a
grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century
through a return to nature, through a going-up to the
naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century.—He bore within him its
strongest instincts: sentimentality, nature-idolatry, the
anti-historical, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary. . . . He called to his aid history, the natural sciences,
antiquity, likewise Spinoza, above all practical activity;
he surrounded himself with nothing but closed horizons; he did not sever himself from life, [rather] he
placed himself within it [that is, “at the very center of
the plenitude”]; nothing could discourage him and he
took as much as possible upon himself, above himself,
within himself. What he aspired to was totality; he
strove against separation of reason, sensuality, feeling,
will (—preached in the most horrible scholasticism by
Kant, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself
to the whole, he created himself. . . . Goethe was, in an
epoch disposed to the unreal, a convinced realist; . . .
Goethe conceived of a strong, highly cultured human
being, skilled in all physical accomplishments, who,
keeping himself in check and having reverence for
himself, dares to allow himself the whole compass and
wealth of naturalness, [one] who is strong enough for
this freedom. . . . A spirit thus emancipated stands in
the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only what is separate and individual may be rejected, that in the totality everything
is redeemed and affirmed—he no longer denies. . . .
But such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths: I
have baptized it with the name . . . Dionysus.—100
Those who’ve read more widely in Nietzsche will recognize this
last act of baptism as extraordinary: there is no higher, nor deeper,
nor more original mode of being for Nietzsche than this aboriginal
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and creative life force that he identifies in the person of Goethe:
1) this rare independence from it’s times, 2) this extraordinary, if
circumspect, positivity, 3) this unlimited and deep interest in all
things, 4) this secure groundedness in practical, concrete reality,
5) this insistence on our original, primary experience, 6) this noble
distance from suffering, 7) this incomparable sense of measure,
and of course 8) this Olympian courage. If not Dionysus, then what
name or word would be appropriate?
Goethe and Nietzsche saw that we moderns have a hard choice
before us: between disaffection and engagement, between cynicism101 and wonder. Goethe somehow was able to affirm life, to
say YES!102
So we ask you tonight to consider this figure, how he might
move you to “discipline yourselves to the whole” and summon the
natural fecundity of your inherence.
And we ask you tonight “to place yourselves within life,” to
seek out what is primary and original and, daring to speak the language of discovery, to speak “poetically.103”
And we ask you tonight to “make time” for thoughtfulness,
that you transform the mundane with the joys of daily discovery,
that your life be rich and your days not ordinary ones.
One last comment: Eckermann observed that even until
Goethe’s last days (that is, into his eighty-third year), he was continually learning. May this be so for you as well.
Thank you.
NOTES
1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, #337; also
#664 (hereafter MR). Given as the annual Friday night “Dean’s Lecture”
to open the thirty-seventh academic year at St. John’s College, Santa Fe.
See MR #864. This talk is a further development of work begun in 1986
(see Levine, “The Political Philosophy of Nature, A Preface to Goethe’s
Human Sciences,” (hereafter Political Philosophy) Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 11 [1986]: 163-178). It was Thomas McDonald who introduced me to the work of Eric Heller and Karl Löwith, and all three
who introduced me to the depth of Goethe’s thinking; my debt to them
continues. For the ambiguity and greatness of Goethe’s “grand attempt,”
see Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, trans. John Ox-
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enford, (London: E. P. Dent, 1951 [1850]) (hereafter ECK), October 20,
1828.
2. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Hammondworth: Penguin, 1968 [1889])
(hereafter TI), 102.
3. “Analysis and Synthesis” (hereafter AS), in Goethe, Scientific Studies,
(hereafter SS), ed. and trans. Douglas Miller, Vol. 12 of Goethe: The Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 48. The publication of this collection of Goethe’s disparate scientific works has
provided a new occasion for further reflection about his “grand attempt.”
4. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence and Concept of Phusis in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1,” in Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998) (hereafter Phusis), 183.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Goethe; or, the Writer,” in Representative Men
(New York: Marsilio, 1995 [1850]), 195.
6. ECK January 4, 1824, May 2, 1824, February 18 and 19, 1829.
7. ECK February 26, 1824.
8. ECK March 1, 1830.
9. Outline of a Theory of Color (hereafter OTC), in SS, #743; see also
note 21.
10. Nietzsche, “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” in Human all too
Human, A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdate (Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press, 1986) Vol. II, Part II, #109, 336.
11. Letter to Zelter, June 7, 1825; in Löwith, Karl, “The Historical Background of European Nihilism,” “The Fate of Progress,” Nature, History,
and Existentialism, and Other Essays in the Philosophy of History
(Evanston, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1966) 4, 156-7; From Hegel
to Nietzsche, the Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1964), 27-8, 177-181 (hereafter HN); also
MR #480.
12. MR #474.
13. MR #479.
14. MR #770.
15. HN, 226.
16. “The Enterprise Justified,” in On Morphology, SS, 61.
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17. The ego or modern self is doubtful of all but bare existence, where
even the externality, the worldness of the world, is in question.
18. For an interesting reflection on the problem of the subject-object polarity, see Heidegger, Phusis, 188.
19. A modern irony: man is least at home in a world of his own conception.
20. ECK September 24, 1827.
21. ECK September 18, 1823. By contrast, all of Goethe’s poetry was insistently “occasional,” that is objectively motivated: “The world is so
great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never want for occasions for poems. But they must be occasioned [poems] [Gelegenheitsgedichte]: that is to say, reality [Wirklichkeit] must give both impulse and
material. A particular event becomes universal and poetic by the very circumstance that it is treated by a poet. All my poems are occasioned
poems, suggested by real life, and having therein a firm foundation.” A
radically different orientation and tone is apparent here. See also January
29, 1826 and MR ##337, 393, 119.
22. MR #935.
23. ECK January 29, 1826: also MR #1119.
24. ECK May18.24.
25. ECK January 29, 1826.
26. MR #1031; ECK May 2.1829.
27 .A comparison with Nietzsche is appropriate here.
28. ECK March, 14, 1830; also December 21, 1831; and “Significant
Help Given by an Ingenious Turn of Phrase” (hereafter ITP), in SS, 39.
29. ECK April 14, 1824; also “The Content Prefaced,” (hereafter CP) in
On Morphology, SS, 67, and HN, 6-7.
30. On the Parts of Animals, I.v. 645a16, 19-27.
31. Fortunate Encounter (hereafter FE), SS, 18.
32. “The Germans,” Goethe notes, “have a word for the complex of existence present in the physical organism, Gestalt [or structured form] . . .
[whereby] an interrelated whole is identified, defined, and fixed in character. But if we look at all these Gestalten [all these forms], especially organic ones, we will discover that nothing in them is permanent, nothing is
at rest or defined—everything is in flux of continual motion. This is why
the Germans frequently and fittingly make use of [another] word Bildung
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[formation] to describe [both] the end product and what is in process of
production as well.” “The Purpose Set Forth,” in On Morphology, SS, 63.
33. ITP, 40.
34. CP,. 69; also Eric Heller, “Goethe and the Idea of Scientific Truth,” in
The Disinherited Mind (hereafter Heller) (New York: Meridian, 1959), 10.
35. Metamorphosis of Plants (hereafter MoP), in SS, 60, 67.
36. MoP, 76.
37. OTC #743.
38. ECK May 18, 1824; also January 17, 1830.
39. This is the “modern cave.” We may not be disposed at first to include
the philosophers among the “opinion makers” parading above and behind
the chained onlookers in Plato’s cave (Republic VII). But they are wordsmiths and as such we are indebted to them for our language and lenses
as well; see also Hegel, “Preface,” Phenomenology of Spirit, trans, A. V.
Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), #33, 19-20: “In modern
time the individual finds the abstract ready made . . . . Hence the task
nowadays consists . . . in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity
so as to give actuality to the universal and impart to it spiritual life.”
40. MR #1364.
41. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, II.
42. “These attempts at division also produce many adverse effects when
carried to an extreme. To be sure, what is alive can be dissected into its
component parts, but from these parts it will be impossible to restore it
and bring it back to life.” See “The Purpose Set Forth,” in SS, 63. The
natural plenitude is now compounded exponentially by the analytical dissolution or decomposition of wholes; cp. Heidegger’s characterization
that the original “atomic bomb” is to be found here in our modern analytical disassociation or explosion of all things into bits, parts and particles. See Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poety, Language, Thought,
trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 168.
43. And thus the diminished reality of those who think that a home is
bricks and mortar, and humans their chemical makeup.
44. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, II, AT, 19-34. How
someone could even think this is worth further thought.
45. A science that had given up trying to explain our experience was simply incomprehensible—not to mention infuriating—to one so firmly
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rooted in the actual (“at the very center of the plenitude”). “The Extent to
Which the Idea ‘Beauty Is Perfection in Combination with Freedom’ May
be Applied to Living Organisms,” in SS, 22; also ECK September 2, 1830;
see also Goethe’s longstanding debate with the Newtonian school and their
tendency to substitute secondary for primary phenomena; OTC ##176,
718.
46. “The Enterprise Justified,” in On Morphology, SS, 61.
47. In this regard one might want to compare Goethe’s and Nietzsche’s
respective attempts to “stave off the nihilistic consequences of modern
science” See David Lawrence Levine, “A World of Worldless Truths, An
Invitation to Philosophy” (hereafter Worldless Truths)in The Envisioned
Life: Essays in Honor of Eva Brann (Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2008), 163.
48. OTC #158.
49. AS, 48.
50. ECK September 2, 1830; also Heller, 16.
51. MR #430: gemeine Menschen verstand (not “common sense”); cf.
“Empirical Observation and Science,” (hereafter EOS) SS, 25.
52. “Naively”: see Levine, Political Philosophy, 163-78.
53. MR #664; also ECK January 29, 1826: “People always talk of the
study of the ancients; but what does that mean, except that it says, turn
your attention to the real world.”; see also OTC #358. Yet as we shall see
Goethe is not an ancient but seeks to carve out a middle position between
ancient and modern science. While there is deep agreement with Aristotle
about our experience of nature in terms of wholes, there is disagreement
about what is eternal. In making form eternal, Aristotle, he said, was
prone to “precipitousness.” By contrast, for him it is the process, not the
form, which abides. “Everything is in flux of continual motion.”
54. “There is no worse mistake in physics or any science than to treat secondary things as basic and . . . to seek an explanation for the basic things
in secondary ones” (OTC #718). It’s as if we were “to enter a palace by
the side door” and thereafter base our description of the whole on our
first, one-sided impression. See “General Observation” (hereafter GO),
SS, 42 and OTC, 160); also, #177, 716 and its application to the “grievous” Newtonian error at #176.
55. See Heidegger, Phusis: “The act of self-unfolding emergence is inherently a going-back-into-itself. This kind of becoming present is phusis.
But it must not be thought of as a kind of built-in ‘motor’ that drives something, nor as an ‘organizer’ on hand somewhere, directing the thing.
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Nonetheless, we might be tempted to fall back on the notion that phuseidetermined being could be a kind that makes themselves. So easily and
spontaneously does this idea suggest itself that it has become normative
for the interpretation of living nature in particular, a living being has been
understood as an ‘organism.’ No doubt a good deal of time has yet to pass
before we learn to see that the idea of ‘organism’ and of the ‘organic’ is a
purely modern, mechanistic teleological concept, according to which
‘growing things’ are interpreted as artifacts that make themselves. Even
the word and concept ‘plant’ takes what grows as something ‘planted,’
something sown and cultivated” (195), and “But is not phusis then misunderstood as some sort of self-making artifact? Or is this not a misunderstanding at all but the only possible interpretation of phusis, namely,
as a kind of techne? This almost seems to be the case, because modern
metaphysics, in the impressive terms of . . . Kant, conceives of ‘nature’ as
a ‘technique’ such that this ‘technique’ that constitutes the essence of nature provides the metaphysical ground for the possibility, or even the necessity, of subjecting and mastering nature through machine technology”
(220).
56. GO, 42.
57. ECK May 12, 1825; also AS, 48.
58. ECK April 11, 1827.
59. FE p. 20.
60. “The Influence of Modern Philosophy,” (hereafter IMP) in SS, 28.
61. MoP #77.
62. MoP #84.
63. OTC #175.
64. EOS, 25.
65. OTC #665. There are times when Goethe seems to anticipate Husserl’s
phenomenological approach, in particular in “The Experiment as Mediator Between Object and Subject” [hereafter EMOS], in SS, 16, and IALO,
22, where the rigor and thoroughness of something like “eidetic variation”
seems to be proposed. The question is living form: “We cannot find
enough points of view nor develop ourselves enough organs of perception
to avoid killing it when we analyze it,” that is, multiple adumbrations
may give us a kind of whole but at the risk of rendering the outcome a
‘mental composition’ (as in Kant). It would be interesting to see how
Husserl and Heidegger treat life in its original vitality. See also OTC #166.
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66. “Preface,” OTC,. 159. We’ve taken the liberty to add the specification
“modern scientific” to abstraction. Throughout his OTC Goethe addresses the problems of scientific cognition and its tendency to excessive
abstraction (##310, 716, 754, and p. 162). For Goethe, as for Hegel, this
tendency is consequential and reckless. See note 52.
67. EOS, 25.
68. “Polarity,” in SS, 155; OTC #175; Letter to Herder, May 17, 1778 (in
Heller, 10).
69. OTC #732 (“expanded empiricism”).
70. “On Granite,” in SS, 132.
71. “A Study Based on Spinoza,” in SS, 8.
72. Despite Kant’s denial of such a human faculty in his Critique of Teleological Judgment, Goethe found a window of opportunity. He wrote that
Kant had “a roguishly ironic way of working: at times he seemed determined to put the narrowest limit on our ability to know things, and at
times, with a casual gesture, he pointed beyond the limits he himself had
set.” The passage in Kant that Goethe alludes to reads thus: “We can . . .
think [of a kind of] understanding which [unlike our discursive one
is] . . . intuitive, [and] proceeds from the synthetical-universal (the intuition of the whole as such) to the particular, i.e. from the whole to the
parts. . . . It is here not at all requisite to prove that such an intellectus archetypus is possible, but only that we are led to the idea of it—which too
contains no contradiction—in contrast to our discursive understanding,
which has need of images (intellectus ectypus) and to the contingency of
its constitution.” However, Goethe then drew the opposite conclusion:
“Why should it not also hold true in the intellectual area that through an
intuitive perception of eternally creative nature we may become worthy
of participating spiritually in its creative process?” he wonders. “Impelled
from the start by an inner need, I had striven unconsciously and incessantly toward primal image and prototype, and had even succeeded in
building up a method of representing it which conformed to nature. Thus
there was nothing further to prevent me from boldly embarking on this
‘adventure of reason’ (as the sage of Konigsberg himself called it).”
“Judgment through Intuitive Perception” (hereafter JIP), in SS, 31-2; also
EMOS, 11-17. Cf. Kant’s “aesthetic normal idea” in Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment, §17.
73. OTC #177; if we deny this faculty of intuitive perception we have no
real wholes.
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74. Letter to Herder, May 17, 1787: “I am very close to discovering the
secret of the creation and organization of plants. . . . The crucial point
from which everything else must needs spring. . . . The Urpflanze is to
be the strangest creature in the world. . . . After this model [visual formula] it will be possible to invent plants ad infinitum, which will all be
consistent...would possess an inner truth and necessity. And the same law
will be applicable to everything alive” (Heller, 10). Also OTC #175, “Polarity,” in SS, 155.
75. Urpflanze is often translated as “symbolic plant.” While this rendering
might be helpful if we keep a strictly Goethean notion of symbol in mind
(as in MR #314), this translation more often misdirects us if it suggests
to the reader either a mental abstraction or a literary device. Rather it
seeks to embody the manifold fruitfulness of nature “in potential” (“Outline for a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, Commencing
with Osteology” (hereafter GICA), in SS, 118).
76. “All is leaf.” MoP #119; OTC #120.
77. FE, 20; ECK November 14, 1823.
78. Letters to Schiller, February 10, 14, 1787 (in Heller, 20).
79. Hegel too—who otherwise was well disposed to Goethe’s project, indeed helped Goethe see how it fit into the larger scheme of the development of ideas—Hegel too nevertheless failed to see the Urpflanze as
anything but an abstracted archetype (See Hegel, The Letters, trans. Clark
Butler and Christiane Seiler [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1984], 681-711; HN, 11).
80. CP, 68-9. And we read in the Metamorphosis of Plants of the calyx
that it “betrays its composite origins in its more or less deep incisions or
divisions.”
81. ITP, 41.
82. OTC, 166. This may sound like ‘deconstruction,’ yet we would have
to consider whether it represents a true break with analytical thinking, as
Goethe seeks to do here.
83. CP, 69. Just as it led to his “discovering” the Ur-principle of the plant
kingdom, so Goethe is led in his other studies to “postulate” one for the
mammal family: “In the process I was soon obliged to postulate a prototype against which all mammals could be compared as to points of agreement and divergence. As I had earlier sought out the archetypal plant I
now aspired to find the archetypal animal; in essence the concept or idea
of the animal.”
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84. GICA, 118.
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
85. Letter to Herder, May 17, 1787; OTC #175; “Polarity,” 155.
86. ITP, 41 (“ . . . my whole method relies on derivation”).
87. Aristotle’s eidos is not subject to metamorphosis. On the other side,
in Darwin the metamorphosis of form is not an unfolding of immanent
form but the haphazard “evolution of species” and creative adaptation on
the part of active wholes becomes “random selection.” See note 51. My
thanks to John Cornell for his helping me think this through.
88. OTC, #720.
89. OTC, #109.
90. MR #504.
91. ITP, 39. Also “If we take the significant dictum ‘know thyself’ and
consider it, we mustn’t interpret it from an ascetical standpoint. It does
not by any means signify the kind of self-knowledge advocated by our
modern hypochondriacs, humorists, and ‘Heautotimorumenoi’ [self-torturers], but quite simply means: pay some attention to yourself, watch
what you are doing so that you come to realize where you stand vis-à-vis
your fellows and the world in general. This needs no psychological selftorture; any capable person knows and appreciates this. It is good advice
and of the greatest practical advantage to everyone (MR, #657).” He objects only to those isolating tendencies of the subjective sciences and psychologies that are heir to the fateful alienation, if not divorce, of the ego
from the world.
92. ECK April 10, 1829.
93. ITP, 39.
94. MR #935; the whole passage reads “let him find a girl or a world, no
matter which, and he will become whole.” This is typical (see Eric Heller,
“Goethe in Marienbad,” in The Poet’s Self and The Poem, (London:
Athione Press, 1976).
95. MR #442 (“Try to do your duty and you’ll soon discover what you’re
like.”); also ##770, 935; ECK January 29, 1826.
96. ECK February 13, 1829.
97. HN, 226; also ECK October 18, 1827: In a conversation with Hegel
about the potential for modern sophistry of the “dialectic disease,”
Goethe says: “Let us only hope that these intellectual arts and dexterities
are not frequently misused, and employed to make the false true and
the true false. . . . The study of nature preserves me from such a disease.
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For here we have to deal with the infinitely and eternally true, which
throws off as incapable everyone who does not proceed purely and honestly with the treatment and observation of his subject. I am also certain
that many a dialectic disease would find a wholesome remedy in the
study of nature.”
98. ECK January 2, 1824; also March 12, 1828.
99. TI, #51.
100. Ibid., #49; cf. MR #864.
101. ECK January 2, 1824; letter to Zelter, June 18, 1831 (in HN, 27).
102. See also ECK January 24, 1825, October 12, 1825; February 1, 1827;
October 18, 1827; February 12, 1827; MR ##191 and 1121. See Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, passim. This affirmation is what Nietzsche found most admirable, indeed he was envious of this, for it was not
available to him. See “Afterword: Goethe and Nietzsche,” in Levine,
Worldless Truths, 163-65.
103. “A More Intense Chemical Activity in Primordial Matter,” SS, 137.
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Special Section:
Justice
Editor’s Note
In November of 2012, O. Carter Snead, Professor of Law at Notre
Dame Law School and Director of the Notre Dame Center for
Ethics and Culture, invited five tutors from St. John’s College in
Annapolis to speak at the Center’s thirteenth annual fall conference
entitled The Crowning Glory of the Virtures: Exploring the Many
Facets of Justice.
The following five papers were delivered on a panel session,
together with a sixth: “The Relevance of Lay Views on Punishment
to Criminal Justice” by Christopher Slobogin, Professor of Law
and Psychiatry at Vanderbilt Law School. A greatly expanded version of the paper was published the following month: Christopher
Slobogin and Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, “Putting Desert in its
Place,” 65 Stanford Law Review 77 (January 2013). The article can
be accessed online at the following URL:
http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/sites/default/files/
Slobogin-65-Stan-L-Rev-77.pdf
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The Actual Intention of Plato’s
Dialogues on Justice and Statesmanship
Eva Brann
71
Cicero famously said of Socrates that he was the one who brought
philosophy down from heaven to earth. This must be some other
Socrates than the one of the Platonic dialogues, perhaps
Xenophon’s of the Memorabilia. After all, even the comic Socrates
of Aristophanes’s Clouds is a meteorologist, a watcher of the heavens, though he does it hoisted up in a basket, butt up. Of course,
he is a sky watcher, since that is where the vaporous and loquacious
Clouds—Aristophanes’s comic version of the Forms—are to be
found. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that
Socrates connected earthly matters, such as politics, to the invisible
heavens, the realm of the forms.
There are three Platonic dialogues overtly and extendedly concerned with politics. The first, the second longest of all the dialogues, is the Republic, in Greek Politeia. It bears the subtitle,
added in antiquity, “On the Just.” The second is the Statesman, in
Greek Politikos; its ancient subtitle was “On Kingship.” And the
third, the Laws, Nomoi in Greek, subtitled “On Legislation,” is by
far the longest.
In the Republic Socrates is both narrator and main interlocutor.
In the Statesman he is the originating occasion of the dialogue but
not a participant. He sits it out as an auditor, perhaps at times somewhat skeptical; the leading speaker is a visitor, or stranger, from
Elea, Parmenides’s hometown. Finally, the Laws don’t even take
place in Athens but in Crete, and Socrates doesn’t appear at all,
though there is an anonymous visitor, a stranger from Athens. Who
doubts that the Laws is a work of practical politics, in fact the
mother of constitutions? As the Athenian says: “Our logos . . . is
of cities, and frameworks and law-giving” (678a). Perhaps we
might even say that the farther Socrates is from a dialogue the more
it is merely earthly.
When I speak, in my title for this brief talk, about “The Actual
Intention” of the first two of these dialogues, I imply that in them
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all is not as it seems. Here is Rousseau’s opinion of the Republic,
taken from the first book of his Émile: “Those who judge books
merely by their titles take this for a treatise on politics, but it is the
finest treatise on education ever written.” And, indeed, the central
books of the ten that comprise the Republic are taken up with the
ontology, the philosophical framework, that must underlie education, and with the ensuing education itself. To be sure, the education discussed is that of the philosopher kings who will found and
maintain that best Politeia, the civic framework with which the Republic is concerned (473c).
And yet again, neither this civic framework for the best city,
which will be superintended by the philosopher kings, nor its justice is actually the intended topic of the Republic. For recall that
this city is devised as a model writ large of the soul (368d), a model
from which we can conveniently read off the nature of individual,
internal justice. The book we call the Republic rests on are two
tremendous assumptions: One is that political frameworks—not
only the best but even more strikingly the worst—are analogous
to, enlarged projections of, the soul. And the other, even prior one,
is that the soul ought to be our first topic of inquiry, and it is only
on the way to it that we discover political ideals: Psychology absolutely precedes Politics; Souls make States.
Thus it would be a fair argument to say that the particular political justice which is generally understood to be the peculiar contribution of the Republic is, in fact, a civic construction meant in
the first instance to incorporate a notion appropriate to internal,
psychic justice. For the three castes of the best city are delineated
in such a way that the famous definition of justice as “doing one’s
own business,” which falls out from the community’s constitution,
is applicable to the soul as Socrates conceives it. In other words,
the just city is built from the first to be an enlarged soul.
Let me outline how Socrates makes it work. These castes are
functionally defined, each by its own specific task within the city.
Moreover, they form a hierarchy of command and responsibility
such that any one caste’s transgression is in fact rebellion, factional
strife. Such internal dissension is, however, nearly the worst fate—
as any Greek knew or should have learned in the course of the
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Peloponnesian War (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.82)—
that could befall a political community, because it is the prelude to
tyranny. To reiterate: for Socrates, the maladjusted and dysfunctional soul is the antecedent cause of political evil.
It is to me an unresolved problem whether Socrates was in politics the anti-egalitarian he is sometimes accused of having been.
In his demeanor, and what matters more, his conversations, he
seems as populist as possible, not much impressed by smart young
aristocrats about to go to the bad, like Critias, Charmides and Alcibiades; moreover, in the Republic he says of a democracy that
it’s “handy for searching out a politeia” (577d)—which happens
to be what he himself is doing right then, down in the city’s most
democratic district, its harbor. The solution to the problem depends
on how we look at the kallipolis, the “fair city” that he’s found or
made: Is it and its justice a serious political proposal, on a par in
earnestness with Aristotle’s Politics in antiquity or Locke’s, Montesquieu’s, and Rousseau’s works at the beginning of modernity?
In view of the motive for the constitution of Socrates’s city, that is
a reasonable question.
To lend my exposition some specificity let me give you the
briefest reminder of the model city, both as best and as paradigmatic for the soul—and let me once more anticipate the result: The
human soul too will be a hierarchy of functional parts, and it too
will sport the virtues displayed by the city, now operating in individual human beings much as they did in the community.
At the bottom of the city’s castes, then, are the craftsmen and
tradesmen whose business it is to perform their particular work
well and profitably, and to attend just to those assignments and no
other. Beyond that, they are pretty free and prosperous, and thus
satisfied. They are without a specific caste virtue other than competence, for they are driven by appetite rather than character. But
they are the class for the particular operation of the most encompassing virtue, justice. Justice is the virtue of the part and the
whole, of each part doing its own thing and thereby preserving the
integrity of the whole. (Temperance is another non-specific virtue,
that of agreeableness in the sense that each caste is accepting of its
position in the hierarchy.)
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The middle caste consists of the warriors who guard the city,
and it is the training ground of kings. This caste is defined by their
spiritedness, and it is the locus of honor, the source of a soldier’s
satisfaction through danger. These warriors do have a particular
virtue, courage.
The ruling caste is comprised of the philosopher kings, whose
virtue is wisdom and in whom the intellectual part, thoughtfulness,
dominates. Their satisfaction is the highest; their happiness is subject to interruption by the duties of governing. This hardship is,
however, alleviated by their affection for the young they teach—
and by a more selfish fact: that the city is essentially set up to protect philosophizing, one of quite a few signs that all is not as it
seems in this Republic.
There are certainly some other odd, even bizarre, aspects to be
observed in this political device. Its strict hierarchy of command
is inverted in respect to prosperity; the lowest caste, the craftsmen
and merchants are the rich ones, the warriors are allowed no
wealth. At the end of the books on the construction and the deconstruction of this city, we’re told outright that it is “a model laid up
in heaven” for anyone to look at who “wishes to found himself;
he’ll practice its politics only and no other” (592b; italics mine).
In other words, we really have all along been participating in soulconstruction rather than city-construction. But oddest is the notion
that the governors of this “fair city,” the philosopher kings, don’t
want to rule it—indeed, this reluctance is a criterion of fitness.
In fact, the education is set up so as to cancel political ambition—indeed, to capture the love of future kings for another realm,
to alienate them from the earthly city. For they are to have a carefully graduated program of learning, elevating them beyond the
world of appearances into the world of forms, the world of pure
trans-earthly being. That’s why Cicero’s dictum that I began
with—about Socrates bringing philosophy down for the heavens
to the earth—sounds so, well, inept.
In particular, the study that is the capstone of the education,
that levers the learner into this world of being and drags him out
of the terrestrial slime, is dialectic (531 ff.), of which more in a
moment. Now for Socrates—to the astonishment and disgust of a
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practical statesman like Jefferson, who waded contemptuously
through the “whimsies” and “nonsense” of the Republic (to Adams,
July 15, 1814) – the study of supra-worldly forms, of beings, is the
proper foundation for government. This is especially the case insofar as statesmanship is concerned with the virtues of justice, temperance, courage, and wisdom. For obviously, to properly locate
these in the city, in the civic community, it is necessary to know
them. But to know them is not a matter of empirical research but
of dialectical (that is, ontological) inquiry, a matter of the study of
beings as beings, the study of Being itself. So the education does,
after all, have a political purpose—if we agree that ethics, the inculcation and preservation of virtue, is the end of the polis and its
politikoi, the civic community and its statesmen. I do not think any
contemporary citizen, attached to our Madisonian tradition, can
really agree—nor wholly disagree—and that is one of the many
reasons why the Republic is indispensable to political inquiry. For
it raises the question of justice in this original way: Is justice in the
sense of the Republic, as the proper adjustment of the faculties of
the soul—in particular the ready subordination of the lower parts
to reason—the condition for political unity and civic peace? From
this question falls out a whole slew of problems: Can we commit
ourselves to a psychology of faculties such as those involved in
the Socratic psychic constitution? And if so, is the adjustment of
the functions and their subordination to reason a persuasive analysis of psychological soundness? And if so, does it follow that the
adjustment is a political—or even a social—task? And if so, can a
democracy produce government wise enough to accomplish these
psychic adjustments, to induce virtue?
Before going on to the Statesman, I want to return to Rousseau:
Is the real business of the Republic indeed education, rather than
politics? Socrates never says so explicitly, nor can he, since the
program there presented is not just an education for leadership
loosely speaking, but very specifically the education of kings—
and, as Socrates makes very clear, of queens (540c). It is an education very specifically geared to the Republic’s polis—although
it will, amazingly, become the general model of higher, liberal education, lasting until the middle of the last century.
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Nevertheless, I think Rousseau is right. Indeed, some aspects
of this “fair city” have been politically and socially realized: the
equality of men and women and (to some extent) the community
of marriage partners and children. But by and large it has remained,
blessedly, “a pattern laid up in heaven,” for it has its repulsive aspects. Its educational program, on the other hand, has, as I said,
cast loose and become viable even in a democracy, because what
is nowadays called its elitism is not an intellectually integral part
of this kind of learning. In fact, the college where my two translation partners and I teach, St. John’s College, is a remarkably close
incarnation of it, and it revels in its intellectual egalitarianism. That
is one more element in an argument that political justice is not the
actually intended topic of the Republic.
So now to the dialogue called The Statesman, a conversation
to which Socrates only listens. Here, at one point, things become
startlingly explicit. Near the very middle of the conversation the
stranger makes an announcement under the form of a rhetorical
question asked in that throwaway tone that alerts the reader of dialogues to a crucial turn. It concerns the ostensible search for the
true statesman. “Has it been proposed,” he asks, “for the sake of
this man himself rather than for our becoming more dialectical
about all things” (285d)? And the answer is: plainly for learning
to think dialectically. We thought we were learning about governing well; it turns out we are involved in a logical training exercise
using a universally applicable technique—dialectic, the expertise
of dividing and collecting subjects by terms.
Socrates is, once more, not a participant in this conversation,
and this dialectic is not quite his dialectic. His dialectic was a way
by which apt students, through being questioned cleverly and answering carefully, had their opinions, their mere assumptions
about the way things are, demolished and then reconstituted, so
that they might be led up into a solid knowledge of the true
sources of these things. It was, in short, an ascending way of learning. The stranger’s dialectic is a method that works the other way
around. From a tacitly assumed overview of the whole, the accomplished dialectician makes divisions (diaireseis). When he has
arrived at what will in later time (when this method has turned
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into the technique of classification) be called the “lowest species,”
he goes back up, making a collection of terms. These add up to a
definition. Many of our students begin by thinking that that is
what Socrates does when he philosophizes—he makes definitions.
Of course a collection of terms is not what Socrates looks for
when he asks, say, the question, “What is justice?”—but it is a
preparation for an answer.
Is definition-making, however, what the Elean Stranger believes to be the profitable end product of the dialectic for which
the statesman is only an example? No, nothing so unsubtle, as I’ll
try to show in a minute.
Not that this more subtle use of division is likely to have satisfied the auditing Socrates. We three translators of the Statesman
express this sense of his skepticism by our assignment of the last
speech of the dialogue. Someone says: “Most beautifully . . .
you’ve completed for us the kingly man, stranger, and the statesman.” Now the stranger’s interlocutor in the Statesman is a young
man who is also called Socrates. There is some question among
scholars whether the older or the younger Socrates speaks this valedictory line. We thought our Socrates, the older one, couldn’t have
thought it, and so he didn’t say it.
Here is what the stranger does with the dialectical art of division. First, the whole dialogue is a composition of divisions. To
see its handsome design, that of a tapestry, it is helpful to work
through its dialectical episodes and the way they are sewn together,
like the pieces of a figured robe. The beauties of this dialogue are
not imaginatively visual but logically structural; this text is a texture. But this cloaklike characteristic is not just a stylistic formalism. It signals that this new dialectic is a craft that produces
practical results. Its physical exemplification, and the great
metaphor of the dialogue, is weaving, cloak-making in particular.
And making intertwined, protective, enveloping compositions
turns out to be the royal art, the discerning and composing craft of
the statesman. This is no transcendentally derived wisdom, but a
technical expertise. For the subject of the Statesman, as contrasted
with the Republic, is unambiguously political; it is concerned with
human herds. However, from the vantage point of the king of
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crowds, of herds, the internal relations disposing the soul of an individual human being, which are the concern of the Republic, recede; they lie below the royal oversight. And with that distance
diminishes the interest in justice, which was, after all, the right relation of the soul’s parts. So justice is indeed no big concern of the
statesman, be it of the man or of the dialogue named after him.
So the statesman, who is, thus, not a philosopher king but an
expert ruler, sees each soul from afar as displaying one permanent
characteristic. My colleague Peter Kalkavage will point out the exceedingly interesting consequences for statesmanship of what he
discerns and what, again as a consequence, true statesmanship must
be. It is, its royal denomination notwithstanding, an expertise much
closer, I think, to our idea of politics than the philosophical rule of
the Republic.
Then what happens to the stranger’s startling claim, with
which I began my remarks on the Statesman? How can the dialogue’s real purpose be an exercise in dialectic when it will be
shown to be so precise and practical a doctrine about managing
multitudes?
Well, the Statesman is neatly reflexive. It is, one might say, a
self-reentrant dialogue. For by relentless dialectical division the
stranger establishes the precise location of the statesman in the
whole economy of crafts and sciences, materials and products,
regimes and rulers, virtues and vices. And in the course of doing
that, he is indeed also giving a lesson in the method of division to
young Socrates. It may even be that his teaching actually has more
effect on a finer young man who is also present, a second silent
listener, one of old Socrates’s two favorite partners in inquiry,
namely Theaetetus (the other being Glaucon in the Republic).
Then here’s the denouement: The art of dialectic, the ability
to distinguish perspicaciously the parts of any subject, an art for
which weaving is a very precise figure, is the true statesman’s expertise. Statesmanship, then, is the craft of setting up a civic
framework, a loom upon which the citizens of various temperaments, here the warp and woof, are interwoven into a cloaklike
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texture, which represents at once the body politic and its protective cover, as if to say that a well-interlaced citizenry will wrap
itself in its own constitution for security.
On this conclusion old Socrates may, after all, have smiled.
For among the Greeks weaving is always a women’s art, and that
women might match men as rulers is a teaching of his Republic.
So ends the Statesman, a dialogue that sets forth a doctrine of governing which requires an expertise for which participation in the
dialogue is itself the training.
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Reflections on Justice in Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
Chester Burke
The last book of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is entitled
“A Judicial Error” because Dmitri Karamazov, the eldest Karamazov brother, is incorrectly found guilty of murdering his father Fyodor. Nearly all the spectators in the packed courtroom are stunned
by the verdict, despite the fact that most of them had assumed that
Dmitri had indeed committed the murder. Only his brother
Alyosha, his recently captivated love Grushenka, and his other
brother Ivan are certain of Dmitri’s evidence—Alyosha, because
of the innocence on Dmitri’s face when he said he hadn’t done the
deed; Grushenka, because “Dmitri isn’t the sort of man who would
lie” (683);* and Ivan, despite his loathing of Dmitri, because he
visits Fyodor’s illegitimate son Smerdyakov the night before the
trial and forces him to confess to the murder. Later that night,
Smerkdyakov commits suicide. Ivan’s testimony becomes worthless when, suffering from brain fever, he goes mad on the witness
stand, claiming that the only witness to this stunning revelation is
the Devil.
The first chapter of this final book is entitled “The Fatal Day.”
In the paragraph that concludes the previous chapter, Alyosha says
to himself, “Yes, with Smerdyakov dead, no one will believe Ivan’s
testimony; but he will go and testify . . . God will win!” (655) Having heard these three powerful words, “God will win,” the reader
is thrown into the human drama, that is, the trial. How can the truth
emerge from such a gigantic public spectacle, in which every one
of the participants has entered with his private opinions and passions? Dostoevsky characterizes the spectators, standing “in a
closely packed lump, shoulder to shoulder” (657), as having been
* Page references are to Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov,
trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Strauss
& Giroux, 2002).
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enflamed by impatience. The women favor Dmitri’s acquittal and
the men, many of whom have been personally insulted by Dmitri,
wish to see him punished. The prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovich, trembles at having to oppose a famous Petersburg defense attorney,
whom he feels has overshadowed him since their younger days in
Petersburg. He believes that everything is at stake in this trial, both
for himself and for Russia. Fetyukovich, the famous defense attorney, exudes an air of confidence. The reader may feel a little uneasy
when Dostoevsky describes his eyes as small and inexpressive:
“his physiognomy had something sharply birdlike about it, which
was striking” (660-61). The material evidence with which the
reader is so familiar, wrenched from its living context, is on display
in the middle of the courtroom.
The prosecutor, known for (and sometimes ridiculed for) his
passion for psychology, puts together an account that seems to
make sense of all the facts, even though the defense attorney, having digested the situation with astonishing rapidity, is able to discredit many of the witnesses. Readers take delight in this passage,
because they have previous knowledge of these witnesses and the
ugliness of their souls. The prosecutor tells the compelling story
of Dmitri finishing “a poem” (717) that culminates in the murder
of his father, the stealing of 3,000 rubles, and running off madly to
find his lover Grushenka, only to relinquish her to a man who
abused her as a young girl. The defense attorney then accuses the
prosecutor of writing his own novel, of being a psychological poet
whose psychology is two-pronged and therefore equally capable
of proving a given statement of fact and its opposite. He masterfully shows that only the totality of the facts— and not a single
one of them in isolation—speak against his client.
Though he claims to demonstrate the limitations of psychology, the defense attorney is in fact a far better psychologist than
the prosecutor. He argues persuasively that there was no money,
no robbery, and no murder—at least no murder committed by
Dmitri. Seeing far deeper into Smerdyakov’s soul than most, the
defense attorney gives good reasons why Smerdyakov could have
killed his natural father.
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Only the reader has the privilege of having witnessed Dmitri,
filled with loathing in front of his hateful father, pulling out a brass
pestle from his pocket—and then not using it. Why didn’t Dmitri
kill his father? “God was watching over me then,” Dmitri used to
say afterwards. This is another reference to a divine intervention
that seems to have no place in a court of justice. (Recall Alyosha’s
“God will win!”) Due to Fetyukovich’s skill in destroying each
part of the whole accusation, there is, however, a reasonable chance
that Dmitri will either be released or at worst given minimal punishment. But in the chapter entitled “A Sudden Catastrophe,”
Dmitri’s spurned lover Katya, ready to sacrifice her honor for his
brother Ivan, who has just been carried out of the court suffering
an attack of brain fever, comes forward with a letter from Dmitri
that she has been withholding. She presumably intends to use the
letter to save Dmitri, despite the fact that he has stolen 3,000 rubles
from her—the entirety of which she thinks he has spent in a single
drunken binge with her rival Grushenka that night before the murder. In this letter, written just two days before the murder, Dmitri
says that he will get hold of the money he has stolen from her, even
if he has to rob and kill his father to do so. The reader knows that
Katya asked Dmitri to send these 3,000 rubles to a relative in
Moscow, though she fully believed at the time that he would spend
the entire sum on Gurschenka. Two other facts must be remembered: 1) before the events of the novel, Dmitri lent Katya 5,000
rubles to cover up a financial indiscretion committed by her father;
2) Dmitri (who did not in fact steal the 3,000 rubles from his father)
spent only half of Katya’s 3,000 rubles during his wild night with
Grushenka. He retained the rest in a packet tied around his chest,
uncertain whether to return the unspent half to Katya (thus removing half of his disgrace), or to keep it for the opportunity of running
off with Grushenka.
It is only natural that the reader should be confused by the intricate adding and subtracting of monetary sums. Dostoevsky, always in need of money himself, deftly uses sums of money to show
how human beings struggle to regulate equality, honor, pride, and
justice among themselves.
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But back to the letter. This suddenly revealed document, an
apparent blueprint of the murder, gives “mathematical significance” (619) to the prosecutor’s case. And though the words
“mathematical significance” are a clear signal to readers of Dostoevsky that whatever is certain in this way is certainly not true, it
is equally certain that a jury will be very unlikely to yield a verdict
of not guilty in the face of such evidence.
Aware of the difficulty of achieving a verdict of not guilty, and
despite having just produced his own “demonstration” that there
was no money, robbery, or murder, Fetyukovich (whose name in
Russian suggests the words “jerk, drip, sourpuss”) addresses the
jury, changing his tone and his approach: “I have it in my heart to
speak out something more to you, for I also sense a great struggle
in your hearts and minds. . . Forgive my speaking of your hearts
and minds, gentlemen of the jury, but I want to be truthful and sincere to the end.” “I do not renounce one iota of what I have just
said, but suppose I did, suppose for a moment that I, too, agreed
with the prosecution that my unfortunate client stained his hands
with his father’s blood” (741).
This begins the second part of Fetyukovich’s summary to the
jury. Dostoevsky entitles the chapter “An Adulterer of Thought,”
without any comment on this astonishing title. Since the corpse of
a father is the only fact in the case that could speak against his
client, Fetyukovich tries to show that Fyodor was not at all a father.
He masterfully summarizes the most poignant scenes in the novel
in order to paint Fyodor in the worst possible light. He shows why
it would have been completely natural for Dmitri to have beaten
and killed his father (who is in truth not a father) with the fatal pestle (which the reader knows was not even the real murder weapon)
without intention or premeditation. “Such a murder is not a murder.
Such a murder is not a parricide, either. Such a murder can be considered parricide only out of prejudice” (747). The attorney then
invokes a passage from the gospel according to Matthew, and compares Dmitri’s plight to that of Christ. The most terrible punishment, but the only one by which Dmitri’s soul will be saved, would
be for the jury to overwhelm him with mercy. Only then would
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Dmitiri— horrified by his deed—which, according to the defense
attorney’s earlier argument, Dmitri had not done)—realize that he
was guilty before all people.
Fetyukovich “adulterates thought” by fabricating a dangerous
novel (“novel upon novel,” shouts the prosecutor [748]), a concoction that is all the more wicked because it is a false image of Father
Zosima’s teaching. And, more important, it is the opposite of what
Dostoevsky has spent his whole life attempting to articulate. Only
the prosecutor, “breathless, inarticulate, confused” and “shaking
with emotion” (748), has the courage to respond. Of course his response will receive no sympathy from the mass of spectators, especially the mothers and fathers, who have amazingly enough
become enraptured by the words of the adulterer. Though the prosecutor is vain and beaten down by a failed life, though his superficial psychology prevents him from understanding the motives
and actions of the human beings right in front of him, he knows
with certainty that one cannot kill and not kill at the same time,
that one cannot praise and immortalize a man who murders his father, and that a false image of Christ and religion have been fabricated by his talented competitor. The reader is easily irritated by
the just response of this pathetic man (the prosecutor will himself
die soon after the trial) to a powerful and dangerous speech that is
arguing for a new understanding of human justice, one that includes a notion of mercy which could only be found in God or in
the heart of an individual human being.
I have pointed out that Dmitri, the prosecutor, and the defense
attorney have all been accused of acting out novels. By his subtle
but powerful use of chapter titles, Dostoevsky himself takes the
harshest stance toward the defense attorney. The Russian word for
“adulterer” (or “fornicator”) is a variation of the word for “lover.”
Fetyukovich, who claims to be able to feel “invisible threads that
bind the defense attorney and the jury together,” whom everyone,
including himself, expects to pull off some kind of miracle by proving Dmitri innocent when he is guilty, ends up by “proving” Dmitri
guilty when in truth he is innocent. His call to regenerate not only
Dmitri but also Russia herself is met with rapture and enthusiastic
weeping among the spectators, and the reader too is likely to be
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sympathetic. When he pleads with the jury to show mercy to
Dmitri even if he did kill his father, he shows himself not to be a
seeker of truth but to be unjust—indeed, an adulterer of thought.
He is unjust because he portrays Christ as an enlightened and compassionate liberal rather than the Son of God, who died in order to
save human beings from the power of sin.
We can detest Fyodor Karamazov in the depths of our souls.
We can pity the children that he brought into the world. We can
wish that he were dead and wonder why such a man is alive. But
we cannot excuse the man who killed him. That man, Smerdyakov,
hangs himself from a nail on his wall with a brief note saying that
he alone is responsible for his own death. This extreme isolation
is what Dostoevsky sees as the dreadful future of a world that denies God. Instead of hanging an icon or image of God on the wall,
we will end up destroying ourselves. Dostoevsky the novelist, committed to real justice and truth, cannot allow the jury to be won
over by this adultery of thought, even though what results is a momentary injustice in a court of law. By entitling the next chapter
“Our Peasants Stood Up for Themselves,” he shows that he is
pleased that the peasants (who comprise half of the jury) are not
seduced by this highest and ultimately most dangerous form of seduction. Though their verdict was incorrect, the peasants understood a deeper truth and rightly stood up for it. Their hearts rejected
false novels.
But the real novel ends several months after Dmitri receives
his sentence. It ends with the burial of a ten-year old schoolboy,
Ilyusha. Dmitri had gravely insulted Ilyusha’s father, a retired and
drunken officer known as the Captain, by dragging him out of a
tavern and across town, pulling him by his wispy beard. Desperate
to provide for his family—his wife and older daughter are crippled
and ill—the Captain was employed by Fyodor, assisting him in
shady financial dealings. One of them was to buy up Dmitri’s
promissory notes so as to bring him to financial disgrace. Seeing
his father publicly humiliated, the young Ilyusha begged Dmitri to
forgive his father, “rushing up to everyone asking them to defend
him, but everyone laughed” (192). When Ilyusha’s schoolmates
heard about the incident they teased him mercilessly. The next day
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he angrily threw stones at them, but he himself received a great
blow to the chest. He came down with a fever, and died two days
after Dmitri was sentenced for the murder he did not commit.
Given Dostoevsky’s masterful juxtaposition of scenes and
events, it would be easy to connect Dmitri’s punishment with the
death of this young boy. As the proud and angry Katya says to
Alyosha, “Dmitri committed a rash and unjust act, a very ugly act”
(193). She commissions Alyosha to give a large sum of money to
the Captain in recompense for this act. The attempt at justice (in
truth Katya, herself recently injured by Dmitri, considers herself a
fellow sufferer) does not work at first. The Captain initially takes
the money, imagining a way out of abject poverty for himself and
his miserable family. But suddenly, shaking and tearful, flings
down the money at Alyosha’s feet. He will eventually take not only
this money, but much more from the generous, though proud,
Katya. But his son will nonetheless die and the doctors will not be
able to cure his family.
It was not unlikely that the previously consumptive Ilyushka’s
life would have been short. But that is not the point. All of us are
continually doing harm to our fellow human beings. While it does
not seem possible that any system of justice could regulate the
damages, we humans are always trafficking amongst one another,
exchanging goods and money in an attempt to achieve some kind
of fairness.
“Each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most
of all” (289). This puzzling statement, lying powerfully in the
background of the novel, is said repeatedly by Father Zosima
throughout the novel. I have tried to show that Fetyukovich’s version is a dangerous adulteration of this claim. Dmitri, Ivan,
Smerdyakov, and even Alyosha can be held responsible for the
death of their father. Yet only one human being killed Fyodor and
it is the responsibility of the legal system to find and punish that
human being. Dmitri had previously thrown his father to the floor
and brutally kicked him, suspecting that Fyodor was hiding
Grushenka from him. Though drunk, he had written the damning
letter. Ivan had tacitly given Smerdyakov permission to kill Fyodor
by leaving town on the day of the murder; even worse, he had spent
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much of the night before his departure listening for sounds in the
house, unconsciously anticipating and desiring that someone would
come and kill his dreadful father. Alyosha, distracted by the death
of his hero Zosima, and overwhelmed with grief by the dishonor
of Zosima’s rotting corpse, had forgotten to keep in contact with
Dmitri. But Smerdyakov, having spent his entire life serving a family whose members he despised—except for Ivan, whose respect
he craved—understood the character of these Karamazovs, at least
in its baser aspects. He was able to set up a scenario in which it
would be possible for him to kill Fyodor, who trusted him, and
then steal the 3,000 rubles for which Dmitri had claimed he would
risk all. With this money, Smerdyakov imagined that he could start
a new life. And only Ivan could get Smerdyakov to confess—Ivan,
who, though he hated bitterly both his father Fyodor and his
brother Dmitri, had a conscience deeper than he himself knew.
During their conversation about the murder, Smerdyakov comes
to understand the emptiness and dishonesty of Ivan’s thoughts,
though he understands nothing of Ivan’s heart. And in that understanding about his former idol, he gives up on life, which had never
offered him anything but pain and misery. Smerdyakov—far cleverer and wiser than even the most observant reader could suspect—
sees that Ivan is more like his father than any of the brothers.
The chain of responsibility is endless. Grushenka says in
court, “It all happened because of me” (682)—claiming responsibility both for Fyodor’s and Dmitri’s falling in love with her.
Shortly thereafter, she says of Katerina, who had tried to charm
her out of loving Dmitri, “She is the cause of everything” (683).
And at the time of Dmitri’s arrest, Grushenka, hearing that Dmitri
had supposedly killed his father, had cried, “I am the guilty one,
first and foremost, I am the guilty one!” (457)
But everyone gets the problem of justice wrong, precisely because it is impossible to see clearly into the heart of another
human being. Father Zosima immediately understands the danger
looming before the Karamazov family in the first chapters of the
novel. That is why he bows before Dmitri and encourages Alyosha
to look after him. But Zosima cannot control the outcomes stemming from human nature. He can only preach “active love”—a
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difficult and profound concept derserving of another talk—and he
can pray.
While I do not claim that the following is a solution to the
problem of human justice, I’d like to end this talk with a quotation
from Father Zosima:
If it were not for Christ’s Church, indeed there would
be no restraint on the criminal in his evildoing and no
punishment for it later, real punishment, that is, not a
mechanical one . . . , which only chafes the heart in most
cases, but a real punishment, the only frightening and
appeasing punishment which lies in the acknowledgement of one’s own conscience (64).
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Peaceniks and Warmongers:
The Disunity of Virtue
in Plato’s Statesman
Peter Kalkavage
89
I want to begin by saying how my theme is related to justice. Plato
and Aristotle often connect justice with wholeness. And it is wholeness—the whole of virtue and the whole of a political community—that is very much at issue, and at risk, in Plato’s Statesman.
Perhaps at risk as well is the wholeness of logos or discourse.
Plato’s mysterious stranger from Elea delights in division. In
the Sophist he uses the method of dividing genera or kinds to pin
down the elusive professor of wisdom. In the Statesman he uses
this same method, with some modifications, to show the genuine
statesman and king “naked and alone by himself” (304a). But the
stranger isn’t all about logic. Like Socrates, he enjoys images of
all sorts and regularly avails himself of their curious power to illuminate. In the Statesman, soon after the great myth about reversed
becoming, the stranger announces the need for paradigms in inquiry.
He tells young Socrates that they would do well in their search if
they came up with a paradigm that would, in its small and humble
way, help to reveal the magisterial form, the eidos, of the true king
(277d).
This paradigm, as we soon hear, is weaving (279b). Politics is
the master-art that weaves together all the other arts in the city and
bends them to its high purpose. But it is not until late in the dialogue, almost at the end, that the precise meaning of the paradigm
is explained. The true statesman, we discover, knows how to interweave courageous and moderate types of souls. To use the language of the paradigm, he combines the warp or hard woollen
threads, which resemble courageous natures, with the woof or soft
threads, which resemble moderate natures. Properly combined,
these human threads produce “the web of statesmanly action”
(311B). This web is the wisely constituted polis—the beautiful end
of politics conceived as a productive art.
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But the path to this beautiful end requires an account that the
stranger calls “somewhat astonishing”—astonishing because it
proceeds from the view that virtue is not a happy unity, in which
different portions of virtue are “friendly” to one another, as the
many say and as Socrates suggests in other dialogues. On the contrary, virtue has within it, and seems even to be defined by, a war
between courage and moderation. The stranger is unsparing in his
formulation. The two virtues, he says, “have a deep-seated enmity
toward one another and maintain an oppositional faction in many
of the things that are” (306b). The stranger, we must note, does not
ask Socrates’ question: What is virtue? Instead, he posits an opposition between two forms of virtue. This opposition, more than anything else in the dialogue, defines the political art.
To illustrate his point, the stranger urges young Socrates to consider the two forms (eidē) that come to light when we praise things
for their beauty—various doings and makings, whether of bodies
or of souls (306c). We praise things that manifest “keenness and
swiftness.” These can be the things themselves or their images—
the swift movement of a runner, for example, or a vase painting
depicting such a runner. The name for what underlies such praise
is andreia, “courage” or “manliness.” This is the form we are admiring when we praise the keen and the swift.
But we also praise what the stranger calls “the gentle form of
generation.” We praise as beautiful those actions and thoughts that
are quiet, modulated, slow, and careful. The name for this form is
orderliness or composure, kosmiotēs (307b) It refers to moderation
as the virtue of keeping things measured and undisturbed. We think
of things like a smooth transition in a piece of music or a soothing
tone of voice. To sum up, we are thoroughly contradictory in our
praise of beauty. We praise as beautiful those things that have a
manly look, and we also praise the look that is opposed to manliness. Furthermore, we blame as ugly both what is opposed to manliness and what is opposed to the opposite of manliness, that is,
what is opposed to moderation. We do all this, we should note, not
because we are inept but because beauty itself is self-opposed.
Shifting now from things that display opposed virtues to the
very natures of courage and moderation, the stranger refers to these
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as “looks [ideas] destined . . . to be split apart in hostile faction.”
He then turns to the people who have these natures in their souls,
not by choice or upbringing but by nature (307b-c). Faction is here
described as a feud between warring families. Members of each
family judge the beautiful and the good solely in terms of their
family virtue, and hate members of the other family simply because
they are in the other family. This love of Same and hate of Other
blinds each family to the common, if problematic, eidos of virtue
that both families share. Each family, by virtue of its virtue, is blind
to the virtue and beauty of the other. As a consequence, members
of neither family really know their own virtue, since they do not
know why and in what manner their characteristic virtue is beautiful and good. Because of this blindness and the mutual hate it engenders, the two families, though they live in cities, may be said
to occupy, in Hobbes’s phrase, a pre-political “state of nature” with
respect to virtue.
As if this situation weren’t bad enough, the stranger goes on to
say that the family feud between noble types is child’s play compared with the disease that is “the most hateful of all for cities”
(307d). It is here that the stranger shows why the two forms of
virtue, and the two opposed types of soul, constitute the central
problem of politics. Indeed, he demonstrates the urgent need of the
political art in the Reign of Zeus, the era in which the world has
been abandoned by its divine shepherd and guide.
The stranger gives a devastating portrait of what happens to
cities that fall prey to the ethos of peace at any cost. He refers, paradoxically, to the eros for composure (307e)—the only appearance
of this word in the dialogue—as if to say: “Look at these people,
young Socrates. To themselves they seem all calm and reserved,
but in fact they have a disordered desire for order. Why, they are
as crazy as a man in love!” Perhaps there is also the suggestion
that eros, for the stranger, is to be associated with what is soft or
tender rather than with the sort of tough love that Diotima describes
in the Symposium (203c-e). In any case, because of their unmeasured love of order, these people slip unwittingly into an unwarlike
condition and raise their children to be similarly unwarlike. The
condition spreads through the city like an infection and becomes
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more virulent with each generation. Since unmixed moderation
cannot accommodate itself to the aggression of an enemy, cannot
rouse citizens to display a decisive and manly spirit when this is
needed, the city eventually loses its freedom and becomes enslaved.
The very same result awaits the macho city that wants war at
any cost and is driven by thymos, spiritedness, rather than eros.
The rage for courage leads citizens and rulers to be constantly tensing up their cities for opportunities to display what they wrongly
take to be the whole of virtue. Before too long, the city that idolizes
courage eventually picks a fight with the wrong adversary, an
enemy it can’t vanquish, and so is vanquished in turn. Like the
peace-loving city, the war-driven city ends in destruction and slavery (308a).
Now we normally think of faction, stasis, as the strife between
two parties within a single city. But the stranger’s view in the present context is very different. The political problem par excellence
is, for him, not violent heterogeneity (for example, champions of
oligarchy vs. champions of democracy) but virtuous homogeneity,
the idolatry of one of two opposed virtues, either courage or moderation. To be sure, there is faction in its usual sense within the
form of virtue. This is the eidetic situation, known only to the
philosophic statesman. But the real-life political problem occurs
when the two naturally opposed virtues are not simultaneously
present. Hence, as the stranger sees it, the devastating political outcome of the principle “likes attract and opposites repel” is enacted
on the stage of inter-polis relations, when a city suffers destruction
at the hands of another city rather than from internal discord. The
stranger is surely not unaware of the evils of faction in this latter
sense—the horrors, for example, that Thucydides describes in the
case of Corcyra (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War,
3.82). But for the stranger this is not the central political problem,
which has its source in the eidetic opposition between the beautifully tough and the beautifully gentle that pervades “many of the
things that are.” The problem is not vice, or human nature simply,
or intense disagreement over which regime is best, but virtue,
which is by nature turned against itself.
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We might try to make sense of the stranger’s unsettling account
by citing Aristotle’s distinction between natural and ethical virtue,
the latter being guided by the intellectual virtue of phronēsis or
practical wisdom, which allows the virtuous individual to avoid
excess and deficiency by perceiving the mean (Nichomachean
Ethics, 6.13). This is helpful to an extent, but it takes the sting out
of the stranger’s insight into why virtue is a problem. The stranger
would no doubt agree with Aristotle’s opinion that virtuous dispositions, when left to themselves, are dangerous, and that they
need practical wisdom in order to be reliable virtues. But far more
important to the stranger is the primordial dyad of courage and
moderation—the dyad that defines the task of the political art.
That task is not how to interweave a multiplicity of virtues in order
to make them one but how to unite two naturally opposed virtues
so that they may complement rather than repel one another and
contribute their distinctive powers to the political web. These are
toughness and flexibility, quickness and caution, forcefulness and
grace.
It is tempting to say that the problem of politics, for the stranger,
is that of knowing how to interweave the male and the female
forms of ethical beauty. It is true that each virtue, by the stranger’s
account, must apply to both men and women. How else could one
trait come to dominate a city’s population through marriage and
procreation? Nevertheless, the manliness of courage strongly suggests as its correlate the femininity of moderation. If we admit this
sexual distinction in the case of the two virtues, it becomes interesting, to say the least, that the paradigm for political wisdom in
the dialogue is the feminine art of weaving. This may be Plato’s
way of showing that, of the two opposed virtues, moderation, as
the love of order and peace, is closer than courage to justice and
wisdom. It may also show Plato’s philosophic preference for
music over gymnastic, since weaving engages in deft material harmonization. In good statesmanship, as in philosophy, grace trumps
force to become the greatest force of all. This is true even for our
tough-minded, methodically rigorous stranger, who tells young
Socrates that the statesman and good lawgiver knows how to instil
right opinions in others “by the muse of kingship” (309d).
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The stranger proceeds to outline the education and nurture that
will generate the needful thing—the artful synthesis of virtuous
opposites in a coherent political whole. This whole, this web, in
order to be beautiful, requires beautiful threads that have been previously prepared by means of a subsidiary art. Statesmanship, like
all compositional art, is elitist: only the best materials will do. And
so, there must be an artful way to determine who is fit for an ethical-political education, and who is not. This consists in observing
children at play in order to see which ones show signs of a virtuous
disposition, whether of courage or moderation. The stranger lays
special emphasis on those who prove to be uneducable. He describes them as “violently driven off course by a bad nature into
godlessness and arrogance and injustice” (308E-309A). The political art, here seen in its harsh and decisive aspect, casts them out
“by punishing them with death penalties and exiles and the greatest
dishonors.” And those who “wallow in ignorance and much baseness” are put into the class of slaves.
The stranger at this point explicitly connects the union of manly
and moderate natures with the intertwining of warp and woof
(309b), in effect closing the paradigm-web he began to weave earlier in the dialogue. The city, in order to be a durable garment suited
to the protection of all those it embraces, needs both kinds of
human threads: the hard and the soft. This unity of opposites requires a two-tiered system of civic education that produces two
sorts of “bonds”—one higher, one lower. The higher bond is said
to be divine, since it applies to the part of the soul that is “eternalborn,” the part that thinks and holds opinions. The lower, human
bond is marriage, which applies to what the stranger calls “the animal-born part,” that is, the part of the soul that has to do with bodily desire. The bonds are produced successively: first the higher,
then the lower. Once the higher bond of right opinion is in place,
the stranger asserts, the lower one isn’t difficult to bring about
(310a). This optimism presupposes that the divine bond is strong
enough to overcome the greatest of all human drives—the erotic
attraction that human beings have for one another and that connects
them, as we hear in the Symposium, with the striving for immortality (207a).
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The higher tier of the educational process aims at inculcating
“genuinely true and also steadfast opinions about beautiful and just
and good things” (309c). These opinions are implanted in both
types of noble individuals. In other words, the inculcation of “one
opinion about what’s beautiful and just and good” supersedes the
idolatry of a single virtue and overcomes the natural impulse to
welcome one’s like and shun one’s unlike. Moderate and courageous individuals will share the opinion that it is good for the city
that they mingle, and bad if they don’t. In other words, they will
learn to respect, if not love, a virtue higher than either courage or
moderation—the virtue of justice. They will believe that they and
their respective virtues are threads that must be woven together to
form the political web.
I note in passing that the education the stranger describes is
based entirely on the cultivation of habits and right opinion. There
is no philosophic education for guardians, no turning of the soul
from becoming to being, as there is in the Republic. The stranger’s
version of a city in speech may be the work of a philosophic statesman, but it does not appear that this statesman, though possessing
kingly science, is in fact a king in this city.
The stranger dwells on how the higher sort of education, which
aims at the divine bond, tempers the excess in the two opposed
virtues. If a manly individual takes hold of true opinions about
what is good and beautiful and just, he will “grow tame and in this
way be most willing to commune with just things.” Without these
opinions, he will degenerate into a beast (309e). Similarly, the
order-loving individual who holds these same true opinions will
become “genuinely moderate and intelligent,” and the one who
doesn’t will rightly be called simpleminded or foolish. The establishment of these true opinions takes place through laws and customs that apply only to those naturally suited for an ethical
education. This education, the stranger asserts, is the “drug” prescribed by the ever-vigilant art of politics. It is the antidote for onesided virtue.
At last we reach the stranger’s account of marriage, the “human
bond” implanted by the political art. This bond, though lower than
the other, is crucial, since the city’s continuance and well-being
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depend on procreation through sexual union. We should recall that
it is not courage and moderation per se that bring about political
downfall but rather the gradual build-up and concentration of a single virtue through sexual generation over the course of time. As
the stranger approaches his culminating definition, he gets down
to the nitty-gritty of why people marry. He dismisses those who
marry for wealth or power and focuses on those whose care is family and children. These are the people who marry, or who arrange
the marriages of their sons and daughters, for the serious (if wrong)
reason that they always choose partners who are of their own family when it comes to virtue and eschew members of the opposite
family.
The political art counteracts this error, goes against nature, by
compelling members of each “family” to overcome their natural
repugnance for the other and to marry against type. This will prevent the spread of a single trait by producing hybrids that combine
both virtuous types. The stranger does not say what home life will
be like for married opposites, nor does he care. The only thing that
matters, from a political standpoint, is that the virtues are mixed
rather than kept separate. Of course, genesis in the Reign of Zeus
is unpredictable: there will always be children whose nature reduplicates that of, say, a courageous mother rather than a moderate
father. And so, the political art must exercise perpetual vigilance
and continually oversee marriage and sexual union. The war on
nature must go on.
The needful union of opposed virtues must be enforced at the
highest level of the city—that of the rulers. The stranger acknowledges that it is possible for one individual to have both virtues
(311a). The monarchic city must choose this sort of individual as
its supervisor. If more than one ruler is required—if the city is aristocratic—then the ruling class must have both kinds of virtuous individuals. The reason is that moderate rulers are cautious, just, and
conservative, but they lack, the stranger says, the needful acuity
and vigor, which would be supplied by the courageous among the
ruling class. The stranger ends his “astonishing account” of virtue
on a negative note: “And it’s impossible for all things having to do
with cities to turn out beautifully in private and in public when
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these characters [courage and moderation] aren’t present as a pair”
(311b).
Only one thing remains: the final definition of the web that is
produced by the true statesman’s knowledge. Will this web, as the
stranger glowingly describes it, ever be woven in deed as it is in
speech? From the stranger’s perspective, it does not matter. The
goal was to define statesmanship solely in terms of the statesman’s
knowledge or science, apart from whether he actually rules,
founds, reforms, or advises (259b).
What, then, does the statesman know? Not, it seems, how to
lead individuals to virtue, but how to temper the virtue they already
have by nature. The statesman’s wisdom is the wisdom of defence.
That is why the stranger tends to dwell more on bad things to be
avoided and feared than on good things to be sought and aspired
to. Politics is a defensive art. It is embodied in the web that ends
the dialogue. Strange to say, when we finally find the statesman
“naked and alone,” he turns out to be a maker of garments, which
earlier in the dialogue were placed in the class of defences (279c280a). He is the maker of the web that is both the body politic and
the political cloak that defends the otherwise naked city from its
enemies, the virtuous from their monomania and wrong marriages,
and all its inhabitants from exposure and need. Perhaps most of
all, the political web protects the city from the ravages and uncertainties of time. A good garment is one that wears well. It must
protect us from seasonal extremes. The same is true of the political
garment, which must defend the city not only during the winter of
war and its discontents but also during the summer of peace, prosperity, and inattention.
In Plato’s Statesman, politics appears in its true light only when
it is seen in the context of the stranger’s cosmic myth about the
Reign of Kronos and the Reign of Zeus. The myth compels us to
judge the tension-riddled, endangered life we have now by contrasting it with an earlier peaceful life that ended in disappearance
rather than old age and death, that had no sex or sexual desire, and
that needed neither politics nor clothes. The myth discloses what
is most needful for beleaguered humanity in this our Reign of
Zeus—the era that depends on the god-like statesman and shepherd
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because it can no longer depend on a kindly nature and a caretaking
god.
I suspect that the world for the stranger is, like virtue, fundamentally incoherent. Strictly speaking, there is no kosmos, no permanent world-order that grounds the inherent goodness of the
virtues. Instead there are two opposed cosmic eras, two opposed directions of becoming, and two opposed forms of human life and
human nature. In the Reign of Zeus—that is, in the realm of politics—the “condition of ancient disharmony,” the tendency toward
degenerateness that is woven into the very constitution of the world
on account of its bodily being, asserts itself (273c). That is why we
need the Promethean powers of method and art—to make order
where there is no order. In the Statesman—one of Plato’s fascinating experiments in post-Socratic philosophy—Plato tempts us to
consider the grounds and implications of this modern-sounding
world-view.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES
Raskolnikov’s Redemption
Nicholas Maistrellis
99
The narrative of Crime and Punishment is very straightforward.
An impoverished university student named Raskolnikov plans and
commits a murder. The murder accidently turns into a double
murder. There follows a sequence of incidents and conversations
that reveal the turmoil this act causes in the soul of the criminal.
Through two conversations with a young prostitute named Sonya
the murderer finally confesses his crime, first to her and then to
the authorities. Finally there is an epilogue in which we are told
that Raskolnikov is sentenced to a period of imprisonment in
Siberia. Sonya follows him to Siberia. Remarkable things happen
to him there.
Of all the four great novels of Dostoevsky–Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov—it is only
in this one that Dostoevsky creates a sustained dialectic with the interior life of one and only one character. Crime, on the other hand,
is a theme in all the novels, but it’s only in this one that Dostoevsky
focuses single-mindedly on unfolding the nature of crime, together
with its causes and effects in the human soul. This makes it particularly relevant to the theme of this conference. However, Dostoevsky is not as interested in criminal justice as he is in the effects
of crime, first on the soul of the criminal, and finally, on the whole
human community. This doesn’t mean that he ignores justice. In
fact, the question of Raskolnikov’s debt to society occupies a large
part of the book, especially in the interrogation of Raskolnikov by
Porfiry Petrovitch, the investigating detective who suspects very
early in the book that Raskolnikov is the murderer, and in the conversations with Sonya, the prostitute who befriends Raskolnikov.
Considerations of justice are a dialectical moment in the unfolding
of crime, and not the highest moment. By “dialectical moment” I
mean that the claims of justice are gathered up and form part of the
transformation of the redeemed criminal. These dialectical moments
cannot be the highest moment of the transformation.
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Now, the claims of justice could be said to be satisfied when
the criminal is punished. But Dostoevsky is not interested in punishment as retribution. He thinks it is ineffective. He is interested
in punishment only in so far as the demand for it arises in the criminal himself, and results in his redemption. The highest moment
is when the criminal acknowledges his crime and asks for forgiveness from the whole human community. Thus, Dostoevsky’s treatment is “psychological,” if it is clear that by psychology one does
not mean a putative science of the soul, but an attempt to get to
know another human being. In his notebooks on Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky makes the extraordinary claim that it is the
crime itself that makes Raskolnikov a moral being. “His moral development begins from the crime itself; the possibility of such
questions arises which would not have existed previously.”1 It is
impossible in a short paper to do more than give a sketch of this
theme, and even this sketch will focus on only a few incidents.
Let me begin with Dostoevsky’s account of crime. The commission of a crime, for him, is a sign that the criminal has separated
himself from his fellow human beings. It is not the crime that separates the criminal, but some transformation in his soul which
causes him to focus his attention entirely on himself. Such transformations are hard to discern. Often, even those closest to the
criminal are puzzled about what is going on. Even the criminal
himself is not fully aware of what is moving him. He becomes surprised at his own behavior. I think this is Dostoevsky’s reason for
believing that ordinary punishment is useless in reforming the
criminal. Since the criminal has separated himself from society, he
feels that the power of society is arbitrary and that the freedom he
has given himself precisely by his separation from his fellows
makes retribution merely another act of violence equivalent to his
own. He both resents the power of society and despises it. Redemption cannot come from actions done to the criminal; it has to
arise in his own soul.
The whole novel takes place over the span of two weeks, and
the crime occurs at the end of Part I, about three days into the action. In the days leading up to the crime, Raskolnikov has stopped
going out. He has stopped seeing his friend Razhumikin, and has
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stopped communicating with his mother and sister. He has also
stopped tutoring students. He has no income. He hasn’t paid his
rent for a long time. He spends most of his time sleeping in his
room—a horrible garret. He eats only when Natashya, the caretaker, brings him something. He is withdrawing from the world.
On the very first page of the novel, the narrator says, “He was so
immersed in himself, and had isolated himself so much from everyone that he was afraid not only of meeting his landlady, but of meeting anyone at all.”2 Very soon, however, we are introduced to an
ambiguity in Raskolnikov. At the beginning of the second chapter
of Part I, we are told that he “was not used to crowds. . . . But now
something suddenly drew him to people.”3 This is the first indication of the doubleness in Raskolnikov’s soul. He separates himself
from others, but he cannot do it with his whole soul. Later we will
learn that it is this doubleness that makes redemption possible.
The sequence of events in Part I leading up to the murder is
very important to Dostoevsky’s dialectic, so I will take some time
going over them. On the first day, Raskolnikov wakes up, goes out,
and almost immediately visits the pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna,
whom he is planning to murder. He pretends he wants to pawn
something. Dostoevsky carefully reveals to us Alyona’s poisonous,
grasping character. This visit is a rehearsal of the murder, so the
murder is committed twice in his soul. He assures himself of the
rightness of what he is planning by reminding himself of Alyona’s
wickedness. By this he shows the conventional side of his character, which he despises. He then decides that he wants to be with
people, and decides to go to the tavern. There he enters into conversation with Marmeladov, a civil servant and a drunkard who is
deliberately destroying his own life and his family’s life. Raskolnikov helps bring him home and meets his consumptive wife and
hungry children. Marmeladov is the father of Sonya, the fourteenyear-old prostitute with whom Raskolnikov falls in love. When he
departs, Raskolnikov leaves behind, without saying anything, most
of his money. The narrator makes it clear that Raskolnikov’s own
generosity at this moment is unintelligible to him. He returns home
and goes to sleep.
The next morning, he is given a letter from his mother that re-
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counts in great detail her numerous trials, including the decision
by his sister to marry someone despicable in order to escape
poverty. While reading the letter, the narrator tells us, his face was
wet with tears, but when he finishes, “it was pale, twisted convulsively, and a heavy bilious, spiteful smile wandered over his lips.”4
Raskolnikov returns to wandering around town, and he encounters a drunk girl whose disheveled clothing had clearly been
thrown on her by those who had made use of her before turning
her out on the street. She is being followed by a middle-aged, welldressed man whose intentions are obvious. Raskolnikov’s first impulse is to help her. He yells at the man, and calls to a nearby police
officer for assistance. He gives the officer some money for a taxi
to bring the girl home when they find where she lives. The narrator
then tells us, “At that moment it was as if something stung Raskolnikov, as if he had been turned about in an instant.” He immediately says to the police officer, “Forget it! What do you care? Leave
her alone. Let him have fun. . . . What is it to you?”5 Raskolnikov
now identifies with the presumed violator.
He then continues his frantic pilgrimage through St. Petersburg, and finally collapses in complete exhaustion under some
bushes, where he falls asleep. He dreams a terrible dream: He is a
boy walking with his father and they witness a peasant beating his
horse to death, accompanied by cheers from the crowd. He tries to
stop the peasant, but he cannot. He asks his father to explain, but
he only replies that it is none of their business. When Raskolnikov
wakes up, he exclaims, “Thank God it was only a dream!” followed almost immediately by “God! But can it be, can it be that I
will really take an axe and hit her on the head and smash her skull
. . . slip in the sticky warm blood, break the lock, steal, and tremble,
and hide, all covered with blood . . . with the axe . . . Lord, can it
be?”6 He has now identified himself not with the helpless witness
of the slaughter but with both the murderer and the victim, and he
is horrified. He continues walking and inadvertently discovers by
means of an overheard conversation that Alyona’s sister Lizaveta
will not be in their apartment at a certain time on the next day. He
takes this as a kind of presentiment, and the narrator tells us, “He
was not reasoning about anything, and was totally unable to reason;
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but suddenly felt with his whole being that he no longer had any
freedom either of mind or of will, and that everything had been
suddenly and finally decided.”7
On the next day, the third day, he kills Alyona with an ax. Unfortunately, Lizaveta comes home unexpectedly, and he has to kill
her too. He hurriedly and inexpertly steals some things and returns
to his apartment. He falls asleep again. He sleeps for a very long
time.
This is the account of Raskolnikov’s actions before, during,
and after the crime. The main thing I want to point out is Raskolnikov’s extraordinary ambivalence: he affirms the crime and yet is
horrified by it. He rejects human contact and yet seeks it. He weeps
for his mother and sister, yet he is filled with spite, and so on. He
cannot affirm anything in himself whole-heartedly.
Dostoevsky has structured the crime quite deliberately. In the
first place, he makes Alyona an unsympathetic victim. She is
greedy and selfish, and looks it. He does not want our confrontation
with the issue of crime to be sentimentalized by feelings of pity
for the victim. On the other hand, Lizaveta is a sympathetic character. We find that, although simple-minded, she is kind. In fact,
she is friendly with Sonya. Raskolnikov murders her purely for the
sake of concealment. So the disunity in Raskolnikov is mirrored
in the victims. Also, it is essential to the narrative that there is no
evidence against Raskolnikov. Through an improbable series of
circumstances, and in spite of his own blunders, Raskolnikov escapes undetected from a building filled with people, and manages
to hide what he stole before he is searched. Dostoevsky makes it
clear that all this is purely by chance, and even in spite of Raskolnikov doing things that could make it more likely that he would
be suspected. Dostoevsky has, in fact, constructed something like
a controlled experiment in which all variables except for the feelings and reactions of the criminal are controlled. If Raskolnikov is
to be found out, it would have to be by some action of his own.
We are ready now to consider the crime from Raskolnikov’s
point of view. He initially gives two reasons for the crime: first, he
needs the money to advance his career; second, he needs the money
to help his mother and sister. He understands both to be humani-
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tarian reasons. He is a very able man, and if he could advance his
career, he could do valuable work for mankind. He is a very able
man, and if he could advance his career, he could help his mother
and sister—and especially, he could prevent the unfortunate marriage of his sister, which she is clearly undertaking for financial
reasons. Contrasted with this is the fact that Alyona is a terrible
person, who not only has done nothing good for anyone but, in
fact, has done untold harm. Her death would be a blessing. Underlying these reasons is the idea that for the sake of humanity higher
human beings can transgress ordinary moral and civil laws. In fact,
Raskolnikov accepts the idea that great men do this all the time.
His recurrent example is Napoleon. In fact, Raskolnikov apparently
wrote an essay, which had been published, on this theme. Dostoevsky does not give his readers the opportunity to read it.
Up to this point in Raskolnikov’s internal dialectic, he considers himself a great man like Napoleon or Isaac Newton, a superior
person who needs to sacrifice ordinary conventions for some
higher good. But the conduct of the crime continually speaks
against this. The theft was botched because he didn’t take the time
to find the large cache of money in the apartment. He hides and
keeps the money and jewels he did manage to steal, ostensibly because it would be too dangerous to spend the money or sell the
jewels, but it is clear that its presence horrifies Raskolnikov because it reminds him of what he did. It becomes increasingly clear
that the reasons given for the crime do not come close to revealing
what is in his soul, or what he thinks is in his soul. This comes out
most decisively in what he says to Sonya during their second conversation:
“I tormented myself for so many days: would Napoleon
have gone ahead or not? It means I must already have
felt clearly that I was not Napoleon . . . . I endured all,
all the torment of this babble, Sonya, and I longed to
shake it all off my back: I wanted to kill without casuistry, Sonya, to kill for myself, for myself alone. I
didn’t want to lie about it even to myself! It was not to
help my mother that I killed—nonsense! I did not kill
so that, having acquired means and power, I could become a benefactor of mankind. Nonsense! I simply
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killed—killed for myself alone—and whether I would
later become anyone’s benefactor, or would spend my
life like a spider, catching everyone in my web and
sucking the life-sap out of everyone, should at that moment have made no difference to me! . . . And it was
not the money above all that I wanted when I killed,
Sonya; not the money so much as something else. . . .
I know all this now. . . . Understand me: perhaps, continuing on that same path, I would never again repeat
that murder. There was something else I wanted to
know; something else was nudging my arm. I wanted
to find out then, and find out quickly, whether I was a
louse like all the rest, or a man? Would I be able to step
over or not! Would I dare to reach down and take, or not?
Am I a trembling creature, or do I have the right—”
“To kill? The right to kill?” Sonya clasped her hands.8
105
What did Raskolnikov mean here when he says that he committed the crime entirely for himself?
The question of freedom was very important to Dostoevsky,
and especially the claim that the only way for a human being to affirm his freedom is through the commission of a crime for its own
sake. It is present in one way or another in all four of his major
works. Think, for example, of Nikolai Stavrogin in Demons. Dostoevsky takes this idea very seriously, and, in fact, affirms its truth
in some way. It is freedom that Raskolnikov is seeking, First, he is
seeking freedom from the bounds of social conventions, and also,
most importantly, from what he considers his own sentimental tendencies. This is why he has to separate himself off from other
human beings, why this separation is the source of crime. I do not
believe that Dostoevsky is saying that all criminals have motives
exactly like those of Raskolnikov, but I do think that some separation from mankind is at work in all criminals. Dostoevsky is particularly interested in exploring what happens when someone tries
to do this deliberately. After he commits the murder, Raskolnikov
is still torn, but now the stakes are much higher than before. Now
he has to see if he has the fortitude to affirm his crime, not as a
project, but as his deed. This affirmation would be the sign that
he was in fact a superior being, a free man, and not an ordinary
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criminal. But he discovers very quickly that he cannot affirm his
crime as he wishes. Sentimental regrets plague him. He becomes
ill, and experiences an almost overwhelming desire to confess. It
is this desire to confess which that exposes him to the interest of
the police. He now begins to feel regret for what he has done, but
this is not the regret the reader might expect. He does not regret
that he has done something wrong; he regrets that he cannot wholeheartedly affirm his crime. Of course, there is a part of him that
does regret the crime profoundly, that knows that he has done a
terrible thing; but it takes the the entire rest of the book for Raskolnikov to acknowledge that this other part is truly himself, and not
internalized convention. The doubleness we have seen in Raskolnikov’s behavior is now revealed as a doubleness within himself.
Through our own ambivalence, which is revealed to us as we read,
Dostoevsky shows us that this doubleness is not peculiar to Raskolnikov, but is true of us as well.
The novel proper ends with Raskolnikov’s confession, once to
Sonya, and once to the police. He has two conversations with
Sonya: the first is a rehearsal of his confession; the second is his
actual confession. This behavior mirrors the commission of the
murder. The confession to the police also has a doubleness about
it. He goes to the police station to confess, but at the last moment
runs out of the station. When he sees Sonya looking at him from
the street, he returns to the police station and confesses. The novel
ends with Raskolnikov’s confession, but the motive for it ambiguous. Is Raskolnikov finally filled with true remorse and the desire
for repentance, or is he confessing because he has failed to live up
to his own view of the murder and himself? Is he simply acknowledging his failure to affirm his crime? The novel inclines us to the
latter account, but it is hard to be sure.
In the Epilogue (which, by the way, does not appear at all in
Dostoevsky’s notebooks), we are told the Raskolnikov was sentenced to eight years hard labor in Siberia. Dostoevsky makes it
clear that both spirits in Raskolnikov are still at war during his imprisonment. The narrator tells us that Raskolnikov was suffering
not from remorse at the crime he committed, but from “wounded
pride” at the fact that he had to confess in order to find “some peace
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for himself.”9 But this was not repentance. “He did not repent of
his crime.”10 By the end of the Epilogue, however, he does repent.
How does this happen? I only have time here to give a bare sketch
of this transformation.
The first and most fundamental element of the change is his
love for Sonya. This love began almost from the moment he first
met her. This love was not intelligible to him. In fact, it annoys
him, and he tries to get rid of it, but it is clear, whether he likes it
or not, that she is what ties him to life itself. In Siberia, she becomes indispensible to him.
A second element in the change arises after an extraordinary
experience he undergoes while in Siberia. He discovers that all his
fellow prisoners, who have had much harder lives than he, love
life. “He looked at his fellow convicts and was amazed at how they,
too, all loved life, how they valued it! It precisely seemed to him
that in prison they loved and valued it even more, cherished it even
more than in freedom.”11 This experience, combined with his realization of the depth of Sonya’s love, brought about his transformation. Retributive punishment did nothing to heal his soul; but the
experience of living with dangerous, desperate men who nevertheless loved life made him whole again. This experience makes him
realize the meaning of the murders he committed: they were acts
against life itself, and thus against all human beings. In some
wholly mysterious way, this experience allows him to discover the
love of life in himself.
Let me end with a brief epilogue: a story of retribution and
penance related by my friend and colleague, Howard Zeiderman,
in an essay about the educational work he has been doing the last
fifteen years with prisoners at the maximum security prison in Jessup, Maryland. A group of prisoners were discussing a drawing as
a text:
The text was a drawing by Kathe Kolwitz, Prisoners
Listening to Music. The three prisoners depicted are
skeletal, with hollow eyes—and all seemingly gripped
by something. The session was not going very well and
I regretted trying to use a text that connected too
vividly with their situation. A number of the younger
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members were clearly repulsed by the drawing. When
I asked why a few who spoke often were silent, Larry
answered. “It’s scary looking at them. I don’t want that
to be me.” As he finished, another prisoner, Craig, a
man almost seventy years old who first served time
more than fifty years before, laughed. “You don’t understand nothing. They’re not dying. They’re gettin’
past their hungers. It’s the music that makes them
pure—like angels. Listen—when I was young down
south we had a chaplain. Every day he would play
music for us. Old music, beautiful. At first we couldn’t
listen to it. We never heard nothing like it. Sometimes
a song would last a long time, no words. But then we
started to love it. We would listen like in the picture,
and we’d remember things. And we’d cry. Sometimes
you could hear ten men cry. And sometimes the priest
would cry too. We were all together in it. But then he
retired and a new chaplain came. He was different. He
wanted us to see the doctors and counselors, the case
workers. They would ask us questions about ourselves
and make us go to classes, programs. They were working on us and the music ended. It was different. It was
them against us.” Correction, as Craig sensed, is entirely different from penance.12
NOTES
Fyodr Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1967), 64.
1
Fyodr Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), 3.
2
Ibid., 11.
Ibid., 39.
5
Ibid., 49.
6
Ibid., 59.
7
Ibid., 62.
8
Ibid., 419
9
Ibid., 543.
3
4
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10
11
Ibid., 544.
Ibid., 545.
109
Howard Zeiderman, “Caged Explorers: The Hunger for Control,” The
St. John’s Review 53.2 (2012): 157.
12
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Justice in Plato’s Statesman
Eric Salem
Ordinary politicians love to talk about justice, and to go on—and
on—about all the just things they have done, are doing, or mean to
do in the future. We see it all the time—just turn on the television,
especially in an election year. But what about the genuine article,
the true politikos, the statesman who possesses genuine political
science and who practices or could practice the genuine political
art? What role does justice play in such a man’s thinking and doing
and speaking?
A selective glance at our tradition suggests that justice plays a
very large role indeed. Consider, for instance, our own founding
documents—certainly works of statesmanship of a very high order.
The Constitution bluntly proclaims in its preamble that one of its
purposes is to “establish justice.” And the Declaration declares,
among other things, that governments exist for the sake of justice—that “governments are instituted among men to secure” the
rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Or consider the
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s prolegomena to the Politics: his
treatment of justice is longer by far than his treatment of any other
virtue, and second in length only to his two-book treatment of
friendship—a topic that, for Aristotle, is itself deeply intertwined
with matters of justice and political life. Or to move a little closer
to our chosen topic, consider the Republic, Plato’s most famous
book about political affairs: all of Book I is devoted to justice, and
the inquiry into the goodness of justice that begins in Book II is
based on the assumption that an investigation of a well-constituted
city is bound to come across justice—because well-ordered cities,
like well-ordered souls, always contain it. In other words, all of
these texts suggest that a fairly deep connection exists between
politics and justice, and between thinking about justice and thinking about politics.
Suppose, then, we turn as novice readers to Plato’s Statesman,
which purports to be an inquiry into the nature of the statesman,
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the politikos, and the nature of his art or science, politikē. Given
the sketch we have just seen, we might expect the dialogue to contain a series of acute reflections on the relation between justice and
the true science of politics. We might even expect the Stranger
from Elea to take up again the question that Socrates had wanted
to pursue further at the end of Book I of the Republic, the “Socratic” question, “What is justice?” In fact we get nothing of the
sort. We get a strange, vast myth about the cosmos; we get an extended—some might say over-extended—account of weaving and
its attendant arts; we learn that men as herd-animals closely resemble pigs, on the one hand, and chickens, on the other. But we hear
next to nothing about justice.
To begin with, there is no extended discussion of justice in the
Statesman—no discussion of what it is or whether it’s good or bad
or anything else. As a matter of fact, justice-words, that is, words
cognate with Greek word for justice, turn up only about thirty times
in the entire dialogue. (In the Republic such words turn up more
than two hundred times in Book I alone.) What’s more, only about
half those appearances have the moral and political connotations
that we ordinarily associate with the word “justice.” In fact the
Greek word for justice, dikaiosunē, the word that is so central to
Socrates’s inquiry in the Republic and Aristotle’s inquiry in the
Ethics, does not appear in the Statesman at all. The word injustice
does turn up, once, but it refers, not to a tendency in citizens that
needs to be corrected, but to a disqualification for citizenship altogether. As for the remaining cases in the dialogue where justicewords are used with moral or political meaning, most are
disappointingly conventional, while the most interesting or promising phrases appear to come out of nowhere.
What are we to make of this peculiar state of affairs? Does
the relative rarity of justice-words in the dialogue point to a deep
divergence between the Stranger’s approach to politics and human
affairs and the approach of Socrates? Do considerations of justice
simply not play a major role in his thinking about politics? Do his
interests lie elsewhere? Or, on the contrary, is the Stranger’s thinking about politics shaped by a distinct conception of justice, but
one that leads him to employ the language of justice sparingly?
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In the end I want to suggest that the Stranger’s thinking about
politics is in fact profoundly shaped by a certain conception of justice—a peculiar one, to be sure, but perhaps no more peculiar than
the one Socrates lays out in the Republic, and perhaps not so very
different from it either. But I mean to approach this conclusion in
a rather roundabout way, by first considering seriously the possibility that the Stranger is just not very interested in justice and that
his lack of interest is reflected in his thinking about the science of
politics. My hope is that this indirect approach will force out into
the light what is distinctive about his understanding.
If the Stranger is not interested in justice, what is he interested
in? Almost any page of the Statesman—or the Sophist—gives us
the answer: the arts and sciences, including his own science or art
of division. In the Phaedrus, Socrates calls himself a lover of collections and divisions, and elsewhere in the dialogues he makes
constant use of analogies with the arts. But the Stranger goes much
further: he seems to see the whole human world as an interconnected array of always-multiplying arts, the sorting out of which
into their more or less natural divisions is one of the philosopher’s
prime tasks. Angling and sophistry, louse-catching and generalship,
doctoring and potion-making—all these arts and at least fifty more
make their appearance somewhere in the Sophist or Statesman.
The Stranger’s myth, his cosmic vision, helps us to understand
this remarkable proliferation of arts and the Stranger’s acute interest
in them. During the age of Saturn, we enjoyed a carefree life under
the care of the gods. With no regimes and no families, we lived on
the fruits that sprang spontaneously from trees and bushes, talked
with the animals, slept naked on the grass and woke up every
morning feeling just a little bit . . . younger. But that time is long
past. This is the age of Zeus. The world has grown harsh, the gods
have withdrawn, and we grow old. We have been left to our own
devices, and those devices, the first fruits of our new-age thinking,
are the arts. Men need food; the arts of agriculture and herding and
hunting (including the art of angling) must be developed. Men need
shelter from winter cold and summer sun, from the animals that no
longer like us and from . . . other men. The arts of wall-making and
house-building, shoe-making and armor-crafting, rug-making and
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wool-working must come on the scene. This list could go on: along
with needs arise desires. Every need or desire demands a new art,
and every new art demands a new sub-array of subordinate arts to
provide materials to be worked up and tools to work with.
Atop this dizzying array of arts is a kind of art of arts, an überart, if you will. For man the artisan is also man the herd animal,
and the human herd, like all herds, needs to be tended and managed. This art or science of herd management as applied to the
human herd is . . . statesmanship. Its task is neither simple nor easy.
It must rule over the other arts and sciences, deciding which ones
are to be learned and to what degree. To retain its purity of purpose,
it must keep itself separate from the arts most akin to itself, the arts
of persuasion and generalship and judging. Under certain circumstances it must engage in lawmaking. But its most difficult task
has to do with the noblest natures under its sway. Just as nature left
to itself, and permeated by the Other, seems to give rise to deception, and thus to sophistry (including the sophistry that masquerades as statesmanship), so too, human nature left to itself seems to
give rise to two distinct and opposed temperaments: courageous
natures and moderate natures. Left to themselves, these natures
tend to separate from each other and, in the end, degenerate into
self-destructive factions. To combat this most dangerous of threats,
the statesman must become a master weaver, a webmaster of the
spirit and of the body too; he must find ways to knit together the
lives of the city’s noblest natures. For only thus can the city become
and remain a self-bound, self-sufficient whole.
This would seem to be a good time to ask what place, if any,
justice has in this picture of politics and political life. The obvious
answer seems to be: a place that is important, but rather small and
decidedly subordinate. Human herd management would seem to
differ from other forms of herd management in this: all herding involves giving commands, but members of the human herd, especially in the age of Zeus, seem to need explicit commands or
prescriptions, explicit rules, to govern their communal life. These
rules, which allow men in cities to get along with one another, constitute justice. Now from the point of view of citizens, especially
artisan citizens going about their daily, commerce-driven lives,
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such rules—we call them laws—might seem to be the most important manifestation of the political art. But they are in fact only an
imperfect and secondary manifestation of that art, in part because
they are riddled with imprecision, and in part because, as we have
already seen, the first business and real work of the political art
lies in the weaving together of courage and moderation. It would
be a mistake, according to this account, to think of justice as a
virtue, just as it would be a mistake to think of justice as something
high, a criterion that the political art has to look up to as it goes
about its business. Justice is nothing high or deep or fancy; it is
nothing but the set of rules, invented by the statesman, that allow
us to lead reasonably decent lives in an unfriendly world.
Is this account of justice in the Statesman adequate? Does it,
as we say, do justice to the Stranger’s view of justice? There are
certainly a number of passages in the dialogue that lend credence
to it. For instance, at one point the Stranger makes it very clear that
the power of the judge is separate from, and sub-ordinate to, the
art of the statesman. Then he asks if the judge
has any power more far-reaching than, in matters
pertaining to contracts, that of discerning the
things ordained as both just and unjust by keeping
in sight whatever is laid down as lawful and which
it received from a law-giver king (305b).
It looks here as if justice is simply identical to the legal, as it
is defined by the law-giving king—that is, the statesman. This language of contracts also turns up a bit earlier, in the course of the
Stranger’s critique of law and its lack of precision, when he speaks
of those who “supervise the herds with respect to the just and their
contracts with each other” (294e). Once again justice seems to be
equated with the contractual obligations defined by the law—and
the baseness involved in dealing with matters of justice, its distance
from real statesmanly activity, is underscored by the re-introduction of the language of “herds.” The text of the Statesman also
lends support to the thought that justice is not a virtue: there is no
place in the dialogue where the Stranger states or even implies that
it is the statesman’s task to instill justice or anything resembling
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justice in the souls of his citizens. The closest we get is the suggestion very near the end of the dialogue that moderate natures
tend to be more just than courageous ones, but this does not seem
to be a matter of education, and in any case, “just” in this context
seems to mean “cautious and therefore inclined to follow the law.”
The meaning of “just” here is perfectly compatible with passages
that identify the just with the legal; it simply means “law-abiding.”
Are we to conclude, then, that justice has no meaning in the
Statesman other than a set of rules laid down by the statesman in
his law-making capacity, and then turned over to a subordinate
power? We might have to reach this conclusion were it not for a
handful of odd passages where the Stranger seems to be pointing
us in a different direction. Let me briefly go over three of them. In
the first, the Stranger argues that rulers in “the correct regime” can
do anything, including banishing and even killing inhabitants, “so
long as they make it better from worse and preserve it as far as
they’re able by using science and the just” (293d). In the second,
which comes just as he is beginning his critique of law, the Stranger
notes that law “could never, by having comprehended what’s most
excellent and most just, command what’s best” (294a-b). And in
the third, the Stranger claims that:
there is no error for thoughtful rulers, whatever
they do, so long as they guard one great thing, and,
by at all times distributing to those in the city
what’s most just with intellect and art, both are
able to preserve them and make better men from
worse as much as possible (297a-b).
These passages share several features in common. In all of
them, the just is linked to, and subordinated to, the good —either
the good of the citizens or the good of the city. In addition, the just
is paired with, or at least linked to, thought in some form—science
in the first passage, comprehension in the second, and intellect and
art in the third. Finally—and most important for the issue we are
considering—in all three passages the just in these passages simply cannot be identified with what is lawful or what is defined
by the law. In the first passage, the just seems to function as a
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criterion or standard at least co-equal with science; according to
the second, the just cannot be comprehended by law; and in the
third, the just arises directly from intellect and art, without the
mediation of law. Clearly then, justice or “the just” has more than
one meaning in the Statesman and in the Stranger’s mind. But exactly what does it mean in this second set of passages? For instance, what does it mean in the peculiar phrase “science and the
just”? We can’t look to the immediate context of the phrase for an
answer. In all three passages the language of justice seems to come
out of nowhere.
To answer this question we need to take a step back. I mentioned earlier that there are a number of places in the Statesman
where the language of justice is used with a meaning that is nonmoral and non-political. Let me add that, with one exception,
which I’ll get to later, every appearance of this language before the
“science and the just” passage falls into this category. Now in all
of these earlier appearances, “just” and “justly” have a specific
meaning and specific range: they are used to characterize speech
or thought; and they refer to correctness or precision or aptness of
thought or speech, as when we say, in English—as I did a little
while ago—that we want to do justice to someone’s thought or that
someone has gotten something “just right.” Now it is “precisely”
this meaning of justice that I think we must import, and are meant
to import, into the passages in question. The intellectual quality
that the Stranger prizes most in his own science of division—the
ability to divide well, to find a “part” that is also a “form” (262b263b)—is also the quality that defines or gives meaning to justice.
Thus when the Stranger says that rulers in the “correct regime”
must employ “science and the just,” “the just” is not being introduced here as an extraneous criterion that comes out of nowhere.
It rather refers to the exactness or precision of application that is
implicit in the very notion of science—in this case, the science of
statesmanship. Or again, when the Stranger faults the law for failing to comprehend what’s most excellent and most just, he is simply faulting the law’s characteristic lack of precision: because laws
are necessarily universal, they cannot help but miss what is best
here and now and must be inexact in their attainment of it. It should
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come as no surprise, then, that the Stranger keeps referring to the
“correct” or “most correct regime” where we would probably say
“best regime”—the best regime is, for him, “precisely” the regime
in which precision or correctness is the ruling principle.
There is another way to formulate this thought in the language
of the dialogue. At the very center of the Statesman there is an extended discussion of the art of measurement, and at the very center
of that discussion, the Stranger introduces, without much explanation, the phrase “the precise itself.” Why? It turns out that the very
existence of statesmanship—in fact the very existence of all the arts
that generate something—rests on the existence of something called
due measure. All the arts aim to achieve or produce some good.
Sometimes they miss the mark: they fall short of or exceed their
aims. But when they bring about the goods they aim at, they attain
what the Stranger calls “due measure.” At such moments, when
they get things just right, when they arrive at due measure, the precise itself is present. But what holds for the other arts holds for
statesmanship as well. Whenever the statesman, aiming at the
preservation or improvement of his city or its citizens, brings about
this good, he attains due measure, and in attaining due measure,
he participates in the precise itself. But if I am right in thinking
that, in at least a select number of passages in the dialogue, the just
coincides with what is correct or precise, then at such a moment
the statesman can also be said to have achieved justice. To achieve
the good is to achieve justice.
This brings me to my final point. I want to bring what I have
just said to bear on the most important activity of statesmanship:
the weaving together of courage and moderation. I mentioned a little while ago that there is one passage early on in the dialogue
where the language of justice is not used to refer to precision of
thought. It occurs in the myth. Interestingly enough, precision is
also mentioned but here refers to precision in the movement of the
cosmos. The claim is that when the cosmos is first allowed to move
on its own, it moves with precision, but over time, because of the
bodily aspect of the cosmos, it gradually winds down. Everything
beautiful in the cosmos comes from its composer, while everything
“harsh and unjust” has its source in this “fellow nursling of
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primeval nature” (273b-d). Of course this is a myth and we have
to be careful about what we extract from it. Still, I cannot help but
think that the Stranger is here positing something like a primal
principle of disorder, a principle that is always at war with beauty,
with precision of movement, with the very notion of a cosmos, that
is, an ordered whole. That he associates this principle with harshness and injustice suggests that this principle is at work in the
human world as well: the city is an attempt to found something
like a human cosmos in the face of primal disorder, primal imprecision, primal injustice. The ordinary arts that ground ordinary life
within cities are one aspect of this cosmos-formation. Each is an
attempt to bring forth due measure within some specific context;
each is an attempt to wrestle with its material’s resistance to being
given proper form. But the greatest of such attempts is the effort
of the statesman to bring forth due measure in and through his
weaving together of courage and moderation. Justice in the primary
sense, then, is not to be found in law-making or judging in accordance with law. Nor is it to be found in the accomplishing of this
or that good thing for the city. It is found right here, in the overcoming of primal injustice, primal resistance to having a city at all.
We might think of it this way: In the Sophist, the Stranger suggests
that being is not rest, or motion, or some third thing. He suggests
instead that being is the belonging together of rest and motion. But
within the sphere of politics, courage corresponds to motion and
rest to moderation. Where, then, and what is justice? It is not something present in the soul of the courageous man, nor something
present in the soul of the moderate man. Nor is it some third thing
hovering over the two. Instead, justice in the primary sense is present whenever the statesman, by thinking precisely and achieving
due measure, keeps the primal dyad from falling asunder; it is there
both in and as the belonging together, the being woven together,
of courage and moderation.
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Getting to Know Kierkegaard Better
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A Review of Richard McCombs’s The Paradoxical
Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2013. 244 pages, $36.00.
James Carey
On first looking into Kierkegaard, the student who has already read
around in the history of philosophy or has limited his studies primarily to twentieth century philosophy, whether analytic or “continental,” is likely to find himself puzzled at several levels. He may
have heard that Kierkegaard is both a Christian and an existentialist, even a founder of existentialism, and he might be interested to
find out how one man can be both of these things at once. Or,
doubting that one man could be both these things at once without
being confused, he might be inclined to shrug him off. But then he
may also have heard that Heidegger was profoundly influenced by
Kierkegaard and that Wittgenstein declared him to be a “saint.” So
he sets out to get a better sense of who Kierke-gaard is and what
he is aiming at. After reading the first few pages of, say, Fear and
Trembling, he comes quickly to recognize that he is in the presence
of an original and incisive thinker. But he also encounters obscure
arguments and formulations that seem more colorful than illuminating. And sooner or later he runs up against assertions about the
relation of Socrates to Christianity that seem naïve at best, perverse
at worse. He begins to suspect that Kierkegaard, for all his undeniable brilliance, is in full control of neither his intellect nor his
imagination. After reading a relatively accessible book such as
Philosophical Fragments he might turn to Concluding Unscientific
Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (the latter book four times
the length of what it is advertised as a “postscript” to) in hopes of
finding a resolution to some of the perplexities in which the former
James Carey is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Santa Fe,
New Mexico.
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work left him. Instead, he finds himself by turns beguiled and exasperated by an art of writing that is both concentrated and ironic.
He is not sure whether he is being led towards the truth or being
manipulated. And if he has not done so sooner, he begins to wonder
exactly what Kierkegaard intends by presenting some of his books,
but then not all them, under pseudonyms, and in particular why one
book is presented as written by Climacus and another by anti-Climacus. Can all Kierkegaard’s books be understood as expressing
his own thoughts? Can any of them be understood as expressing
his own thoughts? Not knowing how to find an answer to these
and related questions, the student may decide at this point to postpone engaging with the full sweep of Kierkegaard’s project until
later on, more or less indefinitely later on.
Needless to say, not all who have struggled with Kierke-gaard
at some stage of their studies fit the above profile. But some—I
suspect quite a few—do fit it. After reading through one or two of
Kierkegaard’s books and probing around in a few others, they will
profit immensely by stepping back from his oeuvre and reading
Richard McCombs’s The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard. Those who have read a larger number of Kierkegaard’s
books will profit immensely as well. I for one can say that there is
a not a single question I have asked myself about Kierkegaard over
the years that McCombs’s carefully argued and beautifully written
book does not answer, clearly, comprehensively, and convincingly.
The title of McCombs’s book expresses his general intention,
which is to show that Kierkegaard is a rational thinker and that he
employs paradox in the service of reason. What Kierkegaard calls
“subjectivity” McCombs calls “paradoxical rationality.” The
provocative conclusion of McCombs’s study is that paradoxical
rationality reaches its perfection not in knowledge, either theoretical or practical, but in faith. In this review I will highlight only a
few of the observations that McCombs makes en route to this conclusion.
In Chapter 1, McCombs considers evidence in favor of the
view the Kierkegaard is an irrationalist and then evidence in favor
of the view that he is a rationalist. He argues, persuasively, that the
preponderance of evidence is in favor of the latter view. When
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Kierkegaard directly or through one of his pseudonymous authors
affirms what he calls a contradiction, he means not a flat-our logical absurdity but rather “a tension or an unresolved opposition”
(13).1 And, as Kierkegaard sees it, “when the believer has faith,
the absurd is not absurd—faith transforms it” (22). Kierkegaard’s
Climacus calls the Incarnation a contradiction. But, as McCombs
points out, to show that such a thing is an irresolvable logical contradiction “one would need a thorough understanding of the
essence of God and of temporal, finite human existence” (13).
Kierkegaard is aware that this understanding is not at our disposal.
The appearance of irrationality is only feigned by Kierkegaard. It
is a pretense in the service of a pedagogical aim. “The human
model for Kierkegaard’s incognito of irrationalism is Socrates. If
Socrates ironically feigned ignorance in the service of knowledge,
Kierkegaard ‘goes further’ and ironically feigns irrationality in the
service of reason” (2). He “creates Climacus specifically to address
and appeal to philosophical readers . . . in order to find such readers
‘where they are’ and to lead them to subjectivity” (5). Where philosophical readers “are” is not simply in their thinking but in their
existing. There is, it should go without saying, more to existing
than thinking.
Near the conclusion of this chapter, McCombs offers a perceptive analysis of the limitations of Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling. This author attempts to
show to philosophical readers who regard faith as a demotic substitute for knowledge, or as a station that gets aufgehoben on the
way to absolute knowing, that genuine faith, as exemplified by
Abraham, is in fact rare, awesome in the exact sense of the word,
and more difficult to achieve than any knowledge we humans can
attain or pretend to. But Kierkegaard also subtly leads his readers
to see that Johannes de Silentio can, or rather will, only admire
faith. He will not attempt it. Faith is a task—a task that Silentio
evades (24). Faith is, moreover, not merely a task but “a difficult,
dangerous, strenuous, and painful duty, and human beings will do
virtually anything to evade such a duty” (30). In Fear and Trembling, “Kierkegaard first tries to get readers to admire the greatness
of faith, and then breaks the distressing news to them that the faith
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that they admire is an absolute duty.” Kierkegaard has “constructed
Fear and Trembling so ingeniously that interpretation of it unexpectedly and disconcertingly turns into self-examination” (31).
In Chapter 2, McCombs argues that subjectivity or paradoxical
rationality is, like all rationality, consistency. It is consistency not
just of thought, however, but of the whole person. “To be subjective means consistently to relate oneself, the subject of thinking,
to what one thinks. It is to think about life and action, most of all
about one’s own life and action, and to strive to feel, will, and act
consistently with one’s thoughts” (35). Not everyone who prides
himself on the consistency of his thinking aims at this more comprehensive consistency. For example, a person who holds in his
thinking that everything is determined—whether by the will of
God, physical mechanism, or the apparent good—and that the future is thereby fixed, nonetheless deliberates and acts, as all human
beings must, on the assumption that the future is not fixed and that
how it turns out depends in some measure on one’s choices. Such
a person is not wholly rational no matter how impressively his theory holds together qua theory merely.2 His speculative thinking,
however consistent it may be in itself, is inconsistent with his practical thinking. Kierkegaard’s subjectivity is not so much the opposite of objectivity, an inner and private domain as distinct from an
outer and public one, as it is the whole of rationality. Subjectivity
comprehends objectivity as a part, assigning it its altogether legitimate, though limited, role within a properly integrated life of reason. Subjectivity, for Kierkegaard, is integrity.
It is “Kierkegaard’s belief that thinking is unavoidably interested.”(37). Objective thinkers frequently claim to be disinterested.
But they are wrong. For objectivity is not without an interest: speculative reason (which could be called, somewhat misleadingly, objective reason) is interested in the true, just as practical reason
(which could be called, also somewhat misleadingly, subjective
reason) is interested in the good. Pursuit of the true and pursuit of
the good are two pursuits of one and the same reason.3 As McCombs later points out, interest derives from interesse, literally,
“to be in between” (155). Human reason is in between the temporal
and the eternal. It moves teleologically from the temporal toward
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the eternal, as it moves teleologically from the conditioned toward
the unconditioned and from the finite toward the infinite.
Subjective thinkers have a better appreciation of the wholeness
of reason, its teleological orientation toward both truth and goodness, than do objective thinkers. Kierkegaard suspects that many
who take pride in their commitment to objectivity use the search
for knowledge “as a way to delay or to evade ethical action” (45).
He also thinks that, “because the human will is free, the rationality
of human beings—his own included—is always precarious” (75).
This is true of speculative reason no of less than of practical reason.
McCombs speaks of the “shaky foundations” of logic and its “liability to perversion” (60). In my view, logic per se—certainly its
indemonstrable but self-evident first principles, such as the principle of non-contradiction—is sound.4 But logical principles and
rules of inference, unimpeachable in themselves, can be used to
deduce questionable conclusions from questionable premises. In
that way logic can assist one in rationalizing the satisfaction of certain desires that, unlike the desire for integrity in thought and action, are not intrinsic to reason and are often at odds with the telē
of reason. “When these desires are threatened by the strenuous requirements of ethics, they fight back with astonishing cunning and
sagacity, by co-opting the powers of logic for specious reasoning
and self-deception” (60). And So McCombs rightly recommends
“rectifying [not logic itself but] one’s use of logic” (65).
In Chapter 3, McCombs distinguishes between traditional negative theology, which he understands to be primarily theoretical,
and the negative theology of Climacus, which he understands to
be primarily practical. “Climacus thinks that if anything has priority in salvation it is or would be love and not knowledge” (87).5
This chapter contains helpful accounts of the Kierkegaardian conceptions of resignation and guilt-consciousness, and of
Kierkegaard’s arresting formulation that “to need God is a human
being’s highest perfection” (88-89; on resignation see also 106).
Of course, from the perspective of Christianity all human beings
need God. The perfection of humanity consists then not in the need,
simply, but in the recognition of the need and the follow-through
on what it ultimately entails: “reverence, awe, adoration, worship,
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or as Johannes de Silentio calls it, ‘fear and trembling’” (88-89).
We naturally desire perfect happiness; but for Kierkegaard perfect
happiness is “the good that is attained by absolutely venturing
everything” (95), for it is “essentially uncertain” (98). McCombs
concludes this chapter with a reflection on how Kierkegaard understands the relation between the good and one’s own good. There
is no “tension” between them: “one most truly loves the good by
loving one’s own good in the right way” (99).6
In Chapter 4, McCombs shows what Kierkegaard means by
simplicity. It is “translating one’s understanding . . . immediately
into action” (101). Just as McCombs discloses limitations, which
Kierkegaard intends his readers to recognize, in Johannes de Silentio’s admiration, absent imitation, of faith, so he discloses limitations in Climacus’s conception of “hidden inwardness.” Climacus
recognizes that there is something wrong with flaunting one’s efforts at becoming a Christian. But, McCombs notes, “going out of
one’s way to look ‘just like everyone else’” while “being very different from most people in one’s heart” can stand in the way of
“witnessing the truth and thus risking suffering and persecution”
(112; cf. 117-118; 124). In Chapter 5, McCombs continues the critique of Climacus he initiated in Chapter 4, with the focus now on
the limitations of indirect communication and its need to be complemented by direct communication. By expressing himself so
obliquely and paradoxically, Climacus runs the risk of detaining
the reader in the process of interpretation so that he fails to undertake the practical tasks that it is Climacus’s main intention to urge
him toward. McCombs intends this chapter as a criticism of Climacus, not necessarily of Kierkegaard. But because “Kierkegaard
never explicitly addresses some of the vices or weaknesses of indirect communication” (115), McCombs concedes that perhaps
Kierkegaard “is not adequately aware of its pitfalls and shortcomings” (117). As the chapter progresses, criticisms of Kierkegaard
himself come to replace criticisms of his pseudonymous author.
Though Kierkegaard recognizes that his position is one of faith and
not knowledge, his employment of indirect communication does
not allow much room for serious confrontation with thoughtful criticisms of Christianity. McCombs goes so far as to express a con-
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cern that if Kierkegaard not only does not know where the full truth
about Christianity lies—and no believer can claim to know—but
is actually wrong about where the full truth lies, he “bears responsibility for risking the ruination of many lives” (131). More direct,
and less indirect, communication would go a long way toward reducing this risk. It would leave the reader greater freedom to make
a responsible decision for or against faith, being more cognizant
of both the case for and the case against, in light of the very little
that we humans are actually capable of knowing beyond the
shadow of a doubt.
In the first five chapters of his book McCombs occasionally
speaks to some of the initially mystifying albeit intriguing things
that Kierkegaard says about Socrates. In Chapter 6 and 7, and also
in part of Chapter 8, he treats Kierkegaard’s interpretation of “the
figure of Socrates” thematically. McCombs makes, I think, as wellinformed and cogent a case as can be made for the coherence of
Kierkegaard’s understanding of Socrates.
In Chapter 6, McCombs shows how and why Kierkegaard
presents Socrates as embodying “climacean capacity,” which is the
capacity “to be a climber over boundaries and a transgressor of
limits” (134).7 “[T]he climacean capacity is a power of synthesizing an eternal, infinite, universal, and absolute ideal with or in the
temporal, finite, particular, and relative aspects of oneself and one’s
everyday life, which is to say that the climacean capacity is a capacity for subjectivity” (154). “Human beings seem to be finite,
temporal, particular, and conditioned animals. And yet they also
seem to be able to conceive, however inadequately, the infinite,
the eternal, and the unconditioned.” (157).8 As Kierkegaard sees
it, “Socratic ignorance is an essential component of faith and Christianity” (135). According to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the Philosophical Fragments misrepresents Socrates “as an
objective thinker, whereas he was really a subjective thinker”
(139). Climacus recognizes that “if one could not discover one’s
incapacity before God, then neither could one exist as a being who
attempts to live in time according to an eternal ideal” (147). “[T]he
god is ‘present just as soon as the uncertainty of everything is
thought infinitely’” (151).
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Whereas in Chapter 6 McCombs focuses on Kierke-gaard’s
understanding of Socrates’s ascent, in Chapter 7 he focuses on
Kierkegaard’s understanding of Socrates’s downfall. Kierkegaard
finds this downfall expressed in a striking passage from the Phaedrus. There Socrates confesses that he does not know himself.9
And so he investigates himself rather than other things in order to
find out whether he happens to be a monster (thērion) more multiply-twisted and lustful (epitethymenon) than Typhon or a gentler
and simpler animal having by nature a share in a certain divine and
non-arrogant (atyphon) allotment.10 As Kierkegaard interprets this
passage from the Phaedrus, “‘he who believed that he knew himself’ becomes so perplexed that he cannot decide between utterly
opposite self-interpretations.” This is the “downfall of the understanding.” Kierkegaard, through Climacus, suggests that Socrates
actually willed this downfall (162-163).
On first hearing, this suggestion sounds like Kierkegaardian
hyperbole. But, if the will is the appetite of reason,11 then human
reason is naturally propelled by its own appetite toward truth, including, paradoxically, the truth that human reason is not capable
of answering all the questions it naturally proposes to itself.12 In
the case at hand, Socrates’s will propels his reason toward selfknowledge; but the knowledge he attains is that he does not have
complete self-knowledge. It is in this way that Socrates wills the
downfall of his understanding. The will moves reason to the discovery and acknowledgment of its natural limits. This is not a merely
negative development, however. For “to will the downfall of reason
is to transform and perfect reason” (163). As McCombs writes in
an earlier chapter, “[T]he power of reason comes to light in the act
of becoming aware of its weakness” (69).
This transformation and perfection is not of theoretical reason
alone, but of practical reason as well (cf. 211).13 The standard interpretation of the downfall of reason is that it results in “an openness or receptivity to a divine revelation of truths that exceed the
capacity of natural reason” (164). McCombs thinks that this interpretation is correct as far as it goes. But he thinks that it does not
go far enough, for it places stress only on the theoretical consequences of the downfall. As McCombs argues, it has practical con-
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sequences as well. “The thing that falls in the downfall of the understanding is the whole human capacity to achieve the highest
human end—an eternal happiness, which includes not only joy, but
wisdom and goodness as well. Consequently, the downfall is a disavowal of the pretentions that one can become good, wise, and joyful on one’s own, a rejection of the determination to rely only on
oneself in striving for one’s highest end” (165).
The disavowal of these pretensions results indeed in an openness to revelation. According to Christianity, there is a revelation
of truths regarding action: how to become truly good through repentance, on the one hand, and through cultivating love of God
and neighbor, on the other. And there is a revelation of truths regarding being as well: that God is a Trinity of persons, without the
slightest compromise to his unity but as its perfection through the
unqualified love that unites the three persons, and that one of these
persons became incarnate in order to save us from sin and call us
toward fuller and fuller participation, through love, in the divine
nature.14 “[O]ne accepts revelation not in order to become a better
philosopher but in order to become a better person” (165).
It should be noted that Socrates’s qualification in the Phaedrus
that he does not “yet” know himself implies that he has not simply
given up on the possibility of attaining complete self-knowledge.15
Furthermore, any openness to revelation that he might have arrived
at is, in the absence of actual revelation, an openness only to the
possibility of revelation.16 But until and unless Socrates does attain
complete self-knowledge, he cannot definitively know whether all
so-called choice is merely a case of being determined by the apparent good, more precisely by the apparent best;17 or whether, instead, man is capable of radically free choice and
self-determination, including the abuse of radically free choice and
self-determination that is sin. The crucial issue, then, is whether
Socrates has any inkling of sin. Though “Climacus claims that neither Socrates nor anyone else can be aware of sin without revelation” he nonetheless “portrays Socrates as suspecting his sinful
condition” and “as suspecting that he is misrelated to the divine
owing to Typhonic arrogance” (167-168; cf. 175). Plato surely expects the reader of the Phaedrus to remember that Typhon was, as
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McCombs says, “an arrogant, violent, and defiant enemy of the
gods.” Moreover, with his hundred heads, he was “presumably not
even friendly to himself” (167). A monster like Typhon cannot be
happy.
We noted earlier that the interest of reason lies in its being between the temporal and the eternal, and that it moves teleologically
from the temporal toward the eternal. According to Kierkegaard, it
cannot reach its ultimate telos without supernatural assistance. This
assistance becomes available only when the eternal, at its own initiative, becomes temporal “in the fullness of time.” In what Christians
believe to be the historical event of the Incarnation, a synthesis of
the eternal and the temporal is achieved in deed and not just in
thought. The Incarnation is for Kierkegaard the paradox (146); it is
the absolute paradox (219).
Assuming both (1) that neither complete self-knowledge nor
complete knowledge of the whole and its ground is humanly possible, and (2) that one has heard the Gospel of Christ, Kierkegaard
thinks that only two responses to what one has heard are possible:
faith, which is not knowledge,18 and offense, which is not doubt. Offense is “a delusion of rational autonomy”—deluded because human
reason has limits and thus is not “self-sufficient.” Offense is “unhappy self-assertion”—unhappy because one asserts oneself on the
basis of what one knows, deep down, is insufficient knowledge of
oneself. In the human being there are “two elements in tension with
one another: a desire for happiness and a desire for autonomy or selfsufficiency.” These elements are incompatible, and “one or the other
of them must fall. Faith . . . is the downfall of the desire for self-assertion, while offense is the downfall of the desire for happiness”
(176-177).
In Chapter 8, McCombs further explores the consequences of
Kierkegaard’s conviction that there are no “public demonstrations of
the answers to certain crucial questions: Is there a personal God who
created and maintains the world? Does a human being have an immortal soul? Is there a best life for human beings?” (184) If by “public demonstrations” Kierkegaard means rationally accessible
demonstrations, it can be countered that there are such demonstrations, pro and contra, on these and related matters, particularly in
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medieval theology and in the reaction of modern philosophy against
medieval theology. There has indeed never been universal acceptance
of either theological or anti-theological arguments. But then there
has also never been universal acceptance, not even by the greatest
minds, of many philosophical arguments, such as, for example, the
divergent arguments regarding the scope of human knowledge (think
of Hume and Hegel), the relation of acts of thought to the objects of
thought (think of Plato and Husserl), the relationship between the
good and the pleasant (think of Kant and Mill), and the authority of
reason (think of Aristotle and Heidegger). It is likely that there is no
“public demonstration” on these matters because the public is insufficiently perceptive to follow the arguments. In considering a disagreement between great philosophers, say, the disagreement
between Locke and Leibniz on how much our knowledge arises from
the senses, one has to consider the possibility that one of the two
thinkers penetrated closer to the root of the matter than did the other.
It seems improbable that there will ever be universal acceptance of
most philosophical and theological demonstrations. But that does not
mean that these demonstrations are not rationally accessible.
That theological and philosophical demonstrations are so controverted might not be due solely to different capacities for clear
thinking. McCombs highlights Kierkegaard’s conviction that character cannot be easily separated from the quest for knowledge.
“[D]esires, fears, emotions, actions, and habits have an influence
on what and how a person thinks, or on what a person can see,
understand, know, or become aware of. In other words, some desires, habits, emotions, and actions are conducive to truth, and
some are inimical to it” (192). McCombs illustrates this claim by
referring to the limitations of Meno and Ivan Karamazov. “[T]he
deep thinker must be a spiritual knight with the strength and
courage to think terrible thoughts that others cannot endure to
think” (193). One terrible thought, of course, is that, even if there
is a first cause or ground of our finite existence, it takes no interest
in us and how we live our lives. But an equally terrible thought is
that we have deceived ourselves into thinking that we know this
to be true when we do not, and cannot, know any such thing. Both
terrible thoughts have to be explored.
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McCombs writes, “It is hard to believe that a person who
often lies to himself about his own actions and qualities, about the
actions and qualities of other people, and about his social and personal relations to other people will be honest when he tries to answer the most important philosophical questions” (194; cf. 65).
The examined life does not consist exclusively, or even primarily,
in the reading and discussion of philosophical texts. Most of all it
requires ongoing self-examination, including especially the examination of conscience that is needed to check the self-deception
that is at the root of sin, including the sin of vanity, especially intellectual vanity (cf. 215). McCombs recognizes that not all intellectual endeavors are equally compromised by corrupt character.
Corrupt character has little effect on “cognition of scientific, mathematical, and linguistic truths.” But corrupt character can pervert
“cognition of human nature and the best life for human beings”
(202). Anyone who is attempting to live a wholly rational life,
whether he is a believer or a nonbeliever, stands under an obligation of ongoing and unrelenting self-scrutiny.
On Kierkegaard’s understanding of the close connection between theory and practice, McCombs writes, “Seeing for oneself
requires acting for oneself…by one’s own self-activity, at one’s
own risk, and on one’s own responsibility. In short, autopsy requires autopraxy” (198). One gains humility, and thereby overcomes doubt through “the bitter method of trying to imitate Christ
and failing” (215). Humility is notoriously misunderstood, and
caricatured as well. McCombs corrects the common misunderstanding: “a meek and beaten-down milksop does not have the audacity to believe. . . . Honestly admitting one’s utter weakness
before God takes the greatest human strength. . . . [O]nly heroes
of the spirit have the audacity to believe . . . what pride cannot
tolerate and therefore willfully ignores: namely, a supreme being
to whom humans ought utterly to subordinate themselves” (215).
In humility, self-transcendence overcomes irrational egoism and
self-importance.
Kierkegaard’s project, like Pascal’s and Dostoyevsky’s, is obviously based on the assumption that the existence of the Biblical
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God cannot be definitively disproven. But some philosophers have
advanced arguments, not subjective but objective arguments,
aimed at definitively disproving the existence of God, especially
as one who freely reveals himself. So a non-Kierkegaardian, but
not anti-Kierkegaardian, task remains for the theologian. First to
examine these arguments dispassionately to assess their cogency;
and then, if they are found to be less than absolutely compelling,
to expose their limitations. For if a man thinks—let us assume,
thinks altogether innocently—that the concept of Christ as true
God and true man, both together, is a logical contradiction, then
exhorting him to imitate Christ is pointless. There is still a lot left
for the theologian to do at the level of objectivity.
McCombs ends his book by raising a question that some readers will have already asked themselves: has Kierkegaard merely
conscripted Socrates into his project? McCombs answers in the
negative. “[T]here are many passages in Plato’s dialogues in
which Socrates professes ignorance, self-blame, suspicions of his
own monstrosity, repentance, and in which he warns against a
self-justifying egoism that undermines truth and justice. Together
these passages seem to constitute a solid basis for a responsible
interpretation of Socrates as a thinker who willed the downfall of
his own understanding because he suspected something very like
sin” (218). McCombs supports this answer with references to the
telling texts. One might object that he has cherry picked the passages that support the Kierkegaardian interpretation of Socrates.
But all interpretations of Plato that aim at taking the dialogic form
of his teaching seriously have to come to terms with everything
that is said and happens in the dialogues, including occasional observations of Socrates’s that do not fit with preconceived notions
of what Platonism is supposed to be. The passages that McCombs
cites in support of Kierkegaard’s Socrates are not more salutary
and comforting than passages one might cite in support of someone else’s Socrates. On the contrary, they are among the most startling and disconcerting passages to be found in the entire Platonic
corpus. It is the singular, though by no means the sole, merit of
McCombs’s study that it forces many of us, just when we thought
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that we, with the assistance of our teachers and our friends, might
have finally gotten a relatively firm grasp of what Socrates is up
to, to take a fresh look at the enigmatic figure through whom Plato
presents his teaching.
NOTES
1. Unless otherwise noted, numbers in parentheses after quotations refer
to the pagination of The Paradoxical Rationality of Søren Kierkegaard,
even where the sentence quoted is Kierkegaard’s and not McCombs’s.
2. Determinism cannot be known, definitively and beyond the shadow of
a doubt, to be true. As David Hume has shown, the proposition, “Every
event has a cause,” is not an analytic judgment. It follows a fortiori that
the proposition, “Every event has a cause outside itself,” which is the thesis of determinism, is not an analytic judgment. It can be denied without
contradiction. The thesis of determinism is not self-evident; and any attempt to demonstrate it begs the question.
3. This is also the view of thinkers as different as Thomas Aquinas and
Kant.
4. Cf. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 71b20-35; 72a26-31; 72b19-2;
90b19-100b18; Metaphysics 1005b6-1006a10; 1011a7-13.
5. Kierkegaard seems here to be close to Gregory of Nyssa, who understands the supernatural end of man to consist not simply in a reposeful
intellectual vision of God, but in infinite and yet unimpeded progress,
progress in love especially. Gregory interprets the claim that we are called
to become partakers of the divine nature (koinōnoi theias physeōs—2
Peter 1: 3-4) to imply theosis, i.e., becoming more and more like God.
This goal, perfect love, can be infinitely approached by man, starting even
in this life, but never attained once and for all, even in the next life. Perhaps surprisingly, Kant similarly understands immortality of the soul to
consist in infinite progress. See Critique of Practical Reason Part 2, Bk.
2, Ch. 2, iv.
6. McCombs draws attention (199) to a remarkable statement made by
the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws: “Truly the cause of all errors
(aition . . . tōn pantōn hamartēmatōn) is in every case excessive friendship for oneself ” (731e3-5). If Plato is expressing his own thought here,
it is not easy to see how he could have held, as some seem to think he
held, that the good is essentially one’s own good, understood narrowly
as one’s own sweet pleasure.
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7. As McCombs notes (173), it is likely that Kierkegaard selected the
pseudonym “Johannes Climacus” (Greek, Iōannēs tēs klimakos, literally,
“John of the Ladder,” the name given to a twelfth century Christian monk
and saint, who wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent) with an eye on the
“ladder of love” described in the Symposium.
8. Whatever share irrational animals have in the eternal, there is no reason
to think that they conceive of the eternal, much less concern themselves
about it.
9. Phaedrus 229e8.
10. Ibid., 229a3-a8. McCombs notes that the name Typhon can be translated “puffed up” (167). On the difficulty of complete self-knowledge,
consider the qualifier eis dynamin at Philebus 63c3.
11. Aristotle, De Anima 432b5-8 and 433a8-31; Thomas Aquinas Super
Sent., lib. 2 d. 30 q. 1 art. 3, ad 4. Summa Theologiae 1-2 q. 6, introd.; q.
8 art. 1, co.; q. 56 art. 5, ad 1; ibid., 3 q. 19 art. 2, co.; Kant, Critique of
Practical Reason, Book 1, Ch. 1, Theorem 3, Remark 1.
12. See the first sentence of the “First Preface” of Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason.
13. Here Kierkegaard parts ways with Kant. Consider the qualification
in the sentence cited in the previous note: “in one [!] species of its cognition.”
14. Cf. note 5 above.
15. See pō at 229e8 and eti at 230a1.
16. An inability to refute, and hence a consequent openness to, even the
bare possibility of revelation would situate the philosopher qua philosopher in an untenable position, at least according to Leo Strauss: Natural
Right and History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953). 75.
Cf. “Reason and Revelation” (appended to Heinrich Meier’s study, Leo
Strauss and the Theological-Problem, trans. Marcus Brainard [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006] 150, 176-177; “Progress or
Return” (in Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity,
ed. Kenneth Hart Green [Albany: State University of New York Press,
1997], 117, 131. On this crucial point, however much they otherwise differ, Strauss and Kierkegaard are in essential agreement: opposition to
faith cannot consistently be based on an act of faith, or on anything resembling faith.
17. Gorgias 466e2; Meno 77d8-e3.
18. John 20:29.
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Plato’s Political Polyphony
A Book Review of Plato: Statesman. Translated by
Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2012. vii + 166 pp.
$10.95.
Gregory Recco
Continuing the work begun in their previous two translations of
Plato,* Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem have now
translated Plato’s Statesman. In addition to the translation, the volume includes an introduction, a glossary, an interpretive essay, and
two appendices. The introduction situates the dialogue in the context of Plato’s works, both dramatically and conceptually, announcing its main themes and connecting it with other
works—particularly its immediate dramatic predecessor, the
Sophist, and its thematic siblings, the Republic and the Laws. The
translation contains footnotes that provide pertinent literary or cultural background, references to other dialogues, and pointers to the
attached glossary when particularly important words or ideas first
appear. The glossary, like those in the earlier translations, is organized into meaning-clusters, groups of related or associated words
that together make up one important conceptual unit of the dialogue. The selection and discussion of these words, then, constitutes a work of interpretation—or at least the preparation of
material for such a work—and gives the translators a natural opportunity to discuss the rationale behind their English renderings
of important Greek terms. After the glossary comes a substantial
essay on the whole of Statesman, a thoughtful recapitulation and
reflection that presents a systematic and thorough survey of questions raised in the dialogue. Finally, the appendices: the first
*Plato: Phaedo (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 1998) and Plato:
Timaeus (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2001).
Gregory Recco is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
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graphically presents an overview in word and image of the practice of weaving which forms the dialogue’s most densely intertwined “paradigm,” or model, of the work of statesmanship; the
second unravels and graphically portrays the various heuristic
“divisions” by which the Stranger investigated questions of definition in the Sophist and here seeks the politikos, or statesman.
The translation is of very high quality—a fact that will likely
not surprise readers of the team’s previous two efforts. To describe
its excellence I must make some preparatory remarks about what
a translation is, who Plato is, and how Plato ought to be translated.
And I must discuss the particularities (or rather peculiarities) of
the Statesman.
The art of translation possesses, in a particularly pronounced
degree, a feature that characterizes all arts: What directs the activity
of artists is not their own wishes and ideas, but the necessities of
the work to be done. Becoming the practitioner of an art involves
a kind of surrender to something alien, namely, the determinacies
of the product and the conditions of its production. In translation,
this relinquishment of authority is especially evident in the very
nature of the work, which consists of transplanting a thought that
belongs to someone else from its native home into the foreign soil
of another language while keeping it intact and alive. Because the
translator does not create the being of that which he translates, his
excellence consists in his ability to let the thought of another shine
forth unimpeded and unaltered.
Plato’s thought poses special challenges to the prospective
translator, because the dialogue form in which it predominantly
resides gives it a uniquely amorphous character unparalleled anywhere else in Western literature. Because of their polyphonic conversational style, the dialogues of Plato give no authoritative
indication of how they are to be interpreted, no explicit endorsement of some message, so that it is quite difficult to say just what
Plato’s thought actually is. Without some definite notion of how
to deal with this difficulty, the choices and judgments that the
translator must make run the risk of being severally ad hoc and,
taken together, inconsistent. But in the dialogues themselves Plato
is completely silent about this difficulty. Faced with this apparent
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authorial dereliction, it is tempting to conclude with a kind of misplaced strictness that the phrase “Plato’s thought” signifies but
does not refer, as Heraclitus nearly says of the oracle at Delphi.
But this is the counsel of despair, and it leaves out the third leg of
Heraclitus’s saying: the oracle, who does not speak, but gives sign,
does not conceal. Something similar must be said of Plato. Even
cursory comparison of the dialogues uncovers themes that recur
with some frequency. Longer acquaintance reveals how generous
Plato can be to the careful reader, who discovers that the cracks
in the surface form a pattern, so to speak. The latter point deserves
fuller and more literal articulation, both on its own terms and because it is so often overlooked—which leads to bad interpretation
and consequently to bad translation.
Many of the dialogues take on the outward form of a “Socratic”
conversation, with one dialectically more experienced person taking the lead and questioning another in what seems to be a more or
less directed way, so that the latter gradually takes on views suggested by the former. But the inner truth of the dialogues is that
they are documents bearing witness to the event of thinking, paradoxically more akin to Thucydides’s record of a great event than
to Hippocrates’s scientific investigation of the causes of sickness
and health. The dialogues are not treatises of Socratic dogma thinly
disguised as conversations, but more or less dramatized presentations of what it looks like to think. I say “dramatized” because, as
I hinted above, that is where Plato’s artistry lies: this is his real
work, which is also something like the work of a translator.
Plato’s art is to show us the event of thinking, by dramatically
portraying what it looks like when it happens among human beings, in both its grandeur and its modesty. To say that thinking is
such and such, or has such and such characteristics, is perhaps a
fairly idle and undemanding pursuit, but to show it—that is, to
make manifest through a single instance the structure of intelligibility that informs it and gives it life—is an accomplishment of an
exceedingly high order. Somehow the dialogue must both be a conversation and exhibit “conversationality.” Not surprisingly, the investigation of how conversing ought to take place in order to get
at truth is one of those recurring themes that give the dialogues of
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Plato their distinctive mark. But the exhibition of thinking as such
occurs in several other, less immediate, ways. To note just one,
briefly, let me point out the structure of errancy and return, or wandering and recapitulation.
In the Statesman, as in the Sophist and so many other dialogues, the tentative answers given to the guiding questions are
forever turning up inadequate, coming unmoored as they are jostled by fresh contenders that look no less promising, even if they,
too, ultimately fall apart. This is especially evident in the bewildering multiplicity of “definitions” that fail, by the very fact of
their being multiple, to hem in or pin down the sort of men being
sought in these two dialogues. The various ways in which the dialogues can acquaint us with perplexity, and thus make us feel
thought’s errancy, are probably familiar to many readers. No less
important, however, is a dimension of thought that tends to belong
less to the one questioned than to the one doing the questioning:
to put a name to it, the dimension of redemption, of making up for
what has gone wrong by noticing how it has gone wrong. The dialogues are chock-full of bad arguments, wrong turns, and dead
ends. But these errors never just lie there. They stand out, and and
were made to stand out by their author. Plato calls on us to respond
more adequately than Socrates’s interlocutors and to consider how
an attentive and active questioner might help things move forward
from there. Giving us the opportunity to become better at thinking
is a great gift that is squandered by dogmatic interpretations (and
the translations founded on them), for they can see only the degree
to which the things said in the dialogues do not form a very compelling body of theory, even as they tantalizingly hint at one.
Brann, Kalkavage, and Salem understand quite well both this difficulty and other difficulties related to Plato’s portrayal of the
drama of thinking; their understanding guides their choices and
contributes greatly to the excellence of their translations.
In general, Plato’s artistry exists on the level of style, in the
nuances of diction and register, metaphor and allusion, that reveal
the character behind the thought, and give us something further to
think about when the resources of the argument turn out to be insufficient to answer all our questions. In the case of Socrates, this
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is well known and acknowledged, though less so for his interlocutors: it is a commonplace to mock their “dialogue” as merely a series
of more or less undifferentiated assents. The characters in Plato who
are generally considered to be well drawn are usually the ones who
disagree, and they are considered better drawn the more vehemently they disagree with Socrates (like Callicles and Thrasymachus). The Statesman has neither of these advantages: its main
speaker is the somewhat opaque Stranger from Elea, and its main
respondent is the somewhat colorless Young Socrates. Not a very
promising circumstance for the translation that seeks to reveal a
Plato who is a master of style. It is the particular excellence of this
translation that it is able to show us a Plato who is at work in his
accustomed ways even in these changed circumstances.
The translation is above all else trustworthy. If a word or
phrase jars (such as Socrates’s having “mixed it up” with Theaetetus on the previous day [258a]), consulting the Greek reassures
(perhaps he is meant to sound relatively informal compared with
the Stranger or perhaps he wants to recall the Stranger’s mixing of
the eidē). Words whose polysemy is troublesome are rendered consistently, in a neutral and readable way that has no axe to grind.
Instead of translating most replies as “Yes, Socrates,” the translators make the responses both differentiated and differentiable, an
absolutely invaluable aid to the close reader who is keeping watch
over the fitness of the interlocutor’s responses. The Stranger’s
humor, which verges, it is no exaggeration to say, on aridity, appears in all its understated, deadpan glory. Picture the face of a very
serious old man intoning these words: “The king at least is manifest
to us as one who pastures a certain horn-shorn herd” (265d). Even
when the syntax becomes tortuous, the translation remains not only
readable, but even speakable. What is perhaps most impressive is
that the translation’s readability does not come at the cost of overly
interpretive (or inventive) construal. Heidegger said approvingly
of Kant that he left obscure what is in itself obscure. In this rendering of the Statesman, it should be said that what is puzzling in
the original remains so in translation, but because of what is said,
not because of any obscurity in how it is said. The translation’s
simultaneous readability and faithfulness (in the fullest sense of
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that word), coupled with its generous and thoughtful supplementary materials, strongly recommend its use for classroom study by
serious students, with or without some knowledge of the Greek. It
should also be of interest to, and useable by, any sort of serious
reader at all. In contrast to the translators’ earlier editions of the
Phaedo and the Sophist, this one clearly distinguishes the functions
of the Introduction and the Essay, placing the latter, appropriately,
after the dialogue itself. The “Essay” pithily and unpretentiously
raises questions that cut to the very heart of the dialogue, questions
about the nature and possibility of rational politics, and questions
about the very identity of philosophy. No mere “student edition,”
this; the Plato scholar, too, will find much here that advances serious thinking.
�
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Pastille, William
Brann, Eva T.H.
Hunt, Frank
Sachs, Joe
Van Doren, John
Williamson, Robert B.
Zuckerman, Elliott
Arnaiz, Deziree
Sachs, Joe
Frost, Bryan-Paul
Levine, David
Burke, Chester
Kalkavage, Peter
Maistrellis, Nicholas
Salem, Eric
Carey, James
Recco, Gregory
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The St. John’s Review
Volume 55.2 (Spring 2014)
Editor
William Pastille
Editorial Board
Eva T. H. Brann
Frank Hunt
Joe Sachs
John Van Doren
Robert B. Williamson
Elliott Zuckerman
Subscriptions and Editorial Assistant
Deziree Arnaiz
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ISSN 0277-4720
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��Contents
Essays & Lectures
The Mutuality of Imagining and Thinking: On Dennis Sepper’s
Understanding Imagination: The Reason of Images ..................1
Eva Brann
Similarity and Equality in Euclid and Apollonius ............................17
Michael N. Fried
The Soul’s Choice of Life.................................................................41
Greg Recco
Artistic Expression in Animals .........................................................61
Linda Wiener
Poems
Troy...................................................................................................82
Hannah Eagleson
Three Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal
by Charles Baudelaire...................................................................84
Peter Kalkavage
The Second Sense .............................................................................88
Elliott Zuckerman
Review
To Save the Ideas
Book Review of Daniel Sherman’s Soul, World, and Idea:
An Interpretation of Plato’s Republic and Phaedo ...................89
Eva Brann
��The Mutuality of
Imagining and Thinking:
On Dennis Sepper’s
Understanding Imagination:
The Reason of Images1
Eva Brann
When Professor Rosemann invited me to this colloquium—small
in scale, but to my mind great in significance—I told him that I
conceived my talk on Dennis Sepper’s newly published Understanding Imagination as a sort of book review, which earned me a
wonderful possession, a copy of this magnum opus, as he called
it, rightly.
There cannot be even the hint of a wink in this appellation. It is
indeed a magnum opus, magnificent, powerful, and copious. I want
to address this last feature first, since it colors the reading of the
book.
This work takes its time. Since, to describe its thesis in a first
approximation, there is no activity homo sapiens sapiens engages
in as such that is not imaginative, Sepper ventures into all sorts of
intellectual territory and calls on a variety of theories and concepts.
The point is that instead of dropping names allusively and naming
notions abbreviatedly he takes his time in explaining what he uses,
and he does it so that a reader can follow. He needs the idea of a
field. Do we all know off-hand what a field, formally speaking, is?
1. New York: Springer, 2013. This review-lecture was written for a colloquium held on October 30, 2013 in honor of the book by the Department
of Philosophy at the University of Dallas, Irving, Texas, where Professor
Sepper teaches. Eva Brann, tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis, was invited to be the main speaker because Professor Sepper has had close relations to St. John’s, and because her book The World of the Imagination
(Savage, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 1991), is cited in Understanding
Imagination as a sort of predecessor in the attempt to treat the imagination
somewhat comprehensively and with due regard to the reflective tradition.
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Well, now we know. Is everyone interested in the imagination familiar with Saussurian linguistic theory? Well, a lucid exposition
is given. Does that sane remainder among us who is convinced that
opining without some grounding in the tradition of thought is like
Chanticleer standing on top of a middenheap crowing, know exactly why, and how, to study texts of the past? Well, though I come
from a school that deliberately resorts to that tradition as a treasury
of texts, yet on reading Dennis Sepper’s first introductory chapter
I felt better armed in what looks at the moment like a rear-guard
action in its defense. Let me quickly inject here that I think this is
a sufficiently winnable battle, that the last shall soon enough be
first, and that books like this one will belong to the special forces
of this fight. One element in its effectiveness is precisely that its
generalities are highly and acutely specified. What I mean by that
I’ll say before long, and I’ll even express some misgivings. But
they are the queries and doubts of a reader who has been made to
think hard.
So let me begin my review of the content of Understanding
Imagination by saying that the plenitude of notions introduced is
lucidly organized. This book knows exactly where it’s going. The
title announces the comprehensive topic of the book. (Topic, topos,
topology, topography, I should say, are not casual but carefully expounded terms of the work.) This overarching topic is the imagination and its two aspects: the activity of imagining, and its
product, images. First, the imagination is to be understood, that is,
subjected to thinking. And anyone who has ever developed an interest in this topic will know that this endeavor opens a can of
worms—particularly the problematic idea that one mental function
can be applied to another, and the implied pseudo-traditional notion that the imagination is in fact a separable faculty. (I’ll explain
“pseudo-traditional” in a moment.) The subtitle, then, implies that
this understanding will yield the “reason of images.” Now believe
it or not, the book itself contains an explication, applicable to this
phrase, of genitives, objective and subjective. Thus “the reason of
images” means both “what is the reason we have images, how and
for what purpose they come about” (objective) and “the rationality
belonging to images themselves, how images and logoi (reasons
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
3
and ratios) are identical” (subjective). The main title has a similar
double meaning. The book will make good on both parts of the
promise, to elucidate both the activity and the product of images—
and, of course, these expositions will raise questions.
The organization of so large a number of mental motions must,
as I said, be lucid, and it is. I’ll first set it out summarily, then permit myself to pick out the particular aspects that got to me, and finally formulate some of the aforesaid queries. That’s as much as
to say that this is a personal take on the book, but that way of proceeding needs no excuse in respect to this work. For the author
himself has some keen observations bearing on the strenuous selfdenial of the impersonal approach, with which I have my own experience: Academic treatments of the inner life, driven by some
misguided notion of objectivity (I don’t want to say, individual inadequacy) quite often read as if the scholar had mislaid his soul
and excised his personal experience while writing on, say, the passions, the will, or the imagination. In these matters, our author
might agree, taking it personally gains something even more valuable than objectivity—call it verity.
I must say at this point what “taking it personally” shouldn’t
mean. Dennis gives the most generous praise and acknowledgment
to my own book, The World of the Imagination, which he clearly
regards as a worthy predecessor to be worthily superseded. There’s
no cause for grief in that. What better chance for an afterlife than
to find a delimited place in the next, more global treatment? At the
end, I’ll indicate briefly how the picture-making view of the imagination preferred in my book both accommodates itself and is recalcitrant to Dennis’s topology.
Chapter 1 begins by giving shape to the questions that matter
about the imagination: How do we come by the idea? Why is it
important? And it promises answers. It then goes on to a critique
of what Sepper calls “the occluded-occulted tradition” of sapient
imagining. He mounts a fair attack on what one might call the
canned version of the tradition, the “pseudo-tradition,” which is
divorced from the subtleties of the actual texts and thus set up to
miss the meaning. Here he produces a pointed answer to two questions: One, what killed the tradition? Answer: survey-type, textless
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textbook accounts. And two, what have the original texts to give
us? Answer: fresh, unstereotyped approaches to truth.
Chapter 2 offers a five-line definition of the imagination, which
is deliberately comprehensive and incidentally shows that good
books are written back to front. My students tend to think, wrongly,
I believe, that philosophy is about and ends in definitions. Yet it is
a part of the intelligent plan of this book that it begins by focusing
the mind on the topic by means of this definition. It is a risky and
arresting strategy: risky because, unlike the Socratic initiation of a
search by means of a definition that is at once popular and self-refuting, Sepper’s definition is at once demanding and conclusive;
arresting because you can tell that it is new-old, not one of the
going formulas, yet rooted in the intellectual tradition.
His ultimate aim is, as I said, comprehensiveness, initiated by
actually practicing imagining, by attending to the act. There are
guided exercises asking you to determine such aspects as how
much of imaginative remembering is reproduction, how much
detail is present, etc. There is a first engagement with various approaches, such as psychologism, which regards knowledge as
“what people in fact think” rather than “what objects actually
are,” and works on the supposition that we have similar, naturally
given, minds which have before them mental objects, and also
posits that both the mind’s thinking and its objects are accessible
to introspection. One can see that “having images”—pictures
held in or before the mind—goes well with this school of thought.
It is, however, afflicted with many quandaries. Its opponent, antipsychologism, argues that it is not from mental, thus subjective,
objects that knowledge comes but from objective public objects,
from logic, mathematics, the world. Internal objects are denied
in favor of overt behavior; mental images, at least the claim that
there are well-formed, stable mental pictures, are obvious targets
of anti-psychologism. It, too, has its difficulties.
Sepper gives notice that he will sail between these Clashing
Rocks: A mental image must be somehow based both in its situation and its forming activity—must be both public and private.
To escape falsifying fixations, we must reradicalize imagination,
recover its roots, its ontology. Sepper proposes a guiding idea
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
5
that will avoid getting caught in the conventional commonplaces:
a “topology” of the imagination.
Chapter 3 could be said to set out the methodology of the book,
but that would be falsifying Sepper’s enterprise, which is premethodological. I might describe it as putting to work, for all it’s
worth, a well-found metaphor. Topos, the Greek word for “place,”
has many spaces—physical territories supporting settled locales;
reversely, mathematical fields constituted from the relations among
its elements, its sites; topological space in which expansible shapes
undergo transformations without tearing; and the index in which
rhetorical “common-places,” in Greek, topoi, can be looked up.
These are all versions of a “conceptual topology.” This rich notion
is the notable discovery, or I should say, rediscovery of the book.
Sepper finds that certain philosophers’ writings about imagination,
when directly approached, in fact employed a conceptual topology
all along.
Here is a very preliminary description of the topological approach, as exercised by people who have some preparation:
They have not acquired just a greater quantity of discrete
ideas and their associations. They have cultivated new
fields of imagination as such, as whole fields; they have
learned to mark out special positions in the field; they
have come to isolate (or section out) subfields and sometimes they learn how to relate the various fields to one
another in a new entity or a new field (94).
This much is already evident about a topological understanding
of the imagination: It will see imagining as holistic, fluid, multilevelled—and all that to the second degree. I mean that the above
is not only a description of the imagination but also of the understanding of imagination. For if the imagination is a “topography,”
a placing-in-fields activity, so much the more must its understanding
be a “topology,” an account of a topography. And conversely, if the
approach is adequate in its metaphoricity—for “place” as primarily
used and defined by Aristotle, is a phenomenon of extension—then
so must the imagination be a power of metaphorical placing. But
this is not Sepper’s explicit vocabulary; it is perhaps more an expression of my misgivings, which I’ll articulate at the end.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Chapters 4 through 7 then do what is obviously next: give a
reradicalized reading of the deepest philosophical texts bearing on
the subject—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant.
Chapter 8, on post-Kantian treatments, displays what happens
sooner or later to anyone who tries to trace the tradition of a topic
chronologically. Eventually things fall apart into multifariousness;
one is obliged to choose a few authors out of a multitude. Sepper
concentrates on those, namely Wittgenstein (in his Tractatus) and
Saussure, who exemplify an important consequence of his own
heuristic, his topological device: that logos, far from being the antithesis of an image, is an image.
To explain the assertion that the overlapping of language with
imaging is implied in the topological approach, I must return to
Chapter 3 to introduce Sepper’s notion of “biplanarity.” It refers
to a sort of double sight by which one imaginative plane is simultaneously present with another, and the imaginer sees one in terms
of the other. It is first mentioned as a sort of dissociation, such as
happens when one distances oneself from the sense-filled experience of the world in order to see it as reason-resistant appearance,
opposed to intelligible being, if one is Socratically inclined. Or reversely, if one tends to Husserlian phenomenology, then it is real
existence that is “bracketed,” so that one may see the world as an
analyzable phenomenon. Later this relation between the planes is
called a projection. “Seeing-as” has in fact become a topos.
So logos or reason and image or picture can live simultaneously
on two planes while being, moreover, somehow projectible—that
is, in some aspect isomorphic. I have some misgivings about this
rather broad application of the notion of projection that I will offer
later on.
Now before going to those central chapters that revive the tradition and reradicalize the problem, let me just complete the sketch
of the book’s organization.
Chapter 9, the last chapter, presents the initial definition, now
endowed with enough mental material to shed the term definition
and to become a delimitation—a kinder, gentler, more inclusivesounding term. Like any thoughtful philosopher (there is, after all,
the other kind), Sepper does not in fact highly value definitions,
because they are too bare, and he says that they never deliver an
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
7
unpackable essence. Nonetheless his now much amplified delimitation does invite an analytic reading. I will sketch out what this
reading yields, since that is the crux of the book, yet I know full
well that I’m reversing Sepper’s deliberate expansion. But what
else to do? Let me call it whetting your appetites.
So: the imagination is an activity; one might say that the imagination is nothing but imagining. This identification does an end
run around the “mental modularity” debate, which is concerned
with the problem hinted at before: whether the mind has a multiplicity of distinct faculties or is a global activity. The imagination
is neither a separate faculty nor an undiscriminable activity. This
imagining is a third something, quite positive, quite specific. It acts
evocatively, calls something forth, and that in a dual way: “abstractional” and “concretional.” Its evocative work produces on the one
hand something drawn away from, abstracted from, detached from
the original. But on the other hand, the emergent imaginative phenomenon has—this is my term now, (Sepper avoids it)—quasi-sensory characteristics, reminiscent of the embodied original insofar
as that it is a concretion, a thickening, of features. The definition
then goes on to specify this activity of imagining. First, it envisions
imaginative fields of concern with a basically potential nature, in
which the fixities of the sensory world become fluid. Second, it
exploits this potentiality to allow the projection of field upon field,
that is, of biplanarity. I have, of course, truncated this concluding
exposition and so robbed it of its subtlety.
The chapter then gathers in the topics that give the potential features form, actualize them, as it were, and so shape the field into a
topography, an expression of the field’s potentials. Recall that these
topoi or topics are figurative places, mental foci.
Here are some examples: Imagining begins with “the emergence
of appearance as appearance,” a formulation that implies “not as
appearance of a stably real thing,” and which is, by reason of this
divorce from reality, both initially placeable in the imaginative
field and essentially evanescent. Fixing this appearance, giving it
firmer shape is a further work of the imagination.
A second topic is the image as inchoate, labile, and contextual.
Contextuality in particular is a recurrent and crucial topic, since in
its shiftiness it partly explains the mobile character of images, but
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
even more because context is placing, and placement is the necessary correlative of place. Further on, a topic zeroes in on imagining
as abstracting from perception. One might say “abstraction from
perception” is the preliminary activity that yields appearances as
appearances, since perception is the sensing of things as things.
But one can regard this abstraction from perception also in an opposite way: When the imagination strips the thing of its perceptual
accidents it produces a rationalized image, one having the lucidity
of reason—reason in image-shape. I think of diagrams and blueprints in connection with this.
Nine such topoi are mentioned, features both of and in the field
that have now become topics, subject-areas for future study and
theorizing, and with these “areas” the book concludes. One stems
from Sepper’s unapologetic acknowledgment that he has “cognitivized” the imagination and omitted the human depths of affectivity. He regards the future incorporation of these factors as
plausible and predicts a complex inquiry.
Another concern is the anthropological positioning of the imagination: How does the imagination fit into our humanity? Sepper
suggests that Heidegger’s Being and Time might be translated into
a more conventional philosophical anthropology, in which terms
like attunement (Stimmung) might be put to use. Here I am driven
to an aside: I would applaud this outcome, because if such a normalized derivation had been plausibly accomplished, that would
imply what some of us suspect—that Heidegger’s original existential analytic is, after all, an ordinary ontic anthropology ratcheted
up by fiat into an extraordinary ontology.
Ontology is indeed another concern. Sepper’s envisions ontological explanations that are imaginative in the sense of being fieldto-field projections, one field being the explanatory, the other the
explained field. A bonus is that this duality avoids destructive reductionism, since in the imaginative mode the field elucidated is
not collapsed into the explaining field. Simultaneity of levels is
maintained, and the object explained survives in its plane, unreduced to its explanatory elements in the underlying parallel plane.
Finally an ethics of imagination is adumbrated. Sepper speaks
of an ethos of imagination as the “inhabitable place of imagina-
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
9
tion”—how we live in its fields. Such a way of life will develop
an ethics that requires this way of life to be good. His book has
shown that thinking and imagining are inseparable. The obsession
with formal and procedural rationality and the relegation of imagination to the arts is disastrous in children’s education and, by implication, to adult practice:
The only adequate way of developing rationality is to develop our ability to imagine comprehensively; we must
start with ourselves, or we will inevitably fail our children and the future world (524).
In leaping from the first three chapters to the last, I have hollowed out the nourishing marrow of Understanding Imagination,
the “reradicalized” readings of imagination’s great philosophical
texts. I would keep you here past lunch, dinner, and nightcap, if I
attempted to fill the gap. Those interpretations are based on close
and acute textual analyses, and they take their time.
Instead I will try to say, briefly, in gist, what in each of the four
philosophers to which Sepper gives a chapter is particularly germane to the delineation of the imagination just outlined. In this
sketchy review I shall have to omit entirely the history-of-ideas
glue that holds these philosophers steady in the context of a—putatively—coherent development.
It is, incidentally, not clear to me what the actual order of discovery was: Did Sepper formulate his understanding of the imagination first and then discover previously occulted corroboration
in the textual tradition, or was it the other way around, or both simultaneously? Maybe he will tell us later.
I’m not sure whether this attempt to pinpoint the intention of an
extended exposition, to find the crux of a highly textured lay-out,
amounts to a subversion or a highlighting of Sepper’s work. Anyhow, I mean it for the latter and will try not to miss the point, but
if Dennis says I did, I will gladly yield to correction. So, then:
Chapter 4: Plato. The chapter intends a major correction of standard interpretations that downplay images in the dialogues. In fact,
“for Plato reality is mimetic,” meaning that the levels of being are
seen as a cascade of images along which the viewer rises and descends in inquiry. Moreover the image-beings produced by what I
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might call “ontological imaging” are analogically connected, that
is, by proportions constituted of logoi, ratios—as in the Divided
Line of the Republic. So they can be said to be logos-involved
(though I’m not sure that ratio-logos so readily translates into reason-logos). I also want to add that Plato calls the lowest human
thought capacity eikasia, “image-recognition,” but then puts it to
work throughout the realm of knowing, for the ascent of knowing
is through recognizing images as images.
Chapter 5: Aristotle. Next, the imagination is retrieved from a
truncated conventional account of Aristotle’s On the Soul which
suppresses two aspects—that imagination seems to be a sort of motion and that it is one aspect of intellection. The imagination’s motion is that of abstracting from the matter of the sensory object and
locating the resulting appearance in the thinking, noetic part of the
soul. There, as “intellectualized imagination” (Sepper’s term), it
functions freely over a field of shifting conformations and contexts,
over a topography. Here I want to add that Aristotle calls even the
Divine Intellect a topos eidōn, a “place of forms,” and the very fact
that this description is figurative (since the Intellect is beyond all
place) may strengthen Sepper’s claim: thoughts and images are
“concreted” in the highest reaches.
Chapter 6: Descartes. Now the topological view of the imagination is refounded in modernity, though again conventional imagination-suppressing selectivity has obscured this fact. Descartes is
a persistent practitioner of the imagination, particularly in the
mathematization of physical nature. Imagination, however, is identified as an activity of the intellect, which is capable of “remotion,”
of stepping back from its imagined figures to rethink them as
purely intellectual existences. Thus intellect exceeds imagination
so as to become, from beyond it, the source of its directed mobility,
that is, the source of its biplanarity and field-topography.
Chapter 7: Kant. Sepper precedes his exposition with an account
of the post-Cartesian occultation of the imagination by rationalism
and its revival within a new science of sensibility, aesthetics. To
these developments Kant responds with a radical epistemology—
an account, called “transcendental,” as yielding knowledge going
beyond the only conscious material knowledge possible, an account
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN
11
that traces experience to its root. This root is dual, a passively receptive sensibility “looked at” by intuition, and an actively constructive conceptuality “functioning” by understanding. The
sensibility is again dual, consisting of transcendental, that is, hypersensory space and time. Spatiality and temporality are thus with
us from the first, a priori. Into these notional receptacles flows—
from somewhere—a sensory manifold, an unstructured matter. The
imagination is a synthesizing power, a power of “placing together”
disparate elements, both at the very origin and on several higher
knowledge-producing levels of the soul. Thus imagination is, for
the first time in philosophy, productive before it is reproductive. It
is now knowledge-shaping rather than knowledge-aiding, as it was
for Aristotle, for whom it presented to thought the sensible world
without its matter. The first work of Kant’s transcendental imagination is that of informing the sense-manifold spatially and temporally, so that all sensation of the world comes to our
consciousness “in” space and “in” time, extendedly and sequentially. Mathematics, then, is a product of another imaginative synthesis, which directs thinking to invoke, to inscribe, in space
particular geometric figures, and also calls on time to develop them
progressively. Of the several syntheses, the highest and deepest,
most original, hence most mysterious, work of the imagination is
done by a procedure that is called a schematism. It “puts together,”
or rather infuses, the functions of the understanding, which is a rational power, with the space and time, the pure intuitions of the
sensibility, which is a receptive mode. On the face of it, their disparateness would seem to preclude this miracle of involvement.
But the imagination provides the ground of their union. One example: “Substance,” as a mere rational notion, is an empty concept.
When time-informed it becomes the more concrete category of that
which persists in time, a locus of underlying stability.
There are further syntheses, those that produce the ascending
ways consciousness deals with the representations before it: first,
an “apprehension,” a mere awareness of a representation as an
item; then, a “reproduction” of the representation as a memoryimage; finally, a “recognition” that by coming under concepts the
representation is now stably settled in consciousness and fully ac-
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quired by self-consciousness.
So the Kantian imagination is an activity responsible for the togetherness of analytically disparate factors. It works at the roots of
consciousness, to give it its basic constitution, and then over multiple and layered fields of knowing, by projections from the level
of mere awareness to full self-consciousness. Sepper says that
Kant, as the most consequential representative of the eclipsed tradition, “brought the . . . intelligible dynamism of imagining to a
high point that was not exceeded even by the romantics”—which
is saying a lot, and rightly.
To summarize my summary: Plato introduces an ontological
imagination, whose places are held together in a bond of logoi, ratios. Aristotle adds a psychological activity working at the crux of
human knowing, between thing and soul. Descartes conceives an
intellect that contains and directs the imagination; hence the dynamism of images—their mobility, responsiveness to context, and
biplanarity—is not intrinsic to images but is the inspiriting work
of the intellect. And Kant discovers a synthetic power merging sensibility and understanding, the two aspects of cognitive consciousness; this power originates at its unknowable root of the human
subject and works at all its levels.
These four philosophers anticipate in various degrees of prominence the two chief elements of Sepper’s analysis: the close linkage of reason with imagination and the shifting field-topography
notion of mobile imagining. And they corroborate his respect for
the tradition as a source of illumination.
Now, to do my job as reviewer, I should subjoin some misgivings—and I do mean misgivings and queries, not criticisms and
condemnations.
First, then, I’ll articulate a sort of global unease about explanatory delineations like Sepper’s efforts that make the—surely
heroic—attempt to capture the mobile multifariousness and closeup complexity of embodied beings, and particularly, of their mental
life. In one of his many helpful footnotes he explains the mental
motions of “abstracting” and “prescinding” (drawing off and cutting away), both of which are a kind of simplifying fixative; the
imagination itself, as a cooperating power of understanding works
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with these devices. If the project is to understand understanding
imagination through a descriptive analysis that preserves the flexible richness of a participating power, a certain swampy doubletalk is the penalty. So for example, a key word, topos, carries,
as I pointed out, the dual meaning of a given subject of inquiry
fitted into a topology and of a placing function of the imagination
producing a topography. And the imagination itself appears—indeed early Descartes is the predecessor here—in two forms. On
the one hand, it is a general power of figurative reconception—
whence its relation to human “creativity.” This human power is,
of course, nothing like the divine creation of the Bible that makes
a world out of chaos; it is rather a new perspective on an old situation or its reconfiguration. This general imagination is a Protean
power. On the other hand, there is also the narrower power of producing and manipulating images; it is a rather specialized capability. I wonder if prescinding, cutting away, containing, would
not be an authorial virtue here. But then again, if something, the
imagination par excellence, is by nature duplicitous, perhaps its
account must display intentional ambiguities and homonymous
doublings—never mind Occam’s Razor and its injunction not to
multiply explanatory entities.
The second item is only a specification of the first. Certain notions don’t seem to lend themselves to clarity—for example, contextualization and fusion. A context, as Sepper fully appreciates, is
logically definable by what is sometimes called an infinite judgment, as the indefinitely large negativity surrounding a place. So
“contextualization” means putting a small island in a large ocean
and calling that a placement. This misgiving, incidentally, reaches
to all those unhelpful politico-socio-economico-psychological explanations: You can’t zero in on an apprehended “this” by means
of too-big-to-know “that.” Something analogous goes for fusion,
the togetherness of word and thought or thing and image. It doesn’t,
incidentally, matter whether the cognitive union is to be of thought
with a material object or with its matter-stripped image; their mutuality is, by the very reason of being a fact, a mystery, and it might
be most incisive to call it that.
Third, this mutuality or reciprocity of intellect and imagination
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seems to me the mystery of mysteries, one attested to by the very
variety of grappling devices proposed for their union, precisely because of their structural dissimilarity. All of Sepper’s four philosophers, however they may assimilate the intellect to its object—as,
for example, when Aristotle analogizes sensing and intellection—
at the end of their ruminations admit, either explicitly or implicitly,
the existence of a non-sensing, imageless power of intellect. This
shows, I think, that in those high reaches the intellect itself is an
imageless power. How does a power which at its purest is placeless
come to govern placements?
These considerations make me wonder about the biplanar, fieldto-field-projecting imagination. It is, to begin with, a very congenial notion to me, this double-sight (for which Dennis kindly gives
me credit), in which an image over- or underlies worldly events,
lending them a resonance from other world-venues. Such are the
Homeric similes of the Iliad that alleviate the excruciating concentration of the battlefield by overlaying it with a bonding analogy
to the rest of the world, from the heavens to the household.
But that template notion presupposes some articulated similarity,
some isomorphism, and I have not quite understood on what basis
Sepper’s fields are actually projectible onto one another, how they
are homologous. For example, he says that there is something perverse in the claim that geometry is left behind in analytic, that is
algebraic, geometry. And yet there is a powerful notion, set out recently in Burt Hopkins’s extended commentary on Jacob Klein’s
work on the origin of algebra,2 that just this is the case. Symbolic
mathematics casts loose from image-mathematics and thereby
founds the very modernity Sepper is trying to reform, the world of
abstract reckoning that has suppressed concrete imagining and has
no structural relation to it and is simply not homologous with it.
Another example is word-painting, the power of language to
arouse mental images. No one knows just how words intend toward
and reach the world, nor, therefore, how they instigate its images.
So, it seems to me, the field of thinking and its articulation in words,
2. Burt Hopkins, The Origin of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics: Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2011). Jacob Klein was the third Dean of the New Program at St. John’s.
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this field of logos, is not, at least not obviously, in the field-to-field
relation to the imagination that the notion of a reasoning image requires—and yet I know that language often delineates pictures and
passion usually infuses words.
That brings me to a fourth and final query. Sepper quite intentionally barely touches the relation of imagining to phantasy, to
painting, and to the passions. Might it not be that in relation to
these the understanding of imagination requires different rubrics
and emphases from those in Understanding Imagination? I’ll post
brief surmises.
Cognitively useful imaging is fed from the outside face, so to
speak, of consciousness by the sensed world. Phantasy, by which
I mean fiction, presents what-is-not, and so offers a re-presentation
of no worldly original. No receptive taker-in of a fiction thinks of
it as a re-arranged reality, a reality-collage. Should one not consider
that there might be a conduit from the inside, for which the term
“unconscious” is just an evasive makeshift? Although I am here in
the company of soberly sane thinkers, I am nevertheless suggesting
that one might seriously consider what the practitioners of poetry
meant by the Muses, who live on Olympus and not in neuronal networks. The question here is, Whence comes imagining in its most
life-enhancing aspect?
When the visual arts are drawn into the inquiry, painting is apt
to come front and center, because, if a painting is (as we pre-postmoderns tend to think) an externalization of a mental image (of
course modified in its passage from quasi- to real space), then the
embodied product might in turn throw light on that immaterial
image. It might be that we are drawn to flat-medium imagery because it reminds us of our soul’s imagining—in its plane dimension
(that is, lacking volume), in its immobility (or virtual mobility),
and in what I’ll call its momentousness (its excerpting from the
banal spatial and temporal context a moment of intensified significance). The question here is, Whence issues the imagination’s
most poignant work? Even to ask that question is, to be sure, a surreptitious bit of special pleading on my part, since the answers I’ve
just suggested are the ones given in my book.
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And finally, when the imagination is properly related to the passions, from the devastating storms of erotic desire to the delicate
atmospheres of esthetic feeling, might the imagination not appear
in yet another capacity than that of abstracting from the round reality outside, or of receiving influxes from a ghostly source beyond?
I mean the capacity to transmogrify the blind shapelessness of our
most intimate psychic condition, our affectivity, into formed feeling—a phrase that surely describes some of our internal imagery.
The question here would be whether the image as an effluvium of
feeling is the same as or different from the cognitive, the art-producing, the Muse-inspired image. Thus the question of questions:
Is the imagination—be it activity, capacity, power, faculty—one or
many? Almost two and a half millennia, and we are still in medias
res. Well, I seem to have talked myself into acknowledging that
Dennis’s multiplication of entities may mirror the way things are.
Thus Understanding Imagination is a wonderfully anticipatory
waystation. So here, in conclusion, are my wishes for the book:
First, that it gain influence enough to encourage a new round of
broadly conceived image-inquiries aided by fresh, close attention
to the great predecessors and perhaps some new, ingeniously devised, imagination-informed image-research. And then, that its call
be heeded for a reform which I’ll put in my own words: There is
in our world a strong strain of relentless reductionism and blind
rationalism whose inevitable complements are mechanical creativity-mongering and thoughtless image-proliferation. One antidote,
perhaps only topically applicable—but then positive good usually
is local—would be a revivified attention to the reason of images.
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Similarity and Equality in
Euclid and Apollonius
Michael N. Fried
By Way of Introduction
My subject today is the meaning of similarity and equality in Euclid and Apollonius—and, by implication, in Greek mathematics
generally during its climax in Hellenistic times. But before I actually begin, I want to say just a few words about history of mathematics and St. John’s College, and I would like to do so by telling
a little story. I told this story the last time I spoke at St. John’s,1
but I would like to tell it again, for I still think about it and am
still unsettled by it.
Not long after I finished my doctorate, I was invited to Delphi
for a meeting of historians of ancient mathematics—a small intimate group, only slightly larger than a St. John’s seminar. During
one of the morning coffee breaks, Alexander Jones, the classicist
and historian of Greek mathematics, casually asked how I felt having made the transition from a St. John’s way of thinking to a historian’s. Like a good seminar question, I was stunned by this, and
I was not sure how to answer. This was mainly because I could not
decide whether there really was a difference between a St. John’s
way of thinking and the way of thinking of a historian of ideas,
that is, whether it really was true I had made any kind of transition
at all.
With a kind of dullness until that moment, I had no trouble, on
the one hand, claiming that in the work I was doing as a historian of
Greek mathematics I was continuing what I had learned at St. John’s,
and, on the other hand, feeling frustration, sometimes bordering on
Michael N. Fried is Professor of Science and Technology Education at
Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel. This lecture
was delivered on July 31, 2013 at St. John’s College in Santa Fe.
1. At the conference Classical Mathematics and Its Transformation, held
at the Annapolis campus in 2004.
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resentment, at having to explain yet again how, despite its centering
on texts mostly written long ago, the St. John’s approach was not
historical. Jones’s question made me face the possibility that there
might be a real contradiction here. Of course the reason it still preoccupies me is not because I am overly concerned about my identity
as a Johnny, but because it raises the question of history altogether.
Let me say just a word about this.
When Alexander Jones contrasted the study of history with the St.
John’s program he had in mind, I believe, a view of history, particularly the history of ideas, in which the thought of thinkers in the past
is assumed to be conditioned by times and contexts; understanding
Euclid or Apollonius must, in that view, always be mediated. The contrast with St. John’s may have been based on a mere caricature of the
College where students deal with “eternal ideas” able to be grasped in
an unmediated way. But there is another non-historical view of Euclid
and Apollonius that involves assuming such authors can be read with
no mediation beyond a good Greek lexicon, one that is related to that
caricature version of St. John’s, while not, I hasten to add, the St.
John’s way. It is that in which one comes to mathematics of the past
through modern mathematical concepts and methods, as if the mathematicians of the past were merely writing about the same ideas in a
different language—as John Edensor Littlewood famously said, like
“fellows of another college.”2 Modern mathematical ideas, for those
who approach ancient texts in this way, do not mediate a reading of
the past, but only clarify what those older mathematicians were actually saying. Modern mathematical insight, on that view, becomes the
key to historical insight. A historian like Jones could well see that same
modern insight as obscuring what the mathematicians of the past understood.
For Jones, what the older mathematicians were actually saying is
what they did say in the body of texts they left behind. In order to recover the original meaning of those texts, if we can, one must read
them attentively and with the thought that they were meant to be read.
This unmediated reading of texts, I think, is not far from what one
tries to do at St. John’s. The difficulty here is that having read the texts
2. Quoted in G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 81.
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one must nevertheless interpret them—and what it means to interpret
can be interpreted in many ways! Here there can be deep divisions in
outlook.
It may be that Alexander Jones, as a historian of mathematics, is a
historicist, that is, that he truly believes mathematics to be entirely a
product of historical forces so that Greek mathematics, say, belongs
immovably to its own time. In that case he would certainly see a divide
between the way he relates to the past and the way one does at St.
John’s. But whether he really is a historicist I do not know; I never
asked him. Whatever the case, in approaching the history of mathematics, he must, as I must as well, begin at least with a working assumption that the mathematics of the past is different from that of the
present.
The subject of this lecture is not the idea of history, to use the title
of R. G. Collingwood’s famous book,3 and so I shall have to risk your
being left with the impression that this working assumption is only a
kind of maxim. However, I do want to stress that it is in fact fundamental to the way a historian must come to the past. For example, in
the chapter on historical experience in Michael Oakeshott’s Experience and Its Modes, the author distinguishes different kinds of past,
of which one is the historical past, or, we might say, the historians’
past:
The differentia [emphasis in the original] of the historical past
lies in its very disparity from what is contemporary. The historian does not set out to discover a past where the same beliefs, the same actions, the same intentions obtain as those
which occupy his own world. His business is to elucidate a
past independent of the present, and he is never (as an historian) tempted to subsume past events under general rules. He
is concerned with a particular past. It is true, of course, that
the historian postulates a general similarity between the historical past and the present, because he assumes the possibility
of understanding what belongs to the historical past. But his
particular business lies, not with this bare and general similarity, but with the detailed dissimilarity of past and present.
3. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1946), which collects together the author’s works on his philosophy
of history.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
He is concerned with the past as past, and with each moment
of the past in so far as it is unlike any other moment.4
As a position regarding the way one should come to the past rather
than a position about how the past really is, this is not very different
from a good rule for listening or reading well, as we try to do at St.
John’s: you will listen better to what authors are trying to say if you
do not assume you already know what they are saying—if you assume, rather, that they are saying something different from anything
you have ever heard before.
That said, we are creatures of the present; we cannot pretend the
present does not affect us in any way. For this reason, it is at least useful, if not essential, to be cognizant of the present even while we are
trying to find a very different past. So, while my purpose today is to
try to clarify the notions of similarity and equality in Euclid and Apollonius, I want to begin with a certain aspect of how we moderns tend
to think about similarity and equality: I hope it will help to bring out
the tremendous difference and even strangeness in the ways these notions were understood in classical times.
Similarity and Equality in a Modern Context
Let me begin with a problem someone gave to me sometime before
my flight from Israel to Santa Fe (it is a long flight so it is always
good to have a mathematics problem to work on in transit). The
solution I will present is a modern one.
Let A and B be given points and let C lie on a given
circle. Let P be the centroid of triangle ABC. Find
the locus of point P.
Let E be the midpoint of AB. Then if EC is any line from E to a
point C on the circle, EP:EC=1:3, since P is the centroid of triangle
ACB. Hence, we may think of E as a center of similitude—a point
from which the plane is dilated or contracted uniformly, that is,
that the distance between points is enlarged or diminished by a
fixed ratio (3:1 in this case). The locus PP′P″ is then the image of
4. Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1933), 106.
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circle CC′C″ via a contraction relative to E. Therefore, the locus
PP′P″ is a circle having a radius 1/3 that of the given circle CC′C″.
By the same argument, we can see that if C moved on any other
shape, say, an ellipse or a square, the locus of P would also be an
ellipse or a square 1/3 the dimensions of the original ellipse or
square.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
In fact, it can be a completely arbitrary shape.
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In every case, the locus required is a shape similar to the original
shape and 1/3 its dimensions.
For our purposes, there are two things we should observe. The
first is the form of the problem, the mere question of locus. What
does it mean to “Find the locus of P”? The idea of locus, or in
Greek, topos, is not an easy one. It would require a lecture of its
own. Yet, it is related, I think, to my main subject, similarity and
equality. I shall say a word about this later.
The second thing to observe, putting the difficulties of locus
aside, is my own way of answering the question, namely, “The
locus required is a shape similar to the original shape” What allows me to speak so generally? Why is it that I need to know nothing about the original shape, none of its special properties? What
allows me, a post-nineteenth century person, to speak of the similarity of a shape I know nothing about?
The answer to this is that in solving the problem I only referred
to a relation between EC, wherever C happens to be, and EP. More
precisely, I took P as an image of C when the entire plane was
contracted by a factor of 1/3 with respect to the point E. That ABC
happened to be a triangle and that P was the centroid of ABC was
really incidental. More importantly, in the original problem, the
fact that the point C moved along a circle was incidental. I did
not, even once, refer to a property of circles!
The modern turn here is precisely to ignore any particular shape
and give all of one’s attention to the space in which it is found.
The contraction by 1/3 is of the space itself, the entire plane:
everything in it will be contracted, shrunk, by a factor of 1/3, so
whatever the shape, it will be the same, only smaller (and in another instance of course it could also be larger)—it is as if we
make a change of scale. This kind of transformation of the plane
is called a “dilation,” and, in general, we can speak about similarity in terms of a dilation combined with other transformations
of the plane that preserve distances between points, translations,
reflections, rotations (these are known as “isometries”).5 This centering on the space is crucial in almost every aspect of modern
5. In fact, it turns out to be enough to speak about reflections: translations
and rotations can be defined in terms of combinations of reflections.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
mathematics.6 And it is what links similarity and equality, or congruence. For since a dilation is determined by the factor of contraction or enlargement, one can speak of a unit dilation where the
factor is 1. Congruence—and we shall have to confront the problem of congruence versus equality later—is only a special case of
similarity, so that if two figures are congruent they are automatically similar as well.
I want drive home the point that modern geometry is colored by
its emphasis on space by quoting a nineteenth century geometer
who is thought of as a classical geometer, that is, one whose work
is not governed by algebraic ideas—and, indeed, he is considered
one of the greatest geometers of nineteenth century. This is Jakob
Steiner. One of the ideas Steiner developed (though he may not
have invented it) was called the “center of similitude.” In the problem above, this is the point E, the point with respect to which we
dilate the plane. Steiner speaks of this in more than one work; here
is how he describes it in “Geometrical Constructions with a Ruler
Given a Fixed Circle with its Center”:
If in a plane through any point E we draw rays (lines) in
all directions EA1, EB1, EC1, . . . and by means of these
rays, so connect with one another all points of the plane
that to every point A1 on such a ray as EA1 corresponds another point A2 on the same ray; and indeed, under the condition that the distance of every two corresponding points
from the point E, and EA1 and EA2, have throughout one
and the same given ratio, as n1:n2, then such a system of
correspondence is thereby brought about that the plane is
6. I think Jacob Klein put his finger on the same tendency when he wrote,
“Descartes’s concept of extensio identifies the extendedness of extension
with extension itself. Our present-day concept of space can be traced directly back to this. Present-day Mathematics and Physics designate as
‘Euclidean Space’ the domain of symbolic exhibition by means of linesegments, a domain which is defined by a coordinate system, a rational
system, as we say nowadays. ‘Euclidean Space’ is by no means the domain of the figures and structures studied by Euclid and the rest of Greek
mathematics. It is rather only the symbolic illustration of the general
character of the extendedness of those structures.” Jacob Klein, “The
World of Physics and the ‘Natural’ World,” The St. John’s Review 28.1
(1981): 29.
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traversed twice. Or, we can also imagine that two planes,
which may be called α and α′, lie one upon the other, while
every point may be considered as belonging as well in one
as in the other plane.7
Although Steiner will use the center of similitude specifically for
circles, lines, and angles, his way of presenting it in terms of a
transformation of the entire plane—or, as we would say, a mapping
of one plane onto another—shows the generality of his conception.
So, to reiterate the main point above, similarity can be a general
notion for us since in our modern mathematics similarity refers to
such an operation on the entire plane in which geometric figures
live. And because we focus on the entire plane rather than the objects themselves, the particularity of the objects deemed similar becomes unimportant, as we have seen. It is in this way that the
conception of similarity in Euclid and Apollonius (and, I would
add, Archimedes as well) is profoundly different from that in modern, post-nineteenth-century mathematics.8
7. Jakob Steiner, “Geometrical Constructions with a Ruler Given a Fixed Circle with its Center,” trans. M. E. Stark, ed. R. C. Archibald, Scripta Mathematica 4 (1948): 222. Steiner’s diagram is slightly different from the one
included above, for there are a few more points he wants to emphasize beyond
the mere definition.
8. For this reason, comments such as this from Jeremy Gray seem to me completely wrongheaded: “The Greek geometrical proofs worked because of assumptions made about the underlying space, which are reflected in the ideas
of congruence, similarity, and parallelism.” (Jeremy Gray, Ideas of Space
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], 29.)
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
Similarity in Euclid and Apollonius
In some ways, the radical departure of the modern conception of similarity from the classical Greek conception has everything do with
how mathematicians like Euclid and Apollonius treated the plane itself. The plane, epipedon, in Greek geometry has, one might say, two
expressions, 1) as an object, and 2) as a place. As an object, it can be
considered in relation to other objects, for example, it may be inclined
to another plane, or a line may be inclined to it. It may cut another
figure, a parallelepiped as in Euclid, Elements XI.25 (“If a parallelepipedal solid be cut by a plane which is parallel to the opposite
planes, then, as the base is to the base so will the solid be to the solid”),
or as in Apollonius, Conics I.11-14 where the conic sections are produced by cutting a cone by a plane. Sometimes a plane is nearly identified with part of itself, as in the face of a solid figure (see for
example, Elements XI, Definitions 9 and 10), in which case it becomes an object in a sense not much different from the way a triangle
is an object.
As a place, it is not something manipulated: it is there, and there
are things in it—they can be manipulated, but it cannot.9 Thus in Elements I, Definition 8, “A plane angle is the inclination to one another
of two lines in a plane (en epipedōi) which meet one another and do
not lie in a straight line.” Again in Book XI, Proposition 1, “A part of
a straight line cannot be in the plane of reference (en tōi hupokeimenōi
epipedōi) and a part in a plane more elevated,” the plane is an immovable place. This phrase “the plane of reference,” or “the plane
placed under,” as a place on which things may be situated, also appears in Apollonius’s Conics I.5210 where Apollonius constructs a
parabola in a plane. Even though the plane is not the exclusive field
of action here, as it is in Book I of the Elements, and may have a relation to other objects or be constructed, it is, nevertheless, unmanipulated in these contexts, a that-with-respect-to-which other things may
be manipulated. It is also the place in which the similarity of figures
9. This idea is important in connection to Book IV of the Conics. See Michael
Fried, Apollonius of Perga’s Conics, Book IV: Translation, Introduction, and
Diagrams (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2002).
10. See, for example, Apollonii Pergaei quae Graece exstant cum commentariis antiquis, ed. I. L. Heiberg, Vol. 1 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1891), 160, line 15.
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is explored. Of course the plane is a place in which the similarity of
figures is explored for the moderns as well; however, they do so by
treating the plane as a place that is able to be manipulated, as if the
place were an object. As such, it can also be compared to other planes,
as we saw in the example from Jakob Steiner.11
To return to the main point, however, the upshot of the ancient
view is that the similarity of figures must be a comparison of the figures themselves within a plane. One’s attention, therefore, must be
sharply focused on the figures and their properties. The foundation
of similarity rests in the look of geometrical figures. I use the word
“look” intentionally; it is a fair translation of the Greek word eidos,
which besides its well-known Platonic context has a mathematical
meaning of “shape,” or “form” in the sense of “shape.” For example,
in Euclid’s Data, Definition 3, we find the following explanation:
“Rectilineal figures are said to be given in form (tōi eidei), if the angles are given one by one and the ratios of the sides to one another
are given.”12 This definition is notable not only because of its resemblance to the definition of similarity in the Elements (see below), but
also because it makes clear that “similar” is related to something the
figures themselves possess,13 namely, their own look or form: for
one figure to be similar (homoios) to another means that they are in
possession of the same shape, the same form, the same look.
The shape of a person may be different from the person, but the
shape of a triangle is impossible to separate from what it is to be
a triangle. In geometry, the shape of something depends on what
that something is. There are, for this reason, as many criteria for
similar figures as there are different kinds of shapes: this is why
for the Greek mathematician there is no single governing rule for
11. See pp. 24-25 above.
12. Translation from Christian Marinus Taisbak, Euclid’s Data: The Importance of Being Given (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003), 115.
Taisbak’s book contains a deep discussion of the idea of “givenness in form”
and of Euclid’s Data generally.
13. In this connection, Taisbak points out, “The Elements compare triangles.
The Data deals with individuals [emphasis in the original], and with the
‘knowledge’ we may have of such individual triangles, within the language
of Givens.” (Taisbak, Euclid’s Data, 126-127.)
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determining similarity. In the Elements, for example, we have the
following different criteria for similarity:
Elements III, Def. 11, Similar circular segments: “Similar
segments of circles are those which contain equal angles
or in which there are angles equal to one another.”
Elements VI, Def. 1, Similar rectilineal figures: “Similar
rectilineal figures are such that they have each of their angles equal and sides about the equal angles proportional.”
Elements IX, Def. 9, Similar solid figures: “Similar solid
figures are those contained by similar plane areas
(epipedōn) equal in number.”
Elements IX, Def. 24, Similar cones and cylinders: “Similar cones and cylinders are those of which the axes and
diameters of the bases are proportional.”
Add to these other definitions from Apollonius and Archimedes:
Apollonius, Conics VI, Def. 2, Similar conic sections: “[S]imilar [conic sections] are such that, when ordinates are drawn
in them to fall on the axes, the ratios of the ordinates to the
lengths they cut off from the axes from the vertex of the section are equal to one another, while the ratios to each other of
the portions which the ordinates cut off from the axes are
equal ratios.”14
Archimedes, Conoids and Spheroids, Introduction, Similar obtuse-angled conoids (i.e. hyperbolas of revolution): “Obtuse-angled conoids are called similar when
the cones containing the conoids are similar.”
Each of these definitions demands prior knowledge of the object
to which the word “similar” is being applied; for example, one
must know that the angles contained in a segment of a circle are
all equal so that one can speak of the angle of the segment. The
necessity of such prerequisite knowledge precludes a general definition of similarity: “similar” always awaits the particular geometrical entities which are to be similar—even ratio and
14. All translations of Books V-VII are from G. J. Toomer, Apollonius Conics
Books V to VII: The Arabic Translation of the Lost Greek Original in the Version of the Banu Musa, 2 vols., (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990).
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proportion is not fundamental, as the case of similar circular segments shows. And since “similar” for triangles is one thing and
“similar” for conic sections something else, one could not ask
whether some shape is similar to some other shape without first
assuming that they are of the same type—a polygon, for example,
or, again, a conic section.15
Thus, while Apollonius can ask whether or not a parabola is similar to a hyperbola or even an ellipse in Conics VI.14, the question
remains strictly within the context of the similarity of conic sections for which there is a general definition. And when we look at
that general definition, we see how deeply it is rooted in the foundations of conic sections developed in Book I of the Conics. Let
us restate it:
Similar [conic sections] are such that, when ordinates are
drawn in them to fall on the axes, the ratios of the ordinates to the lengths they cut off from the axes from the
vertex of the section are equal to one another, while the
ratios to each other of the portions which the ordinates
cut off from the axes are equal ratios.
15. I am referring of course to “similarity” in its strict mathematical sense, as
opposed to the use of “similar,” in a non-mathematical context, even within
a mathematical work. For example, in the preface to his Phenomena, Euclid
writes that “if a cone or cylinder be cut by a plane not parallel to the base, the
resulting section is a section of an acute-angled cone which is similar to a
shield (homoia thureōi).” (Euclidis Phaenomena et Scripta Musica, ed. Heinrich Menge and I. L. Heiberg [Leipzig: Teubner, 1916], 6.)
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So, suppose ACD and PMN are two conic sections. Let AB and
PQ be their respective axes, and let CEC′, DFD′, MRM′, NSN′
be drawn ordinatewise.
Then ACD and PMN are similar if CC′:EA::MM′:RP and
DD′:FA::NN′:SP whenever AE:PR::AF:PS.
In order to follow this definition one must understand what
an axis is and what lines drawn ordinatewise means—and, naturally, one must understand that every conic section has an axis,
or, more generally, a diameter with respect to which lines may
be drawn ordinatewise.16 Unlike the little problem with which
I began the discussion, a proposition about similarity in Apollonius’s Conics must concern conic sections and their particular properties: Conics VI, the book which treats similarity (and
equality) is, after all, a book about conic sections!
As an easy example of how Apollonius uses the definition
and how not only its formulation but also its use depends on the
properties of conic sections, consider Conics VI.11, which
proves that every parabola is similar to every other parabola.
Here is a paraphrase of the proof.
Suppose AB and GD are two parabolas, AK, GO are their
axes, and AP, GR are their respective latera recta.
16. There are other definitions, notably one implied by Archimedes for
the ellipse and hyperbola. If PQ and pq are the axes of, say, the two ellipses and AR is an arbitrary ordinate in the one while bs is an arbitrary
ordinate in the other, Archimedes says that the two ellipses will be similar if it is true that:
sq.AR:rectPR,RQ = sq.bs:rect.ps,sq
Note that nothing is said about where R and s are on the respective axes.
The condition is equivalent to Conics, VI.12, for this ratio is always that
of the latus rectum to the transverse diameter, by Conics, I. 21. I might
add that although Toomer calls this a definition, Archimedes does not:
he simply states the fact that the conics will be similar if this is so—and
that at the end of a proposition! (See Conoids and Spheroids, Proposition
14 ad fin., in T. L. Heath, The Works of Archimedes [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897], 125.) In any case, like Apollonius’s definition of similarity, this condition of Archimedes is also tied closely to
conic sections as opposed to any other kind of shape.
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Let AK:AP::GO:GR, and suppose Z and Q are arbitrary points on
AK.
Choose M and C so that they cut GO into segments having the same
ratios as the corresponding segments defined by Z and Q.
In parabola AB, draw EZI, HQS, BKT ordinatewise, that is perpendicular to AK since AK is an axis. Similarly, in GD, draw LMU, NCF,
DOX ordinatewise.
Now, by Conics I.11, BK and DO are mean proportionals between
AP and AK and GR and GO, respectively (i.e., AP:BK::BK:AK and
GR:DO::DO:GO)
Therefore, BK:AK::DO:GO, so that BT:AK::DX:GO [since
BT=2BK and DX=2DO].
Since AP:AK::GR:GO, AK:AQ::GO:GC, therefore, AP:AQ::GR:GC.
Thus, repeating the argument used to prove BT:AK::DX:GO above,
we can show also HS:AQ::NF:GC and, again, EI:AZ::LU:GM.
And so Apollonius concludes:
Therefore, the ratio of each of the lines BT, HS, EI,
which are perpendiculars to the axis [AK], to the
amounts which they cut off from the axis, namely, to
AK, AQ AZ is equal, respectively, to the ratio of the
lines DX, NF, LU, which are perpendiculars to the axis
[GO], to the amounts which they cut off from the axis,
namely OG, CG, MG.
And the ratios of the segments cut off from one of
the axes to the segments cut off from the other are
equal.
So section AB is similar to section GD.
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Again, what I wish to stress about this proof is not the details of
the argument, but the mere fact of its appealing at every step to the
specific properties of the parabola demonstrated in Conics I.
Perhaps the most striking reflection of how the similarity of
conic sections completely depends on the definition of conic sections, their geometric identity as the section of a cone, is the fact
that book ends with a set of eight constructions involving the cone
and locating conic sections within the cone, for example, “Given
a cone and given a parabola, find a cone containing the parabola
that is similar to the given cone” (Conics VI.31). Significantly,
Book VI is the only book in the Conics, besides Book I, in which
the cone appears explicitly.
We need now to move on to the question of equality. For, remember, Conics VI is not just about similarity, but also about
equality.
Equality in Euclid and Apollonius
As we noted above, with the modern view of similarity in which
similarity relates to a transformation of the space in which objects
are found, congruence becomes a completely derivative notion. And
here I should say that moderns speak about congruence and not
equality—and I think there is much to say about that—but more
often than not the use of one or the other is a matter of convention.
For example, when Hilbert comes to the axioms of congruence in
his Foundations of Geometry he more than once uses the expression
“kongruent oder gleich,” that is, “congruent or equal.” That it can
be a matter of convention is an important aspect of the modern perspective. Greek mathematicians do have a special designation,
“equal and similar” (isos te kai homoios); nevertheless, they do not
have a separate term for the relation of “congruence.” We shall have
to confront this combination “equal and similar” later, but for now
suffice it to say that there are only two basic terms “equal” and “similar.” The difficulty of their relationship cannot be swept away.
Thomas Heath’s treatment of this, for example, is quite unsatisfying.
When Euclid uses the word “equal,” isos, in a manner corresponding
to our notion of congruence, Heath just takes that to be the sense of
the word, and when Euclid then uses it in a manner corresponding
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to our notion of equal areas (Elements I.35), Heath says this is
“equality in a new sense.”17 Nevertheless, Euclid does use the same
word, isos. One cannot escape that.
For Euclid at least, equality is a very general notion, and it is certainly one of principal themes of Book I of the Elements, if not the
principal theme. As such, it is an idea that undergoes development
in the book; one might say the book develops a kind of theory of
equality. Let us consider briefly the overall direction of that development.
The theory of equality is contained in the five Common Notions
(koinai ennoiai) at the start of Book I of the Elements.18 These Common Notions are the following:
1. Things equal to the same thing are equal to one another.
2. And if equal things be adjoined (prostethēi) to the
same thing, the wholes are equal.
3. And if equals be removed from the same thing, the remainders are equal.
4. And things fitting (epharmozonta) on one another are
equal to one another.
5. And the whole is greater than the part.19
Of these, the fourth provides the basic criterion, the basic test for
equality: if one figure can be fitted exactly on top of another, then
the figures are equal (isos). It makes its first appearance in proposition I.4, which states that two triangles will be equal if they have
17. T. L. Heath, The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, Vol. 1 (New
York: Dover, 1956), 327.
18. Heiberg mentions other common notions appearing in some manuscripts; for example, “If unequals be adjoined to unequals, the whole is
unequal” and “Doubles of the same thing are equal to one another,” as
well as, “Two lines do not contain a space.” Except for the last about two
lines not containing a space—which, as Proclus himself seems to suggest,
is odd fish among the others—all of these common notions, therefore,
concern equality—and even that last common notion may be connected
to the nature of coinciding.
19. My translation.
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equal sides surrounding an equal angle. The entire demonstration,
problematic though it may be, plays on Common Notion 4: equal
lines are fitted on equal lines; the equal angle is fitted on the equal
angle; this forces the one triangle to fit on the other, so that the two
are equal.
In fact, that equal lines can be fitted on equal lines and equal angles on equal angles is not truly an application of Common Notion
4, but its converse; however, with simple undivided objects like
lines and angles, being equal and fitting on one another are treated
as identical relations.20 And in this connection we must return to
Book VI of the Conics for a moment. For Apollonius takes the criterion for equality provided by Common Notion 4 as the very definition of equality of conic sections:
Conic sections which are called equal are those which
can be fitted, one on another, so that the one does not exceed the other. Those which are said to be unequal are
those for which that is not so.
In the Elements, however, Euclid shows that the converse of
Common Notion 4 cannot be assumed in all generality. It is here
that the other Common Notions clarify why the criterion of “fitting on one another” is sufficient but not necessary for equality:
in Elements I.35, Euclid shows that things can be equal without
having the same shape, that is, without being able to fit on one on
the other.
Proposition I.35 states that “Parallelograms on the same base
and in the same parallels are equal to one another.” Thus the
proposition tells us that parallelograms such as ABCD and EBCF,
which are clearly not the same shape, may, nevertheless be equal.
It is instructive to look at Euclid’s proof of the proposition (in
paraphrase):
Since ABCD is a parallelogram, AD is equal to BC.
For the same reason, EF is equal to BC. Whence also
AD is equal EZ (by Common Notion 1); and DE is
common; therefore, the whole AE is equal to the whole
20. See Michael N. Fried and Sabetai Unguru, Apollonius of Perga’s
Conica: Text, Context, Subtext (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 228.
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DF (by Common Notion 2).21 But also AB is equal to
DC. So the two lines EA, AB are equal to the two lines
DF, DC, each to each. Also the angle contained by FDC
is equal to the angle contained by EAB, the exterior to
the interior. Therefore, the base EB is equal to the base
FC and the triangle EAB is equal to the triangle FDC
(by I.4 and, derivatively therefore, Common Notion 4];
let the common part DGE have been removed; therefore, the remaining trapezoid ABGD is equal to the remaining trapezoid EGCF (by Common Notion 3); let
the common triangle BGC have been adjoined; the
whole parallelogram ABCD is therefore equal to the
whole parallelogram EBCF (by Common Notion 2).
The parallelograms being on the same base and in the
same parallels are, therefore, equal to one another.
What we see in this proposition is no “new conception of equality,”
as Heath says; on the contrary, what we see is that the Common Notions—which comprise, as I said, the theory of equality—begin from
the basic notion of “fitting on one another” to show how equality applies also to shapes that do not fit on one another. It is an elaboration
of equality, a spelling out of the theory, not a new kind of equality. Even
Elements I.47, the “Pythagorean Theorem,” can be seen in this light,
since it shows not only how one figure can equal another of a different
shape, but also how one figure can equal two others of the same shape.
21. It is typical that Common Notions 2 and 3 are used when a single thing
is removed from two equals. This assumes that anything that can be equal
to something is always at least equal to itself. It is curious—and perhaps significant—that this fundamental fact is missing from the Common Notions.
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And, I would argue, Book II continues this inquiry with its attention to
how one or several rectangles may equal other rectangles.
This elaboration of the idea of equality demonstrates how things
can be equal even though they have far from the same shape. Conversely, things can be of the same shape and yet not be equal. Aristotle points this out, tellingly enough, in the section on motion
and alteration in the Categories (15a, 30-33): “there are things that
increase and are not thereby altered as well. For example, if a gnomon is added, a square is increased in its size but does not undergo
alteration (ēuxētai men, alloioteron de ouden gegenētai).
Thus, in both directions, equality of figures is not identical with
sameness of shape. Equality cannot be subsumed under similarity
and similarity under equality. Yet, equality has to do with shape in
some way. It is rooted in shape inasmuch as superimposition is its
basic test; and it can be used to probe shape, for example, in showing that a line through the center of an ellipse divides an ellipse
into two equal halves (Conics VI.4 and 5). But, again, because
equality does not necessarily mean sameness of shape, shape itself
cannot be its main object. That main object of equality is similarity.
Thus it is a kind of counterpoint between similarity and equality,
rather than a logical dependence one way or another, that characterizes how these ideas appear in Apollonius and Euclid.
Equal and similar
The logical disconnection between equal and similar is particularly
clear in the Conics, where propositions for similarity are kept separate from those on equality: one proposition will show when two
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sections are equal and a different proposition later in the book will
show when they are similar. Now we must return to the idea of
“equal and similar” (isos te kai homoios) in Apollonius and Euclid,
for here the two notions do come together. But it is a peculiar coming-together—not a logical joining, but only slightly more than a
mere conjunction. This has the effect of forming a new term while
leaving the independence of the original terms. There is “equal,”
there is “similar,” and there is “equal and similar.”
As a unit of meaning, Charles Mugler, in his dictionary of Greek
mathematical terminology, notes a non-mathematical use of isos te
kai homoios: he cites Thucydides’s account of the battle between
Corinth and Corcyra over the fate of Epidamnus, in which Corinth
at one point advertised Epidamnus as a colony where citizens would
be “in perfect equality” (epi tēi isēi kai homoiai).22 The two words
isos and homoios come together almost as mutual intensifiers. Greek
mathematics does not use intensifiers—“really round,” “really
straight,” “really parallel,” “really similar” don’t appear! Yet “equal
and similar” does seem to have the sense of “equal in every way.”
And this puts objects into a new class. Thus, in the Elements, “equal
and similar” solid figures makes its appearance in Book XI, Definition 10 as an independent definition after the definition of similar
solid figures quoted above: “Equal and similar solid figures are those
contained by similar plane areas equal in number and in magnitude.”
Euclid might have defined equal and similar solid figures as similar
solid figures whose faces are not only similar but equal as well—
that is, he might have subordinated “equal and similar solids” to
“similar solids,” and, therefore, also have eliminated any need for a
separate definition. Obviously there is a relationship between “similar solids” and “equal and similar solids,” but in Euclidean discourse
it is a relationship between inhabitants of distinct categories.
This understanding of “equal and similar” can also be seen in
Book VI of Apollonius’s Conics. Proposition VI.16, for example,
tells us that “Opposite sections are similar and equal.” The proof
runs as follows: in Conics I.14, Apollonius proved that the latera
recta of the opposite sections are equal; therefore, the figures of the
22. Charles Mugler, Dictionaire historique de la terminologie géométrique
des Grecs (Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1958).
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two opposite sections (the rectangle whose sides are the latus rectum
and the transverse axis) are equal and also similar; therefore, by VI.2,
the hyperbolas are equal (this is unmentioned in the text), and, by
VI.12, they are similar. The proof is simple, but there is a subtlety.
In proposition VI.2, Apollonius proved that “If the figures that are
constructed on the transverse axes of hyperbolas or ellipses are equal
and similar, then the sections [themselves] will be equal.” From this,
as I said, it follows that the opposite sections are equal, which, by
Appolonius’s definition (in contrast to Euclid’s Common Notion 4),
means they may be fitted one on the other. It would seem then an
immediate inference that they are also similar, that they have the
same shape. But Apollonius says this only after VI.12, which shows
that if the figures of hyperbolas (or ellipses) are similar then the hyperbolas (or ellipses) are similar, and what is more, he cites only
VI.12 as his justification.
Therefore, for Apollonius, to be equal—even when this means
“able to be fit one on another,”—and to be similar are different relations: the assertion that the opposite sections are “equal and similar”
demands proving that the distinction can be made. For us moderns,
who see a logical connection between “equal” and similar,” saying
“similar and equal” is understandable but redundant—like saying
“rectangular and square.”
Conclusion
Let us then go over the ground again and see where we have arrived.
The modern notion of a transformation of a plane ignores the particularity of a given object and acts only on the space within which it is
placed. Such transformations can be chosen in many ways, but, for
similarity, one can be chosen so that all distances between points in
the original space can be dilated or contracted by a fixed ratio; the
ratio, treated as a number, can be greater than 1, less than 1, or equal
to 1. In this way, similarity and equality can be taken as concepts that
are not fundamentally different, equality being the case when the fixed
ratio happens to be 1.
This way of approaching the subject of similarity and equality is
foreign to the mathematics of Euclid and Apollonius because of its
roots in specific geometric figures and their specific properties. Similarity in Greek geometry begins and ends in the sameness of shape.
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Equality begins with the sameness of shape, with superimposition, but
its special character, as seen explicitly in Euclid, is its ability to depart
from the sameness of shape. In this way, similarity and equality are
independent, so that recognizing a similarity, a sameness of shape, is
a different process from recognizing an identity, even though the
processes are tantalizingly close—should I say similar? Still, the two
processes can meet, and when they do, they create a third notion,
“equal and similar.” But, as I argued above, they create a third notion
precisely because they are not joined in logical way—they are simply
brought together.
But this presents us with a difficulty. If similarity and equality are
indeed independent notions, what then is Book VI of the Conics really
about? It cannot be exclusively about shape, as I have thought in the
past, because that, as I have argued, is the province of similarity, not
of equality. So when Apollonius describes Book VI as a book about
similarity and equality in the letter introducing the entire Conics, does
he mean to say that it is simply about two unrelated or vaguely related
topics? Perhaps.
But I think there is more to it than that, chiefly for two reasons. The
first is, as we have noted above, the reappearance of the cone in Book
VI, drawing us back to conic sections as whole, definable objects. The
second is the form of the definition of equality, which is, I believe,
more problematic than similarity, as I have implied throughout this
lecture. The difference between this definition and Euclid’s Common
Notion 4 is found in its second phrase, “Those [conic sections] which
are said to be unequal are those for which that is not so”—making superimposition the exclusive test of equality for conic sections. Thus,
when Apollonius wants to show that sections, or segments of sections,
are equal, he assumes typically that there is some point that does not
coincide with a point on the section presumed equal, and then demonstrates that contradiction follows. What I would like to bring out is
that equality has something to do with every point on the conic section.
In this way, what links similarity23 and equality is their way of looking
at a conic section, or a segment of a conic section, all at once.
23. In the Protagoras (331e), Plato has Protagoras make the remark, concerning justice and holiness, that we should not call things dissimilar just
because there is one point of dissimilarity between them. Socrates replies,
“I was surprised at this.”
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This is the connection, I believe, in which the problem of similarity and equality is related to the idea of locus, which I mentioned
in regard to the little problem with which I started. It too concerns
not an arbitrary place, but a definite identifiable place, all of whose
points have a certain property. It too, in other words, concerns in
some way the whole of conic sections, but in a less direct way.
There is no time, of course, to go into this in detail here, but I do
want to make clear that as we approach an understanding of similarity and equality, it is likely we shall also approach an understanding of other fundamental notions in Greek mathematics.
This, I might add as a final word, was the not the view of older
historians of mathematics, such as H. G. Zeuthen (1839-1920).
Zeuthen had no doubt that the modern point of view was Apollonius’s point of view, and on that basis wrote his expansive and deep
work on the ancient theory of conic sections (Zeuthen, 1886), which
set the tone of Apollonius scholarship for almost a century.24 He
could brush Conics VI aside, saying that it was “of no great significance” in the attempt to understand the Greek theory of conic sections.25 I hope that the discussion here makes that statement moot,
to the say the least.
24. H. G. Zeuthen, Die Lehre von den Kegelschnitten im Altertum (Kopenhagen: Höst und Sohn, 1886).
25. Zeuthen, 384.
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The Soul’s Choice of Life
Greg Recco
Most dreams are forgotten, perhaps even before the night has
passed. Others obtrude into daytime thought, even as their meaning
remains obscure. They haunt us, and seem to promise a rare and
precious revelation. Their coming insistently to mind implies a
faint undertone of reproach, like hearing your name repeated on
waking, before you are quite sure who you are. Such dreams seem
to call from afar, and from where we stand, they can only seem
alien. But we also suspect that we are the ones who are out of place,
and that the dream is calling us back from our wandering. In this
recollection of the unfamiliar, we sense dimly that we are tied to
what is familiar by only a specious kinship, and that our true home
lies elsewhere.
This sort of strange appeal that calls us back from estrangement
can occur not only in dreams or visions, but also in deliberately
produced works of art such as poems, paintings, and stories. In refusing to make any ordinary sort of sense, they contradict our
everyday understanding and invite us to speak along with them in
something like a foreign tongue. The dialogues of Plato, in particular, contain many examples of images or tales of this sort, beguiling works of imagination that linger in memory on the far horizon
of intelligibility. For those of us who read and talk together about
Plato with some frequency, such tales or images have become part
of the vocabulary of our thought—perhaps even a large part, just
as loan-words can come to outnumber a language’s own stock of
true-born names. Before moving on to our main theme, it will be
worthwhile to reflect briefly on a familiar example—the image of
the cave in the Republic—so that we can begin to meditate on how
such images work and what they accomplish.
Socrates asks his interlocutor Glaucon to imagine a cave in
which people are chained in such a way as to be able to see only
what is directly before them, the cave wall on which shadows are
Greg Recco is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. This
lecture was delivered in Annapolis on 12 November 2012.
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projected by a fire above and behind them. Glaucon exclaims that
these are “strange prisoners” (515a).1 “Like us,” Socrates replies.
But then something odd happens. At the very moment when we
might expect Socrates to offer the key by which to decipher these
unfamiliar letters, he instead continues to speak in the language
of the image. The prisoners are “like us,” he continues, “for do
you suppose such men would have seen anything of themselves
or one another other than the shadows cast by the fire on the wall
facing them?” Now, this is not so strange a move as to pose an
impossible task of interpretation, especially to someone who has
thought about the image for some time. We might start with the
idea that our ordinary efforts to know are wrongly oriented and
thus largely unsuccessful, and from there move on to the idea that
this concerns not only our attempts to know the world but even
our self-knowledge and knowledge of others. That sounds about
right. But we should try to imagine what Socrates’s reply would
sound like to someone who had never heard the rest, to someone
who has not had the time to think about it, to someone who does
not know where Socrates is going. To this person, Socrates’s response must seem pretty nearly the opposite of the explanation
that Glaucon’s remark implicitly requested. After hearing it, Glaucon would probably still say that the prisoners are strange, perhaps
as a sort of polite way of saying that the man telling him about
the prisoners is strange—and it would be hard to disagree.
But whether or not Glaucon meant his remark as a reproach, and
however strange Socrates’s speech is, its strangeness does not stem
from some madness of his, some disordered state of his powers of
thought or imagination. What is truly strange here is not the image
to which he gives voice, but the situation it is intended to portray,
namely, the fact that creatures destined for knowledge should
spend their lives so unaware of, and so unwittingly cooperative
with, the powerful impediments to knowing that characterize their
situation. The proper way to hear Socrates’s response to Glaucon’s
remark about the prisoners’ strangeness is thus affirmatively—not
“the prisoners are not strange; they are like us,” but, “they are like
1. Translations throughout are lightly adapted from Allan Bloom’s The
Republic of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
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us, strange.” And his explanation is an explanation not of the prisoners’ likeness to us but of their strangeness; again, “do you suppose such men”—those described in the image—“would have seen
anything of themselves or of each other than the shadows?” Given
what Socrates is trying to accomplish, deflecting the question of
likeness and going farther into the image may be the only way to
make it work. The image presents important features of our epistemic situation that are normally difficult to discern, but that we
can come to perceive if we take up an initially unfamiliar and awkward perspective, make it our own, and then turn this view back
on what had previously gone unquestioned. In order to know, we
must learn to speak strangely.
With a few small, though significant, differences, this kind of
change in understanding is what is aimed at by the final pages of
the Republic, the so-called Myth of Er (614b-621b). It, too, is a
fantastical story that represents in figurative form an important but
overlooked dimension of our actual situation. Its fantastical character is not a product of wild genius, but arises from Plato’s rigorous attention to both the nature of human freedom and the
difficulty of discerning it from within our ordinary perspective.
In the case of the cave image our learned familiarity with it
makes it relatively easy to put a name to what it is about; unlike
Glaucon, we have read the Republic. And we get some more help
from the fact that Socrates tells us outright what the image is meant
to be an image of. “Make an image,” he says, “of our nature in its
education and want of education” (514a). The Myth of Er, by contrast, is not presented as an image of anything at all. It is ostensibly
the report of a man who returned from the dead to tell of what
awaits souls after life. Socrates presents it as the completion of the
dialogue’s investigation of justice, inasmuch as it gives an account
of the good and bad that come from being just or unjust, not in this
life, but after death.
In this connection, the story is a fitting end for the dialogue, in
that it recapitulates a theme first sounded very near the beginning.
Cephalus reports that as a young man he scoffed at the stories of
punishment in the afterlife, but old age has found him and his agemates more fearful of what is to come. They are looking back over
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lives that contain perhaps no small measure of wrongdoing.
Cephalus is thankful for his wealth, above all for the ability it gives
him to conduct the costly private rituals of expiation that his fear
has made seem prudent. Socrates’s return to this theme at the end
of the dialogue, then, seems to endorse Cephalus’s anxious piety,
at least in confirming that there is something to fear for those who
have done wrong. But the story contains much more than is necessary for this purpose and, indeed, much that does not directly or
obviously further it. Also, it is just very strange. Even with some
degree of paraphrase, it will take a short while to recount it. So
here it is.
Upon his death, the soul of Er traveled along with other souls of
the dead and came to a place where there were two openings in the
earth and two in the sky, above and across from them. Between the
pairs of openings sat judges, who directed the just to continue to
the right and upward through the opening in the sky, and the unjust
to go to the left and downward into the earth. Er himself they instructed to remain, observe, and report what he saw on his return
to the world of the living. What he saw first was this: as some souls
were going into the two openings indicated by the judges, other
souls were coming out of the others, some up from earth, others
down from the heavens. All those who had returned went off with
delight to a nearby meadow, where they made camp and engaged
in conversation. Those who had known each other in life greeted
each other and asked what it was like in the other place. So they
all told their stories, some lamenting and crying as they recalled
all they had seen and undergone in the thousand-year journey beneath the earth, the others telling of the beauty of the sights and
experiences above. In general, those who came from below the
earth said they had received a tenfold punishment for each of their
acts of injustice, once each hundred years, on the grounds that a
human life was about a hundred years long. For acts of impiety towards the gods, the penalty was yet worse. Of one particularly terrible tyrant named Ardiaeus it was related that when his thousand
years had passed and it was his turn to go up, he and other perpetrators of unholy deeds were rejected by the opening. Men standing
nearby seized them, then bound them, flayed them, and dragged
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them along the rough ground in the sight of the others, finally casting them into the pit of Tartarus, from which none return. Fear of
being rejected by the opening and subjected to this torment was
thus the last of the punishments for souls who had lived an unjust
life. The rewards for justice were said to be the counterparts of
these.
On the eighth day, the souls who had returned were made to
leave the meadow and continue their journey. In four days’ time,
they came to a place from which they could see a sort of pillar of
light stretched from above through all of heaven and earth, like a
rainbow. This light was said to bind the earth and the heavens and
be connected to a complex, interlocking arrangement of whorls
forming a sort of spindle, which belongs to the goddess Ananke or
Necessity. Her daughters, the Fates Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis,
put their hands to the turning of these otherworldly whorls and
were associated with the three dimensions of time: Atropos, she
who cannot be turned, with the future, Clotho, the weaver, with the
present, and Lachesis, the dispenser of lots, with the past.
The souls were then brought before Lachesis. Her spokesman
gathered up the lots and patterns of lives that lay in her lap, and
then delivered the goddess’s message to the souls arrayed before
him. He said: “This is the speech of Ananke’s maiden daughter,
Lachesis: ‘Ephemeral souls, this is the beginning of another deathbringing cycle for the mortal race. A spirit shall not be allotted to
you, but you shall choose a spirit. Let the holder of the first lot
make the first choice of a life to which it shall be bound by Ananke.
Virtue is without a master; as each honors her, it shall have more
or less of her. The blame belongs to the chooser; the god is blameless.’”
Then the lots were distributed to the souls and the patterns of
lives were laid out on the ground before them, lives of all sorts—
lives of animals and tyrants, lives of the famous and the obscure—
and these lives far outnumbered the souls present.
The spokesman continued: “Even for the one who comes forward last, if he chooses intelligently and lives earnestly, a life to
be happy with has been laid out, and not a bad one. Let the first
not be careless in his choice, nor the last disheartened.”
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Since the soul’s choice of life is my theme, let me quote without
paraphrase the section that follows, which deals most directly with
that choice.
“And the first to choose came forward and immediately chose
the greatest tyranny, and, because of folly and gluttony, chose without having considered everything adequately; and it escaped his
notice that eating his own children and other evils were fated to be
a part of that life. When he considered it at his leisure, he beat his
breast and lamented the choice, not abiding by the spokesman’s
forewarning. For he didn’t blame himself for the evils but chance,
demons, and anything rather than himself. He was one of those
who had come from heaven, having lived under an orderly constitution in his former life, partaking of virtue by habit, without philosophy. And, it may be said, not the least number of those who
were caught in such circumstances came from heaven, because
they were unpracticed in labors. But most of those who came from
the earth, because they themselves had labored and had seen the
labors of others, weren’t in a rush to make their choices. For just
this reason, and because of the chance of the lot, there was an exchange of evils and goods for most of the souls.”
“He said that this was a sight surely worth seeing: how each of
the several souls chose a life. For it was pitiable, laughable, and
wonderful to see. For the most part the choice was made according
to the habit of their former life. He said he saw a soul that once belonged to Orpheus choosing the life of a swan, out of hatred for
womankind; because he died at their hands, he refused to be generated in and born of a woman. He saw Thamyras’s soul choosing
the life of a nightingale. And he also saw a swan changing to the
choice of a human life; other musical animals did the same thing.
The soul that got the twentieth lot chose the life of a lion; it was
the soul of Telamonian Ajax, which shunned becoming a human
being, for it remembered the judgment of arms. And after it was
the soul of Agamemnon; it, too, hated humankind as a result of its
sufferings and therefore changed to the life of an eagle. Atalanta’s
soul had drawn one of the middle lots; it saw the great honors of
an athletic man and couldn’t pass them by but took them. After this
he saw that of Epieius, son of Panopeus, going into the nature of
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an artisan woman. And far out among the last he saw the soul of
the buffoon Thersites, clothing itself as an ape. And by chance the
soul of Odysseus had drawn the last lot of all and went to choose;
from memory of its former labors, it had recovered from love of
honor; it went around for a long time looking for the life of a private man who minds his own business; and with effort it found one
lying somewhere, neglected by the others. It said when it saw this
life that it would have done the same even if it had drawn the first
lot, and was delighted to choose it. And from the other beasts, similarly some went into human lives and into one another—the unjust
changing into savage ones, the just into tame ones, and there were
all kinds of mixtures.”
So far the report of Er. Socrates interrupts his recounting it just
once, to emphasize the supreme importance of this choice of a life
and to point out that we really ought to devote all our energies to
acquiring the art of making this choice well. His way of talking
about what would make for a good choice is very interesting, and
I will return to it near the end of this lecture. But for now, let us reflect on the many ways in which the story gives the attentive reader
pause and does not simply supplement the dialogue’s account of
what justice is and what effect it has on souls. The story, it must
be said, does not do just what it was said to do.
In the first place, it is worth reflecting on how extravagant the
whole section on the souls’ choice of life is. The account was introduced and admitted on the pretext that it would supplement the
dialogue’s account of the power that justice has in the soul without
the assistance of reputation or other external benefits. Like other
such familiar tales, it accomplishes this by adding to whatever uncertain external benefits justice and injustice might win in life and
among humans, a certain and unerring exactitude in punishment
and reward from the gods in a sort of life after life. So, one might
reasonably inquire how this purpose is advanced at all by the elaborate account of the spindle of Necessity or the whole idea of souls
choosing their next life, not to mention the many examples of particular choices made by souls famous and unknown. At most, one
might argue that the fact that the lives for which the souls are being
rewarded or punished were of their own choosing underscores
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souls’ responsibility for their own justice or injustice, and thus
shows that the rewards and punishments are deserved. Even according to this explanation, however, the wealth of detail concerning particular souls’ choices, as well as the cosmic backdrop, would
be only so much ornament.
But of all the reasons for taking the Myth of Er as a figure for
something other than what it is said to be, the most compelling is
the fact that the rewards and punishments pointedly do not have
the character we might expect they ought to have: they are ineffectual or at least unfathomably obscure in their mechanism.
That the rewards for a just life are ineffectual we learn from the
example of the soul that draws the first lot and chooses its next life
first. It had come from heaven, and apparently a thousand years’
worth of beautiful sights and enjoyment was not enough to persuade it of anything but its own fitness to be the biggest tyrant of
all. Although it was happy enough to reach immediately for this
life, it was also particularly resistant to taking responsibility for its
own choice when it became clear that the life contained many evils.
This kind of remorse over bad choices, Socrates’s summary indicates, was not uncommon among those who came down from the
heavens.
What of the others? Those who had toiled and suffered below
the earth and had seen the toils and suffering of others were said
to choose more carefully, and thus on the whole, we are told, there
was an exchange of goods and evils for most souls. This might lead
one to the conclusion that while the rewards do not promote the
choice of justice, the punishments do.
But several things undercut the confidence we might have in the
efficacy of posthumous punishments: in particular, the fate of the
incurable or unholy, the complete forgetfulness of the living, and
above all the impossibility of adequately representing injustice to
the unjust perspective. As for the first, there are those like Ardiaeus,
for whose crimes, it seems, no finite punishment could be adequate, on the grounds that his soul was incurable, and possibly also
because of the enormity of his crimes, which transcend the horizon
of justice altogether, being not only unjust but also unholy.
A second problem with the notion that the punishments of the
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afterlife are effective in curbing injustice lies in the fact that souls
are made to drink from the river of Carelessness on the plain of
Forgetfulness before continuing into the life they have chosen, and,
as a result, forget everything. Those who have chosen a just life,
being the majority of those who completed the underground passage, will go through it and then join those who make the heavenly
passage. Now having forgotten their former labors, they are likely
to choose hastily and with misplaced confidence in their ability to
discern what is a good life. Interestingly, this “exchange of goods
and evils” for most souls was already inscribed, so to speak, in the
topography of the place of judgment: the opening that leads out of
heaven is located above and opposite the one that leads into the
earth, as the one that leads out of the earth lies below and opposite
the opening that leads back into heaven. Forgetfulness and carelessness seem to guarantee that there will be a revolution not only
of whorls, but also of souls. But forgetfulness and carelessness are
not magical effects brought about by the eponymous plain and
river. If punishment is the engine driving the motion of souls upwards and towards justice, then the beautiful sights and enjoyment
found in the heavenly passage do no less to drive them down, towards injustice. This is precisely not the image of a world-order
that uses rewards and punishments to produce justice with mechanical accuracy and inevitability, but the image of a world-order that
strongly inclines souls towards an eternal and predictable alternation of good and bad. Why should this be the purpose of the cosmos?
A third problem with the account is that it is difficult to see what
the souls must be in order for their passage to be able to teach them
anything. This difficulty is thrown into relief by a significant omission. Of the souls returning from beneath the earth, Socrates says:
“They were punished for each injustice once every hundred years;
taking this as the length of a human life, they could in this way pay
off the penalty for the injustice ten times over. Thus, for example,
if some men were causes of the death of many, either by betraying
cities or armies and had reduced men to slavery, or were involved
in any other wrongdoing”—and here I interrupt to note that just
where one might hope to learn precisely how such acts are an-
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swered in that other place, Socrates concludes simply, “they received for each of these things tenfold sufferings.” In other words,
Socrates provides us with no specific information. Plato handles
the issue of narration very deftly here, for he has Socrates preface
this section with a warning about its incompleteness; Socrates says,
“Now, to go through the many things would take a long time, Glaucon. But the chief thing is this,” and then proceeds with the summary I just read. But if the purpose of resorting to summary was
to avoid trouble, then it is difficult to understand Socrates’s choice
of examples.
In the first place, the list of specific forms of injustice by itself
leads one to expect a similarly specific list of punishments. Also,
the fact that each “cycle” of punishments is calibrated to the length
of an average human life supports the expectation that punishments
will somehow correspond to, mirror, or just repeat in inverted form
the particular wrongs one has done. But the examples of injustice
Socrates in fact offers do not fulfill any of these expectations, for
the important reason that the victims of these injustices are in each
case many in number. If a man betrays an entire city, how can his
single life (or a single afterlife) stand any chance of comprising
the myriad injustices done to his fellow citizens? If he sold dozens
into slavery, how could his life encompass suffering the same fate
dozens of times? Even if somehow it could, it would also have to
contain dozens of instances of the state of freedom that slavery destroys. And each of these would have to be in some way pristine,
so that the evil that is enslavement could have its full effect on the
soul being punished in this way—for enslaving one person twice
is not the same as enslaving two different people. In general, then,
it is unclear how a single life can have the evil it does to many represented to it effectively.
One solution to this conundrum, of course, is to take one sort of
evil to stand for all others, to serve as a kind of medium of exchange. Maybe pain could serve as such a punitive currency, repaying specific evils with generic badness. The extravagant
punishment of the soul of Ardiaeus, however, serves both as an example of this sort of thinking and as a sign of its insufficiency. The
punishment is not only of infinite duration; it is also unimaginably
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intense, and the one being punished in this way does not in any
way signal to us what his experience is. Now, it is possible, of
course, that we hear nothing from the soul of Ardiaeus because
there is no need. If his soul is incurable, perhaps his punishment is
not for him but an example to others, and in order for him to serve
as an example, all that matters is that they take his experience as
an example, whatever he himself may think of it. Consistent with
this interpretation is the presence of the guards who point out to
the others why these souls are being singled out for such treatment;
that is, it seems at least in part to be a show put on for their benefit.
Also consistent with this view is the claim that what improves the
judgment of those who make the underground passage is not just
that they have labored and suffered themselves, but also that they
have seen the labors and sufferings of others. Nonetheless, the absence of the directly suffering soul’s perspective on the single particular punishment reported to us underscores the problem,
outlined by omission in the preceding passage, of how a soul’s evil
can be represented to it—and this remains a problem.
If the soul’s thousand-year journey below the earth is to teach it
anything—as the improvement in its choice of life suggests it
does—then the soul must somehow have the evils it engaged in as
though they were something good presented to it as what they in
fact are. But in order to recognize one’s own wrongdoing for what
it is, the perpetrator must have a different perspective than was
available to him during the act, and this kind of thoroughgoing
change in perspective is, as we have learned, terribly difficult. In
the cave image, it is represented as a turning around that can simultaneously be a passage from what is darker to what is brighter
(that is, an actual improvement) and a passage from what is perceived clearly and comfortably to what is perceived only dimly
and painfully (that is, an apparent worsening). Something else is
needed: a trustworthy and trusted guide who can articulate what is
happening to the soul being forcibly turned around in this way. In
the end, pain by itself is too diffuse, too immediate, and too uncontextualized to bear the articulated meaning that would be necessary in order to effect this change, a fact that is perhaps hinted at
by the punishment’s tenfold repetition. Even the torture of the souls
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of the unholy, which might seem to stand on its own as an object
lesson in the wages of wrongdoing, is supplemented in the story
by agents standing by to explain it, which suggests that it cannot
bear its meaning within itself on its own.
In the case of both punishments and rewards, then, the report of
Er sets up certain expectations or requirements that it then pointedly does not or cannot fulfill. The rewards for a just life, we feel,
ought to reinforce the choice of justice, but instead they are presented as strongly correlated with the careless haste and entitled
self-importance that lead to a bad choice of life. As for the punishments, while they are said to have the effect they ought to, still,
the mechanism by which they are meant to accomplish this is
markedly obscure, and inquiring more closely into it only makes
the confusion more intense, particularly by directing attention to
the source of the problem: the soul and its perception of, or perspective on, the good. If the myth’s self-presentation is at odds with
its content, particularly in its central conceit, we have to turn elsewhere to discover its real import. One thing that is clear, as we
have just seen, is that the story concerns the soul. Just what is the
soul in this story?
One phrase in the description of souls’ choice of lives incidentally brings to the fore one of the key features of the myth’s portrayal of the soul. Er saw “a soul that used to belong to Orpheus”
choosing the life of a swan. The striking phrase “used to belong”
underlines something that must be assumed in order for the story
to work at all, and it does so compactly and forcefully. For the myth
to work, a soul, whatever else it may be, cannot be identical with
any named person. The name “Orpheus” must indicate the temporary composite of an otherwise anonymous soul with the singer’s
life whose story we know from myth. Any name, then, must miss
the soul and indicate only such a composite, even my name or
yours. The possessive in the phrase “my soul” becomes particularly
obscure. If I were to utter the words “my soul,” who would I be
saying the soul belongs to, and what would I be taking myself to
be that is distinct from my soul? Who or what is speaking when
the words “my soul” are uttered? Whatever we might previously
have thought it was, the story is now telling us that a soul is not
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identical with a life or a person, since it precedes and outlives both.
One possible source for this strange conception of the soul is the
discussion of its immortality earlier in Book 10 (608d-612a).
There, the question arises how the soul can be both immortal and
capable of being at odds with itself. Self-opposition (of the sort examined in Book 4) is associated with being composite, and this, in
turn, is associated with change and decay. A soul composed of
parts, it seems, could only be mortal. Instead of investigating this
dilemma, Socrates merely suggests that the view of soul that we
have—and that he and his interlocutors have had throughout the
whole of the dialogue—is like the view one would have of how a
man looks if one were to see only the statue of him that had lain at
the bottom of the sea for many years and become disfigured and
covered with shells, seaweed, rocks and so forth, as in the case of
the statue of Glaucus. The image more or less directly asserts that
our embeddedness in body, change, and manyness has made our
souls unrecognizable. This is an unpromising starting point, but
Socrates remains confident and ventures the guess that the soul’s
true nature is to be found by our looking to its philosophia, its love
of wisdom. This recalls another account of the division of the soul
that emerges from the yet earlier discussion of the terrible evils of
tragic poetry in Book 10. This account divides the soul’s philosophical, calculating, law-abiding part, which suffers misfortune
in silence and tranquility, from another part, which indulges in loud
lamentation. The latter is itself indulged by writers of tragedies,
who trick even the decent man into weeping immoderately at the
misfortunes of another on the grounds that this is at least not selfpitying, and is only a kind of play (606a-b). The gist seems to be
that the first part of the soul would do its work better without the
second. Both accounts, then, solve the problem of manyness by
making one part stand for the whole. Whatever the merits or faults
of such a solution, we should consider that if the true identity of
the soul should turn out to be only its rational part understood in
this way, then the whole drama of existence—the stories of our
lives as we commonly understand them—would be wholly irrelevant, composed entirely of a sort of encrustation of alien matter
that only serves to obscure the soul from view. By themselves, on
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this view, souls might essentially have nothing to do with lives.
While these two prior discussions of soul seem relevant to the
myth and are consonant with some aspects of its sharp distinctions
between soul and person and between soul and life, they are at odds
with others. Souls in the myth are not heartless calculating machines, but beings capable of feeling and expressing emotion.
When the souls complete their respective journeys, they go off
“with delight” to the meadow where they confer. When those who
came from the underground passage recount what they have seen
and undergone there, they cry and lament in recalling it. When
these souls are nearing the exit and see some like the soul of Ardiaeus being rejected, they experience a great fear, which they note
is only one among many they have suffered. In sum, then, the souls
in the story respond emotively and expressively to their situation,
even during this time when they are presumed to exist in separation
from body and life.
In addition to transitory affections such as a moment of fear,
souls in the myth also have longer-standing dispositions or traits
of character. The soul of Ajax, son of Telamon, bitterly recalls the
judgment that granted the arms of the departed hero Achilles to
Odysseus instead of to him, and so flees humanity. The souls of
Orpheus and Agamemnon, in turn, make their choices of animal
lives out of long-standing hatred, of women in the first case and
of humanity in general in the second. In each case, these quasi-permanent states were crystallized, so to speak, by the trauma of their
previous lives (the very ones we associate with their names, as if
their souls had become those single lives). Their hatreds and resentment are very much not the passions of a moment, as they appear to have persisted unchanged and utterly undiminished
throughout their millennial journeys. A final, most significant example of a state or characteristic of soul allowed by the myth is
that of the soul of Odysseus, which “from memory of its former
labors, . . . had recovered from love of honor.” Somehow, the soul
as portrayed in the myth is capable of being affected by its life,
and affected in such a way as to be able to learn, not just greedily
carry forward the savor of bitter memory. In either case, however,
what we see is that however distinct souls may be from lives, their
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lives affect them. In light of this, perhaps it is time finally to turn
directly to what the story must take a life to be.
This is in one way the most straightforward and familiar element
of the story; everyone knows what a life is, what it is composed
of, why it is important, what makes it good or bad, and so forth. In
another way, however, the central conceit of the myth of Er requires a life to be something that is almost impossible to understand. Recall that the life contains elements like wealth or poverty,
good or bad birth, strength, beauty, political office or rule, and indeed everything that could characterize a life, or almost everything.
For, as was explained, since the soul that lives the life must be
changed by it, the life considered by itself does not contain an “ordering” or “arrangement” of soul (taxis). If our question is what
we ought to remove in thought from our usual conception of what
a life is in order to arrive at an idea of the lives whose paradigms
lie in the lap of Lachesis, the answer is both simple and perplexing:
we must remove everything that soul is. As it has done in many
places, the dialogue is once again causing a problem by treating a
distinction as a separation. When Socrates manages to bring the
conversation to a halt of this sort, he often turns to an image or example that retroactively modifies one of the discussion’s starting
points. We could try the same, and instead of trying to proceed with
delimitation or definition in the face of aporia, we might turn to an
example of what the myth takes to be a life, which it obligingly
provides.
None of the lives is very extensively described, but the first example of a life that is chosen is among the fullest. The nameless
soul that drew the first lot—which “participated in virtue out of
habit, without philosophy” after living in “an ordered regime”—
picked the life containing the biggest tyranny straightaway, “but it
escaped its notice that eating his children and other evils accompanied this.” It escaped his notice. How strange. How can we understand this? Should we agree with the old song that “the large print
giveth and the small print taketh away”?2 Do the events or elements
of a life presented to choice differ in their prominence, such that
some would count as the large print, and some as the small? And
2. Tom Waits, “Step Right Up” (Small Change, Asylum Records, 1976).
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what would determine which appear more or less prominent? Just
what is written or figured on the paradigms of lives in the lap of
Lachesis? In the example just considered, the great tyranny looks
good at first, but when the soul “considered the life at its leisure,”
it discovered its evils, and was unhappy with its lot.
In a way, this latter portrait of a life is familiar and cogent: a life
containing an apparent good may of necessity also contain actual
evils that counterbalance or even outweigh the apparent good. But
in another way, this is an unsatisfactory way of talking about a life.
It tries to mark the badness of the life that contains one sort of fact
sometimes thought to be good (being a tyrant) by pointing out that
it also contains another sort of fact, which is generally acknowledged to be bad (eating one’s children). The whole question of
what makes a life good or bad has been reduced to the piecemeal
evaluation of particulars, and the summation of such judgments,
as in what is sometimes called a rubric.
But we really ought to doubt this soul’s assessment of its chosen
life, since we have already been told that it makes the choice affected by folly and gluttony. It could be so misguided as to be mistaken about which of the life’s elements is good and which bad. In
fact, we have already been told in Book 9 that the worst possible
eventuality for a soul that is tyrannically inclined is for it to become
an actual tyrant. Conversely, it may be that something as horrible
as eating his children is an appropriate accompaniment to the
“large print” of his being a tyrant.
But just inverting the assessment this foolish soul made of each
of these facts does not really solve the deeper problem, of which
the problem of the relative prominence of a life’s parts—its large
and its small print—is just a symptom. The component elements
of a life in the myth are subject to two seemingly contradictory demands: they must be “without an arrangement of soul,” and thus
be somehow meaningless, and they must be capable of “leading”
the soul to being just or unjust, and thus somehow have a meaning.
As for the former term of the contradiction, given that there are
good and bad among rich and poor alike, wealth, to pick one example, looks like the sort of thing that the Stoic Epictetus would
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call indifferent, something that is of no importance when compared
with the greater question of whether we are living well, and does
not by itself answer the question. As for the latter, however, the
soul that has learned the art of choosing lives well, Socrates says,
will call lives good or bad depending on whether they “lead to
virtue or vice.” But now we have to ask: how can events be said to
“lead” to virtue or vice at all unless they have within them the germ
of a sense, an incipient significance that is preserved in what it
gives rise to?
As in other similar cases, the commentary on the myth is quite
relevant and helpful, if somewhat oblique. Socrates portrays in
some detail the person who has acquired the art of choosing lives
well. He says: “He will take into account all the things we have
just mentioned and how in combination and separately they affect
the virtue of a life. Thus he may know the effects, bad and good,
of beauty mixed with poverty or wealth and accompanied by this
or that habit of soul; and the effects of any particular mixture with
one another of good and bad birth, private station and ruling office,
strength and weakness, facility and difficulty in learning, and all
such things that are connected with a soul by nature or are acquired.
From all this he will be able to draw a conclusion and choose—
while looking off toward the nature of the soul—between the worse
and the better life, calling worse the one that leads it toward becoming more unjust, and better the one that leads it to becoming
more just” (618c-e).
One of the most striking things in this passage, I think, is the intensity of its emphasis on combination. The possessor of the art of
choosing lives is said to consider the elements of lives both “separately and in combination” but all the examples are of complex
configurations. Here, then, is one way in which something can both
have a meaning and not have it in itself: it can have its meaning in
being combined with something else. Note that the myth helps us
here. The composition of elements that makes up each life is not
something chosen; the lives have already been assembled by the
time the souls have to choose them. Rather, souls are to call lives
good or bad on the basis of no element in them, but on the basis of
what living such a life will work in the soul that lives it. That is,
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what was being chosen (whether or not this escaped the choosers’
notice) was not an indifferently composed aggregate of particular
life-events or features, but something whose value lies on another
level.
Another striking feature of the passage is how thoroughly confusing it makes the separation of life and soul that lies at the basis
of the myth. In the first place, the possessor of the art is said to
know about the effects of mixtures that include elements such as
“this or that habit of soul.” This seems directly opposed to the
claim that lives are without an “ordering” or “arrangement” of soul.
Including this feature does not in itself introduce an inconsistency;
rather, it states the problem well: the soul that sets out to have
wealth or any other good thing will be changed by its pursuit, so
that there is no guarantee it will still want or be able to enjoy what
it was pursuing by the time it gets it. The one who possesses the
art would have to be able to predict what changes the living of a
life would work in the soul. In short, what makes elements of a life
part of a life that can be called good or bad is their connection with
the soul that has to live that life—the suffering, rejoicing, experiencing, remembering, expressing, and thinking being. These powers are what lend to those events or conditions whatever sense they
have. Here we see another way in which a life has a meaning, but
not in itself; it has a meaning in and for a soul.
To state the matter most generally, elements of a life are capable
of having a meaning that is not in them because that’s just what it
is to be an element of a life: to be a “Here” that is also, with all the
weight Plotinus gives the word, a “There.” The seeming paradox
is just the reality of our situation, and one that Plato has been carefully directing our attention to throughout the dialogue. We spend
as much time as we do in this dialogue on the proper organization
of an educational program not merely for the stated reason—that
we need guardians who will be both harsh with the city’s enemies
and gentle with its citizens. Rather, as the central books show and
the final myth signifies, the deeper issue is that what is most immediately apparent is always somehow a distraction from the intelligible reality of what is. But the sensible is not merely
something other than the intelligible: it is the region wherein the
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intelligible shows itself; it is where we live. The small things matter. The ball I learn to catch may be little more than arbitrary mineral, vegetable, and animal products refashioned to the measure of
a human hand, but the act of catching that this ball makes possible
is an emblem and anticipation of all sorts of future forms of mastery. The little bumps and tussles of playground life are like so
many prophetic utterances spoken to us in childhood that foretell
adult life’s disappointments—its alliances and betrayals, its kindness and its savagery—and they foretell them with both the accuracy and the obscurity that are characteristic of an oracle. Our lives
consist not in isolated events, but in pattern and paradigm, eidē on
the move.
This strange mode of being of the elements of our lives is a feature of the world of the myth of Er that also happens to be a feature
of our world; it is the literally true thing at the center of a mass of
figurative falsehoods, and around which the whole turns. It is the
true thing that seems strange to us who have become strangers to
it. The elements of lives can appear big or small, cruel twists of
fate, or irrelevant impediments to powers we find we do not need
to get by. We who live them do not experience ourselves as having
chosen them. But reflecting on the image of our souls choosing
our lives can awaken us from the dream-state in which we treat the
meanings of our lives as beings, as ta onta, as things that always
are, with no tincture of ambiguity or self-opposition, no dependence on perspective or interpretation, no horizon of possible transformation. On the contrary, we should recognize our lives in their
truth: they are the materials—somehow both indifferent and essential—out of which souls weave the tissue of meaning they first put
on and then inhabit; they are elements that stand to our souls and
hearts as those other elements—earth, air, fire, and water—stand
to the multifariously capable bodies of living beings of all kinds,
their material support and flesh. When the elements of our bodies
or lives fail us, we break, but when they cooperate, we succeed in
being something they would not be on their own, something other
and beyond.
The myth tells us that we need to learn how to cooperate with
these elements and their ways, so that we may make a good pas-
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sage in this life and the next, and perhaps in the next after that. But
what would make for a good passage? What should we hope for?
A well-deserved reward? Or a suffering that makes the soul better?
The beautiful sights and pleasant experiences that the myth sets up
as a reward for a good life carry with them the same ambiguity as
the goods of this life: many souls are not improved by them, but
turn out worse. To answer the question, we might think of the soul
that once belonged to Odysseus. Of this restless and clever soul,
we were not told whether it had come down from heaven or up
from the earth, only that memory of its former labors had cured it.
Those labors could have been carried out on earth as part of the
life we associate with Odysseus’s name—where he struggled to
regain his home after long years in foreign lands, losing all his
comrades—or they could have been performed as payment in that
place beneath the earth, some days’ journey from the spindle of
Necessity where lives are woven. Perhaps our hope and prayer
should be the same as his could have been: may we all perform
such labors, and remember them, and be cured of what ails us.
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Artistic Expression in Animals
Linda Wiener
I have three main goals in this lecture. The first, and most important, is to inspire you to be more open to and aware of the animals
all around you. The second is to give some history of a fascinating
debate on animal color and behavior that began in the early twentieth century in the United States; this will illustrate how difficult
it is to elicit any sort of Truth from the phenomena of nature. The
third is to persuade you that, at least some of the time, animals engage in artistic expression for its own sake.
Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species
in 1859,1 by far the most popular way of interpreting the appearance and behavior of organisms has been through the theory of natural selection. According to this theory, if a mutation appears in an
animal and that mutation helps the animal survive and reproduce
better than similar animals in their environment, the mutation and
the animals that carry it will be preserved while others will eventually decline and die out. But ever since this theory was published
there has been dissent. The most well known dissents are from religious objectors, however there have always been some scientists,
naturalists, philosophers, and others who work intimately with
plants and animals who accept the theory of evolution through natural selection, but believe that it is not sufficient to account for all
the phenomena of nature. I am one of this latter group.
In this lecture, I will use the lens of artistic expression in animals
as a way of exploring this question. I begin with an example from
bird song. I was at a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,
Linda Wiener is a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
This paper is adapted from a lecture delivered at the College’s Annapolis
campus on September 6, 2013. The original lecture involved images and
some video clips. This version makes do with some photographs, as well
as links to images on the web. Be sure to open the links and look at the
images while reading!
1. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, first edition (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2001.
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given by the Santa Fe Community Orchestra at the Santa Fe Opera
House in May, 2008. The opera house is covered on top, but open
around the sides. At the very beginning of the third movement, a
flock of house finches flew in and perched above the orchestra.
One male joined in singing with the music in such a way that it
seemed a part of the piece. He sang for most of the third movement
and at the very end of that movement, when the orchestra plays
four notes, the bird came in afterward, using the contact chirps of
the species, and mimicked those last four notes.
This is an example of a bird singing in his capacity as a musician. He shows that he knows something about music and can employ it appropriately outside its use for attracting mates and
protecting territories. This propensity of a least some birds to sing
outside the mating and nesting seasons was noted by Thoreau and
more recently by David Rothenberg in his book Why Birds Sing.2
David is a philosopher and jazz clarinetist. He plays his clarinet
with birds in aviaries and in the wild, sometimes with remarkable
results. As with the bird at the opera house, some birds respond
musically to his musical prompting. I particularly like a duet he
participated in with a laughing thrush; it can be heard online.3
Rothenberg concludes that birds sing because they enjoy it.
Other animals have been reported to respond to human music. I
read that crickets will approach when they hear music and start
singing. My own experiments with two species of crickets were
inconclusive; they chirped so much it was hard to tell when they
were responding to music and when they were chirping in their
natural rhythms. I have been told stories of raccoons coming on
stage during a concert. There is also record of a bear doing the
same thing (Fig. 1).
Moving on from music, probably the most famous artistic animals are the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea. For instance,
the satin bowerbird builds an oval shaped bower out of sticks and
decorates it with mostly blue objects. This includes flowers, berries,
and even human-made items like plastic drinking straws. Other
species have differently shaped bowers and use different color
2. David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
3. http://www.whybirdssing.com
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63
Fig. 1: Bear at concert4
schemes. The vogelkop bowerbird builds a conical bower and decorates mostly with red and orange objects.5 The females come
around to check out the male bowers, the males dance for them, and
then the female selects a male to mate with. She then goes off to
build a nest and raises the young on her own.
This is a classic example of what Darwin called “sexual selection” in his book Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex.6
In Darwin’s account, the females have aesthetic standards and
whichever male best meets those standards is the one she chooses
as a mate.
Darwin thought sexual selection less rigorous than ordinary natural selection because it was not a life and death matter. Recently,
Darwin's view of sexual selection has been revised. Now, the
building, decorating, and dancing activities of the male are seen
as direct reflections of the actual genetic quality of the males. The
females are selecting the males not according to an aesthetic standard, but according to which are the most genetically fit. This
brings sexual selection theory more in line with the classic theory
of natural selection.
4. From Carl Marty, Northenaire’s Ginger and Her Woodland Orphans
(Park Falls, Wisconsin: MacGregor Litho, 1953).
5. http://www.duskyswondersite.com/animals/bower-birds
6. Charles Darwin, Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New
York: Penguin, 2004).
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A group of birds called the catbirds, in the same family as the
bower birds, helps raise a few questions about this modern understanding. In the catbirds, the males and females cooperate to build
the nest and rear the young; on average catbirds rear more offspring than the bowerbirds. An alternative explanation for bowerbird behavior is that the bower birds have “chosen” in some way
to forgo their maximum reproductive potential in order to devote
energy to the creation and appreciation of art.
Closer to home, there are other collecting and decorating animals. The pack rat of the Southwestern states is one. They are
beloved by archaeologists because they collect all sorts of things
from their surroundings and store them in their nests. An ancient
pack rat nest can tell scientists a lot about the sorts of things that
were around at the time. Pack rats are also famous for being destructive when they choose to nest in your home or vehicle. Whenever I hear friends complain about a pack rat nest, I beg them for
photographs.
Pack rats have different preferences when constructing their
nests. Sometimes, it is just a bunch of sticks and a few fabulous
items they have collected. My friends Betsy and Jamie had a nest
in their vehicle with a central white fluffy nest structure, then an
attractive bed of greens with dried red chiles piled in the center
(Fig. 2a). My friends Robert and Susan had a pack rat nest in their
vehicle with a central grey fluffy nest structure surrounded by a
variety of sticks, stems, and cholla cactus pads (Fig. 2b).
Fig. 2a
Photo by Jaimie Haskell
Fig. 2b
Photo by Robert Schlaer
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ESSAYS & LECTURES | WIENER
Another friend, Pam, tells this story about a pack rat nest she
found in her truck. She was so mad when she saw the nest, she
threw everything on the ground; when she came back some time
later, it was all back in the truck. Not only that, it was back in just
the way it had been before, with each major element, stems, sticks,
and other items in exactly the same spot. This shows us that the
nest isn’t just a bunch of stuff thrown around. The pack rat arranges
her space to her own taste. Just as when someone messes up one
of your rooms, you put it back to its original arrangement, so too
does the pack rat.
Let’s look at some domestic animals. I had three ferrets over a
period of about nine years. They were all avid collectors. They had
stashes of the stuff they collected; there was a main stash usually
under and couch or in a cabinet, and smaller satellite stashes in
various locations. I noticed that they went through periods of collecting. My ferret Fennel collected soft things like beanie babies
and stuffed animals for a while and then switched to hard things
like pill bottles and vials. They also had a sense of value. If they
found something unusual, it would be hidden way in the back underneath other items in the stash, whereas a common object like a
pencil would just be thrown in anywhere.
My colleague Llyd Wells in Santa Fe has a ferret named Tomato
who makes stashes.
Tomato keeps a stash of mostly soft items in the closet in the
bedroom (Fig. 3a) and another stash of mostly harder rubber items
under the sink in the bathroom (Fig. 3b). Llyd will switch an item
Fig. 3a
Tomato’s bedroom stash
Fig. 3b
Tomato’s bathroom stash
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out of one stash into the other and Tomato is quick to “correct”
this. Tomato has organized her stashes and knows how they are
supposed to be.
If it seems like I am talking about ferret collecting in much the
same way I might talk about human collecting, it is because I am.
This brings up the bad word anthropomorphism. I am accused of
projecting my own desires, intentions, and activities onto the ferrets. However, if I see an animal acting in much the same way I
would in a similar situation, why shouldn't I, at least as a first step,
assume that it is acting with similar desires and motivations? After
all, the ferret, the pack rat, and me are all children of nature. We
have all evolved on this earth; why should we be assumed to be so
alien to one another?
Here is one more example from our domestic animals. Robby
is a dog who belongs to friends Jonathan and Barbara. He has a
basket of stuffed animals and when his people are away he makes
careful arrangements of them on the living room floor. A typical
one has four evenly spaced animals in a straight line, with one off
center (Fig. 4a). A slightly more complex arrangement has two of
the same animals, in different colors, together. There are two animals, evenly spaced on either side of these two and then down from
the ends, another animal on each side with different, but still even,
spacing (Fig. 4b).
Fig. 4a
Robby’s animals, simple
Fig. 4b
Robby’s animals, complex
Also typical of Robby’s work: the stuffed frog is in every arrange-
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67
ment. This is definitely not the work of an animal just throwing
things around because he is mad that his people are away.
A few years ago on YouTube there was a doberman who made
similar stuffed animal arrangements, though he went in more for
circular patterns. Let me take a moment to recommend YouTube
as a valuable source of information about animal behavior. Now
that most people have small video cameras or cell phones with
them all the time, an amazing variety of animal behavior has been
recorded and put online. Behaviors that I would have been called
crazy for reporting ten years ago are now accessible to everyone.
And everyone can judge for themself.
These collecting and decorating behaviors show us a range of
possibilities in nature. They are essential to the reproductive biology of the bower birds and certainly serve a utilitarian function for
them. For pack rats and ferrets these activities are typical of the
species, but do not serve any essential functions that we know of.
Robby the dog’s activities are not at all typical of the species, but
such behavior pops up now and then among dogs. I have read of
other cases in which one or a few animals engage in these kinds of
activities, though, again, they are not typical of the species. There
were a group of pigs7 who made arrangements out of shingles and
dirt and even a wolverine who made arrangements of sticks in a
chain link fence, left them up for a few days, and then made a new
arrangement.8
I suggest that the musical, collecting, and decorating activities I
have been chronicling are not always specifically evolved to serve
mating rituals or other survival needs, but may be part of a much
broader expressiveness in the natural world that can be turned to
utilitarian functions, but need not be.
When we look at invertebrates, it is a little harder to judge what
they intend, because they are not so closely related to us. Let’s look
at a few examples that might count as art for art’s sake. The decorator urchin collects various materials from the ocean floor and
7. Noel Perrin, Second Person Rural (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980).
8. Douglas Chadwick, The Wolverine Way (Ventura, California: Patagonia
Books; 2010).
9. http://www.flickr.com/photos/benjaminbull/2844381114
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puts them on top of its spines. I have read that this is for camouflage, but the photos that I have seen do not support this; they are
all highly visible.9
Harvester ants are common in the Southwestern United States.
Their nests are covered with small stones and are famous as collecting sites for various materials that people want. Some are covered
in crystals and sparkle in the sun. People know they are the place to
go to find turquoise and beads. Paleontologists find small fossils
from rodents on their nests, and scientists studying radioactive minerals go to their nests to find trinitite, the mineral formed from the
first atomic bomb test at the Trinity site in New Mexico.10
Garden spiders, also called writing spiders, build orb webs and
decorate them with zig zag patterns that are different for each
species.11 Henri Fabre, the great French entomologist, called these
their “signature.” I had, until recently, not read any plausible accounts of their function. It turns out, however, that the silk in the
“signature” is different from the web silk. It reflects ultraviolet
light and may function to attract insects into the web.
This is still untested, but does seem plausible. Even so, a further
question is why the web is decorated in just this way. Why do such
decorations seem more than is needed to fulfill the functions they
serve? This is one of the main questions that David Rothenberg,
the man who wrote Why Birds Sing, pursues in a more recent book
called Survival of the Beautiful.12
Usually when we think about animals and art, we are not thinking
about the arrangement of a pack rat’s nest or the beads on a harvester ant’s nest. We are thinking, rather, that animals are beautiful.
Humans have long appropriated bird feathers and animal skins for
our own adornment. I am an entomologist, and so I look at insects
a lot. Consider this beetle (Fig. 5)—the highly ornamented form of
the legs, the shape and texture of the thorax, the colors and patterns
on the wing covers. It is a fantastic animal and only has to be put
on a background and photographed to be easily seen as art. This is
10. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mouser-nerdbot/5334689193
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Argiope_aurantia_web.jpg
12. David Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011).
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Fig. 5
“Coleoptera” by Jo Whaley
one of the ideas behind a book, The Theater of Insects,13 that I collaborated on with photographer Jo Whaley.
Other insect colors are understood as serving important protective functions. The great purple hairstreak, a butterfly I see in New
Mexico, has prominent white polka dots set in a black background
on its head and thorax, a bright orange abdomen, and iridescent
scales on its wings.14 The top of the wings are a beautiful irridescent purple. The bold black, white, and orange colors are referred
to as warning coloration. Insects that are poisonous such as the
black and orange monarch butterfly, or dangerous like the yellowand-black-striped wasps and bees, have these kinds of color patterns. The theory is that predators such as birds learn to avoid these
patterns and so the animals are protected. Also, insects that are neither poisonous nor dangerous may evolve these patterns to fool
predators into refusing to eat them.
The peacock spiders, a group of jumping spiders, have wonderful bright color patterns, and special flag-like structures on their
second pair of legs.15 They do elaborate courtship dances for the
females. This again seems like a classic example of sexual selection in that the colors, patterns, ornaments, and dancing serve an
13. Jo Whaley, Deborah Klochko, and Linda Wiener, The Theater of Insects (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008).
14. http://www.jeffpippen.com/butterflies/greatpurplehairstreak.htm
15. http://amazinglist.net/2013/02/the-peacock-spider-maratus-volans
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essential function in attaining a mate.
Consider, however, the radiolarians. They are one-celled animals
that live in the ocean. They are an old lineage, existing for over
600 million years. They have an amazing variety of forms, ornaments, and textures that serve no known functions.16 It seems that
as soon as there were animals, even just single-celled ones, there
was already a tendency toward elaboration. Again, I suggest that
such elaboration may be part of a basic expressive function of nature. Such appearances are not necessarily evolved to serve particular survival or reproductive functions.
Hold that thought. Now I am going to turn to the debate I mentioned earlier. Abbott Thayer was a well known portrait painter in
New England at the turn of the twentieth century. He was famous
for portraits of women with angel’s wings. He was also famous for
his theory of animal coloration. With his son Gerald, he published
a book in 1909 called Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom.17 I came across this book quite by accident about eight years
ago and was enthralled by it. Contrary to the theory of his day, and
also contrary to the theory of our day, the Thayers thought that all
animal colors were concealing.
The frontispiece of the book, a painting, shows a male peacock
with his colorful tail concealed in the colorful leaves on the forest
floor and his beautiful blue neck concealed against the sky (Fig. 6).
This vantage would be from the point of view of a ground predator
such as a fox.
More plausible, perhaps, is his photographic plate of a grouse
showing it concealed in its forest environment (Fig. 7).
Almost everyone would agree that grouse are well concealed in
the forests in which they live. But, Thayer goes further. He tells us
that if you want to know what a forest looks like, you should not go
around looking at forests because they will confuse you with their
idiosyncracies. You should look at animals such as the grouse who
must be concealed wherever they are in the forest. Thayer writes:
16. http://incrediblebeings.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/radiolarians-10species-2.jpg
17. Gerald Thayer and Abbott Thayer, Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (New York: MacMillan, 1909).
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Fig. 6
Thayer plate of a grouse
concealed in the forest
Fig. 7
Thayer plate of a grouse
concealed in the woods
They are, in the best sense of the word, triumphs of art;
and in a sense they are absolute, as human art can never
be . . . There he will find it in epitome, painted and perfected by nature herself. Color and pattern, line and shading, all are true beyond the power of man to imitate, or
even fully to discern.18
It was this insight that led Thayer to become the father of military camouflage. He went around trying to get the U. S. military
18. Thayer, 240.
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to adopt the idea. He failed, though the French military took him
up on it. Now, of course, military camouflage is well established
everywhere.
Under the influence of this book, I was failing to see animals
everywhere. Driving in the high plains along Route 285 in New
Mexico in the early spring, I would think of Thayer’s claim that
antelope are marked so as to be concealed on the patchy background of snow and bare soil.19 I would be thinking that there were
hundreds of antelope out there, but that I could not see any of them.
The problem with this construal is that in fact you can see them,
especially if you are looking for them.
One person who read Thayer’s book and was incensed by it was
Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, he was so incensed that he published
a 120-page rebuttal in the Bulletin of the American Museum of
Natural History.20 Roosevelt writes: “It is impossible to go over
page by page the really countless erroneous statements, wild
guesses, and absurd interpretations of fact which the book contains.” He cuts the Thayers some slack because of their artistic temperaments, but finds their lack of knowledge inexcusable. As you
may know, Roosevelt was famous as a big game hunter and could
easily take the point of view of a predator. He was also an excellent
naturalist and knew the names and habits of all the small birds and
mammals that lived around him. Going back to the frontispiece,
Roosevelt points out that if the peacock is indeed concealed in the
forest environment, then the peahen—which is very differently colored—must be conspicuous in that environment.
Here is a summary of some of his main objections: First, Roosevelt says that it is our eyes, and not the colors of the animals,
that determine whether we will see them. He tells us that his native
guides in Africa could often see animals he failed to pick out. Further, cover is more important in concealing animals than their colors, motion is also more important than colors, and besides, most
predators hunt by scent and do not use their eyes until they are very
19. http://kenarcherphotos.com/p953706307/h1BF0CD15#h1bf0cd15
20. Theodore Roosevelt, "Revealing and Concealing Coloration in Birds
and Mammals,” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 30
(1911):119-239.
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73
close—and by then they already know the animal is there. All these
objections have merit. In fact, Roosevelt almost, not quite, but almost, claims that all animals are conspicuously colored, the opposite of the Thayers’ claim.
Before going on I want to relate an incident that happened while
I was still very much under the influence of Thayer’s book. I was
watching mallard ducks on a pond at sunset with my daughter. The
speckled brown females were difficult to see wherever they were—
on the bank, in a tree, or in the water. The males, which Thayer
claims are concealingly colored in the pond environment, were
very easy to see.21 We were watching a particular male swim across
the pond, and at one point it suddenly and completely disappeared.
That is, its white back matched the sparkly white water of the pond
at sunset, its brown breast matched the reflection of a tree trunk in
the water, and its green head matched the reflection of foliage in
the water. It was so startling that I actually jumped. Then, a halfsecond or a second later, it swam out of that position and again
could be easily seen.
So, Thayer is only a little bit right when he claims that male mallards are concealed in their pond environment. For the most part
they are not. However, a kind of secret was revealed through this
experience. They seem somehow born of their environment. It was
as if someone had taken a piece out of a jigsaw puzzle of a pond
at sunset and turned it into a male mallard duck.
One more important participant in this debate on animal coloration was John Burroughs, a naturalist and writer from New York
state. He published an essay in 1908 entitled “Gay Plumes and
Dull.”22 In it he takes up the topic of concealing coloration. He has
his own set of objections to the theory. He points out that if concealing coloration were so important to animal survival, you would
expect all animals in a given environment to be the same color, yet
we see that they are not. Also, we would expect concealingly colored animals such as grouse to be more abundant than brightly col21. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mclap/4366013629
22. John Burroughs, “Gay Plumes and Dull,” in Leaf and Tendril (New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1908).
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ored animals such as male cardinals and pheasants, and we would
expect the females of these last two species to be more abundant
than the males. Yet, this is not what we see. From experience I can
say that this is also the case with insects. Species with concealing
colors are not more numerous as a rule than brightly colored ones.
Burroughs writes:
Whatever truth there may be in this theory of protective
coloration, one has only to look about him to discover
that it is a matter which Nature does not have very much
at heart. She plays fast and loose with it on every hand.
Now she seems to set great store by it, the next moment
she discards it entirely.23
Burroughs accounts for the colors of the antelope and other animals like this:
Things in nature blend and harmonize. One thing
matches with another. . . . Arctic life will blend more or
less with Arctic snows, tree animals will show greater
variety in tint and form, plains animals will be dull of
hue like the plains . . . through the law of natural assimilation, like begetting like, variety breeding variety.24
He reaches for a “law of natural assimilation” to explain this,
and also reaches for another natural law to explain differences in
coloration between males and females of the same species:
His gay plumes are the badge of his masculinity . . . the
riot and overflow of the male sexual principle.25
Females being generally more dull in hue partake in a more passive female principle of nature. Burroughs still feels that the appearances have not been fully accounted for. He goes further,
speculating that:
It is like the caprice of fashion . . . exaggerated plumes,
fantastic colors, and monstrous beaks of many birds in
both hemispheres have as little apparent utility, and seem
23. Burroughs, Leaf and Tendril, 61.
24. Ibid., 80.
25. Ibid., 95.
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WIENER
75
to be quite as much the result of caprice, as are any of
the extreme fashions in dress among human beings.26
Even in the animal world, there is fashion. One man who takes
up this theme, decades later, is Roger Caillois, a French philosopher who published a book in 1964 entitled The Mask of Medusa.27
Caillois was especially interested in the phenomenon of mimicry
in the insect world. The dead leaf butterfly is a good exarnple.28
The undersides of the wings are a perfect mimic of a dead leaf,
complete with leaf veins, fungal spots, and a broken stem. If this
butterfly was immobile in leaves on a forest floor, you would never
see it. However, it is not uncommon to see these insects outside of
the environment where they would be concealed, as if they are,
perhaps, showing off.
Another spectacular mimetic caterpillar is Hemeroplanes triptolemus, found in Central America.29 It looks like a regular caterpillar when it is feeding on a branch, however in the last stage
before it pupates, if disturbed, it turns upside down and comes at
you looking for all the world like a tree viper, though the “eyes”
are not real and cannot see. The theory is that birds or other predators think they are in the presence of an animal that is dangerous to
them and are frightened away, instead of eating the caterpillar. It is
thought that any caterpillar that deviates from the perfect mimetic
form will be spotted and eaten by predators until, eventually, the
most perfect mimics are “created” by this selective predation.
Many butterflies and moths are known as snake mimics. The
spicebush swallowtail, native to the United States, is one such
caterpillar.30 To me, this caterpillar looks more like a friendly
stuffed toy snake than a dangerous enemy. We need to wonder why
it is that the first mimic is so perfect if this second one is an effective deterrent of predation. Adults may also be identified as snake
26. Ibid., 90.
27. Roger Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, tr. George Ordish (New York:
C. N. Potter, 1964).
28. http://beastlyvirtues.blogspot.com/2013/03/fuxianhuia-who.html
29. http://madasamarinebiologist.com/post/16015203836/snake-mimiccatepillar
30. http://www.pinterest.com/pin/459859811920520201/
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mimics. Philip Howse, of Southampton University in England
claims that the wing of the atlas moth is a cobra mimic.30 Look at
a whole atlas moth.31 Again, we are led to wonder why, if birds are
such astute and perceptive predators, they don’t know that cobras
are five feet long and live in the rice paddies, not five inches long
and hanging in the air.
Caillois notes this “aimless delirium of perfection in nature,”
and proposes that mimicry is an autonomous force in the world of
biology that does not require utilitarian explanations. He goes further and also invokes, like Burroughs, a principle of fashion, connecting it with the phenomenon of mimicry:
But in the case of man, fashion is also a phenomenon of
mimicry, of an obscure contagion of fascination with a
model which is imitated for no real reason.32
The plant hoppers are a group of sap-sucking insects that live
on trees and shrubs. They have an astounding variety of forms.33
They may resemble wasps as one of the photos on the foregoing
site sort of does. You can see the black and white stripes, the narrow “wasp waist,” and a variety of pointed projections that may
deter a predator. Notice that the real body is underneath the wings.
The whole “wasp” is a projection of the prothoracic segment. It is
as if the plant hopper is wearing a mask or a costume. If we look
at other plant hoppers, we will be impressed that many do not seem
to be mimics at all. Their colors, shapes, and ornaments seem more
like the work of a playful, creative imagination.
So far, I have been referring to art as something like “the beautiful.” Now we are seeing, in the natural world, a different category
of art, that of mask and costume, a category that has a wide variety
of functions in the human world. Caillois was especially interested
in an insect called the lantern bug (Fig. 8). They are related to the
30. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/8082739/Butterflies-andmoths-mimic-snakes-and-foxes-to-fool-predators-claims-researcher.html
31. http://butterflycircle.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-atlas-moth-chroniclesepisode-1.html
32. Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, 41.
33. http://femtasia.blogspot.com/2010/11/membracidae.html
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WIENER
77
Fig. 8
Lantern Bug34
tree hoppers and also live by sucking sap from trees. It is a Swiss
army knife of a bug; the forewings mimic dead leaves, when they
are lifted up there are two prominent eye spots. These are generally
interpreted as looking like vertebrate eyes so that a potential predator, thinking it is in the presence of a larger predator that could be
a danger to it, will be frightened away. Best of all, it has a large alligator mask above its real head. You can see the eyes, the nostrils,
and the row of teeth. Again, we must question. Don’t the predators
know that alligators are 6 feet long and live in the river, rather than
an inch or so long and in a tree?
Caillois compares the lantern bug to a human shaman. The dead
leaf forewings are its cloak of invisibility which can be suddenly
thrown off to reveal the conscious being who had been hidden. He
writes:
Where there was nothing, there is suddenly horror. The
insect knows how to frighten; what is more it gives rise
34. James Duncan, Introduction to Entomology, Vol. 1 [Vol. 30 of The
Naturalist’s Library, ed. Sir William Jardine] (Edinburgh: W. H. Lizars,
1840), Plate 22.
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to a particular kind of fear, an imaginary terror not corresponding to any real danger . . . working through the
strange and fantastic.35
One further example of this phenomenon is the oleander hawkmoth caterpillar, Daphnis nerii.36 This caterpillar, when viewed
from a certain angle, exhibits creepy glowing eyes that do not look
like those of any animal, but evoke horror. They have the same kind
of effect as eyes painted on a shield or the bow of a ship. This suggests that birds, monkeys and other predators may be susceptible
to a kind of existential dread brought on by these false, staring eyes.
The wide range of such costume- and mask-effects in insects
mirrors the many uses of masks in human communities. There
are masks to disguise, to camoflauge, to frighten, to take on the
look and energies of another kind of creature—there are even
masks just for play. If we go with Caillois’s thought, we can see
that humans are not isolated from the rest of the natural world by
our art, our mythology, our psychology. We belong to the world
and can see aspects of these human features represented in the
behavior, or printed on the actual anatomy, of other animals.
I have been arguing that there is more going on in the world of
biology than natural selection for the purposes of survival and reproduction. Especially today, when most thinking about evolution
is connected with thinking about genes, we confine ourselves to a
narrow range of interpretation of biological phenomena. As a result,
we are continually underestimating the capacities of animals, and
this underestimation takes place before there are any data. We are
always tempted to read the capacities of animals off of their genes
or anatomy and from the theory of natural selection. No matter how
many times this is shown to be wrong-headed, these strategies are
constantly invoked. Truly, it is not possible to know what an animal
is capable of without actually observing its behavior for a long time
under a variety of circumstances.
It is assumed that bees have such tiny brains that they cannot do
symbolic reasoning, but showing that they do somehow does not
35. Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, 104.
36. http://www.flickr.com/photos/77995220@N00/9398097107
�ESSAYS & LECTURES | WIENER
79
challenge the general principle. When we limit beforehand what
we believe is possible, we often cannot see what is right in front
of our eyes, or we fail to reflect about it at all because we have already sorted out the observed appearance or behavior into one of
our preset categories. One thing is warning coloration, another is
sexual selection, another is protective coloration—and we’re done.
Not only do we fail to see, we lose a language that is adequate to
the actual phenomena. We lose a sense of Nature with a capital
“N,” a nature rife with potentiality and surprises, Nature as a principle of motion and change. Only the poets still use this sort of language with a good conscience.
I’ve been using the lens of artistic expression in animals as a
way to explore this issue.
Here at the end, in the coda, I would like to switch to a different
sort of example to illustrate this point. A few years ago there
showed up on YouTube some footage of an elk, named Shooter, at
the Pocatello Zoo in Idaho, saving a marmot from drowning in a
water tank.37 There were two witnesses, a veterinarian and an educator. The whole event took about 15 minutes. The elk was pawing at the water and with his big unwieldy antlers, trying to get his
head in the tank. Finally he lifted out the marmot, put it on the
ground, and gently nudged it with his foot. In a little while the marmot shook itself and ran into its hole. It is wonderful footage.
The odd thing to me was the narrative of the witnesses. Even as
we are watching, they are explaining that elk don’t do this. They
are all about survival. They speculate that it is only because
Shooter lives in a zoo and has his needs met that he can develop
more elaborate behavior. The scientist in me immediately asks how
we know that elk don’t do this. Do we have dozens of examples of
marmots squeaking in distress as they drown in mountain lakes
while elk graze unconcernedly on the shore? We don’t really know
as we only have one example of an elk confronted with this situation. Underlying the narrative is the view that elk behavior is
generic and aimed only toward survival. I suggest that the elk and
37. http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?id=8211416
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the marmot, who after all live in the exact same place, know each
other. This may be an act of individual friendship, not calling for
any explanation at all in terms of natural selection.
I hope I have stimulated you to look more carefully and think
more widely when you observe animals. The world of animal appearance and behavior is wide and wonderful. The next step is for
you to go outside and start looking around for yourself.
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Troy
Hannah Eagleson
Eris
You cannot even bite into it,
Feel color burst in your mouth,
Taste nectar on your tongue.
Hard gold spinning down the table,
Stopping talk,
Clanging pitchers,
Breaking glasses.
Spilling wine
On immortal gowns.
Setting at war
Beauty, wisdom, power
Unleashing the bronze spear and gleaming chariot,
The arrows’ iron,
Drawing jagged lines.
Eve had at least the momentary taste,
Flavor widening her eyes,
Fruit in her mouth
In exchange for Eden lost.
Troy fell for an apple no one tasted.
�POEMS | EAGLESON
Judgment
Did Priam ever wonder,
Why Paris? Like a filigree circlet,
Looking fine enough, delicately wrought,
But not much use in battle.
Why not Hector, steady and strong,
Brave and to be trusted?
Why not honey-tongued Odysseus on the other side,
Or fierce Agamemnon himself?
Why should Paris be unlucky enough
To stumble near the gods’ celebration,
Fool enough to think he could judge
Among beauty, wisdom, power?
And who would choose beauty?
What good is that,
To managing a kingdom?
Does it build the walls or feed the hungry?
Does it grow the wheat or press the grapes?
Does it strengthen the gates or make the wells run deeper?
Who would have thought that epics begin
Not with the bright spear or bronze helmet,
Not even with the twist of golden hair,
But with the slight prince
Strayed to the wrong table,
Making a fool’s choice?
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Three Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal
by Charles Baudelaire
Translated by Peter Kalkavage
The Swan (to Victor Hugo)
I
Andromache, I think of you! That little stream,
Poor and gloomy mirror where once there shone so bright
The tremendous majesty of your widow’s grief,
That lying Simoïs that grew great through your tears,1
Impregnated at once my fertile memory,
As I made my way across the new Carrousel. 2
Old Paris is no more (the form of one’s hometown
Is quicker to change, alas! than a mortal’s heart);
I see but in my mind that whole camp of makeshift huts,
Those piles of capitals, rough-hewn, and column-shafts,
The grass, the massive blocks turned green by standing pools,
And shining in the panes the scattered bric-a-brac.
There a menagerie at one time was spread out;
There I saw, one morning, under skies cold and clear,
At the hour when Work wakes, when street cleaners push
A menacing storm into the silent air,
A swan that had recently escaped from his cage,
And, scraping the dry pavement with his webby feet,
Was dragging his white plumage on the rugged ground.
Near a waterless ditch, the beast, opening his beak,
1. In the Aeneid (III, 302), Andromache, now a refugee in Epirus, weeps
for Hector near a “false” Simoïs, a river near Troy.
2. The Place du Carrousel, an area near the Louvre, underwent continual
renovation in the 1850s.
�POEMS | KALKAVAGE
85
Was nervously bathing his wings in the dust,
And said, heart full of his beautiful native lake:
“Water, when will you rain? Lightning, when will you roar?”
I see this ill-starred wretch, a strange and fatal myth,
Toward the heavens sometimes, like Man in Ovid’s poem,3
Toward the heavens ironic and cruelly blue,
On his convulsive neck straining his thirsty head,
As though he were addressing reproaches to God!
II
Paris changes! But nothing in my melancholy
Has budged! New palaces and scaffoldings and blocks,
Old quarters, all turns to allegory for me,
And my precious memories are heavier than rocks.
In front of that Louvre too an image weighs me down:4
I think of my great swan, with his gestures insane,
Like people in exile, ludicrous and sublime,
And gnawed by relentless desire! And then of you,
Andromache, fallen from a great husband’s arms,
Vile beast of the field, under Pyrrhus’s proud hand,
Near a bodiless grave, bent over in a swoon;
Hector’s widow, alas! and Helenus’s wife!5
I think of the negress, all consumptive and thin,
Trudging in the mud, and searching with haggard eye
For the now-absent palms of proud Africa’s land
In the distance behind the immense wall of fog;
3. Metamorphoses I, 84-85: “All other animals look downward; Man,/
Alone, erect, can raise his face toward Heaven.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses,
trans. Rolfe Humphries [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960], 5.)
4. That Louvre, i.e., the Louvre before the reconstruction in 1852 that
eliminated the old streets separating the Louvre from the Palace of the
Tuileries.
5. After the fall of Troy, Andromache and Helenus (Priam’s son) became
the slaves of Achilles’s son, Pyrrhus, who eventually let them marry
(Aeneid III, 321-336).
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Of whoever has lost what will never return—
Ever, ever! Of those who sate themselves with tears
And are suckled by Grief as by a good she-wolf!
Of skin-and-bone orphans withering like flowers!
And so, in the forest that inexiles my mind
An old Memory sounds with full blast of the horn!
I think of the sailors forgotten on an isle,
Of captives, the vanquished! . . . and many others still!
Fogs and Rains
O ends of autumn, winters, springtimes steeped in mud,
Sleepy-headed seasons! I love you and I praise you
For enveloping thus both my heart and my brain
With a vaporous shroud and a vague sort of tomb.
On that vast open plain where the cold storm-wind plays,
Where the weathercock rasps through the long drawn-out nights,
My soul, even better than in spring’s tepid time,
Will proceed to spread wide its great raven-black wings.
Nothing is more sweet to the funereal heart,
And on which for so long winter’s chill has come down,
O seasons drenched in pallor, you queens of our clime,
Than the unchanging look of your deathly-white gloom,
—Lest it be, on a night without moon, two by two,
To put sorrow to sleep on a perilous bed.
�POEMS | KALKAVAGE
87
The Vampire
You who, like a thrust of the knife,
Entered inside my plaintive heart;
You who, as mighty as a herd
Of demons, came, adorned and mad,
To make your bed and your domain
Of my humiliated mind;
—Obscene one, to whom I am bound
Like the galley slave to his chain,
Like the hard gambler to his game,
Like the wretched sot to his bottle,
Like the carrion to its vermin,
—Accursèd, accursèd be you!
I pleaded with the rapid blade
To win my freedom back by force,
And told the poison, schooled in guile,
To come and aid my coward’s will.
Alas! the poison and the blade
Both held me in disdain and said:
“You’re not worthy to be relieved
From your accursèd servitude,
Fool! —if from that empire of hers
Our efforts would deliver you,
Your kisses would resuscitate
The cadaver of your vampire!”
�POEMS | ZUCKERMAN
The Second Sense
Elliott Zuckerman
Listen: In wind and water,
the second sense
records a message for the sixth
Before our birth
only a patch of reason moved the pulse
Before the germ
of anything like melody,
maternal heartbeat set the meter’s pace
In harmony
the pulse ascends to the unheard. Though sound
is left below, compatible numbers
continue climbing
That’s why the masters of man’s sound
enthralled by breeze and shower
and friendliness of field and leaf
reiterate the triad tirelessly
sustained beyond the call of need or taste
The level field
the rising cliff or tree
are the co-ordinates of the soul
In simple chords sustained
beyond all reason
one master celebrated greenery
striding and hunched, hands clasped behind his back.
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89
To Save the Ideas
A Review of Daniel Sherman’s Soul, World, and Idea: An
Interpretation of Plato’s Republic and Phaedo. Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2013. viii + 410 pages, $110.
Eva Brann
“To save the phenomena” of heavenly motions by undergirding
them with rational, that is, mathematical, hypotheses—that is said
to be the problem Plato set for astronomers in a passage from the
Republic frequently referenced by Daniel Sherman.1 His own
project is, as I understand it, the inverse one: to save the Platonic
ideas by a new interpretation of the dialogues in the title of his
book. It might be said to be the deeper and more difficult problem
to solve—and just as enticing.
But what, you may think, is the use of an inviting review, when
you blanch at the price? This book, written by an alumnus of St.
John’s (Annapolis, 1963) after a long teaching career and obviously
much study and reflection, should be kept in mind by anyone of us
who has more than a nostalgic interest in the Platonic dialogues; if
you can’t afford it, you might persuade your local library to acquire
it or get it for you on interlibrary loan.
It is surely a book not to be overlooked in any serious study of
the Platonic dialogues, not just the Republic and the Phaedo. But—
in any responsible review there must be “buts,” and I’ll get them
out of the way, the more uninhibitedly to do this huge work justice—its very volume raises some obstacles, thought-provoking
enough to induce the following little prefatory meditation on voluminousness.
There is an aphorism by Callimachus (third century BCE), the
most famous librarian of the great ancient Library at Alexandria:
mega biblion, mega kakon, which our wicked undergraduates at
St. John’s used to translate: “A great book is a great evil.” What he
actually meant is probably: “A long book is a big pain,” since he
1. Republic 528 ff. Simplicius (Commentary 2.43, 46) reports Plato’s
challenge to the astronomers.
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considered long epics to be antiquated. Having, on several occasions, inflicted such pain, I have come to think of book length as
an independently significant factor. For one thing, it is involved
with the distinction between “primary” and “secondary” literature—between a difficult, rebarbative original and its ancillary elucidation. There’s “learning’s crabbed text” and then “there’s the
comment,” as Robert Browning says in “The Grammarian’s Funeral.”
A primary text may be as long as it pleases, say, the roughly
seven hundred pages of the Critique of Pure Reason or the nearly
double that of War and Peace. But a secondary text, a commenting
explication? Well, how can it help but be a good deal longer than
the original? It is, after all, an explication or “unfolding,” an explanation or “planing-out,” an exposition or “setting-out,” an elucidation or “bringing-to-light.” Anything that is smoothed-out will
be larger in bulk than it was in its original implicitness or self-entanglement. However, the length of an exegesis that “leads-out” of
a textual complexity is a very real problem of human temporality.
Even for willing learners, since ars longa, vita brevis, if the artfulness of the text is great and the commentator tries to be adequate
to it, there is the risk of displacing it, because human life is always
short on time. Moreover, while words clarify, wordiness obscures
matters.
To my mind this means that to make up for its preempting bulk,
an interpretation has the obligation to be easier—and so, faster—
to read, and the interpreter has the obligation to accordingly be
willing to accept a loss of subtlety and depth. Although one might
say that a great text is one long aphorism, being too brief for what
it bears, surely the difference between a weighty text and its analysis is not merely that of succinctness and amplitude. In addition,
an interpretation should willingly forego that mysterious penumbra
of connotation and resonance which attends a great book and candidly admit that a great author’s scope is apt to exceed the interpreter’s perspective (not withstanding his—dubious—advantage
of an added historical distance). To say it plainly: secondary writing has a smoothing function; to it shallowness is mandatory. So
much here for one of its qualities; more about its quantity below.
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91
There is a now often deprecated notion behind the “primary/secondary” distinction which goes beyond that of “original/commentary,” namely, “great/not-so-great.” The one main mark of textual
greatness is just this: exposition-proneness. Whatever spatial
metaphor you may apply to the effort—illuminating the surface,
delving into the depths, unrolling the convolutions—there is always more to be said about it. The exegete may be exhausted; the
book never is. Put another way: A great book will contain many
serendipities but few inadvertencies. (Even Homer nods, but rarely.)
Thus the interpreter’s care is safely invested; there will be returns.
I have slipped from “commentary” to “interpretation” because,
while a commentary might be pretty innocent, hovering around the
factual extrinsicalities of the text, interpretations get inside it and
are fraught with potential culpability. First of these is inadequacy
to the meaning of the text: To interpret well, you have to begin
reading literally, attend to the letter of the text. Any willing student
can be trained to do that. But then it gets complicated, especially
for the Socratic dialogues of Plato. Who among the participants
understands what Socrates is asking and what he himself is saying?
What is Socrates’s intention? Where is Plato? Which words or suppressions bear the meaning of the conversation? In what sayings
or silences is its locus of truth? The effort of cluing this out is very
nearly simultaneous with the exposition of that truth or of its occlusion—here’s a version of that notorious “hermeneutic circle,” that
the parts are known by the whole, but also, inversely, the whole by
its parts.2 Inadequacy, lack of acuteness in construing the text from
both ends, here vitiates the interpretation—but that is not at all the
problem of Sherman’s book, and thus not my problem here.
Second, the pedagogic ineffectiveness of interpretative commentary: I want to frame this aspect of secondary writing as a large
problem, so to speak, that is little regarded—the problem of bulk.
Having myself perpetrated several big books, I suppose I’m qualified. Here’s the problem: In writing of that sort there are levels of
aboutness. At the bottom there is, once again, what the primary
2. The “hermeneutic” or interpretational art is named after the herald-god
Hermes, one of whose offices it was to convey plainly the meaning of
messages.
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THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
book literally says. On top of that (or wherever it’s to be located)
there is the originating writer’s meaning—not that he failed in saying
what he intended, but that he may have reached for a new language
to convey his original notions, or that he may have suppressed complete articulation so as to involve the attentive reader. For most (no
longer all) interpreters, it is an article of hermeneutic faith that there
is such an implicit meaning, that its novel language often needs an
interpreter, that the author’s intention is often not immediately obvious—and that they’re elected to open up the book to others’ view.
So on top of that comes the secondary writer’s own understanding
of the primary text, which any candid commentator will, by that
little margin of modest doubt, know how to distinguish from its
underlying template. And now, to top it off, there is a tertiary level,
huge and growing: the more or less deviationist opinions of all the
fellow interpreters, who each have different perspectives, reconcilable and irreconcilable. And in this perspectival fecundity lies
the proof both of the primary text’s grander scope and of its human
limitations.
Secondary bulk is a real and present danger: smoothing turns
into smothering. Oddly enough, there is a device for the self-neutralization of big secondary books: the Index. For original books,
excerpted reading is a hermeneutic no-no, precisely because of the
hermeneutic circle, because the clue to the whole may lie in any
or all parts. Not so in interpretative commentaries, whose writer
should not be out to piggy-back a masterpiece on the underlying
text, but should help the user to check out names, find definitive
passages, and follow up themes. Indices affirm the secondary
writer’s modesty; a detailed index signifies the writer’s blanket
permission to spot-read, to use the interpretation in thinking about
the text thus served. Primary texts usually aren’t indexed to begin
with. Soul, World, and Idea has an index, but I wish Lexington
Books had invested in a more ample one.
“Careful” unpacking, analysis, reading, is a phrase, the favorite
one in Soul, World, and Idea, of hermeneutic virtue. Here’s the
“but”: it leads to pertinent paraphrases of the text to be interpreted,
together with commenting qualifications, modifications, cautious
retractions—in short, to lengthiness. Add to this the dutiful inclu-
�REVIEW | BRANN
93
sion, both in the text and in long footnotes, of tertiary commentary,
in which the work comes to grips with, analyzes, critiques, or accepts a large number of contemporary interpretations by fellow
scholars. Just as the careful reading often yields welcome insights
(of which I’ll give an example a little below), the referencing of
scholarship is often helpful. Instead of just citing names and numbers, Sherman actually reproduces arguments. But it nearly doubles
the book’s length.
I am, as they say, “conflicted” about both of these efforts: the
written record of “careful reading” and the learned absorption of
“scholarship.” Who can doubt the value of carefully thinking
through a worthy text by engaging in extensive internal i-dotting
or the propriety of responsively considering others’ understandings
and making a mental note of their putative mistakes? But, then,
isn’t it the next best step to allow the bulk—not the gist—of our
own thinkings and others’ errors to pass away, unpublished, into
forgetfulness? Treat them as ephemeral, and let them die within
days of their birth (as do those eponymous ephemerids, the
mayflies) and enter forgetfulness, there to become the soil of reflection. Shouldn’t philosophy be resolutely anti-cumulative, ever
at the beginning? Absent a firm settlement of my misgivings about
bulky writings and extensive sourcing, I take refuge in a very practical solution: at least to pay attention to what is near and dear, and
certainly to the works of alumni.
So let me start with a sample of insights Daniel Sherman’s book
offers, combining close reading and responsiveness to scholarship
(p. 165). An interesting issue is “the autonomy of philosophy” seen
in personal terms, namely as the ability of ordinarily thoughtful
human beings to withstand the social order. Pierre Bourdieu, a
French sociologist, surmises that the categories imposed by the
power structure are intractable because they are unconsciously involved in the very struggle to escape them; thus even the not-soconforming characters of the Republic respond to Socrates’s
sedition with responses varying from “metaphysical fury,” through
friendly doubt, to sullen withdrawal. Against this defeatism, Sherman pits his interpretation of Platonic discourse as being very
awarely situated in medias res. Socrates indeed operates, albeit
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quite consciously, in the context of the social setting and its implicit
opinions. He employs dialogic practices to make these explicit and
to ascend, starting from within the social and natural world, to the
alternative realm of Ideas; the ideas are thus both continuous with
and opposed to the given social context, hence in a tension of critique and acceptance with respect to ordinary meanings. One might
say that Sherman saves the autonomy of thinking from circumstance by arguing that it is its very implication in the opinionenvironment of the world which, when brought to awareness,
gives it its rightful claim to independent knowledge. (P. 165.)
I’ve begun with this example, taken from the middle of the book,
because it is typical of Sherman’s saving, composing, middle-ofthe-way responses to exaggeratedly alienating views of Plato’s
project. Now it’s time to give a glimpse of the over-all structure of
the book, chapter by chapter. Keep in mind that this is a dense exposition, consisting of four-hundred meticulously argued pages, so
my summary will be skeletal indeed, and my queries will loom
larger than they would were the detail not suppressed.
The Introduction sets out the interrelation of cognizing soul,
experienced world, and Sherman’s own conception of discourseembedded ideas, in the Republic and the Phaedo. He reviews the
various values accorded by scholars to their dramatic aspect, from
mere embellishment, through an attendant enactment of philosophical life to an inextricable involvement of action and argument.
Jacob Klein3 was an early and vivid proponent of this third view,
and Sherman recalls Klein’s influence on him in the warm appreciation of his Preface. In particular, Klein’s close-to-life reading
of the dialogues is reflected in Sherman’s “most radical and challenging suggestion”: the ideas are not atemporal beings separated
from the world but have a temporal, world-implicated dimension;
consequently the Platonic account of ideal being can the better be
the operative basis of a philosophic life of learning, teaching, talking. Images and image-making—and image-recognition, I would
add—will be crucial in drawing the ideas into human cognition
and moral activity.
3. Jacob Klein (1899-1978) was tutor (1938-69) and dean (1948-58) at
St. John’s College, and teacher until his death.
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Chapter 1. The Interlocutor’s Request analyzes the problems
posed to Socrates in the Republic by Plato’s two brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus: to show that justice is an inherent good,
hence a source of happiness. Here, I might comment, is a first
occasion for Sherman’s “careful parsing”; he delves deep into
the shallowness of Socrates’s talking partners. I think that approach, a dimension of the whole book, is a little hard on these
young men, as well as the all-but-boys of the Phaedo. After all,
they are there all night in the Republic and all day in the Phaedo,
attentive and eager; they do about as well as would any of us. If
I’d been there I wouldn’t have intruded my every mental reservation either, and, I think, that the same experience of a tacit
critical descant that Plato asks of a reader, Socrates respects in
his companions. We must supply knowing smiles, snickers,
raised eyebrows, furrowed brows, just as in a St. John’s seminar.
I think Socrates is more apt to bring out his present partners’
strengths than to expose their efforts to our cavils—if they’re
young.
To satisfy the brothers’ request Socrates sets up that problemfraught analogy between the offices of the castes of a well-constituted political community and the powers of the parts of the
soul. Sherman’s thorough expository prose obscures a little—a
dramatic hiccup would have helped—the arresting political assumption of this magnifying image, in which the individual psychology is said to be mirrored in the communal “constitution”
(whence the Greek title Politeia, “Polity”): civic justice is understood as the image of psychic adjustment. The consideration
of imaging becomes more urgent.
Chapter 2. Discourse treats of the possibility of realizing a
city so constituted. Recall here that Socrates in fact gives an unambiguous final answer: It makes no difference whether the
ideal city will ever exist or is just a model laid up in heaven; the
point is to practice our inner politics in its image—to use its politeia in turn as a model for constituting our own, individual,
psychic balance (592b). However, Sherman introduces several
levels on which the possibility question may play out. One condition for the existence of the just city is that a philosopher-king
will turn up—and, I would add, before he arrives there must be
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a pre-royal philosopher-founder—a proven unlikelihood, as is
shown by Plato’s misadventures with Syracuse’s tyrant-dynasty,
set out in his Letters. Therefore Sherman now reviews these
royal philosophers’ nature and their education, and in preparation, the underlying characteristics of degrees of cognition and
their objects. Thus the “digression of the central books” (p. 77)
is justified. Some readers may recall that Rousseau saw the center of the Republic in these books. Whatever the title may imply,
he says, it is really a treatise on education (Émile I) and, I might
add, on the constitution of the soul and the beings of the world.
Apparently, Sherman agrees (p. 137). However, he regards the
application of the ontology (the account of Being) and its realization in a program of education as provisional, incomplete.
The Phaedo is a necessary supplement. In any case, for him the
prerequisite imaging of the ideal in discourse looms yet larger.
Chapter 3. The Cave: Education and the Lack of It deals with
the Image of the Cave (the venue of human life) and the Divided Line (the gradation of beings and the ascent of cognition). Sherman takes the cave to be the city and, in clever
accord with the order of the Republic’s earlier books, where
city precedes soul, but in reversal of Books VI-VII, where the
enabling ontological line precedes the consequent civic cave,
manages neatly to insinuate his main thesis, the implication of
the Ideas in the human experience and knowledge of the world.
A bonus is Sherman’s account and critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Cave Image as embodying a loss of openness to the direct presence of beings, a receptivity still retained
by the Presocratics. Sherman shows that Heidegger himself actually appeals to the “ungrasped essence,” said to be deformed
by discourse, an appeal that vitiates the purity of his cherished
immediacy. Since Sherman himself supposes that beings come,
so to speak, into Being only in thinking and its speech, he argues that Plato’s image-dynamics more adequately facilitates
the sharing of Ideas between soul and world than does Heidegger’s hope of “unhiddenness.”
Chapter 4. The Divided Line and Dynamic of Ascent gives a
dynamic interpretation of the Divided Line, as an ascent and
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descent, turn and turn-about, of living thinking, whose motor,
so to speak, is imaging: the Divided Line represents the cosmos, both its shifting appearances and its stable beings, as a
top-down cascade of images and a bottom-up effort of imagerecognition.4 Sherman begins with the triple causation attributed to the Idea of the Good, which is off the line, “beyond
Being.” It is a hyper-principle that brings things into being, allows them to flourish, and makes them knowable (as its image,
the sun, causes birth, growth, and visibility). Sherman deals
with a scholarly claim (Annas’s) that the Good is too impersonal and offers no human fulfillment thus: As the source of
the world’s intelligibility it is surely good for human beings. I
would add that the Good was in Plato’s “Unwritten Doctrines”5
named the One; thus it is a principle of unification, hence responsible for all human community, be it the civic union of
politics or the private bond of friendship; that is why it is introduced in the Republic.
There follows a close reading of the Line as a ladder of dialectic
ascent, which cannot be thrown away—“a serious claim” (p. 134)
moving toward Sherman’s interpretation of the Ideas as tied to psychic activity. The problem of images comes ever more front and
center in a critique of one scholar’s (Patterson’s) analytic treatment
of the sort of things the original Forms (Ideas) must be if worldly
things are their images: The Form is what its name says it is, but
not as having the qualities its namesake images possess. This
makes more sense than you’d think (though like all analytic expla4. “Image-recognition,” which is the mode of ascent along the Divided
Line, is Jacob Klein’s rectifying translation of eikasia, often understood
as a mode of guessing, conjecturing (as by Sherman himself, p. 151). Thus
the ability to distinguish between original and copy becomes the basic and
pervasive ontological capacity. Images, the objects recognized by imagerecognition, the central problem of Plato’s Sophist, present a never-ending
enticement to ontological reflection, some of which is being carried on in
issues of this journal: Review of Eva Brann, The World of the Imagination
(1991) by Dennis Sepper, The St. John’s Review 42.1 (1993): 1-19; review
of Dennis Sepper, Understanding Imagination (2013) by Eva Brann in
this issue, 1-16; and now this review of Sherman’s book.
5. Plato’s oral speculations, reported first by Aristotle.
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nations it’s flatly clarifying rather than brightly illuminating): A
Horse-Form is what a horse in truth is, but it’s not for riding. Sherman must object. Whatever this analysis of being a form means, it
implies that forms, ideas, are quite separate in kind from their physical images; he is preparing to bring forward a way of understanding the (moderated) separateness of Ideas from Soul and World
that requires their (ultimate) interdependence. The rest of the chapter concerns the soul’s different cognitive relations to the rising reality of the objects represented by the upright Line.
Chapter 5. Education and the Mind’s Eye attends to
Socrates’s filling in the lack of education in the Cave with the
education for the philosophic rulers. Sherman dwells on the
significance of Socrates’s beginning the program of study with
arithmetic—not the technique of numerical calculation but the
science of the nature of numbers.6 This science, beginning with
the unit, the one that constitutes each of the unit-assemblages
called arithmos, has special powers of philosophical levitation.
The “one” that is the beginning of counting-up, of generating
numbers, is, one might say, the inverted image of the One that
is the principle of the unity of all that is, the Good: the least
constituent mirrors the whole constitution.
From the first study I pass directly—Sherman leaves no such
lacuna—to the final one, dialectic, which dwells on the Ideas:
“Dialectic, then, produces the image of discourse [my italics]
as the song of reason of which the relations of Ideas as a harmony of the whole is the ultimate objective content” (p. 198).
Sherman means this literally: the identity of Ideas is inseparable from the relations among them, and those relations are insubstantial, it would seem. By “insubstantial” I mean that
normally relations emanate from and terminate in beings,
6. He takes his departure from Jacob Klein’s Greek Mathematical
Thought and the Origin of Algebra (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1992). Alumni
of the St. John’s Program will recognize all the elements of Socrates’s
program of learning, but will want to ponder the fact that we begin our
mathematical studies with Euclid’s geometry, with shapes and magnitudes
rather than with numbers and multitudes. I’d like to hear speculations
about, and opinions of, this pedagogic reversal.
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which is why humans have to be somebody to relate to somebody. It’s not that existence as a mere node of relations is unthinkable, but rather that it’s demeaning. However, since the
treatment of the objects of dialectic, the Ideas, is deliberately
inexplicit in the Republic, it is in any case insufficient for a
persuasive theory of ideal being, and that deficiency makes
room for Sherman’s speculation.
Chapters 6-8. The Phaedo’s Arguments for Immortality, The
Problem of Wrong Beginnings, From Logos to Idea—these
chapters bring in the Phaedo’s fuller account of the soul as capable of learning and its more direct treatment of the Ideas as
necessary hypotheses; “image” and “separation” (chorismos)
are the concepts to be further clarified (p. 211).
In Chapter 6, the issue is whether the separation of the soul
from the body that the Phaedo appears to propose, be it as a
means of moral purification or as a condition of immortality,
is to be taken literally or imagistically, whether it is logos or
mythos (p. 221, though as it turns out logoi are also “images”).
Sherman prepares for his denial of this separate existence of
the soul and that of the Forms, whose separation is implicated
in the immortality and thus in the separability of the soul, by
arguing that if the reading of the text is properly dramatic, separation will always appear as “mythical” (p. 256), that is to say,
figurative—and that the naive boys of the Phaedo are not up
to the image-recognition required by Socrates’s myths.
It is a little absurd to balk at a book’s bulk and then to ask
for more. But, by concentrating on the boys’ inept literalism,7
an image-ontology, though projected in Chapter 7, is displaced
by a critique of the interlocutor’s powers of image-recognition
and interpretation. Such an ontology would, I think, give an
account of two aspects of image-being: 1. whence comes the
difference in plenitude of being that distinguishes an original
from its image, that admixture of being and non-being which
7. I keep saying “boys.” Simmias and Cebes are neaniskoi (Phaedo 89a),
adolescents with incipient whiskers or youths with first beards. To me
they seem the age of freshman, boys and men in turn.
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makes an image a mere image to the detriment of its dignity
(as set out in Plato’s Sophist);8 and 2. what is that similarity,
that admixture of sameness and difference, that connects an
image to its original—a far more complex question. It is this
second inquiry that would seem to me pertinent to Sherman’s
central thesis, which will involve a right reading of imagistic
logoi or rational mythoi. Here is how the philosophical problem
of similitude presents itself to me: Can objects from realms that
are conjoined by no exhibitable “isomorphism,” no structural
identity, have an image-relation? How far can the ordinary
word “image” be stretched, salva significatione, with its meaning being saved?
But perhaps before ontology should come phenomenology, an
account of the way imagining works and images appear.9 Sherman
puts to use a long passage from Proust’s Remembrance of Things
Past (p. 236), a practice I like very much because good novelists
are master-phenomenologists—it’s their métier. Marcel is enamored of a black-eyed woman, but every time he re-envisions her
the memory presents her as blue-eyed—as he says, because she
was a blonde. Perhaps, he perversely concludes, if her eyes had
not been so strikingly, intensely black, he would not have been so
particulièrement amoureux with her as blue-eyed. Sherman understands Proust’s passage—due notice being given to its perversity—
to illuminate a kind of “recollection,” here of dredging up those
image-memories from the soul in which the image of an object
brings with it the image of a person, as in the Phaedo a lyre is associated with its owner, a beloved boy. His point is that this boyimage lacks observed detail; it is of a “total person,” and the details
8. Generally the original is distinguished by several primacies: in time,
dimensionality, functionality, reality. Not so in representative art: A
mound of two-dimensional, inedible, unreal apples, painted by Cezanne
from a prior arrangement, is generally regarded with more respect (and
certainly costs more) than a bag of Pink Ladies bought by anyone at the
supermarket. That’s the valuation Socrates wants, on ontological grounds,
to forestall in Republic X.
9. As Sherman comes near saying (p. 388). For if human discourse is
image-making, then its interpretation is image-recognition (p. 391).
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may well be mistaken. But—here’s the difficulty—Marcel is not
making a mistake. He knows, first and last, that the woman is
black-eyed. He is engaging in deliberate perversity: the imaginative potentiation by willful modulation of an observed reality that
is too opaquely positive for a languid sensibility. More simply put:
Marcel rearranges reality on the slight excuse of blondness to make
it his; so adjusted, it furnishes the object of his self-pleasingly
repetitive daydreams (je repensai); you might call it bed-ridden
love.10
I’ve picked on the Proust passage because Sherman infers from
it a solution to the problem of similarity I posed just above:
The picture does not look exactly like its original, but
then neither does the lyre look like the young boy, yet
we bridge this difficulty by our ability to respond to the
image as image. The sense of both “like” and “unlike”
is in fact multiple; it can be both in order of vivacity (picture vs. object) and visual resemblance (lyre-person).
And this is true of relations of the non-visible of “resemblance” and recollection (p. 237).
Sherman concludes that in the lyre-boy passage Plato is stressing
the possibility of such non-similar resemblance (I’ve intentionally
put it as a contradiction in terms), and that is what I want to question: When push comes to shove, how far up the ascent to Being
can image-recognition take you without obscuring the very nature
of the objects, the Ideas, which you want to attain?11
10. Proust’s way with love meets its refutation in a charming movie, It
Happened in Brooklyn, a 1947 film directed by Richard Whorf, starring
Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, and Jimmy Durante. The Sinatra character
takes his girl for granted, Lawford’s is really in love with her. Durante
(Brooklyn’s wise man) tests Sinatra: What’s the color of her eyes? He
dithers: perhaps blue? And so with other detail. Lawford knows on the
instant: brown. Q.E.D.: True love is hyper-observant; in fact that’s its
hallmark: acutely observational concentration.
11. Sherman has certainly considered, but apparently without consequence, the notion that for the highest thought, for noesis, the imagelogos might fail (p. 392, n. 1); but perhaps it is fairer to say that because
he gives so much “a wider interpretation” of images and image-making,
he considers the restriction overcome.
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In Chapter 8, From Logos to Idea, Sherman’s thesis is fully developed, once again with the aid of the Phaedo, where on his last
day Socrates himself says more about the Ideas than anywhere
else.12 Socrates recounts his taking refuge in the use of of logoi for
looking at the truth of beings, lest his soul be blinded by sensory
looking. To pursue this way Socrates has recourse to hypothesizing
(literally, “sup-posing”), a way of proceeding by hypotheses,
namely Ideas, such as the Beautiful Itself (Phaedo 100a ff.). Sherman observes helpfully that a Socratic hypothesis is not, as for us,
a theory to be verified by being tested against experience, but the
converse: experience derives such being and intelligibility as it has
through some sort of presence in it of the forms (pp. 294-5).
But to test (worldly) things against the (transcendental) idea
means—and here I am not certain I follow (that is, understand
rightly or, if I do, agree)—to test them against the “idea functioning
as a logos” (ibid.). Moreover, it now turns out that “the hypotheses
as the particular idea expressed as a dianoetic [discursive] logos is
the idea at work,” and that this logos-idea is in fact to be verified,
not to the detriment of the idea but to the logos which may have
applied it wrongly by misclassifying the things of which it meant
to give an account. This human action (praxis) is, then, “a verification of the idea as logos, that is to say, as a hypothesis which is
an image of its idea” (p. 299; I’ve italicized the last clause). But
Socrates has already said that his images are both deficient and not
logoi: “for I don’t at all concede that somebody who looks into beings in accounts [logoi] looks at them in likenesses [images] to a
greater extent than one who does so in actions” (Phaedo 100a)13—
namely, does not look at them at all.
12. Along with his first appearance, as a boy in the Parmenides, so that
they are shown to preoccupy him first and last as problems; the Socratic
Ideas are ever works-in-progress. In the Symposium and the Phaedrus the
vision of the Ideas is imaginatively consummated.
13. I’ve taken this rendering from Plato’s Phaedo, trans., with introduction
and glossary by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (Newburyport, MA: Focus, 1998). We thought that “in actions” means something
like “in sensory reality” (p. 14). My own sense, expressed elsewhere, is
that the Phaedo’s blatantly unpersuasive arguments for the immortality of
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The clearest formulation of Sherman’s thesis I found is this:
“The subjective form reflected in a logos must be seen as an image
of the objective Idea: the form is a rational image” (p. 217). The
soul’s ability to make and read “noetic images”14 is its very immortality, and the ideas it images are correspondingly eternal (p.
320). The logos-involved soul, that is, the form-informed soul and
the ideas share an ontology because they are interdependent;
“though something more than concepts, ideas do not have any real
independent existence outside this human dialectical triad of world,
soul and idea” (p. 387). And, as the logos-soul, the soul of the subjective form, is immortal and atemporal in the act of knowing in
which it accepts the eternal idea, so, reciprocally, the objective
ideas are timeless because they are congruent with the soul, not
because of some otherworldly stability (ibid.).
This account, if I have it correct, is certainly circular,15 which is no
argument against it. The most invulnerable philosophical accounts
are circular; they are ontological mirror images of the above-mentioned hermeneutic circle: Grounds “cause” consequences, consequences “confirm” grounds; inquiry requires pre-knowledge,
knowledge comes from inquiry. But in this perfect mutuality of
soul and idea, the outside third, the world (and the Idea of the Good
that makes the world intelligible) have somehow dropped out; how
are worldly things, which ideas were to serve both as causes
(sources of existence) and as reasons (sources of intelligibility),
actually involved in the triad?
the soul are each occasions for Socrates’s formulating the questions he is
leaving behind; he is handing on his forms as works-in-progress, as problems for future philosophy.
14. Sherman apparently identifies “rational” (dianoetic, discursive) and
“noetic” (intellective, directly beheld); they are, however, different segments
on the Divided Line.
15. While circularity—certainly no venial sin in secular argumentation—
is excusable in philosophical discourse, equivocation is, except in deliberate, inspired double-speak (such as Socrates’s “invisible looks,” the
Ideas) not so acceptable. I think some of my difficulties stem from subtle
meaning-shifts in key words such as image, separation, soul, rationality—
shifts away from common usage and also variations of use within the book.
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There is surely much at stake here for those of us who have the
sense that the explication of these matters might be, in all unhyperbolic sobriety, a matter of life and death. The reason is that, if we
believe that philosophical reflection (even if only occasional) makes
life more—and death less—real, this is an ever-present question:
Are there supersensible realms for us but also beyond us, attainable
but not just yet? And Sherman is surely speaking to just that question, but perhaps not altogether clearly.
Chapter 9. Closing the Circle. Now Sherman “closes the circle”
by returning to the Republic, to its last book. On the basis of his
theory of thinking as primarily image-recognition, he defends
Socrates’s condemnation of the imitative arts as practiced primarily
by painters and also poets against various scholarly critiques:
Socrates is not simply against the fine arts and their ways with reality, but he, in fact, has knowledge of a more veracious imagemaking and a more truth-telling myth-making (p. 349). So
Sherman ends by recurring to the inadequacy of the conversation
partners here, especially the vein of reward-seeking he discerns in
Glaucon (which is, in accord with the pervasive human theme of
the Republic, the happiness to be gotten from practicing justice
even incognito). Finally he resumes his own hermeneutic preoccupation by interpreting in his own mode the final myth, the myth
of Er, who returned from the Afterworld: It requires us “to see
through our images to the invisible in this life” (p. 379).16
Although it is not Sherman’s modus scribendi to collect his theses in one place succinctly and crisply as he goes, the Conclusion
does contain some summations, and therefore I may properly park
my three main queries under its title, ready to withdraw them if
I’ve misread the text.
16. That sounds just like our understanding in the Phaedo translation: the
Socratic invitation to practice death in this life (61c ff.) intends us to rise
in thought to the invisible realm here and now (and, of course, now and
then). But we did not mean that the realm of invisibility is somehow subjective, that is, only equivocally objective, psychically objective, so to
speak, or, on the other hand, that human beings come within actual sight
of it—except perhaps Socrates in the several episodes mentioned in the
dialogues, when he seems to be enraptured (e.g., Symposium 175b, 220c).
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1. This three-pronged question eventually arises in reading Platonic texts: Do the thirty-six dialogues form a somewhat organic
corpus, are the dialogues parts of a whole, or is each dialogue its
own dialectic universe, a conversational world of its own? In reading dialogues, we should, I have no doubt, begin with the latter
supposition. But for a global interpretation it seems necessary to
take notice of the ensemble. Sherman leaves the erotic dialogues,
the Symposium and the Phaedrus, out of account, and in these (as
well as in Plato’s Seventh Letter) the ascent to the Ideas is a work
of love, the virtues are practiced to disencumber the soul from the
world, the logos ceases as the soul comes within sight of the Ideas,
and the sojourn with them has an ecstatic element. In fact, in the
Symposium it is said explicitly of the paradigm form, Beauty, that
it is “neither some logos nor some knowledge” (211a).17 So I think
that Sherman’s sort of implication, his dialogical immanence, has
to be balanced, reconciled—whatever—with the other-world separateness of the Ideas as desirable and distinct objects. And, to be
sure, that is practically impossible within the constraints of “careful” dissection, scholarly respectability, and the effort to keep Plato
plausible to contemporaries. For it requires a certain—rightly suspect—suspension of scrupulosity.18
2. I have misgivings about a Socratic (though not so much about
a Platonic) ontology of the soul. To be sure, Socrates is a master
of psychology, of the soul’s phenomenology. But it seems to me
that in the Socratic dialogues, and so in Plato’s view of Socrates,
the human soul hovers outside and around the structure of beings
and Being. As Sherman flips the Socratic sequence of Divided Line
and Cave, to give preeminence to the human context, so he seems
to me to have flipped the Divided Line laterally, so to speak. Reading left to right, the four line segments representing objects of
17. However, the logos—not as thinking but as uttered language—is
imaged, “as in a mirror,” namely, in sounds (Theaetetus 206d).
18. It is a fair question what role the very desire for a beautiful Beyond
plays in making it plausible. One side might well say that such longing
vitiates sober inquiry. The other may counter that, on the contrary, the
desire is itself a testimonial to transcendence, since it is fed by veracious
intimations.
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knowledge come first, on the left side, together with their inherent
kind of knowability. The four corresponding human capacities, including image-recognition, are appended in one sentence (Republic
513d) to the right—an afterthought, as it were. But Sherman gives
them priority. Perhaps the thoughtful soul’s standing among beings
remained a rousing enough problem in the Platonic Academy for
Aristotle to center his own philosophy around its solution, achieved
by setting up the unmovable moving divinity of his cosmos as Nous,
“Thought” or “Intellect,” whose activity is noesis, “intellection,”
the highest power for Socrates. Thus Aristotle made possible an integration of soul and being—and a soul-ontology. For now beings
do not one-sidedly inform the soul, but intellect reciprocally moves
the world into its own being, its fulfillment.
But if it is the case that the soul for Socrates is not within but
about being, then it may be difficult to make it the part-parent of
the Ideas. And even if the soul is a being among beings, I don’t
grasp just how the Ideas can be in their relation to it dependent and
also in themselves independent, in short, how they can be both subjective and objective. I am all for paradoxes; I think our world is
such that they are its most adequate type of speech—provided the
inner nature of the beings that elicit them is first clearly worked
out, so that paradoxical speech is summary speech, language that
collects necessarily disparate insights. That is why I here conclude
with queries rather than with counter-claims—because I’m not sure
how the “both/and” is justified, what mental incongruities I must—
and would willingly—entertain to get the good of the duality.
3. Now comes the more technical crux of these inquiries. Just
how is logos imagistic? Out of the welter of uses for the word
logos, let me choose the two most prominent ones: word (or noun)
and rational discourse (or thoughtful speech). One word names,
intends (how is unknown) numerous instances, distinct in time,
place, or shape (morphe) and yet the same in some respect (or we
would not have a natural inclination to use this logos collectively);
that something “same” in all of them is what a logos picks out and
names; it is Socrates’s form (idea). A word conveys (how is unknown) the idea without being in any normal sense a likeness: I
think it is impossible to detect any image-function in this naming-
�REVIEW | BRANN
107
logos without stretching the meaning out of all recognition. I shall
say why.
“Rational discourse” consists largely of propositions conveying
meaning. Some of these sentences are descriptive and raise mental
images (how is unknown), and such logoi are indeed image-making
(Plato, Sophist 234c). Others, however, are not descriptive but dialectic or “dianoetic;” they “think through” the thought-structure
of appearances and beings, and such logoi are only forcibly imagistic. To be sure, in the lower reaches, some logical arguments can
indeed sometimes be represented in spatial diagrams19 (how is unknown), because the logic-diagrams image not the proposition but
a mental image, a quasi-spatial corralling of class-members: Visualize “All bulls are bovines” as a herd of cattle, enclosed in a
barbed-wire fence, which includes a round pen just for the uncastrated males; then erase the cattle and retain the spatial schematism.
So, if, going from the second to the third part of the Divided
Line, I recognize by the power of dianoetic (thoughtful) imagerecognition that a geometric sphere is the true, more being-replete
original of a soccer ball (quite a feat, since to ordinary thoughtless
image-recognition the ball is surely more real), it is not because
the logos is an image but because it isn’t; it’s about images; it comprehends them. In other words, insights of image-recognition (eikasia) seem to be expressible in logoi, but they aren’t images.20 I have
a suspicion why that is: The logos has a negative capability: not or
non-, while images have no inherent negativity. They have the
same thoroughgoing positivity as the spatial world. It takes words
to dub any aspect or space, even emptiness, as a not-this or an absence. As I said, with Sherman I like to see the novelists bear me
out: The fatal Marabar Cave, in Forster’s Passage to India (Ch.
XIV), is the venue of negation in words, but in experience it is a
resounding “boum”—for negation has no sensory image as such,
and so propositions that are negated can’t be wordlessly imaged.
19. Such as Euler diagrams.
20. Sherman actually speaks mostly of image-making rather than imagerecognition. But I think the logos penetrates rather than produces images.
The difficulty may be located just here: What, in Sherman’s view, is the
work, what are the processes proper to logos?
�108
THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW
In sum, I’m not sure whether language intends, symbolizes, or represents,21 but it doesn’t seem to be at all isomorphic with sensible
objects so as to image them. And when it comes to speech about
the Forms, verbal, expressible thinking seems to fail, as Sherman’s
helpful report of scholars’ battles, for example, with self-predication22 amply shows.
****
These queries have been about Sherman’s unquestionably
thought-arousing interpretation of the Republic and the
Phaedo, or rather, about its philosophical consequences; indeed
they are the very proof of its interest. But Sherman also has,
besides the intention of doing the texts justice by reading them
as conversations among differently inclined and diversely responsive human beings, a motive, a hoped-for effect, which his
interpretation is to serve: to let us, with Socrates, “see ourselves as essentially engaging collectively in a discourse that
brings us together rather than drives us apart” (p. 392). And
that aim is beyond querying; what is an open question, one on
whose terms Sherman’s opus focuses the mind, is this: Do we
come closer to the way things are by recourse to the workinghypothesis of Ideas, unattainable in this life but informing the
soul from beyond with expectant desire and responsive logoi?
Or do we do better by means of Sherman’s thesis of a human
rationality so inseparably involved with the Ideas that they are
“not manifest” outside this union, within which they are interpretable “as essentially atemporal experience wholly in this
21. I half suspect that Sherman would answer my difficulty by saying that
he has enlarged the meaning of “image” so as to mean representation, a
way of re-presenting something, of recalling, of standing-for a thing, that
requires no similarity. I think it would still be necessary to show how
logos “represents.” The proper naming of logos’s relation to the things it
is about is, I think, the perplexity of language.
22. For example is the Idea of Justice itself just? The problem is a version
of the question raised in a note above: Is “similarity” reciprocal between
an idea and its copy? I should say that to me philosophy becomes wonderful just when “rational speech” (actually a redundancy: logikos logos)
fails, becomes para-doxical, “counter-credible.”
�ESSAYS & LECTURES |
109
life” (p. 386)—as our experience, it seems, not as unequivocally separate Beings?
Has Daniel Sherman saved the Ideas and if so, are they
Socrates’s Ideas? I leave that question open. But he has surely
done his part to see that the “myth was saved” (Republic, 621b)
and is now before us to consider—just as Er did by not drinking of the River of Forgetting.
�
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�Editor:
Leo Raditsa
Managing Editor:
Thomas Parran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
Barbara J. Sisson
Consulting Editors:
Eva Brann, Beate Ruhm von Oppen,
Curtis A. Wilson.
Editor's Note
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
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Requests for subscriptions should be sent to The St.
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Although there are currently no subscription fees, voluntary contributions toward production costs are gratefully
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THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW (formerly THE COLLEGE) is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis,
Maryland 21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Edward G. Sparrow, Dean. Published twice yearly, usually in winter and summer.
Volume XXXII
SUMMER 1981
Number 3
©1981, St. John's College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0010-0862
Cover: Front elevation of Virginia State Capitol, by Thomas Jef-
ferson (1785). The Coolidge Collection, Massachusetts Historical
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Composition: Britton Composition Co.
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�fHESTJOHNSREVIEWSUMMER81
3
The Contemporary Reader and Robert Frost Helen H. Bacon
11
From The Hills as Waves
14
Soviet Hegemonism: Year 1 Raymond Aron
24
Thucydides and Perikles
30
Not Quite Alone on the Telephone
38
An Outline of the Argument of Aristotle's Metaphysics
joe Sachs
47
In the Audience Robert Roth
55 .,
Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance"
74
Cicero's Teaching on Natural Law
Etta Blum
Christopher Brue/1
Meyer Liben
Eva T. H. Brann
Thomas G. West
1
��The Contemporary Reader and Robert
Frost
The Heavenly Guest of ''One More Brevity'' and Aeneid 8
Helen H. Bacon
For Kathleen and Theodore Morrison, who pointed
me in the right direction and encouraged me to
keep on looking.
''I almost think any poem is most valuable for its ulterior
meaning .... I have developed an ulteriority complex. 1 ' '
Robert Frost said this in an interview in 1927, but it is
only recently that we have begun to take him at his word
and recognize his ulteriority-the dense literary texture of
his poems in which lurk ulterior meanings that make extraordinary demands on the reader. Frost's well-known essay, "The Prerequisites," written about the same time as
the poem I am about to discuss, is a classic formulation of
what Frost hoped of a reader of what he liked to call "a little poem." There he describes how, repudiating the
wrong, that is, academic, kind of help, he took nearly fifty
years to acquire what he called "the prerequisites" for understanding Emerson's sixteen line poem "Brahma."
What he came to understand in those fifty years was the
meaning of Nirvana, "the perfect detachment from ambition and desire that can alone rescue us from the round of
existence."
Professor of Greek and Latin at Barnard College and Columbia University,
Helen Bacon has published Barbarians in Greek Tragedy (Yale University
Press, 1961) and translated (with Anthony Hecht) Aeschylus, Seven
Against Thebes (Oxford University Press, 1973). She has also written on
Robert Frost's reading of the Greek and Latin poets in the American
Scholar (1974), the Yale Review (1977), and the Massachusetts Review
(1978).
She delivered this essay, in an earlier version, as a Blegen Lecture at
Vassar College.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
To experience the poem as poetry, as opposed to "mere
information," the reader must independently rediscover
its ulterior meanings. "The heart sinks when robbed of
the chance to see for itself what a poem is all about ....
Any footnote while the poem is going is too late. Any subsequent explanation is as dispiriting as the explanation of
a joke. Being taught poems reduces them to the rank of
mere information." And a little further on the often-quoted
statement, "Approach to the poem must be from afar off,
even generations off. A poem is best read in the light of all
the other poems ever written. We read A the better to
read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little
out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to
read D, D the better to go back and get something more
out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The
thing is to get among the poems where they hold each
other apart in their places as the stars do." 2
And this is the contemporary reader's dilemma. The
prerequisites to experiencing the full richness, the ulterior
meanings, of many of Frost's poems include knowledge of
a literary tradition from which each high school generation is more remote than the last. And of that whole enormous tradition the least familiar part, and therefore the
hardest to recognize, are the Greek and Latin classics.
Though his classical education, his lifelong reading of
Greek and Latin authors in the original, is now documented, the extent of Frost's use of them in his poems is
barely suspected. The dilemma is that, even though most
3
�of the poems stand by themselves, their ulterior meaning,
what makes them most valuable in Frost's own terms, often depends on affinities and analogies with a literature
little known and only with the greatest difficulty accessible to modern readers.
Further, the kind of commentary on a poem which I am
about to make is that "dispiriting" explanation that robs
the reader of the joy of discovery. However, if it can be
understood as an example of how to "read A the better to
understand B," etc., rather than as an attempt to reduce
the poem to "mere information," perhaps it will not be
out of keeping with the spirit of Frost's pronouncement
about prerequisites.
Of many possible examples of Frost's method of evoking ancient poems I will mention briefly two which I have
discussed elsewhere with fuller documentation. "Hyla
Brook," which seems to be, and is, about a brook in summertime on Frost's New Hampshire farm, is also an al~
most line-for-line imitation of Horace's celebrated 0 fans
Bandusiae (Odes 3.13), about a spring in summertime on
his farm in the Sabine hills. Horace rather obliquely and
unexpectedly celebrates his humble little Italian spring as
a spring of those quintessentially Greek, and for Italians at
least literary, divinities the muses. Only when we see that
Frost is evoking Horace's poem can we recognize that he
makes the same claim for his brook, and thereby gives a
whole new range of meaning to the last line:
We love the things we love for what they are.
More complicated is a poem called "The Lost
Follower," which seems to be, and is, an evocation of
Browning's "Lost Leader." Both poems are about abandoning poetry for gold. Browning's poet deserts the ranks
of true poets for material gain. Frost's poet deserts the
"golden line of lyric" not for material gold, but to try torealize through social and political action a golden age of
peace and brotherhood on earth. But beneath the explicit
reference to Browning lurks a complicated set of allusions
to another poem of Horace, Epode 16, which asserts that
the only way that men can experience the golden age in
this corrupt world is through poetry. In this context the
function of Frost's poet becomes enormously more cru~
cia!, and his defection proportionately more devastating.
Explicit classical references or clues to classical connections in Frost's poetry are rare. But he does give little
pointers. Apparently random details insisted on in the
text that are very vivid, but not obviously connected with
anything, should be scrutinized. For instance, by june the
Hyla Brook, having vanished underground, is
A brook to none but who remember long.
4
And the poem makes other allusions to memory. Why is
memory important? Memory is the mother of the muses,
and Frost's spring, like Horace's, is a spring of fhe muses,
translated to a, for them, unfamiliar landscape.
Another pointer is the way poems are grouped for publication. Frost placed "The Oven Bird" next to "Hyla
Brook" in Mountain Interval (1916). The bird of dusty
midsummer, hidden in the wood, who "knows in singing
not to sing" and asks "what to make of a diminished
thing," is a somewhat more explicit metaphor than the
vanished brook for poetry's unquenchable power. Such
groupings reinforce suggestions within poems, as do hints
Frost dropped about the poems when he read them aloud.
Frost's evocations of other texts, ancient or modern, are
never lifeless imitations. There are reversals, inversions,
variations of themes and motifs. Frost replaces Browning's materialistic poet leader with an idealistic poet follower, and makes us see the desertion of poetry as morally
paradoxical and the poet's function as morally crucial.
Horace's spring of the muses never fails even in the dog
days of August. Frost's brook dries up in summer. All the
more does it symbolize the muses' unfailing creativity, because, through the power of memory, the spring, though
no longer visible, continues to exist. His reticences and
disguises are not mere tricks. They facilitate the experience of seeing for oneself that he insists on in "The Prerequisites."
What are the criteria for recognizing an allusion, whether
to a classical or to any other poet? How can we be sure
that what we take for a pointer really is not an accidental
analogy? If a possible connection reveals an unsuspected
economy and consequent richness of language, an increased coherence, both internal and external, it is probably intended. If it enables us to see that every word of the
poem relates to a single theme, that what seems like
merely vivid detail reinforces what the poem says by connecting it with some other work of literature, it is probably
valid. If the surrounding poems reinforce and are reinforced by what that poem is saying, that is further confirmation, as are Frost's own comments and collocations
when he read the poem aloud.
Using these criteria I am going to present in detail one
poem that will illustrate how discovering "the prerequisites" (in this case they happen to be largely classical)
affects the way one reads a poem. It vividly illustrates
both the reader's dilemma, and what Frost meant by
"ulteriority ."
The poem, "One More Brevity," is about Sirius, the
brightest of the fixed stars, the "dog star" in the constellation Orion. With one significant deviation, it is in rhymed
couplets. It was Frost's Christmas poem for 1953, composed about the same time as his description of the way a
poem should be read in "The Prerequisites."
SUMMER 1981
�One More Brevity
I opened the door so my last look
Should be taken outside a house and book.
Before I gave up seeing and slept
I said I would see how Sirius kept
His watchdog eye on what remained
To be gone into if not explained.
But scarcely was my door ajar,
When past the leg I thrust for bar
Slipped in to be my problem guest,
Not a heavenly dog made manifest,
But an earthly dog of the carnage breed;
Who, having failed of the modern speed,
Now asked asylum-and I was stirred
To be the one so dog-preferred.
He dumped himself !tke a bag of bones,
He sighed himself a couple of groans,
And head to tail then firmly curled
Like swearing off on the traffic world.
I set him water, I set him food.
He rolled an eye with gratitude
(Or merely manners it may have been),
But never so much as lifted chin.
His hard tail loudly smacked the floor
As if beseeching me, "Please, no more;
I can't explain-tonight at least. ''
His brow was perceptibly trouble-creased.
So I spoke in terms of adoption thus:
"Gustie, old boy, Dalmatian Gus,
You're right, there's nothing to discuss.
Don't try to tell me what's on your mind,
The sorrow of having been left behind,
Or the sorrow of having run away.
All that can wait for the light of day.
Meanwhile feel obligation-free.
Nobody has to confide in me. "
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
'Twas too one-sided a dialogue,
And I wasn't sure I was talking dog.
I broke off baffled. But all the same,
In fancy I ratified his name,
Gustie-Da!matian Gus, that isAnd started shaping my life to his,
Finding him in his right supplies
And sharing his miles of exercise.
Next morning the minute I was about
He was at the door to be let out
With an air that said, ''I have paid my call.
You mustn't feel hurt if now I'm all
For getting back somewhere or further on. "
I opened the door and he was gone.
I was to taste in little the grief
That comes of dogs' lives being so brief,
Only a fraction of ours at most.
He might have been the dream of a ghost
In spite of the way his tail had smacked
My floor so hard and matter-offact.
And things have been going so strangely since,
I wou!dn 't be too hard to convince,
I might even claim, he was Sirius
(Think ofpresuming toea!! him Gus),
The star itself-Heaven's greatest star,
Not a meteorite, but an avatarWho had made an overnight descent
To show by deeds he didn't resent
My having depended on him so long,
And yet done nothing about it in song.
A symbol was all he could hope to convey,
An intimation, a shot of ray,
A meaning I was supposed to seek,
And finding, wasn't disposed to speak.
5
�According to the official biography this poem is "about
a dog very much like [Frost's dog] Gillie, whose death in
1949 had robbed him of his most constant companion
since 1940."3 Frost would not have disagreed. He read the
poem often-seven times at Bread Loaf, with teasing and
suggestive comments. After one of these readings he
hinted at the importance of the couplet form. "I've got a
poem somewhere about how couplets symbolize meta·
phor. There's a pairing that deeper down in is the pairing
of thought that is the metaphor. ... The couplet is the
symbol of the metaphor.''4
What then are "the prerequisites" for detecting "the
pairing of thought" deeper down beneath the pairing of
couplets in this poem? What is
A meaning I was supposed to seek,
And finding, wasn't disposed to speak?
(Note the felicitous couplings-supposed/disposed
within the lines, as well as seek/speak at the end, or, ear·
lier in the poem, smacked/matter-of-fact.)
First of all we have a pattern story quite widespread in
European and Asiatic folklore-the rewarding of a humble host who offers hospitality to a divine visitor in dis·
guise. In this case the reward is some kind of unexplained
illumination. A classic example is Ovid's story of Baucis
and Philemon (Met. 8.618-724). But beyond this easily
recognized pattern, is there a more specific reference? Let
us get to those vivid and expressive but apparently unrelated concrete details that I have already mentioned.
First and most important is the dog's name-Dalmatian
Gus, emphasized in its first mention by the only triple
rhyme in this sequence of couplets.
So I spoke in terms of adoption thus:
"Gustie, old boy, Dalmatian Gus,
You're right, there's nothing to discuss. "
And again, after telling the dog he needn't say anything,
I fancy I ratified his name,
Gustie-Dalmatian Gus, that isAnd finally,
I wouldn't be too hard to convince,
I might even claim, he was Sirius
(Think ofpresuming to call him Gus).
Then 'Dalmatian' is used twice, and also alluded to in the
phrase, "an earthly dog of the carriage breed." Dalmatians, of course, are carriage dogs. There is no need for the
dog to speak, for the poet has found his name, and a name
establishes identity and makes explanation superfluous.
Naming is itself a kind of coupling, a way of creating a relationship by recognition.
Who then is Dalmatian Gus who is also Sirius? What
Augustus, Gus for short, has connections with Dalmatia
and Sirius? I do not know that anyone has asked this question. I think I can show that Frost wanted us to associate
6
Dalmatian Gus with Augustus Caesar as Vergil presents
him in Aeneid 8 directly, and in Aeneid 10 through the figure of Aeneas, linked with the star of destiny, the Julian
star, which Vergil associates with Sirius, celebrating his
triple triumph of 29 B.C. for victories in Dalmatia, Actium, and Alexandria. To understand Frost's allusion we
do not need to understand what Augustus' triple triumph
means to historians, but only what Vergil wants it to
mean.
In book 8 the triple triumph and its attendant celebrations are the climax of a series of images on a shield presented to Aeneas by his mother, Venus, forged at her
prompting by her spouse, Vulcan. These images are
scenes from future, from the point of view of Aeneas,
Roman history. Vergil's language stresses military achievement-"Italian events, and the triumphs of the Romans . .. the whole race to come . .. and, in sequence, the
wars [which will have been] fought" (8.626-629). But, except for the last group of scenes, they are not conventional military episodes. They are rather a series of spiritual achievements, triumphs of light and order over chaos
and darkness. I mention only the first-the wolf suckling
Romulus and Remus. In what sense is this a Roman
triumph? It is an expression of Vergil's vision of Rome's
civilizing mission, the taming of natural savagery and its
integration into a higher order of peace and brotherhood.
Only the final scenes of the shield refer to a literal military
victory-Augustus' naval victory at Actium over Antony
and Cleopatra (8.675-731). As the forces of darkness take
flight Augustus, "standing in the high stern," stans celsa
in puppi, is transfigured. Flames stream from his helmet,
and over his head appears the father's star, the patrium
sidus, the star of the deified Julius Caesar, Augustus'
father by adoption. The comet which appeared at the funeral games for the murdered Julius Caesar was immediately identified as Caesar's soul transported to the realm
of the gods. Augustus was then saluted as the son of a god,
ultimately himself to become a god and join his "father"
in the sky. In the Aeneid the Julian star is a recurring symbol of the savior hero (Aeneas, Romulus, Augustus)
chosen to help realize on earth some part of the Roman
ideal and then join the gods on Olympus.
Throughout the Aeneid Vergil makes Aeneas prefigure
Augustus in his battle with the forces of darkness. This is
nowhere more explicit than in the passage in book 10
where Aeneas is transfigured. Here all the elements of Augustus' transfiguration, the ship, the flames, the Julian
star, recur. The words used of Augustus, "Standing in the
high stern," stans celsa in puppi, are now used of Aeneas
as he descends the Tiber bringing reinforcements to the
beleaguered Trojans. And as he salutes his comrades by
raising the shield, the divine gift of his goddess mother,
which has on it the image of the transfigured Augustus,
flames stream from his helmet, and from the shield. Perhaps because Aeneas is only at the beginning of the historical process which the shield envisions as culminating
with Augustus, the star is not literally present. It is intraSUMMER 1981
�duced in a characteristically complex and indirect way
through a double simile (10.260-275). The streaming
flames are first compared to a comet "glowing blood red
and mournful through the clear night," in the context an
almost inescapable allusion to that other comet, the Julian
star. The second part of the simile likens the flames to
"the burning heat of Sirius which brings thirst and sickness to suffering mortals when it rises and saddens the sky
with sinister light," an evocation of the scene in the Illiad
where Achilles, clad in divine armor, the gift of his goddess mother, about to confront Hector in their final duel,
is compared to Sirius, bringer of suffering and disaster
(22.26). The comet links Aeneas to the future, to Julius
Caesar's death and the culmination of the vision in Augustus' victory at Actium. Sirius links him to the past and
the beginnings of the great historical process in Hector's
death and Achilles' victory, itself the prelude to Achilles'
own death. Both images have a double message. The
comet signalled not only mourning for the murdered
leader, but also his deification and the eventual deification of his son. The rising of the dog star signalled not
only the "dog days" of August, with the suffering and privations of heat and drought, but also the eventual coming
of the season of fruition, of the vintage and the autumn
rains. Both comet and star allude to the suffering and destruction that inevitably accompany the attempt to realize the ideal.
To come back to the shield~the three final scenes of
Vulcan's masterpiece offer a vision of the fulfillment
through Augustus of the ideals which are the goal of all
the struggles of the A~neid. These scenes are the moment
of victory at Actium, and its sequel, Augustus celebrating
the triple triumph of Dalmatia, Actium, and Alexandria,
and finally, enthroned, godlike, on the threshold of the
newly restored temple of Apollo on the Palatine, receiving
the homage of a pacified world, and inaugurating a new
golden age of peace and brotherhood. The imagery of
comet, star, and flame, which links every stage of the attempt to realize this vision from the fall of Troy, through
the ordeals of Aeneas and his descendants, to its culmination in Augustus' victory, stresses the cost in human suffering (Hector's death, Caesar's death, and all the other
deaths and losses of the poem) as well as the greatness of
an ideal that can culminate in deification. If Dalmatian
Gus really represents the spirit of the deified Augustus
briefly returned to earth with a message for the poet, the
message should be something about the pain and struggle
involved in trying to give social and political reality to a
spiritual ideal.
Here are some further coincidences between Aeneid 8
and "One More Brevity" which tend to confirm this
reading.
The theme of hospitality in a humble home to a god in
disguise is central in both. The association with Sirius is
more than a hint of Gus's heavenly origins, and Frost
wants us to be aware of his hospitable concern for his
guest's comfort.
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
I set him water, I set him food . ..
and later,
[I] started shaping my life to his,
Finding him in his n"ght supplies
And shan"ng his mzles of exercise.
Near the beginning of Aeneid 8 Aeneas arrives at the
site of what will one day be Rome. An Arcadian exile
named Evander has found refuge there. It is a wilderness
with a stream running through the valley where the forum
will someday be, and cattle lowing on the slopes of the
Esquiline. Evander after offering Aeneas friendship and
alliance and sharing his rustic feast with him, welcomes
Aeneas into his little thatched hut on the Palatine. Hereminds him that Hercules, recently deified, had also
deigned to be entertained there, after slaying the firebreathing monster, Cacus, that was devastating the region
from his cave on the nearby Aventine. At this point
Aeneas is a refugee and a suppliant, but like the savior
hero Hercules, to whom he is repeatedly assimilated in
the Aeneid, and like Augustus, Aeneas is destined to
achieve godhood for his efforts to save humanity by realizing a golden age of peace and brotherhood. Evander welcomes both Hercules and Aeneas, savior gods in human
guise, in a little thatched hut on the Palatine hill, the very
hill on which Augustus, another savior god in human
guise, will one day have a studiedly modest residence.
The word 'avatar' (the only occurrence in all of Frost's
work) is a further reinforcement of the theme of the god
in disguise. Maybe, Frost suggests, the visitor really was
Sirius, the brightest of the fixed stars~
Not a meteorite, but an avatar.
Avatar is a Hindu term for a brief manifestation of a savior
god in earthly form, a temporary incarnation of deity.
Frost might have learned this from Emerson or Thoreau,
two favorite authors of his, both of whom were saturated
in Hindu mythology, or from Bulfinch's Age of Fable, a
work he consulted often. One of the few things Bulfinch
says about Hindu mythology concerns the nature of an avatar. Certainly the brief visit of Dalmatian Gus is associated with a brief visit to earth of a god in disguise.
Frost's description of the dog's condition, physical and
emotional, also has Hindu associations which evoke a
theme of Aeneid 8. He is "an earthly dog of the carriage
breed," who has "failed of the modern speed." He is out
of step with the world and so exhausted that he can barely
roll an eye and thump his tail. He takes a carefully indicated position of withdrawal.
He dumped himself like a bag of bones,
He sighed himself a couple of groans,
And head to tail then firmly curled
Like swearing off on the traffic world.
7
�Head to tail is the position of that image of detachment
and eternity, the "tail eater," the ouroboros. The dog in
this position, "swearing off on the traffic world" (traffic in
all its senses), is seeking "the perfect detachment from
ambition and desire that can alone rescue us from the
round of existence," that state of Nirvana which Frost
had only recently learned about. The weariness, like the
sorrow, that is inseparable from the attempt to realize the
spirit on earth through the recreation of the golden age is
another major theme of the Aeneid. The young poet of
"The Lost Follower," who is trying to realize the golden
age through social and political action experiences a comparable sorrow and exhaustion. If Dalmatian Gus is intended to evoke the spirit of the deified Augustus his
exhaustion is the exhaustion of this struggle.
Still another detail which this poem shares with Aeneid
8 is the sense of election. The poet
... was stirred
To be the one so dog-preferred.
He is then awed by the thought that Sirius himself
... Heaven's greatest star,
Not a meteorite, but an avatarhas brought him a personal, though enigmatic, message,
which he understands and accepts.
A symbol was all he could hope to convey,
An intimation, a shot of ray,
A meaning I was supposed to seek,
And finding, wasn't disposed to speak.
Aeneid 8 is about the moment when Aeneas finally
accepts election as founder of the new order. With that
acceptance comes renunciation of all earthly fulfillment,
and, ultimately, deification. He receives the message from
heaven in three forms. First Venus most unconventionally thunders in a clear sky. That she should, against all
precedent, be wielding the thunderbolt, Jove's emblem,
indicates that the message comes with his concurrence.
Aeneas' response, "I am summoned on Olympus," Ego
poscor Olympo, is both a recognition and an acceptance of
election, a decision to act and take on the frightful burdens of his mission. The second form which the message
of election takes is the poignant moment when Venus,
bringing the divine armor, briefly ("One More Brevity")
presents herself undisguised to her son, and for the first
and only time in the Aeneid allows him to embrace her.
Aeneas has two other encounters with Venus-in book 1,
where she is disguised as a mortal maiden and reveals her
identity only as she is disappearing, and in book 2, where,
though she briefly appears in person to present a vision of
Troy in ruins, she offers no contact. Only here, in book 8,
do god and man have the kind of real communion, brief
though it is, that occurs between poet and dog in "One
More Brevity." Vulcan's masterpiece bears the third form
of the message of election, the prophecy of Rome's spiri-
8
tual achievement, which Aeneas initiates when he accepts
the burden of election. The theme of exhaustion is associated in book 8 with this burden. Whether for Aeneas, or
Hercules, or Augustus, the attempt to realize the spirit on
earth is exhausting. Throughout the Aeneid, but particularly in book 8, where Hercules' victorious fight with the
monster Cacus is narrated, Vergil makes Hercules' labors,
labores, prefigure the labors of Aeneas and Augustus as
saviours of humanity, struggling to dispel chaos and darkness by giving reality to the vision of peace and brotherhood. The last line of the book, which describes Aeneas
shouldering the shield with its only half understood message, stresses in its movement as well as its sense the
strain of this effort-"Lifting on to his shoulders the fame
and fate of his descendants," attollens umeris famamque
et fata nepotum. The cost of this effort is part, but I would
like to say only part, of the message Dalmatian Gus brings
to the poet.
Another significant detail that connects Dalmatian Gus
with Augustus, is the idea of Sirius as a watch dog.
I opened the door so my last look
Should be taken outside a house and book.
Before I gave up seeing and slept
I said I would see how Sirius kept
His watchdog eye on what remained
To be gone into if not explained.
Sirius is imagined as keeping an eye on things and, characteristically, the poet is keeping an eye on Sirius. Vergil
makes no direct allusion to Sirius as a watchdog, but he
takes pains to make us aware that the rising of Sirius coincides with the feasts of the deified saviors and guardians
of order, Hercules and Augustus. Aeneas arrives at the
site of Rome on the feast of Hercules, which Evander and
his followers are celebrating, at the time of the rising of
the dog-star, which is also the date on which Augustus celebrated his triple triumph, in the month of August,
named for Augustus after the fact. This rather tenuous association of Sirius with the functions of the guardian or
watchdog is made explicit in other ancient authors. For
instance, both Manilius, a didactic poet of the Augustan
period, and Plutarch refer to Sirius as a watchdog. Whatever his source, the watchdog image for Sirius is not an invention of Frost's, but part of Sirius' ancient associations.
These are the principal coincidences that suggest that
Aeneid 8 is one of the prerequisites for understanding
"One More Brevity." It is a reading validated by the criteria I suggested earlier. When the connection is perceived,
the poem gains coherence and intensity. Every commonplace detail of dog and human behavior proves to be related to the idea of election, or of the grief and exhaustion
associated with the struggle to bring the spirit to earth, or
of the poignant brevity of an encounter between god and
man. Above all the dog's name has no other explanation.
The connection gives poetic purpose to an otherwise aimless insistence on an apparently ordinary name. I am open
SUMMER 1981
�to suggestions of a meaning that works better. This increased coherence and intensity is the best evidence that
Frost wanted us to associate Dalmatian Gus with Augustus, and through him with Aeneas, Hercules, and all the
other figures of the Aeneid who will become gods after a
brief sojourn on earth. In this series of brevities Gus
makes one more.
The context of the poem reinforces the suggestion that
Gus brings a message about the cost of trying to recreate
the golden age. In the collection in which it was first published (In The Clearing, 1962) "One More Brevity" is preceded by "America Is Hard To See," a poem about Columbus' failure to find the gold of the orient in the New
World, and his inability to envision the opportunity to create a new age of peace and brotherhood there. The poem
stresses a missed opportunity for godhood and the inevitable weariness of trying to realize the ideal.
The two poems that follow in different ways evoke the
themes of struggle and the new order. The first, "Escapist~ Never,"
is about a pursuer pursuing a pursuer and a
seeker seeking a seeker in what Frost called "an interminable chain of longing." I suggest that this is the "round
of existence," the endless and unrealizable attempt to actualize the ideal. Perhaps we should think of Orion with
his dog Sirius, forever pursuing the Pleiades across the
heavens and never overtaking them. The second poem,
"For John F. Kennedy, His Inauguration," has several explicit and implicit references to a new golden age of Augustus. I mention three. First, the opening lines-
A golden age ofpoetry and power
Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.
One further kind of confirmation. The poems Frost associated "One More Brevity" with in his Bread Loaf readings also emphasize the themes I have been discussing.
He read it with "The Lost Follower" (that poem about forsaking the gold of poetry for the attempt to realize the
golden age through social action), and with "The Gift
Outright," which is the other part of the Kennedy poem.
Another time he followed it with a passage from "Kitty
Hawk," about incarnation-
But God's own descent
Into flesh was meant
As a demonstration
That the supreme merit
Lay in risking spirit
In substantiationand commented, "See, we've got to risk spirit in substanti~
Then the explicit allusion to the adapted Vergilian
phrases about the golden age that appear on our dollar bill
(spiritual and material gold) above and below the image of
a pyramid surmounted by an eye which radiates rays of
light. Annuit coeptis (Georg. 1.40, also Aen. 9.625) novus
ordo saeclorum (Eel. 4.5)-literally, "the new order of the
ages gave the nod of assent to the enterprise." Frost's ver-
ation and we mostly fail." 5 Twice he read it with his better
known poem about Sirius, "Take Something Like A Star,"
which is also about matter and spirit. Once he prefaced it
with "How Hard It Is To Keep From Being King," a poem
about election and the attempt to realize spiritual ideals
through the art of government.
"Take Something Like A Star" brings up a final point.
Frost's lifelong preoccupation with astronomy in general
and Sirius in particular is well-known. It goes back at least
to his discovery when a boy of British astronomer Richard
Proctor's book Our Place Among the Infinities, with its
chapter on Sirius entitled "A Giant Sun." In a 1935letter,
Elinor Frost quotes him as saying he is "down here in Key
West now to find out if Canopus is as good a star as
Sirius."6 In "One More Brevity" he wonders if his visitor
sion is,
was not
Summoning artists to participate
In the august occasions of the state.
Now came on a new order of the ages
That in the Latin of our founding sages
(Is it not written on the dollar bill
We carry in our purse and pocket still?)
God nodded his approval of as good.
For "our founding sages" and for Frost, though unfortunately not for the contemporary reader, the Vergilian
context made it plain that the new order being proclaimed was a recreation of the golden age, the theme of
both passages adapted on the dollar bill. Finally there is a
reference to the challenge of the present.
It makes the prophet in us all presage
The glory of a next Augustan age
The star itself-Heaven's greatest star,
Not a meteorite, but an avatarWho had made an overnight descent
To show by deeds he didn't resent
My having depended on him so long,
And yet done nothing about it in song?
What is this very special relation to Sirius that would make
him say, ten years after "Take Something Like A Star"
first appeared in print, that he had "yet done nothing
about it in song?"
"Take Something Like A Star" is about what Sirius can
mean to everyone.
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
9
�Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may take something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.
"One More Brevity" is about a relationship with Sirius so
personal that the star does stoop from its sphere~ to pay a
personal visit and deliver a personal message which mcorporates the reason for this special dependence ofpoet on
star. The message is best understood m connection with
one more aspect of Aeneid 8.
Not surprisingly it is about being an artist. Aeneas'
shield which embodies the dream of the golden age restored is Vulcan's masterpiece, in Vergil's words, "an in~
describable fabric," non enarrabile textum. The inspiration for its creation is a night of lovemaking with Venus.
The thrill of love experienced by Vulcan is compared to
lightning. This simile makes Venus once again, as when
she sends the sign of election to Aeneas, the unlikely
wielder of Jove's thunderbolt. Inspired by Venus' fire
from heaven, forged in Vulcan's subterranean fires, the
shield bears on it the flaming birth portent of the new
golden age, the star of Julius. Fire is both instrument and
emblem of creation. It links the creation of the great work
of art to the act of love, and, since the thunderbolt is
Jave's instrument, both are seen as expressions of his cosmic purpose. Like Vergil, Frost often associated the impulse of love with the impulse of art, for instance in "Take
Something Like A Star."
not disposed to speak." One can reveal unsuspected ulterior meanings of a poem by finding its relation to other
poems, but, as Frost said of his star,
Some mystery becomes the proud.
I would hope that this demonstration makes it seem at
least credible that Frost wanted to be read as he has frequently compelled me to read him, by getting among the
poems (in this case ancient ones, but they are not always
ancient), and that it would further serve as an illustration
of what the abandonment of the poetic tradition can do to
poetry, even, perhaps I should say particularly, to recent
poetry. Not only the poems of Frost, almost all great
poems, ask "of us a certain height," ask us to repossess our
past so that we may experience them fully by discovering
their "ulteriority." There exists something calling itself
poetry that does not make such demands. But the great
tradition has always been to "get among the poems." The
muses are daughters of memory in more ways than we
realize.
Poets know, Frost knew, there is only one tradition of
literature. We scholars, locked in our specialties, tend to
forget. Classicists in particular should remember that not
only do we "read A the better to understand B" but "D
the better to go back and get something out of A." We
cannot read Vergil unless we know Homer, but having
read Vergil we will read Homer differently, and having
read Milton, or Frost, we will read Vergil differently. We
need to know the poets of the past to be good readers of
modern poetry, but, just as important, to be good readers
of ancient poetry we should read Frost and as many other
modern poets as we can. "Progress is not the aim, but cir-
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, "I burn. "
Aeneas, Hercules, 1_\mp.ulus, perhaps even Augustus, will
die before the golden age becomes a social reality. It is
only on the shield, the work of the artist Vulcan! ulti·
mately of the artist Vergil, that Romans and we, theu successors, can fully experience it. So perhaps another part of
the message brought by Dalmatian Gus is about the role
of the artist in keeping alive a vision which generations of
statesmen and political idealists will exhaust themselves
trying to realize. To be "dog-preferred" is to be elected to
risk spirit in substantiation, to bring back the golden age
by making poems under the inspiration of love.
I would not like to imply that in getting among the
poems to try to understand this poem I have succeeded in
discovering the whole of the message that the poet "was
10
culation." The great poets give us back our past by forcing
us to circulate.
Poems of Robert Frost are cited from The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. by
E. C. Lathem, New York 1972 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston), with permission.
Copyright 1953, © 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1969 by Holt,
Rinehart and Winston. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, publishers.
l L. Thompson and R. H. Winnick, Robert Frost: The Later Years,
1938-1963, New York 1976 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston), 214.
2 "The Prerequisites: A Preface," in Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose, ed.
E. C. Lathem and L. Thompson, New York 1972 (Holt, Rinehart and
Winston), 416-418.
3 Thompson and Winnick, Frost: The Later Years, 204.
4 Reginald Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice, Amherst 1974 (The Uni·
versity of Massachusetts Press), 135.
5 Cook, Robert Frost, 148.
6 Thompson and Winnick, Frost: The Later Years, SOl.
SUMMER 198i
�From The Hills as Waves
Etta Blum
AT YAD VASHEM
(Holocaust Memorial)
1
2
3
The Light
Monument
Remnant
It's the first light,
the last
Upward rising stack
and huge unfurling
to black flame
We are the saved ones,
we are those
who were not slaughtered
The summer air
assaulted by blackness
Shape of darkness
like the heart,
stilled
Your faces are ours,
your eyes
We look with your eyes
The candlelight
driven by our breath,
searchingfinding loss
Hope comes oddly
with the stumbling outside
to sun,
No room for shadow
to the green
leaping at us with gold
We are living your lives for you,
we are safe
We are living your deaths
Blackness
screams into sunlight,
forever condemned
0 mightiest of shrouds
Etta Blum has just published a collection of poems, The Space my Body
Fills (The Sunstone Press, Post Office Box 2321, Sante Fe, New
Mexico). The poems that appear here come from an unpublished collection, The Hills as Waves, inspired on a trip to Israel.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
11
�STRANGER
Neither shalt thou gather the fallen fruit of thy
vineyard...
-Leviticus 19:10
I thank you, watchman of the grove,
for the fruit you did not pick,
for the grapes you left carelessly lying
in the fading sunlight when all things
glowed with a final burning, seared
to the oncoming wind of night.
You dreamed most certainly of a stranger
without vineyard or grove, who could
not calm his hand to sow, or await
as others do, the ripe harvest.
As I was passing, 0 watchman,
a stranger to every home,
I hurried over the earth as
one passing through corridors.
I picked the fruit you left,
the moist and trembling grapes.
Unseen your face, but kind as
that of perfect sister or brother.
12
SuN RisEs, SUN SETS
There's nothing spectacular
about the sunsets here:
light
slips into darkness docilely
without fanfare; the moon
and stars appear on time.
(Because here is where it started?)
Sprinkled lights on hillhumps look upward, questioning
the stars.
Dawn comes
as easily with a sliding
into unblemished brightness.
It's plain God separated
light from darkness,
working it both ways.
SUMMER 1981
�HIPPIE AT WESTERN WALL
Blue-jeaned, hair streaming
straight from the scalp (as
in the New York subway) she
leans on the Wall, forehead
resting on curve of rock
(how this stone shapes itself to flesh) and prays.
With
all of her angulariry (which
is the shape of her loneliness)
she prays to the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob. Beneath
the granny glasses, tears
fall to holy ground.
Within
her palm the small black prayerbook lies, ready to succor her.
Almost, she sees the letters
flying apart, searching.
It's not
hare hare
krishna krishna now, but
ani ma'amin
.
am. ma 'amtn
Jerusalem
Note: ''Ani ma'amin" means ul believe"
in Hebrew.
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
THAN JONAH
Constantly
I flee from self.
Constantly I stare
with bitter eyes
. of hope.
In swift
kaleidoscope of lost
and found.
Tears
start from dry lids,
for I'm more prone
to self-pity
even
than Jonah who,
luckier,
fled only from God.
''THE STORY OF MY LIFE''
The room was too high
for the flies, but
the garbage smells
reached us all right.
On the narrow bed, the
beige blanket with brown
end-stripes was falling
apart. Still, it lasted
for us-a wonder.
The
door opened to the porch
where, above roofs and
treetops, we could see
all the way to Yafo Gate
and King David's Tower,
the walls of the Old City,
Mt. Zion, Ammunition Hill.
At twilight the shadows
(the Judaean Hills really)
emerged to clear foldsmore like the rumpled
cloaks of a Michelangelo.
Close by, palm leaves
tilted into sky.
It was
there you carne and spoke
of your past, the Nazi
horrors. I held your small
perfect hands in mine.
Afterwards, with childish
contentment you said,
"Now you know the story
of my life."
That room's
like a box in my brain.
13
�Soviet Hegemonism: Year 1
Raymond Aron
A year ago,* I analyzed the paradox or the contradiction
in the present situation. Thanks to her military power, the
Soviet Union approaches first place in international rela·
tions at the same time that she remains of secondary im·
portance in world trade. She is of secondary importance
not only because her vast spaces, which provide most of
the raw materials her industry needs, free her from the
kind of dependency on foreign trade characteristic of
Great Britain, Europe, and even the United States, but
also because she does not match the leading nations when
she is measured in our times' standards: gross national
product, per capita production, productivity. Because of
this contradiction, commentators hesitate. Some, obsessed
with the military power of this land empire, denounce like
China the threat that an ideocratic despotism, that relies
on arms to propagate its power and its truth, exercises
over both Europe and Asia; others, struck by the lability of
a state that excels only in missiles and submarines while
borrowing computers for Olympic games and Western
know·how for automobile production, refuse to let exces·
sive Soviet armament frighten them.
In the last years, Western public opinion has finally
come to see the change in the military balance. The abil·
ity of the USSR's heavy missiles, the SS·l8's, to destroy
every one of the United States' land·based missiles im·
presses the man in the street and some of the experts. A
Soviet first strike that deprived the United States of its
Minutemen would, of course, not disarm it. The United
States could still resort to its Poseidon submarine missiles
and its B·52 bombers. The United States has, however,
lost the nuclear superiority so long averred and main·
tained, that had made up for Soviet superiority in conven·
tiona! weapons.
Toward the end of the fifties, Mao's slogan spread
A leading thinker on world events, Raymond Aron writes a weekly column of comment in L'Express. His latest book is In Defense of Decadent
Europe (Regnery/Gateway 1979).
This article first appeared in Commentaire in autumn 1980.
14
through the world: "The East Wind is stronger than the
West Wind." The "missile gap" took up the headlines and
the speeches of presidential candidates. A few years later
the wind blew in a different direction: the "missile gap"
turned out not to exist and ceased to trouble the sleep of
the men responsible for the fate of the West. Is the alarm
today comparable to the alarm after Sputnik? What is the
outlook for Europeans and Americans, still bound in the
Atlantic alliance but not united by a common perception
of events, and by mutual confidence?
The Military Balance-A Few Figures
The defense budget of the United States amounts to
five percent of the GNP, the Soviet Union's to fifteen
percent. This disparity began in 1965, when the defense
budget of the Soviet Union started to increase five per·
cent a year; in the same period the defense budget of the
United States-apart from the bloated costs of the Viet·
nam war-declined steadily in real terms unti\1978. The
1981-82 budget foresees increases; inflation and the rising
price of fuel, however, make accurate calculations in real
terms difficult.
Not all figures are instructive** For instance, the dis·
parity in numbers between fourteen American divisions
and 165 Soviet divisions does not mean much. The Soviet
army numbers 1,825,000 men, 47 armored divisions, 118
ordinary or mechanized divisions, eight airborne divisions;
the American army counts 750,000 men, divided into four
armored divisions, five mechanized divisions, five infantry
divisions, and one airborne division. (There are in addition
a number of regiments, brigades, or battalions.) The So·
viet army, however, is divided between Europe and the
*In an article, "De l'imperialisme americain a l'hegemonisme sovietique," published in Commentaire in spring 1979.
**I refer to figures published by the International Institute for Strategic
Studies in The Military Balance.
SUMMER 1981
�Far East-and a part of it is not available for foreign intervention. But eight airborne divisions tell a different story,
whose truth many events have proven: the bear is no
longer locked in his den. The Soviet Union can now project its power far beyond its frontiers. In Europe, the Far
East, and the Middle East, the Soviet Union can deploy
more tanks, divisions, and artillery than any of its likely
adversaries.
As for the air force and the navy, the figures do not betray quantitative inferiority of the same order of magnitude. Some figures, however, highlight Soviet advances:
the International Institute for Strategic Studies records
180 American surface vessels against 275 Soviet; 80 American attack submarines (73 nuclear) against 248 Soviet
submarines (87 nuclear).
Raw figures, however, do not yield strategic judgements. The American air force and navy probably remain
qualitatively superior. In war, the mission of the United
States Navy would be to keep the seaways open; in contrast, the Soviet navy would seek to wrest dominion of the
seas from the West. Statistics do not tell the outcome of
this potential war at sea.
I think forces should be analyzed in their distribution in
various theaters. Although not entirely without significance, grand totals make for a superficial view-and a partially false one at that: the 165 Soviet divisions are not all
of the same sort or equipped in the same way-and in
peacetime, not at a uniform standard of training and readIness.
The European Theater
Europeans look first to the theater of operations that involves them directly. What is the relation of forces in the
middle of the Old World? The first figures, the figures
most often quoted, support received opinion: the superiority of the Soviets in conventional weapons. Not counting mobilization, 27 NATO divisions face 47 Warsaw Pact
divisions (among them 27 Soviet). 7,000 NATO tanks face
20,500 Warsaw Pact tanks (of which 13,500 are Soviet). In
artillery NATO inferiority is even more telling: 2, 700
against 10,000. In addition, the Soviet Union can reinforce its armies more easily than NATO. Because of the
threat of Soviet submarines and bombers to Western sea
transport, Soviet divisions stationed east of Poland will
reach the battlefields more easily than the divisions available in the United States.
The theater nuclear weapons of the two groups provoked debate upon publication of The Military Balance
last year. Does the Warsaw pact have or is it about to
achieve superiority in delivery of theater nuclear weapons? In such an event there will be no resolving the disputes about bare numbers of bombers, fighter-bombers,
and missiles. How much chance does a fighter-bomber
have of breaking through the Soviet Union's anti-aircraft
defense network? How important are the nuclear warheads of the SS-20 missile, in comparison to the warheads
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
of the medium range missiles (SS-4 and SS-5), aimed at
Europe since the beginning of the sixties?
At the risk of simplistic exaggeration: a direct, head-on,
military attack on Western Europe remains the most improbable of all manifestations of Soviet hegemonism. A Soviet attack against the heart of Europe, unless by surprise
and with all weapons including nuclear, risks unleashing
total war between the super-powers. If the Soviets resorted only to their conventionally armed divisions they
would probably win. They would, however, expose their
more or less clustered armored divisions to an American
initiative in the use of theater nuclear weapons. Immediate employment of theater nuclear weapons, and even of
chemical warfare, would make victory on the ground easier at the same time that it would increase the danger of
American resort to strategic nuclear weapons.
Do the SS-20 and Backfire bombers change the balance
in tactical nuclear weapons? If we limit ourselves to
counting nuclear warheads and megatons, not necessarily.
The Soviets can destroy some of the missiles deployed at
the beginning of the sixties, crude in comparison to the
SS-20 which has three nuclear warheads and has the same
range of accuracy as American missiles, a few dozen me-
ters from the target. NATO has nothing to compare to
the SS-20. But the American commander of NATO has at
his disposal several submarines that belong to the strategic forces, which are the subject of the SALT II accords.
Once one admits the two-fold improbability of a Soviet
attack in the heart of Europe and of a European war that
would not lead to total war, the behavior of the two camps
invites reflection. Why do the Soviets assure themselves a
crushing superiority in tanks and cannons at the same
time that their books of strategy all speak of all-out battle
with tactical nuclear weapons? The Soviets do not want
to foreclose either the option of conventional battle in
which preponderance in steel-tanks, cannons, shellswould bring victory; or of an all-out battle in which armored divisions would only play a subsidiary role, because
nuclear warheads would have destroyed vital NATO defenses beforehand. That seems to me the only answer.
In politics as well as war the West condemns itself to
the defensive. The commanders of NATO have to assume they will suffer the offensive. At the beginning of
the sixties the civilian professors around Kennedy had the
doctrine of "flexible response" officially imposed on the
military. Kennedy's team believed the doctrine of "massive reprisals" would lose credibility the more the Soviet
Union approached parity. Use of nuclear weapons only as
a last resort would reinforce "deterrence" -they thought.
In addition they tended to limit the escalation of response
either to conventional or nuclear. There was no discerni-
ble dividing line, recognized by all belligerents, between a
tactical nuclear shell and the apocalypse. This assumption, which came to be the first principle of United States
and NATO thinking, is, fortunately, arbitrary and unlikely-in my judgement.
Because of this postulate, NATO divisions are not
15
�trained in the use of tactical nuclear weapons, which are
concentrated in a small number of depots. There will be
time in a crisis to distribute the nuclear shells among the
troops-that is the assumption. Not opposed to "flexible
response," the partisans of the neutron bomb criticize the
mystical notion of a "nuclear threshold." They do all they
can to "rehabilitate" both conventional ground war and
the neutron bomb, which will neither destroy towns nor
contaminate battlefields.
What conclusions does this summary analysis afford? A
massive attack against We~tern Europe remains as unlikely today as yesterday. Limited military attacks against
Northern Europe are, for the moment, incompatible with
the policy of detente, which the Soviet Union pursues in
Europe at the same time that it expands in the Near East
and Africa. In Europe the Politburo, however, pursues a
strategy of intimidation; it increasingly strengthens its di·
visions in East Germany to maintain, even to accentuate,
its conventional army's superiority over NATO; it sees to
it that it has means for unlimited battle; it trains its sol·
diers to fight in contaminated territory; finally, its SS-20's
give it. the fearful power of destroying several hundred
crucial points in the Western defense system with re·
duced collateral destruction.
Faced with a variety of hazardous threats, the West has
come up with only two answers, one trivial, the other
more to the point. Every European country has committed
itself to a three percent increase in defense spending-a
commitment of little importance in a time of inflation and
of yearly increases in fuel prices. In addition Europe has
accepted the United States' offer to deploy, during 1983,
108 Pershing 2 and 464 cruise missiles in the Federal Re·
public of Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and perhaps in
Belgium and the Netherlands. The Soviets lost no time in
unleashing a frantic campaign against the modernization
of tactical nuclear weapons-a campaign which told on
Europeans. Does American protection alarm as much as it
reassures?
The modernization of nuclear theater-weapons does
not seem to transform the situation, militarily. The Soviet
Union has assured itself of threefold superiority: an ar·
mored army; integration of nuclear arms in its divisions;
SS-20's. In addition, it alone-and this is an enormous ad·
vantage-will choose between peace and war and decide
on the extent and intensity of hostilities. Despite every·
thmg, a head-on attack of any sort remains fraught with
perils as long as the American presence in Europe means
such a Soviet offensive runs the risk of general war. A sur·
gical operation with SS-20's and Backfires, on its merits
the least unlikely of the possibilities, increases the likelihood of a nuclear response from the United States- aresponse which would enjoy the advantage of a first strike.
In theory less vulnerable because of their mobility, the
Pershing and cruise missiles will complicate the task of Soviet strategic planners.
Will these missiles prevent "decoupling", in the jargon
of strategists? To put it plainly, will they prevent the sepa-
16
ration of the European theater from the central strategic
balance? Specialists argue opposite sides with equal passion. The truth is that everything depends less on arms
than on men: How do the Soviets size up the President of
the United States?
In Europe the balance between the forces has worsened at
the expense of the West; it has not been transformed fundamentally. The men in charge of NATO have never thought
that they could repel an all-out Soviet attack without resort
to nuclear weapons. Ten years ago these men probably
thought they would retain the initiative in escalation, if escalation proved necessary. They no longer have any reason
to assume they have any such freedom of initiative.
The Middle East and Afghanistan
With the fall of the Shah and the occupation of Afghanistan, the situation in the Persian Gulf changed completely. Pahlavi Iran was the policeman of the area; its
troops succored the emirates threatened by revolt; its
navy patrolled the Strait of Hormuz; it allowed the United
States to install on its territory the electronic listening devices necessary to verify arms control agreements; it put
six million barrels of oil a day on the world market; it furnished Israel with oil; most important of a!~ it provided
the United States, in case of a crisis, with a base from
which it could project its military power in the region.
The coup in Kabul brought home his powerlessness to
President Carter. He announced his resolve to defend the
Persian Gulf with all means, even, if necessary, with nuclear weapons-declarations received with indifference
and skepticism. A rapid deployment force was decided
upon. But it will take several years, it seems, before the
United States will be able to send several hundred thousand soldiers several thousand miles away from its shores,
to a territory only hundreds of miles from the Soviet
Union.
Do Soviet actions in Afghanistan show what the Chinese call hegemonism? Taken for a buffer state between
Russian and Indian spheres of influence, Afghanistan in
the nineteenth century saw the disastrous end of an English expedition from India. In the last twenty years Afghanistan moved more and more toward the Soviet sphere
of influence: the Soviets spent more money in Afghanistan than the United States; Afghan officers studied, not
at West Point, but in Moscow.
The first, crucial revolution occurred in April 1978.
Conspirators, with the help of a few officers, either Soviet
trained or inclined to the Soviets, overthrew the President, Mohammed Daud Khan-who himself had removed the King, his brother-in-law and first cousin, in
1973. Daud's replacement, Taraki, signed a treaty of
friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union. He
was in turn overthrown by Hafizullah Amin-a second
coup d'etat that the Soviet Union put up with in distaste.
Faced with Amin's inability to consolidate his regime and
SUMMER 1981
�to take charge in the country as a whole, the oligarchs in
Moscow precipitated still another coup with their troops'
entry. Babrak Karma] was supposed to ask the Soviet
Union for help-like Kadar's work-peasant government
against the Hungarians in revolt. Amin and his family
were killed before his successor, Karma!, leader of the Parcham faction, arrived in Kabul to legitimize, at least, in appearance, the coming of Soviet troops. A badly conceived
or badly executed scenario.
As usual, two interpretations face each other in the
West. Taraki's treaty of friendship and cooperation with
the Soviet Union, according to the first interpretation,
turned Afghanistan into a socialist country-and the
Soviet Union never stands for the desovietization of countries that have crossed the threshold of the socialist community. The military operation is more brutal and drawn
out because of the warlike people's resistance. Other commentators go further. An Islamic republic in revolutionary
ferment might have awakened religious passions in the Islamic republics of Central Asia: in the last analysis the
coup in Kabul occurred for defensive reasons. Not a piece
of 1 global strategic offensive toward the seas to the
South, the invasion of Afghanistan is a local crisis, a feud
between two factions of the popular party, the Khalq (Taraki and Amin) and Parcham (Babrak Karma!). After its exile of the principal members of Parcham, Khalq provoked
increasingly widespread revolt with its attempts at radical
reform. The Soviets returned the exiled Parcham leaders,
who were and are incapable of exercising power without
the Soviet army. The Soviet army cannot withdraw without giving the country up to chaos and anarchy.
The invasion of Afghanistan is yet another example of
the way things go. A pessimistic interpretation contrasts
with this optimistic assessment. The Soviets have completed yet another phase in their whole design, in their
continuous expansion. They are hundreds of miles nearer
the gulf. Additional airbases are at their disposal. They
threaten Pakistan, wedged between India and the Soviet
army. They are now near enough to manipulate the Baluchi tribes at the frontiers of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. Even admitting that the Amin regime's repeated
failures drove the Soviets to forceful measures, the invasion of Afghanistan shows their confidence in themselves,
in their power, and in the weakness of their principal enemy, the United States.
Whatever the truth of either of these interpretations,
the dispatch of a hundred thousand soldiers to a country
that did not belong to the socialist community (a treaty of
friendship and cooperation does not amount to a mutual
assistance pact; it is less important) represents something
new and dangerous that perhaps presages other undertakings. President Carter retaliated: he restricted wheat sales;
suspended the sale of high-level technology, especially for
oil exploration; initiated the boycott of the Olympic
games; postponed the Senate debate on the ratification of
the SALT II treaty. To emphasize the turn in American
policy, the President proposed the reintroduction of regisTI!E ST.JOHNS REVIEW
tration to Congress-a step necessary for the eventual reintroduction of the draft.
The invasion of Afghanistan cost the Soviet Union
both in moral and diplomatic terms. At Islamabad, the
Moslem countries almost unanimously condemned Soviet
aggression, One condemnation included both superpowers, the supporter of Israel as well as the conqueror of a
people faithful to Islam.
The disparity between the "credibility," as it is usually
called, of the United States and the Soviet Union, however,
grows more marked. What does this word mean? Not prestige in its real sense; not the feelings of respect and admiration that a great power evokes. Perhaps a few incidents
will shed light on the meaning of this American word. Iranian students seized the personnel of the American embassy in Teheran and held them; the Iranian crowds that
headed for the Soviet embassy, in contrast, met with the
revolutionary militia. Pakistan contemptuously refused
American offers of help: what difference did a few hundred million dollars make? In some countries governments
hesitate to accept American protection, because it might
exacerbate the fervors of their revolutionaries and because they fear that, compromised by their relations with
Washington, they will be abandoned on the day of reckonmg.
I am not about to review the Iranian file or the file on
the fall of the Shah or the hostages. But the place of Pahlavi Iran in the Americans' world-wide diplomacy has to be
remembered. Brezhnev' s team and the emirs and kings of
the region did not imagine that the imperial Republic
would abandon imperial Iran. Incapable of believing
Washington's resignation to the fall of the Shah, the men
in the Kremlin merely looked on for a long time. Prodigal
in contradictory advice to the sick, will-less sovereign, Carter's team in the end imposed exile on him in the illusion
that they could save the regime without the man who
symbolized it. What can the King of Saudi Arabia and his
countless relatives make of this?
All these "moderate" sovereigns wish for discreet
American protection. They fear revolutionaries, Palestinians, and fundamentalists, those who look to Mecca as
well as those who look to Moscow- even as they all set
their eyes on Jerusalem.
The career of events in the Middle East provides a
touchstone for the two doctrines on use of armed force in
international conflicts, especially in the Third World, that
confront each other in the United States and also in Europe. Iran and Afghanistan appear to teach contradictory
lessons: for all its sophisticated weapons, the Shah's army
showed itself powerless before infatuated crowds and
Khomeini's propaganda cassettes. The unarmed prophet
won. In Kabul not words but Antonovs in a few hours flew
in soldiers and tanks that drove one faction (Khalq) out
and put the other (Parcham) in power. Which of these examples-Teheran or Kabul-should stay with strategists?
Both, obviously.
The example of Iran reminds us once more-if we need
17
�reminding-that in our times a change of regime often
brings a change in diplomatic orientation. The Ayatollahs
curtailed oil production. A fundamentalist or revolutionary government in Riyadh might take similar measures.
These facts lead to the belief that the destiny of the West
will be decided in the Third World, not by intercontinental missiles, but by diplomacy and economics. To a certain
extent, an indisputable teaching; but one-sided and dangerous. Arming a moderate regime shaken by popular reaction to violation of religious prescriptions and to the
weakening of tradition may speed its destabilization. In
the case of Iran the "modern" generals did not defend
their sovereign to the end; they might, however, perhaps
have saved him if they had imposed effective martial law
when still in control of the situation.
A look at the prospects in the Persian Gulf shows that
neither of the two doctrines is sufficient in itself. The Soviets can occupy the Strait of Hormuz without serious resistance if they so decide. They can also gamble on the
precariousness of the so-called traditional or moderate regimes, on the potential rebels in this region that number
in the hundreds of thousands: Palestinians drawn by the
oil riches or Mujahiddin, militant Islamic socialists or
Moslems with a Marxist veneer. Need I add that the correlation of forces, even when not employed, weighs on the
minds of all the actors, on sovereigns and masses. The
American abandonment of the Shah is not forgotten; the
contrast between the proximity of Soviet troops and the
distance of American troops is not overlooked.
Events in the Middle East have brought back to the
fore the economic stakes of the political competition. In
the last thirty years even dogmatic Marxists had a hard
time finding economic motives for the great decisions
made in Washington. The war in Korea, the war in Vietnam, were wars of defense on the edges of the sphere of
influence, and the world market, of the United States.
Neither of these two divided countries had important raw
materials either in their northern or southern halves. To
find economic motives, you had to suppose that containment of Soviet expansion aimed 1 in the final analysis, at
the preservation of the integrity of the world market for
the multinationals, who opposed Soviet armed conquest
or the coming to power of Soviet-inspired parties for the
sake of their expansion.
For the first time, in the Middle East, the doctrine of
containment does not hide an objective that takes precedence: oil. The United States now imports forty percent
of its oil; Japan imports nearly all its oil (which makes up
the largest share of its energy [75% ]). Oil still makes up
about 55% of Europe's total energy consumption. Soviet
control of the Persian Gulf would, for all that, not deprive
Europe of oil in normal times, in times of peace. But who
can underestimate the power of the oil weapon? Added to
thousands of tanks and nuclear warheads, the increased
capacity for pressure and blackmail at the disposal of the
Kremlin would not make the Mecca of Socialism more attractive, but it would make its demands more imperative.
18
Western Dependence
It might perhaps be useful at this point to touch upon a
too-often-neglected subject. It is all well and good to recall
the enormous superiority of Western economies over So-
viet bloc economies. As long as American power fashioned, not an empire, but at least an imperial area inside
of which the world market prospered, we forgot our dependence on raw materials. OPEC reminded us of it.
Economists conceive of production as the result of the
combination of work and capital. Ecologists think of it as
coming from the transformation of nature by human energy, intellectual or material. Without the raw materials to
transform, capital becomes sluggish-and human energy
by itself is no longer enough to keep up the steel and cement monstrosities where hundreds of millions of men in
the industrialized nations live.
The United States depends on other countries for
100% of its cobalt, for 95% of its manganese, for 90% of
its nickel, for 100% of its tin, for 100% of its chrome. All
the raw materials the United States must import are
found in southern Africa, especially in South Africa. By itself South Africa contains 77% of the manganese, 89% of
the platinum, 64% of the gold of the Western world. Modern armament cannot do without raw materials like
chrome, platinum, nickel, cobalt, titanium. The region
where these metals that might be called strategic lie is
another hot point in the world today. Any political upheaval in Zaire (cobalt), in South Africa (chrome, platinum, diamonds, titanium), would mortgage the West's
supply of these strategic materials.
Why Do Present Crises Divide
the Western Partners?
Regardless of whether it betrays a design to expand to
the south, testifies to growing Soviet .confidence in their
power, or comes of a faulty diplomatic move, the invasion
of Afghanistan provoked an international crisis and dissension in each camp. Rumania expressed reservations
about the Soviet operation; the Polish Prime Minister intimated his unhappiness. In the West the Europeans
showed their desire for autonomy in many ways-and not
without criticizing Washington's actions.
Let's put aside the simplistic comments of some of the
American press: the voluntary Finlandization of Europe.
Let us .also forget about the equally simplistic observations of some Europeans: the entrance of Soviet troops
into Afghanistan represented a North-South, not an EastWest conflict; we, we Europeans are not about to sacrifice
the advantages of detente for the sake of a country already
in the Soviet sphere of influence, when Washington, with
hardly any protest, accepted the coup d'etat of April1978
that eliminated Daud, who for his part had set aside without bloodshed the King, his cousin. Europeans who retain
some planetary sense know as well as Americans that
SUMMER 1981
�everything that occurs in Afghanistan interests the Persian Gulf and, thereby, the independence of Europe.
The crucial question is: Why do the present crises-in
Iran, in Afghanistan, concerning Palestine-divide the Atlantic allies instead of tending to unify them like the crises
in the past-Korea, Berlin, and Cuba? Yesterday the allies
backed each other in the face of danger, today they
bicker.
Some answers come to mind of their own accord. The
Europeans have regained their rank and station in the
world economy. The United States is still first, but without the same margin of superiority. Europe's dependence
on the United States has now turned into interdependence. The American authorities who are in charge of the
still irreplaceable international currency of the dollar must
have the cooperation of the central banks, especially of
the bank of- the Federal Republic of Germany. At the
same time, Europeans feel more dependent on the oilproducers. Already, during the Yom Kippur war, Europe
refused the American air force the use of its airports. Only
Salazar's Portugal facilitated the airlift that saved Israel.
Europe feared that joining the United States, the protector of Israel, would compromise it before the oil governments. At the risk of further weakening the only Arab or
at least Moslem leader who had thrown in his destiny with
the West, Europe did not approve the Camp David accords. By mutual consent on either side of the Atlantic
there was relatively little discussion of Europe's attitude
during the Yom Kippur war. Europe's neutrality toward
the Camp David agreements continues her attitude of
1973.
Circumstances made neutrality or indifference impossible in the instance of Afghanistan. With the Arab states
for once blaming the Soviet Union instead of the United
States, with the President of the United States, in words
at least, siding with his advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and
taking his distance from his Secretary of State, the Europeans had to condemn the coup in Kabul. Even more,
they were joyous at the resurgence of American will.
They willingly would have endorsed the sensational
proposition of The Economist: the Soviets did not hesitate
to invade Afghanistan because the United States had let
its guard down and had, since the war in Vietnam, passively put up with Soviet-Cuban activities in Africa. Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Yemen had not been
enough to provoke the reflex of containment. In the first
year of his mandate President Carter used to congratulate
himself on his country's readiness to rid itself of its irrational fear of communism; he stopped taking a country's
turn to communism for an American defeat. The same
Carter worried the allies more than he reassured them
when he declared that he had learned more about the Soviet Union in a few days than in the three preceding years.
A conversion in view of the elections or for good?
After several days' hesitation, Valery Giscard d'Estaing
took on the firm language of the "unacceptable". At the
same time he tried to take advantage of French diplomaTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
cy's independence from Washington. He turned down a
dinner a trois in Bonn because this "informal" meeting
had been announced ahead of time. On his own initiative
or in response to a Soviet initiative through the Polish
Prime Minister, he met with Leonid Brezhnev. Above all,
he was anxious to keep diplomatic contact with Moscow
at a moment when the current no longer passed between
Moscow and Washington.
The real novelty came from Helmut Schmidt, or perhaps one should say, from the Federal Republic of Germany. The Ostpolitik Willy Brandt initiated now unfolds
its unforeseen and at the same time logical consequences.
Before the conclusion of the treaties with the other Germany, the managers of East Germany had la\lnched the
password Abgrenzung-in other words, the solidification
of moral and political borders to compensate for the opening of the actual frontiers to visitors from the West. Abgrenzung seems to me to have enjoyed indifferent success
at best.
The Germans on either side of the line that divides
them have never been closer because of commercial exchanges, television, and personal encounters. The word
Ostpolitik recalls the expression, Ostorientierung, I heard
so often a half-century ago. A country in the middle, Germany looks either to the East or the West for a partner, for
an ally to forestall encirclement. In 1931 and in 1932 at
the Student Center in Berlin, which hummed with political discussion, some looked to the East, and, thereby, to
the Soviet Union; others toward the West and the Western democracies. Both sides emphasized their German
identity in face of the Tsarist knout or Bolshevik despotism on one side and the rationalism of the Western
democracies on the other. Helmut Schmidt would not indulge in such rhetoric or cultural hermeneutics today. He
counts himself-and the Federal Republic of Germany-unhesitatingly among the Western or pluralistic
democracies. In spite of the sincerity of its Westorientierung, the government in Bonn, however, fears
Moscow's bad temper as much as Washington's. The
withdrawal of American troops? The Germans, the Europeans already show too much docility in the face of Soviet prohibitions and commands. The withdrawal of the
American troops in Europe would turn docility into servility. Europeans know that the protection they owe America serves the interest, rightly conceived, both of protectors and protected.
The three hundred thousand Americans in Western
Europe constitute at least an unreckonable risk for the Soviet Union in the event that she envisages military aggression. For his part, Kissinger could say at Brussels-he
would have done better to keep his silence-that no President of the United States would unleash strategic missiles
against Soviet cities in the certainty that American cities
would suffer the same lot within an hour: The truth is
that no one can say with certainty what the President of
the United States would do in reply to a partial or total Soviet attack against the European members of the alliance.
19
�This goes for the men in the Kremlin, too. This uncertainty
has now become the normal, essential mode of deterrence
between the superpowers. The Americans cannot, and do
not desire to, take away this residual deterrence from their
allies, even if they are ungrateful. And the allies for their
part do all they can to supplement it with the Ostpolitik.
The Ostpolitik makes up the specifically national component in Bonn's diplomacy. As long as the Federal Republic of Germany clung to the Hallstein doctrine, she
gave herself no room for maneuver and condemned herself to the role of model ally of the United States. Because
she did not recognize the consequences of the War-the
"Polandization" of the territories east of the Oder-Neisse
and the for!Jlation of the German Democratic Republicshe remained the out-post of the Atlantic army. She was
on the front line. She dedicated herself to economic wellbeing and to the unity of Europe (Europe west of the line
of demarcation). An economic giant and a political
dwarf-as someone put it. The economic colossus in the
end lent political power to the so-called dwarf: the Ostpolitik showed her, not a field for immediate action, but prospects on the future.
The Ostpolitik has inherent limitations, to be sure. The
workers' party, which rules the GDR and which will not
submit its authority to the hazard of free elections, confounds its own and the Soviet Union's destiny. With its
military and civilian technicians the GDR does her share
in helping Sovietism to expand in Africa and the Americas. I do not think Schmidt harbors any illusions about
"peace through commerce" crusades. Nor does he count
on the mutuality of interests of the two countries on
either side of the political and ideological dividing line.
Without the alliance with Washington, cordial relations
with Moscow would turn dangerous. But alliance with
Washington has its perils when relations between Washington and Moscow grow tense.
A "cynical" analysis could -go further in this direction.
Let us look at western Europe's situation without preconceived iudgement: to the east the largest army in the world,
to the south and farther east the Arab countries who for at
least ten years have opened and closed the oil tap. Neither
the Israelis nor the American~> have oil to sell. The United
States still has enough military might to make the Soviets
think; it hardly has any means left to pressure its allies. It
can no longer dictate its decisions to them. It must come to
an understanding with them. The Americans are not yet
fully conscious of their decline.
Schmidt's team and Carter's. The Chancellor has not forgotten the episode of the neutron bomb. He will not forget the undiplomatic letter he received from Washington
just before his trip to Moscow ... The left wing of the Social Democratic Party and an important segment of public
opinion and of the intelligentsia turn away from the
United States either because the United States has disappointed them or for other reasons. They prefer detente to
confrontation with the Soviet Union.
Many top German executives, in and out of government, are severely critical of the fiscal and economic man-
agement for which, in varying degrees, all Presidents since
Johnson have been responsible. In this field they no
longer accept Washington's leadership, even though the
United States, because of its currency and importance, inevitably exercises considerable influence on all participants in the world market. For my part, the inflation, the
fall in the growth of productivity, the inability of Nixon,
Ford, and Carter to conceive and carry out an energy policy impress and disturb me less than the disappearance of
a strategic doctrine, and of leadership capable of overcoming the chaos of pressure groups and setting a goal for the
American Republic.
The East Coast establishment, which had supported
the foreign policy of the United States from 1947 to
1965-from Truman's awakening to the frustrations of an
endless war-split irremediably after defeat in Vietnam
and Watergate. To put it bluntly, it committed suicide.
Since 1975 the United States has had neither a policy nor
a president. Remember John F. Kennedy's inaugural address. To preserve liberty the Republic would shoulder all
burdens and refuse no sacrifice. Turn in contrast to the
speeches of Teddy, the last of that illustrious, tragic dynasty. In domestic affairs liberal, in the American sense,
he belongs to that group of senators who plead for reductions in the military budget and regularly vote against interventions abroad. The alliance that liberalism, the left,
made in the past with the unions to encourage resistance
to the Soviet Union is now all undone. The liberalsmany of them at least-look down with contempt on the
anti-communist obsession that inspired the American
strategy of containment.
The conversion of George F. Kennan, although it occurred before the Vietnam war, is symbolic. The man who
launched the very conception of containment, who
opened the eyes of a President of the United States who
knew nothing or next to nothing of Bolshevism, this man
repudiates himself today, is ashamed of his prophetic writings, and sees one place alone, Berlin, where American in-
American Decline?
Do the Europeans shrink from American leadership because they have come to have confidence in themselves
or because the power of the Soviet Union frightens them?
Or is there a third reason that subsumes the other two:
the decline of America?
Let's take a brief look at personal relations between
20
terests directly oppose Soviet interests. As for the rest of
the world, whether it be Mozambique or Angola, how do
Soviet actions damage the security of the United States?
Kennan does not suggest outright that the leaders of the
Republic give up their interest in regions outside of
Western Europe and Japan, its natural allies. He, however,
no longer finds it necessary to contain the Soviet Union's
expansionist whims more or less everywhere because he
SUMMER 1981
�no longer apparently believes in the inherent characteristics of the Soviet Union.
Containment is admittedly more an all-purpose word
than a doctrine. This word, however, once recalled both
the world·wide dimension of Soviet ambitions and,
thereby, of Soviet-American rivalry, and the uniqueness
of the regime in Moscow. This regime is not a banal despotism, oriental or not, but an ideocracy, animated and
run by a party which, whether it believes or not, will not
think its mission complete until its truth has reached the
ends of the universe. Principles of American diplomacy
until the disaster in Vietnam, these two corollaries of the
word "containment" are today questioned or abandoned
entirely.
The maturity and wisdom the Carter administration
boasted of in its beginnings showed themselves in the
abandonment of just these principles: a conquest of Sovietism in some far-off country of Africa no longer provoked "irrational fear," in the United States. Thanks to
this lack of "fear" events in Angola, Ethiopia, South Yemen did not disturb the serenity of the liberals come to
maturity-including a part of Carter's team. Washington
tolerated the use of Cuban troops in Africa. More than
once Zbigniew Brzezinski evoked "the arc of crisis" around
the Horn of Africa. The United States, however, only reacted unmistakably to the news of hostilities on the frontier between South and North Yemen-hostilities this
time in the immediate vicinity of Saudi Arabia.
Do not misunderstand me. I am not arguing for a return
to containment-if that doctrine was ever carried out in
the sense of resistance at any price, anywhere, to advances of the Soviet Union or communism. The distinction between the Soviet Union and communism brings
out the major difficulty: every victory of a Marxist-Leninist party does not imply a success for the Soviet Union.
The Sino-Soviet schism makes it more difficult to identify
the enemy. Is it the Soviet Union, progressivism, or communism? To some extent this ambiguity was responsible
for the Vietnam war's, and containment's, fall into disrepute.
In Vietnam, on account of something like a conditioned
reflex of containment, the Americans supported the republic in the south against the Marxist republic in the
north. Whose imperialism were they fighting? Moscow's?
Peking's? Hanoi's? We know the answer today. At different times the advisors singled out and announced different enemies. First Moscow. Then, the revolutionary romanticism of the Maoists. Nixon and Kissinger, who were
resuming contact with Peking and sought accomodation
with Moscow, blamed the North Vietnamese themselvesa version nearer the truth, although the Soviet Union supplied Hanoi with modern arms until the end. The equivocality of the cause, the brutality of the means employed
by the American air force in questionable combat, the apparent impossibility of victory, the disproportion between
what was at stake and the cost, in the end, roused public
opinion and discredited the idea of containment. In 1975,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Congress forbade a President weakened by Watergate to
"punish" flagrant breaches of the Paris agreements. The
liberals who bore some of the responsibility for the original American intervention beat Nixon's (whom they
hated) and Kissinger's breasts with their mea culpas. After
the fact and in the light of the events that followed, no
one doubts that intervention was a political mistake. Was
it a moral error? In its defense of South Vietnam the
United States defended the lesser evil. The dominoes continue to fall.
James Carter wanted to learn one of the valid lessons of
Vietnam: he wanted to rid himself of the compulsive imperatives of containment. This break meant two things:
regimes, no matter how hateful, would no longer be supported simply because of fear of communism; everything
possible would be done to avoid sending American troops
to the aid of governments in jeopardy.
The Americans are doing all they can to apply this lesson to Central America and the Carribean. Washington
had entertained cordial relations with the petty tyrannies
(it had not made) in the little countries of this region. The
revolutionaries in Nicaragua did not distinguish in their
hatred between Somoza and his family and their protectors in Washington. After the victory of the Sandinistas,
who were close to the fidelistas, Congress desired to make
the respect of human rights a condition of a loan of seventy-five million dollars. The Sandinistas had it easy: the
senators had never shown such fastidiousness in the respect of human rights in Somoza' s time. In El Salvador
the Americans support a junta of civilians and military
men that at its beginning promised a third way between
President Romero, creature of the big landowners, and
Castroist and Maoist revolutionaries. Besieged on both
sides by the fidelistas and by the extreme right, abandoned by a number of Christian Democrats, the junta, despite its announcement of lapd reform, pursues repression.
It does not appear capable of forestalling civil war.
Successful in Korea, military containment led to disaster
in Vietnam. In Latin America, especially in Central America,
the pursuit of systematic containment-the indiscriminate
support of anti-Communist regimes-ends in either explosions or in Castroist regimes. In Africa, American passivity
allows free play to Cuban operations, whose persistence
makes for lasting influence. From Ethiopia to the frontier of
Pakistan crises intertwine without, however, losing their distinction. In the coming years, these crises will continue be-
yond present preoccupations (the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, ... the impasse in Israeli-Egyptian negotiations).
The complexity of the present career of events would
make a mockery of the slogan: return to containment. The
United States no longer holds sway over the interstate system or the world market. The revolt against the West of
the countries that produce oil and other raw materials
helps Soviet undertakings-but Moscow neither instigates
nor manipulates it. A return to systematic containment in
South America would not be better than passivity in the
face of Soviet-Cuban expansion in Africa. East-West
21
�rivalry now unfolds more and more to the south-and
crises are not always in favor of the camp with the most
arms ....
. . . Reagan with good advisers may surprise even his
supporters .... But the question goes beyond individuals .... The American people have always been more concerned with their own affairs than with the world abroad.
They had immense territory at their disposal and apparently unlimited resources. Politics did not attract the best.
Without a strong state, with a limited central authority
subject to pressure groups, society prospered. The force
of circumstances drove the United States towards an imperial role. For barely a quarter century it dominated the
world. Even in that short period the Soviet Union, inferior
in every respect, had no trouble maintaining her positions.
The United States should no longer aspire to an out-ofthe-ordinary predominance that could not in any case
have lasted. It must, however, reestablish the balance, not
so much of power, but of will. The Soviet Union holds
two cards: its armed might and the inclination toward Sovietism of some revolutionaries in the Third World. The
United States holds others. But neither the gross national
product nor the standard of living can match tanks and
missiles.
The Crucial Question: the True Character
of the Soviet Union?
The reader will probably judge this analysis too pessimistic. I agree. A commanding general knows the weakness of his own soldiers better than the weaknesses of his
enemy, as Clausewitz wrote. In the eighties, according to
all experts, the Soviet Union's economic difficulties will
increase. Economic growth in the Soviet Union has always depended on capital accumulation and expansion of
the work-force. There is, however, less and less surplus labor at the disposal of Soviet planners-and centralized
management hardly allows for the possibility of increases
in the intensity of work, in productivity. The diplomacy of
Brezhnev's team has brought China and Japan, and China
and the United States, closer. At the moment Japan only
dedicates one percent of its gross national product to defense. In equipment the army of the People's Republic of
China lags twenty years behind the Soviet army. With its
invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet Union alienated many
Moslem countries. She frightens many, but the fear she
occasions today will disappear tomorrow if faced again
with an America aware of itself and resolute.
... Massive swift rearmament would require unpopular
measures from any President. There are no available surpluses in the budget or in industry. An additional deficit
in the budget would increase inflationary pressures. The
acceleration of the production of armaments, whether of
tanks, airplanes, or missiles, would mean the transfer of re-
sources, an extraordinary effort, an end to "business as
usual".
Is rearmament a proper response to the challenge? On
this question perhaps more than on any other no unanim-
22
ity prevails in the United States. On the basis of the
wrong lesson learned from Vietnam, the majority of liberals cling to the latest fashionable theory, which holds that
arms are useless in the diplomatic conflicts of our time .
According to this theory, the stability or instability of the
states in the region will decide the destiny of the Persian
gulf-more than tanks and planes delivered to local
princes or installed on the spot by the United States. The
theory holds that sophisticated arms did more to undo
Pahlavi Iran than to save it. Afghanistan underlines the
limits of these otherwise valid objections. Neither rebels
nor princes are indifferent to the assumed relation of
forces between the two superpowers.
The crucial question, however, lies beyond these controversies that concern means rather than principles: What Soviet
Union are we dealing with? A great power, impatient for
recognition as such, desirous of solving its economic problems, ready to seize upon any chance for success but without
revolutionary passion and unlimited ambitions? Or an ideocratic despotism superior only in armaments, indifferent to
the low standard of living of its population, animated always by the same view of the world, always dedicated to the
same end: the spread of its ideological truth throughout the
entire world? Nobody can choose between these two interpretations on the strength of an irrefutable demonstration. In 1936 no one could prove that Hitler would go to
war. It was the same in 1938: neither those for nor those
against Munich could prove their thesis. In 1936 and
1938, those who did not take Hitler at his word and believe in his desire for peace did not lack for arguments.
The situation today is at once different and the same. The
men in the Kremlin loudly proclaim that they are still
Marxist-Leninists; that detente does not lessen the ideological conflict; that the capitalist West is destined to disappear with or without a last battle. The West of the
eighties has this in common with the thirties: a half century ago people refused to take Mein Kampf seriously; today they do not pay attention to the language the oligarchs
in Moscow use in addressing their people and their militants. There is, however, this difference today: Hitler
wanted war; the Soviets want to enjoy its fruits without
fighting.
We are not living the spring of 1914 or the thirties. In
1914 those who ruled unleashed an infernal diplomatic
machine that they proved incapable of, in fact were not
equally interested in, stopping before it exploded. During
the thirties, the West, first France and then Great Britain,
lost their cards and their arms. With or without summit
meetings those responsible for governments today keep
constantly in touch. In contrast to the men of 1914, they
know what a great war would mean. Because of his conviction that he was the only man capable of conducting it,
Hitler preferred to have the war break out when he was
fifty years old and at the height of his powers. Today,
Brezhnev and his comrades conceive of themselves as
militants in a historical movement that existed before
them and will outlive them. I am not even sure that they
SUMMER 1981
�intend to take advantage of "the window of opportunity" -at the suggestion of commentators in the West.
For the moment, as is their practice, they are doing all
they can to distract the attention of the world from Afghanistan in order to win definitive recognition and ac~
ceptance of the unacceptable.
Whether they take advantage or not of the coming
years (Will the military balance have sensibly improved in
four or five years?), they will continue their molelike activity. They will manipulate revolts against pro-Western regimes to their advantage; they will even possibly instigate
these revolts when circumstances are favorable; they will
buy Western technologies on credit; they will make advances at one moment to the United States, at another to
Europe, in order to separate them; they will multiply their
bases in the entire world; they will prepare for the war
they hope to avoid-and to survive.
The Western world has neither a common strategy nor
a firm will to oppose to this armed ideocracy. Ever since
Vietnam and Watergate the American Republic has appeared torn between a bad conscience and the fanciful
wish to pull itself together again. Without a governing
class it is driven at one moment to undertake a new
crusade (human rights) at another to retire from an incomprehensible universe. As for the Europeans, who are beginning to speak with one voice, do they profess their
rewon self-confidence? Do they spell out their independence from the Soviet Union or the United States?
I did not give this article its title, "Soviet Hegemonism:
Year I" without hesitation. I had thought of another title
inspired by Solzhenitsyn's warnings: "Western Blindness".
A friend of mine reported a remark he heard from a Soviet economist who, although fully aware of the defects in
his country's economy, proudly declared: "We would be
masters of the world if it were not for the Chinese."
Would the West have triumphed over Hitler without Stalin? Do democracies always have to count on a brother of
their enemy who hates his brother?
Translated by Nina Ferrero and Leo Raditsa
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
23
�Thucydides and Perikles
Christopher Bruell
The three speeches .of Perikles are a good place to begin
one's study of Thucydides because Perikles is -in many
respects-the most impressive human being and the most
outstanding statesman in Thucydides' book. In many
respects ... not in every respect: Perikles is not, in Thucydides' view, simply admirable. In the following remarks, I
will try to give an introduction to Thucydides' work as a
whole by speaking of the place in that work held by
Perikles and his speeches, of some differences which Thucydides points out between his perspective and that of
Perikles, and of the significance of these differences for
Thucydides' understanding of his theme.
Thucydides' theme is in the first place the war fought
between the two leading Greek cities, Athens and Sparta,
and their respective allies-the cities of the Athenian empire, and the Peloponnesians and their allies outside of
the Peloponnesian peninsula. The war lasted for twentyseven years and ended with the unconditional defeat of
Athens and the dismantling of the Athenian empire. The
Periklean speeches were speeches to the Athenians by a
great leader of Athens-a man who in both influence and
capacity was unrivalled among the Athenians of his time
(I 139.4). What were his qualities of leadership? Perikles
himself says that he was able not only to figure out what
was needed, but to explain his thought to others, that he
was a lover of his city and was above being influenced by
bribes. For, as he explains, a knower who cannot teach
clearly, is no better than one who lacks understanding;
one who has both of these abilities but is hostile to the
city, is unlikely to declare what is in her interests; while
even one who is also loyal to the city but is overcome by
his desire for money, would sell everything for this one
thing alone (II 60.5-6). Thucydides' narrative confirms
and expands on Perikles' self-assessment by incidents
such as the following. When the Spartans and their allies
first invaded the countryside of Athens, Perikles was
afraid that the Spartan king, who happened to be his
friend, might spare his estates-either out of friendship
or, on the instruction of the Spartan authorities, to
damage Perikles' standing with the Athenian people.
Perikles therefore announced to the Athenian assembly in
advance, that if the enemy did not ravage his estates
together with those of the other Athenians, he would turn
Christopher Bruell teaches political science at Boston College. He published another article on Thucydides in The American Political Science
Review (March, 1974).
24
his estates over to the public to be public property, so that
suspicion against him would not arise on their account (II
13.1). This incident not only tends to give a partial confirmation to what Perikles says of himself; it also helps to
show how he was able to make his outstanding qualitiesin this case his honesty and loyalty-visible to the Athenian people (cf. II 65.8). As a result of this, they trusted
him as they trusted no other leader who appears in the
book, though others may have been equally deserving of
their trust. Similarly, Perikles may not have been the
wisest Athenian leader known to Thucydides, but his wisdom was most visible to the Athenians-who, therefore,
respected it and deferred to it to an extraordinary degree
(I 145, II 14 and 65.2-4). As a result, Perikles' leadership
was unusually free from the necessity to flatter or please
the people to their detriment, from the necessity to give
in to their unwise wishes or whims. Thucydides goes so
far as to say that Athens was in Perikles' time a democracy
in name, but in fact or deed the rule of the first man (II
65.8-9).
Perikles' speeches-including one that is merely summarized but not quoted by Thucydides (II 13)-all concern the war, either directly or indirectly. The first urges a
policy of no compromise with the Spartans, or no yielding
to the Spartan demands-a policy which made the war,
likely in any case, inevitable. It also discusses Athenian resources for the war and addresses the question of the
strategy that Athens ought to follow to survive or win the
war. Resources and strategy are also the themes of the second speech (the one summarized). The funeral speech,
like the others, speaks with approval of the imperial
course which brought Athens to the brink of war; and the
last speech defends the decision to go to war and urges
perseverance in the chosen course. Perikles was the leader
of what we can call the war party in Athens. Insofar then
as he was partially responsible for the coming of the war,
and the war ended in complete Athenian defeat, he bears
some responsibility for that defeat, for the fall of Athens.
Thucydides, however, provides a ready defense of Perikles against this charge. He shows that the Athenian defeat was brought about by the Athenians' abandoning
Perikles' war policy or strategy after his death (Perikles
died two and one half years after the war began). Perikles
had advised the Athenians not to seek to add to their
empire during the war and not to fight the Peloponnesians-who were superior to them in numbers-on land
in defense of their homes and farms. These were to be
SUMMER 1981
�abandoned to the ravages of their enemies, while the
Athenians withdrew into the city to guard its walls and to
maintain, through their fleet, their grip on their empire
and the sea. All that Athens needed to survive could be
brought into the city from her overseas possessions by sea;
but the subject cities could not be expected to remain
quiet if the Athenians, through being defeated in a land
battle, became so reduced in numbers as to be unable to
suppress revolts (I 143.4-144.1, II 13.2-3). Some years af.
ter Perikles' death, with the war against the Spartans not
yet completely extinguished, the Athenians decided, contrary to Perikles' advice, to try to conquer Sicily. This de·
cision grew out of a political situation in Athens that had
undergone a considerable deterioration since Perikles'
death. The decline in the quality of Athenian political life,
which brought about the abandonment of Perikles' pol·
icy, also made the consequences of abandonment worse
than they would otherwise have been: not only did
Athens attempt to conquer Sicily-she bungled the at·
tempt. As a result, Athens suffered a defeat of such
magnitude that her loss of the larger war became almost
inevitable. A further deterioration in her domestic political situation-the overthrow of the democracy and the
outbreak of civil war-brought her still closer to the end
(II 65).
Perikles must be absolved then of responsibility for
Athens' fall, because it was only with the abandonment of
his policy, an abandonment brought on by the political deterioration of post-Periklean Athens, that the fall came.
But Perikles' policy itself was not without costs for
Athens-sound as it may have been with respect to the
war (II 65.6). It required that Athenians give up, perhaps
for a very long time (I 141.5), their country homes and
farms, as well as their ancestral shrines or temples, to the
ravages of the enemy. For most of the Athenians, who
were rural people, this was nothing less than the giving up
of their traditional way of life. Perikles' policy may have
been militarily sound; it may have enabled an Athens wise
and sober enough to stick by it to win the war; but it
brought about a grave transformation of Athenian life (II
14-17). In this, and perhaps other ways, Perikles may have
unwittingly contributed to the political decline which, in
the end, undid his work.
*
*
*
With this much as background regarding the place
which Perikles and his speeches have in Thucydides'
work, let me turn to the differences which Thucydides
points to between his own perspective and that of Perikles, differences which Perikles' speeches help to bring to
light. Both Perikles and Thucydides have to face the ques·
tion of what brought on the war, or who was to blame for
it. Perikles' answer is contained in his first speech. The
answer is based on a thirty-year peace treaty between
Athens and Sparta and the Spartan allies which still had
fourteen years to run when the Peloponnesian war broke
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
out (II 2.1; cf. I 115.1). This treaty called for disputes between the parties to it to be submitted to arbitration. Yet
when they began to make complaints to the Athenians before the war, and to make demands on the Athenians, the
Spartans did not ask for arbitration, nor did they accept it
when the Athenians offered it. This showed, according to
Perikles, that the Spartans were plotting against the Athenians, intending that their complaints be settled by war
rather than words (I 140.2). Nor did the demands which
the Spartans were making have any basis in the treaty
(144.2). Perikles therefore characterized the response
which he persuaded the Athenians to give to those demands
as both just and at the same time befitting the dignity of
the city: the Athenians were willing to offer arbitration, as
the treaty required; they would not start the war; but once
it was begun against them, they would defend themselves
(144.2). In short, according to Perikles, the Spartans were
to blame for bringing on the war: they were the aggressors, acting in contravention of a treaty still in force.
Perikles' position derives support from the fact that the
first blow in the war was indeed struck by the Spartan
side. Before war had been declared, the Spartan ally
Thebes launched a sneak attack on the Athenian ally Plataea, in clear violation of the treaty. It is also noteworthy
that this view of the question of responsibility for what
came to be called the first war was later, in large part, tacitly accepted by the Spartans themselves. Even before the
war, a Spartan king had ventured the opinion that it was
not lawful to proceed militarily against those who were offering arbitration, and he had opposed the Spartan decision to go to war partly for this reason (I 85.2). He had
been outvoted; but when the first war began to go badly
for the Spartans, they in turn began to feel that the illegality was more on their side and that, accordingly, their bad
luck was only what was to be expected. Afterwards, when
the first war had been brought to an end and a peace
treaty concluded, there was a reversal of this situation: it
was the Athenians who refused the arbitration called for
by the new treaty and who first committed an open
breach of it. Accordingly, the Spartans turned eagerly to
the renewal of the war (VII 18.2-3; cf. IV 20.2.).
Still, this Spartan-Periklean view of the responsibility
for the coming of the war is not Thucydides' view. According to Thucydides, the truest cause or pretext for the
war, though the one least mentioned, was that the Athenians, by becoming great (that is, by acquiring their great
empire) and frightening the Spartans, compelled them to
go to war (I 23.6, 88, 118.2). According to Thucydides,
then, the Spartans cannot be blamed for starting the war
because the Athenians compelled them to start it. Perikles' treatment of the issue was too narrow, too legalistic:
the Spartans acted out of legitimate self-defense. The
fault for the war lies with the Athenians. It lies with the
Athenians for acquiring their empire, or for expanding it
to the point that it encroached on areas of legitimate
Spartan concern. It lies with the Athenians, that is, unless
there is some reason why the Athenians cannot be blamed
25
�for acquiring or expanding their empire. In order to settle
the question of whether the Athenians can be blamed for
the war, it thus becomes necessary to look into the question of the justice of Athenian imperialism. Here then is a
second question on which we can compare the views of
Perikles and Thucydides.
Perikles barely alludes to this question. In his last
speech, he says that the Athenians now hold their empire
as a tyranny, which it "seems unjust" to have taken but is
dangerous to let go (II 63.2). So far as I know, this is the
only statement of Perikles in Thucydides, which addresses itself to the question of the justice of Athenian imperialism-if even this statement can be said to do that.
For Perikles apparently sidesteps the issue here. He does
not openly admit that the acquisition of empire was unjust; nor does he argue that it was not unjust. (There is a
connection between Perikles' sidestepping of this issue
and his position on the question of who is to blame for the
war. If he had not given the war question such a narrow or
legalistic treatment, his consideration of that question
alone-to say nothing of other reasons-would have forced
him, as it forces Thucydides, to look more deeply into the
question of the justice of Athenian imperialism.)
Thucydides examines the question of the justice of
Athenian imperialism at length. The issue is prominently
raised in the speeches of many characters other than Perikles, and it was Thucydides himself who chose which
speeches to report, arranged their order of appearance,
and was responsible, in the final analysis, even for their
composition (I 22.1); moreover, some of the characters
whose speeches are of interest here, are almost surely his
inventions (Diodotos, the Athenian ambassadors at
Melos, Euphemos). In addition, Thucydides' narrative is
designed and arranged to cast further light on the issues
raised and explored in the speeches. For example, after re·
porting what some Athenians had said in Sparta about the
acquisition and expansion of the empire, and immediately
after stating for the second time that the fear aroused by
the enormous Athenian expansion was what led the Spartans to go to war, Thucydides, in alpng digression (I 97.2),
g1ves h1s own account of Atheman growth (I 89-118).
Through both the speeches and the narrative, then, Thucydides indicates the seriousness with which he-as opposed to Perikles-takes the question of the justice of
Athenian imperialism, and therewith of justice simply. If
we wish to follow Thucydides' thought, we must follow
his treatment of this question.
Is there some reason why the Athenians cannot be
blamed for acquiring or expanding their empire? The
Athenians who speak in Sparta before the war trace the
background of Athenian growth. The great war prior to
the Peloponnesian war was the Persian war, in which two
Persian invasions of Greece had been repelled. The outstanding role in that war had been played by the Athenians, although Sparta, as the leading Greek power, held the
leadership of the alliance of Greek cities. After the invasions had been repelled, however, the Spartans withdrew
26
from active involvement in the alliance, while the Athenians were asked by the majority of the allies to take over
the leadership. The Athenians in Sparta refrain out of tact
from mentioning that the Spartans withdrew after dissatisfaction with the behavior of the Spartan commander
had arisen among the allies and turned them toward
Athens (I 73.2-75.2; cf. 94-96.1). The question of the
justice of Athenian imperialism is largely the question of
how Athens' voluntarily held leadership came to be transformed into what Perikles could describe as a tyranny over
the formerly allied, and now subject cities (75.3; cf. 97.1).
According to the Athenians in Sparta, the Athenians
were compelled to transform the alliance into an empire,
their leadership by consent into leadership through compulsion. That is, they can be excused for the same reason
that Thucydides excused the Spartans for starting the
war. But what compulsion acted upon the Athenians? According to the startling assertion of the Athenians in
Sparta, the compelling forces were fear, then honor, and
in the end benefit (I 75.3, 76.2). If we confine ourselves for
the moment to the question of fear, it is not hard to see
that the Athenian claim has some basis. For as Thucydides indicates in his own treatment of the period between the two wars, the spectacular Greek victories
which had turned back the Persian invasions had not put
an end to the Persian threat: there might be more invasions in the future {cf. I 93.7 with 138.3). Athens, whose
sufferings in the war had been unsurpassed (cf. I 74.2),
might be expected to be especially worried by this prospect. The clearest way to safety was to hold together the
Greek alliance. But as we know from more recent experience, in the absence of immediate obvious danger, few
countries are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to
maintain their military preparedness or to fulfill their obligations to their allies. So it was with the alliance led by
Athens: the allies chafed under the strict Athenian leadership, as the Athenians insisted that they meet their obligations-whether in the form of money, ships, or serviceto the full; the dissatisfaction of the allies led to revolts;
and the Athenians, putting them down, led the cities no
longer as their equals but as subjects (I 96-99). It is difficult to condemn the Athenians for this because it is difficult to know whether any other course would have been
compatible with Athenian safety. Surely the decisive defeat of the Persians in Asia, a defeat which may have
effectively ended for a time the threat from Persia, occurred, as Thucydides emphasizes, after the transformation from alliance to empire had taken place (I 100.1; cf.
93.7). And if the Persian threat ceased then to be worthy
of consideration, and with it the original need for imperial
rule, it may have become dangerous, by that time, for the
Athenians to relinquish a rule that was already widely resented (cf. I 75.4).
To this extent then, there is substantiation, even in
Thucydides' digression on Athenian growth; for the Athenian claim that they were compelled, compelled by fear, to
acquire their empire. But as one reads through the digresSUMMER 1981
�sion as a whole, one finds it increasingly difficult to account for the remarkable range and extent of Athenian
expansionist activity, activity which led them to attempt
even the conquest of Egypt (I 104, 109-IO),by recourse to
a concern for the city's safety alone, however thoroughly
pursued (cf. however Alcibiades' comment in VI 18.6-7).
We should not forget in this connection that expansion itself has risks; that growth on one side may invite growth
on another; and that Athenian expansion in particular
brought on the war through which Athens lost aiL On the
other hand, it is far from clear that an Athenian policy of
expansion inspired solely by concern for the city's safety,
and limited to what could reasonably be expected to con·
tribute to such safety, would have been sufficiently
frightening to the Spartans to force them to go to war:
they were generally quite slow to take such a step (I 118.2).
It is true that as early as the revolt of the Thasians, we find
the Spartans secretly promising to invade Attica to assist
an ally seeking to leave the Athenian alliance (I 101.2); but
this promise was given in the aftermath of the decisive
defeat of the Persians mentioned above, a defeat which
could have seemed to have ended the threat from Persia.
That is, it was given only after continued Athenian imperialism ceased to be clearly authorized by that threat; and
in any case, if only because Sparta was diverted by an
earthquake accompanied by revolution, the Spartan
promise remained unfulfilled. In Thudydides' view, it was
the Athenian reaction to a related incident, a reaction culminating in expansion of the empire at the expense of
Sparta and her allies, rather than the action of putting
down the Thasians (that is, of maintaining the empire already acquired), that first inspired the intense hatred of
Athens in Sparta's allies which eventually forced Sparta
herself to a determined effort to bring Athens down (I
101.3, 102.3-103.4; cf., especially with 101.2, 118.2).
But the Athenians in Sparta do not even claim that it
was fear alone that compelled Athenian expansion. To
the extent that it was not compelled by fear, it was com·
pelled, they claim, by honor and benefit-that is, by the
Athenian longing for these things. Can such longings act
with the force of compulsion? Can we admit such a thing
without at the same time admitting that many more
crimes than just those committed by the Athenians are
excusable (or are not crimes at all)?
Thucydides' answer to this somewhat surprising ques·
lion-which we are forced by the Athenians to raise-is
difficult. I think the heart of it is conveyed in the Melian
dialogue. The Athenians had forbidden the Melians to
raise considerations of justice: the Athenians will not be
influenced by such considerations which, in the circumstances (the vast difference in power between the two
sides) are, according to the Athenians, quite out of place
(V 89). The Melians refuse in effect to accept the separation of utility or advantage from right which they understand the Athenians to have insisted upon, for they take
justice to be a common good (V 90). This, however, opens
the way to the Athenians to demonstrate that their good
TilE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
consists now in the subjugation of the Melians (V 91-99),
to demonstrate that there was no good common to the
Athenians and Melians at this time, unless one considers
that a Melian surrender on moderate terms would have
been good for both parties (V 91.2 and 111.4). More gener·
ally, by pointing to our insistence that justice be (a common) good, the Melians point to the fact of the primacy of
our concern with the good, a fact which comes to light
even and precisely in the midst of any consideration of
justice, provided that it goes far enough. But this means
that the good compels us to its pursuit, at least to the extent that it remains always our most fundamental con·
cern. And if this is so, what appears to us good-even if it
is not truly good-may reasonably be held by us to compel
us, and thus compel us in fact. It appeared to the Athenians that what was best for them was rule over all the
Greeks (at the minimum: II 62.1-2; cf. 41.4 and VI 15.2).
For, as Perikles put it in his last speech, "to be hated and
burdensome in the present belongs to all who think fit to
rule over others; but whoever accepts envy for the sake of
very great things deliberates correctly: hatred does not
hold out for long, but the brilliance of the moment is left
behind even into the future as ever-remembered fame" (II
64.5). We can understand from this why one of the best
and most generous of Athens' opponents, even while resisting the Athenians with all his strength, refused to
blame them for their ambition (IV 61.5).
But is the Athenian ambition as free from reasonable
criticism as this seems to indicate? Having sketched the
argument we have sketched, we are obliged to add that it
is important that the good be correctly understood (cf.
Aristotle, Politics 1325a34-b3). Did the Athenians cor·
rectly understand what was good for them? If, as we have
argued, the Athenians suffered severely from their all but
limitless imperialism, the question becomes whether the
glory or fame to which it led was worth the price. That
such glory or fame is indeed worth the price was somehow
felt by Perikles and, so far as one can judge from Thucydides, by almost all Athenians of quality. But we are obliged
to accept their experience as authoritative with respect to
the human good only if it is a genuine experience, that is,
only if it is based on a clear view of themselves and of the
object of their longing. Did the Athenians in question possess such a view?
The glory for which they long and which they pursue
by their all but limitless imperialism is understood by
them as something noble (II 64.6).lt must therefore be for
something noble, for actions noble and/or just (I 76.3, VI
16.5). But are not such actions characterized at least in
part by the fact that they are not simply self-serving? This,
at any rate, appears to have been the Athenian view. In
the Melian dialogue itself, they assert that it is the Spartans who, in their relations with others, most manifestly
hold that whatever pleases them is noble, whatever is to
their advantage is just: the Athenians imply, that is, that
they themselves do not make these equations. Or, as one
can gather from remarks ofPerikles, it is the actions of vir-
27
�tue which are called noble (II 43.1, 42.2-4; cf. V 105.4),
and it is especially action taken in disregard of advantage
which is called virtuous. It was especially in praising the
non-calculating generosity of the Athenians that Perikles
claimed to be speaking of their virtue; he thus implicitly
distinguished their virtue from what he had been speaking of just previously-the Athenian capacity to act, to
take risks, on the basis of calculation leading to the clearest possible awareness of the terrible and pleasant things
(cf. II 40.4-5 with 40.3; cf. 43.1; cf. also 35.1, 36.1, 42.2-3,
45.1, 46.1, and, on the other hand, 37.1 and 45.2).
Now as this implies, and as a noble imperialism in their
understanding of it requires, the Athenians do not act, or
at least do not understand themselves to act, in a simply
selfish manner. Their spokesmen at Sparta claim that
they are more just in the exercise of their rule than they
have to be, given their superiority in power (I 76.3). And
Perikles claims that the Athenians benefit others not out
of calculation of advantage but from trust in their own
generosity. (Indeed the Athenians at Sparta argue that
Athens was hurt by her rather just or measured conduct
toward her subjects: it permitted resentments to arise
which a harsher rule might have avoided, resentments, we
might add, which helped bring on the war [I 76.4-77.5].
Similarly, according to Perikles, Athenian generosity had
the effect that the Athenians were firm in their regard for
those they had benefited rather than vice versa [II 40.4].)
On the other hand, the fact that the Athenians pursued,
as they thought, a noble imperialism seems to have been
inseparably connected with the limitlessness of their aims
(as well as with their willingness to take risks to achieve
them: V 107): it was the noble-minded Athenians, rather
than the more cynical (and cautious) Spartans, who were
led on by hopes (I 70.3-8, VI 24.3 and 31.6; cf. II 42.4)-as
if the happiness they foresaw always eluded them or lay
ahead.
But precisely because it was a noble imperialism they
wished to pursue or believed themselves to be pursuing,
and because they refused to follow the Spartans in simply
equating nobility and justice with their own pleasure and
advantage, the Athenians could not help becoming aware
of the tension between this wish, or this view of their enterprise, and the fact that in seeking through such an em·
pire above all their glory, they were pursuing what they
took to be their highest good or advantage to the exclusion
of that of all others. The attempt to defend the empire, in
the series of great Athenian statements which address the
question of the justice of Athenian imperialism, is
testimony to this awareness-especially where these
statements go beyond what a politic defense of the em·
pire may have called for in the circumstances. (Cf., for
example, what the Athenians say at Sparta with the statement of "Euphemos" at Kamarina [I 73.1, 75.3, 76.2 and,
on the other hand, 75.4-5 with VI 82.1, 83.2 and .4, and
87.2]. The Spartan ephor correctly understands that the
Athenian statement at Sparta leaves no room for SpartanAthenian accommodation or avoidance of war on terms
28
other than the subordination of Sparta, to take place
sooner or later through loss of her allies, to Athens [I 86].)
In other words, the sometimes shocking argument we
have examined justifying, or rather excusing, limitless ex·
pansion is testimony not to the callousness of the Athenians but to their concern with the noble-and to the fact
that the outstanding Athenians had reflected deeply on
this issue. For there is little doubt that this argument also
lay behind Perikles' ambiguous reference to the question
of the justice of the acquisition of empire. That is, the
conclusion which we drew from that reference and from
the lack of any other Periklean discussion of the justice of
Athenian imperialism, the conclusion that Perikles had
failed to look deeply into this issue, is almost surely false.
Nevertheless, it is not entirely misleading.
The Athenian leaders, and Perikles in particular, did
not take the question of justice seriously enough to draw
out the full implications of the argument to which their
concern to defend the empire, their awareness that their
imperialism needed defending, had led them. Their argument proved to be inseparable, as we saw, from a vindication of selfishness. The Athenians could not abandon this
argument without abandoning the attempt, called for by
their concern with the noble, to defend the all but limitless imperialism to which that same concern with the
noble had helped to lead them; they therefore embraced
the argument and proclaimed their acceptance of the
standard of conduct it sets forth (I 76.2, V 105.1-2). The
argument, however, confirms the very characterization of
their enterprise which they (still) shrink from accepting,
because to accept it is to cease to see that enterprise as
noble (V 89). Hence the strange inconsistency of their
statements, an inconsistency ranging from contradiction
to incongruity of tone: the strong never put justice before
advantage (I 76.2), but the Athenians are more just than
they have to be, even though this does them harm (I
76.3ff.); they advance to conquer without seeking to color
their intention with "noble words" or claims of justice (V
89), in clear-sighted recognition rather of the compulsion
of human nature to rule where it can (V 105 .1-2), yet they
are not so crude as to hold, like the Spartans, that whatever pleases them is noble, whatever is to their advantage
is just (V 105.4). Only the unpolitical Diodotos appears to
have faced squarely the question of what imperialism of
the Athenian sort looks like in the light of a thoroughgoing acceptance of the argument advanced in its defense
(Ill 45; cf. VI 24.3 and 31.6; cf. also Nikias' comments at
VI 9.3 and 13.1). The Athenian spokesmen whom we have
considered turned from this spectacle, if only at the last
minute, to contemplate instead what they regarded as
Athens' less selfish actions. Since these appeared to concern rather small matters (see esp. I 76.3ff.), those spokesmen did not feel the need to explain to themselves how
such selflessness is compatible with the argument they
had embraced, at the core of which is the discovery of the
primacy of the concern with the good. The Athenians
thus sought to have it both ways. Their argument authoSUMMER 1981
�rizes the unrestricted pursuit of the good, and they understood themselves to be pursuing (without significant
restriction) what they felt to be the human good. What
they felt or experienced regarding this "good", however,
was colored by the belief that their pursuit of it was noble,
by which they meant: not dominated by concern with
their own good. This appears to be the most important
ground, in Thucydides' view, for refusing to defer to that
experience, for doubting that the Athenians truly knew
what was good for them.
*
*
*
In conclusion, I wish to turn to some implications for
Thucydides' thought of the differences between him and
Perikles which have come to light.
When we compare Thucydides' book to the writings of
the classical political philosophers, we see that it has a special place among the works left to us by antiquity. While
Plato and Aristotle present us with beautiful pictures of
"ideal" cities, Thucydides describes for us the life of actual cities. Actual cities turn out to be almost always cities
at war or near to war whether foreign or civil. Thucydides
chose to write about the biggest war known to him. As a
result, as he himself notes, his book is full of descriptions
of grim and terrible things (I 23.1-3).
Because Thucydides wrote of actual cities, his book was
of special interest to the modern thinkers who wanted to
construct a new political science on a realistic basis.
Hobbes, for example, made a translation of Thucydides,
and there are important echoes of Thucydides' unrivalled
description of the horrors of civil war, in particular, in
Hobbes' Leviathan. (Compare Thucydides' account of the
Corcyraean civil war with Hobbes' description of "the
natural condition of mankind" in the light of Hobbes'
remark in the same chapter that, "it may be perceived
what manner of life there would be, where there were no
common power to fear, by the manner of life, which men
that have formerly lived under a peaceful government,
use to degenerate into, in a civil war" [Leviathan I 13; cf.
II 29].) The reaction of Hobbes, and later of Alexander
Hamilton, to the sort of description presented by Thucydides may be roughly estimated from this comment of
Hamilton in the Ninth Federalist Paper: "It is impossible
to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and
Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at
the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which
they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between
the extremes of tyranny and anarchy . ... " The "sensa·
tions of horror and disgust" were lessened only by the
conviction of both Hamilton and Hobbes that the civil
wars, at least, to which the Creek cities were subject are
due to "vices of government" (Ninth Federalist) or to "imperfections ..• of policy" (Leviathan II 29), which they
hoped their new political science would overcome. In the
words of Hobbes, when commonwealths "come to be disTHE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
solved, not by external violence, but intestine disorder,
the fault is not in men, as they are the matter; but as they
are the makers, and orderers of them" (ibid). That is, with
the right understanding, we can change things (cf. ibid II
31 ). While according to Hamilton, "the science of politics ... like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well
understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients" (Ninth Federalist).
For the moderns, then, the grimness of Thucydides' account of political life was relieved by their hope for fundamental political progress. It is not difficult to show that
Thucydides did not share this hope: hence his remark that
his work is intended to benefit those who wish to understand what has happened in the past and what will, given
the way of humanity, happen in much the same form
again (I 22.4; cf. III 82.2 as well as II 48.3). What then enabled Thucydides to bear the grimness of his own account, as he did bear it, with such dignity and calm? For
not only is his work without any trace of "horror and disgust"; it is also free from taint of anger or bitterness 1
gloom or despair. The reason cannot be that he lacked
feeling for the sufferings he observed and portrayed: his
feeling shines through no less impressively for being conveyed with a manly gentleness. He was undoubtedly a
man of immense natural strength, but Hobbes and Hamilton were not insignificant in this respect either. I suspect
then that the reason has more to do with his thought: that
Thucydides saw something which the later thinkers did
not see, something which can be glimpsed by reflecting
on the difference between Thucydides' perspective and
that of Perikles. This is that human life, at least for any
human being of quality, is never free from concern for the
noble and the just. This has the result that we are dependent on the belief that we know what nobility and justice
are. We remain dependent on that belief, unless it is replaced by what we can tentatively call the search for justice, for what justice truly is-unless it is replaced, that is,
by philosophy. If I remember correctly, philosophy is
mentioned in Thucydides' work only by Perikles, who in
the same context suggests that thought and writing are
subordinate to action and criticizes the inactive life (II
40.1-3. 41.4; cf. 63.2-3, 64.4). Thucydides, who clearly
regarded his writing and thought, the substance and outcome of his search for truth (I 20. 3), as superior to any possible action on his part, quietly presents the evidence for
the alternative view. Thucydides, that is, shows us the necessity for philosophy; he shows us that human life, for all
its apparent disorder, necessarily points in this direction.
Beyond that, he shows us something of the philosophic
life in action. All that we see in Thucydides' book-battles
and speeches, intrigues and civil strife-we see through
his eyes: In looking at all these things, then, we are also
becoming acquainted with Thucydides himself. This, too,
is part of the reason why his book, despite the many grim
things that it necessarily contains, possesses also a very
great beauty.
29
�Not Quite Alone on the Telephone
Meyer Liben
not mine, but the one I
rent from the Telephone Company, and not all of it,
but just the receiver, cradled in the slightly curved
arms of the secure base, solid mother base, and I heard
not the familiar dial tone, that serene hum which tells us
that all is electronically well, and, by extension, for the
imagination is so at the mercy of the immediate, that all is
well in general, or in the words of juliana (also known as
Julian) of Norwich, moving now into the future, that "all
shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing
shall be well," I heard, not the familiar dial tone, but an
unfamiliar buzzing, rasping sound.
I picked up the telephone (the part for the wholewhat is the word for it?) and heard silence, not a golden silence, but the silence of a far-off emptiness, a silence
growing more and more ominous as time passed and no
sound came to fill the unexpected void.
I picked up the phone, and after dialing my number,
not my number, but the number I was trying to reach, the
number of the other, the phone went dead, into an extraordinarily deep silence, a silence with bells on, the way
). D. Salinger describes sexual intercourse as masturbation
with bells on, then suddenly came to life again, celebrated
I
PICKED UP MY TELEPHONE,
Meyer Liben (1911-1975), whose work has appeared in New American
Review, Commentary, Midstream, in these pages, and elsewhere, is the
author of Justice Hunger and Nine Stories, (Dial Press 1967). "Not Quite
Alone on the Telephone" is from an unpublished collection of stories,
Streets and Alleys.
30
its resurrection with a piercing whistle, a kind of locomotive, clear-the-track whistle.
I picked up the phone, dialed a long-distance number,
and instead of the voice I expected to hear, found myself
in the midst of a conversation between a bank official and
a man who was trying to borrow $12,000 to modernize a
superette (examine that word for an instant), a small supermarket in a southern border state-is there any other
kind of border state? -at least that was my guess by the
accents of the pleasantly recalcitrant banker and the cagy
would-be debtor. Feeling like the unknown and unwanted
member of an audience at a real-life drama, I quietly hung
up the receiver (not the phone).
I picked up the phone, heard a series of staccato noises,
like that of a generator crying for help, hundreds and hundreds of these noises, part of an apparently endless wave
of sound, one unit exactly like another in timbre, duration, volume-then quiet, this side of dead.
I picked up the phone. There was a click, as though two
small metal objects had come together, perhaps in a magnetic field (this is the sheerest surmise of an electronic
cretin), then the familiar reassuring dial tone, that marvelous golden hum we used to take so much for granted.
I picked up the phone and heard a shriek, imagined a
woman in extreme distress, by some monster forced, the
sound echoing as from the wall of a cave, and then slowly
dying away.
I picked up the phone, and heard, for maybe thirty seconds, the pure tones of a string quartet.
SUMMER 1981
�I picked up the phone and heard a blast, like that of a
factory lunch whistle, followed by a kind of tinkling, the
murmur of not altogether still waters .. .
I picked up the phone and heard ... but let these few
examples suffice. I decided that the phone was tapped,
and that it was tapped for no specific reason (what could
such a reason be?) but on a random basis, though no
doubt part of an overall selective process, the way you
might be chosen as a participant in the Neilson ratings or
in The Daily News straw poll. It is, I analyzed, part of the
selective policy of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., or some intelligence-gathering service that I had not yet heard of. But in
our country the most secret agencies become well-known,
we even hear of splits in the C.I.A. between liberal and
conservative factions.
trustingly, in remembrance of the reassuring sonorities of
the woman at the company, I heard, far from the dial tone
I was prepared to hear, hoping and expecting to hear, a
piercing whistle, as from a policeman who has sighted a
thief, followed by a silence not quite long enough to be
ominous, but close to it, and that followed by a familiar
click, and that followed by a voice of a woman asking me
what number I wanted. When I said that I was calling for
Weather Information in New York City, she explained to
me (more slowly and patiently than I thought necessary)
that I had reached a number in Sacramento, California,
that she would connect me with the operator, the wire
went dead, there came the sounds of a kind of electronic
music, and then, what used to be the most reassuringly do·
mestic (all that electronic chaos out there tamed) of all tel·
ephone sounds, the equable, unwavering, steady, warm,
H
AVING DECIDED THAT MY PHONE WAS TAPPED, I
called the Telephone Company (more exactly, I called
my Business Representative on the advice of the
Operator) and that was the beginning of a series of con·
versations with a series of individuals of various ranks and
in various positions in the hierarchy of the phone company's bureaucracy, individuals so numerous, so different
in character, in temperament, that the content and nu·
ances of the conversations I had, as I was plugged into this
or that hole in the huge administrative switchboard, to say
nothing of letters received and answered, plus calls follow·
ing up unanswered letters-all that would take up considerably more space (and therefore time) than I intended to
use up in my account of this episode. I finally wound up
in the hands, rather the voice, of a young woman, who, as
I understood, was in a kind of Public Relations Security
branch of the company, and after a number of conversa·
lions, reports on cable checks, electronic checks and in·
vestigations, she, without firmly saying that my phone
was not tapped, said that she was very sorry about the in·
conveniences I was experiencing, about the spectrum of
noises, silences, and interruptions, that it was all part of
the problems created by the unprecedented growth of the
phone company, that the company was in the process of
catching up with that unprecedented growth by the spe·
cia! training and employment of old and new personnel,
by the installation of new, very sophisticated equipment,
that once this newly-trained personnel was on the job and
once this new equipment was in full use, she was confident that these clicks, interruptions, whizzing sounds,
thunderous noises, hums, whistles, clangings, whirrings,
and welcoming Dial Tone.
I
HAVE ALWAYS HAD MIXED FEELINGS about the tele·
phone in my house. Rats, mice, cockroaches, those
thin silver-fish that sometimes appear in the bathtub,
are living creatures which now and then make their pres·
ences felt. They do not play dead, like the telephone,
fixed in its place forever, wherever you put it, there it
stays (never, never, has a telephone moved by itself, never
has a telephone tried to move by itself), and comes to life
only by human intervention, though not necessarily with
a human presence, for so often does a phone ring and no·
body there to answer it. It has all that coiled power, and
sometimes, when it rings, at odd hours of the night, or
when I am in an absent-minded or bemused state, it is as
though a wild beast has leapt into the room. The roach
surprises, the mouse frightens, the rat scares, the tele·
phone terrifies.
But the phone is so useful an object, brings so much
pleasure, the voices of our far-off dear ones, or those close
by, the simple pleasures of the temporarily parted, that
one grows attached to a given phone. I shall go into that.
Nevertheless it is an instrument not continually under
our control, therefore a stranger in the house, the way all
machines are strangers, no matter how utilitarian or plea-
sure-giving. And when I heard that a phone could be
bugged in such a way that it will record what is said in a
room even when the receiver is on the hook, that rein·
forced my sense of its silent and forbidding animosity, its
treacherous and inhuman nature.
me quite ashamed of my complaints, my ignorance, my
(And yet-to again point up the ambivalence-what
pleasure this same phone has given me over the yearsthe long, cozy conversations, the way on a miserable rainy
or freezing night, I might choose to stay at home, thinking
of all those I hadn't spoken to for so long, and how pleas·
ant it would be (and was) to stay at home, exchanging tele·
suspicious nature.
phonic pleasantries, confidences, ideas, jokes, gossip,
Then, when I came home that evening (I had spoken to
the telephone representative from the office where I am
employed) and picked up the phone to dial a number, all
while the wind rattled the window panes, the rain covered
these panes with crooked streams, and the phone always
available, responding to those needs, obedient, helpful,
buzzes, indeed all the varieties of noises and silence,
would disappear. Added to this was a promise to check
further, all said in a tone of voice so sweet, so agreeable, so
understanding, so sincere and reassuring, that she made
Tiffi ST. JOHNS REVIEW
31
�accurate transmitter of your words, the sounds beneath
the words, and the spirit beneath the sounds).
that the phone was tapped,
my attitude toward it moved naturally, even dramatically, in the direction of suspicion, hostility,
indeed to the limits of that suspicion and hostility. So do
we foist a kind of human nature on a manufactured object. Let me say this: it is possible to have strong personal
feelings about a telephone, but never have I heard of a telephone which has been given a name, the way a domestic
animal (or a wild animal, for that matter) is given a name,
never have I heard of a child giving a telephone a name,
one's positive feeling for it does not go so far, the way it
might go to a moving machine, like a truck (but automobiles are not given names apart from the company names),
though the phone company is now beginning to name its
phones, one being the generic name Princess. I've never
heard anyone refer to this small bedroom phone by name,
though Joyce Carol Oates has mentioned it in one of her
works, casually, the way you'd mention a random character who never appears again.
I moved toward the negative ambivalent pole, first in a
kind of respectful cautious way, the way you deal with a
mysteriously powerful enemy, used the phone as little as
possible, saw in it a new and unexpected power ... Indeed,
my next month's bill was the lowest I can remember, because of the absence of the Message Units so inexorably
used up in those long cozy conversations (isn't talking on
the phone sometimes like being in front of a pleasant fireplace fire?) which take the place of a visit, or a night at the
theatre, or just out? And how many Message Units can
you run up in a call to Weather, a call to the druggist or
cleaner?
0
NCE I WAS CONVINCED
was quite abandoned for a spell,
though it was on my mind, both configuration and
number. It is curious, by the way, how we remember, far back, our own old phone numbers, like the rock
strata which the geologists make so much of. I remember
very old numbers, ones when the Exchange was a name,
like Circle or Butterfield. When you stopped saying the
name, and slatted to dial it, you of course dialed only the
first two letters, then the first two letters and a number
(Cl-2 is quite different from Circle, though if you know
the name of the exchange, you are naturally always aware
of it). And then came the takeover by the numbers, more
of which later.
This feeling of respect, trepidation, in front of a mysterious power, particularly uncanny to one who is electronically backward, soon faded (uncanny or not) and was
replaced by an amalgam of feelings, a many-sided thronging, not too easy to sort out-anger, scorn, sense of outrage, disbelief, among others-which brought me closer
to this instrument (cannot initiate, can only be used), to
an involvement, an engagement, a kind of confrontation.
Y
32
ES, MY PHONE
The way I said it to myself was: If this phone is going to
bug me, two can play at that game (see again how I treat
the instrument as if it had a life of its own, a volitional
sense).
Let me say right off that the fact of a government
agency going to the trouble and expense of tapping my
phone indicated to me (forget the random sampling) that I
was a person of considerably more importance than I had
ever imagined myself (since the daydreams of childhood)
to be. Indeed, this situation reactivated those daydreams
of childhood. I imagined, for example, that in a confusion
of names, I was called before an Investigating Committee
of the Congress, asked my name and occupation, which I
gave, under oath. The committee members then proceeded to launch a barrage of questions at me, regarding
dozens of trips I was supposed to have taken abroad,
about contact with individuals I had never heard of, all of
which made it as clear as the most perfect sentence ever
written that I was being confused with another person
with my name and occupation. I quietly answered "no" to
hundreds of detailed questions about trips to Havana,
Buenos Aires, Hanoi, East Berlin, Hong Kong, small
towns in Cambodia and cities of which I had never heard
in countries which I could not locate nor even identify.
"You are telling this committee, sir, on your sworn
word, that you were not on the premises of the Swedish
Embassy in Jakarta on January 9, 1967?"
"I am telling you just that."
"And you are telling us, sir, that on the afternoon of
June 17, 1967, you did not meet a certain representative
of the government of Albania in a tavern on O'Connell
Street in the city of Dublin, and that certain documents
were not exchanged on that occasion?
"Sir, I am telling you just that."
After some three hours of this questioning, the form
sometimes direct, sometimes involuted or oblique, sometimes coming right at you, sometimes seeming to bank off
the ceiling or walls (so various are the deliveries), a man
suddenly moves into the room, carrying a sealed envelope
which he hands to the Chairman, after a short whispered
interchange. The Chairman halts the proceedings, opens
the envelope, reads the letter, shakes his head in a kind of
weary puzzlement, calls a recess, confers with the other
Committee members, raps his gavel, and calls the meeting
to order. He has a rather strained, awkward look. So do the
other Committee members.
"I have a statement to make," says the Chairman. "We
sincerely regret that a serious error in identification has
been made. There are apparently two gentlemen with
similar names and occupations, approximately. of the
same age, height, and appearance, one of whom lived at
an address which! with the transposition 0 f two numbers,
would be precise y the number of the house on the avenue at which the gentleman on the stand resides. It is the
other gentleman we are seeking to interrogate. Again, we
sincerely regret any inconvenience we have caused due to
this unfortunate case of mistaken identities .... "
11
SUMMER 1981
�HIS REACTIVATION of an earlier fantasy life (not
childhood) helped to break down, after a while, the
tentative reserve I had adopted toward my telephone. It was one of the factors that emboldened me in
my dealings with that instrument
In the formulation of Leon Trotsky (perhaps I shouldn't
mention his name) I have skipped a stage in my description of this process, for, before the anger, emboldenment,
etc., I went through a kind of intermediate stage, one of
easy, impersonal contact.
During that period I called Weather, Time, Dial-APoem (started to write Dial-A-Phonel)-part of the spectrum of services I plan to write about later-the most neutral calls possible. I made calls to strangers which involved
a minimum of conversation (these, of course, can be sus·
pect, on the theory that they are coded), calls to the supermarket, other merchants, to have deliveries made, to the
dry cleaner to find out if my jacket was ready, that kind of
thing. It was a warm-up, where the call had a specific, circumscribed purpose, and to enable me to get the feel of
the phone, after a period of disengagement I succeeded
in that, recovered the physical sense, the old comfort and
flexibility in handling the instrument
T
HERE FOLLOWED (that makes two stages skipped before the turnaround) a kind of cautious approach, on
a more personal level. Actually, these two intermediate stages intermingled, because, though my voluntary
use of the phone is as described above, the phone did ring,
the way it does in the normal course of events. My deduction-for it was nothing more-that the phone was tapped
(curious how tapped is a technical word, and bugged a
word from the natural world, science and nature in this
case seeming to conspire against our sense of privacy, the
inviolability of home and intimacy) naturally had no effect
on the telephone habits of my friends and associates, and
to my amazement, for I had not set myself on such a
course, I found myself reducing all the conversational exchanges to the blandest possible level, I found myself taking the sting out of all potentially partisan or politically
controversial subjects.
Talking generally, our conversations, on phone and off,
tend to fall into certain patterns, depending on so very
many factors, but it is a rare conversation which does not
include, at one time or another, mention of the day's
news, or yesterday's news, so it would not be unusual
(though, at this time of awareness, I noticed that a number of people shied away from touchy subjects, out of extraordinary prudence, a vague sense of discomfort, or
because they were not sure of the absolutely private nature of these phones, imagined maybe that their own
phones were tapped) for a friend to make mention of the
Conspiracy Trial, with the idea of passing the time of
night with a give and take on what we had both read in
the newspapers or heard on the television, the news of the
T
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
day, after all, being so staple a part of our daily conversations. But when I responded by repeating what he had
said, or referring to some totally insignificant element in
the matter, not pushing ahead to meaningful dialogue on
the merits, or even, as I sometimes did, changing the subject-"How do you like the way the Knicks are going?"(though, had I thought the matter through, I would have
seen that this kind of trivialization and change of subject
was more suspicious than the routine give-and-take of
conversation) well, the manner of my response had a way
of taking that first-mentioned particular subject off its
track. It is surprising, by the way, how most people accept
these conversational shifts, particularly if the subject
they've brought up is of no pressing importance to them,
as if it doesn't particularly matter what the topic of conversation, as long as the time passes agreeably. I am not
thinking of those who use the phone for a given specific
reason, to make an appointment, get some information,
and who, if there were no phones available, would have to
write for the given specific reason. But the phone company does not live off these limited calls, the money is in
the out-of-town business and other long-distance calls, it is
in the dawdling friendly conversations (the Message
Units!) and in such a conversation, if a friend were to
make mention of the latest development in the war, and I
would respond by asking when he planned to take his vacation, he'd accept that conversational shift, seeing it
maybe as a kind of impressionistic way of keeping the ball
rolling, of filling the void which had initiated the call.
It is amazing how many subjects are potentially touchy,
even controversial, so complex and interlocked is the
world, I mean touchy from the point of view of telephone
surveillance, though that is a visual word, and the tap or
bug is an auditory intervention, but now we are approaching that era in the communications world where we will
see the ones with whom we are conversing.
It is easy to turn away from the difficult, to reduce the
thrust of the controversial, by a process of homogenization (that recently popular word from the dairy world), so
easy to take the sting out of the thorny. You can do it by
tone, by inflection, by showing no interest, so if a political
assassination is mentioned, you swing it easily to the airplane crash (then it turns out that could have been sabotage, politically motivated). As I've pointed out, this kind
of blanding-to coin a word-this obvious change of subject from the potentially controversial to the ordinary:
"What do you think of our chances in the Olympics?"
(but this can lead to a discussion of the killed and jailed
students in Mexico City) is, to any kind of trained listener,
a most obvious indication of apprehension, and, further,
conversation becomes extraordinarily boring if you cannot discuss a subject in depth, but must leap, like a gazelle
on a mountaintop (why like a gazelle on a mountaintop?)
from one conversational ridge to another, in an effort to
throw off your trail some unknown listener telephonically
stalking you.
33
�and likely deep
down in my character structure, previously called
human nature, I am a prudent, cautionary man,
carefully weighing the next step, considering as best I can
the distant possibilities, the hazards flowing out of present behavior, I am, also, thank God, a rather fun-loving
person, who recognizes that all contingencies cannot be
taken into account, that we have all been blessed with
pleasure-possibilities, that joy attends us, that we scorn
volatility, ebullience, at peril to our bodies, to our very
lives. And, living as we do in a society full of all sorts of
freedoms, we'd have to be pretty retarded not to take advantage of some of the pleasure-possibilities that inhere in
the bureaucratic madnesses of the repressive elements.
So I decided that I'd have a bit of sport with my unknown tappers. The way to do it, obviously, was to present to these unknown listeners as wide a spectrum of
views as I could possible manage. Indeed, I sat down to
my desk and wrote a list of views, ranging from the fascist
right to the terrorist left. On second thought, I excluded
the extremes, for what would stop them from using only
the extreme statements? My revised spectrum therefore
ranged from reactionary to the limits of the constitutional
left. Who has the patience to re-enuri:terate such a list?
And then I threw in religious musings (omitting none of
the great religions of the world), anti-political statements,
all kinds of philosophical analyses on the nature of the
state, the moralities of political behavior, threw in quotations from thinkers famous and unknown, copied quotations and passages from books, encyclopedias, magazines,
newspapers. Working from this list, and from the free-as-
N
OW, THOUGH IN MANY RESPECTS,
sociational, occasional spontaneous working of mind and
imagination, I went to play.
Never had my friends, relatives, associates, even ran~
dam callers and neighborhood shopkeepers been subjected, from me anyway, to such a farrago of thoughts,
opinions, views, analyses, doctrines, probes, questions, descriptions, commentaries, on so wide a variety of subjects
bearing in any way on the political scene. Plato's Republic,
The New Republic, Tolstoy's views on non-violence, editorials from The Manchester Guardian, quotations from
Hobbes, Aristotle on Politics, passages from Fourier,
Kautsky, Eugene Debs, remarks on the Brook Farm experiment, Burke on the American colonies, comments
from The National Review, Sukhanov (Carmichael's translation) on the concept of the power lying in the streets,
critiques of nihilism, sections of the Kabbalah, Daily News
editorials, thoughts out of Thoreau, Harold Lasswell, M yrdal, Le Monde, the St. Louis Post Despatch, Mahatma
Gandhi, A. ). Muste, Thomas Jefferson, reasoned critiques of all sorts of revolutionary thinkers, opinions from
Reston, Buchwald, Mark Sullivan, Walter Lippman, Westbrook Pegler, Heywood Broun, Wechsler, A. H. Raskin,
Hentoff, Roger Baldwin (special emphasis on the great libertarians), passages from Leon Blum, Kierkegaard, Bosanquet, Yeats' airman, Freud and Einstein on war, Goodman,
Mailer, Nelson, Feuer, Macdonald, Dorothy Day, Oswald
34
Garrison Villard, Morris Hillquit, Barry Goldwater, the
New York Review of Books, William Buckley, The Louisville Courier-Journal, Henry Clay, R. H. Tawney-a motley
of names, views, magazines, books, pamphlets, dissertations, theories, manifestoes, for, against, neutral, a me·
lange of all political positions and doctrines, revolutionary
too (let them make head or tail of it). Anyway, for one
week, I made tapes of all my conversations, which I carefully dated and have filed.
and that was all. A frenetic, chaotic
week, and then one night, as I entered the apartment, the phone rang, and I had an ordinary conversation with a friend. I expressed my views as I felt
them, the madness was over, my tapes carefully dated and
filed away for any future eventuality, any legal confrontation. I was back to my old telephone, accepted the weird
noises, silences, electronic beeps, as part of the growing
confusion, part of the complexities of a growing America,
part of the struggle for a better America. And I thought:
In the old days you'd pick up the phone and put through
your call, no problems at all. Now you pick up the phone
to make a call, and the situation is fraught with possibilities. Isn't it more interesting this way?
A
WEEK OF IT,
How, after all, can one do without a phone? Years back I'd occasionally hear of a
person who could afford a phone and chose not to
have one because he didn't want his privacy at the mercy
of friends and strangers (it was before the expression "invasion of privacy" became popular). I don't hear of such
people anymore, it is not in the current style of eccentricity. A telephone is as taken-for-granted as a sink.
My old telephone (rented but not mine) has been around
for some fifteen years, indeed ever since I've been in my
apartment, my rented apartment. You don't change a
phone the way you do a car or an overcoat. The phone
doesn't have moving parts, it rarely breaks down, and
when it does, can most often be put in order from the
Central Office. Think of it! a phone put in working order
from a distance. Since it doesn't much break down, it is
usually replaced when the style changes, or because some
of us can't stand old worn objects around. I remember
only two styles of phone (maybe also the wall phone, the
one you cranked, but that likely is out of a fantasy, a
dream, a movie, or a dream of a movie). The first phone
was lanky, upright, sober, almost preacher-like, the receiver in its right-sided cradle (wonder if you could have
requested a left-handed phone?) parallel with the instrument. I remember very well that skinny phone, weathered
after a while like old Slim Summerville. It had no dial; you
picked up the receiver, and the operator answered, saying
"Hello Central" (later the name of a song, but one can
make a song too about the serene dial tone, mildly telling
you, as I've told you before, that all is in order, that all the
M
Y OLD TELEPHONE.
SUMMER 1981
�electronic complexity and circuitry await your instruction,
your move). Back to the old phone: you told the operator
the name of the exchange and the number, and waited till
she got it for you, all quite personal, not intimate. She put
through local and long distance calls ("put through" more
for long distance than for local), covered the whole electronic spectrum a one-to-one situation. We'd see the op1
erator in the movies, a pretty girl with earphones.
Then came the dramatic change (was there really
nothing in between?) to the dial phone, the one now on
my desk-solid, squat, with the receiver snuggling, nestled
in its cradle, with its round lettered and numbered face,
its ten apertures for the finger to twirl, its four feet (now
coming on to the market, into our home, is the push-button dial-farewell to the ten apertures-a swifter, computer-like mechanism, but that hasn't yet hit the city in
force).
The old, squat, solidly-rooted telephone, with its worn,
familiar number, more familiar than your auto license
number, than your checking account or Social Security
attachment attaching itself) to the numbers which replace
the name. Such an attachment must bear on pleasure
sources, so that, for example, if your public school life was
to some extent enjoyable, meaningful, mention of the
number of that school will bring a kind of glow to the features, indicating a speedup somewhere in the movement
of the body's blood. That kind of familiar, even affectionate connection with numbers could be true of all sorts of
numbers that become ours for a time-just gave such a
list-but these numbers-though conceivably related to
pleasure sources-are rarely used (your car license, Social
Security), only occasionally written, hardly ever uttered.
Not so of our phone number (curious how some cling to
the name of the exchange or the first two letters of the exchange, struggling against the spreading numeralization)
which we see staring at us every time we make a call,
which we have printed up on cards and letterheads, which
we give to people-"This is my number," or, more cau~
tiously, "Call me, I'm listed in the phone book."
number, even more familiar than your age, which changes
from year to year, and you must keep up with it. But your
phone number never changes (unless you ask to have it
changed, out of restlessness or objective need; you can
even take your old number with you if you move from one
apartment to another).
to no one's surprise,
the phone is not a living thing (what we mean by a
thing is that it's not alive), does not have a nervous
system, has wires instead of veins, does not move by voli-
A
S I'VE ALREADY POINTED OUT,
tion, does not grow, merely weathers, but, because of its
utility (forget for a moment all the complaints, such as, in
the middle of a conversation, the entrance of a whizzing
sound, as though a wind, a hurricane, were roaring over
some distant prairie), because of its familiarity, precisely
its unchanging physicality and special quality, because of
the pleasure it has given, and promises to give, is capable
of giving-for these reasons one develops a kind of attachment, not a deep, strong feeling, for the instrument, and
that carries over to the name and numbers. One of the
reasons we don't give a name to the phone is that it already has a name and number, assigned by the Company,
and the fact that names have pretty much been replaced
by numbers doesn't much alter the situation. One got so
used to the name-Circle, Wadsworth, Trafalgar, Gramercy, Endicott-not because it refers to a geometric
form, a historical figure (who Wadsworth?), the scene of a
famous naval battle, a variant of "God's mercy," a Puritan
worthy (might be interesting to make a study of the overall effects an exchange and number have over an individual, how the luck of the draw affects the course of his life)
but simply out of long familiarity, out of everyday use,
everyday contact with the unceremoniously assigned
name.
And the feeling for a name can attach itself (a feeling of
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
NE NIGHT, not so long ago, just before going to bed,
I somewhat sleepily looked into my. dictionary for
the origin of the word telephone. I believe I know
its meaning. It is, as I surmised, a Greek compound, but I
hadn't thought that it meant "sound from afar." Between
the sleepiness and the falling asleep, I considered this an
excellent word origin, and fell asleep, dreaming (after a
while, I guess, for I don't imagine you fall into dream as
you sometimes fall into sleep) of a distant voice, then of a
number of voices, all telephonically connected in error-a
0
woman pleading; a man cajoling, another woman, with a
younger voice, saying over and over again: "but this has to
stop, but this has to stop," and that was the beginning, as
far as I can recall, of a long dream, a mosiac kind of dream.
I heard the insistent, the unrelenting busy, that sound
which is like a wall cutting you off from the one you wish
to talk to, the one otherwise occupied. I saw the coming
visual phone (what will it be called?), a woman alone in a
house having to throw on a house coat before approaching the phone! I heard two of the most popular songs relating to the telephone, namely the afore-mentioned
"Hello Central" and "All Alone," and saw, in viginettes,
the opposing contents of those songs-the young man
flirting with the pretty operator, the fantasy of a date, a
conquest, and the elderly man (or was it an elderly woman) sitting by the instrument, grimly, in trepidation,
waiting and fearing for it to ring. I thought (in my dream)
that there were so many more numbers to dial now, and
wondered if the possible combination of numbers could
finally run out. What then? I asked myself. I went through
a speedy history of the use of numbers and letters-first
the numbers alone, then the first two letters of the exchange plus the numbers, and now all numbers again,
though very likely the first two numbers you'd dial (soon
to push) don't necessarily have to be the first two letters of
an exchange-farewell to Academy, Atwater, Audubon,
35
�Judson, Lorraine, Murry Hill, Sacramento, Schuyler, Rhinelander, Wisconsin, Yukon (what can LL stand for? or LT?
or LR?-not only do the numbers stand for nothing, neither do some of the letters). I saw myself, on a cold wintry
night, curled up over the Manhattan Phone Directory (the
Book Of The Living), looking up the names of friends, exfriends, acquaintances, public figures, seeing who is listed
first, and who is listed last (the stratagems, jockeyings for
position, in the Yellow Pages of the Red Book!), thought
(again) of the pleasure James Joyce used to have in listening to friends read to him from the Telephone Directory
(name after name after name), saw the thin physicist (in
our own apartment, think of it!) tear the Telephone Directory (Manhattan? Queens?) in half, remembered someone
asking me: "What are you reading?" and my answering:
"The Manhattan Phone Book," and he asking: "Who
wrote it?" and then: "How do you like it?" and my answering: "The D's were pretty good, but I'm not so crazy
about the S' s." I saw myself taking care of my phone,
washing and drying it at frequent intervals, occasionally
oiling the surface, covering it in the bitter winter nights,
keeping it in good working condition, the way you do a car
or any machine or instrument that works for you. I saw
the repair man come into the apartment, a tall Scandanavian chap, who checked out my complaint, a kind of intermittent buzz (this in the days before the Troubles) and
wondered if he planned to replace the phone. Prepared
for the change, he had a new instrument with him, which
he started to unpack. "Can't you get the old one to work
properly?" I asked. "I probably can," said the repair man,
"but it's a pretty old machine, and I can replace it." "I like
the old one," I replied, ''I'm kind of used to it." "In that
case," he said, and went ahead, made the necessary adjustments or replacements, and got rid of that intermittent hum. "The old ones are better," he said, in a kind of
confidential manner, before leaving. "They don't make
them that way any more." I thought again of the curious
dichotomy of the words bug and tap, the differences between the natural and technological worlds, saw fields
blooming with flowers, flooded with color, and saw the
steely computer, humming away in some subterranean office. I thought (partly in a dream, partly in half-awake,
half-analytic state) of the various services the phone company provided-Reporting A Fire, Emergency, or that
you could buy, like (once more) Dial-A-Poem, remembered someone telling me that in Vienna you could call
and have someone tell a bedtime story to a child, imagined a body of legal, medical advice, that could be offered,
a place to call when lonely, upset, lost, disappointed (all
such services no doubt exist), read in my mind's eye a letter advising how to deal with nuisance calls, profanities,
curious suggestions, saw the phone as a unique artifact,
the puzzlement on the faces of a crew digging thousands
of years from now amid the ruins of ancient civilizations
and coming up with this phone, squat, four-legged, cradle
and dial. I heard myself explaining to an old woman who
spoke little English that there was a difference between
36
the small o which was shown on the dial together with M,
N, and the number 6, and the large 0, above the word
Operator, and it was the large 0 you had to use when you
were dialing the number 0, and because she was dialing
the small o, she was getting a number 6, and it was a
wrong number, but the old woman had little English and
she kept getting my number, and I kept explaining about
the small o and the large 0, and she kept not understanding, and the phone continued to ring, and I continued to
explain about the big 0, the Operator 0, mentioned
Oscar Robertson, said something about the Marquis of 0.
She couldn't understand hardly anything I was saying,
and I started to holler: "Call the big 0, call the Operator,
not the little o with the M, N, and 6, but the big 0," and I
hollered so loud that I woke myself up arid stared at the
familiar phone on the desk (whatever happened to the
telephone tables?) and it was just as quiet as could be.
And in the morning mail that day was a letter from the
phone company explaining that "a low-pitched melodious
hum will replace the familiar dial tone buzz.'
with a person, or an object (such as a telephone) on this or the other side
of trauma, will permanently affect (I use the word
in its psychoanalytic sense) your connection. Your connection with the telephone! Since the bugging idea came
up, things have never been quite the same between us.
Despite my ordinary common sense, my fun-loving spirit
(akin to that of one of the Rover Boys) there is neverthe-
A
NY STRONG EXPERIENCE,
less a sense of intrusion, an invasion of privacy, surveil-
lance by strangers, not that it would be very pleasant if the
surveillance were by friends. So, now and then, when I
think of it, I talk into the phone with the sense of that
third party, human or technological, in mind. I do it by
sometimes dramatizing the subject at hand, going into an
extra bit of song and dance, pouring it on, making it memorable for the unknown listener (but how successfully
does a bug or a tap catch the excitement of a voice? Loudness is not all, it is more the vibrancy, the thrill of
interest).
One evening I explained to my Uncle Max the Kabbalistic notion of Tsimtsum, about which I had read, as I told
my uncle, in Gershom G. Scholem's work, Major Trends
in Jewish Mysticism:
"This is what it is, in an over-simplified summary. God
decided (think of it! God deciding) to make room for the
world, he contracted, and that made the space. It is the
Tsimtsum."
My uncle is a misnagid, in the rabbinical tradition, and
somewhat cool to the Kabbalistic doctrine, but he was
naturally fascinated by this notion.
"How is it called again?"
"The Tsimtsum."
'Tsimtsum. A curious word."
lsn't it? And a curious notion too."
Then we discussed further, I forgetting after a while
1
11
SUMMER 1981
�the Third Ear, but then recalling it as I imagined this interchange as part of the variegated spectrum which the
unknown listener would have to work on.
The noises continued intermittently-bleeps and
blurps and bloops, sounds difficult to imitate with letters,
delicate taps, interminable moans, riveting sounds, hammer sounds, file rasps, and the one that bugged me the
most, the busy signal which starts up as you are halfway
through the dialing. If the busy signal came when you
were through with the dialing, then there'd be a chance
that the line was indeed busy (circuits too can be busy, are
you aware of that? whole circuits busy so that when you
dial there is a nothing response, but to have the busy signal start when you're halfway through dialing, that is
somehow insulting.
(Now and then I went into double talk or pig Latin, but
that annoyed my friends, they think they're too old for
that sort of thing, so I gave up on it.)
Well, I wasn't going to give up on the phone, I wasn't
going to change to an unlisted number (such notions
flashed across the mind) and talking to my friend Irving,
with whom I sometimes swap jokes (though we are both
complaining about the paucity of jokes) I told him (on the
phone) two jokes that I had heard on two different T.V.
talk shows:
"Dizzy Dean told the story about the baseball manager
who protested a call on a play with such vigor and tenacity
that the umpire threw him out of the game, whereupon
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the manager keeled over. One of the ball players said that
the manager had been ill, that he might now be dead.
'Dead or alive,' said the umpire, 'out he goes.'
"Louis Armstong told the story about one of the guests
at a wake who touched the forehead of the deceased and
said to the widow: 'He feels warm.' 'Hot or cold,' said the
widow, 'out he goes tommorow."'
For my friend yes, but why do I tell such fine jokes to an
unsolicited listener?
Y
ES, ALL THESE MATTERS are part of the story of
what's happening with my telephone, with me and
my telephone. Things are not the same, they're
never the same (for example, I notice that recently I don't
like anyone to use my phone, find it unnerving. But since
I have but the one phone [what difference would it make
if I had two?] when a visitor asks to use it, I accede with a
graciousness which I like to think covers my disinclination). The possibility of the phone being bugged has become part of the situation, and when I think of this possibility, I either react to it or not. What starts as a traumatic
experience sometimes gets absorbed in the ongoing life
process. In our country, with its vast reservoir of freedom,
one likes to think that these inquisitorial tendencies, these
inquisitorial actualities, will sink to the bottom of the clear
waters and there dissolve.
37
�An Outline of the Argument
of Aristotle's Metaphysics
Joe Sachs
When Aristotle articulated the central question of the
group of writings we know as his Metaphysics, he said it
was a question that would never cease to raise itself. He
was right. He also regarded his own contributions to the
handling of that question as belonging to the final phase
of responding to it. I think he was right about that too.
The Metaphysics is one of the most helpful books there is
for contending with a question the asking of which is one
of the things that makes us human. In our time that ques·
lion is for the most part hidden behind a wall of sophistry,
and the book that could lead us to rediscover it is even
more thoroughly hidden behind a maze of misunder·
standings.
Paul Shorey, a scholar best known for his translation of
the Republic, has called the Metaphysics "a hopeless muddle" not to be made sense of by any "ingenuity of conjecture." I think it is safe to say that more people have learned
important things from Aristotle than from Professor
Shorey, but what conclusion other than his can one come
to about a work that has two books numbered one, that
descends from the sublime description of the life of the
divine intellect in its twelfth book to end with two books
full of endless quarreling over minor details of the Platonic doctrine of forms, a doctrine Aristotle had already
decisively refuted in early parts of the book, those parts,
that is, in which he is not defending it? The book was certainly not written as one whole; it was compiled. Once
one has granted that, must not one admit that it was compiled badly, crystallising as it does an incoherent ambivalence toward the teachings of Plato? After three centuries
in which no one had much interest in it at all, the MetaA lecture read at St. John's College, Annapolis, on Aprilll, 1980, and in
Santa Fe on April 24, 1981. Mr. Sachs is a tutor at the Annapolis
Campus.
38
physics became interesting to nineteenth century scholars
just as a historical puzzle: how could such a mess have
been put together?
I have learned the most from reading the Metaphysics
on those occasions when I have adopted the working hypothesis that it was compiled by someone who understood Aristotle better than I or the scholars do, and that
that someone (why not call him Aristotle?) thought that
the parts made an intelligible whole, best understood
when read in that order. My main business here is to give
some sense of how the Metaphysics looks in its wholeness,
but the picture I will sketch depends on several hypotheses independent of the main one. One cannot begin to
read the Metaphysics without two pieces of equipment:
one is a set of decisions about how to translate Aristotle's
central words. No translator of Aristotle known to me is of
any help here; they will all befuddle you, more so in the
Metaphysics even than in Aristotle's other works. The
other piece of equipment, and equally indispensible, I
think, is some perspective on the relation of the Metaphysics to the Platonic dialogues. In this matter the scholars, even the best of them, have shown no imagination at
all. In the dialogues, in their view, Plato sets forth a
"theory" by putting it into the mouth of Socrates. There
is some room for interpretation, but on the whole we are
all supposed to know that theory. Aristotle must accept
that theory or reject it. If he appears to do both it is because passages written by some Platonist have been inserted into his text, or because things he wrote when he
was young and a Platonist were lumped together with
other things on similar subjects which he wrote when he
was older and his thoughts were different and his own.
The Plato we are supposed to know from his dialogues
is one who posited that, for every name we give to bodies
in the world there is a bodiless being in another world, one
SUMMER 1981
�while they are many, static while they are changing, perfect while they are altogether distasteful. Not surprisingly,
those for whom this is Plato find his doctrine absurd, and
welcome an Aristotle whom they find saying that being in
its highest form is found in an individual man or horse,
that mathematical things are abstractions from sensible
bodies, and that, if there is an ideal man apart from men,
in virtue of whom they are all called men, then there must
be yet a third kind of man, in virtue of whom the form and
the men can have the same name, and yet a fourth, and so
on. You cannot stop adding new ideal men until you are
willing to grant that it was absurd to add the first one, or
anything at all beyond just plain men. This is hardheaded, tough-minded Aristotle, not to be intimidated by
fancy, mystical talk, living in the world we live in and
knowing it is the only world there is. This Aristotle, unfortunately, is a fiction, a projection of our unphilosophic
selves. He lives only in a handful of sentences ripped out
of their contexts. The true Aristotle indeed takes at face
value the world as we find it and all our ordinary opinions
about it-takes them, examines them, and finds them
wanting. It is the world as we find it which continually, for
Aristotle, shows that our ordinary, materialist prejudices
are mistaken. The abandonment of those prejudices
shows in turn that the world as we found it was not a possible world, that the world as we must reflect upon it is a
much richer world, mysterious and exciting.
Those of you for whom reading the Platonic dialogues
was a battle you won by losing, an eye-opening experience
from which, if there is no going forward, there is certainly
no turning back, should get to know this Aristotle. But
you will find standing in your way all those passages in
which Aristotle seems to be discussing the dialogues and
does so in a shallow way. Each dialogue has a surface in
which Socrates speaks in riddles, articulates half-truths
which invite qualification and correction, argues from
answers given by others as though he shared their opinions, and pretends to be at a loss about everything. Plato
never straightens things out for his readers, any more than
Socrates does for his hearers. To do so would be to soothe
us, to lull us to sleep as soon as we've begun to be distressed by what it feels like to be awake. Platonic writing,
like Socratic talk, is designed to awaken and guide philosophic thinking, by presenting, defending, and criticising
plausible responses to important questions. The PlatonicSocratic words have only done their work when we have
gone beyond them, but they remain in the dialogues as a
collection of just what they were intended to be-unsatisfactory assertions.
One commentator finds eighty-one places in the Metaphysics where Aristotle disagrees with Plato. It is not surprising that Aristotle himself uses Plato's name in almost
none of those places. Aristotle is addressing an audience
of students who have read the dialogues and is continuing
the work of the dialogues. Many, perhaps most, of Aristotle's students would, like scholars today, find theories
and answers in Plato's dialogues. Aristotle would not be
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
earning his keep as a teacher of philosophy if he did not
force his students beyond that position. Aristotle constantly refers to the dialogues because they are the best
and most comprehensive texts he and his students share.
Aristotle disagrees with Plato about some things, but less
extensively and less deeply than he disagrees with every
other author that he names. The Metaphysics inevitably
looks like an attack on Plato just because Plato's books are
so much better than anything left by Thales, Empedocles,
or anyone else.
My first assumption, then, was that the Metaphysics is
one book with one complex argument, and my second is
that, in cohering within itself, the Metaphysics may cohere
with the Platonic dialogues. I assume that discussions in
the dialogues may be taken as giving flesh to Aristotle's
formulations, while his formulations in turn may be taken
as giving shape to those discussions. One need orily try a
very little of this to find a great deal beginning to fall into
place. For example, listen to Aristotle in Book I, Chapter 9
of the Metaphysics: "the Forms ... are not the causes of
motion or of any other change .... And they do not in any
way help either towards the knowledge of the other things
... or towards their existence . ... Moreover, all other
things do not come to be from the Forms in any of the
usual senses of 'from.' And to say that the Forms are patterns and that the other things participate in them is to
use empty words and poetic metaphors." A devastating attack on Plato, is it not? Or is it? Aristotle says that positing
the Forms explains no single thing that one wants to
know. But doesn't Socrates say in the Phaedo that to call
beauty itself the cause of beauty in beautiful things is a
"safe but stupid answer," that one must begin with it but
must also move beyond it? Again, everyone knows that
the Platonic Socrates claimed that the forms were
separate from the things in the sensible world, off by
themselves, while Aristotle insisted that the forms were in
the things. Recall the Phaedo passage just referred to.
Does not Socrates say that the cause of heat in a hot thing
is not heat itself but fire? Where, then, is he saying the
form is? Aristotle taught that the causes of characteristics
of things were to be looked for not in a separate world of
forms but in the primary instances of those characteristics
right here in the world. This doctrine may seem to be a rejection of Plato's chief postulate, but listen to Aristotle
himself explain it in Book II, Chapter I of the Metaphysics: "of things to which the same predicate belongs,
the one to which it belongs in the highest degree is that in
virtue of which it belongs also to the others. For example,
fire is the hottest of whatever is truly called 'hot', for fire is
cause of hotness in the others." Do you hear an echo?
Again, Aristotle teaches that form is to be understood as
always at work, never static as is the Platonic form, or is it?
Do not the Stranger and Theaetetus agree in the Sophist
that it would be "monstrous and absurd" to deny that life,
motion, and soul belong to the intelligible things? Do they
not indeed define being as a power to act or be affected?
Does not Socrates in the Theaetetus entertain the same
39
�definition when he construes the world as made up of an
infinity of powers to act and be affected? Plato's dialogues
do not set forth a theory of forms. They set forth a way to
get started with the work of philosophic inquiry, and Aristotle moves altogether within that way. Much in his writings that is a closed book to those who insist on seeing him
as Plato's opponent opens up when one lets the dialogues
serve as the key.
We shall not hesitate to take whatever light we can find
in the dialogues and shine it on Aristotle's text, at least to
see if anything comes into the light. And this brings me to
a third assumption: the English word substance is of no
help in understanding Aristotle's word ousia. The central
question of the Metaphysics is, What is ousia? Aristotle
claims that it is the same as the question, What is being?
and that it is in fact the question everyone who has ever
done any philosophy or physics has been asking. Since we
do not share Aristotle's language we cannot know what
claim he is making until we find a way to translate ousia.
The translators give us the word substance only because
earlier translators and commentators did so, while they in
turn did so because still earlier translators into Latin rendered it as substantia. Early modern philosophy, in all the
European languages, is full of discussions of substance
which stem from Latin versions of Aristotle. Though oral
traditions keep meanings alive, this written tradition has
buried Aristotle's meaning irretrievably. We must ignore
it, and take our access to the meaning of ousia from
Plato's use of it, but before we do so a quick look at where
the word substance came from may help us bury it.
The earliest Latin translations of Aristotle tried a
number of ways of translating ousia, but by the fourth
century A.D., when St. Augustine lived, only two remained
in use: essentia was made as a formal parallel to ousia,
from the feminine singular participle of the verb to be. plus
an abstract noun ending, so that the whole would be
roughly equivalent to an English translation being-ness;
the second translation, substantia, was an attempt to get
closer to ousia by interpreting Aristotle's use of it as something like "persisting substratum." Augustine, who had
no interest in interpreting Aristotle, thought that, while
everything in the world possesses substantia, a persisting
underlying identity, the fullness of being suggested by the
word essentia could belong to no created thing but .only to
their creator. Aristotle, who is quite explicit on the point
that creation is impossible, believed no such thing, and
Augustine did not think he did. But Augustine's own
thinking offered a consistent way to distinguish two Latin
words whose use had become muddled. Boethius, in his
commentaries on Aristotle, followed Augustine's lead,
and hence always translated ousia as substantia, and his
usage seems to have settled the matter. And so a word designed by the anti-Aristotelian Augustine to mean a low
and empty sort of being turns up in our translations of the
word whose meaning Aristotle took to be the highest and
fullest sense of being. Descartes, in his Meditations, uses
the word substance only with his tongue in his cheek;
40
Locke explicitly analyzes it as an empty notion of an
I-don't-know-what; and soon after the word is laughed out
of the vocabulary of serious philosophic endeavor. It is no
wonder that the Metaphysics ceased to have any influence
on living thinking: its heart had been cut out of it by its
friends.
What does ousia mean? It is already a quirky, idiomatic
word in ordinary use when Plato gets hold of it. By a quirk
of our own language one may say indeed that it means
substance, but only, I repeat only, in the sense in which a
rich man is called a man of substance. You may safely
allow your daughter to marry him because you know
where he will be and what he will be doing tomorrow and
twenty years from now. Ousia meant permanent property, real estate, non-transferable goods: not the possessions we are always using up or consuming but those that
remain-land, houses, wealth of the kind one never
spends since it breeds new wealth with no expense of
itself. When Socrates asks Meno for the ousia of the bee
he is not using a technical philosophical term but a metaphor: what is the estate of a bee that each one inherits
simply by being born a bee? A man of substance who has
permanent wealth is who he is because of what he owns.
A bee is to his permanent and his variable characteristics
as a man is to his permanent and his spendable wealth.
The metaphor takes a second step when applied to virtue:
the varying instances of virtue in a man, a woman, a ·slave,.
and the rest must all have some unvarying core which
makes them virtues. There must be some single meaning
to which we always refer when we pronounce anything a
virtue. This is the step Socrates continually insists that
Meno must take. But remember, in the slave-boy scene,
Socrates twice entices the slave-boy into giving plausible
incorrect answers about the side of the double square. Is
there an ousia of virtue? Socrates uses the word not as the
result of an induction or abstraction or definition, but by
stretching an already strained metaphor. People have disposable goods which come and go and ousiatic goods
which remain; bees have some characteristics in which
they differ, and others in which they share; the virtues differ, but are they the same in anything but name? Even if
they are, must it be a definition that they share? Not all
men have ousia. Ordinarily only a few men do. The rest of
us work for them, sell to them, marry them, gather in the
hills to destroy them, but do not have what they have.
Perhaps there are only a few virtues, or only one.
The word ousia, as Plato's Socrates handles it, seems to
be a double-edged weapon. It explicitly rejects Meno's
way of saying what virtue is, but implicitly suggests that
the obvious alternative may fail as well. If virtue is not
simply a meaningless label used ambiguously for many unconnected things, that does not mean that it must unambiguously name the same content in each of the things it
names.
Since ousia is our metaphor, let us ask what wealth means.
If a poor man has a hut and a cow and some stored-up
food, are they his wealth? He is certainly not wealthy. On
SUMMER1981
�the other hand, King Lear says that "our basest beggars
Are in poorest thing superfluous"; no human life is cut so
fine as to lack anything beyond what satisfies bare need.
The beggar, like the family on welfare, does not have the
means to satisfy need, but need not for that reason forego
those possessions which give life comfort or continuity.
His wealth is derived from the wealth of others. The small
farmer may maintain something of the independence a
wealthy man enjoys, but one bad year could wipe him out.
He will either accumulate enough to become wealthy
himself, or his life will remain a small-scale analogy to that
of the wealthy. Wealth means, first of all, only that which
a few people have and the rest of us lack, but because it
means that, it also, at the same time, means secondarily
something that all of us possess. There is an ambiguity at
work in the meaning of the word "wealth" which is not a
matter of a faulty vocabulary nor a matter of language at
all: it expresses the way things are. Wealth of various kinds
exists by derivation from and analogy to wealth in the emphatic sense. Indeed Meno, who spontaneously defines
virtue by listing virtues, is equally strongly inclined to say
that the power to rule over men and possessions is the
only virtue there is. He cannot resolve the logical difficulties Socrates raises about his answers, but they are all
resolvable. Meno in fact believes that virtue is ousia in its
simple sense of big money, and that women, children, and
slaves can only have virtue derivatively and ambiguously.
Socrates' question is one of those infuriatingly ironic
games he is always playing. The ousia of virtue, according
to Meno and Gorgias, is ousia.
When the word ousia turns up in texts of Aristotle, it is
this hidden history of its use, and not its etymology, which
is determining its meaning. First of all, the word fills a gap
in the language of being, since Greek has no word for
thing. The two closest equivalents are to on and to chrema.
To on simply means whatever is, and includes the color
blue, the length two feet, the action walking, and anything at all that can be said to be. To chrema means a thing
used, used up, spent, or consumed; any kind of posses~
sion, namely, that is not ousia. Ousia holds together, remains, and makes its possessor emphatically somebody. In
the vocabulary of money, ousia is to ta chremata as whatever remains constant in a thing is to all the onta that
come and go. Ousia also carries with it the sense of something that belongs somehow to all but directly and fully
only to a few. The word is ready-made to be the theme of
Aristotle's investigation of being, because both the word
arid the investigation were designed by Plato. For Aristotle, the inquiry into the nature of being begins with the
observation that being is meant in many ways. It is like
Meno's beginning, and it must be subjected to the same
Socratic questioning.
Suppose that there is some one core of meaning to
which we refer whenever we say that something is. What
is its content? Hegel says of being as being: "it is not to be
felt, or perceived by sense, or pictured in imagination ...
it is mere abstraction ... the absolutely negative ... just
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
Nothing." And is he not right, as Parmenides was before
him? Leave aside all those characteristics in which beings
differ, and what is left behind? To Aristotle, this means
that being is not a universal or a genus. If being is the
comprehensive class to which everything belongs, how
does it come to have sub-classes? It would have to be die
vided with respect to something outside itself. Beings
would have to be distinguished by possessing or failing to
possess some characteristic, but that characteristic would
have to be either a class within being, already separated
off from the rest by reference to something prior, or a
non-being. Since both are impossible, being must come already divided: the highest genera or ultimate classes of
things must be irreducibly many. This is Aristotle's doctrine of the categories, and according to him being means
at least eight different things.
The categories have familiar names: quality, quantity,
relation, time, place, action, being-acted-upon. The question Socrates asked about things, What is it?, is too broad,
since it can be answered truly with respect to any of the
categories that apply, and many times in some of them.
For example, I'll describe something to you: it is backstage
now; it is red; it is three feet high; it is lying down and
breathing. I could continue telling you what it is in this
fashion for as long as I pleased and you would not know
what it is. It is an Irish setter. What is different about that
last answer? To be an Irish setter is not to be a quality or
quantity or time or action but to be a whole which comprises many ways of being in those categories, and much
change and indeterminacy in them. The redness, threefoot-high-ness, respiration, and much else cohere in a
thing which I have named in its thinghood by calling it an
Irish setter. Aristotle calls this way of being ousia.
Aristotle's logical works reflect upon the claims our
speech makes about the world. The principal result of
Aristotle's inquiry into the logical categories of being· is, I
think, the claim that the thinghood of things in the world
is never reducible in our speech to any combination of
qualities, quantities, relations, actions, and so on: that
ousia or thinghood must be a separate category. What
happens when I try to articulate the being of a thing such
as an Irish setter? I define it as a dog with certain properties. But what then is a dog? It is an animal with certain
properties, and an animal is an organism with certain
properties, and an organism is a thing with the proper-ty of
life. At each level I meet, as dog, animal, organism, what
Aristotle calls secondary ousia or secondary thinghood. I
set out to give an account of what makes a certain collection of properties cohere as a certain thing, and I keep
separating off some of them and telling you that the rest
cohere as a whole. At my last step, when I say that an organism is a living thing, the problem of secondary thinghood is present in its nakedness. Our speech, no matter
how scientific, must always leave the question of the
hanging-together of things as things a question.
Thus the logical inquiries bequeath to the Metaphysics
its central question, which we are now in a position to
41
�translate. The question that was asked of old and will always be asked by anyone who is alive enough to wonder
about anything is, What is being? in the sense, What is a
thing? in the sense, What is the thinghood of things?
What makes our world a world of things at all? We are
here at the deepest postulate of Aristotelian philosophizing: the integrity of the world as a world and of anything
in it which endures as itself for any time at all, is not selfexplanatory, is something to be wondered at, is caused.
We are taught that a moving thing, if nothing disturbs
it, will continue moving forever. Do you believe that? It is
certainly true that a heavy thing in motion is as hard to
stop as it was to set in motion, and that we cannot step
out of moving automobiles without continuing, for a
while, to share their motions. But these are evidences of
persistence of motion, not at all the same thing as inertia
of motion. There is no evidence of the latter. In principle
there cannot be, because we cannot abolish all the world
to observe an undisturbed moving thing. There is a
powerful and in its way, beautiful, account of the world
which assumes inertia, appealing to those experiences
which suggest that motion at an unchanging speed is a
state no different from that of rest. The hidden premise
which leads from that step to the notion of inertia is the
assumption that rest is an inert state. If it is not, the same
evidence could lead to the conclusion that an unchanging
speed is a fragile and vulnerable thing, as unlikely and as
hard to come by as an unchanging anything.
How can a balloon remain unchanged? It does so only
so long as the air inside pushes out no harder and no less
hard than the air outside pushes in. Is the air inside the
balloon at rest? Can it be at rest as long as it is performing
a task? Can the balloon be at rest if the air inside it cannot
be? It can certainly remain in a place, like other apparently inert things, say a table. If you pulled the legs from
under a table the top would fall, and if you removed the
top the legs would fall. Leave them together and leave
them alone and they do not move, but is the table at rest?
Surely no more so than a pair of arm wrestlers, straining
every muscle but unable to budge each other, can be said
to be resting. But can't we find an inert thing anywhere in
the world? How about a single lump of rock? But if I
throw it in the air it will return to find a resting place. It
seems to rest only when something blocks it, and if I let it
rest on my hand or my head, something will make me uncomfortable. Can the rock be doing nothing? And if we
cannot find inertia in a rock, where could it be? An animal
is either full of circulating and respirating or it is rotting,
and the same seems true of plants.
But what in the world is not animal-like, plant-like, rocklike, or table-like? The world contains living and non-living
natural beings, and it contains products of human making, and all' of them are busy. From Aristotle's wondering
and wonderful perspective, everything in the world is
busy just continuing to be itself. This is not a "theory" of
Aristotle's; it is a way of bringing the world to sight with
the questioning intellect awake. Try that way of looking
42
on for size; the world has nothing to lose by ceasing to be
taken for granted. Consider an analogy, Ptolemy is content to say that Venus and Mercury happen to have the
same longitudinal period as the Sun, and that Mars, jupiter, and Saturn all happen to lag just as far behind the Sun
in any time as they have moved in anomaly. Copernicus,
in the most passionate and convincing part of his argument, shows that these facts can be explained. Lucretius
(whom we may substitute for Aristotle's favorite materialist, Empedocles) thought that cats and dogs and giraffes
just happened to come about by accumulation, like the
sands on the beach. Lucretius' failure to wonder at a giraffe, his reduction of the living to the blind and dead, is,
from Aristotle's standpoint, a failure to recognize what is
truly one, what is not just a heap, what is genuinely a
thing.
The least thoughtful, least alert way of being in the
world is to regard everything which remains itself as doing
so causelessly, inertly. To seek a cause for the being-as-it-is
of any thing is already to be in the grip of the question
Aristotle says must always be asked. To seek the causes
and sources of the being-as-it-is of everything that is, is to
join Aristotle in his Copernican revolution which regards
every manifest _tion of persistence, order, or recurrence as
a marvel, an achievement. That everything in the world
disclosed to our senses is in a ceaseless state of change,
most of us would grant. That the world nevertheless
hangs together enough to be experienced at all is a fact so
large that we rarely take notice of it. But the two together-change, and a context of persistence out of
which change can emerge-force one to acknowledge
some non-human cause at work: for whichever side of the
world-change or rest, order or dissolution-is simply its
uncaused, inert way, the other side must be the result of
effort. Something must be at work in the world, hidden to
us, visible only in its effects, pervading all that is, and it
must be either a destroyer or a preserver.
That much seems to me to be demonstrable, but the
next step is a difficult one to take because the world presents to us two faces: the living and the non-living. The
thinghood of living things consists in organized unity,
maintained through effort, at work in a variety of activities characteristic of each species; but a rock or a flame or
some water or some dirt or some air is a thing in a much
different way, unified only by accidental boundaries, indifferent to being divided or heaped together, at work
only in some one local motion, up or down. Which is the
aberration, life or non-life?
For Aristotle the choice need not be made, since the
distinction between the two forms of being only results
from a confusion. Flesh, blood, bone, and hair would
seem inorganic and inanimate if they were not organized
into and animated as, say, a cat. But earth, air, fire, and
water, all of it, is always organized into and animate as the
cosmos. The heavens enclose an organized body which
has a size, a shape, and a hierarchical structure all of
which it maintains by ceaseless, concerted activity. You
SUMMER 1981
�may think that in believing this, Aristotle betrays an inno·
cence which we cannot recover. But not only Aristotle
and Ptolemy, but also Copernicus and Kepler believed the
visible heaven to be a cosmos, and not only they, but also,
amazingly, Newton himself. In our century, Einstein cal·
culated the volume of the universe, and cosmology has
once again become a respectable scientific pursuit Mod·
ems, for whom the spherical motion of the heavens no
longer indicates that the heavens have boundaries, draw
the same conclusion from the fact that there is darkness.
Anyone who would take the assertion that his outlook is
modern to include the denial that there is a cosmos would
make a very shallow claim, one having more to do with po·
etic fashion than with reasoned conviction. The question
of the cosmos has not been made obsolete, and the very
least we must admit is that the appearance of an inor·
ganic, inanimate nature is not conclusive and would result
from our human-sized perspective whether there is a cos·
mos or not.
If the world is a cosmos, then it is one more instance of
the kind of being that belongs to every animal and plant in
it And if that is so, there is nothing left to display any
other kind of being. Try it: take inventory. What is there?
The color red is, only if it is the color of some thing. Color
itself is, only if it is some one color, and the color of a
thing. The relation "taller than" is, only if it is of two or
more things. What has being but is not a thing must depend on some thing for its being. But on the other hand a
mere thing, mere matter as we call it, using the word dif·
ferently than Aristotle ever does, is an impossibility too.
Relatively inert, rock-like being is the being of a part of
what comes only in wholes-cosmos, plant, or animal.
And all man-made things must borrow their material from
natural things and their very holding-together from the
natural tendencies of the parts of the cosmos. To be is to
be alive; all other being is borrowed being. Any compre·
hensive account of things must come to terms with the
special being of animals and plants: for Lucretius, living
things are not marvels but a problem which he solves by
dissolving them into the vast sea of inert purposelessness.
For Aristotle, as for Plato, wonder is not a state to be dis·
solved but a beckoning to be followed, and for Aristotle
the wonderful animals and plants point the way to being
itself, to that being qua being which is the source of all
being, for we see it in the world in them and only in them.
Thus when Aristotle begins in Book 7 of the Metaphysics to ask what makes a thing a thing, he narrows the ques·
lion to apply only to living things. All other being is, in
one way or another, their effect He is asking for their
cause. At that point, his inquiry into the causes and
sources of being itself, simply as being, merges with the
inquiry in Book 2 of his Physics, where the question is,
What is nature? The answer, as well, must be the same,
and just as Aristotle concludes that nature is form, he con·
eludes that being is form. Does the material of an animal
make it what it is? Yes, but it cannot be the entire or even
principal cause. If there is anything that is not simply th
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
sum of its parts, it is an animal. It is continually making itself, by snatching suitable material from its environment
and discarding unsuitable material. Add some sufficiently
unsuitable material, like arsenic, and the sum of parts re·
mains, but the animal ceases to be. The whole which is
not accounted for by the enumeration of its parts is the
topic of the last section of the Theaetetus, where Socrates
offers several playful images of that kind of being: a
wagon, a melody, the number six, and the example discussed at most length, which Aristotle borrows, the
syllable.
.
Aristotle insists that the syllable is never the sum of its
letters. Socrates, of course, argues both sides of the ques·
tion, and Theaetetus agrees both times. Let's try it
ourselves. Take the word put, p·u·t Voice the letters sepa·
rately, as well as you can, and say them in succession, as
rapidly as you can. I think you will find that, as long as you
attempt to add sound to sound, you will have a grunt surrounded by two explosions of breath. When you voice the
whole syllable as one sound, the u is already present when
you begin sounding the p, and the t sound is already shap·
ing the u. Try to pronounce the first two letters and add
the third as an afterthought, and you will get two sounds.
I have tried all this, and think it's true, but you· must
decide for yourself. Aristotle says that the syllable is the
letters, plus something else besides; Socrates calls the
something else a form, while Aristotle calls it the thing·
hood of the thing. When I pronounce the syllable put, I
must have in mind the whole syllable in its wholeness before I can voice any of its parts in such a way as to make
them come out parts of it.
Now a syllable is about as transitory a being as one
could imagine: it is made of breath, and it is gone as soon
as it is uttered. But a craftsman works the same way as a
maker of syllables. If he simply begins nailing and gluing
together pieces of wood, metal, and leather, he is not
likely to end up with a wagon; to do so, he must have the
whole shape and work of the wagon in mind in each of his
joinings and fittings. Even so, when he is finished, what
he has produced is only held together by nails and glue. As
soon as it is made, the wagon begins falling apart, and it
does so the more, the more it is used.
All the more perplexing then, is the animal or plant It is
perpetually being made and re-made after the form of its
species, yet there is no craftsman at work on it It is a com·
posite of material and form, yet it is the material in it that
is constantly being used up and replaced, while the form
remains intact. The form is.not in any artist's imagination,
nor can it be an accidental attribute of its material. In the
Physics, nature was traced back to form, and in the first
half of the Metaphysics all being is traced to the same
source. But what is form? Where is it? Is it a cause or is it
caused? Most important of all, does it have being alone,
on its own, apart from bodies? Does it emerge from the
world of bodies, or is a body a thing impossible to be un·
less a form is somehow already present for it to have? Or is
there something specious about the whole effort to make
43
�form either secondary to material or primary? Are they
perhaps equal and symmetrical aspects of being, inseparable, unranked? Just as ultimate or first material, without
any characteristics supplied by form, cannot be, why
should not a pure form, not the form of anything, be regarded as its opposite pole and as equally impossible? Or
have we perhaps stumbled on a nest of unanswerable
questions? If form is the first principle of the science of
physics, might it not be a first principle simply, behind
which one cannot get, to which one may appeal for explanation but about which one cannot inquire? Aristotle says
that if there were not things apart from bodies, physics
would be first philosophy. But he calls physics second philosophy, and half the Metaphysics lies on the other side of
the questions we have been posing. It consists in the uncovering of beings not disclosed to our senses, beings outside of and causal with respect to what we naively and
inevitably take to be the whole world.
Aristotle marks the center and turning point of the Metaphysics with these words: "One must inquire about
(form), for this is the greatest impasse. Now it is agreed
that some of what is perceptible are things, and so one
must search first among these. For it is preferable to proceed toward what is better known. For learning occurs in
all things in this way: through what is by nature less
known toward the things more known. And just as in matters of action the task is to make the things that are good
completely be good for each person,· from out of the
things that seem good to each, so also the task here is,
from out of the things more known to one, to make the
things known by nature known to him. Now what is
known and primary to each of us is often known slightly,
and has little or nothing of being; nevertheless, from the
things poorly known but known to one, one must try to
know the things that are known completely" (l029a 33-b
ll ). The forest is dark, but one cannot get out of it without passing through it, carefully, calmly, attentively. It will
do no good to move in circles. The passage just quoted
connects with the powerful first sentence of the Metaphysics: "All human beings are by nature stretched out toward a state of knowing." Our natural condition is one of
frustration, of being unable to escape a task of which the
goal is out of reach and out of sight. Aristotle here likens
our frustration as theoretical beings to our condition as
practical beings: unhappiness has causes-we achieve it
by seeking things-and if we can discover what we were
seeking we might be able to make what is good ours. Similarly, if we cannot discern the goal of wisdom, we can at
least begin examining the things that stand in our way.
The next section of the Metaphysics, from Book 7,
Chapter 4, through Book 9, is the beginning of an intense
forward motion. These books are a painstaking clarification of the being of the things disclosed to our senses. It is
here that Aristotle most heavily uses the vocabulary that
is most his own, and everything he accomplishes in these
books depends on the self-evidence of the meanings of
these expressions. It is these books especially which Latin-
44
izing translators turn into gibberish. Words like essence,
individual, and actuality must either be vague or be given
arbitrary definitions. The words Aristotle uses are neither
vague nor are they conceptual constructions; they call
forth immediate, direct experiences which one must have
at hand to see what Aristotle is talking about. They are
not the kinds of words that books can explain; they are
words of the kind that people must share before there can
be books. That is why understanding a sentence of Aristotle is so often something that comes suddenly, in an insight that seems discontinuous from the puzzlement that
preceded it. It is simply a matter of directing one's gaze.
We must try to make sense of Books 7-9 because they
are crucial to the intention of the Metaphysics. Aristotle
has an argument independent of those books, which he
makes in Book 8 of the Physics and uses again in Book 12
of the Metaphysics that there must be an immortal, unchanging being, ultimately responsible for all wholeness
and orderliness in the sensible world. And he is able to go
on in Book 12 to discover a good deal about that being.
One could, then, skip from the third chapter of Book 7 to
Book 12, and, having traced being to form, trace form
back to its source. Aristotle would have done that if his
whole intention had been to establish that the sensible
world has a divine source, but had he done so he would
have left no foundation for reversing the dialectical motion of his argument to understand the things in the world
on the basis of their sources. Books 7-9 provide that
foundation.
The constituents of the world we encounter with our
senses are not sensations. The sensible world is not a mosaic of sensible qualities continuous with or adjacent to
one another, but meets our gaze organized into things
which stand apart, detached from their surroundings. I
can indicate one of them to you by the mere act of pointing, because it has its own boundaries and holds them
through time. I need not trace out the limits of the region
of the visual field to which I refer your attention, because
the thing thrusts itself out from, holds itself aloof from
what is visible around it, making that visible residue mere
background. My pointing therefore has an object, and it is
an object because it keeps being itself, does not change
randomly or promiscuously like Proteus, but holds together sufficiently to remain the very thing at which I
pointed. This way of being, Aristotle calls being a "this".
If I want to point out to you just this red of just this region
of this shirt, I will have to do a good deal more than just
point. A "this" as Aristotle speaks of it is what comes forth
to meet the act of pointing, is that for which I need not
point and say "not that or that or that but just this," but
need do nothing but point, since it effects its own separatiun from what it is not.
A table, a chair, a rock, a painting-each is a this, but a
living thing is a this in a special way. It is the author of its
own thisness. It appropriates from its surroundings, by
eating and drinking and breathing, what it organizes into
and holds together as itself. This work of self-separation
SUMMER 1981
�from its environment is never finished but must go on
without break if the living thing is to be at all. Let us con·
sider as an example of a living this, some one human
being. Today his skin is redder than usual, because he has
been in the sun; there is a cut healing on his hand because
he chopped onions two days ago; he is well educated, because, five years ago, his parents had the money and taste
to send him to Harvard. All these details, and innumerably
many more, belong to this human being. But in Aristotle's
way of speaking, the details I have named are incidental to
him: he is not sunburned, wounded on the hand, or Harvard-educated because he is a human being. He is each of
those things because his nature bumped into that of
something else that left him with some mark, more or Jess
intended, more or less temporary, but in any case aside
from what he is on his own, self-sufficiently. What he is on
his own, as a result of the activity that makes him be at all,
is: two-legged, sentient, breathing, and all the other things
he is simply as a human being. There is a difference between all the things he happens to be and the things he
necessarily is on account of what he is. Aristotle formulates the latter, the kind of being that belongs to a thing
not by happenstance but inevitably, as the "what it kept
on being in the course of being at all" for a human being,
or a duck, or a rosebush. The phrase ti en einai is
Aristotle's answer to the Socratic question, ti esti? What is
giraffe? Find some way of articulating all the things that
every giraffe always is, and you will have defined the giraffe. What each of them is throughout its life, is the product at any instant for any one of them, of the activity that
is causing it to be. That means that the answer to the
question, What is a giraffe? and the answer to the question, What is this giraffe? are the same. Stated generally,
Aristotle's claim is that a this, which is in the world on its
own, self-sufficiently, has a what-it-always-was-to-be, and
is just its what-it-always-was-to-be. This is not a commonplace thought, but it is a comprehensible one; compare it
with the translators' version, "a per~se individual is identical with its essence."
The living thing as it is present to my looking seems to
be richer, fuller, more interesting than it can possibly be
when it is reduced to a definition in speech, but this is a
confusion. All that belongs to the living thing that is not
implied by the definition of its species belongs to it externally, as a result of its accidental interactions with the
other things in its environment. The definition attempts
to penetrate to what it is in itself, by its own activity of
making itself be whole and persist. There is nothing fuller
than the whole, nothing richer than the life which is the
winning and expressing of that wholeness, nothing more
interesting than the struggle it is always waging unnoticed, a whole world of priority deeper and more serious
than the personal history it must drag along with the species-drama it is constantly enacting. The reduction of the
living thing to what defines it is like the reduction of a·
rectangular block of marble to the form of Hermes: less is
more. Strip away the accretion of mere facts, and what is
a
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
left is that without which even those facts could not have
gained admittance into the world: the forever vulnerable
foundation of all that is in the world, the shaping, ruling
form, the incessant maintenance of which is the only
meaning of the phrase self-preservation. Indeed even the
bodily material of the living thing is present in the worlcj
only as active, only as forming itself into none of the other
things it might have been, but just this one thoroughly
defined animal or plant. And this, finally, is Aristotle's answer to the question, What is form? Form is material at
work according to a persisting definiteness of kind. Aristotle's definition of the soul in De anima, soul is the beingat-work-staying-the-same of an organized body, becomes
the definition of form in Book 8 of the Metaphysics, and is,
at that stage of the inquiry, his definition of being.
Book 9 spells out the consequences of this clarification
of form. Form cannot be derivative from or equivalent
with material, because material on its own must be mere
possibility. It cannot enter the world until it has achieved
definiteness by getting to work in some way, and it cannot
even be thought except as the possibility of some form.
Books 7-9 demonstrate that materiality is a subordinate
way of being. The living body does not bring form into the
world, it must receive form to come into the world. Form
is primary and causal, and the original source of all being
in the sensible world must be traced beyond the sensible
world, to that which confers unity on forms themselves. If
forms had no integrity of their own, the world and things
could not hang together and nothing would be. At the end
of Book 9, the question of being has become the question
of formal unity, the question, What makes each form one?
In the woven texture of the organization of the Metaphysics, what comes next, at the beginning of Book I 0, is a laying out of all the ways things may be one. Glue, nails, and
rope are of no use for the problem at hand, nor, any
longer, are natural shapes and motions, which have been
shown to have a derivative sort of unity. All that is left in
Aristotle's array of possibilities is the unity of that of
which the thinking or the knowing is one.
This thread of the investigation, which we may call for
convenience the biological one, converges in Book 12
with a cosmological one. The animal and plant species
take care of their own perpetuation by way of generation,
but what the parents pass on to the offspring is an identity
which must hold together thanks to a timeless activity of
thinking. The cosmos holds together in a different way: it
seems to be literally and directly eternal by way of a ceaseless repetition of patterns of locomotion. An eternal motion cannot result from some other motion, but must have
an eternal, unchanging cause. Again, Aristotle lays out all
the possibilities. What can cause a motion without undergoing a motion? A thing desired can, and so can a thing
thought. Can you think of a third? Aristotle says that
there are only these two, and itllatt,moreover, the first reduces to the second. WtiemHdesire am aP,ple ii is the
fleshy apple and not tllee tHought of it toward which I
move, but it js·the thought ou<ifuagining of the fleshy ap-
45
�pie that moves me toward the apple. The desired object
causes motion only as an object of thought. Just as the
only candidate left to be the source of unity of form
among the animals and plants was the activity of thinking,
so again the only possible unmoved source for the endless
circlings of the stars is an eternal activity of thinking. Because it is deathless and because the heavens and nature
and all that is depend upon it, Aristotle calls this activity
God. Because it is always altogether at work, nothing that
is thought by it is ever outside or apart from it: it is of
thinking, simply. Again, because it is always altogether at
work, nothing of it is ever left over outside of or apart
from its work of thinking: it is thinking, simply. It is the
pure holding-together of the pure holdable-together, activity active, causality caused. The world is, in all its being
most deeply, and in its deepest being wholly, intelligible.
So far is Aristotle from simply assuming the intelligibility
of things, that he requires twelve books of argument to account for it. All being is dependent on the being of things;
among things, the artificial are derived from the natural;
because there is a cosmos, all natural things have being as
living things; because all living things depend on either a
species-identity or an eternal locomotion, there must be a
self-subsisting activity of thinking.
The fact that there are a Book l3 and a Book 14 to the
Metaphysics indicates that, in Aristotle's view, the question of being has not yet undergone its last transformation. With the completion of Book 12, the question of
being becomes: What is the definition of the world? What
is the primary intelligible structure that implies all that is
permanent in the world? Books l3 and 14 of the Metaphysics examine the only two answers that anyone has
ever proposed to that question outside of myths. They
46
are: that the divine thinking is a direct thinking of all the
animal and plant species, and that it is a thinking of the
mathematical sources of things. The conclusions of these
two books are entirely negative. The inquiry into being itself cannot come to rest by transferring to the divine
source the species-identities which constitute the world,
nor can they be derived from their mathematical aspects.
Aristotle's final transformation of the question of being is
into a question. Books l3 and 14 are for the sake of rescuing the question as one which does not and cannot yield
to a solution but insists on being faced and thought directly. Repeatedly, through the Metaphysics, Aristotle says
that the deepest things must be simple. One cannot speak
the truth about them, nor even ask a question about
them, because they have no parts. They have no articula·
tion in speech, but only contact with that which thinks.
The ultimate question of the Metaphysics, which is at
once What is all being at its roots? and What is the life of
God?, and toward which the whole Metaphysics has been
designed to clear the way, takes one beyond the limits of
speech itself. The argument of the Metaphysics begins
from our direct encounter with the sensible world, absorbs that world completely into speech, and carries its
speech to the threshold of that on which world and
speech depend. The shape of the book is a zig-zag, repeatedly encountering the inexpressible simple things and
veering away. By climbing to that life which is the beingat-work of thinking, and then ending with a demonstration of what that life is not, Aristotle leaves us to disclose
that life to ourselves in the only way possible, in the privacy of lived thinking. The Metaphysics is not an incomplete work: it is the utmost gift that a master of words can
give.
SUMMER 1981
�In the Audience
Robert Roth
For Pete Wilson
I
A man in his late forties sits on a bench in Washington
Square Park. He is disheveled and out of sorts. He gestures casually in the air as he makes his point. Ideo], ideology, ideal, he says over and over again. His manner is that
of a teacher in front of a small class. Or that of a man, a
man of opinion, being interviewed on television. A
woman not yet old rocks violently back and forth a few
benches away trying to release some violent inner pain.
4
2
It is Christmas time. On sale, green shower soap in the
shape of a microphone.
3
Maxwell throws Allison's book aside. It is a study on language. He is jealous and in a rage. Perceptions formalized.
Thoughts codified. Maxwell Berman cannot follow what
is being said. His mind is in a blur. A real emptiness is slipping through those structures, he thinks, angrily. No, a
passionate heart is beating through those structures. His
own heart beats wildly. And he lies stricken, almost as if in
love.
Inside a car. A scene remembered. In the front seat a dialogue. Karla, dark, intense, a fine public speaker, turns to
her friend Norman and says, You can always interpret
what I have to say. You make clear sense of it." Norman
suddenly pink faced answers, "You're the one with so
much to say."
Short little outbursts. Short political essays. That is the
limit of Maxwell's work. A year of thought into thirty
words, maybe three hundred, maybe twelve hundred.
And the words definitely need an easily recognizable context to give them any sort of meaning. For by themselves
they do not create a world. He cannot "invent" a world. In
such a way is his imagination limited. So he cannot call
himself a poet. He is a marginal polemicist, attached to
the moment, engaged in obscure skirmishes.
Maxwell picks up Allison's book again. Why does she
want him for a friend? Why would any of them want to
11
Robert Roth lives in New Yark City and writes fiction,
THEST.JOHNSREVIEW
know him? It was as if he were a girl who had learned how
to flatter, smile, be bright. And they could imagine him as
they wished him to be. Those of the world of books. Resigned caretakers of Knowledge, he thinks; suddenly angry again. Why do they take it for granted that he knows
·
what they know?
Maybe they are drawn to him tne way social scientists
are drawn to shrewd peasants or bright-eyed black children: to accummulate and codify and pepper their works
with vignettes and little quotations of life. He is repelled
and he is frightened. He wants their acceptance.
The shutters are closed bringing the room into darkness.
"For final relaxation, everyone in the corpse position/'
the voice of the Yoga instructor, authoritative, reassuring.
"On your back, eyes closed, feet a foot and a half apart,
arms slightly away from your sides, palms up, turn your
head from side to side, until comfortable." The voice
changes: "By the process of auto-suggestion ... " It is no
longer authoritative, rather it is mechanically commanding.
A mind control machine, thinks Maxwell. More precisely
it is as if a small cassette recorder had been implanted in
his brain. "By the process of auto-suggestion you will
relax, completely relax. My toes will relax," the voice continues," my toes will relax, my toes are relaxed. My ankles
will relax, my ankles will relax ... "
Allison lies alongside Maxwell. Her toenails are painted
bright orange. The room is at rest. Maxwell lies still, sweat
from his forehead running down the sides of his face. Subtle smells released by the sweat from his groin enter his
nostrils. Maxwell remembers resting after masturbation:
Licking my semen from my fingers, I relax, completely relax.
But for the voice, the room is silent. And the voice soon
will disappear. This is the part of the class Maxwell most
looks forward to. The asanas are arranged to bring one
into a state where consciousness is altered. And the room
itself is transformed into a sanctuary, a place for meditation, reflection. Occasionally the silence will be broken,
and Maxwell jarred, by a loud noise from the street or by
the sweet chiming front door bell of the ashram itself.
Allison's thin arms rest by her side. Her fingers are relaxed, completely relaxed. She is aware of the absence of
pain. Deeply etched lines on her forehead disappear during final relaxation. Life force energy flows through her
body and she feels herself very young and supple.
47
�From the very first moment they met, Maxwell had felt
a powerful, though peculiarly limited, almost compulsive
pull towards Allison. It was as if Allison had drilled two
fingers through his chest, touching his heart but for an in·
stant, then pulled her fingers out as quickly as she could,
leaving the part that she touched burning with love. And
so a part of his heart no bigger than a quarter was totally
in love with Allison. And for the full year they have known
each other it has never increased or diminished in size.
During the first months of their friendship Maxwell
and Allison would meet every couple of weeks for half an
hour or forty· five minutes, usually in the late afternoon in
a coffee house or a restaurant. They would meet in a
space in Allison's tight, carefully structured schedule.
Maxwell who had less to do could more or less be the one
to accommodate.
Their meetings were often tense and peculiar. They
would speak past each other. They would both be dull. AI·
lison would look up at the ceiling. Maxwell would talk past
her shoulder. Allison would withdraw. Maxwell would
grow panicky and start speaking compulsively, speaking
loudly with uncharacteristic bravado. And the more Max·
well would talk the more Allison would withdraw. And the
more she would withdraw the more he would talk. Allison
would feel she was drowning or she was being consumed.
Once, in the street, she grabbed her chest and grew faint.
"Please, no more," she demanded. Whenever he left her
Maxwell would be relieved. It's not worth it, he would
think. And then half an hour later he would be flooded
with affection and longing.
The tension between them in part was over aspiration
and life style. Allison, the author of a book on linguistics,
though in the grip of a tenure struggle, was in a partial
way being rewarded for her work. She felt, however, that
she did not allow herself free rein, either in her work, for
her theories always seemed to stop at the point of break·
through, or in her life style, which was subtly but signifi·
cantly upwardly mobile. Allison in short was the very good
student who had grown up to be the very good scholar. In
turn she was to receive the proper social rewards. She was
extremely competent in her work and she would defend
her areas of competence with a ferocity that she hated,
for it symbolized her own complicity in the limits placed
on her imagination. She could not allow herself to imag·
ine herself as more than competent. She was the Prisoner
of Competence. She wanted to break free.
Maxwell in turn was not able to write a book or produce
a body of work. He didn't even try. He was the poor stu·
dent who had either been broken by the system or had
somehow managed to cut himself free from its socializa·
tion and was brilliant and daring. His essays were usually
very short, condensed, and often beautiful. They were
small meditations. To Maxwell they seem alternately slight
and deep. He wrote them only occasionadly. 'There were
long periods of inertia.
''You are either mwriter or you are not," someone once
48
told him. "And you write thirty variations of the same fan·
tasy," he replied, rupturing their friendship.
His short pieces, while having a validity of their own,
symbolized for Maxwell his own imprisonment. They Je.
gitimated his passivity. They suggested unusual potential
and yet they hid the full range of Maxwell's concerns and
understandings which if revealed might be less significant
than he wished to imagine.
And Maxwell always imagined himself on a grand scale.
Important thinker, huge recognition, tremendous respect
and influence.
Maxwell and Allison, two talented insecure people,
symbiotically locked, would meet fairly regularly. One
day, Maxwell blew up. "I'm always in the interstices of
your life," he said with a flourish. "I'm neither your friend
nor your colleague. I'm neither in your public life nor your
private life."
Allison answered, "There are certain things, very
inti~
mate things, that I can tell you. Other things I make a con·
scious decision not to. It must be painful and confusing.
Our conversations are stilted. There is something twisted
in our friendship." And with a flourish of her own, "From
now on I will be consistently less intimate."
Except for an occasional chance encounter where they
would both be polite and formal, Allison and Maxwell did
not speak for two months. One cold dismal afternoon
marching in a demonstration Allison came over to Max·
well and after a few moments asked him whether he
would like to take Yoga with her. "It might help center
you," she said with a smile. She herself had been taking it
for a couple of months and was feeling very good about it.
Maxwell came to Yoga initially to be near Allison. But
their meetings in class have been only random and occa·
sional. Maxwell came alone more often than not and the
classes themselves have taken on a certain importance.
There are moments of unease, even dread. He always
enters the room with caution. Painful memories surface
as body tension is released. Maxwell is not very loose yet
or supple. He has trouble with the asanas. His legs feel like
match sticks, thin, brittle. And he can feel naked in his
awkwardness.
.. This is not a competitive environment," an instructor
inevitably says when either Maxwell or someone else is
particularly clumsy or slow. And Maxwell can always hear
the unease just barely concealed by these words. The in·
structors' startling grace, thinks Maxwell, is not the result
of inner quiet but is achieved by sheer will. They fear
abandonment as persons and are ashamed of their bodies.
The experience in Yoga is charged and dangerous.
Bodies sweaty, vulnerable. Intense awareness and the sug·
gestion of common understanding. Something powerful
is taking place. Strange unexpected feelings surface and
consciousness is altered. Possibilities for betrayal hang
heavy in the room. A chance word, a foolish observation,
can be particularly painful. Comments such as, "We are
not a Mickey Mouse organization. The weekend retreat is
.~well organized and efficient." Or, "Yoga sure can make
SUMMER 1981
�your day," can be particularly jarring. They underline the
split in consciousness of people who are deep within a
common experience.
Contemplation, silence, community, a dark sexuality
are at the core of Maxwell's social vision. Fear of death
and of life freeze the body and the spirit. Destruction, war
machines, grinding social injustice, brutal nation states
grow out of this terror. And the social structures take on a
life and history of their own, and constrict human and social possibilities even further. In Yoga, as in absorbing
conversation, or in an intense sexual encounter, one briefly
is able to glimpse a state different from what is. It is terrifying and often not very clear. But one has stepped outside everyday experience and consciousness. Things can
be different. And even if only that has become clear,
something significant and dangerous has taken place.
And so when Maxwell distances himself too sharply
from the people in the room, seizing on their vulgarity or
their narrowness, he does so as much out of his own fear
of illumination as out of a desire to protect himself from
false experience.
Our fingers will touch, our fingers will touch, our fingers touch, a hidden smile forms inside his restful face.
Loud disco music from the street, loud frantic voices
from the street break into the room. And across Maxwell's
mind an exuberant Christopher Lasch, wearing silver
pants and a scarlet jersey, skates and dances to the pounding disco beat. And as suddenly as he had appeared, he
disappears as the music and voices fade up the block.
And somewhere in the corner of his mind a long forgotten scene emerges. And he watches as it passes before
him.
A fund raising event for the then faltering now defunct
Free University. Allison, whom he had not yet met, was
being introduced by Joan McBride, economist, workplace
fensive. And Maxwell was no exception. He admired
some of the people, basically he respected everyone, but
more often than not he was in a state of agitation.
Maxwell remembers how his mind strained that night
as he juggled hollow perceptions, idle perceptions to make
himself feel important.
Wedding ring. Worldly. Adult. Domesticated. Complacent. Worn out. Defeated. Red Star. Adventure. Break
from domestic stranglehold. Identification with people in
struggle. Anger at injustice. Sexy. Sexy symbol of entrenched state power.
The event took place three years ago, two years before
he met Allison, one year before the break up of her eight
year marriage. It is the impressions of her songs, more
than the actual words, that have remained with him.
The songs could not be easily categorized. They had
within them conflicting strains. One would emerge, then
fade, quickly replaced by another. It was as if some conflict
and struggle were taking place within the songs themselves. The songs would cut deep and then pull back, becoming almost compulsively lighthearted. Her songs had a
sad playful humor, but it was humor more debunking
than radically subversive. Maxwell sensed at the time a
tension between an almost timid venturing forth and a
wild yet still inhibited rage.
Later in the night the room broke into a chorus of song.
Folk songs, political songs, popular songs, religious songs.
As is often the case, the folk and political songs were sung
with an earnest, animated enthusiasm. And the pop and
religious songs with an ironic, self-satisfied, near manic
frenzy. There was plenty to drink, dope to smoke,. food to
eat.
And in walked Joe DePerri. Short and round, rosy
cheeked from the cold winter night, Joe DePerri joined
the chorus of voices. Someone handed him a beer. "Sono-
organizer, movement heavy.
rous music," he once wrote in an essay on mass culture,
"I would like to introduce my very dear friend who will
sing some songs that she has written."
They theorize, they organize, and they sing their very
own songs Maxwell remembers thinking.
Allison's hair, dark blonde, was cut much shorter then.
He noticed her gold wedding ring as she played her guitar.
She wore a dark blue work shirt with a red star on her collar.
Maxwell remembered how uneasy he felt as he watched
her. He hoped her songs would be good. He hoped her
songs would be bad. Never quite comfortable with the
people at the school, he would often make clumsy attempts at friendship. He, however, was very difficult. He
was insistent, often unyielding. He would polarize and
provoke. He felt beleaguered. But if there was one thing
that defined the Free University it was that everyone felt
as if they were part of a beleaguered minority. There was
much unease and rancor. But little lasting bitterness. People without much social power had gathered to form a
place to share ideas, study, and in some cases work out political strategy. The people were often paranoid and de-
"maintains routine perception by being sweet and soothing." Joe DePerri took a drink from his beer, hitched up
his pants, deepened his voice, giving it a rough edge. But
his voice soon became melodious and high pitched. Occasionally it would crack. And he would collect himself and
his voice would deepen then grow high again.
Joe DePerri's presence charged the room. Singing became more animated. People more alert. This was often
the case. Even rooms that were dull often became transformed when he entered.
Joe DePerri had a galvanizing personality. He set things
in motion. He started magazines, political organizations.
He helped start the Free University. Joe DePerri was a
fine public speaker, a good careful inspiring teacher, with
an acute social imagination and powerful analytic gifts.
He had if not a deeply poetic nature, a forceful and almost
joyous polemical style. His written work could be dense,
even labored, but more often than not it had the feel of a
working class ballad. If there were one major flaw in his
character, it would be that he was morally obtuse. He
could not be trusted.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
49
�Maxwell enjoyed watching joe DePerri when a serious
new problem arose: sensing the confusion and the shifting
opinion in the room, Joe DePerri would panic at his loss of
control, and then make up arguments on the run, leapfrogging ahead to resume his place of leadership. There
would be a slight break in his voice, a slight color to his
cheeks, revealing to Maxwell just when Joe De Perri had
lost his integrity.
Round, long-winded, shiny-faced men have always had
a special place in Maxwell's heart. He would, for example,
make it a point to be home whenever Hubert Humphrey
would defend the Vietnam War on television. Something
in his enthusiasm, in his earnestness, would draw him to
the man. Hubert Humphrey would say and, more importantly, believe whatever it was that was required of him.
He was in the fullest sense the suppliant. Maxwell imagined him as the servant of the people.
One night in a heavy rainstorm, Hubert Humphrey
greeted President Johnson at the airport. He stood there
so erect, holding his umbrella over President Johnson's
head, the rain pouring down his beautiful wet face, the
floodlights shining off his shiny bald head. He had given
himself over totally to his President. Hubert Humphrey
looked almost saintly that night, deeply transformed by
sacrifice.
Joe DePerri, charismatic, inspiring, morally obtuse, occasionally abusive, generated resentment as well as admi-
ration. People felt manipulated by him. "It's as if we were
puppets on a string, here to play out his fantasies," was a
common complaint.
In one rare and revealing outburst, Joe DePerri answered a room full of people angry at what they perceived
to be his cavalier treatment of them by saying, "The
movement is fragmented and there's no sense of commu-
nity. I know almost everyone here. I brought you all
together and there is no other way you would have met.
This project grew out of my imagination and out of my inspiration. It had to grow out of someone's imagination.
I'm limited, I'm just a person. This project can be redeemed, transformed by all of you working together. I'm
tired. And God damn it leave me alone." And he dashed
out of the room and sat on the steps trembling.
Arbyne all night stood off to one side. She did not join
the singing. Looking through slightly tinted glasses, her
eyes, clear and excited, would dart curiously from person
even saying hello. "We decided that it wasn't quite right
for our purposes," he said officially.
"What do you mean 'we'. Two days ago you said that
you liked it. Well I'm upset."
"That's tough," he said suddenly his face freezing into
the face of a tough guy. He grew silent as he savored the
force in his voice.
Arbyne wanted to cry but wouldn't. The thought of
him trying to console her, of his putting his arm around
her made her almost shake with disgust.
"I'll bring it somewhere else then."
This is not what he wanted. "If you only rework it," said
Joe DePerri. He panicked, his voice softened. "I think you
just have to fix up the beginning."
Liar, she thought. Her head pounded. She said, "I like
the beginning. And I don't want to talk about it anymore.
Besides I don't like you."
Joe DePerri grew despondent and he started to speak
very fast, charmingly.
Arbyne felt herself weaken. She tightened up her body
and her face became a mixture of anger and disdain.
Joe DePerri crumbled into sudden depression. Arbyne
walked away. Joe DePerri looked quickly, anxiously
around the room. He settled upon a young man, a psychiatrist, and soon they became locked, absorbed, in conver·
sation.
"Feel the awareness come back into your body," a dis-
tant voice reaches Maxwell. "Everybody sit up. Om. Om.
Om. Om Shanti, shanti, shanti." One final prayer. Maxwell's eyes are still half closed and he smiles at Allison. It is
not so much desire he feels, thinks Maxwell, but the need
to be near her, wake up next to her. Still imagining himself just waking up, he brushes her shoulder as he passes.
Allison quickly thanks the instructor for a very fine class.
Whoever is dressed first will wait for the other on the
stoop outside.
5
Allison, alone in her bed, strokes her belly gently. She
touches a nipple playing with it until it is firm, licks her
fingers, sucking them half unconsciously.
It is still raining hard as it had all weekend. "To be in
bed with someone on such a rainy day, huddled together
under the covers doubly emphasizes the idea of shelter,"
she thinks as she pulls the covers over her head. "Lovers
always rush to meet in the monsoon season. It is a relief
to person, taking in everyone in the room. Her curly hair,
from the barrenness."
black and gray, formed a bluish halo around her.
The communal singing ended. Allison had left much
earlier, but she was not all that important to Maxwell that
night. People moved about starting conversations. Others
went to another room where there was music to dance to.
joe DePerri moved from person to person, speaking intimately and with animation. Each conversation, however
brief, would end only after a small but significant catharsis. Arbyne came up to him. He greeted her warmly.
"What did they think about my piece?" she asked before
Her face flushes with sudden erotic feeling. And as suddenly she feels broken, dried out. "Burned out," she
thinks. Pain grips her stomach. And she does not want to
50
come out from under the covers.
The paper she will deliver comes into focus. Important
faculty members will be there. To displease them might
jeopardize even further her chances for tenure. But some
students of hers will be there as well as some faculty members who support her. She won't be totally alone.
Her hair feels stringy, damp. The fingers on her hand
SUMMER 1981
�ache. Arthritic hands and I'm so young. It can only get
worse. And the pain in her fingers, though not often se·
vere, appears to foreshadow a lifetime of pain. It is something she does not often think about. She has put it to one
side. But it is there, muted but continuous.
The weekend had been one of controlled panic. She
would look at her paper, then type up whole new pages at
a time, only to discard what she had just written. She
would read sections of her paper into her tape recorder,
and play it back imagining herself a member of the tenure
committee, sitting in the lecture hall, holding the frightened candidate's future in her hands. And she even read
the beginning of her paper into her own telephone answering machine. "This is Allison Kramer, the subject of
my paper is patterns of speech differences according to
sex and class in the urban Northeast, if you wish to critique
me please wait until you hear the tone." She had actually
done this and would not answer her phone for five hours.
She smoked dope on and off all weekend. Her mind would
float out into reverie and then crash back into anxiety.
Allison washes her hair, combing it out slowly, relaxing
herself. She smokes a cigarette, and then puts it out
quickly. She makes toast and tea. She puts on a little eyeshadow, a little rouge and some lipstick. She puts on
hooped earrings, a silver necklace and an elegant if not extravagant blouse. She flirts with herself in the mirror,
touches her cheek. Allison's hands begin to tremble. The
pain in her fingers increases, an intense throbbing pain.
She swallows two aspirin. Throws on her raincoat. And
leaves for school.
On the subway Allison carefully observes the passengers. She divides them into age, sexual, and racial group·
ings. She imagines whom she would like to sleep with,
what combinations of people and where. She knows the
stations by heart, but starts testing her memory. She feels
a brief satisfaction as each predicted station comes into
view. It was a game she had played with her brother as a
child. They would compete with each other over whose
memory was better. They liked to make faces at the passengers on the subway and at each other. Their faces so
beautiful and rubbery.
Allison's mind unexpectedly focuses on the last night
she and Joe DePerri had ever spent together as lovers. It
was not a love affair that she often thought about. It was
brief and not very memorable or painful. And it had been
well over a year since it ended. And now she can think
only of that night. The scenes of that night replaying
themselves with astonishing clarity. She has almost completely forgotton that they had been lovers. There is a casualness and affection and mutual regard that they now
have for each other. But she feels bitter as she remembers
that night.
Joe DePerri answered the door carrying a saucepan. I'll
be with you in a minute, he said, rushing back into the
kitchen. Allison walked into the living room, and she noticed herself gazing upon it as if for the first time. She had
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
been there four or five times before. Now she ..yas seeing
it in a totally different light.
The tenure pressure had been severe that week. She
had come here in order to be catered to, waited on, to luxuriate in being attended to. Joe DePerri had said, "Tonight you will just sit and relax. And you'll see what a really
fine cook I am."
But Allison could not relax. She found herself rather detached and anthropologically observant. She looked around
the room and for the first time had a real sense of unease.
For the fi<St time the bookshelves, the art objects, everything about the room seemed io be arranged for effect.
The room in fact was impressive. Everything about it suggested a person of a genuinely serious and critical intelligence, a person of fine taste.
The books were arranged by topic. Excellent books, serious topics. Allison felt cold as she made her observations. The mahogany stained bookshelves were bracketed
to the walls. The shelves on one wall contained fiction,
both contemporary and classical, while on another wall
were arranged scholarly and critical works of history and
social science. Previously she had been impressed by the
range and taste of his reading, but now she felt, and for
reasons she could not fully understand, that there was
something manipulative about it all. She tried to pull herself away from her perceptions. But she could not do so
for more than a few seconds. She felt not so much that Joe
DePerri was trying to manipulate her or any passing stranger
into outright subservience, but rather as if the structure of
the bookshelves provided a framework or scaffolding for
his own egotism. This reflected not a conscious desire to
control or manipulate, thought Allison, but rather a massive self-absorption whose effect was the same.
Allison thought of Joan McBride, whose books were
piled helter-skelter on her bookshelves, other books lying
on tables and chairs. And she thought of Joe De Perri's own
work room, his bedroom with papers scattered on his desk,
his clothes thrown on the floor and chairs. But it was the
living room that he presented to the world. Allison became upset again. There is nothing wrong with beautiful
books she told herself. His books are not detached from
his main concerns, thought Allison, they are books that he
has read, books that he has studied.
Joe DePerri called from the kitchen. 'Til talk to you in a
minute," he said. "Why don't you pick out a record." She
was relieved to be able to perform a task. But similar
thoughts came to her as she attempted to choose a record.
The records were not arranged in such impeccable order.
But they were placed on a beautiful shelf. There were
fewer records, but well chosen. The best jazz, best rock,
best blues, best classical. Pairs of names as if mocking her
flashed in front of Allison's eyes. Vivaldi and Mozart,
Charles Mingus and Charlie Parker, Bessie Smith and Billie
Holliday, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones. A new
thought made her smile: occasionally Joe DePerri would
spend hours listening to records of social protest, mostly
militant workers' ballads, and he would sing along with
51
�them, his voice breaking as always whenever he would get
too excited.
Allison picked Vivaldi's The Four Seasons.
"Oh, The Four Seasons," joe called from the kitchen. "I
particularly like Neville Marriner's performance."
Allison checked the cover quickly with annoyance to
see if it were the Neville Marriner recording. It was. She
was both curious and upset, suspicious and off balance.
Was he patronizing her, she wondered. Was he just show·
ing off his general knowledge of music, or, as she wanted
so badly to believe, was he just expressing simple enthusi·
asm about the recording?
She smoked a cigarette but could not listen to the music.
''I'm making lemon and garlic salad dressing. Come in
and smell it as I put it together. I discovered the recipe
just a couple of days ago."
Allison went into the kitchen. "Do you like your roast
beef rare?" asked joe.
"Yes," she answered.
joe looked at the clock ''I'd better take it out within
five minutes then. While I'm making the salad dressing do
you think you could pull apart the lettuce leaves and slice
the tomatoes?"
The roast beef, the fresh lemon and garlic, the olive oil
carried her along with the impetus of their good smells.
She found herself separating the lettuce leaves and quartering the tomatoes. He said he was going to do it all him·
self. ''I'm going to do it all by myself from scratch," he had
said. And for an intense moment, Allison felt resentful
and constricted. But Joe looked so engaged and earnest,
even loving, as he prepared his dinner for her. But the am·
biguity of the situation did not leave her. For once she
was aware of the disparity between Joe's genuine concern
and interest and his massive egotism, subtly manipulative
while hardly noticeable.
Allison had been uneasy in the living room, and now
she was standing in the kitchen preparing the meal. She
was confronted by false promises subtly broken. Allison
turns over the phrase in her mind as she sits on the sub·
way still not halfway to school.
"! spoke to Robert Laszlo," Joe De Perri said as they sat
down to eat. "I told him how excited I was about your
book. He told me that he remembered Fischer's review in
my magazine and was interested in it. And he'd meant to
get around to reading it. And now that I brought it up, he
will definitely review it for The Nation."
"Robert Laszlo will review my book," Allison screamed
out, her whole face lighting up.
joe smiled at her, a smile mixed with delight and plea·
sure.
So that's my reward for being a good lay. The thought
sprang suddenly and unexpectedly. It almost choked her.
God, that's unfair. And her face turned into a mask. But
quickly the pleasure and excitement of Robert Laszlo re·
viewing her book returned.
Taking a chance, she asked, "Did you finally work
things out with Arbyne?"
52
"She's a very bright women," answered Joe, <~but she's
being totally unreasonable."
"What do you mean?'' asked Allison.
"Each new manuscript becomes crazier -and crazier. A
whole new section of this one is devoted to the occult and
astrology. She calls them the female sciences. It's pseudospiritual nonsense. She won't change a sentence. And
she's not writing metaphorically. She means every word
of it."
"Well, I'm sure there is more to it than that."
"I don't care if there is more to it. It's regressive and it's
empty."
Allison grew stone silent. You boorish pig, her mind
screamed, any creative woman is going to be driven crazy
in this culture.
As Allison now remembers her thoughts she is filled
with shame. She had been thinking like a stupid social
worker. Who was she to imagine Arbyne as crazy? Nine
out of ten times Arbyne will make wild bizarre leaps and
land on her head. Her theories are often half-baked and
compulsively thrown out. But she has also illuminated the
darkness, if only briefly, and she has penetrated, if only
randomly, areas of concern seldom if ever explored.
Allison returns to that night.
"It will be a long hard haul," Joe said speaking of tenure.
"The cutbacks, the firings, make each opening that much
more precious and difficult to secure. As radicals and as
Marxists it's difficult enough. They tell us," his voice grew
indignant, "that our ideology," he said the word with a
bitter mockery, "informs and distorts our objectivity.
They have no ideology, right? Their ideological hegemony
is so taken for granted. They think that is the world." Joe's
face grew soft. "And as a woman," he continued, ((it is
doubly and triply oppressive. Only so many positions can
be filled. No one will say it outright. But we all know that
it's true."
"Well," he said trying to be kind, "security can be its
own prison." He paused for a moment and then smiled.
"Well, if you don't get it, you can always raise a family."
Allison laughed. She answered with a retort that she
cannot remember.
And the next morning she woke all knotted inside.
Where did he get the nerve to put up bookshelves that
would be so imposing. To have such impeccable taste. To
know that it was Neville Marriner. He asks me over to din·
ner and I have to help him prepare the salad. I can always
raise a family. Very, very funny.
Jokes like that blunt the edge of sexual hatred, thinks
Allison as she nears her stop. They allow us to get through
dangerous situations. But they camouflage the social con·
flict and they obscure the true extent of oppression. She
thinks how often she would joke back, share a laugh, be
petulant. But deep down she always felt humiliation and
rage. Filled with embarrassment and self-loathing, she
thinks of how often she has acquiesced to such a process.
One more relationship down the drain, Allison remem·
bers thinking as she left Joe DePerri's apartment.
SUMMER 1981
�Allison pulls out the paper she is to deliver. This whole
fucking nightmare is going to go on forever. Any mistake,
a wrong word and it all can explode. She always has to be
careful. She has to flatter but not be too obvious about it.
Every moment she is on edge. Every step is like being on a
minefield. Every sentence is a semantic minefield. She
must mute her radical perceptions, reducing them to scattered insights. She must keep her prose stiff and dense
and be scrupulous with her references. Why don't I ditch
the whole thing, she constantly asks herself. But security
is very important to her. She does not want to float, to
flounder about. And jobs are not that easy to come by.
Allison has become edgy and paranoid. She read a crucial paragraph to four different friends. Three said it
should stay in. One said that she should cut out the whole
paragraph, that it was too politically charged. And Allison
screamed that her friend was just out to kill her.
The rain has turned into a gentle drizzle. Somewhere
between dream and nightmare Allison Kramer walks the
five blocks to the campus. Twenty minutes early the lecture hall is already half filled.
6
Sarah Kendall is giving a reading. The crowd is steadily
filling up the spacious auditorium of the Greenwich Village school. Maxwell Berman stands by the doors watching people as they enter.
"Are you still an intellectual?" Suzanne says approaching
Maxwell. She leans forward, "Or are you now into using
your hands?" She has always been this way. She would ask
a question, aggressive and intimate and totally unpleasant.
Suzanne's face looks gaunt and haunted. "God, she's
aged," thinks Maxwell. He has not seen her during the
two years since the Free University folded. "Some of us
from the old school have taken over an old precinct house,"
says Suzanne. "We're going to build a garden on the
roof." "That sounds nice," answers Maxwell, sneaking a
look around the room wondering who else had come.
"I just recovered from a nervous breakdown," she con~
tinues. "The tranquilizers have dehydrated my body. I've
lost twenty pounds" "Are you okay?" asks Maxwell, wishing she would leave. He knows he should feel concerned,
but he can't. "Do you know that I just got out of the hospital," Suzanne says, moving to a new person. 1 had a
nervous breakdown. They put me on tranquilizers that
dehydrated my body. I lost twenty pounds. Did you hear
that we've renovated the old precinct house? We don't
know whether we should concentrate on theory or practice. I think we should do both. Don't you?"
It is already twenty minutes after Sarah Kendall was
scheduled to read.
11
"There's Joe DePerri," someone shouts out. Joe DePerri
nods to the voice and scans the room.
Allison walks in with a group of friends. She waves casually to Maxwell. He has the feeling that she is still annoyed
with him. He had spoken to her on the phone yesterday
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
and read her a statement he had written. It called for the
release of Dan White, the murderer of gay rights leader
Harvey Milk, on the grounds that the type of hatred
which leads to murdering "deviants" and the fear which
leads to locking up murderers amount to the same thing.
When Maxwell asked Allison if she would sign the statement she exclaimed, "God, Maxwell, you're always trying
to provoke people. Well, this statement I'm not going to
sign." Robert Laszlo also would not sign the statement.
He told Maxwell that he didn't disagree with it, but he
said that as a gay man he wanted to talk about institutionalized homophobia, not about the nature of punishment.
Maxwell sees Joan McBride. He goes over to her and asks,
"Have you read my Dan White statement?" "I thought it
was basically amoral," she answers.
Her comment makes no sense. There is too much noise,
too much activity to ask her what she means.
Sarah Kendall enters the auditorium. The applause is
heartfelt. She responds to the greeting with a slight, almost timid wave. She seems both shy and overcome as
she makes her way to the stage. Sarah smiles broadly to a
friend, hugs two or three people, squeezes an arm.
Throughout the room people turn to friends and say,
"God, isn't she wonderful." Affection and love pour out
to her as she approaches the microphone; there is a sense
of well being. The people this night have come as much to
celebrate her for the person she is as to hear her read. She
is an artist of rare gifts and a public figure of rare courage.
She speaks with wisdom and simplicity and this has endeared her to her public. And it is these very qualities that
Maxwell Berman will focus on this night with such dark
and bitter rage.
There is a terrible defensiveness, analyzes Maxwell, as
she introduces the first story she is planning to read. He
understands the source of her defensiveness all too well.
The projected wisdom of her persona, like his own stumbling incoherence, protects her from the academicians
and the intellectually accomplished; people she at once
fears and is greatly drawn to. They in turn are often struck
by her vitality and her intelligence. But she knows that
she is not one of them; they fear her. And she herself fears
her own vitality, thinks Maxwell. She has let her folksiness
limit the full range of her subversive spirit.
When Sarah Kendall speaks, a simple anecdote, a shrug
of the shoulder can unravel the most sophisticated apologetics for injustice and death. Yet somewhere within the
simplicity of her manner there lies a rigid ideological
mind, thinks Maxwell, a mind that negotiates its way
through the world along a narrow corridor of concerns.
And for Sarah Kendall to venture outside this narrow corridor causes her terrible anxiety. In the face of a politics
that challenges her own, she can turn vicious.
Maxwell remembers a night many years before when
Sarah Kendall was asked how young men should respond
to the draft. Her voice grew thin as she answered. "It is
our moral obligation to do whatever is necessary to stop
this war. Look at the terrible sacrifices of the Vietnamese
53
�people. It is a moral obligation for young men to turn in
their draft cards." And her tone implied that there was
something unforgiveably self-indulgent about not exposing oneself to danger in the struggle against injustice.
Whether vicious or puritanical, it was very cruel, thinks
Maxwell, suddenly re-experiencing the sense of guilt he
had felt while listening to her answer. And he knew there
would have been no way for him to challenge her that
night without being humiliated, for Sarah Kendall, in
moments of panic, could treat even people of vision as if
they were agents of death.
The room has grown very hot. People throughout have
remained very attentive, engaged in the experience, deeply
responsive. And the more enthusiastic the response the
more Maxwell withdraws into himself. Each turn of phrase
repels him. Each word, each gesture, each response. The
appreciative laughter makes him cringe. The affirmation
of community further separates him from the rest of the
audience.
He thinks of Arbyne secluded in her vision, driven to
near madness by abuse. "The differences between what
you and the others have to say are significant," Maxwell
would tell her, "but not all that significant." "You'll see
some day how serious they are/' she would answer. Tiny
seemingly obscure skirmishes, she would insist, might
very well determine the whole direction and spirit of a
movement.
Sarah Kendall's voice breaks as she reads. There are
sobs in the room, and then laughter.
Headlines shape your consciousness, Maxwell's thoughts
accuse the audience. Code words substitute for thought.
You rest so secure in a closed arena of consciousness. Half
of you are always filled with new concerns: nuclear power
plants, sterilization abuse, medical cutbacks. Always instant anger, instant analysis, instant all the facts, instant
full of opinions. Instantly mobilized. And the rest of you,
the independent-minded, can't get absorbed in anything
that is new. You choose so carefully which issues will engage you, at which injustices you will draw the line. you
remain so complacent with explanations worked out so
long ago.
Maxwell's eyes grow distant as he remembers two re·
cent scenes.
At a conference on pornography a civil liberties lawyer
was talking to a small group of people who had gathered
around him. He took his pipe out of his thin, slightly op·
ened mouth and said, "You should have seen the response when I defended the Klan." There was a twinkle
in his eyes. The civil liberties lawyer was very pleased with
himself. "I recognize all the dangers and complexities of
the situation, but nonetheless I believe ... " Nonetheless
he remains so manly, willing to risk all for a principle. And
in the face of women acting so. irrationally against pornography, he knows how to maintain a consistent point of
view.
Three women against pornography appeared on morning TV in front of a studio audience made up largely of
midwestern housewives. "We have some trouble with the
54
civil libertarians," one of them said to a whole roomful of
people who had no sense of freedom. One woman from
the audience spoke about how pornography pollutes. The
three women against pornography nodded encouragingly.
They would not speak about the hidden violence of the
family. They would not speak about the everyday sexual
and psychic dread of the women in the audience.
Maxwell is enraged by his recollections. He takes out
the notebook that he always carries with him and writes:
"The civil liberties lawyer does not understand the pervasive social madness, the manipulation of consciousness.
He is secure in his homilies, for way down he thinks this is
a free society. He thinks passing ERA will solve the problem of misogyny. He goes through life with his little formulations. He turns red in the face during heated discussion.
Basically he is complacent."
Maxwell continues writing: "In the society of docile,
frightened people, largely without will, the three women
against pornography offer mind control as their program
for social transformation. Destroy dangerous images, they
say. They manipulate the fear and bigotry of imprisoned
midwestern housewives. This to build a movement!!"
The reading will go on forever. His head spins, tears fill
his eyes. He is slumped in his seat. The common understanding. The common pain. The common outrage. So
deeply connected to the people. So split off. Everything is
unraveling, unraveling. They are being thrown into different worlds. It is a rupture of love. The bond between Sarah
and the audience grows stronger. "This is my favorite
story," he hears a voice whisper. The separation is permanent.
The air in the auditorium has grown oppressively hot
and damp. Suddenly the reading is over. He files out with
the crowd. He lingers outside, breathing in the cool spring
air, resting against a car. The light from the street lamps
comes from far overhead. He feels less enclosed.
Some people gather about in small circles, others leave
quickly. He waits a while longer. Joe DePerri walks outside talking excitedly with two friends. Suzanne looks
needfully from side to side. joan McBride, busy as always,
walks away with a strong determination.
"This is the community in resistance," thinks Maxwell.
"The comic individuation of people," he writes in his
notebook. "The comic individuation of the people in the
community of resistance."
What does that mean, wonders Maxwell. Each person is
ludicrous, partly distorted yet partly free. Does it matter?
For a moment the people he knows seem like figures in a
landscape, but a landscape of buildings and human activities. They were shaped by the society, they shaped the
resistance to the society-well, he thinks, it can't be otherwise. He laughs at himself. He feels calm.
Allison calls over to Maxwell. Clearly she is no longer
annoyed at him. She and a few friends are speaking with
Sarah. "Hi," says Maxwell. Allison extends her cheek to
him. Maxwell kisses her quickly, then turns to Sarah and
says, "It was a very beautiful reading." Sarah Kendall
grabs his arm, squeezes it and smiles warmly.
SUMMER 1981
�Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance, ' '
A Model of American Eloquence
Eva T. H. Brann
The document entitled "To the Honorable the General
Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, A Memorial
and Remonstrance" is a jewel of republican rhetoric. 1 Nor
has this choice example of American eloquence gone
without notice. And yet, compared to the Declaration of
Independence and the Gettysburg Address, it has re·
mained obscure-more often quarried for stately phrases
than conned by heart, more often admired at a distance
than studied in detail. This lack of popularity can in part
be accounted for by the circumstances of the document.
Addressed to the legislature of a state rather than to the
people of the nation, it is concerned with an issue which
is critical only sporadically, though then critical indeed.
The Supreme Court has, to be sure, searched the docu·
menton several occasions for help in interpreting the "establishment" clause of the First Amendment. (See the
Appendix.) But this naturally narrow judicial mining of
the text has itself served to draw away attention from the
depth of its political precepts and the fitness of its rhetori·
cal form, discerningly lauded, for example, by Rives, Mad·
ison's nineteenth century biographer. 2 In part, again,
Madison's work has been kept off the roster of canonized
On December 3, 1784, a bill "establishing a provision
for Teachers of Religion" was reported to the General Assembly of Virginia. Its preamble said:
Eva Brann recently published Paradoxes of Education in a Republic (University of Chicago Press, 1979).
This study was written under a Mellon Foundation Grant for Individual
Study and delivered in abridged form at the Conference on Rhetoric and
American Statesmanship held at the University of Dallas on October 1618, 1980.
Whereas the general diffusion of Christian knowledge hath a
natural tendency to correct the morals of men, restrain their
vices, and preserve the peace of society, which cannot beeffected without a competent provision for learned teachers,
who may be thereby enabled to devote their time and attention to the duty of instructing such citizens as from their
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
public prose because it lacks Jefferson's heady generalities
and Lincoln's humane grandeur. But I know this: To study
it is to come away with a sense of having discovered, under the veil of Madison's modesty, the great rhetorician of
the Founding, whom John Marshall called "the most elo·
quent man I ever heard." The immediate and the histori·
cal efficacy of Madison's appeal shows that despite the
deprecating modern estimate that he "could not mesmer·
ize a mass audience" but "only those who sought ... i11umination,"3 Madison was master of that true eloquence
which sometimes turns the former kind of audience into
the latter. It is an eloquence of measured passion and sober
ardor, which knows what to say when and to whom with·
out bending the truth.
L The Circumstances Surrounding
the Remonstrance 4
55
�circumstances and want of education cannot otherwise attain
such knowledge; and it is judged such provision may be made
by the Legislature, without counteracting the liberal principle
heretofore adopted and intended to be preserved, by abolishing all distinctions of pre-eminence amongst the different societies or communities of Christians . .. 5
The author of the bill, Patrick Henry, had introduced it
with a fervent speech tracing the downfall of ancient and
modern polities to the decay of religion: the repeal in 1776
of the tithe law, which meant the end of a state-salaried
clergy and amounted to the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, was a source of such decay in Virginia. Other
eminent Virginians, even more anxious about an increase
in laxness of morals and lawlessness than about the precipitous decline of church attendance during and after
the Revolution, saw nothing wrong with the bilL Among
them were George Washington and John MarshalL
Madison, absolutely opposed, debated Henry on the
floor of the Assembly late in November. These speeches
contain revealing anticipations of-and contrasts to-the
Remonstrance. 6
Even with the bill still in committee, Madison's arguments had told. There had been a short-lived attempt to
de-christianize it extending it to all "who profess the public worship of the Deity," be they Mohametans or Jews.
The bill reported out was, furthermore, no longer the
General Assessment bill which had sought in effect to reestablish Christianity (though, of course, not Anglicanism)
by a general levy on taxpayers in support of a Christian
church. It had been transformed into a Christian education bill, designed partly, as evidenced by the reference in
the preamble to those who cannot afford private education, to be a defense against Jefferson's long tabled secular
public education bill of 1779, and partly, as is apparent
from its more restricted aims, to be a response to Madison's pressure.
Meanwhile Madison also engaged in some practical politics. In order to remove the oratorical Henry from the
scene, Madison had hit on a device both kinder and more
efficacious than Jefferson's suggestion "devotedly to pray
for his death": he had conspired to elevate him to the governorship. The proud governor-elect had retired to his
estates, "a circumstance very inauspicious to his offspring" as Madison wrote with satisfaction to James
Monroe.
Also, in exchange for the withdrawal of his opposition
to a companion bill for the incorporation of the Episcopal
Church, Madison had won postponement of final action
on the bill to 1785, so that there might be time to publish
its text for consideration by the people. This move was
crucial, since in 1784 the bill would probably have passed
the legislature with an overwhelming majority.' Here as
ever, the two facets of Madison's statesmanship-practical maneuvering and principled rhetoric-complemented
each other. He had gained a year.
Throughout spring of 1785 Madison's own inclination
was to wait quietly for the popular opposition to manifest
56
itself. The Episcopalians, as old beneficiaries of establishment naturally, and the Presbyterian clergy to their
shame, supported the bill; the laity and clergy of the dissenting sects were solidly opposed. By May several suporters, but no opponents, of the bill had lost their seats. As
late as June 21 Madison was assured enough of its unpopularity merely to echo the rebellious common feeling, that
although the legislature "should give it the form, they will
not give it the validity of a law ... -1 own the bill appears
to me to warrant this language of the people." 8
Some of his associates in the battle, however, George
Mason and the brothers Nicholas, were anxious for more
pointed action. They had reason to fear civil disturbances
if the legislature, in which the favoring tidewater counties
were overrepresented, should attempt to force the law on
the people. They hoped to deter its passage with a large
number of well-subscribed identical petitions from all
parts of the state, the best device then available for conveying the power of a public sentiment to the legislature.
They asked Madison to compose the text.
He wrote the <(Memorial and Remonstrance" sometime
soon after June 20, 1785, intending it to circulate anonymously. The few friends who knew of his authorship respected his wish, which arose, presumably, from his desire
to maintain good working relations with all parties in the
legislature. At the time some attributed the work to
George Mason, who had drafted the religious liberty
clause of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Though a
printer had put his name on a reprint as early as 1786,
Madison acknowledged only late in life, in a letter of 1826
to Mason's grandson, that "the task of composing such a
paper had been imposed upon him."
Mason had the petition printed as a broadside in Alexandria, having seen no reason for changing even one word
of the text. The Nicholases saw to its distribution
throughout the state. It met, Madison noted in retrospect,
"with the approbation of the Baptists, the Presbyterians
[who had recanted], the Quakers, and the few Roman
Catholics, universally; of the Methodists in part; and even
of not a few of the Sect formerly established by law, [the
Episcopalians]."'
The Remonstrance was solidly successful in drawing
subscribers. The thirteen circulated copies collected 15 52
signatures; 150 freeholders signed one petition in a day.
Yet, successful though it was, another, still anonymous,
petition, based on the fervently Christian argument that
the bill contravened the spirit of the Gospel, ran up more
than three times as many signatures on twenty-nine copies. All in all, about eighty opposing petitions with 10,929
signatures came in to Richmond, and only a few in support.
After a brief consideration the bill died in committee in
the fall of 1785, lost, however, by a mere three votes. Madison's petition may well have been cruciaL
On January 22, 1786, Madison reported the results of
that session to Jefferson in Paris in a modestly jubilant
vem:
SUMMER 1981
�The steps taken throughout the Country to defeat the Gnl.
Assessment, had produced all the effect that could have been
wished. The table was loaded with petitions and remonstrances from all parts against the interposition of the Legislature in matters of Religion.
In the same letter he had already told jefferson even
greater news. One element alone of Jefferson's six-year-
old revisal of the laws of Virginia had that year been
passed into an act, his bill for establishing religious freedom, 10 the most celebrated of all documents concerned
with religious liberty.
Advantage had been taken of the crisis produced by the
crushing of the religious assessment bill to carry through
the jefferson bill, as Madison put it. The two events were
closely connected. The impetus of the collapse of a regressive measure carried over-as sometimes happens-into
a sudden advance. The religious clause of the Virginia
Declaration of Rights had guaranteed the free exercise of
religion to all Christians, but it had not unequivocally
banned-witness the assessment bill-the establishment
of a non-sectarian state church. During the next nine
years the legislature had passed a patchwork of special exemptions, tolerances and particular measures favoring dis-
senting sects. jefferson's bill, which happened to attack
compulsory support of religious teachers in its preamble,
rode in, as Madison recollected in 1826, under the "influence of public sentiment" manifested in the death of the
assessment bill, as a "permanent Barrier agst. future attempts on the Rights of Conscience as declared in the
Great Charter affixed to the Constitution of the State." 11
Madison interpreted the petitions against the assessment
bill as demands for the enactment of jefferson's law concerning religious freedom; he thought it an advantage
that it had been sanctioned by what was in effect a plebiscite. The Remonstrance had advanced it as a principle
that there should be such invitations to the people to express their sentiments in the course of law-making.
II. The Arguments of the Remonstrance
The Remonstrance is a petition addressed to the General Assembly of Virginia that remonstrates on fifteen
counts (listed in summary in Note 12) against a bill before
it establishing a provision for teachers of the Christian religion. Each of these points is set forth in one paragraph in
the form of a reflection on one aspect of the right relation
between religion and politics. Madison clearly intended to
make the argumentation as complete, as principled, as
fundamental, and yet as concise as possible.
The fifteen counts are, furthermore, composed into a
symmetrical structure. The eighth, that is, the middle
point, addresses the concern immediately central to the
occasion-the fear of the decline of social stability-by arguing that state support of religion is not necessary to the
civil authority. Clustered about that-central claim are the
other prudential and cautionary points to be addressed to
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the Christian communities which hoped to profit from
the law. Points 6-7 and again 9-11 display the bill as internally and externally deleterious to Christianity in particular.
By contrast, Points l-4 and again Points 13-15 have a
wider, more encompassing matter: humanity in general.
The intoductory points proceed on the grandest scale.
The first asserts a positive theological prin9iple-the absolute priority of man's relation to God over his social
bonds-as the ground for the inalienable character of the
right to religious freedom; the second deduces from the
first the prohibition of legislative interference in religion.
The third point draws the political principle of prompt resistance to civil interference out of the uncompromisably
absolute separation of the realms, the fourth draws from
the philosophical principle of human equality the political
injunction against state support of religion.
The closing numbers cite the forms and practices of
popular government which proceed from the foundations
established in One through Four as they bear on the bill.
Thirteen warns against unenforceable laws, Fourteen
states the majoritarian principle, and the last point recalls
the principle of limited government to the offending legislature. The rhetorical force of this structure will, I think,
tell even on a reader who does not apprehend it explicitly.
III. Rhetorical Analysis of the Textu
PREAMBLE
To The Honorable the General Assembly of the
Commonwealth of Virginia
A Memorial and Remonstrance
We the subscribers, citizens of the said Commonwealth, having taken into serious consideration, a Bill printed by order of the last Session of
General Assembly, entitled ''A Bill establishing
provisions for Teachers of the Chn'stian Religion, ''
and conceiving that the same iffi'nally armed with
the sanctions ofa law, will be a dangerous abuse of
power, are bound as faithful members of a free
State to remonstrate against it, and to declare the
reasons by which we are determined. We remonstrate against the said Bill,
The preamble alludes to the postponement resolution
which had requested the people of the counties "to signify their opinion respecting the adoption of such a
Bill" -the resolution is quoted in the next to last paragraph. The petition, then a common political instrument,
is intended to elicit popular opinion in the course of lawmaking. Such moments of communication between the
people and their representatives are an important part of
Madison's theory of self-government, set out in the penultimate paragraph of the petition.
57
�Not Madison but "We ... the citizens" speak. His style
could well accomodate itself to a canonical anonymity. He
had been trained in a school of rhetoric which eschewed
idiosyncracies, and he never engaged in the luxuriously indignant periodicity peculiar to Jefferson.
This petition is presented in the form of a remonstrance, that is, a protest, a protest, suggestively, of the
((faithful," but it is not a mere protest, as are most present-
day petitions. It is also a memorial, a declaration of reasons-every paragraph begins with a ~~because" -in the
tradition of the Declaration of Independence.
FIRST PARAGRAPH
1. Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, ''that Religion or the duty which we
owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging
it, can be directed only by reason and conviction,
not by force or violence." The religion then of
every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; it is the right of every man to
exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its
nature an unalienable nght. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the
evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot
follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable
also, because what is here a right towards men, is a
duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every
man to render the Creator such homage and such
only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This
duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of
the Governor of the Universe: And rf a member of
Civil Society, who enters into any subordinate
Association, must always do it with a reservation of
his duty to the General Authon.ty; much more
must every man who becomes a member of any
particular Civrl Society, do it with a saving of his
allegiance to the Universal Sovereign. We maintain
therefore that in matters ofRelzgion, no mans right
is abridged by the institution of Civzl Society and
that Relrgion is wholly exempt from its cognizance.
True it is, that no other rule exists, by which any
question which may divide a Society, can be ultimately determined, but the wz/1 of the majon·ty;
but it is also true that the majority may trespass on
the rights of the minon'ty.
58
The first is the most philosophical and the most rhetorically artful paragraph.
Madison begins by reminding the legislature of its own
fundamental law; he quotes, as he notes in the margin of
his copy, from Article XVI of the "Declaration of Rights
and Frame of Government of Virginia," adopted in 1776.
Madison himself intervened crucially in George Mason's
draft of that article, though not in the clause here cited.
(The sentence he affected is given in the fourth and fifteenth paragraphs.) In accordance with the symmetrical
structure of the petition the Virginia Declaration is cited
in the first, the fourth, the eleventh, and the fifteenth paragraphs.
The quotation from Article XVI is here introduced in
the spirit of the Declaration of Independence-the Virginia Declaration has no such language-as an axiom, an
undeniable truth. The consequences of that axiom are
then developed in an enchained sequence of sentences
which has something of the quality of a liturgical responsion, a kind of ronde! of reason. The enchaining brings
with it a non-periodic style. (A period, speaking technically, is a circuit-like sentence, whose meaning is not deliv-
ered until the whole is complete.) Several sentences are
grammatically simple; conjunctions and relatives, regarded in school rhetoric as weakening the vivacity of
writing since their function should be carried by the diction, 14 are avoided; the continuity indeed comes from the
incantation-like diction.
"The religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man": he restates the phrase
"reason and conviction" of Article XVI alliteratively and
tactfully, avoiding the everlasting dwelling on the reason
by which some of the defenders of religious liberty had
made themselves suspect.
The recurrent phrase "every man," rather than "all
men" as in the Declaration of Independence, carries a
subtle emphasis: as Madison's logic notes from college
point out, when one turns "all" into "every," the predicate is logically distributed so that it "belongs to every individual."15 Since religion consists of "voluntary acts of
individuals singly and voluntarily associated," Madison's
use of "every" rather than "all" conveys the individual
nature of religion implied by the fundamental axiom: no
religious dogma is to be imposed and no religious exercise
interfered with-the First Amendment in germ.
Each key word is picked up and elaborated as the argument continues: " ... it is the right of every man to exercise" religion freely. "This right is ... an unalienable right.
It is unalienable, because the opinions of men" are free.
"It is unalienable also, because what is here a right toward
men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every
man to render the Creator such homage" as seems right to
him. "This duty is precedent ... to the claims of Civil Society." "Before a man can be considered a member of
Civil Society . .. ," etc.
The rhetorical form emphasizes the mutual involve·
ment of the terms. Free exercise of religion is a right and
SUi~MER
1981
�moreover an inalienable right because of an ineradicable
feature of human nature-its freedom. This human freedom, the ground of civil liberty, is understood as a bondage of the mind to the dictates of reason and evidence-a
dependency clearly expressed in the original opening
paragraph of Jefferson's bill on religious freedom, which
was deleted by the General Assembly with Madison's reluctant acquiescence:
Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on
their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed
to their minds . .. 16
Madison, who had earlier displayed a lively interest in the
philosophical question of mental liberty and misgivings
about its possibility, 17 must indeed have been sorry to see
this pertinent passage disappear from the bill, bartered
away for its passage.
The right to religious liberty is inalienable because of
man's nature, but also because of man's relation to God,
which is that of a subject bound by a duty to his Creator.
Religion as defined in the passage from the Declaration of
Rights which Madison quotes is a conflation of the Roman notion of obligatory performance and the biblical
idea of obedience to the Creator, with the Christian salvational sense, to be introduced in the middle paragraphs,
here missing.
The inalienability of the right is, then, rooted in man's
nature as free and as created; it is therefore inalienable by
the very reason which makes it a right, namely that it is a
divine duty that must be individually discharged. Succinctly put: "What is here a right towards men, is a duty
towards the Creator."
Now comes the crux of the paragraph and indeed of the
work. Man's relation as a creature is prior both in time and
in degree to his membership in a polity. Before he can be
thought of as a citizen of civil society, he must be considered as a subject under the Governor of the Universe; as
the former he has rights, as the latter duties. This priority
in time may mean that these duties were his before this or
any polity was instituted, even in the Garden of Eden, or
that they precede adult citizenship and obligate even children. Precedent in "degree of obligation" must mean that
moral duties supersede political obedience and that religion governs citizenship-indeed a creed for citizen-resisters to the usurpations of the civil powers.
Although Madison himself later cites Jesus' "own declaration that his Kingdom was not of this world" in behalf of
the separation of worlds, 18 his own remarkable theory is
quite distinct from the scriptural doctrine of the two
realms, the secular and the spiritual. That doctrine holds
this world inferior-Roger Williams, for example, demands a hedge between the garden of the Church and the
wilderness of the World. 1
'
In contrast the precedence of the religious realm set out
in the Remonstrance is not seen from the perspective of
the world beyond, but from the position of a practicing
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
citizen of this world, albeit with prior obligations. That is
precisely why the functionaries of civil society may not invade the realm of religion-because that realm is here
conceived as belonging to the active life of the world, not
to civil society but certainly to society. The suspicion and
contempt of the world, on the other hand, against whose
intrusions the soul and the church must be guarded, belongs to Christian liberty-a theological condition and not
a civil right. (The defense of religious liberty from the
scriptural point of view is rousingly made in Milton's
Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes; Madison
may have known it.)
Madison is proposing a civil theology20 in which the political arena is circumscribed by religion. From the point
of view of political theory men come out of (though in a
sense they never leave) the Lockean state of nature and its
right to self-preservation; from the point of view of the
civil theology man first and last remains "a free-born subject under the crown of heaven owing homage to none
but God himself."21
Madison, however, does not advocate the cause of a
deistic super-sect with its positive rationalistic doctrines,
so confidently set out in Jefferson's bill concerning religious freedom which knows and approves "the plan of the
holy author of our religion ... to extend it by the influence
on reason alone." Encompassing all religions, whether
propagated by reason, revelation, or force of tradition,
Madison's civil theology is a genuine grounding for religious pluralism.
The conclusion is that rights of conscience are reserved
from the authority of the political power. As Jefferson
puts it in Query XVII of the Notes on the State of Virginia
(1781):
Our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as
we have submitted them. The rights of conscience we never
submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them
to our God.
There follows an intricately wrought analogy containing
more subtleties than bear articulating:
As l. a member of Civil Society 2. who enters into any subordinate Association 3. must always do it 4. with a reservation of
his duty 5. to the General Authority,
Much more so must l. every man 2. who becomes a member
of any particular Civil Society 3. do it 4. with a saving of his allegiance 5. to the Universal Sovereign.
The climax of the deduction from the axiom of religion
as a duty to God is the radical proposition that "no man's
right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society andReligion is wholly exempt from its cognizance." That is to
say: l. individual religious rights are not alienated upon
entering civil society and 2. the realm of common religious observance is wholly out of its jurisdiction.
This is the seminal secular statement concerning reli-
59
�gious liberty as a civil right in the public realm, since Jefferson's law, to which Madison later gave the honor of
being the standard of expression on the subject, was,
though prior in the drafting (1779), posterior in publication (1785).
The political consequences are reserved for the last paragraph of the petition. Madison, however, here adds an afterthought which brings these fundamental principles
into the political arena. It is an antithesis acknowledging
in capsule form the paradox of majoritarianism, a clash of
truths in the world of action: 22 "True it is" that the will of
the majority alone can settle divisive differences, "but it is
also true" that the majority may try to infringe the rights
of the minority. The penultimate paragraph will counterbalance this reservation by an expression of full faith in
the majority as a last court of appeal in cases of infringements on liberty.
SECOND PARAGRAPH
2. Because zf Religion be exempt from the authority of the Society at large, still less can it be
subject to that of the Legislative Body. The latter
are but the creatures and vicegerents of the former.
Their jurisdiction is both derivative and limited: it
is limited with regard to the co-ordinate departments, more necessarily is it limited with regard to
the constituents. The preservation ofa ftee Government requires not merely, that the metes and
bounds which separate each department of power
be invariably maintained; but more especially that
neither of them be suffered to overleap the great
Barrier which defends the rights of the people. The
Rulers who are guilty ofsuch an encroachment, exceed the commission from which they derive their
authority, and are Tyrants. The People who submit
to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived ftom them, and
are slaves.
Now the doctrines of the first paragraph are applied, a
fortiori, to government: if religion is beyond the political
community, so much the more is it beyond the legislature.
For as human beings are God's creatures, so the legislature is civil society's creature. (The manner of this legislative subordination is again taken up in the corresponding
next to last paragraph.) The double limitation on its jurisdiction is stated in a succinct presentation of the theories
of checks and balances and of limited government. It displays Madison's genius for articulating a full complement
of fine but fundamental distinctions in the smallest compass: he speaks of the "metes and bounds" (a phrase possibly adapted from Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration 23 )
60
that contain the departments of government, and of the
"great Barrier" that circumscribes government itself.
That barrier, the limitation of legislative jurisdiction, is
the political palisade before the "wall of separation," in
Jefferson's famous metaphor for the First Amendment,
which is to be erected between church and state. 24
The language of the following sentences grows terse
and absolute (although Madison manages to tuck in definitions of both tyranny and slavery): the rulers who encroach are tyrants, the people that submits, slaves. The
theory of prompt resistance to be set out in the next para·
graph is prepared.
THIRD PARAGRAPH
3. Because it is proper to take alarm at the first
experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent
jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of
the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution.
The ftee men of America did not wait till usurped
power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw a!!
the consequences in the principle, and they
avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much soon to forget
it. Who does not see that the same authority which
can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other
Religions, may establish with the same ease any·
particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of a!!
other Sects? that the same authority which can
force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his
property for the support of any one establishment,
may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?
The first sentence is often quoted, and "viewing with
alarm" has, of course, become a cant phrase of American
rhetoric. Here the key word "liberties" first appears; the
phrase "religious liberty" is missing from the work.
The Revolution is invoked in favor of a "noble" mode
of political response. In the remarkable phrase "prudent
jealousy" Madison conflates republican duty with the
principle of honor, the citizen's calculation of conse~
quences with the nobleman's propensity for quick offense.
The necessity for a ready response lies, of course, in the
fact that absolute principles, not compromisable interests,
are involved; "the least interference with religion would
be a flagrant usurpation." The Revolution, being the complex event of both principle and interest, was in fact slow
in coming:
... mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to
which they are accustomed. {Declaration of Independence.)
SUMMER 1981
�Nevertheless Madison here propagates the view, for the
sake of the "revered lesson" it contains, that the three-penny tax on tea moved the "free men of America" to revolt because it was a first signal of oppression, not the last
straw. 25 This view was evidently dear to him, for later he
wrote:
The people of the U.S- owe their Independence and their liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence
on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprized in the
precedent. 26
The lesson he urges is immediate recognition of and resistance to breaches of principle, and especially of the principle of religious liberty, because it stands and falls as a
whole. As Locke says: "The civil power can either change
everything in religion, ... or it can change nothing." 27
Two balanced rhetorical questions next address first
the churches and then the individual citizens: as the authority to establish Christianity impks the power to
establish one sect, so the authority to touch a citizen's
property implies the power to force him into religious
conformity. This passage reveals Madison's universal view
of religious liberty. He writes here, in hopeful suppression
of the fact admitted in the eleventh paragraph, that Virginia still had a Christian establishment, as if the establishment were an incipient event to be feared by the sects.
His vigorous promotion of Jefferson's bill concerning
religious liberty shows that he knew otherwise. An episode that occurred during its consideration in the Assembly shows where his sentiments lay:
For the sake of passage Madison acquiesced in several
deletions urged by men who objected to the aggressively
deistic tone of the bill, although he thought these defaced
the text somewhat-to him its expressions were ever the
"true standard of religious liberty," even if his own inclination was to phrase that liberty as a right to the "full and
free exercise" of religion rather than to its non-exercise.
What he refused to agree to was an insertion that was attempted; as Madison much later recalled it:
... an experiment was made on the reverence entertained for
the name and sanctity of the Saviour, by proposing to insert
the words "Jesus Christ'' after the words "our lord" in the
preamble. 28
Madison, ever vigilant of words, fought the insertion and
it was dropped_ On January 22, 1786, he reported in a
spirit of modest triumph to jefferson in Paris that the enacting clauses had passed without alteration and,"[ flatter
myself, have in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind." The rejection of the insertion proved, jefferson later said, that
"the jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohametan,
the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination" were
within the mantle of its protection_ Those were exactly
Madison's intentions, and indeed he was to receive expressions of gratitude from American Jews and to give encouragement to them. 29
1HE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
So, although in the Remonstrance he writes to and for
and-unemphatically but unquestionably-as a Christian, there can be no question about the universal application of his principle of religious liberty. No more can there
be doubt about his uncompromising steadfastness in its
application. Of many proofs let me choose only three.
His early draft of those amendments to the Constitution which were to become the Bill of Rights specifically
prohibit the establishment of a "national religion_''
Even in later life he retained his rhetorical vigor in
fighting Christian establishments_ He apostrophises his
country:
Ye states of America, which retain . .. any aberration from
the sacred principle of religious liberty, by giving to Caesar
what belongs to God, or joining together what God has put
asunder, hasten to revise and purify your systems . .. 30
As ever, he attacks the perverse wedlock of church and
state on the ground of Christianity itself_
The most striking, almost comical, examples of his scrupulous avoidance of even the slightest trespass are his
presidential Thanksgiving Messages during the War of
1812- Forced from him by a Congressional resolution, he
phrased them rather as exhortations to free choice of worship than to public piety_li
The strong Madisonian meaning of the word "liberty"
as applied to religion, to be adumbrated throughout the
petition, begins to emerge:
Religious liberty is a civil right which is grounded in relations of duty to God antecedent to political society and
therefore incapable of being abrogated_ These relations
are determined by the nature of the human conscience
which is free in a philosophical sense, that is, determined
not by external force but only by the internal compulsion
of evidence, be it reason or revelation; they are also determined by the original nature of the human being which is
dependent in a theological sense, that is, created by God_
(Para. 1.) Delicate because it must be maintained absolutely (Para_ 3), this liberty requires the government to abstain completely from interference, either for the purpose
of supporting or of obstructing the exercise of religious
obligations (Para_ 2)- The government must protect religion, but only by abstaining evenhandedly from interference and by safeguarding each sect from the intrusions of
the other sects (Para. 8). As a right held on the same political terms as the other natural rights which are reserved to
the individual, religious liberty stands or falls with them
(Para. 15)FOURTH PARAGRAPH
4. Because the Bill violates that equality which
ought to be the basis of every law, and which is
more indispensible, in proportion as the validity or
expediency of any law is more liable to be im-
61
�peached. If' 'all men are by nature equally free and
independent, '' all men are to be considered as entering into Society on equal conditions; as relinquishing no more, and therefore retaining no less,
one than another, of their natural rights. Above all
are they to be considered as retaining an ''equal title to the free exercise of Religion according to the
dictates of Conscience." Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine
origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those
whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence
which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused,
it is an offence against God, not against man: To
God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it
be rendered. As the Bill violates equality by subjecting some to peculiar burdens, so it violates the
same principle, by granting to others peculiar exemptions. Are the Quakers and Menonists the only
sects who think a compulsive support of their Religious unnecessary and unwarrantable? Can their
piety alone be entrusted with the care of public
worship? Ought their Religions to be endowed
above all others with extraordinary privileges by
which proselytes may be enticed from all others?
We think too favorably of the justice and good
sense of these denominations to believe that they
either covet pre-eminences over their follow citizens
or that they will be seduced by them from the common opposition to the measure.
The proposed bill violates the natural equality of men
affirmed in Article I of the Virginia Declaration of Rights,
now quoted by Madison. Such equality is presented here
as an internal condition of all law. The more liable a law is
to the charge of invalidity or inexpediency, the more important such equality becomes. The dictum that equality
"ought to be the basis of every law" refers to the inner
equity of the law, which ought to affect everyone equally,
not to the familiar demand for equality of treatment under the law; the law must be such as to be capable of equal
application.
A succinct statement of the contract theory of rights
which underlies this demand is given: All men being by
nature equally free, they must enter civil society on equal
conditions; they must give up and retain exactly equal
rights. "To embrace, to profess, and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin," to join, to
declare, and to exercise whatever religion seems to us to
be truly a religion, is the essence of these rights with respect to religion.
62
In the conclusion of his Letter Concerning Toleration
Locke says that "the sum of all we drive at is that every
man may enjoy the same rights that are guaranteed to
others." Madison italicizes this one word in the petition-equal-when he quotes for the first time that clause
of Article XVI of the Virginia Declaration of Rights for
whose form he himself was responsible. Equality of application was for Madison, as for Locke, important above all
else. Although it intends to preserve the "liberal
principle" of Article XVI, by "abolishing all distinctions of
pre~eminence" among the different sects, the Assessment
bill is inequitable because it burdens all in support of a religious service that will peculiarly burden non-Christians
and peculiarly exempt those Christians who do not wish
to take advantage of its benefits. The rhetorical question
what sects besides those mentioned would fall under the
latter category would have the obvious answer: above all
the Baptists, whose opposition to any kind of state intervention was a matter of theological principle.
There can never be a moral or theological pretext for interference, because the abuse of the right of religion is not
subject to human punishment. Madison had restricted
Mason's broad reservation in the original draft of Article
XVI, that the magistrate might restrain free exercise if,
"under colour of religion, any man disturb the peace, the
happiness, or the safety of society" to the condition that
"the preservation of liberty and the existence of the State
are manifestly endangered." His record shows that as a
magistrate he would have found no occasion to apply it;
presumably he was glad finally to see the whole clause
drop out. 32
A bilaterally symmetrical sentence, the only one in the
petition to contain the word "God," presents this central
point.
Early American documents mention the names of God
profusely enough to intrigue a medieval theologian. 33 In
this petition he is the Creator to whom man owes the duties of a dependent creature; the Governor of the Universe to whom man is a subject rather than a citizen
(Para. l); God before whom alone man can sin (Para. 4);
the Author of our Religion who hands down its .teachings
in scripture (Para. 6); the Supreme Lawgiver of the U niverse from whom illumination of the legislature is requested (Para. 15). Not mere unreflective Enlightenment
epithets, these names must be genuine expressions of
Madison's understanding of the facets of humanity's relations to God, for they delineate just such a God as would
be the ground of religious liberty.
In his work on Article XVI of the Declaration of
Rights, 34 the young delegate to the Revolutionary Convention of May 1776 had offered but one draft article, on
religion. Patrick Henry, who had himself sponsored it, had
quickly disclaimed it when challenged on the floor to explain whether he actually intended to disestablish the
Church. Madison had, of course, intended just such disestablishment:
SUMMER 1981
�That Religion or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the
manner of discharging it, being under the direction of reason
and conviction only, not of violence or compulsion [a stylistic
emendation of Mason's "force or violence"], all men are
equally entitled to the full and free exercise of it according to
the dictates of Conscience . ..
No man or class of men, the article continues, should receive special privileges or be subjected to special penalties
for religious reasons, a prefiguration of the two prongs of
the First Amendment, the establishment and free exercise clauses.
Madison, having been forced to withdraw his own draft,
scrutinized Mason's version, which promised "the fullest
toleration in the Exercise of religion." He alone, perhaps,
in that assembly took one word of it seriously enough to
forestall a danger. 35
That word was "toleration," which implies not a right
to religious liberty but a privilege granted. That was absolutely insufferable for Madison, for toleration accorded
with, and so confirmed, ecclesiastical establishment (as in
modern times it can accompany an anti-clerical policy). 36
Although he wrote respectfully of the Dutch "experiment of combining liberal toleration with the establishment of a particular creed," 37 Madison would certainly
have rejected Spinoza's views in the Theologico-Political
Treatise (Ch. XIX), that the possessor of sovereign power
has rights over spiritual matters but should grant religious
liberty on matters of outward observancy, only inward
piety being private and inalienable. In any case, it is unlikely that he knew Spinoza's writings, especially since
Locke, whose Letter he had probably read (as external likelihood and internal evidence in the Remonstrance indicate), admitted to little acquaintance with Spinoza's
work. 38 Although called a "Letter Concerning Toleration,"
Locke's work, by a typical cunning twist, shifts the meaning of the term: not granted to dissenting Christians by
the ecclesiastical establishment and its state sponsors, toleration is required of the magistrate toward all churchesMohammetan, Pagan, idolaters (though not-and here
Madison differed-to atheists); the magistrate has no
right to interfere with either the internal or the external
aspects of religion. This ~~tolerance" was not the notion
Tom Paine excoriated in the Age of Reason as "not the opposite of Intolerance, but. _. the counterfeit of it," but a
demand for a right under cover of a less aggressive term.
Madison might well have taken his lead from the thought
of the Letter Concerning Toleration at the same time that
he balked at the use of the term "toleration" in fundamental law.
FIFTH PARAGRAPH
5. Because the Bzl/ implies either that the Civzl
Magistrate is a competent judge a/Religious Truth;
or that he may employ Religion as an engine of
Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension fa/THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
sifted by the contradictory opinions ofRulers in all
ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.
This brief but resounding paragraph ("arrogant pretension"-"unhallowed perversion") appears to have been
retained from the debate on the floor of the Assembly.
Madison's notes show that he employed his large theological erudition 39 to bring home to the Assembly, with that
muted irony of which he was capable, the politicotheological consequences of the bill. It would require a
legislative definition of Christianity: it would require that
the law-makers choose an official Bible-Hebrew, Septuagint, or Vulgate, decide the method of its interpretation, confirm a doctrine-Trinitarian, Arian, Socinian-as
orthodox, and so forth. The sentiment of the paragraph is
Lockean: "neither the right nor the art of ruling does
necessarily carry along with it the certain knowledge of
other things and least of all of the true religion."
In this paragraph alone Madison speaks of religion as a
"means of salvation," in contrast to its employment as an
"engine of civil policy." In the argument for religious liberty the obligations of religion, not its blessings, count
most.
SIXTH PARAGRAPH
6. Because the establishment proposed by the
Bzll is not requisite for the support of the Christian
Religion. To say that it is, is a contradiction to the
Christian Religion itself, for every page of it disavows a dependence on the powers ofthis world: it is
a contradiction to fact; for it is known that this Religion both existed and flourished, not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of
every opposition from them, and not only during
the period of miraculous aid, but long after it had
been left to its own evidence and the ordinary care
of Providence. Nay, it is a contradiction in terms;
for a Religion not invented by human policy, must
have pre-existed and been supported, before it was
established by human policy. It is moreover to
weaken in those who profess this Religion a pious
confidence in its innate excellence and the patronage ofits Author; and to foster in those who stzll reject it, a suspicion that its friends are too conscious
of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.
Madison leaves the universal considerations of religious
liberty to attend to the particularly Christian interest in it.
The seven core paragraphs of the petition are devoted to
that Christian point of view, an arrangement that tellingly
mirrors both the encompassing necessity for a philosophical foundation and the immediate fact that a Christian
63
�constituency is speaking. Establishment, prohibited in a
purely political context for the sake of the free exercise of
religion, is to be yet more eschewed for the sake of Chris·
tianity itself.
His notes for the floor debate show that he intended to
divert the argument from the preoccupation with the so·
cial need for religion to the utrue question": Are religious
establishments necessary for religion? The proponents'
concern with "the peace of society" were, so he implies
later, in part a cover for concern with the declining impor·
tance of the churches. The end of war, laws that cherish
virtue, religious associations which would provide personal examples of morality, the education of youth, and
precisely the end of governmental intrusion, not state in·
tervention, were the "true remedies" for the decline of re-
ligion which he recommended to the legislature. Note the
neo-classical notion that the laws should promote virtue. 40
Madison's Christian defense of liberty is in the great
tradition of Protestant dissenting writings, especially Mil·
ton's Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes
(1659), in which he shows "the wrong the civil power
doth; by violating the fundamental privilege of the Gos·
pel, ... Christian libertie," 41 that is, freedom from forcible
impositions in matters of worship. Indeed Milton's whole
argument is drawn from scripture, especially from the
Pauline letters.
Madison, too, alludes to scripture: "every page" of reli·
gion "disavows a dependence on the power of this world."
The Baptists, whose whole petition was based on the
grounds that the bill was "repugnant to the Spirit of the
Gospel," however, outdid him in this line of argument.
For them, as for other opposing Christians, disestablish·
ment dated literally from Jesus himself. "Render to
Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things
that are God's." (Mark 13, 17).
The paragraph next exposes the contradictions of the
bill's premise that Christianity cannot be diffused "with·
out a competent provision" for its teachers. The contra·
diction of fact is that Christianity has indeed flourished at
all times without aid-and Madison gives a believer's cap·
sule history of its two epochs, the era of miracles and the
era of ordinary providence. The more serious contradiction in terms is twofold: the dependence of religion, which
is pre-existent, on human policy and the failure of the
faithful to trust in God for its support. The argument is
rendered in beautifully branching and balanced cola.
Fifty years later, Madison would feel entitled to answer
the "true question" definitively from the accumulated ev·
idence of the American experience, which had "brought
the subject to a fair and finally decisive test." Left to it·
self, religion would flourish; indeed the danger lay rather
in its extravagancesY Madison insisted that "every
successful example of a perfect separation ... is of imp or·
tance," and that he regarded such success as an indispens-
ible empirical test of the principle of religious liberty. At
the same time, he was certain that the test would never
fail since "there appears to be in the nature of man what
64
insures his belief in an invisible cause ... " But what
would Madison have said in the face of an observable decline of "religious commitment"?41
SEVENTH PARAGRAPH
7. Because experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary
operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the
legal establishment of Christianity been on trial.
What have been its fruits? More or less in all places,
pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and
servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry
and persecution. Enquire of the Teachers of Christianity for the ages in which it appeared in its greatest lustre; those ofevery sect, point to the ages prior
to its incorporation with Civzl policy. Propose a restoration of this primitive State in which its Teachers
depended on the voluntary rewards of their flocks,
many of them predict its downfall. On which Side
ought their testimony to have greatest weight,
when for or when against their interest?
Proof positive that religion could flourish on its own
was a half-century in the future, but the evidence of fif·
teen centuries, that is, dating back roughly to the Conver·
sion of Constantine, showed that legal establishments
corrupted Christianity, because they hampered freedom
of conscience, "the truly Christian principle." 44
Here, as elsewhere, Madison allows himself the most
spirited language for clerical degeneracy, without, how·
ever, giving way to that automatic anti-clericalism that
possessed Jefferson. Even in his youth, in an early letter to
his friend William Bradford (Jan., 1774), he had given a
similar catalogue of clerical and lay vice, of the "Pride ig·
norance and Knavery among the Priesthood and Vice and
Wickedness among the Laity," evident in his home coun·
try; worst of all:
That diabolical Hell conceived principle of persecution rages
among some and to their eternal Infamy the Clergy can furnish their Quota of Imps for such business.
The Protestant supporters of the bill would preach the
life of early Christianity, but they do not want to live like
the first disciples, much less like the first Teacher himself.
This passage deals with church business without resorting
to the word 11 Church," which never occurs in this petition.
Madison opposed not only the "incorporation with Civil
policy" effected by a bill proposing state-salaried religious
teachers, but the "encroachments and accumulations"
encouraged by the legal incorporation of churches. 45 He
desired neither state-supported nor richly endowed
churches, but small congregations which would directly
support their ministers.
SUMMER 1981
�EIGHTH PARAGRAPH
8. Because the establishment in question is not
necessary for the support of Civil Government. If it
be urged as necessary for the support of Civil Government only as it is a means of supporting Religion, and it be not necessary for the latter purpose,
it cannot be necessary for the former. IfReligion be
not within the cognizance of Civil Government
how can its legal establishment be necessary to Civil
Government? What influence in fact have ecclesiastical establishments had on Civil Society? In some
instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual
tyranny on the ruins ofthe Civil authon'ty; in many
instances they have been seen upholding the
thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have
they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the
people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public
liberty, may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just Government instituted
to secure & perpetuate it needs them not. Such a
Government will be best supported by protecting
every Citizen in the enjoyment ofhis Religion with
the same equal hand which protects his person and
his property; by neither invading the equal nghts
of any Sect, nor suffen.ng any Sect to invade those
of another.
At the middle count, Madison takes up the main point
supposedly agitating the proponents of the bill: the dan·
gerous decline of morality which the bill was supposed to
halt.
In his very first extant expression concerning religious
liberty, a youthful letter to Bradford (Dec., 1778), Madison
had asked this politico-theological question: "Is an Ecclesiastical Establishment absolutely necessary to support
civil society in a supream Government?"
In this petition Madison has prepared the ground for
answering the question in such a way that he can dispose
of it by a mere syllogism (modus tollens): Only if religion is
within the cognizance of government can the question of
necessary legal establishment arise. But it is not, by the
first paragraph. Therefore establishment is not necessary.
With equal logic, he disposes of the circular arguments of
the supporters, who say that establishment is necessary to
government only insofar as government is a necessary
means of supporting religion; since the latter contention
has been shown false by the preceding paragraph, the
former falls also.
So logical a resolution of the great question was not universally appealing. After he heard these arguments, Henry
Lee wrote to Madison: "Refiners may weave as fine a web
of reason as they please, but the experience of all times
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
shows Religion to be the guardian of morals." Not really
in disagreement with Lee's premise, Madison only disclaimed the inference that government ought to support
the churches; he certainly never went as far as Jefferson,
who claimed that "the interests of society require observation of those moral precepts only on which all religions
agree," 46 which amounts to saying that any church is unnecessary to society.
There are some instances of establishments supplanting governments, many instances of their upholding
tyrannies, none of their supporting liberty. "A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them
not," concludes Madison, in the language reminiscent of
the Declaration of Independence: "That to secure these
Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed."
How does a just government protect religious rights? It
protects them precisely as it protects property and other
rights. In a short essay "On Property," 47 written in 1792,
Madison elaborates a remarkable theory of religious rights
which goes further: Rights are property: "In a word, as a
man is said to have a right to his property, he may be
equally be said to have a property in his rights ... " And
earlier in the same essay: "He has a property of peculiar
value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and
practice dictated by them .... " Just government is instituted to secure property, in the large sense in which the
term includes anything which a person values as his own
(leaving to everyone else a like advantage), of which dominion over external things is only a part. Religious rights
so conceived establish a kind of internal personal, and external sectarian, territoriality which government is to protect by "neither invading the equal rights of any Sect, nor
suffering any Sect to invade those of another."
NINTH AND TENTH PARAGRAPHS
9. Because the proposed establishment is a departure from that generous policy, which, offen'ng
an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of
every Nation and Religion, promised a lustre to our
country, and an accession to the number of its citizens. What a melancholy mark is the Bill ofsudden
degeneracy? Instead of holding forth an Asylum to
the persecuted, it is itself a signal ofpersecution. It
degrades from the equal rank of Citizens all those
whose opinions in Religion do not bend to those of
the Legislative authonty. Distant as it may be in its
present form from the Inquisition, it differs from it
only in degree. The one is the first step, the other
the last in the career of intolerance. The magnanimous sufferer under this cruel scourge in foreign
Regions, must view the Bill as a Beacon on our
Coast, warning him to seek some other haven,
65
�where liberty and philanthrophy in their due extent, may offer a more certain repose from his
Troubles.
10. Because it will have a like tendency to banish our Citizens. The allurements presented by
other situations are every day thinning their number. To superadd a fresh motive to emigration by
revoking the liberty which they now enjoy, would
be the same species offolly which has dishonoured
and depopulated flourishing kingdoms.
Now Madison inserts two complementary considerations, humanitarian and practical, which had figured in
the floor debates under the heading of "Policy." The bill
might close Virginia as a religious asylum and also drive
out dissenters, and might thus at once prevent much-needed immigration and further thin a population already
moving westward at an alarming rate. Madison did not
have to spell out to his fellow farmers the bad economic
results of this policy: a yet greater shortage of labor power
and further declining land prices.
The politically regressive consequences, however,
needed telling. Citing again his maxim of the contiguity
of the least and the greatest breach of liberty he does not
hesitate to compare, though with reasonable qualifications, a Protestant Establishment with the Catholic Inquisition.
The springiness of style that derives from the adroit use
of the two dictions of English, the long latinate and the
short Anglo-Saxon, is noteworthy; for example: "What a
melancholy mark is the Bill of sudden degeneracy?"
ELEVENTH PARAGRAPH
11. Because it will destroy that moderation and
harmony which the forbearance of our laws to intermeddle with Religion has produced among its
several sects. Torrents of blood have been spilt in
the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm,
to extinguish Religious discord, by proscribing all
difference in Religious opinion. Time has at length
revealed the true remedy. Every relaxation of narrow and rigorous policy, wherever it has been tried,
has been found to assuage the disease. The American Theatre has exhibited proofs that equal and
compleat liberty, if it does not wholly eradicate it,
sufficiently destroys its malignant influence on the
health and prosperity of the State. If with the salutary effects of this system under our own eyes, we
begin to contract the bounds ofReligious freedom,
we know no name that will too severely reproach
our folly. At least let warning be taken at the first
66
fruits of the threatened innovation. The very appearance of the Bill has transformed "that Christian forbearance, love and charity, " which of late
mutually prevailed, into animosities andjealousies,
which may not soon be appeased. What mischiefs
may not be dreaded, should this enemy to the public quiet be armed with the force of a law?
A crowd of notions familiar in early American rhetoric
is now brought to bear on the threat of sectarian strife
raised by the bill: Time has revealed, and America is the
stage to test and prove, the remedies to old problems; liberty once instituted, innovations may be dangerously
regressive.
The paragraph permits itself some hyperbole, in the
claim of complete religious freedom in Virginia, which
flies in the face of the fact that the same Article XVI
which Madison cites establishes Christianity, if not as a
state church, at least as the public morality; moreover, in
1781 jefferson had indignantly noted that although "statutory oppression" had ceased, common law permitting all
sorts of persecution was still on the books. 48
In this section Madison prudently suppresses his opinion that a vigorous variety of sects is an even more practi-
cally efficacious guarantee of liberty than a bill of rights, 49
and that disestablishment promotes church prosperity
very much as factions well managed produce political stability. The unstated premise is, of course, that doctrinal
enthusiasms are as much an irrepressible force of human
nature as special secular interests.
I can detect no strain in this opinion of Madison which
might equate it with the insouciant dogma that truth is a
private predilection and that everything is "true for"
them that believe it. His preference for sectarian variety
rests on the limits and necessities of observed human nature, not on a doctrinal disavowal of the search for truth.
TwELFTH PARAGRAPH
12. Because the policy of the Bill is adverse to
the diffusion of the fight of Christianity. The first
wish of those who enjoy this precious gift ought to
be that it may be imparted to the whole race of
mankind. Compare the number of those who have
as yet received it with the number still remaining
under the dominion of false Religions; and how
small is the former! Does the policy of the Bill tend
to lessen the disproportion? No; it at once discourages those who are strangers to the light of revelation from coming into the Region of it; and countenances by example the nations who continue in
darkness, in shutting out those who might convey
it to them. Instead of Levelling as far as possible,
SUMMER 1981
�every obstacle to the victorious progress of Truth,
the Bill with an ignoble and unchristian timidity
would circumscribe it with a wall ofdefence against
the encroachments of error.
In his notes for the floor debate Madison had proposed
to himself at about this place in the argument a vindication of disestablished Christianity, a "panegyric of it on
our side." He omits it in the Remonstrance in favor of an
appeal to the missionary urge. The offending bill is altogether too parochially conceived. Not only in Virginia but
throughout mankind should Christianity be propagated.
Instead the bill will act to prevent conversions by discouraging "strangers to the light of revelation," that is, infidels, (Madison had first written "light of truth" and then
christianized the term) from "coming into the Region of
it," which implies that a free America ought to be the natural ground on which revealed religion may be experienced.
The final sentence of the Christian section is reminiscent of the great peroration of Jefferson's bill establishing
religious freedom,
that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself: that she is
the proper and sufficient antagonist to error and has nothing
to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate,
except that the truth of this paragraph is truth of revelation, and the freedom here called for Christian liberty, a
very Madisonian harmonizing of the spirit of enlightenment and the claims of Christianity.
THIRTEENTH PARAGRAPH
13. Because attempts to enforce by legal sanctions, acts obnoxious to so great a proportion of
Citizens, tend to enervate the laws in general, and
to slacken the bands of Society. If it be difficult to
execute any law which is not generally deemed necessary or salutary, what must be the case, where it is
deemed invalid and dangerous? And what may be
the effect ofso striking an example ofimpotency in
the Government, on its general authority?
Again balanced phrases: "enervate the laws ... slacken
the bands," "necessary or salutary . .. invalid and danger-
ous." The rhetorical questions are intended to give pause
to legislators who are ignoring the dangerous political effects of an unenforceable law: Madison's associates antici-
pated rebellion in some counties.
FOURTEENTH PARAGRAPH
14. Because a measure of such singular magnitude and delicacy ought not to be imposed, with1HE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
out the clearest evidence that it is called for by a
majority of citizens, and no satisfactory method is
yet proposed by which the voice of the majority in
this case may be determined, or its influence secured. "The people of the respective counties are
indeed requested to signify their opinion respecting the adoption of the Bill to the next Session of
Assembly. "But the representation must be made
equal, before the voice either of the Representatives or of the Counties will be that of the people.
Our hope is that neither of the former will, after
due consideration, espouse the dangerous principle
of the Bill. Should the event disappoint us, it will
still/eave us in full confidence, that a fair appeal to
the latter will reverse the sentence against our liberties.
In accordance with the symmetry of the composition,
the penultimate paragraph returns to the beginning. The
resolution which occasioned the petition is cited, though
with a little rhetorical interjection ("indeed") reflecting on
its insufficiency.
Self-government, Madison argues, demands both that
the voice of the majority be determined and that its influence be secured. That is to say, the legislature's occasional
solicitation of petitions is not a methodical enough polling
of opinion, and electoral qualifications as well as legislative apportionment are not fair enough for either the Delegates or the Senators to be truly representative. 50 Truly
representative representatives, namely those elected from
districts fairly apportioned and responsive to their constituents, would have been less likely to support the dangerous abuse of power perpetrated by the bill. The petitioners hope, however, that even the legislature as presently
constituted can be brought to reconsider its dangerous
course. The paragraph concludes with a veiled threat of
an organized grass-roots campaign for repeal should the
bill nonetheless be passed.
Here is set out an important aspect of Madison's theory
of self-government. It is the idea that when major and
controversial legislation is in progress, the people should
be given some systematic opportunity to express themselves, because such a plebiscitic element is a trustworthy
preventive of legislative usurpation and an added sanction
for laws. (There is, however, no evidence that Madison
was proposing that this "method" for determining the
voice of the majorityj>e incorporated in the constitution.)
Accordingly, the fact that Jefferson's law .on religious
liberty had been overwhelmingly passed in the wake of
this and other petitions was regarded by Madison as a consummating factor: it had the "advantage of having been
the result of a formal appeal to the sense of the Community and a deliberate sanction of a vast Majority .... " 51
The majoritarian faith Madison expresses here is, of
67
�course, qualified in other contexts where he designs devices, "moderations of sovereignty," for protecting liber·
ties from the people as well as from the legislature.
FIFTEENTH PARAGRAPH
15. Because finally, "the equal right of every
citizen to the free exercise of his Religion according
to the dictates of conscience'' is held by the same
tenure with all our other rights. Ifwe recur to its origin, it is equally the gift of nature; zf we weigh its
importance, it cannot be less dear to us; if we consult the "Declaration of those rights which pertain
to the good people of Virginia, as the basis and
foundation ofGovernment, ''it is enumerated with
equal solemnity, or rather studied emphasis. Either
then, we must say, that the Will of the Legislature
is the only measure of their authority; and that in
the plenitude of this authority, they may sweep
away all our fundamental rights; or, that they are
bound to leave this particular right untouched and
sacred: Either we must say, that they may controul
the freedom of the press, may abolish the Trial by
jury, may swallow up the Executive and judiciary
Powers ofthe State; nay that they may despoil us of
our very right ofsuffrage, and erect themselves into
an independent and hereditary Assembly or, we
must say, that they have no authority to enact into
law the Bill under consideration. We the Subscribers say, that the General Assembly of the Commonwealth have no such authority: And that no
effort may be omitted on our part against so dangerous an usurpation, we oppose to it, this remonstrance; earnestly praying, as we are in duty bound,
that the Supreme Lawgiver ofthe Universe, by illuminating those to whom it is addressed, may on the
one hand, turn their Councils from every act which
would affront his holy prerogative, or violate the
trust committed to them: and on the other, guide
them into every measure which may be worthy of
his [blessing, may re]dound to their own praise,
and may establish more firmly the liberties, the
prosperity and the happiness of the Commonwealth.
The right of religious liberty is now examined not insofar as it is grounded in transpolitical conditions, as in the
opening paragraph, but with respect to its situation in the
political realm. Madison again quotes his free exercise
clause of Article XVI, as he evidently had in the floor de-
68
bates, together with a sonorous adaptation of the full title
of the Virginia Declaration of Rights:
"A declaration of rights made by the representatives of the
good people of Virginia, assembled in full and free convention; which rights do pertain to them and their posterity, as
the basis and foundation of government."
The purpose of the citation in the fourth paragraph was
to emphasize the equal application of the right; the point
now is the equal, or even superior, standing that it has
compared with the other fundamental rights. The religious
right is equal with them in its natural origin, in its importance, and in its place of promulgation in fundamental
law. (It had in fact been given the ultimate, most emphatic,
position, even beyond the article of exhortation to virtue
and "frequent recurrency to fundamental principles.")
Since it is coequal with the other fundamental rights,
religious liberty stands or falls with them. The argument,
presented in two parallel sets of alternatives, recurs to the
all or nothing reasoning of the third paragraph which is
now extended: The least breach of the religious right endangers all the rights at once: Either the will of the legislature is unlimited or this particular right is untouchable;
either they may sweep away all rights or they cannot enact the present bill. All the phrases are precise and suggestive: "Will of the legislature" is opposed to "voice of the
people" of the previous paragraph; the "plenitude of their
authority" conveys legislative high-handedness; "sacred"
is used in the double sense of holy and inviolable. The
rights of which the legislature "may despoil us" -Madison had first written "may abolish" but then remembered
that natural rights cannot be abolished-are then enumerated from the Declaration, but their order is almost exactly reversed, ending with the most specifically political
right, a "fundamental article in Republican Constitutions,"
the right of suffrage." The whole appeal is couched in
terms of the constraints of reasonable speech: "Either we
must say . .. or we must say .. .. " It concludes determinedly: "We the Subscribers say, that the General Assembly
of this Commonwealth have no such authority."
The final pronouncement of the citizens, then, supersedes all the previous considerations. It is the principled
denial of legislative authority to enact the bill at all. -The
legislators may not arm it "with the sanctions of a law," in
the words of the preamble. Into the last paragraph of his
law concerning religious freedom Jefferson had written
just such a denial: No assembly can constrain -a future one
equally elected by the people, but it is free to shame it by
declaring that if it should repeal or narrow the law, "such
an act will be an infringement of natural right."
The subscribers' pronouncement introduces the submission of the Remonstrance in a peroration which counters the simplicity of the opening with a grand, intricately
branching rhetorical period, praying, as religious duty demands, that two coordinate illuminations might descend
on the law-makers, that they may both refrain from violating their trust, and pass measures which will make them
SUMMER 1981
�worthy of God's blessing, will procure for them the praise
of men, and will establish for the citizens liberty, prosperity, and happiness.
Observe the careful enumeration of goods in triads and
subtriads; such triples belong to the familiar rhythms of
American rhetoric: "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" rise most immediately to the ear. The prayer for
the establishment of these goods echoes Jefferson's title:
"A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom," which proclaims the republican appropriation of the offending
term. The petition ends as it began, with a reference to
the Commonwealth.
was produced which indeed satisfied them: Certainly they
·
describe Madison's style with accuracy.
They were, I suppose, not so much the instigators as
the precipitates of a well-defined and uncompromising
taste-well-defined insofar as a deviation truly offended,
and uncompromising because no one, certainly not Madi-
son, lowered his language for any audience or occasion.
All the manifestos, pamphlets, correspondences, petitions,
memoranda, and memorials of the time that come in one's
way show the same educated correctness of style.
Such correctness, then called purity, that is, speech
true to its rules, is said by Campbell to be the lowest-and
indispensible-rhetorical virtue:
IV. Madison's Rhetoric
How is the rhetoric of the Remonstrance to be characterized and how is it to be accounted for, reticent and
rousing, calculated to persuade and designed for truth-telling, concisely compendious and artfully structured, as it
is?
In his essay "Of Eloquence," Hume complains of the
definciency of modern eloquence. It is "calm, elegant,
and subtile," but also lacking in passion and sublimity as
well as order and method: it is mere "good sense delivered
in proper expressions." The Remonstrance has the precise virtues and precisely lacks the shortcomings Hume
names. It is at once "argumentative and rational," grandly
passionate and carefully constructed. It is almost as if
Madison had composed to Hume's standards, standards
probably more appropriate to written than to spoken eloquence. -Unlike Jefferson, whose style failed him on the
floor, Madison, incidentally, was a persuasive though undeclamatory speaker. He seems to have addressed assemblies with just the same educated elegance with which he
wrote, suiting his matter rather than his form to the occasion.
The terms and criteria for judging style used to be fairly
fixed; they were to be found in textbooks of rhetoric,
or-the preferred word in the eighteenth century-of eloquence, and they were universally employed in characterizing and judging productions. The loss of such a set critical
vocabulary is not much mourned by modern writers on
rhetoric who regard it as meaningless and unprofitable,
and demand more fluid, sophisticated criteria. But its disappearance is a loss. To be sure, a writer was unlikely to
improve his style through learning Quintilian's maxim
that the first virtue of eloquence is perspicuity or clarity,
that vivacity or liveliness of imagery is next in order of importance, that elegance or dignity of manner is also required, and that the intellect has the prerogative of being
always the faculty ultimately addressed in speech. (My
source here is Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1776, a
work based mainly on Humean principles of human nature
and popular as a textbook in the colleges of the early Republic. 53) Yet it seems to me a suggestive fact that in the
era when these criteria were considered significant, prose
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
14
Where grammar ends,
eloquence begins." It was in such basic studies that Madison, and everyone of his class, was amply trained, and that
early, in boyhood.
At twelve, Madison recalls in his Autobiography, he was
learning Greek and Latin, studies which, if not absolutely
indispensable to good style, at least insure that knowledge
of syntax and vocabulary which prevents illogical constructions and faulty diction, while shaping the latinate
English appropriate to the political writing. "Miscellaneous
literature" was also embraced by the plan of the school he
attended. Madison devotes a special paragraph to one
such work of literature which he read early to great advantage, namely the Spectator, especially Addison's numbers, and in recommending it late in life to his nephew, he
writes:
Addison was of the first rank among the fine writers of the
age, and has given a definition of what he showed himself to
be an example. 'Fine writing,' he says, 'consists of sentiments
that are natural, without being obvious'; to which adding the
remark of Swift, another celebrated author of the same period, making a good style to consist 'of proper words in their
proper places,' a definition is formed, which will merit your
recollection . .. 54
Madison has here conjoined precepts from one writer of
satiny sweetness and another of mordant savor. Both together evidently guided his taste.
The young student apparently had an interest in rhetorical lore; at one point he copied out and annotated a long
poem on the tropes of rhetoric:
A metaphor compares with out the Sign
[Madison's marginalia: "as, like, etc."]
Virtue's A star and shall for ever shine. 55
Studies conducive to good style and rational discourse
continued in Princeton. There he filled a copybook with
notes on a course of logic, probably given by the president, Dr. Witherspoon, much of which naturally bore on
argumentation. 56 There, too, he is very likely to have
heard Dr. Witherspoon's lectures on eloquence, of which
extensive notes taken, among others, by Madison's college
friend William Bradford in 1772, are still extant. 57 Witherspoon was fully conscious that he was speaking to young
men destined for political responsibilities, who might one
day have to address "promiscuous assemblies." He tried
69
�to convey to them the dignity and efficacy of rhetorical
studies. He deals with the usual topics: types of language,
such as the sublime and the simple; the use of tropes or
figures of speech; his own set of characteristics for eloquent writing-for example it is just if it pays "particular
attention to the truth and meaning of every sentence"
and elegant if it employs "the best expression the language
will afford." Furthermore he treats of invention, organization, and style, always giving examples, and among them
Addison and Swift.
But what seems to me most likely to have penetrated to
his young auditors was his introductory list of five rules
for good writing: I. "Study to imitate the greatest examples." 2. "Accustom yourselves to early and much composition and exercise in speaking." 3. Acquaint yourselves
with the Hbranches subordinate" to eloquence, namely
grammar, orthography, punctuation. 4. Notice and guard
against "peculiar phrases," namely idiosyncracies of
speech. 5. "Follow nature," meaning, gain clear conceptions and follow the truth. Who now is bold enough to
give such good advice so authoritatively?
Rives thought that Witherspoon had had a major part
in forming Madison's style. Both show
the same lucid order, the same precision and comprehensiveness combined, the same persuasive majesty of truth an:d conviction clothed in a terse and felicitous diction,
words which surely describe Madison's style faithfully.
-Evidently good style, if not great eloquence, can be
taught.
One far from negligible feature of this early training
was the prodigious amount of studying Madison-and Jefferson as well-did in their youth. Madison reports that
he lost his health and nearly his life at Princeton through
all too successfully cramming two year's work into one.
But as a result both men were masters of their style early:
Jefferson was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration
and Madison composed the Remonstrance at thirty-four.
Yet these efforts, being completely self-imposed, never
spoiled the savor of study for either man. Madison went
to his books throughout his life; for example, no sooner
had he been appointed deputy of the Constitutional Convention than "he turned his attention and researches to
the sources ancient and modern of information and guidance as to its object. Of the result of these he had the use
both in the Convention and afterwards in the 'Federalist'."
And later, at the close of his public life, he devoted himself to his farm and his books. 58 Such continuous, ready recourse to reading both for private pleasure and political
practice is surely a chief contributor to fluent expression.
But of course, the most minute history of his studies is
as insufficient to account for Madison's eloquence as the
most time-honored rubrics of eloquence are to describe it.
Finally, it seems to me, his rhetoric is shaped by that rare
aptitude for conjoining speech and action, which caused
Jefferson in his own Autobiography to couple in his noble
description of Madison "the powers and polish of his pen,
70
and the wisdom of his administration." That capacity was
part of a
habit of self-possession which placed at his ready command
the rich resouices of his luminous and discriminating
mind .. .. Never wandering from his subject in vain declamation, but pursuing it closely in language pure, classical, and
copious, soothing always the feelings of his adversaries by civilities and softness of expression .... With these consummate
powers were united a pure and spotless virtue which no calumny has ever attempted to sully.
In the traditional understanding the rhetorical art has
three parts: first, and least, elements of style such as copious diction and felicitous syntax; next, devices of persuasion such as Civilities," prudent ommissions and emphases
together with well-placed passion; and finally, the very
conditions of good speech, the veracity of the speaker and
the verity of his thought. By these criteria, Madison was a
consummate rhetorician.
11
1
Madison's ' Memorial and Remonstrance" seems to me
in truth among the finest of those works of republican
rhetoric in which adroit enunciation of the principles of
liberty elicits their practice. In particular, that strict separation of church and state which implies the total secularization of public life and which, when promoted with
heedless or rabid rationalism causes me, at least, some unease, is set forth in the Remonstrance with such respectful, even reverent, reasonableness that my scruples are
dissolved in a certain enthusiam for Madison's principles
and in the gratitude that a Jew and a refugee must feel for
the safe haven he made.
And yet the question obtrudes itself whether such texts,
for all their fineness, are not relics of an irrecoverable art.
A document to whose phrases the highest court of the
land has recourse in formulating decisions affecting every
school in every district of the country can, of course,
hardly be relegated to history. Nonetheless, it is perhaps
no longer a possible model of public discourse. I ask my·
self why that might be.
I can imagine four reasons which would be readily
forthcoming. It will be said that the public will no longer
listen to educated speech, and it will be said that politicians
can no longer be expected to have the requisite training.
And again, it will be claimed that the level of language itself
has fallen, and also that the complexity of our condition
precludes any grandly perspicuous statement of principles.
These may be true reasons, but they are also bad excuses. They merit indignant refutation as miserable collu·
sions with mere or imaginary circumstance. How we will
be spoken to, how we and our representatives will be educated, to what level the language will rise, how our thought
will dispose the world-these matters are not yet in the
hands of Society or the Historical Situation, but in ours.
And in the exercise of the liberties in which that truth is
realized Madison is not only a possible, but the best possi·
ble, model.
SUMMER 1981
�APPENDIX
The Remonstrance in Supreme Court Decisions
The after-history of the petition is chiefly that of its citation by
the Supreme Court. 59 The Court has recurred to the Remonstrance for elucidation of the Hestablishment" dause ofthe First
Amendment, both because the latter was also drafted by Madison and because the Remonstrance is concerned with religion in
education, as are so many cases involving that clause.
The relevant part of the First Amendment runs:
Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
It includes two clauses, one prohibiting aid, and the other obstruction, to religion. That is to say, the "establishment" clause
prohibits official support of religious institutions, while the "free
exercise" clause guarantees absence of coercive invasions of any
individual's religious practice. (Justice Clark, 1963). In this country, happily, the court has to deal far more often with putative at~
fempts at establishment than with more direct interference with
the free exercise of religion. Therefore the question of the precise meaning of the term "establishment" remains continual1y
acute.
Madison's wording of the establishment clause is not vague
but extremely careful, careful, that is, to use the most encompassing language. Thus the phrase "a law respecting" an establishment conveys a wider notion than would have been contained
in the briefer phrase "a law establishing" religion, and, as Justice
Rutledge points out, an "establishment of religion" is a wider
notion than would have been an "establishment of a church."
Such observations, however, are only the beginning of an interpretation; the central matter is the recovery of Madison's meaning
of the word "establishment" itself, and here the Remonstrance,
which was composed to combat an establishment of religion, is
naturally the most pertinent document.
The Remonstrance played its chief role in the Everson decision of 1947. Everson, as a district taxpayer in New Jersey, filed a
suit challenging a statute authorizing local Boards of Education
to reimburse parents of parochial school students equally with
parents of public school students for money expended on bus
transporation. The argument was that such state aid to religious
education constituted an establishment of religion under the
First Amendment as made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth. Although the Court held that this particular statute did
not constitute such an establishment, Justice Black in the course
of his opinion paraphrased the Remonstrance at the climax of
his argument for a very strong interpretation of the First Amendment:
The "establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid
one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.
Justice Rutledge canvassed the Remonstrance at yet greater
length for his dissent, to find in it that broad meaning of the
word "establishment" which would be consonant with the evident breadth of language of the First Amendment just pointed
out. He found the word to have a wider scope of application than
that current in England, where it usually meant a state church
established by law. 60 Establishment, he showed, could encom1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
pass measures of all sorts and degrees, including, above all, state
aid to any activity associated with religion, especially when coming out of tax money. He argued that all such government support whatsoever was vigorously proscribed under the name of
establishment by the Remonstrance and hence by the First
Amendment. Therefore the New Jersey statute supporting the
children's way to parochial schools was unconstitutional. Rutledge thought the Remonstrance so fundamental a document
that he appended it to his dissent.
In short, the justices who have cited the Remonstrance have
almost all understood it as enjoining an absolute separation of
church and· state, and have construed the First Amendment accordingly~a construction named by a Jeffersonian phrase the
"wall of separation" doctrine. Justice Frankfurter cites the Remonstrance once again in 1948, in the McCollum opinion, finding
unconstitutional the device of so-called "released time," which
permitted religious groups to come into public schools to instruct children who were released from the classroom for that
purpose. He alone, incidentally, had an ear for that note of the
document which could hardly get full hearing in a judicial context: its "deep religious feeling." Again, in 1963 Justice Clark
quotes from the third paragraph, that "it is proper to take alarm
at the first experiment on our liberties," to support prohibition
of even minor incursions of the state into religion, such as the
reading of a super-sectarian prayer in school
But this agreement on intent has not been sufficient to decide
cases. The Remonstrance has several times been used on both
sides, as in the Everson case and, much earlier, in the Mormon
marriage case of 1879. There Judge Waite endorsed its doctrine
that religion was not within the cognizance of the government,
but found nevertheless that it did not protect religious practices
made criminal under the law of the land, such as polygamy.
Madison himself had confessed "that it may not be easy, in every
possible case, to trace the line of separation between the rights of
religion and the Civil authority," 61 though he thought that the
doubts would arise on inessential points. In other words, like all
fundamental documents, the Remonstrance is necessary but not
sufficient for determining cases.
It should be noted that the one judge who wished to give the
Remonstrance and Madison's views a narrowly historical interpretation, Justice Reed in his McCollum dissent, cites as traditionally permissible involvement of the government in religious
affairs the existence of chaplains of Congress and of the armed
forces-evidently unaware that Madison had most emphatically
opposed the first and only tolerated the latter. 62 (Such toleration
is rationalized by present day courts under the category of "neutralizing" aids, breaches of the wall of separation permitted to
counterbalance restrictions on the free exercise of religion incidental to meeting governmental demands, such as service in the
armed forces.) Madison, however, excused such practices only
reluctantly by the aphorism "the law ignores trifles." 63
Furthermore the judge who rejected most forcefully "a too literal quest for the advice of the Founding Fathers" (Brennan,
1963), largely on the grounds that conditions of education have
changed, failed to recall that the two new issues he mentions,
universal public schooling and religious· diversity, were precisely
among the chief preoccupations of both Jefferson and Madison.
It is as hard to find fault with the strong interpretation of the
First Amendment in the light of the Remonstrance as it is to
deny the principles themselves of the Remonstrance. Yet one
must wonder whether, were Madison alive now, he would not
recognize certain complicating circumstances, especially where
education is concerned.
71
�Within the context of the Constitution the establishment
clause is essentially ancillary to the free exercise clause. -It is
because state aid to religion inevitably in some way restricts
someone's free exericse that it is prohibited. Furthermore, the
Court has repeatedly held that irreligion, secularism, humanism
are all entitled to protection under the First Amendment, that is
to say, they are in some manner of speaking religions, "belief systems": "the day that the country ceases to be free for irreligion it
will cease to be free for religion ... " (Justice Jackson, Zorach v.
Clauson, 1952). Consequently there is, by the Court's own ad·
mission, a sense in which secular schools are not neutral in respect to religious doctrine. ·
Might not Madison, the fairest of men in such arguments;14
have honored the point, if moderately made, that the enormous
preemption of a child's time for secular purposes implied by
modern school-attendence requirements, considered together
with the financial hardship which justice Rutledge admits the
policy of total separation imposes on parents wishing to give
their children religious schooling, amounts to a state invasion of
religious rights? Would he not have lent an attentive ear to the
admission made by Justice Black (Epperson v. Arkansas, 1968)
that non-religious schooling cannot help but be, as &Jr example
in the teaching of evolution, in some sense anti-religious, and
that the mandated secu1arism65 of the public schools is indeed in
the sense before explained, a kind of religious establishment,
possibly in need of counterbalancing by fairly vigorous "neutralizing aids?" To study Madison's writings on religious liberty is to
conceive an ardent wish that he might be here to consider these
dilemmas.
1. Printed with introduction and notes in The Papers of fames Madison,
Robert A. Rutland and William M. E. Rachal, eds., {Chicago) Vol. 8
(1784-1786), pp. 295-306.
I know of no detailed study of the Remonstrance.
2. William Cabell Rives, A History of the Life and Times of James Madison (Boston 1859), p. 632:
In this masterly paper, he discussed the question of an establishment
of religion by law from every point of view,-of natural right, the inherent limitations of the civil power, the interests of religion itself,
the genius and precepts of Christianity, the warning lessons of his·
tory, the dictates of a wise and sober policy,-and treated them all
with a consummate power of reasoning, and a force of appeal to the
understandings and hearts of people, that bore down every opposing
prejudice and precluded reply.
"This noble production of the mind and heart of Mr. Madison" is, he
concluded this _perfectly just appreciation, a triumphant plea in the great
cause of religious liberty, "never surpassed in power or eloquence by
any which its stirring influence have called forth."
3. Neal Riemer, James Madison (New York 1968), pp. 12-13. Riemer
does not rate Madison's rhetorical gifts very high, particularly when
compared to those of Jefferson and of Paine. He describes the style as
earnest, forthright, simple, unadorned, quiet. "His writings convince
but do not take fire." I think his estimate too much reduces rhetoric to
oratory.
4. Sources: Papers, VoL 8, pp. 295-98; Madison's "Detached Memoranda" in the William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, III, (October
1946), pp. 555-56; Irving Brant, James Madison, Vol. 2, The Nationalist;
1780-1787 (New York 1948), pp. 343-55; Charles F. James, Documentary
History of the Struggle for Religious Liberty (New York 1971), pp. 128-41;
Ralph_Ketcham, fames Madison (London 1971), pp. 162-68; Anson
Phelps Stokes, Church and State in the United States, Vol. I {New York
1950), pp. 339-45; Manfred Zipperer, Thomas Jefferson's "Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia" vom 16. Januar 1786, Dissertation
(Edangen 1967), pp. 24-28.
5. James, p. 129.
72
6. The speeches are extant in the form of notes; see Papers, Vol. 8, pp.
195-99.
7. Gaillard Hunt, "Madison and Religious Liberty," Annual Report of
the American Historical Association (1901), Vol. I, p. 168.
8. Rives, p. 631.
9. "Detached Memoranda," pp. 555-56.
10. Papers, Vol. 8, p. 473.
II. Papers, Vol. 8, p. 298.
12. To display the bare bones of the argumentation I have stripped it of
Madison's diction and added connectives.
1. Because of the unconditional priority of religious duties over civil
obligations, religion is wholly exempt from any secular direction.
2. So much more so is it exempt from governmental interference.
3. Therefore even the smallest infringement of religious liberty constitutes an insupportable breach.
4. Governmental aid to religion is necessarily discriminatory and
therefore violates the basic principle of equality.
5. Furthermore it constitutes officials the judges of orthodoxy and
enables them to use religion politically.
6. At the same time it weakens Christianity by making it depend on
secular support.
7. Moreover, such aid contaminates the purity of Christianity.
8. Above all, it is unnecessary to the security of a free government;
indeed it is dangerous.
9. It discourages immigration by signalling possible persecution.
10. And it encourages emigration of dissenting citizens.
11. It encourages violent animosity among the sects.
12. In thus hindering free movement it in fact restricts the spread of
Christianity.
13. The attempt to enforce so unpopular a law will undermine social
stability.
14. Therefore before the bill is enacted into law the will of the majority should be fairly ascertained and represented in the legislature.
15. Ultimately, however, religious liberty being coequal .with the
other natural rights, the legislature has in any case no authority to
abridge it, unless it is granted to have unlimited power to take away
all rights.
13. Since the texture of the Remonstrance will sometimes be best
brought out by comparison with Madison's other writings on religious
liberty, that dearest of his causes, a list of his chief expressions on the
subject is subjoined. I want to observe here that while Madison's language soon acquires a certain canonical quality it never becomes formulaic. -Iteration does not wear away its warmth.
1. 1773-1775. A series of youthful letters addressed to his friend
from Princeton, William Bradford. These were written when Madison
was in his early twenties and express in youthfully vigorous language
his disgusted preoccupation with evidences of religious persecution
in Orange County and in Virginia.
2. 1776. His first small but important contribution as a law-maker,
his amendment of George Mason's draft of Article XVI for the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Also his own rejected version.
3. 1785. The "Memorial and Remonstrance," his most extensive
writing on the subject.
4. 1788. A note on the value of a multiplicity of sects, meant for the
Virginia Convention.
5. 1789. An early version and the final form of the first article of the
Federal Bill of Rights, the First Amendment.
6. 1792. Essay "On Property," expressing a theory of rights, and par·
ticularly religious rights, as constituting personal property.
7. 1811. Presidential Veto Message, against the incorporation of the
Episcopal Church.
8. 1811, 1813: Presidential Thanksgiving Messages, with caveats
about publicly ordered prayer.
9. 1819-1822. Letters demonstrating that state support is not necessary to the religious sects.
10. 1823. Letter to Edward Eyerett, on the secular university.
ll. "Detached Memoranda" (fragmentary essayS sePai-aied from his
main works in the nineteenth century), containing historical notes
and exhortations concerning religious liberty, and an account of the
events around the Remonstrance.
SUMMER 1981
�12. 1832. A late letter to the Rev. Jasper Adams giving proofs from
American history that Christianity is not in need of state support.
The sources for these texts are: 1. Papers, Vol. I (1751-1779), pp. 100-161
passim; 2. ibid., p. 174; 3. ibid., Vol. 8, pp. 298-304; 4. James Madison,
The Forging of American Federalism, Saul K. Padover, ed. (New Yark
1965), p. 306; 5. Stokes, p. 345; 6. ibid., p. 551; 7. Forging, p. 307; 8. Adri·
enne Koch, Madison's "Advice to My County" (Princeton 1966), pp.
33-34; 9. Forging, pp. 308-10; 10. Stokes, p. 348; 11. op. eit., pp. 554-62;
12. The Writings of James Madison, Gaillard Hunt, ed., Vol. IX, 18191836, (New York 1910) pp. 484-88.
14. Gemge Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetorie (1776), Lloyd F. Blitzer, ed. (Carbondale, 1963), p. 365.
15. Papers; Vol. I, p. 38.
16. Frank Swancara, Thomas Jefferson vs. Religious Oppression (New
York 1969), p. 124.
17. Samuel Stanhope Smith sent him a disquisition "on that knotty
question ofliberty and necessity," for light on which, Madison had "frequently attacked" him. Madison's response is lost, but Smith observes in
a later letter: "I have read over your theoretical objections against the
doctrine of moral liberty; for practically you seem to be one of its disciples." (Papers, Vol. I, 1751-1779, pp. 194, 253). For Madison's theory of
human nature in general see Ralph L. Ketcham, "James Madison and
the Nature of Man," Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XIX, (1958), pp.
62-76.
18. "Detached Memoranda," p. 556.
19. Wilber G. Katz and Harold P. Southerland, "Religious Pluralism
and the Supreme Court," Religion in America, op. cit., p. 273.
20. Alexander Landi, "Madison's Political Theory," The Political
Science Reviewer, Vol. VI (Fall1976), pp. 77-79.
21. John Wise in Vindication of the Government of New England
Churches (1717), quoted in Sidney E. Mead, "The 'Nation with the Soul
of a Church'," American Civil Religion, Russell E. Richey and Donald G.
Jones, eds. (New Ymk 1974), pp. 53 ff.
22. On Madison's views of the problems of majoritarian rule, see above
all Federalist, no. 10; also Landi, pp. 84 ff.
23. See Papers, Vol. 8, p. 297.
24. See Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists, 1802; On Roger Williams, see Loren P. Beth, The American Theory of Church and State
(Gainesville 1958), p. 65.
The American author of the separation doctrine was Roger Williams,
with whose ideas Madison was probably acquainted through his connection with the Baptists of his county.
25. John Adams' entry in his Diary shows how the Boston Tea Party
caught the imagination as a beginning: "This is the most magnificent
Movement of all. There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last
Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire .... I cant but consider it as
an Epocha in History." (December 17, 1773).
26. "Detached Memoranda," p. 557.
27. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, J. W. Gough, ed. (Oxford 1976), p. 149.
28. Swancara, pp. 123-32; "Detached Memoranda," p. 556.
29. To Mordecai M. Noah, 1818; to Jacob de la Motta, 1820.
30. "Detached Memoranda," p. 555.
31. Koch, p. 33; cf. "Detached Memoranda," pp. 560-61.
32. Papers, Vol. 1, pp. 172-75.
33. For example, in the Declaration of Independence there is "Nature's
God," man's "Creator," "the Supreme Judge of the World." In his law
Jefferson used one designation that ple.ased the devout, "holy author of
our religion," the very one employed by the Baptists in their resolution
against the assessment bill (James, p. 138).
34. See Papers, op. cit., pp. 170 ff.
35. See Hunt, "James Madison and Religious Liberty," op. cit., p. 166.
36. Stokes, pp. 22-26.
37. Letter to Edward Livingston, 1822; to Rev. Adams, 1832.
38. Locke started writing on toleration in the decade before Spinoza's
Treatise, which appeared in 1670, though the Letter postdated it
(1683-4). For Locke's lack of interest in Spinoza see Leo Strauss, Natural
Right and History (Chicago 1974), p. 211.
39. See, for example, the theological catalogue for the library of the
University of Virginia which he hastily tossed off at Jefferson's urgent
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
request, listing an astonishing number of church writers of the first five
Christian centuries. (Rives, pp. 641-44).
40. Landi, pp. 80-84.
41. John Milton, Selected Prose, C. A. Patrides, ed. (Penguin 1974), p.
316.
42. Letter to Rev. Jasper Adams, 1832. The opinion here expressed
seems to have been current. For example, just the preceding year Tocqueville had asked a Catholic priest whom he had met in his travels
through the Michigan Territory this very question: "Do you think that
the support of the civil power is useful to religion?" -and had received
the same answer Madison was to give to Rev. Adams, a decided negative. See George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America, Dudley C.
Lunt, ed. (Gloucester 1969), p. 203.
43. Evidence for such a long term decline in the second half of this century is given in Rodney Stark and Charles Y. Glock, American Piety; The
Nature of Religious Commitment, Vol. I (Berkeley 1970) pp. 204 ff. Of
course, the question would become moot, should a massive religious revival refute the sociological projections.
44. "Detached Memoranda," p. 554.
45. "Detached Memoranda," p. 556-57.
46. Beth, p. 66. Madison's own church allegiance was so vanishingly
weak a factor in his opinions about religious liberty that it can be rele·
gated to a footnote. He was, in fact, a born Episcopalian with strong
Presbyterian associations from his Princeton days, apparently a communicant of no church, who displayed unfailing respect for the faiths of
the sects.
47. Stokes, p. 551. The starting point of the essay appears to be Locke's
definition of property as life, liberty and estate in the Second Treatise of
Government, Ch. IX.
48. Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII.
49. Madison liked to quote Voltaire's Article on "Tolerance" in the
Philosophical Dictionary: "If one religion only were allowed in England,
the government would possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two,
the people would cut each other's throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace." See Koch, p. 76.
50. Jefferson, too, had complained of the under-representation in both
houses of the middle and upper counties, and of the arms-bearing population in generaL
51. "Detached Memoranda," p. 554.
52. Forging, p. 36.
53. Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, op. cit., pp. 215-16, 285, 35.
I. A. Richards, for example, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York
1965), p. 70, decries the use of just such terms as "misleading and un·
profitable."
54. Rives, p. 25, n. l. It is the spirit of Swift's definitions which I. A.
Richards' rhetoric is intended to oppose.
55. Papers, Vol. 1, pp. 32-42.
56. Papers, Vol. 1, pp. 18-19.
57. Microfilm, Princeton UniVersity Library.
58. "James Madison's Autobiography," Douglas Adair, ed., William and
Mary Quarterly, Third Series, II, no. 2, pp. 202, 207. See also Robert A.
Rutland, "Madison's Bookish Habits," The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, Vol. 37, no. 2 (Spring 1980), pp. 176-91.
59. Sources: Irving Brant, The Bill of Rights, Its Origin and Meaning
(New York 1967), pp. 400-18; The Supreme Court and Education, Classics in Education No. 4, David Fellman, ed. (New York 1976), Pt. I, pp.
3-124.
60. Stokes, pp. 26-30, gives a history of the term. The contemporary political use of the phrase "The Establishment" is, of course, quite differ·
ent since it has no reference to legal confirmation.
61. Letter to Rev. Jasper Adams, 1832.
62. "Detached Memoranda," pp. 558-60; Letter to Edward Livingston,
1822.
63. Religion in America, William C. Mclaughlin and Robert N. Bellah
(Boston 1968), p. 275; "Detached Memoranda," p. 559.
64. An example is his reply to Rev. Adams, 1832.
65. For the definition of secularism, see Stokes, pp. 30-31. Just this year
the secular religion issue has again been raised in Seagraves vs. State of
California.
73
�Cicero's Teaching on Natural Law
Thomas G. West
We are in the midst of a crisis-not always evident in
the comfortable lives we lead, but a crisis nonetheless. A
sign of the crisis is the ongoing political collapse of the
West; the liberal democracies of America and Europe are
barely willing to defend themselves against the insolence
of petty tyrants and the armed imperialism of the Soviet
Union.
Why this somnolent slide into voluntary weakness? Because we are not convinced that we have anything to fight
for. We are ready to believe the worst of ourselves, and the
best of our adversaries, because we no longer fully believe
that we deserve to survive. That is because we no longer
know what the West is, and why its preservation matters
for nurturing and sustaining the noblest and best of human activities. In particular, we in America no longer
know why the United States is the best hope for the
modern world.
The core of the West is not only worth saving; it is perhaps the highest reason for living. Our best moral traditions and political institutions foster a rational thoughtfulness that enables all of us, to the extent of our abilities, to
use words, human speech, to discover and articulate the
natures of things. This unique feature of Western peoples
became most evident to me when I taught classes that
included both Americans and non-Western foreigners,
especially students from the Middle East. Because their
characters were formed by different kinds of laws and
habits, such foreigners are inclined to look upon reason
and speech as manipulative tools by which people impose
their will on each other rather than as aids to bringing
forth truth from darkness. Truth, then, is the opinion of
the stronger, of whoever has or appears to have the power
to make it stick. A Newsweek reporter expressed his bafflement over this attitude when he visited Iran in December
of 1979 and found everyone convinced that Khomeini
would make America turn over the ex-Shah to Iran-even
though our laws and our self-interest forbade it. The Ayatollah said it, so the people believed it. 1
Americans are different. You can argue with them and
get them to see, by means of the argument, what you see.
A successful argument is not just a victory of one person
over another, for what the discussion is about is never
merely personal. Even when Americans fling their convictions at one another in barroom disputes-who is the better quarterback, Bradshaw or Staubach?-they are dimly
aware that the issue they are controverting is something
real, independent of their boisterous claims, and that the
truth about it can be brought to light through words.
When students raised in non-Western traditions appear in
one's classes, they do not grasp that the purpose of talk is
insight, not power; as a result, they usually suppose that
the teacher only wants his students to remember and parrot his own opinions. On the contrary, proper teaching
provides an example of thinking which students at first
imitate; later, they begin to be able to repeat the thought
on their own, and finally, if ability and effort suffice, to
think by themselves without such help.
To learn the connection between rationality and republican political institutions, education is needed. And to
perfect one's own rationality, education is needed. But
education today most often means getting through college quickly and moving on to one's career. I do not believe such an education is enough to enable students to
withstand the assaults of positivism, socialism, and the
other defeatist doctrines that dominate current fashion in
most professional and graduate schools, not to mention
the "real world" outside. As ever, the best education consists principally of a patient, dedicated study of political
history and the outstanding Western authors, particularly
the classical authors, of history, literature, and political
philosophy-' The revival of this education-and it has already begun-is probably the only thing that can save the
liberty of our country and of our minds. Cicero deserves
inclusion in such a curriculum, no less for his admirable
statesmanship than for his philosophical work.
•
•
*
1980.
Cicero has a prominent place in most histories of political philosophy, but few scholars regard him as a thinker
of the first rank. His ideas, it is typically asserted, are
mostly platitudinous and second-hand, taken over from
second-rate Hellenistic philosophers. His philosophical
works, which educated men read as recently as the eighteenth century for rational guidance in the conduct of
74
SUMMER 1981
Professor of Politics at the University of Dallas, Thomas G. West has recently published Plato's Apology of Socrates (Cornell University Press
1979).
This article represents a revised version of a lecture given at Boston Col-
lege, Kenyon College and Wake Forest University in March and April
�life, are now studied chiefly by antiquarians engaged in
source-criticism and historical research.' Even among his
scholarly admirers, few would seriously look to Cicero for
instruction in living their own lives. His eclipse rivals that
of Xenophon, that allegedly simple-minded hanger-on of
Socrates who wrote such surprisingly charming prose. I
believe that what Leo Strauss accomplished in his interpretations of Xenophon-he rediscovered Xenophon the
philosopher by conceding to subtlety the benefit of every
doubt-can also, in part, be done on behalf of Cicero.'
Besides this scholarly depreciation of Cicero, another
and deeper critique is posed by Martin Heidegger. Cicero,
or rather Roman philosophy generally, represents for Hei·
degger an important stage in the gradual forgetting of the
Greek discovery of nature, a forgetting process which has
marked the whole history of the West. According to Hei·
degger, the very translation of Greek philosophy into
Latin effaced that insight. Roman philosophy conceived
natura, the nature of things, as present-at-hand and readily
available to easy philosophic contemplation and the formulation of ethical doctrines. It thereby failed to renew
the vibrant amplitude of the Greek physis, which embraces the emergence and coming-to-be of things no less
than their distinct standing-forth in full presence before
the mind's eye. The Roman narrowing of nature therefore prepared the way for the modern view of beings as
mere disposable resources, easily accessible to human
projects and manipulation.
The scholarly view of Cicero, being less serious, can be
addressed more easily. But Heidegger's more profound
charge can also be met.
Cicero faced a philosophical-political situation in Rome
in some ways similar to our own. As today, philosophical
writings about how politics ought to be conducted, and
more broadly, about how life ought to be lived, were
widely known. But their effect on the formation of the
characters of future politicians, not to speak of direct
influence on public life, was small. Nor did political philosophy temper the philosophers' nearly exclusive preoc·
cupation with private morals, theory of knowledge, the
nature of the gods, and the order of the physical world. By
tremendous efforts Greek philosophy had achieved its
insight into the distinction between and yet necessary belonging-together of nature and convention, being and appearance, truth and opinion, an insight anticipated in the
dark lyrics of the pre-Socratic thinkers and given its consummate expression in the works of Plato and Aristotle.
But now, in the moribund Roman republic, this grasp
upon the tense unity of nature and convention was forgotten by politicians unformed by philosophy and philosophers disdainful of politics.
In all of his writings, from the practical orations to the
theoretical excursions into epistemology and theology,
Cicero strove to reyoke the sundered pair. He sought
thereby not only to revitalize philosophy, which in its late
Greek appearance and Roman transplantation had become routinized in a set of contesting schools of thought,
1HEST.JOHNSREVIEW
each with its characteristic jargon and dogma; he also
tried to revive the wilting prospects for political liberty in
Rome, where the despotic acquisitiveness and imperialism that had long marked its foreign policy were increasingly employed within Rome itself by ambitious factions
and generals, acting against their fellow Romans. Julius
Caesar's conversion of Rome into a popular dictatorship
late in Cicero's career openly displayed whither Roman
politics were tending. Cicero's teaching on law, the peak
of his reflections on the nature of the political, epitomizes
his twofold intention: to render politics more rational and
reason more politically responsible, on the ground that
reason and politics are inseparable.
Only in the first two books of De legibus (On Laws) does
Cicero give a sustained account of his legal doctrine.
There is a famous passage on law from the third book of
his De republica (III.33), but its value is doubtful because
it is a fragment whose context is lost and because it is put
into the mouth of one of the dialogue's characters, Laelius, whose views do not always coincide with Cicero's. In
any event, Laelius's statement on law is not much different from what we find in the Laws, where Cicero speaks
in his own name and the question of law is amply developed.
At first glance the Laws offers an array of comforting
certitudes. True law is grounded in the eternal verities of
God, reason, and nature; and Rome's law, with some mod·
ifications, seems to be a fitting exemplar. Rhetorical
flights in praise of law-abidingness and piety, apparently
nothing more than variations on Stoic commonplaces,
grace the pages of the book.
Cicero is of course fully responsible for this initial impression, and if many scholars penetrate no further than
this surface, they at least grasp the first level of his teaching. The surface provides a standard for politicians and
professors who incline toward private gain at the expense
of public duty; by "private gain" I mean the pleasure of
pursuing wisdom apart from the commonwealth no less
than the acquisition of wealth and honor to its actual
detriment. For the law teaches politicians that man's end
is to know and to choose the good, which requires philosophy and "pure religion," and it teaches philosophers that
the soul is born for political society and not merely for private contemplation of eternity (1.58-62).
It takes only a modest attentiveness to the order and argument of the work to see beyond this first impression.
The Laws is a fictitious dialogue between Cicero himself,
his brother Quintus, who was active in Roman public life
and composed some tragic poetry, and Cicero's closest
friend, Atticus, the Epicurean philosopher and wealthy
Roman knight. Like many Roman political men, Quintus
is liberally educated in Greek philosophy and poetry
(11.17), though not philosophically inclined, and he is an
uncritical adherent of government by his own peers, the
aristocrats or optimates (111.17). He is possessed by a certain excess of the love of one's own that typifies the citizen and gentleman at all times and places.
75
�Atticus has the opposite defect. His very name, "the
man from Attica," signals his long removal from his native
Italy to the academic center Athens. His interest in the
conversation on law is purely theoretical-one might even
call it aesthetic, for he pursues it for the personal pleasure
it affords and the trans-political themes it develops, not
because of any practical good he might gain from it
(1.13-14, 28). He is particularly delighted by the setting of
their dialogue, in the summer shade, along the banks and
islands of a cool stream in the country (I.l4, II.6-7). In his
attention to these pleasures of body and mind he displays
himself as the unpolitical Epicurean that he is.
Cicero's two interlocutors, then, represent the two di·
vergent Roman tendencies mentioned at the outset, un·
philosophical politics and unpolitical philosophy, but with
this difference: both men are close enough to Cicero that
they can be persuaded to follow his lead-Quintus because
of his admiration and affection for his brother, Atticus
because of his friendship with Cicero and of his probable
awareness that law-abidingness protects the wealth that
sustains his philosophic leisure. Cicero comprises in
himself the qualities possessed separately by his two companions. He shares exclusively with Quintus a serious political vocation and a poetizing avocation, and with
Atticus, a dedication to philosophy and admiration for
Plato (1.1, 15, Ill.l ).
These three topics-politics, poetry, and philosophyare prominent themes in the Laws, and the conversation
opens with an exchange on the nature of poetry. Poetry, it
seems, has the capacity to immortalize what is by nature
mortal; the old oak that stands before the three men will
live forever in Cicero's poem, just as the olive tree on the
Athenian acropolis is believed to have been planted by
Athena and hence to be sempiternal. But poetry, says
Cicero, affords pleasure rather than truth; truth is rather
the standard for history. And since history too is full of innumerable fables-Herodotus is the example named-Cicero will shortly turn from history to philosophy to bring
forth the truth about law and justice (1.1-5, 17). The prefatory conversation to the Laws, then, sets forth an implicit
antithesis between poetry, pleasant but untrue, and philosophy, which is true. The contrast raises this question:
does Cicero mean that the truth exposed by philosophy is
unpleasant?
This seemingly inconsequential talk about poetry arrests
our attention as soon as we notice a possible similitude,
not explicitly stated by Cicero, of poetry to law. Poetry
renders the mortal immortal, and, more generally, it bestows life and memory on that which does not exist by
nature. By mentioning the example of Romulus's apotheosis in the context of this discussion of poetry's truth,
Cicero implies that poetry allots to the gods themselves
their being and qualities (!.3). Does not law, too, share this
capacity to implant convictions in the minds of men, convictions that surpass by far in importance and degree the
voluntary suspension of disbelief that we concede to a
well-wrought novel or poem? Poetry and law (law taken in
76
a wide sense, like the Greek nomos, to include custom and
tradition) appear to immortalize the transient or even to
bring non-being into being by touching our minds and
memories through words. If philosophy, which strives uncompromisingly to unveil the true natures of things, is the
antithesis of poetry, it would likewise seem to be the
enemy of the traditions and beliefs on which law depends
and which in some measure law is. The beginning of Cicero's Laws unobtrusively questions whether law contains
any truth whatever. Law, like poetry, may be nothing
more than a fiction that furnishes pleasure by establishing
trust in eternally binding precepts and practices.'
Cicero forestalls this positivist inference by drawing a
distinction between two senses of the word law: the popular sense, according to which law is "that which sanctions
in writing whatever it wishes, either by commanding or
prohibiting," and the more learned sense, derived from
nature itself, according to which law is "the mind and reason of the prudent man" (1.19). This explanation serves
the law's truthfulness by limiting merely arbitrary enact·
ments to the vulgar notion of law. But the unambiguous
clarity we might expect from Cicero's employment of this
distinction is not forthcoming. For he immediately adds
that "it will sometimes be necessary to speak popularly"
about law, since "our whole discussion is involved in the
people's way of reasoning (in populari ratione)" (1.19).
We wonder why Cicero must speak at all in the vulgar
manner, for he has just said that he will draw his account
of law from the heart of philosophy (1.17). We will return
to this question later, but a preliminary answer is suggested
by the parallel treatment of morality in Cicero's On
Duties. Morality (honestum) in the strict sense is wisdom,
says Cicero, possessed (if by anyone) by extraordinary
men such as Socrates. But the morality that is discussed in
Qn Duties, he says, is only "a certain second~grade morality," and the great statesmen who come to mind as examples of virtue, such as the two Scipios and Marcus Cato,
have only "a sort of similitude and appearance of wise
men." Nevertheless, "we [ordinary men] ought to watch
over and preserve that morality which falls within our
[more limited] understanding .... For otherwise it is not
possible to maintain such progress as has been made to·
ward virtue" (De officiis, III.B-17, 1.148). We infer that a
forthright presentation of morality as wisdom would discourage progress in virtue, because genuine wisdom is ex-
alted too far above the common intellectual capacity and
moral taste to be a plausible aim for most men. Most
Athenians regarded Socrates as an object more of curiosity or annoyance than of emulation. By concealing the
wisdom requisite for strict morality, Cicero allows "second-grade morality" to retain the luster that would otherwise be robbed from it. Nevertheless, the concealment is
not absolute, for part of Cicero's purpose is to explain the
truth about virtue.
The Laws treats law as On Duties treats virtue. Cicero
will indeed be seeking true law, but he will also speak with
a view to "strengthening republics, establishing cities, and
SUMMER 1981
�making peoples healthy" (1.37). Therefore he will not ad·
mit Epicureans into the discussion, "even if they speak
the truth," because by referring everything to the criterion
of pleasure and pain, they corrode the convictions of
those who believe that "all correct and honorable things
are to be sought for their own sake" (37, 39). Even the
skepticism to which Cicero adheres in other works is ex·
eluded, so that the grounds for their dialogue will not be
destroyed (39). In short, since the Laws has a twofold pur·
pose of revealing the truth about law and promoting salu·
tary political usages, Cicero will speak about law in both
the strict and vulgar sense-and he does not spell out at
what times he will speak in which sense. The truth frankly
displayed would not only cause displeasure, like poetry de·
bunked, but it would also mar the intended practical effect.
Before we pursue further Cicero's intricate weaving of
the two senses of law, let us first look at some of his ex·
plicit statements on the subject. His first is a report of the
most learned": "Law is the highest reason, seated in
nature, which orders what is to be done and forbids the
opposite. This reason, when it is settled and accomplished
in the mind of a human being, is law" (1.18). In his own
name Cicero restates the formulation as follows: "[Law] is
a force (vis) of nature, the mind and reason of the prudent
man, the standard of the just and of injustice" (1.19). In
the three other places in Book I where law is defined, it is
"correct reason" (1.23) or "correct reason in ordering and
forbidding" (1.33, 42). Law is natural in the same way that
reason is natural, as a gift of nature bestowed on every human being (1.33). But only in the prudent man, whose rea·
son is developed as far as it can be, does reason become
"correct," and so only his commands and prohibitions are
14
truly "law."
In spite of the exalted tone in which Cicero delivers
these pronouncements, we note that law is nothing more
than the reasonable orders of the sensible man. There is
no trace whatever here of a table of definite, eternally bind·
ing precepts, of the sort characteristic of the natural-law
doctrine, actually medieval, that scholars generally attrib·
ute to Cicero 6 His formulation avoids entirely the notori·
ous dilemma between inflexible rules of scholastic natural
law and the Machiavellian renunciation of any natural law
whatever. Cicero's alternative is so simple, yet so radical,
that cognizance of it has rarely been taken. True law-Ci·
cera himself persistently avoids the term "natural law"
(lex naturalis or lex naturae)-true law, then, to put it
bluntly, is whatever the wise man orders.' If he commands
you to worship Zeus, then worship of Zeus is part of the
true law. If he says, "believe that you are sprung directly
from the earth itself and that your soul is compounded of
gold or silver or bronze," then such beliefs too will be en·
joined by true law. Far from being eternal, the true law
will be subject to change whenever the sensible man sees
that circumstances call for it. And conflict between the
positive law of the actual political order, infused as it must
be with concessions to particularity, and a higher law
whose demands cannot be met in this world, need not oc·
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
cur. To the extent that the government is prudent or that
the wise orders of the original law-giver continue to fit
present conditions, the statutes on the books and the true
law will be one and the same.
In light of all this, how can Cicero maintain that law is
"one"? (1.42). What center governs the seemingly indefi·
nile latitude granted to the prudent man and prevents it
from spinning off into orderless multiplicity and caprice?
How can what is one be many? Cicero provides an oblique
resolution of these questions in the lengthy set-piece ora·
tion that occupies the bulk of Book I. The nature of the
just, he begins, must be sought in the nature of man (17),
and human nature, like the divine, achieves its peak and
perfection through virtue (25). Virtue, in turn, is the
steady and continuous rational conduct of life, in which
prudence follows the naturally honorable and avoids the
naturally dishonorable courses of action; virtue is "reason
perfected" (45). And since reason, "when it is full-grown
and perfected, is duly called wisdom" (23), prudence in·
valves the full development of man's rationality and
thoughtfulness.
From these statements we might expect Cicero to pro·
claim unambiguously that wisdom, acquired by philosophy, comprising knowledge of self as well as the nature of
all things, is the human good (cf. 58-62). Such a standard
would furnish the prudent man with a reliable guide as he
crafted his laws for a given polity, just as the legislator of
Plato's Republic looks up to the idea of the good as a pat·
tern for his artful lawmaking (484c-d). The laws would
then prescribe such educational practices and institutional arrangements as would issue in habits of body and
mind conducive to the development of reason in every·
one so far as that is possible. The variety of prudent legis·
lative codes would betoken an application of the one truth
about the human good, qualified by the vagaries of local
circumstances. Laws and customs appropriate to men
who look up to Jave and honor martial valor would be far
different from those suited to men who believe in human
equality and regard the career of a businessman as more
respectable than that of a general.
This interpretive expectation, however, stumbles over
the fact that Cicero disclaims such precise knowledge of
the good. It is true that Cicero allows us to form the im·
pression that he believes he knows not only the good but
the nature of the cosmos and the gods themselves. In con·
sidering his grandiloquent foray, however, we must not
fail to notice the light, bantering exchange that touches it
off, in which the Epicurean Atticus, who can be pre·
sumed not to believe it, agrees to Cicero's assertion of
Divine rule over the cosmos (21 ). He perhaps accepts
Cicero's teleo-theology because he is aware of its
usefulness in supporting the rights of property from
which he benefits and which provides leisure for his phi·
losophizing (cf. III.37). 8 And Cicero's own joking over this
solemn matter is far from reassuring.
We particularly wonder about Cicero's true convictions
in light of his surprising admission at the end of his long
77
�speech that the controversy over the end or highest of
goods, the finis bonorum, will not even be investigated in
their conversation (1.52-57). This theme, which provides
the title for that book of Cicero's which according to himself is most worth reading, On the Ends of Goods and Evils
(finibus bonorum et malorum, 1.11) would divert the inquiry into an extended and perhaps endless weighing of
the alternative accounts of the good. We infer this because although in that book Cicero refutes the Stoic and
Epicurean teachings on the good, he will not affirm there
any definite opinion of his own. To be sure, he finds the
Peripatetic doctrine "probable" or "praiseworthy" (probabilis), but this, he says, in no way qualifies his skeptical
stance toward all of them (De finibus, V.7, 75-76). Although Cicero does not advertise his skepticism in the
Laws, his explicit omission of an account of the good
points to his knowledge that he does not know it. Neither
here nor elsewhere does Cicero claim to have resolved
this first of all moral and political questions.
Quintus, however, is quite satisfied with Cicero's
speech, and he even believes that the nature of the good
has been sufficiently brought to light (1.56). Certainly all
those fine words about honor, virtue, and the gods lend
themselves to Quintus's sanguine conclusion, but it appears that his urgent concern for a code of law to live by
distracts him from the central question of the good, for he
now asserts that that question has nothing to do with the
subject of law (57). Quintus's urgency springs from the
same source as the urgency of law itself, which cannot
hold in abeyance its dispensations of what it holds to be
just and unjust without endangering the political order.
So Quintus calls Cicero and Atticus back from the leisure
of philosophy to the practical problems of everyday life
that demand instant attention, and thus he unknowingly
draws a veil over the unsolved problem. Cicero remarks
ironically that Quintus speaks "most prudently" (57), and
he accommodatingly closes the discussion of the highest
good.
How then are we to understand Cicero's account of
law? Or, putting the question another way, what constitutes the correctness or reasonableness of reason if no
final criterion of good is forthcoming by which reason can
orient itself?
Even if complete knowledge of the good is unavailable,
as Cicero's skepticism implies, we may infer that an approximation to wisdom is accessible through the
assiduous exercise of the understanding. Cicero's final
peroration to Book I paints a picture of perfect wisdom
that can be a standard, even if unattained, of human striving (58-62). Self-knowledge is the key. For once we
thoroughly examine and test ourselves, says Cicero, we
learn that we are equipped by nature for acquiring
wisdom, and we sense that the mind, as a sort of image of
the gods, is worthy of care and cultivation (59). But Cicero
does not promise a consummation of wisdom; using the
future perfect tense, he speaks as one not yet wise, but
aiming to become so: "when [the soul] will have ex-
78
amined ... the nature of all things .... " (61 ). Cicero's own
wisdom extends no further than the "human wisdom" of
Socrates, who, by knowing his own ignorance, is spurred
on to an active pursuit of knowledge to supply that
defect.'
The law laid down by such a man would, I think, have a
double aspect aiming at the single end of wisdom. First,
like the legal code mentioned above, it would nourish decorous moral habits and vigorous thoughtfulness by
means of appropriate rules of conduct and education.
Cicero says, "Law should be a commender of virtues and
detractor from vices" (58). Second, the law's formulation
would itself be both an example of and an incentive to,
thought. Perhaps, like the religious laws that Cicero proposes in Book II, the law's proclamations could be discerned, by a close observer, to be deliberately incomplete
or ambiguous or an image of something else. The theological preface that Cicero attaches to those laws declares at
once that "the gods are lords and governors of all things"
and that "it is sacrilege to say that any thing stands above
the nature of all things" (II.l5-16). Are the gods governed
by nature or are nature's habits subject to divine exception? The philosophic inquiry into the relation of nature
and the will of the gods is as it were built into the law itself, for a self-contradiction embedded in an authoritative
statement can only be resolved by rational consideration
of the doubtful point. 10
I would propose another, deeper sense in which law can
be an exemplary embodiment of philosophy or human
wisdom. This sense can also help to explain our earlier
questions: how the law's variety, which we attributed to
the prudent man's adaptation of wisdom to conditions,
can be reconciled with its alleged oneness, and how and
why the vulgar and precise senses of law are mingled in
the dialogue. Philosophy for Cicero is inseparable from its
beautiful presentation in particular form: "I have always
judged that philosophy to be complete which is able to
speak about the greatest questions abundantly and with
suitable adornment (ornate)." 11 One of Ciceros' characters
in de oratore identifies the complete philosopher with the
complete orator (III.56-73), since the capacity to think
well necessarily involves the capacity to speak well about
what one is thinking. Similarly, if we take a larger, synoptic look at Cicero's teaching on law, we are inclined to the
conclusion that the perfect philosopher is the perfect
legislator, and that law in the strictest sense is philosophy.
If "law is taken as one possible form of wisdom's displaying itself "with suitable adornment," then a well-crafted
legal code would be constructed like any other philosophically informed work of art. The variety and particularity of
true laws would therefore derive not only from the disparity of men and nations, but also from philosophy's inherent need to show itself forth. For reason only becomes
visible in display, and a display is always cast in particular
form. Unless the truth that is thought is given "a local
habitation and a name," it does not manifest itself and
therefore is not itself, for the essence of truth is to be the
SUMMER 1981
�unconcealment of what is naturally hidden. It has to be
brought out into the open, usually through words. And
once truth is given concrete shape, it of necessity appears
as a partial, particular, incomplete fragment or image of
what is inherently one. 12
Let us return to the two senses of law deliberately inter·
woven in Cicero's text. There is a difficulty with my
earlier argument that now must be faced. One law, the
true one, is ~~the reason and mind of the wise man for ordering and deterring," which is "eternal" and can never
be repealed (II.8, 14). About law popularly understood
Cicero says: "those things that have been drawn up for
peoples variously and for the times have the name 'law'
more by indulgence (favore) than in fact (re)" (ILl!). The
statements quoted here require that true law be eternal
and exclude from it the element of timeliness. Yet I con·
tinue to maintain that true law is whatever the wise man
orders, which will vary according to circumstances. How
can this be? Can one and the same law be both law and
not law, both eternal and temporal? Can law in truth and
law by convention be the same? I believe they can, for it
all depends upon how the one "law" is understood. Inso·
far as it is thought through from the rational perspective
of the philosophizing legislator, the law is true; insofar as
it is understood "popularly," that is, to the extent that its
rational conception and intention are missed, then the
and since correct reason is presumably reason perfected,
then law and perfected nature are one. So Cicero's ac·
count of law, his "politics/' is also his account of nature
44
and nature's end, his physics" and "metaphysics." A sign
of this is that the doubleness of law, which both reveals
and conceals, remaining one while adapting to particular
conditions, is like the doubleness of nature itself. Its prin·
ciple is one, its forms diverse; it shows itself but loves to
hide. 14 When Cicero says that law is "something eternal
that directs the whole world by its wisdom in ordering and
prohibiting" (II.8); he is personifying, for the sake of his
proposed civil law, the truth that nature aims at and that
rational man grasps in part.
Why is it that when people accept law as a rule to live
by, they rarely recover or repeat the discovery that gener·
ated its founding? Most men are blind to the single truth
that unites the variety of good institutions found in well·
governed cities and nations or in books like Cicero's Laws.
Once established, law becomes routine, obvious, boringit becomes a convention that reflects only dimly the tre·
mendous thought lying behind it and in it. Why is this so?
Cicero's comparison of law to poetry suggests an answer.
Like poetry, law as convention is sweet. We take comfort
in the simple answers affirmed in its familiar cadences,
and we do not gladly expose ourselves to the uncertainty
that goes with sustained inquiry into its truth. Even when
law is only conventionally or "by indulgence" a law, not in
we moderns, enlightened as we are, question our religious
fact.
At the moment when law is conceived in the mind of a
and moral upbringing, we mostly do so in the name of a
yet deeper unexamined faith in such received opinions as
the value of learning, compassion for our fellow men, or
the vulgar notion that wealth, fame, and enjoying oneself
constitute happiness. Seeing through convention to na·
ture, from law by indulgence to law in fact, means repudi·
ating the comforts of convention. Only when the law's
"poetry," its affirmations of eternity, are read "philosoph·
ically" does it become more than an untruthful instru·
ment of slothful pleasure.
Alfarabi succinctly epitomizes the teachings on law that
I am attributing to Cicero, as follows:
prudent man, a discovery occurs and truth becomes mani-
fest to him, so far as he grasps it, in the artifact he is about
to produce. Truth remains present in the law only when it
is being thought or rethought in its originating sense. So
its truth is eternal only equivocally, during such thought·
ful occasions, as the fruit of the mind's vigorous exertion.
It is not something lying there present at hand, open to
the view of anyone who casts an idle glance in its direc·
tion. But neither is its truth a Nietzschean contrivance of
the mind or will, that imposes itself on an otherwise
meaningless external world. The truth of the law is like
that of any well-crafted dramatic or philosophical work.
Consider the Platonic dialogue. If the reader grasps only
its obvious surface teaching, no "philosophy" will be
transmitted or rather will occur, since "the philosophy of
Plato" is an event that only happens through an active
thinking about the work by the reader, in such a way that
he repeats the thought of its author by discerning the
weave of its dramatic action and its explicit argument.
Such also is true law.
True law, as philosophy, seeks to discover what it is. 13
To the extent that it does so, law reveals nature. But
"Now these things [namely, the images representing the theoretical things, and proper convictions about the practical] are
philosophy when they are in the soul of the legislator. They
are religion when they are in the souls of the multitude. For
when the legislator knows these things, they are evident to
him by sure insight, whereas what is established in the souls of
the multitude is through an image and a persuasive argument.
Although it is the legislator who also represents these things
through images, neither the images nor the persuasive arguments are intended for himself. As far as he is concerned, they
are certain . ... They are a religion for others, whereas, so far
as he is concerned, they are philosophy." IS
nature's own end, its core, is reason perfected, as can be
inferred from Cicero's identification of virtue and per·
fected reason (!.45), and of virtue and perfected nature
(!.25). (Cicero's attribution of reason to the whole cosmos
shows that reason is not confined only to human nature.)
But since Cicero also links law with correct reason (!.23),
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Although Cicero's specific legal proposals presented in
Books II and Ill appear to be a hodgepodge of traditions
from the Roman past, they present a different aspect
when read with this twofold sense of law in mind. His
polytheistic theology in particular deserves scrutiny for its
79
�covert truth, as is indicated by his replacement of the expression "the wise and prudent man" with "highest jupiter" (ILl 0) in the context of composing prefaces to his
proposed laws. From here we begin to make sense of the
fact that the only gods mentioned by name in Cicero's religious law are jupiter and Ceres (representing, respectively, wisdom and grain from the earth), the household
gods of the hearth (the Lares), apotheosized human beings
of exemplary virtue, and deified excellences such as
Mind, Piety, and Virtue (II.l9-22). Evidently a purgation
of the Roman pantheon is in process. The very inclusion
of a god called "Mind" in the list ought to give pause,
since there is no record as far as I know of any Roman tradition assigning divinity to this name. Religion is the people's image of philosophy. It is opium indeed for those
who fail to think, but a stimulant to the rest.
We are now prepared to speak to Cicero's most profound
critic-indeed, the most profound critic of the philosophical tradition stemming from Plato-Martin Heidegger.
Speaking of the translation of Greek philosophy into
Latin by Cicero and others, Heidegger says: "The event
of this translation of Greek into Roman is nothing indifferent and harmless, but rather the first chapter of the
course of the exclusion and alienation of the original essence of Greek philosophy." The rest of the course of
Western philosophy, Heidegger claims, leads us through
Christianity and modernity to the predicament of today,
where an "emasculation of the spirit" reigns, where, in
the grip of technology, which reduces all things to raw materials and resources to be exploited for an indefinite variety of indifferent purposes, "all things reach the same
level, a surface that is like a blind mirror that reflects no
longer, that throws back nothing.""
The impoverished spirit of the present has come about
as the result of a progressive narrowing of the meaning of
being in Western philosophy. For the Greeks, being, or
rather physis ("nature"), which comprehends beings as a
whole, is that which spontaneously emerges out of itself
and endures, standing steadily by itself and manifesting
itself. Physis also designates the process of emerging, the
effort and struggle through which things become what
they are by finding their completion and end. This process includes not only the generation of plants and
animals but also and especially the bringing-forth-into-thelight achieved by our thought and speech. Heidegger
maintains that the post-Aristotelian tradition, presumably
including Cicero, was formed directly or indirectly by a superficial Platonism that forgot the becoming- and thinking-aspect of physis and reduced it to what can be gazed at
by the mind's eye (the ideas) and what can be an eternal
model for human life to imitate (the good). This forgetting
took place in part because of the incapacity of the Latin
language to capture the philosophically indispensable resonances of such decisive Greek words as logos (speech),
aletheia (truth), and especially physis. Thus they inadvertently deprived physis of its richness and depth. In its
place they installed, we may infer, a less ambiguous world
80
of concepts and facts that could be described, to the extent
that human knowledge reached, in propositional formulations suitable for dissemination in schools and treatises.
This change, in turn, which made physis far more accessible to man, became the foundation for the modern transformation of nature into manipulable material available
for an indefinite array of projects of the will. 17
If Cicero truly bears part of the responsibility, however
remote, for the degradation of man and thought that
threatens to overwhelm us today, it would be wrong for us
to defend him. But our discussion of his teaching on law
shows that Greek thinking, far from being smothered, was
recovered in Cicero's work. Cicero was no stale Platonist.
If he had contented himself with being a mere translator,
of which Heidegger almost accuses him, then he would indeed have failed to convey the thought of the Greeks, for
the Latin language simply cannot perform what Heidegger shows that Greek can do. 18 Cicero overcame this obstacle by the arrangement of what he wrote; he created
complex dialogues and double-edged speeches that retained and re-presented the Greek insight into truth and
opinion, the one and the many, being and appearance.
Cicero's teaching on law is from this perspective a restatement and rethinking of the Greek physis, which Heidegger was the first to recover in our century.
Cicero's teaching on law instances the decisive characteristic of the writings of the best philosophers, namely,
exotericism. By "exotericism" I mean a manner of writing
that presents an apparently straightforward outer doctrine which however is substantially qualified and deepened by the reader's reflection on the movement and
details of the argument. 19 By using such a twofold outer
and inner teaching as I have described in this essay, Cicero and the other thoughtful successors of Plato recapitulated in their writings the doubleness vibrating in physis
itself that was discovered by the Greeks. Nature both
shows itself and withdraws; it affords a surface appearance that comes to a stand and yet comprises an inner development, grasped in thought, that gives the lie to that
surface permanence. Similarly, the books of Plato and
Cicero in their weave of surface and thought imitate and
thereby reveal nature's nature.
Although Heidegger recovered the original sense of
physis through his rereading of the pre-Socratics, he was
unaware of the exotericism employed by Plato and later
authors, and so when he compared the early Greek physis
to the doctrines that followed in the later history of
philosophy, beginning with Plato, he plausibly concluded
that a forgetfulness of being has dogged the thinking of all
the philosophers. Whence followed his thesis that philosophy's history describes the course of a gradual withdrawal
or self-concealment of being, culminating in the present
"night of the world." 20 When Leo Strauss and Jacob Klein
rediscovered the exoteric character of the writings of
ancient and medieval philosophers, partly under the im·
petus of Heidegger's recovery of physis, 21 the Heideggerian presumption about the philosophers' forgetfulness
SUMMER 1981
�of being could be strongly challenged, The multitude of
philosophical doctrines among Greek, Roman, and Christian thinkers is not necessarily a consequence of the blind
dispensation of fate, as Heidegger's radical historcism
would aver. Some of these writers may have chosen their
doctrines quite deliberately, with a view to the changing
circumstances of the people they were addressing and as
the particular embodiment of the writers' insights. The
history of philosophy, at least in pre-modern times, may
chronicle the thoughtful responses to these circumstances and the various depictions of a ('common" truth,
rather than the shifting conceptions of being over which
the thinkers have no control. Their deepest insights may
well be the same. Hence the recovery of exotericism is the
condition for the refutation of historicism.
Cicero employed exotericism to redeem philosophy
from its Roman and late Greek tendency toward doctrinalism, which treated nature as eternally present to view,
lying open to the propositional descriptions and contented gaze of apolitical contemplatives like Atticus.
Cicero also directed his teaching toward the educated
politicians like his brother Quintus who, being ignorant of
the unity of true and popular law, saw no need to engage
in abstruse philosophical considerations as a prelude to
decent political practice (1.56-57). By directing Atticus's
attention from nature to politics and Quintus's from politics to nature, Cicero points each of them to the one truth
of which each touches only a part. He thus made available
to the Latin-speaking world if not a salvation from the impending tyranny of the Roman empire, at least an example from which a later revival of liberty and philosophy
could take its bearing.
1. Newsweek, December 17, 1979, 34.
2. See my three-part essay, "On Education," Improving College and
University Teaching 28/1 (Winter 1980), 3-7; 28/2 (Spring 1980), 61-66;
and 28/3 (Summer 1980), 99-104.
3. This is particularly so in the case of Cicero's Laws: Elizabeth
Rawson, "The Interpretation of Cicero's 'De legibus,' " in Aufstieg und
Niedergang der rOmischen Welt, ed. Hildegard Temporini, Berlin 1973,
Part I, val. ' ~40.
4. Exem]
c Strauss on Xenophon is On Tyranny, New York 1963.
5. This oL
cion on law, and the point to be pursued later connect·
ing the partJcular laws of Book II with law in the strict sense, were first
developed in part by Eric Salem in a graduate seminar paper at the
University of Dallas.
6. The scholarly consensus on Cicero has changed little since George
H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 3rd ed., New York 1961,
163-167. As for the medieval doctrine, even St. Thomas Aquinas
(Summa Theologica, 1-11.100.8) appears more rigid than he is, for although he maintains that the ten commandments are indispensably part
of the natural law, he qualifies this by admitting that the only moral
precept that admits of no exception is "that nothing undue be done to
anyone and that each one be rendered his due; for it is according to this
reasoning that the precepts of the decalogue are to be understood." The
spirit of Acquinas's doctrine comes very close to the spirit of Cicero's.
For a different account of Acquina's natural law-but one that agrees
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
with the tendency noted here-see Ernest L. Fortin, "Thomas Aquinas
and the Reform of the Augustinian Natural Law Doctrine," paper
delivered at the 1975 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, mimeographed.
7. Quintus uses the expression "law of nature" at 1.56, but Cicero himself never does. As a man of the city, Quintus is unaware of the problem
embedded in that facile formulation. As far as I know, the only other occurrences of "natural law" in Cicero are in On the Nature of the Gods,
1.36, and in On Duties, III (several times). In the former instance, the expression is attributed to the Stoic Zeno by an Epicurean critic, who may
be exaggerating the Stoic claim in order to refute if more easily. And in
On Duties Cicero has deliberately adapted the imprecise manner of
speech.about morality described on page 76 above. Apparently Cicero
himself, when speaking in his own name, hesitated to yoke nature and
law (convention) in an unqualified bond. Cicero does occasionally speak
in the Laws of ius naturae, the right or justice of nature (1.36, 40); this expression grates less because of the wide range of ius from "legal enactment" to ''that which is right." Helmut Koester argues persuasively that
there is no natural law teaching properly so called either in the pre-Ciceronian Stoics or in Cicero himself: natural law in the sense of an eternally valid binding rule of moral conduct first appears in the Jewish
author Philo of Alexandria (Koester, "Nomos Physeos: The Concept of
Natural Law in Greek Thought," in Religions of Antiquity: Essays in
Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. Jacob Neusner, Leiden
1970, 521-41). Hence Leo Strauss's remarks in Natural Right and History, Chicago 1953, 15·4-55, on Cicero's relation to Stoicism are misleading insofar as they appear to attribute to the Stoics a natural law that
commands particular moral duties.
8. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 154.
9. Plato, Apology, 20d-23b.
10. The "preludes" to the laws in Plato's Laws perform a similar function, as is shown by Thomas L. Pangle, The Laws of Plato, New York
1980, 445-49, commenting on Laws 718b-724a,
11. Tusculan Disputations, 1.7. The importance of ornatus for Cicero's
thought is discussed by Raymond DiLorenzo, "The Critique of Socrates
in Cicero's De Oratore," Philosophy and Rhetoric 11 (Fall1978), 247-61.
12. The conception of truth informii:tg the latter part of this paragraph
is the Greek one, as explained by Martin Heidegger, Introduction to
Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim, New Haven 1959.
13. Cf. Plato, Minos, 315a: "Law wishes to be a discovery of being."
14. Besides Heraclitus's Fragment 123-physis kryptesthai philei {nature
loves to hide)-compare this remark made by one of Cicero~s characters
in de finibus, V.4l: " ... at first, at any rate, nature is marvellously hidden and can be neither observed nor known; as we grow older, however,
we gradually or rather tardily come, as it were, to know ourselves."
15. "The Attainment of Happiness," in Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato
and Aristotle, trans. Muhsin Mahdi, Ithaca 1969, 47.
16. Introduction to Metaphysics, ch. 1;·the quotations are on pp. 13, 45,
and 46 (translations mine); "The Question Concerning Technology," in
The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York 1977.
17. Introduction to Metaphysics, especially ch. 2 and 4.
18. Consider, for example, his discussion of physis (Introduction to Metaphysics, 13-17, 100-101), aletheia and doxa (102-105), and logos
(119-136).
19. Leo Strauss has written widely on this topic. See, for example, Persecution and the Art of Writing, Glencoe 1952.
20. Introduction to Metaphysics; the expression "forgetfulness of being"
(Seinsvergessenheit) appears in Wegmarken, Frankfurt 1967, 243; "night
of the world" in "What are Poets For?" in Poetry, Language, Thought,
New York 1971, 94.
21. Leo Strauss, "An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St.
John's," Interpretation 7 (September 1978), 2; "Klein was the first to understand the possibility which Heidegger had opened without intending
it: the possibility of a genuine return to classical philosophy, to the
philosophy of Aristotle and of Plato, a return with open eyes and in full
clarity about the infinite difficulties which it entails." See also Jacob
Klein and Leo Strauss, "A Giving of Accounts," The College 22 (April
1970), I, 4.
81
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St. John's Review
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�Editor:
Leo Raditsa
Managing Editor:
Thomas Parran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
Janet Durholz
Consulting Editors:
Eva Brann,
Curtis A. Wilson.
Editor's Note
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned comments are also
welcome.
Requests for subscriptions should be sent to The St.
John's Review, St. John's College, Annapolis, MD 21404.
Although there are currently no subscription fees, volun·
tary contributions toward production costs are gratefully
received.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW (formerly THE COLLEGE) is pub·
lished by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis,
Maryland 21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Edward G. Spar·
row, Dean. Published thrice yearly, usually in autumn, winter
and summer.
Volume XXXIIl
AUTUMN 1981
Number 1
©1981, St. John's College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Cover: Superimposed on Thomas Jefferson's "Rough draft" of the Declaration of Independence (composed between June 11 and 28, 1776) upon
a Mathew B. Brady photograph of President Abraham Lincoln with
General George B. McClellan, October 4, 1862. This latter photograph
was taken at McClellan's headquarters near Sharpsburg, Maryland, about
two and one· half weeks after the Battle of Antietam.
Composition: Britton Composition Co.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
�~HESTJOHNSREVIEWAUTUMN81
3
Inventing the Past Henry V. jaffa
20
Four Poems Laurence Josephs
22
The World of Physics and the
"Natural" World jacob Klein
35
"Sexism" is Meaningless Michael Levin
41
Going to See the Leaves Linda Collins
46
One Day in the Life of the New
York Times and Pravda in the
World: Which is more informative?
Lev Navrozov
62
The Incompleteness Theory David Guaspari
72
Philosophy and Spirituality in
Plotinus Bruce Venable
81
OCCASIONAL DISCOURSES
The Permanent Part of the College Eva T. H. Brann
84
FIRST READINGS
Sidney Hook, Philosophy and Public Policy,
review by Nelson Lund
V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, review
by Adam Wasserman.
1
�Abraham Lincoln, photograph by Mathew B. Brady,
probably taken in February 1860. From the Collections
of the Library of Congress.
2
AUTUMN 1981
�Inventing the Past
Garry Wills's Inventing America and the Pathology of
Ideological Scholarship
Harry V. Jaffa
And this too is denied even to God, to make that which has been not to have been.
Thomas Aquinas
Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is a book that should never
have been' published, certainly not in its present
form. Its errors are so egregious that any intelligent graduate student-or undergraduate student-checking many
of its assertions against their alleged sources, would have
demanded, at the least, considerable revision.
It has been widely hailed as a great contribution to our
understanding of the American political tradition. There
have been "rave" reviews in the New York Times Book
Review, the New York Review of Books, the Saturday Review, the New Republic, the American Spectator, and National Review, to mention but a few of many. It has been
praised by S\lCh glittering eminences of the academy, and
of the historical profession, as David Brion Davis, Edmund
Morgan, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. These are men who
can, if they wish, split a hair at fifty paces. In this instance,
their critical faculties seem to have gone into a narcotic
G
ARRY WILLS'S
Henry Salvatori Research Professor of Political Philosophy at Clare·
mont Men's College and Claremont Graduate School, Harry V. Jaffa
has recently published The Conditions of Freedom (The John Hopkins
University Press 1975) and How to Think about the American Revolution
(Carolina Academic Press 1978) He is editor of, and contributor to, the
forthcoming Statesmanship: Essays in Honor or Sir Winston Spencer
Churchill (Carolina Academic Press 1981).
THE ST.JOHNSREVJEW
trance, proving the truth of the aphorism that ideology is
the opiate of the intellectuals. Among the reviewers hitherto, only Professor Kenneth Lynn, writing in Commentary, October, 1978, has seen Wills's book for what it is.
"Inventing America," he writes, udoes not help us to un~
derstand Thomas Jefferson, but its totally unearned acclaim tells us a good deal about modern intellectuals and
their terrible need for radical myths." The myth promoted by Inventing America "is that the Declaration is
not grounded in Lockean individualism, as we have been
accustomed to think, but is a communitarian manifesto
derived from the common-sense philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. .. " By this myth, says Lynn, Wills
would have "transmogrified" a ~~new nation, conceived in
liberty ... into a new nation, conceived in communality,"
and thus have supplied "the history of the Republic with
as pink a dawn as possible."
I think that Professor Lynn is correct as far as he goes.
But he does not go far enough. Inventing America was received with virtually the same enthusiasm on the Right as
on the Left. The reviews in National Review and the
American Spectator were both written by current editors
of National Review, surely the most authoritative of conservative journals* (Ronald Reagan's message to the
*See Postscript
3
�Twentieth Anniversary banquet declared he had read
every issue from cover to cover.) But the current editors,
we must note, are apostolic successors to Wills himself,
who wrote for the journal for a number of years. His account of his days as an NR staffer may be found in
Confessions of a Conservative, published shortly after Inventing America. The title of the book is not meant in
irony. Wills thinks of himself as a Conservative still, and
somehow traces all his serious ideas to St. Augustine. At
the deepest level of Wills's being, there is indeed a kind of
Lutheran hatred (and Luther was an Augustinian Monk)
of classical rationalism. Lynn calls Wills "the leftist
(formerly rightist) writer." Yet there is more inner consistency between the two "Willses" than Lynn perceives.
That is because there is more inner consistency between
the Right and the Left than is commonly supposed.
where Inventing America "comes
from," to employ a popular neologism, one must read
an essay Wills published in 1964, entitled "The Convenient State." It was originally published in a volume
edited by the late Frank Meyer (an NR editor, and Wills's
close friend), called What is Conservatism? Later, it achieved
neo-canonical status, by. its inclusion in an anthology of
American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century,
edited by NR's Editor of Editors, William F. Buckley, Jr.
(It is only fair to add that an essay of mine, "On the Nature of Civil and Religious Liberty," was included in the
same volume. My essay, however, represented Conservative heresy; Wills's Conservative orthodoxy.) Frank Meyer
and I exchanged dialectical blows in the pages of NR in
1965, after Meyer published an article attacking Abraham
Lincoln as the enemy of American constitutionalism and
American freedom. (Meyer's own best known book is called
In Defense of Freedom.) Meyer in 1965 and Wills in 1964,
follow exactly the same line: Calhoun is their hero and
their authority, Lincoln the villain of American history. As
we shall see, both of them, in the decisive sense, follow a
pattern of thought which seems to have been worked out
for them by Willmoore Kendall. Kendall was a professor of
political science at Yale when Wills was a graduate student in classics there. For Wills, as for Meyer and Kendall,
there is no contradiction, nor even any paradox, in identifying the cause of constitutionalism and freedom with the
defense of chattel slavery. For all three, the defense of
freedom turns, in the decisive case, into the defense of
the freedom of_ slaveowners.
The main thesis of Wills's 1964 essay was that something called "rationalism" is the root of all political evil.
This attack on "reason" has been the stock-in-trade of
Conservatism since Rousseau's attack on the Enlightenment was fortified by Burke's polemics against the French
Revolution. Most present-day Conservatives would be
horrified to learn that they are disciples of Rousseau, yet
such is surely the case. For it was Rousseau who, in going
all the way back to the "state of nature" discovered that
T
4
O UNDERSTAND
man by nature was free, but not rational. The celebration
of freedom, divorced from reason, has a theoretical foundation in Rousseau which is nowhere else to be found.
The Rousseauan denigration of reason, and the elevation
of sentiment to take its place, is the core of nineteenth
century romanticism, both in its Left phases (e.g. anarchism, syndicalism, socialism, communism), and in its
Right phases (e.g. monarchism, clericalism, feudalism,
slavery). Romantic nationalism has been equally a phenomenon of the Right and of the Left. "Rationalism,"
Wills declared as a man of the Right, "leads to a sterile
paradox, to an ideal freedom that is a denial of freedom."
What such a remark means can be inferred only from the
use to which it is put. Here it clearly refers to the question
of slavery, and to the Civil War. Concerning slavery, heremarks, somewhat vaguely, "One cannot simply ask whether
a thing is just." Certainly, to ask whether slavery was just
was never sufficient, but it was always necessary. One
cannot distinguish a greater from a lesser evil, unless one
can distinguish evil from good. Wills concedes that "the
abolition of slavery [may have] been just," but insists nevertheless that the only politically relevant question was
"whether it [was] constitutional." For "what is meant by
constitutional government" Wills turns to that statesman
of the Old South, the spiritual Father of the Confederacy,
John C. Calhoun. According to Calhoun, we are told, constitutional gov·ernment means Hthe government in which
all the free forms of society-or as many as possible-retain their life and 'concur' in a political area of peaceful
cooperation and compromise." We can now better understand Wills's polemic against "rationalism," since among
the "free forms" which, by the foregoing statement,
ought to be retained, was the institution of chattel slavery.
It was not the slaves whose concurrence Calhoun's constitutional doctrine required, but only those who had an
interest in preserving, protecting, and defending slavery.
Calhoun provided the slaveholders a constitutional mechanism, in the supposed rights of nullification and secession, to veto any national (or federal) legislation that they
regarded as hostile to the interests of slavery. Calhoun's
constitutionalism, based upon supposed rights of the
states, was originally forged in the fires of the nullification
controversy, between 1828 and 1839. Later it was elaborated in two books, the Disquisition on Government, and
the Discourse on the Constitution. Calhoun's main dialectical adversary in 1830 was no one less than the Father of
the Constitution, James Madison, although his principal
political adversary was President Andrew Jackson, backed
in the Senate by Daniel Webster. It was as the heir of
Madison, Jackson, Webster (and others) that Lincoln compounded his constitutional doctrine. Lincoln's genius
proved itself less by its originality than by the ability to reduce a complex matter to its essentials, and to express
those essentials in profound and memorable prose. The
essence of a constitutional regime, according to Lincoln,
was that it was based upon the consent of the governed.
And the consent of the governed was required, because
AUTUMN 1981
�"all men are created equal." In 1964, Wills rejected Lincolnian constitutionalism because (like the Declaration) it
was rational. In 1978, he rejects it because it is based upon
an allegedly mistaken understanding of the Declaration.
In Inventing America, he will undercut what Lincoln has
made of the Declaration, by unleashing a barrage of fanciful scholarship designed to transform the Declaration's
lucid doctrine of self-evident truths into esoteric eighteenth century mysteries.
Wills's 1964 essay follows the conventional path of Confederate apologists since the Civil War (and Wills is a native of Atlanta). He tries to make it appear that, on the one
hand, Lincoln's war was an abolitionist crusade and, on
the other, that the South was defending, not slavery, but
constitutionalism. Nothing could be further from the
truth. As we shall presently see, however, Inventing America is less a book about Thomas jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, than it is a book against Abraham
Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address.
make the record straight, as against the
1964 Garry Wills and his preceptors of the Right, as
to what purposes were in conflict, that led to the Civil
War, or the War for the Union. (It was not a War between
the States.) First of all, there was no disagreement between Abraham Lincoln and the followers of John C. Calhoun that slavery was a lawful institution in some fifteen
of the States. Moreover, it was agreed that where slavery
was lawful, it was under the exclusive control of the
States, and that the federal government had no jurisdiction over it. In his inaugural address, Lincoln quoted from
a statement he had made many times before, in which he
said that he had "no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where
it exists." He said that he believed that he had "no lawful
right to do so," and added that he "had no inclination to
do so." Lincoln's anti-slavery policy was comprehended
completely by his avowed purpose to have excluded slavery, by federal law, from the national territories, where it
had not already established itself. It is true that Lincoln
believed, as, indeed, his pro-slavery antagonists believed,
that slavery as an institution in the United States was
highly volatile, and that if its expansion were prevented,
its contraction would set in. And, it was further believed-on both sides-that if contraction once set in,
slavery would be, in Lincoln's words, "in course of ulti~
mate extinction."
Lincoln believed that, in the understanding of the
Founding Fathers, slavery was an evil. It was an evil condemned by the principles of the Declaration, which Lincoln called "the father of all moral principle among us." It
was an evil to which certain constitutional guarantees
were given, in the political arrangements of the Founding,
because at the time there did not appear to be any alternative arrangements which would not have been disruptive
L
ET US HERE
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
of the Union. Yet the Fathers showed their opposition to
its perpetuation in various ways: by the limit placed upon
the foreign slave tra-de, and by the prohibition upon slavery in the Northwest Territory, among others. They had
left the institution of slavery where, to repeat, "the public
mind might rest in the belief that it was in course of ultimate extinction." Such a belief, Lincoln held, was absolutely necessary, if the slavery question were not to agitate
the public mind, and threaten the perpetuity of the Union.
Yet the expectations of the Fathers had been upset: by
the invention of the cotton gin, by the progress of the factory system, by the enormous expansion of the cotton
economy, and with the latter, the expansion of the demand for slave labor. These changes culminated, in time,
in the most sinister change of all: that change in at least a
part of the public mind which, from regarding slavery as
at best a necessary evil, now began to look upon it as a positive good. With this, slavery sought expansion into new
lands: into the lands acquired from France in 1803 (the
Louisiana Purchase), and into the lands acquired from
Mexico as a result of the war that ended in 1848. To prevent this expansion of slavery, the Republican Party was
formed in 1854, and, in 1860, elected Abraham Lincoln to
be sixteenth President of the United States.
The great ante-bellum political question, the one that
dwarfed and absorbed all others, was the question of
whether slavery should be permitted in the territories of
the United States, while they were territories, and before
they became states. The dialectics of this dispute became
as complicated as any thirteenth century theological controversy. Yet in the end the legal and political questions
resolved themselves into moral questions, and the moral
questions into a question of both the meaning and the
authority of the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution itself was ambiguous-if not actually self-contradictory-as to whether Negro slaves were human persons
or chattels. In fact, the Constitution refers to slaves
(which are never explicitly mentioned before the Thirteenth Amendment) only as persons, even in the fugitive
slave clause. But by implication, it also refers to them as
chattels, since they were so regarded by the laws of the
states that the fugitive slave clause recognized. But the
logic of the idea of a chattel excludes that of personality,
while that of a person excludes that of chatteldom. The
Fifth Amendment of the Constitution forbade the United
States to deprive any person of life, liberty, or property,
except by due process of law. Did this forbid the United
States to deprive any citizen of a slave state of his Negro
chattel, when he entered the territory of Kansas? Or did it
forbid the United States to deprive any Negro person of
his liberty, when he entered that same territory? Since the
language of the Constitution was equally consistent with
two mutually exclusive interpretations, there was no way
to resolve the meaning of the Constitution, from the language of the Constitution alone. For Lincoln the question
was resolved by the Declaration of Independence, by the
proposition that all men are created equal. The right of
5
�persons to own property under the Constitution as under
any substance. Rather was he "the great artist of America's
the laws of nature and of nature's God," was derivative
romantic period." By his "democratic-oracular tone" he
from their right, as human beings, to life and to liberty.
Such an understanding of the Declaration alone gave life
and meaning to the Constitution. Wills, in "The Conve·
nient State," repudiates the Declaration. In Inventing
America, he denies that it has any such meaning as Lincoln found in it. In the course of denying that meaning,
he denies some of the most undeniable facts of American
history.
invested the Declaration with a meaning that the Gettysburg Address canonized, but which has nothing in com·
mon with the document drafted by Thomas Jefferson in
1776!
The Civil War was not, however, fought because of any
merely abstract moral judgment concerning the ethics of
treating human beings as chattels. It was fought because
eleven states of the Union "seceded," meaning that they
repudiated and took arms against the Constitution and
the laws of the United States. They did so because they
refused to accept the lawful election of a President who
believed that slavery ought to be excluded by law from
United States territories. (The President, by himself, had
no authority to accomplish that exclusion. Nor was there
a majority in Congress to pass such a law, before the representatives of the "seceding" states left Washington.)
Slavery was, in fact, abolished as a result of the Civil War.
This abolition was accomplished, in part, by the Emancipation Proclamation. It was consummated by the Thir-
11
*
*
*
in the free states of the antebellum United States, for public opinion to acquiesce
in the proposition that slavery was in itself neither good
nor evil, and that it was best to leave to the people of a territory the decision whether they should permit slavery as
one of their domestic institutions. This was the famous
doctrine of "popular sovereignty," advanced by Lincoln's
redoubtable opponent, Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas's
doctrine was both appealing and plausible, since it seemed
to rest upon and embody the very kernel of the idea of
popular self-government, that "the people shall be judge."
Here is how Lincoln-dealt with it. The following is from
Lincoln's Peoria speech, of October 1854:
I
T WAS NOT POSSIBLE,
The doctrine of self-government is right-absolutely and eternally right-but it has no just application as here attempted.
Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such application depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man. If he
is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if
the negro is a man, is it not to that extent a total destruction
of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another
man, that is more than self-government-that is despotism. If
the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me
that "all men are created equal;" and that there can be no
moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of
another. [All emphasis is Lincoln's.]
I have quoted so much of classic Lincolniana here, to
bring before the reader an example of that reasoning that
Garry Wills dismisses and ridicules. For Lincoln, of
course, the article of his "ancient faith" was such, not be-
cause it was inherited, but because it was true. Inventing
America was written for no other reason than to obfuscate
and deny what Lincoln here affirmed. The Declaration,
Wills writes, "is written in the lost language of the Englightenment." "It is dark with unexamined lights." It embodies "the dry intellectual formulae of the eighteenth
century" which according to Wills "were traced in fine
acids of doubt, leaving them difficult to decipher across
the intervals of time and fashion." Wills does not think
that Lincoln-like Calhoun-was a political thinker of
6
teenth Amendment. The former was a war measure, aimed
at the property of the enemies of the United States, in
arms against the United States. But we cannot forget that
the destruction of property by the Proclamation had a
double effect, due to the peculiarity of the "peculiar institution" at which it was directed. By the laws governing
this institution, certain human beings were legally defined
as chattels. Interestingly, the root meanings of both "peculiar" and of "chattel" refer to "cattle." But some eightysix thousand of these human beings who had hitherto
been regarded by law as no more than cattle, enlisted and
fought in the Union armies, many of them sealing with
their blood their right to that freedom that the Declaration of Independence had proclaimed to be the universal
birthright of mankind. Nevertheless, the Civil War was
not, we repeat, an abolitionist crusade. It was a war to preserve the Union, to prove that there could not be a successful appeal, as Lincoln said, from ballots to bullets.
Emancipation and abolition became, in the course of the
war, and because of the war, indispensable constitutional
means to a constitutional end. Let us never forget this just
but tragic consummation of our history: that men who
had been called cattle proved their manhood in arms, and
provided indispensable help to save a Union which thereby
became theirs. They also vindicated the Declaration ofln·
dependence, by proving that human laws which rest upon
a denial of the laws of nature cannot long endure. The
Union endured, but only by repudiating that denial and
becoming a different Union. The original Union-or nation-embodied the Original Sin of human slavery. With·
out "a new birth of freedom" it must needs have perished
from the earth. It is this understanding of the Declaration
of Independence, in the light of what "fourscore and seven
years" had revealed as to its meaning, that is immortalized
by the Gettysburg Address, but that Inventing America
maliciously attacks.
AUTUMN 1981
�in 1964 that in a constitutional
regime "the free forms of society ... 'concur' in ...
peaceful cooperation and compromise," he was
using Calhounian Confederate code language, implying
the rightfulness and constitutionality of "secession." Con·
versely, he was implying the wrongfulness and unconstitutionality of Lincoln's executive action to preserve the
Constitution and the Union. But what was this vaunted
''right of secession"? Lincoln called it an "ingenious
sophism" according to which "any State of the Union
may, consistently with the national Constitution, and
therefore lawfully and peacefully, withdraw from the
Union without the consent of the Union or of any other
State." [Lincoln's emphasis.] But, Lincoln asked, if one
can reject the constitutional decision of a constitutional
majority, whenever one dislikes that decision, how can
there be any free government at all? Unanimity is impossible. Government that is both constitutional and popular
also becomes impossible, if the principle of "secession" is
once granted. With what right, Lincoln asked, can the
seceders deny the right of secession against themselves, if
a discontented minority should arise amongst them?
In 1848 Henry David Thoreau published his essay, "Civil
Disobedience." At the same time, Thoreau called for the
secession of Massachusetts from the Union. He adopted
the pattern of abolitionists generally, who declared that
there should be "No Union with slaveholders." Thus
Thoreau invoked an alleged right of secession against slavery, as Calhoun's followers would invoke it for the sake of
slavery. But Thoreau brushed aside any such notion as
that of the "concurrent majority" in Calhoun's sense.
Thoreau saw quite clearly that the argument of a minority
veto upon majority action, in any matter of interest that
could be called one of conscience, did not admit of any
stopping point, short of the minority of one. Thoreau declared frankly that, although he preferred "that government ... which governs least," he would not be satisfied
except with that government "which governs not at all."
Thoreau believed in the withering away of the state quite
W
HEN WILLS WROTE
as much as Karl Marx, and saw the best regime as an anar-
chist regime, also quite as much as Marx. But Lincoln, in
1861, showed by unrefutable logic that Calhoun's premises
led to Thoreau's conclusions. In short, despotism leads to
anarchy, as surely as anarchy leads to despotism. The
Garry Wills of 1964 defended despotism. In the later sixties and early seventies, Garry Wills joined those who
were protesting and demonstrating in behalf of their
Thoreauvian consciences, in behalf of those causes
which, in the name of conscience, would arrest the process of constitutional government. But the earlier Wills
and the later Wills are like two segments of the same circle. Each leads into the other: like anarchy and despotism.
I
*
*
*
differs from the later one, as John
C. Calhoun differs from Henry David Thoreau, so also
do the two "Willses" differ as George Fitzhugh and Karl
F THE EARLIER WILLS
THE ST.JOHNSREVIEW
Marx. Fitzhugh (1806-1881), after the death of Calhoun
in 1850, became the leading publicist and intellectual protagonist of the thesis that slavery was a positive good. Of
all the pro-slavery writers, none roused the anger of Abraham Lincoln more than he did. Yet Lincoln viewed Fitzhugh's argument with a certain grim satisfaction, since it
arrived at the conclusion that Lincoln always insisted followed from the pro-slavery premises: namely, that if slavery was a positive good for black men, then it must also be
good for white men. Calhoun had already argued that, in
the burgeoning conflict in the industrial North, between
capital and labor, the South, with its stability rooted in
chattel slavery, would be the force making for equilibrium
between the two great factions. Fitzhugh went a step farther: only by the enslavement of the white work force,
could the North achieve that equilibrium. By way of contrast, Lincoln declared, in March, 1860, "I am glad to
know there is a system of labor where the laborer can
strike if he wants to! I would to God that such a system
prevailed all over the world."
It is a matter of the highest moment for students of the
political scene today, to understand that what is now called
Conservatism, and what is now called Liberalism (although
neither is properly so called), have their common ground
in the rejection of the principles of the American Founding, above all in the rejection of the principles of the Declaration of Independence. On both sides, there is a peculiar
hatred of Abraham Lincoln, because of the renewed vitality
he gave to the authority of the Declaration, in and through
the Gettysburg Address. The Liberalism of today-or,
more properly the Radical Liberalism of today-stems
largely from the Abolitionism of the ante-bellum North
(not to mention its successor in the Reconstruction era).
And the abolitionist critique of Northern free society, and
the critique by Fitzhugh and his pro-slavery coadjutors of
that same free society, were not only virtually identical,
but were hardly distinguishable from the Marxist critique
of capitalism.
Anyone today reading the pro-slavery literature of the
ante-bellum South, must be struck by the constant reference to Northern workers as ''wage slaves." Indeed, if
someone reading these tracts did not know where they
came from, and when, he might reasonably suppose that
they were written by Marxists of a later period, or even by
Bolsheviks. The general argument against Northern capitalism-which as we noted was shared with the Abolitionists-ran as follows. The "free workers" depended upon
the owners for their livelihood. But the owners employed
them only when they could make a profit from their labor.
There was no provision for the workers during the slack
periods of business; but neither was there provision for
them when they were too young, too old, too sick, too feeble, or too handicapped to be profitably employed. In
these respects, Fitzhugh (and all the other defenders of
slavery) argued, slavery, with its traditions of paternalism
and patriarchalism, with its ethics of responsibility for
masters no less than of obedience for slaves, was morally
7
�as well as economically superior. Thus Fitzhugh, at the
end of Cannibals All! (1857) addresses the Abolitionists as
follows. (In today's parlance, a Conservative addressing a
Radical Liberal, or Garry Wills, vintage 1964, addressing
Garry Wills, vintage 1978):
As we are a Brother Socialist, we have a right to prescribe for
the patient; and our Consulting Brethren, Messrs. Garrison,
Greeley, and others, should duly consider the value of our
opinion. Extremes meet-and we and the leading abolitionists
differ but a hairbreadth. We ... prescribe more of government;
they insist on No-Government. Yet their social institutions
would make excellently conducted Southern sugar and cotton farms, with a head to govern them. Add a Virginia overseer to Mr. Greeley's Phalansteries, and Mr. Greeley and we
would have little to quarrel about.
Extremes do indeed meet. "Phalansteries" were the Fourierist anticipation of the later and better known "communes" and "soviets." Nearly a century before Hayek's
Road to Serfdom, Fitzhugh saw with perfect clarity the inner identity of the slave system and a socialist system.
We noted earlier the denigration of reason, and the
elevation of sentiment, that characterized the radical
thought~equally of the Left and the Right-of the nineteenth century. Capitalism, Marx declared, reduces all
human relations to "the naked cash nexus." It is this
~~nakedness," this reducton of man to a "commodity"
which ((alienates" him, and leaves him feeling alone in a
world without meaning. It is Marxism's promise to restore
"community" (where all men will be "comrades"), that is
the source of that magnetism to which we have adverted.
No promise of wealth to mere "individuals" by a market
economy can possibly compete for long with this secularization of Christian eschatology. But Marx's communist
moral vision is itself adapted from the moral vision of the
ancien regime that we find in Edmund Burke. From the
standpoint of historical dialectics, it is true that the bourgeois regime is "progressive" compared with its predecessor_ That is because, in stripping away ''illusions," it
prepared the way for the revolution of the proletariat. Intrinsically, however, the ancien regime is more humanly
desirable, even to Marx, because these self-same illusions
made man at home in his world. Men are not as ''alien-
as if Conservatism is wedded to the
free market economy. But that is true only on the
surface. Garry Wills deserted Conservatism rather
than embrace the free market. Others embraced the free
market, rather than submit themselves to the authoritarianism of the Left. But Conservatives who embrace the
free market, not as Abraham Lincoln did, because it implements the moral principles of the Declaration of Inde-
T
ODAY IT SEEMS
pendence, but because it is "value free," are building their
politics on that same "House Divided" as the ante-bellum
Union. For a free market economy committed to nothing
but "consumer sovereignty" does not differ essentially
from a "popular sovereignty" that is free to choose slavery. Those who look backward to slavery, and those who
look forward to the dictatorship of the proletariat, will
always have the better of an argument founded upon
"ethical neutrality." Critics of Marxism in our time,
notably the patrons of the free market economy, constantly marvel at the survival of Marxism as an intellectual
force (notably in the minds of college professors of the
liberal arts). They marvel at the apparent immunity of
Marxism to the disastrous fate of every single one of
Marx's predictions, based upon his analysis of the dynamics of capitalism. And this, moreover, despite his
claim of "scientific" status for his analysis, and his staking
of his claim to that status upon the verification of these
same predictions. But the magnetic core of Marxism, the
source of the power of its attraction, consists not in its
economic analysis, or its economic claims, but in its moral
analysis, and in its moral claims. What follows is a representative passage from the Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put
an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to
his "natural superiors."
8
ated" under feudalism as they are under capitalism. For in
the ancien regime there is the illusion that, in being governed by his "natural superiors" the superiors and inferiors
are joined together in ucommunity," an organic relation-
ship in which the whole gives independent meaning to
each of its human parts. In the meaning that the proletarian whole gives to the lives of each of the comrades, it
resembles the feudal order. This is why R. H. Tawneyhimself a socialist-could remark, with profound insight,
that "the last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx." Both feudalism and communism see themselves as bonded into a
community, which is denied to man in "the lonely crowd"
of the de-humanized bourgeois-capitalistic order.
Burke's romantic imagination dignified the morality of inequality, of the ancien regime.
Here, in truth, is the inspiration of Marx's moral
imagination. What follows are excerpts from the Reflections on the Revolution in France:
H
ERE IS HOW
It is now sixteen or seventeen years, since I saw the Queen of
France, then the Dauphiness ... and surely never lighted on
this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful
vision ...
Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men . .. I thought
ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards
to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the
age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and
calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever . ..
All the pleasing illusions . .. are to be dissolved by this conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of
AUTUMN 1981
�life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furn·
Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another,
ished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the
heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to
cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature . .. are to be
example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence
but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by
when built.
exploded ...
On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a
woman ...
In another famous line, Burke also spoke of that "digni·
fied obedience, that subordination of the heart, which
kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted
freedom." Here was the very spiritual charter or gospel of
the Confederacy, in building a polity upon chattel slavery.
For make no mistake, it was this spiritual justification of
the ancien regime that became the ideology of the Holy
Alliance, and that served the cause of American slavery,
when it came across.the seas. For the "exalted freedom"
of the slaves was compared, to its disadvantage, with the
debased freedom of the "wage slaves" of the bourgeois
order. How these "superadded ideas" appeared to the
leader of the American Revolution, may be inferred from
what Washington wrote in 1783:
The foundation of our empire was not laid in the gloomy ages
of ignorance and superstition; but at an epoch when the
rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly
defined, than at any other period.
Everyone knows that Karl Marx called revealed religion
"the opiate of the people." But Marx's critique of Chris·
tianity, the very foundation of his system, also had its lum·
inous antecedent in Burke. Here is what Burke wrote, in
the Reflections, before Marx was born:
The body of the people ... must respect that property of
which they cannot partake. They must labor to obtain what
by labor can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavor, they
must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of
eternal justice. Of this consolation, whoever deprives them,
deadens their industry, and strikes at the root of all acquisition as of all conservation.
To convert Burkean Conservatism into Revolutionary
Communism, all that was necessary was to declare that
the disproportion between labor's endeavor and labor's
success was the Hsurplus value" appropriated by the owning classes. To make the proletariat revolutionary, it was
necessary to deprive them of that meretricious consola·
tion in the "final proportions of eternal justice." Marx did
not state more clearly than Burke the utility of revealed
religion for maintaining a regime of unmerited privilege.
here to compare the proto-Marxism of
Burke, and the Marxism of Marx, with Abraham Lin·
coln. Here is how Lincoln teaches respect for private
property:
I
T IS DESIRABLE
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
Concerning the priority of labor to capital, Lincoln was as
emphatic as Marx:
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only
the fruit of labor; and could not exist if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the
higher consideration. (Nevertheless] Capital has its rights,
which are as worthy of protection as any other rights . ..
What the rights of Capital are, is seen in the following:
That men who are industrious and sober and honest in the
pursuit of their own interests should after a while accumulate
capital, and after that should be allowed to enjoy it in peace,
and . .. to use it to save themselves actual labor, and hire
other people to labor for them is right.
The common ground of Burke and Marx is the idea that
morality-whether illusory or real-is ineluctably grounded
in stratified and invincible class distinctions. For Burke,
this stratification follows the arbitrary lines of the feudal
regime. It requires, in the name of the myths of such a re·
gime, an unequal distribution of the rewards of life, along
the lines of class and caste. Yet the proletarian society of
the future-the classless society of Marx-is nothing but
a mirror image of that very same feudalism. For it is as
arbitrary in its commitment to an equal distribution of the
rewards of life, as the other is to an unequal distribution.
For arbitrary equality-that is to say, giving equal rewards
to unequal persons-is as unjust as unequal rewards to
equal persons. Both are equally unjust, for the same
reasons. The regime of the American Founding, however
imperfect the implementation of its principles, is in its
principles the perfectly just middle way between these
two extemes. As a regime of equal rights, it recognizes the
justice of unequal rewards. There is, said James Madison,
"a diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights
of property originate." "The protection of these faculties,"
he added, "is the first object of government." Because of
this equal protection of unequal faculties, wealth accumu·
lates and social classes become distinguishable. But neither
accumulations of wealth, nor social classes, are fixed in
any immutable pattern. As Lincoln declared, on one of
many similar occasons,
There is no permanent class of hired laborers among us.
Twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer. The hired laborer
of yesterday labors on his own account today, and will hire
others to labor for him tomorrow.
And again:
The progress by which the poor, honest, industrious and resolute man raises himself . .. is that progress that human nature
is entitled to [and} is that improvement in condition that is in-
9
�tended to be secured by those institutions under which we
live ...
It is this moral vindication of the "bourgeois" regime, as
the regime which is truly in accord with human nature,
that makes Abraham Lincoln, and his interpretation of
the Declaration of Independece, that "hard nut" that the
tyrannies of both Right and Left must crack, to establish
their sway and domination. It explains the extraordinary
efforts in Inventing America, of that symbol of the union
of Left and Right: Garry Wills.
I
NVENTING AMERICA begins in this way:
Americans like, at intervals, to play this dirty trick upon themselves: Pollsters are sent out to canvass men and women on
certain doctrines and to shame them when these are declared
-as usually happens-unacceptable. Shortly after, the results
are published: Americans have, once again, failed to subscribe
to some phrase or other from the Declaration of Independence. The late political scientist Willmoore Kendall called
this game ''discovering America.'' He meant to remind us that
running men out of town on a rail is at least as much an American tradition as declaring unalienable rights.
But Wills is not accurate even in this reference to Kendall.
The game Wills calls "discovering America" is called by
Kendall "Sam Stouffer discovers America," and may be
found described in pages 80 and 81 of The Conservative
Affirmation. It is Kendall's commentary on a book by
Stouffer published in the early fifties under the title of
Civil Liberties, Communism, and Conformity. It is one of
the "classic" liberal attacks on the reactionary public opinion of the so-called McCarthy era; and one should bear in
mind that Kendall was one of McCarthy's staunchest defenders. Hence Kendall's testimony is unusual, in this
context, for a guru of the Left to take as his authority!
Here is how Kendall actually described Stouffer's book:
Mr. Stouffer and his team of researchers asked a representative sample of Americans a number of questions calculated to
find out whether they would permit (a) a Communist, or (b)
an atheist, to (I) speak in their local community, or (2) teach
in their local high school, or (3) be represented, by means of a
book he had written, in their local public library. And consider: some two-thirds of the sample answered "Nothing
doing" right straight down the line . .. nor was there any evidence that they would have been much disturbed to learn
that the Supreme Court says that the Fourteenth Amend-
ment says they can't do anything legally to (e.g.) prevent the
Communist from speaking.
In the poll conducted by Stouffer there is, we see, literally
nothing about the Declaration of Independence. What
Kendall observes the American people saying "Nothing
doing" to-at the period in question-is what the Warren
Court (not the Declaration) was saying in interpreting the
First and Fourteenth Amendments. And on this point I
10
think the American people (thus polled) were right, and
the Court wrong. In 1964 I myself published an essay "On
the Nature of Civil and Religious Liberty" in which I
argued that precisely on the ground of the principles of
the Declaration, Communists and Nazis had no just claim
to the constitutional privileges of the First Amendment.
Moreover, I know of no such polls or studies, that Wills asserts exist, in which Americans have "failed to subscribe
to some phrase or other from the Declaration oflndependence."
In any event, it is not phrases that count, but ideas or
principles. These must be stated in terms intelligible to
the respondent. Perhaps the best known slogan of the
American Revolution was "Taxation without Representation is Tyranny." In accordance with it, the Declaration
denounced the King "For imposing taxes on us without
our Consent." The premise underlying these judgments is
that the power to tax is the power to destroy. Does Wills
think that Americans today do not agree with these judgments or their underlying premise? The Declaration says
that the just powers of government are derived from the
consent of the governed. Suppose a pollster, asking
whether the respondent thinks that any government that
governed him, might do so justly without his consent.
Does Wills believe that Americans today would answer
differently from those in 1776? Does he think that they
think that any government might justly levy taxes upon
them-or on anyone else-without the consent, given by
their elected representatives, of the ones taxed?
But perhaps Wills thinks that the arch mystery of the
Declaration is the great proposition, upon which Lincoln
so concentrated attention in the Gettysburg Address, that
all men are created equal. Certainly many are today puzzled by this doctrine. This is not, I think, because of its intrinsic difficulty, but because publicists like Wills have for
so long told them that it is a mere vague abstraction. But
let us re-phrase the proposition, in some of its applications. Suppose, in conducting a poll, one asked whether
the respondents thought it reasonable to divide all human
beings (men and women) into the superior and the inferior, the latter to be ruled by the former, and without their
consent? Or, to put the same queston slightly differently,
suppose one asked whether those· who made the laws
should live under them, or whether the government might
reasonably and justly exempt itself from the laws it made
for others. (One example might be whether the lawmakers
might exempt themselves from the payment of taxes; another might be whether the punishments for either civil
damage or criminal offenses might be different for those
in office, as compared with those out of office.) How
many today would reject Lincoln's simple maxim-interpreting the proposition that all men are created equalthat no man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent?
All the foregoing questions a.re based upon that simplified Lockeanism that Jefferson thought was to be found
AUTUMN 1981
�in the American mind, no less than in the common sense
of the subject. One need not have ever heard of the
names of Hume or Hutcheson or Reid or Stewart-indeed
one need not have heard of John Locke-to know that the
power to tax is the power to destroy, and to draw all the
long series of inferences that follow from it. Wills wants to
turn the Declaration into an esoteric mystery, by convincing us that we do not know things that we know perfectly
welL He would have us think that eighteenth century
beliefs are necessarily different from twentieth century
beliefs, and that the veil between them can be pierced only by the magic of the cultural (or professorial) elite. This
is the priestcraft of our contemporary Dark Age.
I would like to make one
further comment on Kendall's assertion, endorsed by
Wills, that
T
O END THIS DISCUSSION,
the true American tradition is less that of our Fourth of July
orations and our constitutional law textbooks, with their
cluck-clucking over the so-called preferred freedoms, than,
quite simply, that of riding someone out of town on a rail.
Note that even here Kendall says something different
from what Wills represents him as saying. Kendall does
not mention unalienable rights. The closest he comes to it
is when he mentions Fourth of July orations. "Preferred
freedoms" refers almost certainly to the constitutional
doctrines of Mr. Justice Black, not to those of Thomas Jefferson, or of any other of the Founding Fathers. Yet Kendall here is in fact being squeamish, something certainly
unusual for KendalL Riding someone out of town on a rail
is a quasi-euphemism for lynching. Someone-perhaps a
specialist in Burlamaqui or Hutcheson-might not know
that riding on a rail was usually preceded by tarring and
feathering. And tarring frequently resulted in second (and
sometimes third) degree burns. Since the tar covered the
whole body, the minimum result was usually pneumonia.
Not many more survived a tarring and feathering than
survived a hanging. But it was a more protracted process,
and accompanied by terrible suffering. In the thirty-third
chapter of Huckleberry Finn we bid our farewell to the
Duke and the King. These bunco artists have by now forfeited all of our-and Huck's-sympathy, by betraying
Jim back into slavery. In their last appearance Huck sees
them being whooped along by the townsmen they had
cheated. Huck says he knew it was the Duke and the
King,
though they was all over tar and feathers, and didn't look like
nothing in the world that was human . ..
Although he had loathed them before, and hates them
now, he says that
It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful
cruel to one another.
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
When Kendall or Wills tells us that lynching is as much an
American tradition as declaring that there are unalienable, or natural human rights, they are telling us no more
than that evil is as deeply engrained in the American tradition as good. This is a difficult proposition to contest. All
that I would contend is that the principles of the Declaration, which embody the principles of the rule oflaw, stand
in direct opposition to lynching, which is the denial or repudiation of lawfulness. And by a disposition of Providence, as poetical as it is historical, Abraham Lincoln's
first great speech-his Lyceum Address of 1838-was a
denunciation of the growing and dangerous habit of lawlessness, which he observed to be abroad in the land then.
In that speech, Lincoln warned that lynch law and free
government were enemies of each other, and that one
could not long survive in the presence of the other. Lynch
law, we repeat, was but one expression of the repudiation
of the Declaration of Independence. Slavery was another.
Slavery and lynch law went together. Kendall's (and
Wills's) tacit patronage of lynch law is but another aspect
of their tacit patronage of slavery.
According to Wills, Abraham Lincoln was "a great artist
of America's romantic period." This, however, is not in-
tended as a compliment. Rather is it intended as an a
priori explanation of how Lincoln was able to substitute a
fallacious myth of our origins as a nation for the truth
about those origins. Lincoln's artistry, he says, fit the antiscientific, biblical mood of mid-century, so that the "biblically shrouded" figure of "Fourscore and seven years . .. "
presumably evoked acceptance, as "eighty-seven" might
not. And Wills is not tender with Lincoln's character, in
regard to this alleged deception about the date of the
founding of the nation. "Useful falsehoods," he writes,
"are dangerous things, often costing us down the road."
The Gettysburg Address, beginning with its magisterial
invocation of the year 1776 as the point of our origin as a
nation, is a "falsehood," and even a "dangerous" one.
Wills has summoned up a strict standard of truthfulness,
by which he, no less than Abraham Lincoln, must then be
judged.
Wills's entire work, as we shall see, actually stands or
falls by this claim that 1776 is not, and cannot be regarded
as, the birth date of the nation. Lincoln, he says, "obviously gave some thought" to his "Fourscore and seven."
Indeed he did.
I pointed out, more
than a score of years ago, that the beginning of the Gettysburg Address marked as well the end of the long debate with Stephen A. Douglas. For Douglas had declared
that we existed as a nation only by virtue of the Constitution. Notwithstanding the fact that, in other respects,
Douglas was a Jacksonian Unionist, in this he echoes
Southern-and Calhounian-doctrine. It was axiomatic
for Jefferson Davis-and for all who voted for secession in
the winter and spring of 1860-1861-that the United
I
N CRISIS OF THE HOUSE DNIDED
11
�States could be regarded as a single nation, solely by virtue
of the Constitution. Each state, it was held, became part
of the Union or nation by virtue of the process of ratification. The ordinances of secession were regarded as-and
in some cases were actually called~acts of de-ratification.
And there can be no doubt that, were the Union or nation
created solely by the process by which the Constitution of
1787 was ratified, then it could lawfully have been uncreated by the same process. Willmoore Kendall, whom
Wills is obviously following, repeats this Confederate
dogma, saying that there was a "bakers dozen" of new nations resulting from the Declaration of Independence. By
this interpretation, in the Declaration of Independence
the thirteen colonies were not only declaring their independence of Great Britain, they were declaring their independence of each other.
Wills thinks that Lincoln would have had some ground
for treating 1777 as the year of birth of the nation, since in
that year the Articles of Confederation were adopted. But
best of all, as a proposed birth date, he thinks, is 1789, the
year in which the Constitution came into operation. For
this date, he says, Lincoln should have written "Four
score minus six years ago ... " With this ill-placed facetiousness Wills shows himself completely oblivious of the
great ante-bellum debate. He seems unconscious of the
existence of the masterful brief, legal, historical, and
philosophical, that Lincoln presented, notably in his inaugural address, and still more copiously, after Sumter, in
his message to Congress, in special session, July 4, 1861.
Lincoln's argument, as to the nature and origin of the
Union, is presented with Euclidean precision and classic
beauty. It is surpassed by nothing in Demosthenes, Cicero, or Burke.
Wills writes as if Lincoln had suddenly invented the notion that the nation had been born in 1776 as he com·
posed the Gettysburg Address, and that he relied upon
the mesmerizing influence of his vowels and consonants
(e.g. "by mere ripple and interplay of liquids") to secure
his deception. But Lincoln's audience in 1863 and thereafter, unlike Wills, knew very well that the Gettysburg Ad·
dress was but a moment in a dialectical process that had
been going on for more than a generation. Neither Lin·
coin nor the nation ever imagined that he was appealing
to their sentiment, apart from an argument, laid in fact
and reason. It would have been perfectly honorable for
Wills to have taken up the weapons of controversy against
Lincoln's side, as statemen and scholars have done since
the days of Calhoun, jefferson Davis, and Alexander
Stephens. But mere malicious sneering has no place in
such a debate.
Wills tells us, with easy assurance, that "there are some
fairly self-evident objections to that mode of calculating,"
viz., the mode expressed by "Four score and seven years
ago ... " What are these objections?
All thirteen colonies [writes Wills] subscribed to the Declaration with instructions to their delegates that this was not to
12
imply formation of a single nation. If anything, july 4, 1776,
produced twelve new nations (with a thirteenth coming in on
July 15)-conceived in liberty perhaps, but more dedicated to
the proposition that the colonies they severed from the
mother country were equal to each other than that their in-
habitants were equal. [Italics by Wills.]
We note that Wills does not say that the delegates were
not instructed to form a single nation. He says that they
were instructed not to form (or imply formation of) a single
nation. If Wills had said that the instructions for indepen·
dence were in some cases ambiguous, as to whether the
thirteen colonies were to form a single union, state, or na~
tion, he would have asserted what would certainly have
been plausible. But in positively asserting an unambiguous intention not to form a single nation, he is asserting
something for which there is not a shred of evidence.
Not many readers will take the trouble to look up the
colonial instructions to the delegates to the Continental
Congress, in the spring of 1776. Like most reviewers, they
will assume that someone with a prestigious professorship
at a major university, with a doctorate from Yale (all
things advertised on the dust jacket), will of course have
read documents carefully, and reported them faithfully.
Errors like Wills's, launched with such authority, spread
like plague germs in an epidemic. And although it takes
few words to put such errors in circulation, it takes painstaking effort, and detailed analysis, effectively to contradict them.
Turning now to the instructions, we note that they do
not contain the word "nation" at all. The word "union" is
its nearest equivalent. (We note also that in Lincoln's political vocabulary, the words "union" and "nation" were
virtually synonymous.) In the instructions, the word "confederation" is also used in a sense, at least quasi~synony~
mous with "union."
The important question we must ask, in examining the
language of the instructions for independence, is whether
the colonies were, in making a single and common declaration of independence, implying or assuming or declaring
that they did so as members of a common government.
And further, we would want to know whether they implied or stated that they expected their association in and
through the Congress to become a permanent one. An affirmative answer to these two questions is all that would
be needed to sustain Lincoln's thesis with respect to the
"Four score and seven years." Wills, we repeat, by assert~
ing that in july of 1776 thirteen nations or states came
into existence by virtue of the Declaration, asserts that
the thirteen were not merely declaring their independence of Great Britain, but their independence of each
other.
Rhode Island, by its General Assembly, on May 4, 1776,
instructed its delegates
to join with the delegates of the other United Colonies in
Congress . .. to consult and advise . .. upon the most proper
AUTUMN 1981
�measures for promoting and confirming the strictest union
and confederation . ..
such further compact and confederation . .. as shall be judged
necessary for securing the liberties of America . ..
Virginia's instructions-May 15th-called simply for such
measures as might be thought proper and necessary
Most extraordinary of all is the instruction of the House
of Representatives of New Hampshire. For in this case,
the instruction for independence and the instruction for
union, given separately in the other cases, were here com~
bined into one. New Hampshire instructed its (single)
delegate
for forming foreign alliances, and a confederation of the
colonies.
Here "confederation" is synonymous with "union and
confederation" in the Rhode Island instructions.
in reading these documents,
that we are witnessing a transformation in the use
and application of certain key terms. The word
"confederation," like the words "federal" or "confederal,"
was an old bottle into which new wine was being poured.
The American Revolution, and the American Founding,
produced a form of government unprecedented in the history of the world. In later years, James Madison called the
government of the United States a "nondescript," because there was still no word that properly expressed what
it actually was. In 1787, in the Federalist, Madison called
the government of the new Constitution, "partly national,
partly federal," although by the traditional understanding
of "federal" and ''national" such an expression would
have been a self-contradiction. As the late Martin Diamond
has pointed out, the expression "federal government"
would have been a solecism, prior to the emergence of the
American form of government. What had hitherto been
regarded as federal, could not properly be regarded as a
government, and what had hitherto been regarded as government, could not properly admit any distinct or separate sovereignty in any of its parts. In these instructions
we see an early application of "confederation" in a sense
consistent with what was later understood clearly in the
expression "federal government." It would be a mistake to
assume that the later meaning was clearly present to the
minds ofthe men of 1776. Yet it would be an equally great
mistake to fail to perceive, in 1776, the genesis of the later
meaning. Lincoln, one should remember, said that the nation had been born in 1776, he did not say it had already
matured.
W
E SHOULD BE AWARE,
Connecticut, on June 14, 1776, instructed its delegates
in Congress to
.
move and promote, as fast as may be convenient, a regular
and permanent plan of union and confederation of the
Colonies ...
New Jersey, on June 21st, called for
entering into a confederation for union and common
defense .. .
Maryland, on June 28th, in authorizing independence,
also authorized
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
to join with the other colonies in declaring the thirteen
United Colonies a free and independent state . ..
Concerning what might justly be called the burgeoning
national consciousness, consider the language with which
the Georgia Colonial Congress addressed its delegates in
the Continental Congress, in April of 1776. They exhorted their representatives that they
always keep in view the general utility, remembering that the
great and righteous cause in which we are engaged is not provincial, but continental. We therefore, gentlemen, shall rely
upon your patriotism, abilities, firmness, and integrity, to propose, join, and concur in all such meaSures as you shall think
calculated for the common good, and to oppose all such asappear destructive.
We see the coordination of "patriotism" with the "com~
mon good," and that this good is said to be "continental"
and not "provincial." Can anyone, reading these words,
think that in 1776 Georgia (any more than New Hampshire) was engaged in declaring its independence from its
sister colonies?
what could lie behind Wills's assertion
about these colonial instructions. It is certainly true
that the full implications of single statehood, or
union, or nationhood, were not visible in 1776. And it is
true that all of the colonies, while endorsing union in vary:
ing terms, nonetheless did so with reservation. For example, while calling for the formation of the "strictest
union," Rhode Island required that the greatest care be
taken
L
ET US ASK
to secure to this colony . .. its present established form, and all
powers of government, so far as it related to its internal police
and conduct of our own affairs, civil and religious.
Virginia, in like manner, asked that
the power of forming government for, and the regulating of
the internal concerns of, each colony, be left to the respective
Colonial Legislatures.
Pennsylvania required that there be reserved
to the people of this colony the sole and exclusive right of
regulating the internal government and police of the same.
13
�And New Hampshire, the same New Hampshire which
thought that the United Colonies should declare themselves a single "free and independent state," nonetheless
required that,
the regulation of our internal police be under the direction of
our own Assembly.
Could there be any clearer demonstration, than these
words by which New Hampshire reserved its right of internal or local government, that such reservations did not
constitute obstacles, in the minds of those making the reservations, to national unity?
These reservations of local or state autonomy represent,
in generic form, the great principle of American federalism. They reappeared, the year following the Declaration,
in the Articles of Confederation, in Article II, which reads
as follows.
Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not
expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress
assembled.
The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution contains a
similar reservation of the "internal concerns" to the juris-
diction of the governments of the states-and to the people of the states-as is found in those colonial instructions
of the spring of 1776. It reads:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the
States respectively,
o~
to the people.
The notable difference between these two articles is the
presence of the words Hsovereignty" and "expressly" in
the former. But John Quincy Adams, among others,
thought that the spirit of the Declaration (and of the instructions authorizing the Declaration) was stronger in
the Constitution than in the Articles. The Tenth Amendment, by not referring to the powers delegated as being
"expressly" delegated, opened the door to the great contest, begun by Hamilton and Jefferson, between liberalor broad-construction, and strict-or narrow-construction, a contest which continues until this very day. But
the ambiguity in the Constitution which permits two
schools of constitutional interpretation is not different
from the ambiguity in the original instructions for forming a union. If that ambiguity is regarded as militating
against the formation of a national union, then we are no
more a nation today than we were on July 4, 1776.
*
*
*
denies any credibility to
Lincoln's characterization, in the Gettysburg Address, of july 4, 1776, as the birth date of the nation. We have seen that his alleged grounds for this denial,
the colonial instructions to the delegates to the Continen-
W
14
lLLS, WE HAVE NOTED,
tal Congress in the spring of 1776, do not bear out what
he says about them. But Edmund Morgan, writing in The
New York Review of Books, August 17, 1978, in a generally
favorable notice of Inventing America, has pointed to a
very good test of single statehood in the Declaration itself.
For the Declaration reads, near the end, as follows:
That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be Free
and Independent States . .. and that as Free and Independent
States, they have full power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and do all other Acts
and Things which Independent States may of right do.
"Which of these free and independent states," asks Morgan, "undertook to do the acts and things Jefferson specified as characteristic of a state?"
It was Congress [Morgan continues] that levied war through
the Continental Army; it was Congress that concluded peace
through its appointed commissioners; and it was Congress
that contracted the alliance with France. Congress may not
have established commerce, but in the Association it had disestablished it, and in a resolution of the preceding April 6, it
had opened American ports to all the world except England.
In denying that there was "one nation" or anything like
it, resulting from the Declaration of Independence, Wills
makes the extraordinary assertion that the Declaration is
not a legal document of any kind. He calls it and the Gettysburg Address mere "war propaganda with no legal
force."
Now the Gettysburg Address was an occasional address
of the President of the United States. Its force, as such,
was moral rather than legal. Its chief feature, however,
was to reaffirm the principles of the Declaration, and to
reaffirm them in conjunction with another Presidential
act, namely, the Emancipation Proclamation. The latter
of course was a legal act, although its permanent force depended upon the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. The purpose of the Gettysburg Address was to help
to generate the political forces which would lead the nation from the Emancipation Proclamation-whose legal
effect was limited to what could be inferred from the war
powers of the Commander-in-Chief-to that permanent
abolition of chattel slavery that could only be accomplished by an amendment to the Constitution. It is that
fulfillment of the promise of equal human rights by the
Declaration, in the Thirteenth Amendment, that constitutes the "new birth of freedom" wished for by the Address. If Wills regards this as mere "war propaganda" then
he can have little regard for the abolition of slavery as an
event in American history.
To assert, as Wills does, that the Declaration of Independence is not a legal document, is simply amazing. It is
among the more stupendous reasons why we think that
Inventing America should have been shipped back to its
author in manuscript. Evidently Wills-and the readers of
his manuscript-have never held in their hands the StatAUTUMN 1981
�utes at Large of the United States, the Revised Statutes of
the United States, or the United States Code. The 1970
edition of the United States Code, which is before me as I
write, classifies the Declaration among the "Organic Laws
of the United States." Of these, the Declaration of Independence is the first. Second is the Articles of Confederation. Third is the Ordinance of 1787: The Northwest
Territorial Government. Fourth is the Constitution of the
United States and Amendments.
Let us recall that Wills preferred both the Articles and
the Constitution to the Declaration, as marking the beginning of American statehood or nationhood. But the Articles declares, in its preamble, that it was done "in the
second year of the Independence of America." Moreover,
the Constitution, in the form in which it left the Convention, over the signature of George Washington, dates
Itself
in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and
Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States
of America the Twelfth.
Both these notable documents-which Wills thinks Lincoln should have preferred to the Declaration-themselves
refer to the Declaration as the originating document of
the United States.
This dating of the union, at the end of Article VII of the
Constitution, has moreover a particular legal application.
Article VI reads, in its first paragraph, that
our State, and of that of the United States," they wrote,
the first of the "best guides" to this end was
the Declaration of Independence, as the fundamental act of
union of these States.
We see then that the Declaration was not regarded by Jefferson and Madison, as it is by Wills (and Kendall), as an
act whose sole effect was to separate thirteen colonies
from Great Britain. It was an act whereby the separation
from Great Britain was simultaneously accompanied by
union with each other. It was the accomplishment of
union that makes it the primitive organic law of the
United States. This is why all acts of the United States are
dated from the Declaration.
But the Declaration is more even than an organic law.
Its statement of principles remains that statement of the
principles of natural right and of natural law which is the
ground for asserting that the government of the United
States (and of each of the States) represents law and right,
and not mere force without law or right.
In 1844, for example, in a great speech in the House of
Representatives, john Quincy Adams declared that the
assertion of principles in the Declaration of Independence, beginning with the proposition that "we hold
these truths to be self-evident ... " constituted the "moral
foundation of the North American Revolution." It was, he
said, "the only foundation upon which the North American Revolution could be justified from the charge of
treason and rebellion."
All debts contracted and engagements entered into, before
the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the
United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.
From the foregoing, it is clear that there was a "United
States under the Confederation" before there was a
"United States under this Constitution." The fact that
the United States in its subsequent form (that of "a more
perfect Union") acknowledges the debts of the earlier
United States, shows that it remains the same moral person. But Article XII of the Articles of Confederation
accepts responsibility for the debts contracted by the
Congress before the adoption of the Articles, just as the
Constitution accepts the debts of the government of the
Confederation. In short, the United States is continuously
the United States, is continuously the same collective
identity, the same moral agent, from the moment that it
became independent, viz., since july 4, 1776.
In what sense then is the Declaration of Independence
a law of the United States; or, rather, in what sense is it
the first of the organic laws of the United States? The
United States Code does not say. In 1825, however,
Thomas jefferson and james Madison, both members of
the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia, together prepared a list of books and documents to serve as
authorities for the instruction to be offered by the faculty
of law. On "the distinctive principles of government of
1HE ST.JOHNSREVIEW
But Wills hates the very idea that the United States was
born out of a dedication to liberty and justice. For him,
the belief that our political arrangements are in some particular sense in accordance with universal principles of
natural right, breeds only a sense of self-righteousness,
and makes us a danger to ourselves and to others. As an
example of the latter, he cites john F. Kennedy's alleged
willingness "to throw Communist devils out of Russia,
China, Cuba, or Vietnam." As an example of the former,
he cites "the House Un-American Activities Committee!"
In 1823, jefferson, writing to Madison on August 30th,
referred to a meeting that had taken place the previous
month as an anniversary assemblage of the nation on its
birthday. When Jefferson thus referred to july 4th as the
nation's birthday, Abraham Lincoln was fourteen years
old. By this time, such references to the Glorious Fourth
were traditional and customary. No one seemed to doubt
then that the principles that accompanied our beginnings
were as luminous as they were true. It was some years
later that men began to discover the "positive good" of
slavery, and to mutter that the so called self-evident truths
might after all be self-evident lies. Then was the foundation laid for Garry Will's discovery that the Declaration
was, after all, written in "the lost language of the
Enlightenment."
*
*
*
15
�ILLS CONTENDS that the major influence upon
Jefferson, and upon the writing of the Declaration, was not John Locke, but Francis Hutcheson.
Hutcheson was a Scottish philosopher, who wrote a generation or so after Locke. The dates of his books, as given
by Wills, are from 1725 to 1755. Locke died in 1704. Indeed, the principal explicit thesis of Inventing America is
that the Declaration is an Hutchesonian and not a
Lockean document. Wills's principal antagonist, within
these lists of controversy, is Carl Becker.. Becker's The
Declaration of Independence, published in 1922, has long
been regarded as a classic. And in certain respects, its authority-as Wills notes-has gone unchallenged. We
would note that Becker was himself an historicist and a
relativist, and as such took no more seriously than Wills
the Declaration's assertion (in Lincoln's words) "of an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times." However,
Wills cites one noted scholar after another, who has cited
Becker, assimilated Becker, built on Becker. "The secret
of this universal acclaim," writes Wills,
W
lies in the inability of any later student to challenge Becker's
basic thesis-that Jefferson found in John Locke "the ideas
which he put into the Declaration." [Wills's italics]
According to Wills, the thesis of a "Lockean orthodoxy ... coloring all men's thought in the middle of the
eighteenth century" is one which has not been challenged
by "any later student." That is to say, it has not been challenged by a single student prior to Wills.
Wills's bold cliallenge to Beckerian-and all later-orthodoxy, concerning the Lockean orthodoxy of the Amer·
ican Founding, comes to a climax in Chapter 18. This
chapter is prefaced by a paragraph from an influential
pamphlet essay by James Wilson, first published in 1774.
This passage from Wilson, says Wills, was used by Becker
"to establish the orthodox Lockean nature of Jefferson's
Declaration." Here it is, as it appears in Inventing America.
All men are, by nature, equal and free: no one has a right to
any authority over another without his consent: all lawful
government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it: such consent was given with a view to ensure and to
increase the happiness of the governed, above what they
could enjoy in an independent and unconnected state of nature. The consequence is, that the happiness of the society is
the first law of every government. [Wilson's italics.]
Next, we will repeat what Wills says about this passage
from Wilson's essay, and what he says about Becker's use
of it. We give this paragraph from page 250 of Inventing
America exactly as it appears there. If the reader finds the
paragraph confusing, he must ask the apology of Wills.
For Wills has the muddling and confusing habit of using
no footnotes, but incorporating all his reference notes in
parentheses within his text. As we shall presently see,
however, Wills does not only not use footnotes, he does
not know how to read them. Becker, says Wills,
16
calls the Wilson quote "a summary of Locke" (Declaration,
108), part of America's common heritage of ideas. But if the
idea was so common, why did Wilson give a particular source
for it, and only one? Here is his own footnote to the passage
(in his Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament of 1774): "The right to
sovereignty is that of commanding finally-but in order to
procure real felicity; for if this is not obtained, sovereignty
ceases to be a legitimate authority, 2 Burl., 32, 33." He is
quoting in summary Burlamaqui's Principes du droit politique,
1, v, 1; 6( ~Principes du droit nature!, 1, x, 2). Now Burlamaqui
was a disciple of Hutcheson's philosophy of moral sense
(Nature!, 2, iii, 1) and therefore he differed from Locke on
concepts of right (ibid., 1, v, 10) and property (1, iv, 8), of the
social contract (1, iv, 9) and the state of nature (2, iv, ll). If
Wilson meant to voice a Lockean view of government, as
Becker assumed, he clumsily chose the wrong source.
The unsuspecting reader, confronted by this witches'
brew of scholarship, is apt to think that Carl Becker must
certainly have been clumsy, and not James Wilson. And it
would certainly seem as if a whole generation-or
more-of scholars had followed Becker, "like sheep,
through the gates of error." It takes two or three readings
of this paragraph before one can accustom one's eyes to
the forest of parentheses, and then slowly begin to distinguish the sentences within. This, however, is what can be
seen at last. Wilson has quoted something in a footnote.
At the end of the quotation, and within the quotation
marks, he has given a source for that quotation. Wills calls
the quotation "a summary" of a certain chapter in a book
of Burlamaqui, which parallels another chapter in another
book of Burlamaqui. Having read with some care both
chapters in both books, I would call the quotation a paraphrase rather than a summary. But that is not important.
What is important is that Wilson does not present the
paraphrase or summary of Burlamaqui as a source for
what he himself has written. Wills's assertion 'that the passage from Burlamaqui is the "particular source" and the
"only" source for Wilson's alleged "summary of Locke" is
simply untrue. It is easier to see this if one has Wilson's essay before one, and if one sees the footnote separated
from the text at the bottom of the page. Let us suppose,
for example, that after saying that "all lawful government
is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it"
Wilson had appended this footnote: "Our authority is his
consent, Sh., 2 Hen. 6, 4, I, 316." Would this have meant
that Wilson had declared that the source of the idea expressed in the text was the second part of Shakespeare's
Henry VI? Would it have meant more than that Wilson
had found a felicitous expression of his thought in Shakespeare, and that such an expression lent a certain cogency
or weight to what Wilson had said?
Wills's assertion that this note gives the "only" source
of Wilson's thought, is all the more absurd because Wilson's essay has forty-eight separate footnotes. Some cite
Blackstone, some cite Bolingbroke, but the majority refer
to decisions of British courts, and opinions of British
AUTUMN 1981
�judges. As Becker rightly observes, the main point of Wilson's entire essay is to show the close approximation of
the principles of British constitutionalism to the principles of natural law. All of Wilson's footnotes are designed
to confirm his judgments, not to give sources for his ideas.
To repeat: the quotation in the footnote is a paraphrase of
Burlamaqui. The reference to Burlamaqui is simply to
give the source in Burlamaqui of the passages thus paraphrased. The reference then is to the source of the footnote, not to the source of the text. All that buckshot spray
of alleged differences between Burlamaqui and Hutcheson, on the one hand, and Locke on the other, is simply
pretentious nonsense. Wilson has throughout spoken in
his own name, not in that of either Locke or Burlamaqui.
That he has in the main followed Locke, as Becker says, is
not to be doubted on the basis of any evidence supplied
by Wills.
*
I
*
*
N HIS ANXIETY to re-write the intellectual history of the
American Founding, Wills goes to lengths of hyperbole
and exaggeration which are inconsistent with serious
scholarship. He says, for example, that there is "no demonstrable verbal echo of the Treatise [Locke's Second
Treatise of Government] in all of Jefferson's vast body of
writings." Against the many writers who have said that
the Declaration repeats not only arguments, but even the
phraseology of the Second Treatise, Wills airily asserts that
"no precise verbal parallels have been adduced."
Wills, however, thinks that verbal parallels to the Declaration abound in Hutcheson. Here, for example, is a passage from Hutcheson, adduced by Wills as an example of
the proximity of Hutcheson to the jefferson of the
Declaration:
Nor is it justifiable in a people to have recourse for any lighter
causes to violence and civil wars against their rulers, while the
public interests are tolerably secured and consulted. But
when it is evident that the public liberty and safety is not tol-
erably secured, and that more mischiefs, and these of a more
lasting kind, are like to arise from the continuance of any plan
of civil power than are to be feared from the violent efforts for
an alteration of it, then it becomes lawful, nay honorable, to
make such efforts and change the plan of government.
Here is the passage in the Declaration it is compared with:
Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;
and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are
more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right
themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are
accustomed.
But here is what Locke, in the Second Treatise (para. 230)
had written:
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
For till the mischief be grown general, and the ill designs of
the Rulers become visible, or their attempts sensible to the
greater part, the People, who are more disposed to suffer,
than right themselves by Resistance, are not apt to stir.
Who cannot see that the words of Locke are much closer
to the words of jefferson than those of Hutcheson? The
phrases "disposed to suffer" and "right themselves" may
or may not be echoes, but they are key phrases, and they
are identical in Locke and Jefferson.
Here is another example of Hutcheson, provided by
Wills:
A good subject ought to bear patiently many injuries done
only to himself, rather than take arms against a prince in the
main good and useful to the state, provided the danger extends only to himself. But when the common rights of humanity are trampled upon, and what at first attempted
against one is made precedent against all the rest, then as the
governor is plainly perfidious to his trust, he has forfeited all
the power committed to him.
Here is the parallel passage in the Declaration. This is
from the Declaration in the draft originally reported, as
distinguished from that finally adopted:
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, begun at a
distinguished period and pursuing invariably the same object,
evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism it
is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government .. .
And here is Locke, in the parallel passage in the Second
Treatise.
But if a long train of abuses, Prevarications, and Artifices, all
tending the same way, make the design visible to the people,
and they cannot but feel, what they lie under, and see,
whither they are going; 'tis not to be wonder'd, that they
should then rouze theniselves, and endeavor to put the rule
into such hands, which may secure to them the ends fOr
which Government was first erected . ..
Once .again, we have, not echoes, but identical phrases
in jefferson and Locke. The "long train of abuses" has
been the phrase most cited by generations of
scholars-although Wills stubbornly denies that they have
ever "adduced" such parallels. Even more to the point, is
the key word "design," which occurs in both Locke and
jefferson, and which is peculiarly vital to the Declaration's
argument.
Edmund Morgan, in the review to which we have already referred, says flatly that the resemblances of Jefferson's language to Locke are closer than anything Wills has
found in any Scottish philosopher. But even more to the
point-and we will let Morgan make this point for us-is
that in the parallels between Hutcheson and Jefferson
cited by Wills, "the distance from Locke's political principles is not noticeable, indeed it is non-existent." Yet so insistent is Wills upon this very distance of jefferson from
Locke, that he asserts that: "There is no indication )effer-
17
�son read the Second Treatise carefully or with profit. Indeed, there is no direct proof he ever read it at all (though
I assume he did at some point.)" Wills is aware that Jefferson recommended the book to others but thinks that, like
many a professor puffing himself to students, "There
would be nothing dishonest about his general recommendation of the Treatise, made to others while he lacked any
close acquaintance with the text. .. " Yet in 1790, writing
to an intimate friend, Jefferson pronounced "Locke's little
book on government" to be "perfect as far as it goes."
Forty-five years later, near the end of his life, Jefferson
collaborated with Madison-as we have already noted-in
drawing up a list of books and documents for the faculty
of law at the University of Virginia. Again-and for the
last time-he turned to Locke, as he sought by university
education to preserve the principles of the Revolution. In
a resolution, prepared for, and adopted by the Board of
Visitors, it was affirmed to be
the opinion of this Board that as to the general principles of
liberty and the rights of man, in nature and in society, the
doctrines of Locke, in his "Essay concerning the true original
extent and end of civil government," [the full title of the Sec-
ond Treatise] and of Sidney in his "Discourses on government," may be considered as those generally approved by our
fellow citizens of this, and the United States ...
From this recommendation of Locke and Sidney for "general principles" Jefferson went on, as we have already
seen, to recommend the Declaration for the "distinctive
principles" of American government. The pairing of Locke
and Sidney was, as Wills notes, a traditional Whig custom.
I do not see how this detracts from the importance of
Locke. Wills says that the famous letter to Henry Lee is
the only place in which Jefferson ever links Locke and the
Declaration. In this resolution however, Locke and the
Declaration are again linked, and linked in the most authoritative manner. Coming at the end of Jefferson's life,
this resolution has a peculiar and final authority.
Among the many absurdities of Wills's work is that
Adam Smith, as a "moral sense" philosopher, becomes a
"communitarian." Thus the spiritual father of capitalism-or the system of natural freedom, as he called
it-becomes part of the anti-individualism which prepared the way for Marx and today's Left. Had Wills read
that notable book linking the Theory of Moral Sentiments
with The Wealth of Nations, Joseph Cropsey's Polity and
Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam
Smith, he would not have committed such an egregious
error. For he would have learned from Cropsey that the
Scottish school were emenders of Locke, rather than negators or opponents. All their thought moves within a circle previously defined by Locke, and before Locke, by
Hobbes. Indeed, the quotation from Burlamaqui, relating
the purposes of civil society to sovereignty, points back
from Locke towards Hobbes, rather than forward toward
the Scottish school.
18
An important book may still be written about Hutcheson, and the school he represents, and their influence
upon the American Founding Fathers. No responsible
scholar has ever claimed that the Declaration of Independence is purely (or merely) a Lockean document. The substitution of "pursuit of happiness" for "property" in the
famous enumeration of rights is a sufficient obstacle to
such a simplistic view. So is the appeal to the "dictates of
prudence." The ultimate authority for the meaning of the
intellectual virtue of prudence is Aristotle. For it was Aristotle who separated philosophic wisdom from practical
wisdom, sophia from phronesis, sapientia from prudentia.
T
a great deal in the Declaration that points backwards from Locke, towards the
ancients. In that famous letter to Henry Lee in 1825,
Jefferson wrote of the Declaration:
HERE IS ACCORDINGLY
All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of
the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed
essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle,
Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.
Wills attempts to brush this aside and to ridicule the reference to Aristotle, because elsewhere Jefferson depreciates
him. But Jefferson makes clear in the Lee letter that in
drafting the Declaration he was the agent of the Congress, and of the American people. What he wrote was not
intended as a personal statement, but "as an expression of
the American mind." That Jefferson listed two ancientsAristotle and Cicero-before two moderns-Locke and
Sidney-was not casual or accidental. Patrick Henry's
famous apostrophe began by noting that "Caesar had his
Brutus." The Senate, the Capitol, and many other symbols from the Founding period remind us of the power of
the example of ancient Rome, and of ancient freedom.
Perhaps Rome was more looked to than Greece. But Cicero himself looked to Athens to discover the principles of
Rome's greatness. Cicero was an "academic skeptic,"
who, although he wrote both a "Republic" and a "Laws,"
came closer in many respects to Aristotle than to Plato.
Wills ends his Prologue, his apology for writing his
book, with an appeal to the authority of Douglass Adair.
He cites an essay by Adair published in 1946, in which
Adair said, among other things, that
An exact knowledge of Jefferson's ideas . .. is still lacking ... We know relatively little about his ideas in the context
of the total civilization of which he was a part . ..
This, Wills thinks, authorizes his flat rejection of the
Lockeanism of orthodox scholarship. Certainly, Adair was
himself something of a rebel against orthodox scholarship.
He was also the author of what has often been referred to
as the most influential unpublished dissertation of our
time. Adair was restrained more by modesty and perfecAUTUMN 1981
�tionism, than by fear of the orthodox. Adair-who died in
1968-was my colleague and my friend, and a copy of his
1943 dissertation is before me. It is entitled The Intellec·
tual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy. Its exceedingly
bold hypothesis is: that the most important source of Jef.
fersonian ideas on the connection between virtue, free~
dom, agrarianism, and republicanism, was to be found in
the Sixth Book of Aristotle's Politics. Adair's argument,
although brilliantly set forth, is not altogether persuasive.
But it adds plausibility to the notion of an Aristotelian in·
fluence on the Declaration-particularly since Jefferson
mentions that influence himself. When the Declaration
speaks of the people, instituting new government, such as
"to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and
Happiness," he is appealing to a tradition of more than
two thousand years. For safety and happiness are the
alpha and omega of political life, according to a tradition
originating with Aristotle. Political life, Aristotle had writ.
ten, originates in the desire for life, that is, for self-preser.
vation. But it moves on a scale of dignity, from mere life,
to the good life. And the name for the good life is happi·
ness.
In his straining to credit everything Jeffersonian to
Hutcheson, Wills makes much of the fact that Hutcheson
coined the phrase, "the greatest happiness of the greatest
number." He is sure that this is what caused Jefferson to
write "pursuit of happiness" instead of property" or
~<estate," in the famous enumeration. He tells us confidently that from the teachings of the Scottish school
"public happiness" is "measurable'' and "is, indeed, the
test and justification of any government." That public
happiness is the test and justification of any government
is also the teaching of both the Nicomachean Ethics and
of the Politics. Such public happiness would not, how·
ever, be measurable in any mathematical sense. Happi·
ness, according to Aristotle, is the summum bonum. As
such it cannot be counted among good things, since it
11
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
represents the presence of all good things, in the propor·
lions that make them beneficial to their possessor. For ex·
ample, you cannot be made happier by becoming richer,
if you already have all the wealth that you can use well.
But where does Jefferson ever speak of measuring happi·
ness, in the mathematical or geometrical manner that
Wills imputes to Hutcheson? It bears repeating, that in
sketching the literary sources of the Declaration-or,
rather, of the American mind that the Declaration ex·
pressed-Jefferson names Aristotle first of all. Then, after
naming Cicero, he mentions Locke. But the name of
Francis Hutcheson, in connection with the Declaration of
Independence, is never mentioned at all.
POSTSCRIPT
The two reviewers in question were M. J. Sobran, for NR, and
Richard Brookhiser for the American Spectator. In a later article
in NR, "Saving the Declaration," (December 22, 1978) Mr. Sobran
wrote as follows.
The Declaration is a republican document, based squarely on
Locke's theory . .. Which brings me to a personally embarrassing
point. In his recent book, Inventing America, Garry Wills persuaded
me (NR, July 7), that the Declaration can be understood without
reference to Locke. He denied, in fact, that there are any distinct
echoes of Locke, either in the Declaration or in Jefferson's writings
generally. But a careful reading of the Second Treatise makes overwhelmingly clear that Wills is wrong. In diction, terms, turns of
phrase, structure, and of course destination, the resemblance is so
close that it is hard to feel that the Declaration is anything but a sustained allusion to Locke. [Emphasis by Mr. Sobran.]
The reader will, of course, have perceived that in our opinion
the Declaration is in fact much more than an allusion to Locke.
Without that allusion, however, nothing of substance in the Declaration comes to sight. I am pleased to be able to record that Mr.
Brookhiser has authorized me to declare his association with Mr.
Sobran's revised judgment of Inventing America. This is a most
hopeful sign, that for better reasons than mere success, the Right
may become the Center of American politics.
19
�Four Poems
Laurence Josephs
ELM TREE
LATE WINTER PoEM
My elm is dead. Its bark
Peels off in shrugs, aghast
Bendings. Though some birds
Still bud there like leaves,
They sing through its bones
Resentfully, and none will nest.
For Frederick Caldwell II
A fairground edge-of-town,
A wreck stripped for the next
Stop, it shows only absence
Down to the last pennant
Where before the summer sky
Gorgeously intervened.
There has been some snow, I see,
Enough just to receive
The traced pawprints
Of small animals, to and from
The birdfeeder
Where they have mined
A first course of fallen
Seeds left by the birds.
Next spring will hear it
Shrieking in the chain-saw's
Mad embrace, as if
Gargantuan insects
Rubbed mutant wings, until,
Mire in the chimney
And released, all sickness
Burned away, its pale insubstant
Ghost against a pewter sky
Once more will branch
In air, blooming high over the house.
Up early I catch a cold
World almost a part
Of the moon, as if
It had dropped from that
Somehow and hardened.
Let me open the door! 0 let
Me open the window and lean out
Into this mask of silent air!
Has nothing really human
Happened here since last night
Before the snow began to come down?
In the road are tire-tracks:
Tracks of snow pushed aszde
To look like sculptured wavesThe wake of someone rushing past my house
As I slept and dreamed.
Professor of English at Skidmore College, Laurence Josephs has published three collections of poems, Cold Water Morning (Skidmore College 1964), The Skidmore Poems (Skidmore College 1975) and Six Elegies
(The Greenfield Review Press 1972).
20
AUTUMN 1981
�THE PoRCH
UNFINISHED SELF-PORTRAIT AND SEASCAPE
(Late August Mternoon)
Seeing in the glass their life
Losing color- as you saw that last,
Sad summer- painters will make us
Their mirror. Now I am your mirror,
Father, today looking your sickness
Back into your eyes; knowing
Nothing to disguise it in paint or words.
The breeze is transparent
Ribbons coming untied between the trees.
Far back, tin-voiced
Hawks parade the air, not flying,
But afloat, cruciform, at leisure
Just lower than the cloud.
Somewhere closed in all this
I am lying-a book interrupted
By a forgotten bookmark
Beneath which the page is a slightly
Differing color: a pale
Stripe no one could ever have painted;
Almost a whisper of color, unnameableAnd I hear your voice, unrolling too,
Like the ribboned breeze:
~ou are saying that summers were always
Ltke thts; always, always the same
As this: that there was even the same
Thunder waiting somewhere near the tall
Glasses of tea the ice had made
Weep through the tea -colored glass
And run down the sides like tears.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
On the easel where an unfinished
Seascape began to grow from canvas,
I see reflected the start
Of a world losing itself in your skill
That was not skillful enough.
Now it will never flow, that ocean,
Though in my eyes its sketchy tide
Stops, starts, subsides; changing
No course as we knew it could not
When you put aside the last brush.
Horizons show beginning
Is the end; endings begin.
And even God, I think, knew this
Ceding the sea nothing but depth
And that restlessness
From which life came crawling up
On a shore unwilling,
As it always is, to support life.
21
�The World of Physics
and The "Natural" World
Jacob Klein
I
It can scarcely be denied that at the present time physics
and philosophy, two sciences of recognized durability,
each handed down in a continuous tradition, are estranged
from one another; they oppose one another more or less
uncomprehendingly. By the nineteenth century a real and
hence effective mutual understanding between philosophers and physicists concerning the methods, presuppositions, and the meaning of physical research had already
become basically impossible; this remained true even
when both parties, with great goodwill and great earnestness, tried to reach a clear understanding of these issues.
When, in the second half of the last century, physicists
themselves adopted certain basic philosophical positions,
the Neo-Kantian or Machian, for instance, this scarcely affected their genuine scientific work. They did their work
independently of any philosophical question; they conquered more and more territory and were not distracted
from their course by difficulties appearing from time to
time in the interpretation of the formal mathematical apparatus (as in the case of Maxwell's Theory) or in regard to
the validity of ultimate physical principles (as in the case
of the second law of thermodynamics).
In this respect the situation has now changed in an essential way. To be sure, mathematical physics, in conformity with the basic attitude it has never abandoned, is still
content today with what can be established experimentally
and can be given an exact mathematical formulation; it refuses to follow philosophy into the region of what is neither experimentally nor mathematically confirmable and
hence is almost always controversial. Nonetheless, physics
now sees itself faced by questions in its own fundamental
work which have always been taken to fall within the domain of philosophy. In its own right physics raises questions about space and time, causality and substance,
about the limits of possible knowledge and the epistemic
sense of scientific statements and experimental results.
Consequently, it now considers turning to "philosophy"
as a reliable and valid court of appeal, if not for solutions
to these questions, then at least for advice or for new
points of view. The unsatisfactory relation between mathematical physics and philosophy has consequently become
more acute than it usually was in the 19th century. The
particular philosophical tendencies involved are a secondary matter. More importantly, it is clear that no agreement
about the meaning of the most fundamental concepts
which both physics and philosophy employ can be achieved,
e.g., the meaning of the concepts Space," "Time,"
11
('Causal Law,'' ''Experience,'' ''Intuition.''
texts.
Sometimes it seems as if two languages were being spoken, languages that sound the same and yet are totally different. Physicists and philosophers assess this situation
differently only insofar as the physicists are inclined-not
always, certainly, but for the most part-to regard the language of philosophy as unscientific, while the philosophers
-not always, to be sure, but frequently enough-suspect
themselves of something like bad conscience in such debates, simply because they think they are incapable of getting to the bottom of the physical concepts amidst the
formalistic thicket of differential equations, tensor calculus,
or group-theory. This bad conscience is understandable.
For, no matter how philosophy expresses itself philosophi-
22
AUTUMN 1981
Delivered as a lecture to the Physikalische Institut of the University of
Marburg on February 3, 1932, this paper is the only completed work
which one of Jacob Klein's literary executors, David R. Lachterman,
found among his papers after his death in 1978. The first half, roughly
of the paper is in typescript, the second in manuscript with marginal ad:
ditions, not always easily fitted into the text. The transcriber and translator, David R. Lachterman, has completed several elliptical references to
�cally, no matter what "standpoint" it might adopt, it cannot possibly pass by the problem of the World. And does
not physics, most of all, have to do with the world around
us? Don't the formulae of physics give an answer to the
question of the "true world," however "truth" might here
be understood? Even when philosophy believes it cannot
accept the answer physics gives, even when it regards it as
basically unsuccessful, it still has to reckon with it in some
fashion, even if only to refute it. Above all philosophy
must try to understand this answer. Even if philosophy
concerns itself exclusively with things falling within that
other hemisphere of science, the so-called "Geisteswissenschaften," it should never forget, even for an instant,
that mathematical physics is at the foundation of our
mental and spiritual life, that we see the world and ourselves in this world at first quite ingenuously as mathematical physics has taught us to see it, that the direction, the
very manner of our questioning is fixed in advance by
mathematical physics, and that even a critical attitude towards mathematical physics does not free us from its dominion. The idea of science intrinsic to mathematical
physics determines the basic fact of our contemporary
life, namely, our "scientific consciousness."
Mathematical physics and philosophy are nowadays
split apart and at odds with one another; they depend on
one another, even while time and again they are forced to
acknowledge their mutual incomprehension. What is to
be done in this situation? We must first of all try to find a
common ground, a basis of shared questions, such that
our questions are not in danger of missing their target
from the start. Is there any common ground? Where
should we try to find it? If we cannot glimpse it anywhere
in the present, then we have to consider whether we can
find it in the past.
Let us remember that there was an age that did not
know this hard and fast division between philosophy and
physics. Let us recall the title of Newton's work: Philosophiae natura/is principia mathematica. For Galileo the
true philosophy coincides with the true science of the
structure of this world. Likewise, Descrates' entire physics
is contained in his Principia philosophiae. The philosophia
naturalis of the seventeenth century is scientia naturalis,
science pure and simple, the heir to the legacy of medieval
and ancient science. The seventeenth century claimed
that the foundations it gave to this scientia were identical
with the foundations of all human knowing. Leibniz was
the first to open a gap between physics and metaphysics,
between the sciences of nature and of philosophy; however, Leibniz himself also exhibited their essential unity
in an especially impressive way. In the middle of the eighteenth century the paths of the new science of nature and
the new philosophy parted, even though their common
origin could never be forgotten. Furthermore, the contemporary tense division just noted between physics and
philosophy has its roots in precisely this history of the two
disciplines, a history which leads them from an original
unity to an increasing mutual estrangement.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Accordingly, we must try to gain purchase on that common ground by going back to the initial situation, the situation of science in the seventeenth century; from this we
might possibly gain a measure of enlightenment concerning present-day difficulties, even if we simply come to understand the nature of these difficulties better. We should
not forget that all of the basic concepts of contemporary
science were given their now·authoritative stamp in the
seventeenth century. This holds especially true of the
basic concepts of physics, at least of "classical" physics, to
speak in the idiom of modern-day physics. However great
the changes modern-day physics is about to make, or has
already made in its foundations, no one will deny that it
stands squarely on the shoulders of classical physics and,
thus, of seventeenth century physics.
Reflection on the historical foundations of physics is
not an utterly wayward and irrelevant beginning, since
physics itself, even in its most recent phase, has been
forced again and again to look back to the past in order to
recognize the limited character of many of its basic concepts. Thus, the designation "classical physics," used to
refer to the physics of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and
nineteenth centuries, arises from the debate between
quantum mechanics and relativity-theory and the basic
concepts of Galilean and Newtonian mechanics. In their
own day, the debates between the mechanistic and the
energistic conceptions within physics led to the historical
investigations of Mach and Duhem. What we have to do,
in my judgment, is make this turn to historical origins
even more radical. Not only is this demanded by the issue
itself, it is most intimately connected with the basic presuppositions of our knowledge of the world.
II
Let us begin by picturing the general situation of science in the seventeenth century: A new science, desirous
above all of being a science of Nature and moreover a
"natural" science, opposed an already extant science. The
conceptual edifice of this new science was built up in continuous debate with the traditional and dominant science
of the Scholastics. The new concepts were worked out
and fortified in combat with the concepts of the old science. As has been emphasized time and again, the founders of this new science, men like Galileo, Slevin, Kepler,
Descartes, were moved by an original impulse quite alien
to the erudite science of the Scholastics. Their scientific
interests were inspired by problems of practical mechanics and practical optics, by problems of architecture,
machine construction, painting, and the newly-discovered
art of optical instruments. An open and unprejudiced eye
for the things of this world took the place of sterile booklearning.1 However, it is no less true that the conceptual
interpretation of these new insights was linked in every
case with the old, traditional concepts. The claim to communicate true science, true knowledge, necessarily took
23
�its bearings from the firmly-established edifice of traditional science. At all events, such a claim presupposes the
fact of "science"; it also presupposes the most general
foundations of the theoretical attitude which the Greeks
displayed and bequeathed to later centuries. The battle
between the new and the old science was fought on the
ground and in the name of the one, uniquely true science.
One or the other had to triumph; they could not subsist
side by side. This explains the great bitterness of the battle which lived on in the memory of succeeding generations, a bitterness immediately evident even today in the
difficulty we have when we try to distance ourselves from
the interpretation the victors -gave both of the battle and
of the enemy they vanquished.
_
What especially characterizes this battle is not only the
common goal marked out by those most general presuppositions, viz., the one, unique science, but, over and above
this, a definite uniformity of the weapons with which the
battle was fought. However different their viewpoints,
however antithetical the contents designated by their
concepts might be, the antagonists are very largely in accord as to the way in which these contents are to be interpreted, the way in which the concepts intend what is
meant by them whenever they are employed, in short, the
conceptual framework or intentionality [Begrifflichkeit] in
which their antithetical opinions are expressed. This accord has all too often been overlooked. The only issue is:
Which of them handled these weapons more suitably,
which of them filled in the conceptuality common to both
with contents genuinely in harmony with it? No doubt,
the outcome gives the victory to the new science. When it
mocks at the physics of the Scholastics, the physics of
"substantial forms/' the new science is striking primarily
at the unquestioning attitude of the old science, the Scholasticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an
attitude which made this old science unable to detect the
tension between the contents of its concepts and the use it
made of these. Such an unquestioning understanding of
oneself always exhibits a failure to comprehend one's own
presuppositions and thus a failure really to grasp what one
pretends to know. This is the danger to which science is
always exposed; this is the danger to which Scholastic science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries succumbed
as no other science had done before.
To penetrate to the foundations of the new science
and, in this way, to the foundations of mathematical physics, we have to keep this general situation of science in the
seventeenth century constantly in mind. It determines in
the most basic way the horizon of this new science, as well
as its methods, its general structure. It determines, above
all, the intentionality of its concepts as such.
There is a long-standing controversy over how the experiential bases of physics fit together with its specific
conceptuality. The very possibility of distinguishing "experimental" from "theoretical physics," a distinction
which surely rests on nothing more than a didactic, or
technical, division of labor, illustrates the problem. The
24
reciprocity of experiment and theory, of observation and
hypothesis, the relation of universal constants to the
mathematical formalism-all of these issues point again
and again to the two antithetical tendencies pervading
modern physical science and giving it its characteristic
stamp. This controversy, familiar to us from the nineteenth century, fundamentally concerns the preeminence
of one or the other of these two tendencies. Nowadays,
depending on the side one takes, one speaks of Empiricism or Apriorism; physicists themselves customarily side
with the so-called empiricists and confuse apriorism with
a kind of capriciously speculative philosophy. The good
name of Kant has been made to bear the burden of furnishing ever-new fuel for this controversy. I am not going
to take sides in this controversy. The controversy itself
first grows from the soil of the new science and must be
clarified by turning back to its origins in the seventeenth
century. What is primarily at stake is an understanding of
the particular intentionality, the particular character of
the concepts with whose aid the mathematical physics
which arose in the seventeenth century erected the new
and immense theoretical structure of human experience
over the next two centuries.
This intentionality is that of contemporary Scholasticism. The Scholastics believed that by using it they were
faithfully administering the legacy of knowledge handed
down to them by tradition. They believed that they were
reproducing ancient doctrine, especially ancient cosmology, in exactly the same way as it was understood and
taught by the Greeks, that is, by Aristotle. They identified
their own concepts with those of the ancients. The new
science, moreover, followed them in this matter. It, too,
interpreted ancient cosmology along the lines of contemporary scholastic science. It was, however, certainly not
content with this. Rather, it called upon the things themselves in order to rebuke the untenable doctrines of this
Scholastic science, with its seemingly unquestioning certitude. In doing so, it exposed the incongruity between
Scholastic intentionality and the contents the traditional
concepts were intended to refer to. Furthermore, it went
back to the sources of Greek science, neglected by Scholastic science; these sources, too, were interpreted in
terms of the intentionality it shared with Scholastic science. And this interpretation of the legacy of ancient
teachings, involving a characteristic modification of every
ancient concept, is the basis of the whole concept-formation of the new science.
As a result, the special character of these new concepts
can be brought to light in one of two ways. First, we can
contrast the Scholastic science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with genuine Aristotelianism. If we do
so, a direct path leads from the lengthy and little-read
compendia of Cremonini,Z Francesco Piccolomini,3 Buonamico,4 Zabarella, 5 Toletus,6 Benedictus Pereirus/ Alessandro Piccolomini,8 etc., and, above all, of Suarez, as well
as from the humanistically-influenced interpretation of
Aristotle (e.g., in Faber Stapulensis and Petrus Ramus),
AU!1JMN 1981
�back to the Nominalism of fourteenth century. As
Duhem has shown, initiatives leading to the modern sci·
ence of Nature are present everywhere in fourteenth cen·
tury Nominalism. Secondly, we can confront Aristotle
himself as well as the other sources of Greek science, most
importantly Plato, Democritus, Euclid, Archimedes, Apol·
Ianius, Pappus, and Diophantus, with the interpretation
given them by Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Fermat, Vieta,
et al. In what follows I want to discuss only this second
path, selecting just a few characteristic examples. None·
theless, before I begin I must make a more general remark.
Since the pioneering works of Hultsch and Tannery on
the history of ancient mathematics, the relation between
ancient and modern mathematics has increasingly be·
come the focus of historical investigation as well as the
theme of reflection in the philosophy of history. Two general lines of interpretation can be distinguished here.
One-the prevailing view-sees in the history of science a
continuous forward progress interrupted, at most, by periods of stagnation. On this view, forward progress takes
place with "logical necessity";' accordingly, writing the
history of a mathematical theorem or of a physical principle basically means analyzing its logic 10 The usual presentations, especially of the history of mathematics, picture a
rectilinear course; all of its accidents and irregularities disappear behind the logical straightness of the whole path.
The second interpretation emphasizes that the different stages along this path are incomparable. For example,
it sees in Greek mathematics a science totally distinct from
modern mathematics. It denies that a continuous development from the one to the other took place at all. Both
interpretations, however, start from the present-day condition of science. The first measures ancient by the standard of modern science and pursues the individual threads
leading back from the valid theorems of contemporary science to the anticipatory steps taken towards them in antiquity. Time and again it sees contemporary science in
ancient science; it seeks in ancient science only the seeds
of now-mature fruits. The second interpretation strives to
bring into relief, not what is common, but what divides
ancient and modern science. It, too, however, interprets
the otherness of ancient mathematics, for example, in
terms of the results of contemporary science. Consequently, it recognizes only a counter-image of itself in ancient science, a counter-image which still stands on its
own conceptual level.
Both interpretations fail to do justice to the true state of
the case. There can be no doubt that the science of the
seventeenth century represents a direct continuation of
ancient science. On the other hand, neither can we deny
their differences, differences not only in maturity, but,
above all, in their basic initiatives, in their whole disposition (habitus). The difficulty is precisely to avoid interpreting their differences and their affinity one-sidedly in
terms of the new science. The new science itself did exactly that, in order to prove that its own procedure was
the only correct one. The contemporary tendency to subTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
stitute admiration or tolerance of ancient cosmology for
condemnation contributes little to our understanding of
that cosmology. The issues at stake cannot be divorced
from the specific conceptual framework within which
they are interpreted. Conversely, these issues cannot even
be seen within a conceptual framework unsuited to them;
at best, they can only be imperfectly described. The best
example comes from modern physics itself: the discussion
of modern physical theories is ensnared in great difficulties when physicists and non-physicists alike try to ignore
the mathematical apparatus of physics and present the results of research in a "commonsense" manner!
We need to approach ancient science on a basis appropriate to it, a basis provided by that science itself. Only on
this basis can we measure the transformation ancient science underwent in the seventeenth century. A transformation unique and unparalleled in the history of man!
Our modern ''scientific consciousness" first arose as a re-
sult of this transformation. This modern consciousness is
to be understood not simply as a linear continuation of ancient h<UT~I'~> but as the result of a fundamental conceptual shift which took place in the modern era, a shift we
can nowadays scarcely grasp.
I want to try to grasp the nature of this conceptual shift
more precisely, that is, to determine more precisely the
character of the new concepts in contrast with the old.
III
The unambiguous and explicit preference for quantitative over qualitative determinations in the new science
sets it distinctively apart from the old. There cannot be
any difference of opinion on this point. How often have
those lines from Galileo's II Saggiatore (1623) been cited,
that pilosophy is written in mathematical language in the
great open book of the Universe! To be able to read it one
has first to understand this language, one has to know the
script, the letters in which it is written. These letters are
((triangles, circles, and other geometrical Figures"; without their aid we cannot understand even a single word of
that language. II In the second chapter of Kepler's Mysterium cosmographicum this idea finds its most pointed formulation:
God wanted quantity to make its appearance in reality before
anything else, so that the relation between the curved and the
straight might exist (Quantitatem Deus . .. ante omnia existere
voluit, ut esset curvi ad rectum comparatio.) Hence, He first
selected the curved and the straight in order to spread a
reflection of the splendor of the divine creator over the world
(ad adumbrandam in mundo divinitatem Conditoris); for this
purpose the 'quantities' were necessary, namely, figure (fig~
ura), number (numerus) and extension (amplituda or extensio).
For this reason He created the body which embraces all these
determinations. 12
25
�These words point immediately back to Nicholas of Cusa,
whom Kepler explicitly mentions, and anticipate Descartes'
later theory. However, they are also directly connected
with the whole Platonic-Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic
tradition and, above all, with Plato's own Timaeus. This
tradition had always remained alive. For example, in
Roger Bacon's Opus Maius (1266-68) we can find statements such as these: "Mathematics is the gateway and
key to all other sciences." "Anyone who does not know it
cannot understand either the other sciences or the things
of this world" (Qui ignorat earn, non potest scire caeteras
scientias nee res huius mundi.) HLogic, too, depends on
mathematics. Nothing of great significance in the other
sciences can be understood without mathematics." (Nihil
in eis potest sciri magnificum sine mathematica.)" What
distinguishes Kepler's and Galileo's words from such statements in the earlier Platonic tradition? There clearly must
be a distinction here, one that shows itself in the quite different influence, that is, the entirely different role played
by mathematics in ancient and modern science. Is the distinction merely that Kepler and Galileo spoke from a firsthand, living experience of things, while the earlier authors
were attached only to traditional texts? Or, did the two
traditions understand something different by "quantity,"
by "mathematical science?"
To answer this question, I have chosen examples relevant to the foundation of analytical geometry and algebra.
Both analytical geometry and algebra stand in the closest
relation to one another from the outset, although algebra
asserted its primacy within this relation. Both belong to
the foundations of mathematical physics. Vieta took the
decisive step in the realm of algebra, basing himself both
indirectly and immediately on Diophantus. Fermat and
Descartes, who, as is well-known, count as the founders of
analytical geometry, rely directly on Diophantus and
Apollonius, as well as on Pappus. In both cases, then, we
can confront the old and the new concepts by paying attention to the way Diophantus and Apollonius were received and construed. In both cases, what is at issue is
nothing less than the creation of a formal mathematical
language, without which mathematical physics is inconceivable. I shall begin by considering Apollonius' relation
to Fermat and Descartes.
IV
A. Two works by Apollonius particularly captured the
interest of sixteenth and seventeenth century mathematicians: (I) the first four books of his Treatise on Conic Sections, available in the original Greek since the fifteenth
century and since 1566 in the first usable Latin translation
made by Fredericus Commandinus; (2) his "Plane Loci"
in two books. Only fragments of the latter are preserved in
the Mathematical Collection of Pappus, the Latin translation of which-also by Commandinus-appeared in 1588.
These works-along with those of Diophantus, Archi-
26
medes, and Euclid-are among the basic books of seventeenth century mathematical science. Fermat, for example,
undertook to reconstruct the "Plane Loci" on the basis of
the fragments in Pappus and in the light of the Conic Sections. In an introduction added later, the Isagoge ad locos
pianos et solidos, and an appendix, Fermat sketched the
basic features of analytical geometry. Among other things,
he shows that every equation of the first and second degree in two unknowns can be coordinated with a plane
geometrical locus, that is, a straight~line or a curve, if one
represents the two unknowns as (orthogonal) coordinates,
as we would say today. Among the infinitely many possible curves of this kind are the circle, the parabola, the
ellipse, and the hyperbola, that is, the conic sections Apollonius treats in his major work. Independently of Fermat,
Descartes, by solving a locus-problem posed by Pappus
which goes back to Apollonius, arrived at the definitive
conception of this procedure now familiar to us from ana-
lytical geometry. In doing so, Descartes took up again a
line of thought that had occupied him in his youth. Nonetheless, since the studies of Moritz Cantor, Fermat has
rightly been considered the genuine founder of analytical
geometry, since his Isagoge had certainly already been
written when Descartes' Geometrie appeared (1637). Strikingly, neither Fermat nor Descartes unleashed one of
those struggles over priority so common in the seventeenth century. Fermat made Descartes acquainted with
his own works in analytical geometry after the Geometrie
had appeared; nonetheless, neither of them placed any
value on claiming priority for himself. This is all the more
astonishing since they did embroil the entire Republic of
Letters in the most unpleasant disputes over much flimsier points, as Gaston Milhaud has emphasized.l4 The
only explanation must be that neither Descartes nor Fermat believed he had advanced beyond Apollonius on any
essential points. What we take to be the enormous achievement of Descartes and Fermat they themselves believed
they had learned in essence from Apollonius or Pappus.
Fermat finds fault with Apollonius only because he did
not present matters "generally enough" (non satis generaliter).15 He says very cautiously that his general procedure
for constructing geometrical loci "was perhaps not known
to Apollonius" (ab Apollonio fortasse ignorabatur). 1 And
'
Descartes is quite convinced that the Ancients-he expressly names Pappus along with Diophantus-deliberately erased the traces of their true knowledge out of a
kind of perverted cunning (perniciosa quadam astutia) and
divulged to us, not their own art, but only a few of their resultsP I want to examine this matter more closely.
When Apollonius considers a conic-section, e.g., the ellipse in Book I, Theorem 13 of the Treatise on Conic Sections,18 he begins by passing a plane through the axis of a
cone and then lets the cone be intersected by another
plane in such a way that the desired figure, an ellipse in
this case, emerges on the surface of the cone; the line of
intersection of these two planes forms the diameter of the
ellipse (see Fig. 1).
AUTUMN 1981
�A
day we call the parameter of the ellipse and in Apollonius
is called bpO{a, because it is perpendicular to the diameter
and hence is "straight.") If, now, a perpendicular to ED is
drawn at M, and Pis connected with D, then the segment
PD cuts the perpendicular from M at point X, which determines segment MX. The segments EM and FM thus
stand in a ratio that can be exactly determined geometrically and this holds true of any point F on the ellipse. In
other words, this ratio is characteristic of ~he entire ellipse
and, consequently, of any ellipse as such. Apollonius calls
the segments EM and FM, respectively, ~ &7roTEJ'VOJ'€v~
(the line "cut off' by the diameter of the chord) and ~
TE7a"fl'{vw• xaT~'YI'€v~ (hl ri)v &&J'ETPov) the line "drawn
down" to the diameter in a determinate way (that is, not
in an arbitrary, but in an "ordered" way)-in Latin translation, abscissa and ordinatim applicata, or for short, ordinata.l9 Apollonius uses these segments, the Habscissa" and
the "ordinate/' in every individual case, in order to define
Figure 1
An auxiliary line is drawn from the vertex A which meets
the plane of the base of the cone at point K; AK is parallel
to the diameter ED. From an arbitrary point F on the ellipse a straight line FM is drawn to the diameter in a determinate manner, namely, in such a way that the chord
FF' is bisected by point M. Consequently, FF' becomesas we say today-a conjugate chord to the diameter ED.
(Compare Figure 2.)
F
MF
l.
=
EM-MX
Figure 2
It is then proved that the square on FM equals the rectangle made up of EM and a segment MX (in modern notation: FM2 ~ EM•MX), where the segment MX is defined
as follows: on a perpendicular line dropped to E the segment EP is drawn, which stands in the same ratio to the
diameter ED as the rectangle BK, CK to the square on
AK (in modern notation: EP:ED ~BK·CK:AK 2 ). (Compare Fig. 1). The straight-line EP corresponds to what toTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the general properties, the basic "planimetric properties,"
characteristic of different conic-sections.
What distinguishes these segments from our "co-ordinates" employed for the first time by Fermat and Descartes? First of all, the axes to which they are referred,
viz., in the present instance, the diameter ED and the tangent to the conic atE, "do not constitute a system of lines
on their own, but like other auxiliary geometrical lines
make their appearance only in connection with the conic
section; they are brought into existence by the theorem to
be proved in each instance."20 This procedure, which for
the Greeks themselves belonged to "Analysis," has been
called "geometrical algebra." This expression, first used
by Zeuthen21 and now widely current, is quite felicitous
insofar as it hints at both the affinity as well as the difference between the Greek and the modern procedure.
The term, however, does not indicate that the procedure
can only be carried out on different conceptual levels in
these two different cases. In each case Apollonius has in
view the particular ellipse, which is cut out on the surface
of a particular cone by two particular intersecting lines.
The representation in the drawing gives a true 'image'
[Abbild] of this cone, these intersecting lines and this ellipse. There are infinitely many possible cones, sections,
and ellipses. The procedure specified is applicable to all of
them-its generality consists in this-but to this generality of procedure there does not correspond the generality
of the object. There is no "general object" for the drawing
ing to represent in a merely symbolic way [symbolisch ].
There are infinitely many possible, more or less good, images of the one ellipse represented here. And there are, in
turn, infinitely many such ellipses which can be exhibited
or 4 'imaged." The characteristic of the f.U:t.O'Yip.&nxa, math-
ematical objects in the Greek sense, is precisely that they
can be grasped by the senses only in images, while they
themselves, in their unalterable constitution, are accessi-
ble only to the discursive intellect; however, there are infinitely many of these objects. 22 What the phrase "there
are" is supposed to mean here, how the mode of being of
27
�mathematical objects is to be understood, is one of the
great disputes in Greek philosophy. No one disputes,
however, that mathematical science as such has to do
with these "pure" figures or formations [Gebilde] whose
nature is accessible to the intellect alone. The lines drawn
in any particular diagram and their ratios belong to this
"pure" ellipse which is exhibited by them. To be sure, in
the case of every individual ellipse-thanks to the generality of the procedure-such "abscissas" and "ordinates"
can always be singled out, but each time line-segments belonging to the particular ellipse in question are intended.
This is not due to the imperfection of Greek mathematics,
its defective means of presentation, or its inadequate
capacity for generalization, but is rather entailed by the
specific intentionality of Greek science. Its concepts in
each instance intend the individual objects themselves;
they are-to speak in Scholastic language-intentiones
primae ["first intentions"]-that is, concepts which refer
immediately to individual objects. This is in harmony
with the means of presentation which Greek science employs. The lines drawn in the figure exhibit the object,
they "image" it. Consequently, the mode of presentation
of Greek mathematics-with a single exception which we
shall come to later-is never merely representative [stellvertretend], never symbolic, but is always the presentation
of an image [abbildlich], and in this way first-intentional.
For this reason, the designation "geometrical algebra,"
which perhaps takes its bearings too much from the exceptional case we shall discuss later, does not really do
justice to the facts of the case.
In contrast to analysis in our own sense, Greek analysis
does not merely have a different style of presentation, but
embodies a fundamentally different relation between the
style of presentation and what is presented. What, in fact,
do the lines which Descartes and Fermat employ as abscissas and ordinates signify? What do the curves which
they draw mean? In the second part of his Discourse on
Method, Descartes gives us exhaustive information on this
point-" In these curves he intends to exhibit only relations or proportions (nihil aliud quam relationes sive proportiones~4 and to do so in the greatest possible generality
(et quidem maxime genera/iter sumptas). 25 The exhibition
of these relations in line-segments is only the simplest and
clearest illustration for the senses and the imagination, so
long as it is a matter of a single relation. In order to survey
many such relations together and to be able to keep them
conveniently in memory, they have to be simultaneously
represented [representiert] by appropriate signs of ciphers,
namely, by letters. Illustration by lines and representation
by letters are thus merely two modes of the very same
symbolic style of presentation. Lines and letters both are
here simply the most suitable bearers of the general relations and proportions being considered; they are merely
"les sujets qui serviraient a m'en rendre la connaissance
plus aisee. "26 The ellipse inscribed within coordinate-axes
(as we employ them today, using the method worked out
by Descartes and Fermat) (Fig. 3)
28
Figure 3
is thus no longer an image of the "pure" ellipse, the Ellipse-Itself. The coordinate-axes drawn are no longer images
of a pair of straight lines applicable to the "pure" ellipse,
but merely symbolize the generally possible use of such a
pair. The abscissa and the ordinate of a point when actually drawn no longer exhibit particular line-segments in
the manner of images, but "illustrate" the general procedure of Apollonius; in other words they stand immediately
only for the general concepts of "abscissa" and ('ordinate"
resulting from that procedure and not for the line-segments directly intended by these concepts in each individual instance. Accordingly, the modern concepts of "abscissa" and ''ordinate" are intentiones securidae [''second
intentions"], concepts which refer directly to other concepts, to intentiones primae, and only indirectly to objects.
In the language of mathematics this means: They are concepts of the "Variable n." For this reason the abscissa and
ordinate axes can be detached from the realm of objects.
All the curves investigated with their help are from now
on nothing but symbolic exhibitions of various possible
relations, or of the different "functional" relations, between two (or more) variables.
All this, however, is only one side of the matter (the side
emphasized principally by the Neo-Kantians and viewed
by them as the only essential aspect). It is no less essential
that these symbolic curves were understood as the images
of the curves exhibited by the Ancients. For example, the
ellipse inscribed within coordinate-axes was regarded as
the very same ellipse treated by Apollonius. Precisely this
assumption led Fermat and Descartes to believe that they
were not proceeding any differently than Apollonius had.
Although, in fact, there has been a shift in conceptual-levels, Fermat thinks that he has simply interpreted many of
Apollonius' theorems more generally (generalius), 27 that
his procedure merely opened up a "general path" to the
construction of geometrical loci (generalis ad locos via)" in
exactly the sense in which Apollonius says that Book One
of his Conic Sections treats things more generally or uniAUTUMN 1981
�versally ("a86)..ov p,&AAov~ 9 than his predecessors had
done. (And not even this is certain for Fermat, if we reflect on his word fortasse ["perhaps"].) What Fermat and
Descartes call "generalization" is in reality a complex conceptual process ascending from intentio prima to intentio
secunda while, at the same time, identifying these. Only in
this way can we understand what Descartes means when
he characterizes his analytical procedure as a unification
of the geometrical analysis of the Ancients with algebra.
This unification is brought about through a symbolic in·
terpretation and exhibiton of geometrical forms, on the
one hand, and of arithmetical ratios, on the other. Both
kinds of "quantities" are viewed together with regard to
their common 1 "general" quantitative character and ex~
hibited in this generality. Consequently, the modern analytical procedure has to do immediately only with "general
quantities." However, these "general quantities," on the
whole, can only be sensibly exhibited because their generality at the same time is understood as variability, that is,
because these magnitudes are thought of from the start as
"alterable." (And, indeed, this holds true as much of the
magnitudes posited as 'constant' as it does of genuine
variables.) The <(being" of "general magnitudes" consists
here only in their peculiar ability to take on all, or all admissible, values one after the other. This is exactly what
gives all of them the capacity to replace particular line-seg·
ments or particular numerical values. Their symbolic exhibition corresponds to what Kant understands by a
schema. Kant says:
This representation of a universal procedure of imagination
in providing an image for a concept [i.e., assigning to a first intention the image belonging to it], I entitle the schema of this
concept. 30
The schema can be directly transformed into an image
[Abbild], if the segments and ratios of segments, of which
it consists, assume numerically determinate lengths and
values. The possibility of identifying prima and secunda
intentio is, therefore, based on this, that the schema is or·
dinarily understood as a schema already transformed into
an image. Schematic imageability [Abbildlichkeit] is thus
the element which allows us to illustrate the generalization of Arithmetic into Algebra, or, in other words, to
"unite" geometry and algebra.
Only in this way can we come to understand that Des·
cartes' concept of extensio identifies the extendedness of
extension with extension itself. Our present-day concept
of space can be traced directly back to this. Present-day
Mathematics and Physics designate as "Euclidean Space"
the domain of symbolic exhibition by means of line-segments, a domain which is defined by a coordinate system,
a relational system [Bezugssystem], as we say nowadays.
"Euclidean Space" is by no means the domain of the fig·
ures and structures studied by Euclid and the rest of
Greek mathematics. It is rather only the symbolic illustration of the general character of the extendedness of those
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
structures. Once this symbolic domain is identified with
corporeal extension itself, it enters into Newtonian physics as "absolute space." At the present time it is being criticized by Relativity Theory, which has been steered by
the question of "In variance" into trying to break through
these symbolic bounds, while continuing to use this very
symbolism.
B. The founding of analytical geometry by Descartes
and Fermat is also conditioned by the immediately preceding development of algebra and the language of algebraic formulae. Vieta, as I have said, provided the decisive
impetus here. I want to consider now, as a further example of this conceptual shift, Vieta's relation to traditional
algebra.
The science of algebra, in the form in which Vieta encountered it in the sixteenth century, namely, in the form
of a doctrine of equations, was received in the West from
the thirteenth century on as an Arabic science. This Arabic science was, in all probability, nourished essentially by
two Ancient sources. We can identify one of these straightaway, viz., the Arithmetic of Diophantus; the other can
only be indirectly inferred. (Tannery believed that he
could recognize it in a lost work by a contemporary of Diophantus, sc., Anatolius.) In any case, Diophantus is by far
the most important source, as the very name "Algebra" indicates: the word ''Algebra" (a 'nomen barbaricum/ as
Descartes says) is in Arabic nothing more than the first
half of a formulaic expression for the basic rule for solving
equations that Diophantus sets out at the beginning of
Book I of his Arithmetica.l 1
The doctrine of equations had made great progress in
the West, before people began, in the second half of the
sixteenth century, to take up Diophantus' work itself.
Modern algebra and modern formalism grew out of
Vieta's direct occupation with Diophantus; later writers
merely elaborated and refined his work. Here, then, in
Vieta's reception of Diophantus, we encounter one of
those nodal-points of development, a point where the new
science arose from the confrontation of two distinct conceptual planes.
The surviving six books of Diophantus' Arithmetic*
teach how to solve problems of reckoning which today are
familiar to us as determinate and indeterminate equations
of the 1st and 2nd degree. Diophantus, in giving these solutions, uses, in addition to other signs, a series of abbreviations for the unknowns and their powers. In every case it
is only a matter of a simple abbreviation; this is above all
the case with the sign for the unknown, which is nothing
other than an abbreviation of the word &p,Op,6<. Heath has
conclusively explained this point. Diophantus' "epochal
*[Readers of the Review may be interested to know that the "lost" books
of Diophantus' Arithmetica have now been discovered in an Arabic
translation. See J. Sesiano, The Arabic Text of Books IV to VII of Diophantus' 'ApdJp.rtnx& . .. edited, with translation and commentary (Ph.D.
Diss., Brown Univ. 1975).]
29
�invention" (to use Hultsch's phrase)32 consists in his having introduced this sign into the logistical procedure of solution, that is, he reckons or calculates with the unknown.
Apart from the unknown or unknowns and their powers
he admits only formations that correspond to rational
numbers, i.e.~ to integers and fractions. In modern termi·
nology, only numerical coefficients appear. What does an
equation look like in Diophantus? Let us look at a very
simple example which I shall write in its simplest form:
That is, lxptfJp.ol OUo p.ov&OES rPt'i:~ '[(JO'i Elalv 1.wv&cn brrci.
Or, in English, "Two numbers [lxP<OI'ot] and three units
are equal to seven units." The sign s is a ligature for
&p,OI'6s; the sign IV! (or tt=J is an abbreviation for l'ov&s or
l'ov&!i<S (the plural is also written 1'"). The corresponding
equation in Vieta, which for the sake of simplicity I shall
write in modern form, since this does not basically deviate
from his, is: 2x + 3 ~ 7. Is this merely a technically more
convenient form of writing? Do the two equations say entirely the same thing, if we disregard the mode of writing?
To answer this question we have to look a little more
closely at the Greek manner of writing. (It is of no importance here whether Diophantus wrote in exactly this way;
the extant manuscripts reproduce what is essential.) What
is particularly surprising is the addition of the sign for
l'ovali<S. Scholars have tried to explain this as intended to
discriminate with sufficient clarity the numerical signs
which specify the number [Anzah~ of dptOI'o(, i.e., the
number of the unknowns (thus, in our case, the sign /3),
from the signs for the purely numerical magnitudes (in
our case the sign)'). If the sign M did not stand between /3
and)', then the expression could be read: 2 C,p,OI'o( and 3
C,p,OI'o( together make 7. Regardless of the fact that in a
great many instances confusion is not possible at all, this
interpretation fails to recognize the fundamental importance of the monad, or the monads, for Greek arithmetic.
Hence, it also misjudges the Greek concept of dptOI'ot,
the Greek "number-" concept in general. 'Apt01'6s does
not mean "Zahl," [number in general) but 11 Anzahl/' viz.,
a definite number of definite things: 'II'Els &pt01'6s nvos
ian. ("Every number is a number of something." 33 ) In
daily life we frequently have to do with numbers of visible
and tangible objects, each of which is in each case just
one. However, the very possibility of counting, where we
utter the same words again and again, viz., "two,"
~<three," "four," etc., while referring to different things at
different times, points to objects of a quite different sort,
namely, to incorporeal, "pure," ones, to "pure" monads.
The Greek science of arithmetic is occupied with these
monads. For this reason the well-known definition of
&pdJp.Os in Euclid runs as follows: ro €x p.ovciOwv
av'Yx•ii'Evov 'll't./i/Oos (Euclid 7, Def. 2), "a multitude composed of monads, of unities." What it means that there are
such monads, the question of the mode of being of these
30
pure monads, is the great issue in Greek philosophy, as I
have already mentioned. Indeed, the case of the monad is
one of the ultimate issues which divide Plato from Aristotle. It is not a matter of controversy, however, that only
these pure monads as such can be the object of scientific
arithmetic. According as one interprets the mode of being
of these pure monads there can or cannot exist a scientific
doctrine of reckoning, a logistic, alongside arithmetic, the
doctrine of pure numbers and pure numerical relations.
Diophantine arithmetic is in this sense a scientific logistic
and stands to arithmetic in much the way the metrics of
Heron of Alexandria stand to theoretical geometry. 34 It focuses upon the field of pure monads. Every single number
which it treats is a number of such monads. Its mode of
writing is accommodated to this fact. Even the unknown,
the dptOwfs which has to be reckoned, is a definite
number of monads, although still unknown at first and
"indeterminate" in this sense alone. All the signs used by
this logistic refer immediately to the enumerated objects
in question here.
How does the new science interpret this situation? In
his work "In artem analyticen Isagoge" published in 1591
Vieta introduces the fundamental distinction between a
''logistica numerosa" and a "logistica speciosa." The former is a doctrine of numerical equations; the second re-
places numerical values with general "symbols," as Vieta
himself says, that is, with letters. (We can, in this context,
disregard the fact that Vieta, in accordance with his "Law
of Homogeneity," has these symbols apparently refer to
geometrical formations.) Logistica speciosa gives Vieta the
capacity, not only of writing an expression such as
ax+ b ~ c (in a much more detailed form, with which we
are not concerned here)-initiatives in this direction can
be found prior to Vieta-but also of calculating with this
expression. With this step, he becomes the first creator of
the algebraic formula.
How are we to understand this step from 2x to ax, from
the numerical coefficient (the term "coefficient" stems
from Vieta himself) to the literal coefficient? Could Diophantus have taken basically the same step? The answer
to this depends directly on how we interpret the numerical sign "2." For Vieta the replacement of "2" by "a" is
possible because the concept of "two" no longer refers, as
it did for Diophantus, directly to an object, viz., to two
pure monads, but in itself already has a umore general"
character. "Two" no longer means in Vieta "two definite
things," but the general concept of twoness in general. In
other words, in Vieta the concept of two has the character
of an intentio secunda. It no longer means or intends a determinate number of things, but the general number-character of this one number, while the symbol "a" represents
the general numerical character of each and every number. In this sense the sign "a" represents "more" than the
sign "2." The symbolic relation between the sign and what
it designates is, however, the same in both cases. The replacement of "2" by "a" is in fact only "logically required
here." However, in this case as wel1, this
uz" is identified
AUTUMN 1981
�with the sign employed by Diophantus-and this is the
decisive thing. The concept of two ness is at the same time
understood as referring to two entities. (Modern set theory
first tries to separate these two constituents, to clarify
what "at the same time" means.) In any case, Vieta, as the
result of this identification, understands Diophantus' logistic as a logistica numerosa which "logically" presupposes the "more general" logistica speciosa. Thus, Vieta
says in paragraph 14 of his Isagoge that Diophantus practiced the art of solving equations most cleverly. He continues: "Earn vera tanquam per numeros non etiam per species,
quibus tamen usus est, institutam exhibuit." ("However,
he exhibited it [this art] as if it were based on numbers and
not also on species [that is, the literal-signs,] although he
nonetheless made use of these species.")35 Diophantus
kept silent about the latter, in Vieta's opinion, only so as
to make his acuity and his skill shine more brightly, since
the numerical solution-procedure is indeed much more
difficult than the convenient literal-reckoning. The relation between Fermat and Apollonius finds its exact counterpart here: Vieta sees in literal-reckoning only a more
convenient, because more general, path to the solution of
the problems posed. He can do this because he interprets
the numbers with which Diophantus dealt from a higher
conceptual level, because, in other words, he identifies
the concept of number with the number itself, in short he
understands Anzahl [counting-number] as Zahl [number
in general]. Our contemporary concept of number [Zahlbegriffj has its roots in this interpretation of the Ancient
c,p,ep.6s.
We can now understand how important it is that
Bachet, who in 1621 (hence, after Vieta) published the
first usable edition and Latin translation of Diophantus,
abandons the current rendering of the sign for the p.ovas.
"Who," he says, "does not immediately think of six units
when he hears the number 6 named?" ("Ecquis enim cum
audit numerum sex non statim cogitat sex unitates?") "Why
is it also necessary to say 'six units,' when it is enough to
1
say 'six'?" ("Quid ergo necesse est sex unitates dicere, cum
sufficiat dicere, sex?'')l 6 This discrepancy-felt to be selfevident-between cogitare (thinking) and dicere (saying
and also writing) expresses the general shift in the meaning of the concept from intentio prima to intentio secunda,
together with their simultaneous identification. Consequently, there is no longer anything to prevent Vieta's
logistica speciosa from becoming a part of geometrical
analysis; this is exactly what Fermat and Descartes explicitly did. The unification of these two disciplines is basically complete in Vieta' s ars analytica. Modern analysis is,
therefore, not a direct combination of Ancient geometrical analysis with the Ancient theory of equations, but the
unification of both on the basis of a transformed intentionality. The same shift in meaning can be established in
a whole series of concepts. For instance, the mathematical term OVvafus, 'power' in ancient mathematics, means
only the square of a magnitude, while we speak as well of
the third, the fourth power, etc. We do not encounter this
THEST.JOHNSREVIEW
relation in the mathematical domain alone. It also holds
between the modern concept of 'method' and the Greek
term p.€8ooos, between our 'theory' and Greek B<wPia. In
two cases, those of substance and causality, this shift in
meaning was of the greatest importance for the construction of the new science. I cannot discuss these now. I
want simply to remark that the relation here is more complicated, inasmuch as these concepts-like all concepts
belonging to 1rpwr~ qn"Aoao<ria, the Ancient ontological
fundamental-science-themselves already have the character of intentiones secundae; this is why the new science
considered itself the sole legitimate heir of ancient philosophy, why, in other words, mathematical physics can in a
certain sense replace ancient ontology for us. I want now,
by way of conclusion, to turn to the exception I mentioned earlier and thereby compare one of the bases of ancient cosmology with the fundaments of the modern
study of nature.
C. I said that what is peculiar to the conceptual intention of ancient science-and especially of Greek mathematics-is that its concepts refer immediately to definite
objects. This obviously does not hold true of the 5th book
of Euclid's Elements which goes back to Plato's friend
Eudoxus. This book contains the so-called general theory
of proportions, that is, it treats ratios and proportions of
p.ey€8~, magnitudes in general. Accordingly, it does not
treat the ratios of particular magnitudes, geometrical
forms for instance, or numbers or bodily masses or time-
segments, but ratios "in themselves," the wholly undetermined bearers of which are symbolized [symbolisch . .. versinnbildlicht] by straight lines. The fifth book of Euclid, in
fact, contains a "geometrical algebra." The exceptional
character of this branch of Greek mathematics brings it
into immediate proximity to Greek ontology. It is not surprising, therefore, that it had an exemplary, although diverse, significance for both Plato and Aristotle.
This xcxOO>..ov 7rPcx'YJ.UXTEia,31 this scientia generaliS or
universalis, took on an even greater importance for the
new science, if that is possible. A direct path leads from
the fifth Book of Euclid and the late Platonic dialogues,
through the preface of Proclus' Commentary on Book
One of Euclid, and the Latin translation of that work by
Barozzi in 1560, to Kepler's astronomical researches, to
Descartes' and Wallis' mathesis universalis, to Leibniz's
universal characteristic and finally to modern symbolic
logics, on the one hand, and, on the other, to Galileo's mechanical investigations and to the conception of natural
laws in general. (The latter connection has not been sufficiently emphasized up to now.) The close relation between
the general theory of proportions and the new science is
established from the start by their kindred conceptual
basis.
What is important, however, is the very different ways
in which ancient cosmology and seventeenth century
physics made use of the concept of proportion. I want to
31
�try to define this difference by using the example of seventeenth century interpretations of Plato's Timaeus. In
that dialogue, the mathematician, the "Pythagorean" Timaeus, gives a genetic presentation of the construction of
the world. (In this context, and only in this, can we disregard the fact that this presentation does not claim to be a
valid €7na7'1/p:q, a true science, but claims only to give an
Elxws !LiiOos, an image approximating the truth as closely
as possible.)l 8 A chaotic state of the world-matter precedes
the origin of the world: Fire, Air, Water, and Earth are in
disharmonious and disordered motion, they pass freely
into one another, they are at first nothing but 7fA~!L!LEAws
xed drrixrws xtvoVp,€vcx.39 The divine demiurge brings
them from this condition of dis-order into the condition of
order, of nXtts-: Els r&~w . .. if'YCX'YfV Ex rfjs lna~t&s. 40 How
does he bring about this condition of order? By producing
a self-maintaining equilibrium among the world-materials,
so that their restless passage into one another yields to
well-balanced rest, turns into ~<Jx{rx. 'Avrx>-.o-y{rx, proportion, is best suited for this purpose, in the first place, because it knits together a firm connection, a firm bond, a
liE<JjLos,' 1 among the world-materials, a bond which proves
to be unbreakable throughout almost all internal changes
in these materials, that is, throughout the overwhelming
majority of possible permutations of the elements within
this proportion; secondly, because the proportion is a
bond which, among all possible bonds, is itself most of all
bound to what it binds together, that is, it binds itself
most intimately with what is bound together so as to form
a unitary whole: atnOv n xal: nl ~vvOoVp..EVa ~n p.&Aurra
€'v 7fotfi.42 Proportion has both of these features by virtue
of its incorporeality. Thus, its incorporeality, by virtue of
which it institutes wholeness and brings about order,
makes it akin to what we call "soul," >fvx~- Indeed, it is difficult to say whether the Timaeus allows us to draw any
distinction at all between >fvx~ and d.vrx>-.o-yfrx. All of the
world-materials together from now on form a structured
whole, because their quantity, the size of their respective
bulk (cf. rxptOjLGJv o-yxwv-3lc), remains in a fixed ratio
throughout all changes or at least comes very close to this
fixed ratio: as Fire is to Air, so Air to Water, and as Air is to
Water, so Water to Earth. Just as a single, living, "besouled"
organism maintains itself as a whole throughout the constant changes of its bodily materials, so, too, the entire visible world maintains itself, thanks to this proportion
among its materials, as this one, perfect whole (t'v OX.ov
TEAEov).43 And that means: as this living whole. It is only
through this proportion that a "world" arises at all, that is,
an ordered condition of the world-materials, which we call
that it continues to produce itself anew, renews itself
again and again as what it already is within the texture of
the world-order. Thereby it helps this world-order, this
Ta~ts, to be continuously maintained. The being of every
natural thing, therefore, is determined by the world-order
as such, the Td.~ts of the world, the >fvx~ Tov xo<JjLOV [soul
of the world) and, finally, by the d.vrx>-.o-y{rx. Td~ts is thus
the basic concept of ancient cosmology, not only Plato's,
but also Aristotle's, in the version transmitted to the
Christian centuries 45 But Ta~ts, order, essentially means
in every case a definite order, an ordering according to a
definite point of view, in conformity with which each individual thing is assigned its place, its location, its n57fos.
Order always means well-ordering. For this reason ancient
cosmology, as topology, is not possible without the question of this ultimate ordering point of view, without the
question of d-yrxOov, the Good. And ancient cosmology
reaches its fulfillment in the doctrine of the different
T61fot [places). This doctrine also investigates the ratios
and proportions in which the celestial bodies appear arranged in their spheres.
How did the new science receive this ancient doctrine
of nx~ts and rxvrx>-.o-y{rx, of ordo and proportio? In his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo takes his
bearings continuously from the two basic books of traditional cosmology, Aristotle's De caelo and Plato's Timaeus;
in battling against Aristotle he relies again and again on
Plato. The entire construction of Galileo' s dialogue is in a
certain sense determined by the construction of the Timaeus. Like the Timaeus, Galileo, too, bases all further
cosmological explanations on the thesis that the world has
an order. Its parts are coordinated in the most perfect
manner ("con sommo e perfettissimo ordine tra di lora dispaste.") In this way the best distribution ("l'ottima distribuzione e collocazione") of the heavenly bodies, the stars
and the planets arises. However, what is important here is
how Galileo understands the Platonic principle that the
divine demiurge brought the world-material from disorder
to order. He thinks that Plato meant the following: each of
the different planets has a different orbital velocity within
the present order of the world. In order to reach these
velocities, they must, from the instant of their creation,
have passed through all the grades of lesser velocity. The
creator let them fall close to the mid-point of the world in
rectilinear motion, so that the uniform acceleration
pecu~
liar to falling-motion (free fall) could bring them gradually
to their present velocity, at the moment when they reached
the place assigned to them. Only then did He set them rotating, so that they proceeded from the non-uniform recti-
a cosmos. K6aJLoS thus means a self-maintaining condition
linear motion to the henceforth uniform circular motion
of m'~" (order). This condition is the basis of life, life that
maintains itself, produces itself time and again. For life
alone creates itself ad infinitum. Hence the world, precisely as an ordered world, is a self-sufficing animal, a tWov
rxvmpxn. 44 Its own being, as well as the being of its parts,
in which they persist until today. Non-uniform rectilinear
motion along the vertical corresponds, for Galileo, to the
state of disorder, rxmUrx, of which Plato speaks, while uni-
is cpVat.s, that is, Hnatural" being. The natural being of
every entity existing "by nature" is determined by the fact
32
form circular motion, that is, motion along the horizontal
line (for "horizontal" originally means the direction of the
circle of the horizon) corresponds to the present state of
order. With this interpretation, Galileo intends above all
AUTUMN 1981
�to defend the Platonic principle against Aristotle's criti-
new science, it is a "law." Accordingly, the new science in
cisms in De caelo.46
terprets ""'~"' ordo, as law, and construes the order of the
world as the lawfulness of the world. The shift in the meaning of the concept of ordo has its concrete basis here in
the possibility of transferring proportion from the ratios
among the quantities of the relevant elementary-bodies,
or from the ratios of their correlative positions, to the state
of motion of these bodies. This shift, however, eliminates
the order of the elementary-bodies, their r&~"' in the
sense of well-ordering. For the lawfulness of their motion,
the regular sequence of their states of motion, can be constructed only on the basis of their complete equality in
rank, their lack of ordering in the strict sense, that is, their
complete indifference to the place they occupy. The new
science now understands just this lawfulness in the course
of motion, in the temporal sequence of states of motion,
as the order of the world. The order of things moves up
one story higher, so to speak, when the temporal dimension is added. At the same time, however, the disorder of
the elementary-bodies, on which the lawfulness of the
It is not crucial here that Galileo's interpretation finds
no support in Plato's text What is significant is the direction in which he looks for the distinction between order
and disorder: not in the ratio or absence of ratio among
the quantities of the basic materials, not in the correlative
positions of the celestial bodies (although these do appear,
in accordance with the construction of the Timaeus, as
the genuine theme of his inquiry), but in the differences
in the states of motion as such. The bodies themselves are
not subject to comparison (comparatio, as Cicero in his
translation of the Timaeus says for proportion as well), only
a mode of being of these bodies, namely, their motion.
The application of proportion in Galileo's mechanical
works is also consonant with this. The connection with
the Greeks' general theory of proportions is immediate
here, thanks to the direct reception of Euclid and Archimedes, as well as indirectly, by way of a qualitative doctrine of geometrical ratios stemming from the 14th century
Nominalist school.47 What we today call Galileo's laws of
free-fall are intended by Galileo himself as EudoxianEuclidean proportions. In the Discorsi (Third day, Second
Book, Theorem II, Proportio II) a proportion is derived
with Euclidean means which we today would write as:
Both types of magnitude (S and T) are symbolized by
straight lines, in accordance with Book Five of Euclid.
The decisive difference from the cosmological proportion
in the Timaeus is that time becomes one of the elements
of the proportion. What I have said about Galileo also
holds true of Kepler, whose lifework, in his own opinion,
consists in the restoration of the Platonic doctrine of
order and proportion. The relation between the square of
the periods of the planets and the cubes of the great axes
of their orbits, familiar to us as Kepler's Third Law, is once
again conceived as a Euclidean proportion, of the form
ti:ti=d:ri,
or, as it has to be written to conform with Kepler's own
wording in Book One of the Harmonice mundi:
11
world is based, is now understood as Drder." Let us hear
Descartes: In chapter 46 of the Third Part of his Principia
he sets out the basic assumptions of his physics. In the
next chapter Descartes refers to his earlier attempt to
derive the present state of the world by assuming an original chaos. He says: "Even if, perhaps, this very same order
of things, which we encounter now (idem ille ordo qui iam
est in rebus) can be derived from chaos with the help of
laws of nature (ex chao per leges naturae deduci potest),
something I once undertook to show [sc. in Le Monde],
nonetheless I now assume that all the elementary parts of
matter were originally completely equivalent to one
another both in their magnitude and their motion ... because chaotic confusion (confusio) seems to be less fitting
to the highest perfection of God, the creator of things,
than proportion or order (proportio vel ordo) and also can
be less distinctly known by us, and because no proportion
and no order is simpler and more accessible to knowledge
than the one which consists in universal equality." It was
only later, through the work of Boltzmann and then of
Planck, that this "hypothesis of elementary disorder," as it
was called, was made explicit in statistical terms. Its importance for physics is clear from the fact that Planck called
the essence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics the
"Principle of Elementary Disorder."48
The world of mathematical physics built upon this presupposition, the world of natural processes occurring in
accordance with law, determines the concept of nature in
Taken together with the other two proportions which we
today call Kepler's First and Second Laws, it determines
the cosmic order in which we live. In these Galilean and
Keplerian proportions the concept of law, of the lex naturae, becomes visible for the first time. (Although neither
Galileo nor Kepler uses this word as a technical term; it is
first given a fixed sense by Descartes.)
The relation of the new to the old intentionality here
becomes immediately comprehensible. For Greek cosmol-
concept of nX~L>; T&~t.s is now understood as lex, that is, as
ogy, &va'Ao"({a is the expression of rtx~~~, of order; for the
order over time. The ascent from prima intentio to secunda
THEST.JOHNSREVIEW
the new science generally. "Nature" means for it a system
of laws, means-to speak with Kant-"the conformity to
law of appearances in space and time." All the concepts in
this formula (as I have tried to show for "space" and "law")
can only be understood by contrast with the corresponding concepts of ancient science. Above all, the concept of
conformity to law signifies a modification of the ancient
33
�intentio is initiated here by the insertion of the time-dimension.49
How, then, does the new science, on the basis of its intentionality, interpret ancient cosmology? How does it interpret the "natural" world of the Ancients, the world of
r&hs? It interprets it as the qualitative world in contrast to
the "true" world, in contrast to the quantitative world. It
understands the "naturalness" of this qualitative world in
terms of the "naturalness" of the ''true," "lawful" world.
Eddington, in the introduction to his recent book, speaks
in a characteristic way of these two worlds: "There are duplicates of every object about me-two tables, two chairs,
two pens." The one table, the commonplace table, has extension, color, it does not fall apart under me, I can use it
for writing. The other table is the "scientific" table. "It
consists," Eddington says, "mostly of emptiness. Sparsely
scattered,in that emptiness are numerous electrical charges
rushing about with great speed."SO
Translated by David R. Lachterman
1. Leo Olschki has forcefully emphasized this point in his important
work Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur, I-III
(Heidelberg 1919-1927).
2. Disputatio de coelo, 1613.
3. Librorum ad scientiam de natura attinentium pars prima, 1596.
4. De motu, 1591.
5. De rebus naturalibus libri XXX, 1589.
6. Commentaria una cum quaestionibus in octo libros Aristotelis de physica auscultatione, 1574.
7. De communibus omnium rerum naturalium principiis et affectionibus,
1562.
8. De certitudine mathematicarum, 1547.
9. Compare, e.g., Leon Brunschvicq, Les €tapes de la philosophie mathimatique, Paris 1912, 105.
10. See Pierre Duhem, La thiorie physique, son objet et sa structure,
Paris 1906, 444 [English translation, The Aim and Structure of Physical
Theory, trans. P. P. Wiener, Princeton 1954.}
11. Galileo Galilei, Opere, Edizione nazionale, 6, 232.
12. Kepler, Opera, ed. Frisch, I, 122 f.
13. Pars IV, Dist. 1, Cap. I & II.
14. Descartes savant, Paris 1921, 124-148.
15. Oeuvres de Fermat (ed. Tannery and Henry), I, 91.
16. Oeuvres de Fermat, 99.
17. Regulae ad directionem ingenii, Rule IV, Oeuvres, ed. Adam & Tan·
nery, X, 376.
18. Opera, ed. Heiberg, I, 48 ff.
34
19. See also Apollonius, ed. Heiberg, I, 6, DeF. 4. (The term "abscissa"
was first used in the 18th century; cf. Tropfke, Geschichte der ElementarMathematik (2nd ed., Leipzig 1921-24), VI, 116 f.)
20. Moritz Cantor, Vorlesungen tiber Geschichte der Mathematik (3rd.
ed., Leipzig 1907), I, 337.
21. Zeuthen [The author may have had in mind H. G, Zeuthen, Geschichte der Mathematik in Altertum und Mittelalter (Copenhagen 1896),
ch. IV: "Die geometrische Algebra," 44-53. Translator's Note.]
22. See Plato, Republic VI, 510 D-E and Aristotle, Metaphysics, #6,
987bl5 ff.
23. Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Adam & Tannery, VI, 19-20.
24. Oeuvres de Descartes, 551 (Latin text).
25. Oeuvres de Descartes.
26. Oeuvres de Descartes, 20.
27. Oeuvres de Fermat, 93.
28. Oeuvres de Fermat.
29. Ed. Heiberg, I, 4.
30. Critique of Pure Reason, B 179.
31. [The full Arabic phrase is "al-jabr wa'l-muqabalah." For a contemporary discussion of the meanings of "jabr" and "muqabalah" see G. A.
Saliba, "The Meaning of al-jabr wa'l-muqabalah," Centaurus 17 (1972),
189-204. Translator's Note.]
32. F. Hultsch, Article: "Diophant," in: Pauly Wissowa Realenzyklopii.die,
Paragraph 9.
33. Alexander of Aphrodisias, In Aristotelis Metaphysica Commentaria,
ed. M. Hayduck, 85.5-6. See also Aristotle, Physics IV 4, 224a2 ff.
34. Compare Heron, Metrica {ed. Sch6ne), I, 6 ff.
35. [Vieta's Isagoge has been translated by]. Winfree Smith as an appendix to Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of
Algebra (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). The passage cited occurs on page 345.
Translator's Note.]
36. 1621-edition, 4.
37. See, for Aristotle, Metaphysics 6 1, 1026a23-27; K4, l061b17 ff; M2,
1077a9-12; M3, 1077bl7-20; Posterior Analytics A5, 74al7-25; A24,
85a38-bl. Compare also Marinus on Apollonius [i.e. the mention of a
now-lost "General Treatise" (xa86Aou 7rPa'YJ.tO'Tda) in Euclidis Opera,
ed. Heiberg-Menge, VI, 234 Translator's Note.]
38. Timaeus 29D
39. Timaeus 30A
40. Timaeus
41. Timaeus 31C
42. Timaeus
43. Timaeus 33A-B
44. Timaeus 33D; 37D
45. See Aristotle, Metaphysics M3, 1078a36-b6 and compare the title of
Ptolemy's work: h ativm~n (sc. TWv E 1rAavw~-tfvwv The Ordering-Together of the Five Planets.) For this title, see Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "Astronomie."
46. r2, 300b 16 11.
47. Compare P. Duhem. [The author most probably had in mind
Etudes sur Leonard de Vinci (Paris 1905-1913)-Translator's Note.]
48. Max Planck, Die Einheit des physikalischen Weltbildes, Leipzig 1909.
49. M. Planck, Das Weltbild der Physik (Leipzig 1931, 2d. ed.).
50. Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, New York
1929, ix-x.
AUTUMN 1981
�"Sexism" is Meaningless
Michael Levin
W
HEN MY WIFE AND I PLAY TWENTY QUESTIONS,
and my wife must guess a woman, she will often
ask "Is this woman famous for whom she married?" Many would label her or her question "sexist." Indeed, few words have figured as prominently as "sexism"
in contemporary public discourse. Such currency would
ordinarily suggest that this epithet means something, but
in the present instance this impression is mistaken.
Beyond carrying a negativ·e expressive force, like "Grrrr"
11
or "Goddammit," Sexism" is empty. 1
What "sexism" is supposed to mean is clea~ enough.
"Dr. Smith has a roving eye, and his attractive wife is a notorious flirt" is called "sexist" because it implies that interest in the opposite sex is worse in married women than in
married men, and that appearance matters more for
that will serve my son will not serve my daughter. I base
these convictions on a belief in a difference between men
and women. Call these convictions "sexist" if you wish,
but please tell me what precisely is wrong, unreasonable,
or even controversial about them. The discomfort of
women in milieus demanding aggression has been confirmed by experience countless times. If noticing this is
sexism, there is nothing wrong with it. "Sexism" cannot
be used to label the factual judgement that the sexes dif.
fer in certain specific ways and at the same time retain its
automatic pejorative force.
Unfortunately, words are not always used as they should
be. "Exploit" means "to use another without his
consent," but contractual wages are nevertheless de-
is a man's book" is "sex-
nounced in some quarters as "exploitative." The point of
such tendentious misusage is, of course, to get your inter~
ist" because it implies that men more than women enjoy
adventure stories. My wife is a sexist because she believes
that fame often comes to women from their liaisons with
men, and-more egregious-she isn't indignant about it.
"Sexism," then, is typically used to describe either the
view that there are general, innate psychological differences between the sexes, or that gender is in and of itself
important.' Since the first view is simply a factual belief
supported by a vast body of evidence, and the second
view, however objectionable, is held by almost no-one,
neither view is worth attacking. But one thing is clear:
locutor to call wage labor "exploitation" and then to let
the negative connotations of that word impel him to denounce wage labor itself. If you succeed, you have boxed
him into a substantive moral position by word magic.
Once recognized, this trap is easy to elude. Anyone who
approves of wage labor ought to say: "I'll call wage labor
'exploitation,' if you insist on using words that way. But I
see nothing wrong with what you call 'exploitation'." The
same maneuver avoids the feminist's provocation. If, as it
often is, "sexism" is deployed simply to descredit belief in
gender differences, anyone who accepts these differences
those whose active vacabulary includes "sexism" (femi-
can treat "sexism" as a neutral name for this belief. With a
nists, for short) take it to describe something that is both
objectionable and widely held, and hence worth-in fact
requiring-regular and vehement attack.
This relentless tagging of "sexism" on to what it does
not fit suggests, to put it charitably, that feminists are confused about what their subject is and about what they
want to say about it. The word Sexism" simply encapsulates and obscures this confusion.
Take the view that there are innate gender differences.
I doubt that my daughter will become a quarterback. I expect her to develop habits different than those of my son
-and I hope so as well, because I believe that the habits
little gumption he can preface his conversations with feminists with this caveat, and continue to judge his belief on
its factual merits.
Sometimes the trick of illicitly transferring an epithet is
managed by constantly stressing some similarity between
its central cases and vaguely peripheral ones. A polemicist
may seduce his audience into calling wage labor "slavery"
by focusing on what wage labor does share with slavery.
(Both may involve working up a sweat.) To transfer an epithet to new cases ad libitum is harder, the clearer and more
stable its central cases are; easier, the fewer its antecedently
clear cases. At the limit of this process are neologisms, like
"sexism," which come into the world with only negative
connotations and nearly unlimited denotative potential.
"Exploitation" derives its force from the recognizable
badness of its central cases; abusing it consists in exporting it too far from these cases. One might suppose that
women than for men.
"Kon~Tiki
11
Professor of Philosophy at The City College of New York, Michael
Levin has recently published Metaphysics and the Mind-Body Problem
(Oxford University Press 1979). He has contributed to Measure, Commentary, Newsweek, and numerous philosophical journals.
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
35
�"sexism" has acquired its force similarly, by describing
something obviously bad. This would imply that "sexism"
does have some legitimate meaning, however much that
legitimate meaning has been abused.
Not every word, however, functions like "exploitation":
some have only the force of disapprobation. Consider the
communist practice of endlessly reviling enemies as
"bourgeois" and 1'revanchist." These words have lost a11
mooring in the descriptive uses they once had. Nonetheless, their repetition induces confusion and guilt in the
victims of public hate sessions simply because they convey so much hate.
Words used as vehicles for anger will acquire negative
force, whatever the source of the anger. Neologisms like
"sexism," trailing clouds of rage at their birth, are of this
sort. The very ugliness of "sexism" itself supports this account of its genesis, for it you want to endow a word with
a negative force, it is helpful to make the word itself repellent. Calling housework "shitwork," and using the grating
sound "sexism" for those rare cases to which ''misogyny"
might have applied, plays on the human tendency to attribute the qualities of words to things, and, by the animosity implicit in flaunting ugliness, communicates the
rancor behind the word. (Orwell noted that avoidable ugliness is a sure sign of political cant.) Calling my belief in
gender differences "sexist" invites me to perceive my belief as ugly because its name is ugly and comes prepackaged with ugly emotions.
that men and women differ
''sexist" makes for sheer confusion, what of using
"sexist" to describe the idea that gender is intrinsically
important? Obnoxious as this idea may be, it is virtually
without adherents. Suttee and purdah are not features of
Western culture. Despite the frequency and vigor with
which feminists publicly identify their enemy as the doctrine that IDen are inherently superior," 3 its followers
could hold a public meeting in a telephone booth.
That the feminists' enemy here is merely nominal becomes clear with the reflection that "better" means nothing at all apart from some specification of abilities or relevant context. Mr. A cannot simply be better than Miss B.
Of course, we do speak of one person being morally better
than another, and by this we do perhaps intend a judgement of overall value. The feminist's point can hardly be,
however, that women are morally as good as men. Not
only does no one deny this, feminists themselves are constantly deploring the ''stereotype" that woman's "role" is
to civilize the naturally amoral and anarchic impulses of
the male.
"Better," then, must mean "better at this or that particular task," and men are so obviously better at some things
than women that this "doctrine," rather than being the
object of scorn, should pass unchallenged. If "sexism," for
example, means the idea that men can hurl projectiles farther than women, it once again becomes impossible to un-
I
F CALLING THE BELIEF
11
36
derstand why "sexism" is used with such heat. Is "sexism"
the view that men surpass women at some highly valued
activity, like abstract reasoning, while women are better at
other activities like child-rearing-which, outside feminist
circles, are valued as highly as anything men do? If so,
then the view in question once again becomes a factual
hypothesis, indeed a hypothesis which is rather obvious to
the unaided and scientifically aided eye. In any case, we
are back to interpreting "sexism" as a name for a group of
factual beliefs and, as I have already stressed, calling a factual hypothesis by an invidious name is sheer confusion.
The readiness of feminists to attack what no one defends- "men are better than women" -may be explained
by the observation that traits can be significant in two different ways. A trait can be important in itself: intelligence,
for example, is necessary for a variety of tasks and is valued in its own right. This is why employers may permissibly hire the brightest applicants, and why most people
enjoy witty companions.
But many traits not significant in themselves are closely
associated with some which are. People may and do heed
such derivatively significant traits because they confirm
the presence of what actually matters. Illiteracy is not intrinsically bad, but it usually implies deeper incompetence. We permit an employer to ignore illiterates who
want to be laser technicians because an illiterate is unlikely to know much about lasers. Similarly, strength is
what counts for being a fireman, but size and weight are
sufficiently reliable signs of strength to serve as proxies in
deciding who gets to be a fireman. Since we can be pretty
sure of the results beforehand, it is a waste of time to let a
5 foot, 100-pounder try to drag a 120 pound weight up a
flight of stairs.
Values and institutions commonly deplored as "sexist"
because they appear to appeal to the intrinsic importance
of gender really rest on the idea that gender is highly correlated with traits whose significance is not at issue. Take
two examples. Those opposed to drafting women do not
argue that women are women, but that women are less aggressive and less tolerant of the stress of combat than
men. (They also understand that an army is meant to defend its country, not to serve as an equal opportunity employer or a crucible for social experiments.) The pivotal
objection to conscripting women has nothing to do with
any inherent "inferiority" of femaleness, everything to do
with the ability of women to fight.
Take even the "double standard" which judges female
promiscuity more harshly than male. Despite appear·
ances, this difference in attitude is not based on the belief
that there is something intrinsically worse about female
promiscuity. Even the unanalyzed "gut" double standard
that most people still feel rests on a belief about the different psychologies of the sexes. Most people believe that
men can divorce their sexual feelings from their emotional
commitments more easily than women, and hence can
more easily satisfy their sexual appetites without risking
rejection and unhappiness. People thus believe, or sense,
AUTIJMN 1981
�that there is more likely to be something wrong with a promiscuous woman than a promiscuous man. We expectand I know of no statistical or impressionistic evidence
against this-that willingness to have sex with many partners is more likely to be associated with compulsivity and
other personality disorders in women than men. It is this
belief, however inarticulate, that underlies the double
standard, and even feminists must agree that if it is true
the double standard is more than caprice.
I believe that a dispassionate overview would confirm
what these two examples illustrate: almost all views labelled "sexist" because implying the intrinsic importance
of gender amount to factual beliefs about the sexes.4
T
of dubious relevance so certain to be raised at this point that it must be heard. It
runs that judging people on the basis of what is usually true is unfair to the unusual. What of that unusually
strong midget who could pass the fireman's test? What if
there is a female tougher than most Marines who, because
women ar~arred from combat, will never get a chance to
win the Medal of Honor? It must be replied, first, that expectations must be based on what is generally, even if not
universally, true. A sure way to fail to get what you want is
to base your plans on expectation of the exceptional. If
ninety percent of the apples in an orchard are green, it is
sheer irrationality to expect the next apple you pick to be
red. Second, legally mandated discrimination on the basis
of derivatively significant traits is relatively rare. All that
most people want is the legal right to use their own discretion. What is wrong with much "anti-discrimination" legislation is that it forbids attending to what may prove
relevant. (The whole matter is exacerbated in this country
by the alacrity with which the federal government has
overruled local jurisdiction on such matters.) Third, and
most important, it is perniciously utopian to demand that
exceptional cases have a right to be recognized. It is not
unfair, although it is perhaps unfortunate, that a potential
female Audie Murphy goes unrecognized. No one promised her she would be appreciated, no agreement has been
breached if she is not. Nobody promised you at birth that
you would enter the field best suited to your talents, but
this hardly violates some mythical right to self-actualization.
HERE IS A COMPLAINT
B
the impatient feminist might be keen to remind me that there is a middle ground. "Sexism,"
she might say, is prejudice against women and their
abilities. According to her, prejudice is a much subtler
matter than dislike of a morally irrelevant trait like gender
or race: it is the irrational retention of unflattering beliefs
about those who have the trait. A racial bigot need not believe that Negroes are "inferior" to whites: his bigotry
consists in believing on patently insufficient grounds that
Y NOW
Negroes are lazier than
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
~bites.
Prejudice, moreover, in-
valves self-deception. A bigot may believe he has an open
mind-even though he loses his temper whenever anyone
tries to change it. Finally, prejudicial underestimation typically serves unhealthy needs: it bolsters feelings of worth
by representing the Other as inferior, or forestalls guilt by
projecting illicit desires onto the Other. Perhaps, then,
"sexism" should be taken to mean the belief, held with
irrational tenacity, that on the whole men and women differ significantly.
The trouble with this new gambit is that anyone who
claims much of past and current society to be "sexist" in
this new sense must deny that there is good evidence that
men differ significantly from women, and maintain that
people would not change their minds if presented with a
disproof of sex differences. This is not an easy position to
hold.
The most ardent feminist must admit that all the available evidence favors difference. Women differ physically
from men, and act differently. Anyone who has had anything to do with little children observes that these behavioral differences appear before "socialization" takes
hold. Every little boy notices that his little girl friends'
homework is neater than his own, and that they are not so
willing as he is to fight over points of honor. Everyone
sees that fathers are usually sterner than mothers. Anyone
familiar with the artistic and literary classics of other cultures finds that they represent men and women just about
as ours do.
The feminist may deplore these facts, and she may
believe that an environmentalist hypothesis will someday
explain them, but she cannot deny them. Even she must
admit that belief in male/female difference is perfectly
reasonable. People think of the typical physicist as male
simply because almost all physicists have been male. "Liberated" movies and novels which ostentatiously present
female detectives, etc. are so jarring precisely because
their self-conscious implausibility destroys the suspension
of disbelief. My wife asks her question because many
women have derived fame from the fame of their husbands or lovers. To pretend this is not so is to refuse to
face facts and to handicap oneself at such practical tasks
as winning at twenty questions.
Even if the apparent differences between men and
women are the result of conditioning-a hypothesis that
can only be invoked after the innateness hypothesis has
been refuted and some other hypothesis, however ad hoc,
must be invoked-classifying traits as "masculine" and
"feminine" is too well founded to be called prejudice.
Even if there is a shortage of brilliant female composers
because a conspiracy barred women from conservatories,
it is not "sexist prejudice" to expect the next Mozart to be
male.
For all its contribution to modern science, the work of
Copernicus managed to convince the learned world of a
great falsehood: that things are usually not what they
seem. Descartes was only the first of many thinkers who,
shaken by the discovery that the sun's motion is merely
37
�apparent, resolved to regard his senses as liars until
proven truthful, his ordinary beliefs guilty until proven
innocent.
In fact, the instance of Copernicus and the others
stressed by such champions of scientific revolution as
Kuhn and Feyerabend are rare and anomalous. Most
things do turn out, under critical scrutiny, to be as they
seem. Bread really nourishes, water does extinguish fire,
appeasement encourages bullies, and on and on. What
science tells us is why and how these things are so, not
that they are illusions.
I stress this because the falsehood that most scientific
discoveries undo common sense is, I suspect, one of the
main supports of the currently rampant scepticism about
sex differences. Because common experience points over·
whelmingly to important intrinsic differences between
the sexes, it is inferred that the job of science, in this case
social science, is to explain these differences away. What
the history of science should lead one to expect is that, on
the contrary, deeper inquiry will explain the gender differ·
ences revealed by ordinary experience.
But the acid test of the "prejudice" theory is whether
society would abandon belief in gender differences in the
face of evidence to the contrary. This question must be
carefully distinguished from several others. Since the
belief at issue concerns general tendencies, ignoring ex·
ceptions is not prejudice. One can consistently believe
that men are better at mathematics than women while ad·
miring the work of Emmy Noether. Furthermore, a belief
may be important without being irrationally fixed, and
serve a need which is profound but healthy. A belief may
thus be painful to surrender without being a prejudice.
For instance, a man finds it important that his wife's per·
sonality complement rather than copy his own. He meets
enough duplicates of himself in the impersonal world of
work to want something else at home. The suggestion
that the complementarity he prizes is an artifact will natu·
rally disturb him. 5 But this does not mean that his belief
channels guilt or fortifies a weak ego, or that he is wrong
to demand convincing arguments before he accepts the
suggestion.
Nor is the irritation felt by many men at the (alleged) in·
flux of women into "non-traditional" fields evidence that
belief in sex differences is held with prejudicial tenacity.
This outrage is directed against coercion, not against a
challenge to faith. It is provoked by the pressure-group
agitation, lawsuits, and doctrinaire federal fiats that force
women on them. Changes that no one would mind or take
much note of had they occurred through necessity or
social evolution (like the influx of women into factories
during World War II, or the replacement of men by wo·
men as telephone operators earlier in this century) are bit·
terly resented when imposed by ideologues.
Feminists might want to cite, as proof of "sexist prejudice," those famous experiments in which graders gave
the same test a higher grade when told that the testee was
"Norman" than when told the testee was "Norma." (I will
38
not here go into the serious issues that can be taken with
the design and replicability of these experiments, or the
ways in which they have been reported.) Even this evidence is equivocal. If a professor has found over many
years that females write inferior philosophy examinations,
it is reasonable for him to anticipate that the next female
philosophy examination will be inferior. His expectation
will, of course, influence his perception, but this influence amounts to prejudice only if there is no "feedback
loop" by which a run of good female tests can correct his
expectation. A baseball scout used to minor-league incompetence can reasonably attribute a B-league shutout to
atrocious hitting rather than good pitching. His attitude
toward the winning pitcher is prejudice only if he continues to denigrate the pitcher's fastball after it has been
clocked at 97 mph. To return to those grading experiments-there is, however, no evidence that teachers persist in anticipating poorer Norma performances after a
string of good Norma tests. (It is in any case worth remembering in this connection that the tests which provide the
chief quantitative evidence for differences in male/female
aptitudes are standardized and computer graded.)
The performance of women in the military hardly challenges the belief that women cannot do some jobs that
men can, since women have been accommodated by lowered standards. Barriers on obstacle courses, for example,
have literally been lowered so females can get over them.
It is an open secret that universities have compromised
their standards to accomodate "affirmative action" and
live in dread of lawsuits filed by females denied tenure. As
a result, it is impossible to gauge the performance of
women against the standards of scholarship men have had
to meet. Such assessment is made especially difficult by
the great number of academic women who specialize in
"women's studies" and cognate made-up subjects in other
disciplines, subjects in which expertise is the ability to
perpetuate the anger that created them. Throughout
1979 the New York Times chronicled the troubles of the
First Women's Bank, floundering despite a Federal law
mandating assistance to firms with a "substantial"
number of female managers. This law makes it impossible
to tell if women can do as well as men in the realm of
finance.
The closer one looks the harder it becomes to evaluate
the acid test. There is no way of saying how men might
react to evidence against sex differences, because there
isn't any such evidence. The anthropological uevidence" is
fanciful or worse.6 The most recent psychological and
neurological research supports the view that women are
more verbal than men, men more at home with spatial abstractions, and so on.? Indeed, these studies are so decisive
that feminists have lately started to shift the focus of the
debate by trying to minimize rather than, as in the 1960's,
denying gender differences. For instance, Drs. Macoby
and Jacklin insist that of the thousands of variables they
studied, men and women differ "only" in four: verbal ability, spatial visualization, mathematical ability, and aggresAliTUMN 1981
�siveness. This is like saying that the difference between
me and Pavarotti is insignificant because he and I differ
"only" with respect to girth and the ability to sing.
Others who are at least willing to face the scientific
facts 8 stress that intra-gender variations far exceed the difference between gender means: e.g. men average about 6"
taller than women, but the tallest man is about 4' taller
than the shortest man. This is so, but it hardly shows that
inter-gender differences are trivial. Even though Wilt
Chamberlain is much, much bigger than I am, I remain
much bigger than most women.
There is, then, not a shred of support for the view that
the ordinary attitudes of ordinary people toward the sexes
are prejudice, and hence more reason to doubt that "sexism" is the name of anything in heaven or earth.
B
EFORE ADOPTING A STUDIED incomprehension toward those who find "sexism" richly informative, let
us recur to our reflections about words as vehicles
for negative emotions. One can make a kind of sense of
Hsexism" in three stages. First, take "sexism" as the fern·
inist uses it to refer to the conviction that men and
Nomen differ. Second, take her to believe that many people subscribe to this conviction and are in this sense "sexists." Third, to explain why "sexism" is a term of abuse,
attribute to the feminist rage at the existence of these differences and people's acknowledgement of them. The
feminist's usage now becomes quite coherent: "sexism"
denotes a fact of nature while expressing outrage at this
fact and its universal recognition.
If this is the real meaning of "sexism," it is a very mis·
chievous word. Its negative charge invites us not to believe-to insist that it is bad to believe-what can be
shown to be so. Insofar as "sexism" refers to sex differ·
ences themselves, "sexism" invites a negative response to
a fact of nature, a response as inappropriate as annoyance
at the law of gravity.
Only two obstacles impede attributing this array of beliefs and resentments to the feminist. (1) She herself is unlikely to agree that this is what she means by "sexism,"
and would probably repudiate it angrily. (2) Rage at the
workings of D?ture is a peculiar and perverse emotion;
such alientation is rare and should not be imputed to anyone without good grounds.
As for (I), people often deceive themselves about what
they are doing with words and about the feelings that lie
behind the ready use of a phrase. Such blind willingness
to let language do the work of thought is a hallmark of
ideological rhetoric. There is no other way to explain, for
example, the evident sincerity of politicians who call the
forced transfer of income "compassion."
As for (2), it is not hard to understand this particular
form of alienation. Modern society rationalizes tasks,
thereby making them less expressive. Male and female impulses remain to be expressed, but it is no longer easy to
tell by inspection what is a "male" activity and what is
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
"female." Warming a TV dinner is not especially nurturant, nor does riding a bus to work satisfy the urge to
dominate. Western industrial society tends to separate
people from a sense of their own gender and hence their
own identity.' Combine this phenomenon with the radical
egalitarianism and environmentalism of the last half-century,
and widespread gender confusion becomes inevitable 10
A woman who is ill at ease with her essential identity,
who has lost the sense of the values peculiar to her sex
and to herself as a member of her sex, cannot very well admit this to herself. No ego can support such self-hate,
such loss of meaning. But the emotion is there, and the
ego must do something with it. Freud first identified the
process by which the psyche resolves such tensions: the
ego can recognize an unacceptable emotion by projecting
it onto someone else. By calling her self-hate the hatred of
others, and confirming the attribution by endlessly reviling
her imaginary enemies, the feminist can transform a sense
of worthlessness into a sense of moral superiority.
Taking this to be the real function of "sexism" explains
more than how usexism" has acquired such emotional
freight while failing to attach itself to a recognizable object. It connects as well with the larger distrust of human
sexuality that is becoming increasingly evident in the soidisant "women's movement," a distrust fully compatible
with its ritual paeans to sexual activity and to abortion as a
right coequal with free speech. In addressing the fear that
further obliteration of sex roles in the interest of "nonsexist"
childrearing will increase the incidence of homosexuality,
Letty Pogrebin writes "Homophobia, not homosexuality,
is the disease of our times/' and uour fear of lesbianism
for ourselves and our daughters may really be fear of selfhood and freedom." 11
Res ipsa loquitur.
F "SEXISM" IS SO CONFUSED, why worry about it? Since
words that mark no salient fact or distinction usually
fall into disuse, it would seem that "sexism" is destined
to go the way of the names of the humours. Unfortunately,
the situation is complicated by the immense power of
"sexism" to intimidate. No one knows what the label
means, but everyone-especially politicians-knows he is
in for trouble if the label is pinned on him. People have
learned to avoid at all costs doing or saying anything that
attracts it. Feminists have thus perfected a tool for stigmatizing beliefs that they do not like but which they cannot
discredit on rational grounds. The self-evident beliefs
most people hold about human nature have been called
"sexist" so often and so angrily that continuing to hold
them now carries a heavy price. People would rather surrender them than endure the anger and internalized misgivings that holding them provokes. Feminists are not
likely to surrender lightly so apt a tool as "sexism."
A parable and a precedent may serve to suggest the
I
39
�harm done by the persistence of "sexism" in public discourse.
L Suppose an influential group of people began referring to the belief that automobiles should move in
traffic lanes as "stupidism" (or "traffickism"), a word
they always used with rage. They denounced as "stupidist" anyone who thought that if traffic were not
uniform, driving would be too dangerous. Anyone
who requested clarification about why all vehicular
institutions to date were "stupidist" was met with redoubled anger. Through repetition, "stupidism"
would doubtless come to be regarded as more than a
device for expressing rage at the way traffic works.
Eventually, ordinary people-and especially politicians-would start to worry about being called "stupidists." To avoid the imputation of stupidism, they
would, doubtless, begin to agree that traffic should
follow no fixed lanes. They would agree that to say
or even think otherwise was stupidist prejudice. Proponents of "automobile liberation" who gained control of highway policy would denounce the desire to
test the tenets of automobile liberation as the profoundest form of stupidism of all.
I leave to the reader's imagination what a day on the
road would be like.
2. In Nazi Germany, the theory of relativity was called
"Jewish physics." This meant nothing except,
perhaps, the uninteresting fact that the theory of
relativity was invented by a Jew. Enough people
used this phrase, however, and used it vituperatively
enough until-unbelievably, it seems to us-German scientists actually began to disregard the theory
of relativity on the grounds that it was Jewish
physics.
So don't be puzzled when I say words like "sexism" and
"Jewish physics" can mean nothing at all, yet do immense
harm by creating aversion to reasonable beliefs. Happily,
this conditioning can be resisted. My wife usually wins at
twenty questions_IZ
1. The 1980 Report of the President's Advisory Committee for Women
uses "sexism" freely but without explanation. The word occurs most frequently in the subsections ominously headed "Federal Initiatives."
2. The suffix "ism" suggests, often falsely, belief in a doctrine. Socialism is indeed belief in the virtues of a command economy, but "capitalism" -i.e. the practice of anyone who distinguishes what is his from
what is someone else's-typically involves no beliefs at all about economic organization. So here: "sexism" sounds like a doctrine, and "sexists" its followers. Typically, however, practices labelled "sexist" -such
as the use of the generic pronoun "he" -involve no beliefs at all about
the sexes or anything else on the part of those who follow them. Calling
your opponent an "ist" is a good tactic, since most people are sceptical
40
of worldviews and you can thus create an unearned initial distrust for
what you want to attack. I suspect that feminists avoid the word "misogyny" because it carries no connotations of system.
3. See e.g. Iris Mitgang in Commentary, March 1981, 2.
4. Judith Finn made a comparable point simply and well when testifying
before the Senate in connection with the claim that "sexism" and "sex
discrimination" are responsible for pay differences between men and
women:
"Since pay differences are almost completely caused by differences
in jobs rather than the failure to obtain equal pay for equal work,
understanding the earnings gap requires an explanation of the
reasons why women, on the average, hold lower-paying jobs than
men. Women have different job-related attributes and different
amounts of these attributes than men." [Testimony before the U.S.
Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, April 21, 1981;
(my emphasis)]
5. See Bruno Bettleheim, "Notes on the Sexual Revolution," in Surviving New York 1979.
6. For the anthropological material on male dominance, see Steven
Goldberg, The Inevitability of Patriarchy, 2nd ed., London 1977. Martin
Whyte has lately offered the Semang (HRAF, AN7) as a matriarchy in
The Status of Women in Pre-Industrial Societies, Princeton 1978. Goldberg replies in " 'Exceptions' to the Universality of Male Dominance,"
to appear.
7. Even avowed feminists concede important psychological differences:
see e.g. E. Macoby and C. Jacklin, The Psychology of Sex Differences,
Stanfmd 1974.
8. Not all scientists are. The Newsweek of May 18, 1981, carried that
magazine's millionth cover story on "the sexes," which concludes, after
much divagation and vague talk about man's ability to "transcend his
genes," that the latest research demonstrates gender differences built in
by hormones. The editors, perhaps trying to defuse the issue, quote the
geneticist Richard Lewontin to the effect that the whole question is
"garbage from old barroom debates," as if that renders the question
meaningless. Egalitarian fundamentalists are also fond of citing silly
nineteenth century phrenological theories, as if that undercuts modern
research.
9. Edward Levine and his associates have explored this topic in a series
of papers in the Israel Annals of Psychiatry and Related Disciplines (1966,
1971, 1972, 1974), Adolescent Psychiatry (1977) and The American Journal
of Psychiatry (1977).
l 0. This hypothesis predicts parallel if not similar effects among men,
and such effects are appearing. For instance, homosexuality among
black males is increasing sharply, just as urbanization, welfare, AFDC,
and other boons of modern life destroy the black family.
11. Growing Up Free, New York 1980.
12. In an essay entitled "Research on IQ, Race and Delinquency" (in
Taboos in Criminology, ed. E. Sagarin, London 1980, 37-66), Robert
Gordon has occasion to ponder the word "racism" as it is used nowadays of scientists like Arthur Jensen. He concludes that this epithet does
no work whatever: "Clearly, if a scientist reports or hypothesizes ... a
non-trivial difference, perhaps genetic in origin, between racial groups .. .
we have added nothing to the content of discourse by describing him in
addition as a 'racist.' Employed in this way, the term is simply redun·
dant. ... But 'racist' is used in a second sense .... In this sense, use of
the term 'racist' conveys something in addition to the first sense that is
not easily communicated by other means, something plainly unscientific
and gratuitously invidious." Just replace "racism" by "sexism" here and
you have in a nutshell what I have taken many pains to say. The point
itself is obvious to Gordon, to me, and I daresay to anyone who reflects
on the issue for a single moment. Unfortunately, explaining the obvious
involves lessons more complicated than what the lesson is intended to
convey.
AUTUMN 1981
�Going To See The Leaves
Linda Collins
to go to Vermont to see the
leaves, and to invite their son and his wife to go with
them. They could stay, she said, in a really nice inn,
and go for walks, and on Saturday, if it was warm, they
could find a meadow to picnic in with a view of the moun-
I
T WAS MRS. CHILD'S IDEA,
tains.
She had suggested the plan rather tentatively: there
would be a lot of driving, and it would be sure to be quite
expensive, putting up all four. Besides, she was hesitant
about making outright proposals. She preferred to agree
to the suggestions made by others.
HAnd on Sunday," she said, "there is a concert we
might want to go to. And start home from there."
But Thomas agreed at once. He said, "Yes, let's."
Elizabeth felt that he had agreed too quickly, there was
no chance now for her to explain why it was a good idea,
no chance for them to talk about Luke and his wife,
Sarah. Thomas said, "Yes, let's," in a voice that sounded
as though he was putting his newspaper up before his
face. Yes, they should go, Elizabeth needed something.
Elizabeth did want something. It had been at one time
Thomas who used to say, "Let's take Lukie out West." He
had suggested a trip to Kenya, to the Serengeti. One of
his partners had gone there and advised him to go soon
while the animals were still thriving and before Luke was
too old to want to travel with his parents. Thomas's partner
had said it would be the experience of a lifetime. But Elizabeth hadn't wanted to go and so they had stayed home
and gone to the seaside for a week when Luke came home
from camp. But recently Elizabeth thought about places
to go, where, she didn't quite know, while Thomas now
wanted to stay at home in the evening and on long weekends, as well as on his month's vacation.
Thomas did not know what made him agree so quickly
to Elizabeth's suggestion. Still, the proposal struck him as
one that would accomplish something that should be accomplished, touched his underlying understanding of
things, for even to himself his "Yes, let's" sounded too
quickly after his wife's, "Dear?"
HOMAS DROVE, although Luke had offered to drive.
After New Haven, they started north. A blue light,
soft and even, spread from one part of the sky to the
other. It was hot.
Thomas drove, looking straight ahead. Sarah sat behind
Elizabeth, looking out the window. Her hair blew across
T
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
her mouth. She pushed it away with the back of her hand.
Luke turned this way and that, trying to find space for his
long legs. His mother saw his profile and the full, sculptured curve of his lips. He ran his big fingers through his
blond hair which sprang up again after his fingers had
passed.
Elizabeth said: "We used to sing on drives."
Luke began: "Oh, the cow kicked Nelly in the belly in
the barn."
Sarah: "But the doctor said t'wouldn't do her any harm."
The two young people sang out with their loud strong
voices. They heard themselves. Their voices shook their
chests and vibrated in their throats. Sarah tried to outsing
Luke, she sent her voice from her diaphragm, a soldier in
her cause. Luke heard the challenge but would have none
of it. He had no doubt he could wrestle her to the ground,
pin her, outsing her, but she would not accept this. Thomas
sang with them, then fell silent. Elizabeth hummed.
They passed a clump of low red bushes on the grassy
divider. Elizabeth said she hoped they had not come too
early, that the leaves would have reached the height of
their color.
They drove past the domes and cylinders of Hartford.
There were many cars on the highway with out-of-state
plates.
"I wonder how many of these cars are going to see the
leaves," said Elizabeth. She had a strong response to the
idea of people being brought together; the periodicity of
things moved her, and the discovery of community in unexpected places.
Sarah opened her camera case. She loaded three cameras.
"There," she said.
"Black and white?" said Elizabeth, looking over her
shoulder. "For the leaves? Why black and white?"
"She takes a dim view of color," said Luke.
"Oh, Luke," said Sarah. "I want to try to do something
with the leaves. With the light. I don't want just to gawk
at the color."
"You know, in Japan, people swarm to the hillsides to
see the leaves," said Elizabeth, while to herself she said
that Sarah was not being rude to her, only eager about her
work.
Linda Collins's stories have appeared in The Hudson Review and other
magazines.
41
�"Well, so do we. That's just what we're doing, isn't it?
How is it different?" Luke pressed Sarah and his mother
both.
"Nobody calls them 'leafies' in japan," said Sarah.
"How do you know?" asked Luke. "How do you know
there aren't just as many scoffers in japan as here?''
"Peering out from behind screens and saying 'See the
reafies' to one another." Sarah took up Luke's scenmio
with a certain excitement. She tried to adorn it, expand it,
but Luke let it go, turned to the window, and Sarah's
voice trailed off.
Thomas said nothing. He was the driver. He was the
person behind the wheel, taking his wife where she
wanted to go, ferrying the young people. It brought a sort
of peace to him. He had, when he was young, harbored
the idea of some outcome for himself. It had been unclear
to him what it would be, but that it would be, had seemed
unquestionable. For most of his life, he had taken courage
from the thought that a task awaited him. Thomas was still
strong, still smooth muscled and fit. Recently, the thought
had come to him that perhaps the rest of his life would be
no different from the way things were now, that he would
not be called upon. Recently, he had found he could no
longer contemplate his wife in an erotic fashion. Nothing
was said about this. He meant to speak about it, but it
seemed unspeakable. He could not raise the subject. He
was not sure whether the reason was that he feared to
hurt her or that he hesitated to embarrass himself. Sometimes he wished for old age when the issue would be, he
thought, dead.
Soon they would pass Deerfield, where Thomas had
spent his years from thirteen to seventeen. As the little
school buildings came into view, Elizabeth, as she always
did, turned her head to look at them across the fields.
They seemed far away and very small. There Thomas had
played ice hockey and read Ethan Frome. In the early
morning, in all seasons, thick white fog had sat in the low
places in the valley. In spring, limp yellow strings had blossomed on the birch trees. When his parents came to visit,
they took him out to lunch in Greenfield. His father asked
him how things were going. His mother told him what his
cousins and aunts were doing. He felt very small, very
young. It seemed at each visit that he and his parents
were growing farther apart. He no longer cried when they
left. He knew it was untenable to love them.
"How come you didn't send Luke to Deerfield?" asked
Sarah.
"Thomas hated Deerfield. They snapped towels at
him." Elizabeth was always outraged that his parents had
sent him off so young and tender.
But I didn't hate it, Thomas was thinking. That he had
been lonely as a child had seemed only ordinary. He had
merely waited for the end of childhood.
In school, he had walked from building to building. He
had seen, as the morning fog lifted, the color of the leaves,
which had grown stronger during the night. No child remarked to another on the color or observed aloud that the
42
trees, which had been green when school started, were
now orange, or red. The children noticed the leaves but
said nothing.
In the autumn, he had run cross-country; in winter, he
wrestled. He grew, he felt himself to be merely the container of his strength. Who could tell how much stronger
he might become? Running through tunnels of copper
leaves, he thought of nothing but persisting. In winter
afternoons in the wrestling room, he heard the thunder of
the basketball team overhead. In january, the daylight was
gone by the time he got to the gym. Under yellow lightbulbs in their metal cages, he lifted weights and practiced
his moves. On Saturday, all honed and pure, he struggled
with another youth. His veins swelled. He scarcely saw his
opponent. It,was all in terms of something else. If I win
this match, then ... what? His thoughts carried him far,
but something lay beyond them. There was something
more than the trophy to be gained.
In the rear-view mirror Thomas caught his son's glance.
Father and son seldom spoke to one another, but each
sometimes intercepted the other's gaze. Now Thomas
swung out into the passing lane and pressed the accelerator to the floor, causing Elizabeth to sway forward against
her seat belt, and the maps to slide along the top of the
dashboard. Exhaust fumes entered the car as he passed
first one trailer truck, then another, and pulled back into
his lane.
"Thomas, my goodness," said Elizabeth.
As they crossed into Vermont, the color in the trees
intensified.
"Oh, look," said Elizabeth, as they left the Connecticut
Valley and started up into the orange hills, "this really is
the peak. We came at the right time."
I
N THE MORNING, Thomas and Luke got up first. They
met in the hall, testing the locks of the doors they were
closing upon their wives who had not yet risen. Sunlight blazed at a little window at the end of the hall.
Thomas waited for Luke to reach him. He felt a shy excitement which he was scornful of, but nonetheless he
wondered what he could offer Luke that might please
him. Luke approached, bending a little under the low ceiling of the hallway, and together they went down the uneven, carpeted stairs to the dining room.
In the morning light, between butterings and bites and
swallows, Thomas examined his son. He felt able to look
at Luke in a way he could not in his wife's presence. He
was anxious to make his observations acutely and quickly,
before Elizabeth should appear. Luke's skin was fresh, he
looked rested, but what Thomas had thought he had detected yesterday was true, his hair was beginning to
recede. Thomas reached up to touch his own hairline, but
he blurred the gesture by stroking his head where the hair
was still thick.
How old is Luke? he thought. Is he twenty-five or
AUTUMN 1981
�already twenty-six?· Thomas hoped he was only twentyfive.
Luke held his fork with the tines down and pressed a
neatly cut, five-layered mound of pancake into the maple
syrup which had pooled at the outer edge of his plate.
When the syrup had all disappeared into the pancake, he
leaned over his plate and brought the forkful to his
mouth. It was winking with syrup. When he had finished,
he drank the last of his milk, tilting the glass, and then
turned to his coffee.
"Good?" said Thomas. "Did you enjoy your breakfast?"
"Listen, Daddy," said Luke. "I know that you are worried about me. And Mommy is, too. I know that. But
don't. Or do. I know you can't help it. I will be all right."
The morning sun moved in the sky just enough to brilliantly strike the water glasses and the restaurant silver on
the table, flinging blades of light on the walls. The table
cloth was too white to look at. For that moment Thomas
felt that Luke was the father and he was the son. He
wanted to say something to Luke that would be true. At
the £arne time he wanted to say something that would
make him be the father again. He raised his eyes from the
quivering light and saw that Elizabeth and Sarah were
standing in the doorway of the dining room.
~~There you arel" said Elizabeth.
Thomas and Luke stood up. Elizabeth wore a white cardigan over a blouse with little lavender dots, and a blue
denim skirt. She was wearing pink lipstick. Her "There
you are!" had sounded so loud in the dining room that she
was surprised. She crossed quickly from the dim hall to
the bright square of sunlight where Thomas and Luke
were standing, letting herself smile only when she had
reached them. Sarah followed. She wore an olive shirt
with many pockets. When she moved her head, her long
straight hair parted in places, and Luke could see the little
turquoise earrings his parents had given her. She seldom
wore jewelry and he was glad she had put them on.
"How lucky we are!" said Elizabeth and smoothed her
skirt under her as she bent to sit down on the chair
Thomas was holding. "What a beautiful day it is!"
Luke winced at the eagerness and timidity with which
his mother, dressed like a child, had crossed the room.
Both his mother and father had blue eyes. To Luke, it
seemed that they both peered at him as if to see what was
inside his head. Their look seemed to try to exact something from him, some agreement; for instance, as now,
that it was indeed a beautiful day, and since all were
agreed on that, all of one mind, some further harmony
was bound to follow. The mild questioning look of his
mother and father peering at him made him say: "Let's
get this show on the road," but when he realized that his
mother and Sarah had not even ordered yet, he sat back,
abashed.
Thomas ordered Granola for Sarah and muffins for
Elizabeth. While they ate, the men drank more coffee,
and together they agreed on a plan for the day.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
FTER LUNCH, it took a while to get comfortable.
They shook the crumbs off the two blankets and
·spread them out again to rest on, but they had picnicked in a mown field and the ground was stubbly. Finally, they moved the blankets to the far edge of the field
under the trees where the grass was soft. Thomas was reluctant to leave the car so far out of sight, but Luke said
he wanted to take a nap and Sarah had her tripod and
filters ready and was eager to get to work. For a while, as
they carried the blankets across the field, sending up
showers of crickets with each step, it seemed they were
making too much fuss. Elizabeth tried not to seem to be
arranging things. She knew there could be a reaction
against her for being too managing, too motherly, but she
was willing, right now, to risk it. What had they driven all
this way for, if not for this? Nonetheless, as they walked,
she hung back, not to be first. Thomas took the lead, and
Luke walked with him. The sun shone through the rims
of their ears. Sarah noticed this and said to Elizabeth:
''The sun is shining through their ears." Elizabeth was offended that this young woman should speak so familiarly
about her son's ears, her husband's.
"I think Luke might go back to school next semester,"
said Sarah in a soft voice. Elizabeth knew she was anxious
lest Luke hear them talking about him.
When the blankets were smoothed out, Luke stretched
himself out on the plaid one and folded his arms over his
chest.
"Night," he said from under closed eyes.
Sarah looked at him, the length of him on the blanket,
occupying it fully.
''I'm going to take some wide-angle shots," she said,
with a lift of her chin, and she picked up her tripod and
bag and stalked off down the field.
And so, wheh Elizabeth and Thomas lay down on their
blanket, having carefully made room for one another, the
family was together, mother, father, and son.
After a bit, Luke opened his eyes and turned his head
towards his mother. She was lying on her back with her
eyes closed. The afternoon sun struck her full in the face.
A lavender vein moved stepwise across her eyelid. The lid
was rose-colored; the edge of the lid looked moist and it
trembled slightly. Her yellow-gray hair lay in flattened
coils under the weight of her head. Above her upper lip
fine hairs shone in the light, and from the red cave of her
nostril long yellow hairs emerged. Luke touched his own
nostril and felt the stiff hairs that stuck out of his nose. He
raised himself on one elbow and looked beyond his
mother. His father lay beside her. Briefly, he saw them
both up close, enormous, as though in a fever, or through
a lens. Their faces were magnified in his eyes, for a second
they occupied the entire landscape.
With a guilty heart, he sat up straight and felt in his buttoned-down shirt pocket for a marijuana cigarette. At the
sound of the match striking, both his parents opened their
eyes. As he inhaled the smoke, his father said, "Do you
have to do that, Lukie?" and he said, "Yes, Daddy, I do."
A
43
�He sat with his knees up, one arm around them, holding
his cigarette with his free hand. His parents sat up and
began to brush bits of grass off their sweaters. Leaves, the
color of apricots, with an occasional speck of light green,
were falling from the tree above.
"There's Sarah," said Elizabeth.
Sarah was at the lower end of the meadow. It was diffi·
cult to tell how far away she was. She looked tiny and
there was nothing to measure her by.
Elizabeth stood up and waved, but the sun was behind
her. "Saaa-rah." She gave a sort of yodel. Sarah turned in
their direction but Luke knew that all she could see was
the afternoon sun. They watched her walking up the
slope with her awkward, determined stride. She could as
well have been an utter stranger.
Luke gently tapped his cigarette on a rock in the wall
behind him. When he was quite sure it was out, he pinched
the end, and folded the remains in a bit of paper which he
carefully returned to his shirt pocket. Then he stood up
and in long strides ran the length of the field to Sarah who
was standing at the edge of the woods in a drift of leaves.
She watched him running towards her. The opening and
closing of his legs gave her the impression he was running
in slow motion and she started to reach for her camera,
but he got to her too soon, before she was ready. She
hadn't got the lens cap off when he grabbed her and held
his arms around her. "Oh, Sarah, don't leave me," he said.
She felt his heart leaping like an animal in a cage, she
smelled his sweat and felt the moisture on his neck and
face.
"I wasn't going to leave you," she said, but she felt, as
usual, a certain confusion, an apprehension. Why had he
lain down in the field in front of his mother and father
and taken up the whole blanket? Didn't that mean she
should leave him? How could they be going to lead their
whole lives together? Where was comfort to come from,
where was happiness? From passion? Perhaps, but it was
unreliable. Who was this man, this blond man? How had
she come to lie down with a stranger?
The sun was veiled, as a thin skin of clouds rose in the
west. As the light in the sky paled, the radiance of the
leaves increased. Something solemn and important was
happening in the woods. A chill crept over the meadow.
Luke's lips nuzzled Sarah's neck. His knee pressed between her legs. She saw the small figures of Elizabeth and
Thomas leave the far edge of the field and move toward
them over the stubble. Luke inserted his hand under the
waist of her jeans in the back and reached down to feel
her buttocks, thin and clenched.
"Luke," said Sarah, twisting about, "don't. Don't do
that."
Luke began to laugh. He wanted to wrestle with her, to
push her down in the leaves. The smell of the woods rode
upon the cooling air which poured into the meadow, carrying with it the smell of moss, of mushrooms, of rot, of
black mud, of rotting stumps and the rotting bodies of
small animals, of chipmunks, rats, mice, squirrels, of
44
everything that dies in the woods. The smell of decaying
leaves and decomposition was delicious, it appeared suddenly and turned thoughts to the secrets that lie in the
forest. Luke pressed against Sarah.
~~Later," said Sarah.
"I would like to go into the woods with you now," said
Luke.
He pressed his knee against the hard double seam of
her blue jeans. She stepped back and let herself fall to the
ground. The wind blew a hard gust. Above, the ash tree
let loose a shower of leaves, yellow, the color of dark mustard. They lay in the leaves, laughing.
"OK," said Sarah, in a soft voice, as Luke's parents,
smiling uneasily, drew near, "later."
Elizabeth slept and
woke, hearing the wind and the tap of branches
against the window of the unfamiliar room. She lay
in bed and thought about the leaves and their drying
stems and the trees they dance upon as they try to leave.
She thought about how hard it is for them to leave. The
tree sends juices, the leaf clings; the wind blows and the
leaf turns, spins, bends back upon its stem.
She went to the window and stood looking out. Her
bare feet on the wooden floor made her feel like a girl.
The room was cold. She heard the wind and saw that the
leaves were still falling in the dark. It was a grave matter
that all the leaves were falling, but she was very glad she
had come to see them.
T
T
HE WIND BLEW ALL NIGHT LONG.
in what had been a Congregationalist church, square and white, which had
been renovated to accommodate its new function.
Moulded stackable seats replaced the pews, and recording
equipment stuck out of the pulpit. On the floor, wires
trailed.
It took most of the first movement for Elizabeth to
begin to concentrate. She had to remind herself to pay at·
tention to the sound which drummed or gurgled in her
head, memorably, she thought, but no sooner had the first
bit opened into its development than it was gone. And she
couldn't get it back. She criticized herself, but at the same
time wondered if she was alone in this failing, or whether
there were others like herself who were confused.
The cellist plucked a loose strand from his bow and
poised himself to plunge in again. The cello was pale,
almost yellow; the viola was red. The two violins were similar in color, but one glittered, the smaller one. The second violinist was a woman who wore a long dress of bright
green. The dress was sleeveless and the woman's arms
were white. Elizabeth thought it was no doubt a C<Jnvenience for her not to have sleeves. A loose sleeve would
get in the way, and a tight-fitting sleeve would pull under
the arms, or at the elbow. And yet the young woman was
HE CONCERT WAS PLAYED
AUTUMN 1981
�exposed, and her arms seemed very private, with everyone looking on. Of the four players she was the only
woman. She was neither pretty nor ugly. From time to
time, as she played, she gave her head a shake, and her
smooth brown hair crested and fell back into place. The
first violinist played, and she waited, holding her violin
upright on her thigh. When he had played for several mea·
sures, she raised her violin and held it under her chin, let·
ting the bow hang loose from her right hand, watching the
other players, and nodding her head, until, with a sudden
deliberate movement, she lifted the bow and began to
play vigorously. Her thin arm went rapidly up and down.
The four leaned toward one another as they played. The
music was loud and strong. Then the three others plucked
their instruments and the woman in green played alone.
Afternoon light fell in stripes upon the listeners. In the
darkness between the stripes, motes of dust floated. Eliza·
beth held her breath. Something wonderful was happen·
ing. The music rose from the platform and spread to fill
the space above. The sound resonated upon whatever it
touched, the beams in the ceiling, the planked floor, the
walls. The first violinist and the woman in green were
playing sweetly and loudly to one another, while the
others sustained them with arpeggios. As he finished
drawing his bow and with a subtle gesture of his wrist was
preparing to return it, she was drawing hers to its tip. Her
head was bent down so her chin touched her chest, and
her arms were spread wide apart. Her face was hidden.
Only the top of her bowed head could be seen. The
sounds she was pulling from her instrument were the
sounds of tearing, the sound of something long being torn
in two. The cello and viola fell silent and then the first via·
linist stopped playing as though to honor the last of her
long trembling notes. Elizabeth thought: Then there is no
happiness. A rush of courage filled her completely, and
she thought, I can bear it, now that I know.
From above a peculiar noise distressed her. She realized
it had been pressing upon her for some time and she had
been resisting it, as though holding a door shut against a
great force, but now she gave way. She looked up. On a
ledge under one of the high windows, birds were sitting.
One fluttered out, circled and landed. The others chirped
and shrilled. It was a shocking breach. Could the players
hear? Elizabeth would have liked to do something to save
the situation, but that was ludicrous. What could she do?
Nothing, she thought, but sit there and wait it out. Dis·
tracted, she waited for the quartet to finish.
When the concert was over and the players had come
back several times to bow to the audience, which was
standing to applaud, Elizabeth turned around to look up
at the eaves. The birds had disappeared, but she thought
she saw straw sticking out from one of the high joists. The
glare of the lights caught a feather which was floating
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
down in an uneven way, impelled by whatever drafts
reigned up there.
Luke followed her gla:rrce. He put his arm around her.
"Did they bother you, the birds?" he said.
Love for him weakened her. She wanted to sit down.
She did not want Thomas to see how moved she was, or
Luke either.
"Sparrows, were they?" she asked, turning her face
away slightly to hide her eyes.
"Passer domesticus," he said, evoking thus the days
when he and she had walked together, noting the particulars of the world. She had carried with her her bird book
and little jars in which to bring home beetles or whatever
special things they should find. In this manner she had
felt she was molding him into the kind of man she dreamed
for him to become.
In the parking lot, they saw the cellist set his instrument
carefully in the back seat of his car. They said how glad
they were that they had already checked out of the inn,
that they could start home at once. Thomas agreed that
Luke should drive, and so he and Elizabeth sat in the
back.
Thomas reached for Elizabeth's hand.
"I am glad we came," he said.
"Oh, wonderful," said Sarah. "Thank you so much.
Thank you both."
Thomas fell asleep holding Elizabeth's hand. When she
saw that he was deeply asleep, she gently withdrew her
hand. Darkness gathered quickly. As the light sank out of
the air, the sky became dark blue. Sarah and Luke murmured together in the front seat, laughing occasionally.
Then they fell silent. Sarah leaned her head on the headrest. Soon she too was asleep. Elizabeth looked at the red
taillights extending far ahead and the sweep of the lights
of the northbound cars approaching. By the dim light of
the dashboard she could see the line of Luke's cheek and
his brow when he turned his head to look in the side
mirror.
"Mom?" said Luke softly. "Why don't you go to sleep,
too? I'm going to drive very carefully."
"I wasn't worrying," said Elizabeth, quite truthfully,
but nonetheless she too then fell asleep.
Although they had agreed to stop for a bite to eat somewhere near the halfway point, Luke did not stop at all. He
drove peacefully, absorbed in the task of not driving too
fast, or too slowly, in deciding whom to pass and whom to
let pass, checking the fuel gauge and the mileage. No one
woke until he stopped for the toll at the bridge. Both his
parents woke then, and after a minute Sarah, too raised
her head.
"Where are we?" she said.
"Almost home," said Luke. "You were asleep almost
the whole way."
45
�One Day in the Life of the New York Times
and Pravda in the World:
Which is more informative?
Lev Navrozov
To inform is not the raison d'etre of Pravda, for Pravda is.
no source of news for Soviet decision-makers. The latter
have for their daily information a multi-tier system of
their own "closed" (secret) newspapers like White Tass,
just as they have their own "closed" statistics, or their
own "closed" book publishing. The goal of Pravda, as well
as all uopen" media intended for non~decision·makers, is
to assure the Soviet expendable majority (which is to do or
die, not to ask why) as well as all vassals, allies, and supporters all over the globe that they are on the right (winning) side of history.
In contrast, the Western media must be informative, for
the entire population of the Western democracies makes
decisions, if only by voting, in foreign policy, strategy, and
defense, and the New York Times is the main source of
In 1971 Lev Navrozov left Russia for the United States with all of his
son, and mother (his father had been killed in action in the
Second World War). Trained both in the exact sciences (at Moscow Energy Institute) and in languages, he graduated in 1953 from the Institute
of Foreign Languages, Referents' Faculty-a facility, organized on the
specific orders of Stalin, to produce "outstanding experts whose knowledge of Western languages and cultures would not be inferior to that of
well-educated natives of the relevant countries." In Russia he translated
Dostoevsky's The Poor People and Notes from the Deadhouse and Alex·
ander Herzen into English. In 1975 he published The Education of Lev
Navrozov (Harper and Row), a work he had written in English in Russia.
Among his most important articles are: "The Soviet Britannica" (Midstream,
February 1980); "Liberty and Radio Liberty" (Midstream, January 1981);
"What the CIA Knows about Russia" (Commentary, November 1978);
and a series of reviews of recent novels in Chronicles of Culture. In 1979
he founded The Center for the Survival of Western Democracies. This
article is taken from a forthcoming book, What the New York Times
Knows about the World.
family~wife,
46
daily international news for top American decision-makers, including the President of the United States.
In short, for Pravda to be informative is a gratuitous luxury, while in the case of the New York Times, information
is a matter of life and death for the United States and the
entire non·totalitarian world. But is ~<international news"
more informative in the New York Times than in Pravda?
The top New York Times editors seem to be confident
that it is ridiculous even to compare the two newspapers.
Pravda is free to be informative only within its propaganda assignment. The New York Times is free to be as in·
formative as it wishes. Does it not follow therefrom that
the New York Times is as informative as a newspaper can
possibly be?
Who can compare the international news of the New
York Times whose Sunday edition averaged 558 pages per
issue and weighed seven pounds way back in 1967, with
that of Pravda which still consists of six pages?
In a book of generous self-appreciation written by fortyeight Timesmen," one of the contributors, Max Frankel,
says that at some point in his sojourn in Moscow as a New
York Times correspondent, he could compose a Pravda text
in advance, without seeing it, With 80 percent accuracy":
11
11
WORLD SERIES ... TASS ... NEW YORK ... The peaceloving peoples' valiant struggle for progress throughout the
world is being obscured in the American monopoly press this
month by a great hullabaloo over what American sport finan·
ciers arrogantly call a world championship. Not only the
heroic sportsmen of the Great Socialist Camp but even
America's poorer allies are barred from the games ... 1
We will see if Mr. Frankel's composition is good even as
a parody. Alas, the fact that Pravda is a sensitive and
AU1UMN 1981
�powerful totalitarian tool in an evil cause does not mean
that it consists, as Mr. Frankel assures us, of moronic gobbledygook, in contrast to the New York Times, "by every
objective criterion the most thorough, most complete,
most responsible newspaper that time, money, talent, and
technology in the second half of the twentieth century
had been able to produce," to quote Harrison Salisbury's
Without Fear or Favor.
Unfortunately, utotalitarian" and "evil" does not mean
"stupid" or "funny." Nor should it be forgotten that freedom means in particular the freedom to ascend to the infinite heights of genius as well as the freedom to descend to
the incredible depths of ignorance, stupidity, or general
personality degradation, as is exemplified by Walter
Durante of the New York Times who is now recognized,
even by Harrison Salisbury, to have been perhaps the
worst non-Communist falsifier of information on Russia
in the twenties and thirties.
So let us turn to Pravda and the New York Times as they
are, not as the "top Timesmen" assume them to be. As a
sample for comparison I take the issues of both newspapers dated February 18, 1975, a date I picked at random as
I scanned the New York Times for Cambodia-related
reports and articles.
In its "News Summary and Index" the New York Times
lists five news items as the "major events of the day." The
first of them the newspaper summarizes as follows:
International
Secretary of State Kissinger and Andrei A. Gromyko, the Soviet Fareign Minister, completed their talks in Geneva still in
disagreement over the Middle East. After five hours of discus-
sion on the Middle East, Mr. Gromyko told newsmen that
"there were questions on which our positions did not exactly
coincide." Mr. Kissinger said he concurred with that.
The relevant Pravda article is entitled "Joint Communique on the Talks Between A. A. Gromyko and H. Kissinger" and is the text of the official document so named.
The Pravda text is worth reading for seven words near the
end of the following paragraph:
Special attention in the talks between A. A. Gromyko and
H. Kissinger has been paid to the Middle East. Both sides
continue to be concerned about the situation there which remains dangerous. They have confirmed their determination
to do their best for the solution of the key problems of a just
and durable peace in this area on the basis of Resolution 338
of the United Nations Security Council, with due account of
the legitimate interests of all peoples in this area, including
the Palestinian people . ..
The sole purpose of the "talks" and the "Joint Communique" lay for the Soviet side in these seven words, "the legitimate interests of. .. the Palestinian people," which
were to be officially and publicly endorsed by the United
States Government.
The question is: why did the New York Times leave out
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
these seven words in all relevant texts of the issue under
review?
My explanation, based on my studies of the New York
Times in the last sixty years, is that the New York Times
has always tended to conceal unpleasantly dangerous
"sharp angles" of the outside world and show it far more
benign, safe, and peaceful than it really is.
Here in 1975 there still flourished detente, that is, the
unilateral fantasy that the Soviet war-regime is a peaceful,
cooperative if essentially Russian and hence outlandish
society. And suddenly this American recognition of the
"legitimate interests of the Palestinian people" (read: the
establishment of "Arafat's Cuba" at the heart of Israel).
So the Soviet rulers were pushing their global strategic interests just as before-and much more successfully owing
to the American fantasy called "detente"?
This could upset some Americans, especially Jews, and
in the ensuing panic, paranoia, hysteria, they might (God
forbid!) question the meaning of detente itself!
It is true that the tendency of the New York Times to
conceal "sharp angles" becomes strong if the (future)
tyrant and his (future) tyranny can be connected with
"Left-wing" words like ''revolutionary," "progressive,"
"independence," "national liberation," as opposed to
"Right-wing" words like "reactionary," ~<colonialism,"
"imperialism/' "fascism." However, if the tyrant and his
tyranny are dangerous enough, the New York Times
seems to be anxious to play down the danger, no matter
whether it can be connected with Left- or Right-wing
words.
The New York Times was ruthless to Lon Nol's government in Cambodia since whatever its "ineptitude" and
"corruption" were according to the New York Times, even
the latter never suggested that Cambodia under this government was dangerous to any country on earth.
But the more dangerous the regime is the more determined the New York Times seems to be to conceal the
danger, just as some individuals conceal unpleasant news
from everyone around them and even from themselves,
and speak especially well of those who are powerful and
nasty.
Certainly Hitler and his regime could be much more
readily connected with words like "reactionary" or "fascism" than the government of Lon Nol of Cambodia, "inept" and ''corrupt" as it was, according to the New York
Times. But what was the coverage of Hitler and his regime
by the New York Times?
This digression into the past will not be time wasted.
"If the international Jewish financiers (read: the United
States, Britain, and France) go to war with Germany," Hitler stated in the official translation of his speech of January 30, 1939, "the result will be the annihilation of the
Jewish race in Europe." That is, Hitler officially declared
that he regarded the Jews of Germany and any country he
would occupy as hostages whom he would kill off if the
Western democracies tried to interfere with his conquests.
47
�The intention was clear already in 1938 as Dr. Goebbels's Angriff commented on Kristallnacht, the Nazi's ostentatious pogrom of Jewish-owned businesses in Germany on November 10:
For every suffering, every crime and every injury that this
criminal [the Jewry] inflicts on a German anywhere, every in~
dividual jew will be held responsible. All that Judah wants is
war with us, and it can have this war according to its own
moral law: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
"Excerpts" from Hitler's speech of January 30, 1939, occupy pages 6 and 7 of the New York Times. But on the
front page we find an article headlined "Hitler's Advice to
U s. "
I had to read the article twice to get rid of the notion
that the New York Times was being sardonic. No, it was
dead serious. It presented Hitler's speech as Hitler's advice
to the Americans. I reproduce the article in full, down to
the last full stop:
"Hitler's Advice to Us"
Berlin, jan. 30-That part of Chancellor Adolf Hitler's
speech dealing specifically with German-American relations
reads textually as follows:
"Our relations with the United States are suffering from a
campaign of defamation carried on to serve obvious political
and financial interests which, under the pretense that Germany threatens American independence, are endeavoring to
mobilize the hatred of an entire continent against the European States that are nationally governed.
"We all believe, however, that this does not reflect the will
of the millions of American citizens who, despite all that is
said to the contrary by the gigantic Jewish capitalistic propa·
ganda through press, radio and films, cannot fail to realize
that there is not one word of truth in all these assertions.
"Germany wishes to live in peace and on friendly terms
with all countries, including America. Germany refrains from
any intervention in American affairs and likewise decisively
repudiates any American intervention in German affairs.
"The question, for instance, whether Germany maintains
economic relations and does business with the countries of
South and Central America concerns nobody but them and
ourselves. Germany, anyway, is a great and sovereign country
and is not subject to the supervision of American politicians.
"Quite apart from that, however, I feel that all States today
have so many domestic problems to solve that it would be a
piece of good fortune for the nations if responsible statesmen
would confine their attention to their own problems."
There is a story about a class at an American school
writing an essay on poverty, and one girl stating: "That
family was very poor, and their butler was poor, too." The
girl differentiated between wealth and poverty, but the
scale of differentiation was very narrow: the wealthy employ rich butlers, while the poor poor ones. The New York
Times differentiated between good and eviL Stalin's regime was good, and Hitler's eviL But the scale of differentiation was very narrow. From the article entitled "Hitler's
48
Advice to Us" it was clear that Hitler referred to "gigantic
Jewish capitalistic propaganda" and so he was an evil
man. But no more evil than Henry Ford I and other such
reactionaries who used the word "Jewish" in this sense.
And despite this evilness, the German Chancellor's
speech is presented by the New York Times as advice,
good and sensible: he is obviously for peace (the conjecture that Hitler may be for world conquest seems in the
context as outrageous as the conjecture that some poor
family may not employ even a poor butler).
But what about Hitler's warning that the "Jewish race"
in Europe would be annihilated? Surely this was the only
news in Hitler's endless verbiage. And surely this on/y
news was the news of the century, certainly so in New
York where so many Jews lived. The New York Times
tucked away this news of the century into the middle of a
paragraph, lost in the full-page expanses of Hitler's speech
far from the front page. I wonder how many scholars
found it. I have never seen it quoted or recalled anywhere.
On page 6, the New York Times printed within a frame
inside Hitler's speech a summary of the speech as a whole.
The summary is attributed to the Associated Press and entitled "Hitler's Salient Points":
BERLIN, jan. 30.-Following are important quotations from
Chancellor Adolf Hitler's Reichstag speech tonight, as contained in the official translation.
There are four salient points. In point I, subtitled "Colonies," Hitler speaks reasonably and peacefully about the
European colonial powers, though he tactfully mentions
no country. Do usome nations" imagine that ' God has
permitted" them to "acquire the world by force and to defend this robbery with moralizing theories"? The Chancellor suggests a peaceful solution "on the ground of
equity and therefore, also, of common sense."
In point 2, subtitled "Support of Italy," Hitler says, no
less reasonably and peacefully, that Germany will side
with Italy if the latter is attacked.
In point 3, subtitled "Need for Exports," Hitler explains~not only reasonably and peacefully, but indeed in
the tone of a pathetic plea-that the "German nation
must live; that means export or die." "We have to export
in order to buy foodstuffs."
And in point 4, subtitled "Foreign 'Agitators'," Hitler is
again made to present a well-justified plaint: when British
agitators rail at Germany this is considered part of their sacred rights, but when Germany defends herself against
their attacks, this is regarded as an encroachment on these
sacred rights of theirs.
So the forthcoming annihilation of the "Jewish race" in
Europe is not even a salient point of Hitler's speech.
In other words, part of the American media, including
the New York Times, had been seeing the totalitarian regime of Germany as a projection of their own American
middle-class experience. According to this projection, international peace is something like peace in an American
middle-class environment. If you have failed to make a
1
AUTUMN 1981
�deal, do not blame the other side: you have been insufficiently understanding, attentive, accomodating. What on
earth are you trying to say? That Herr Hitler does not
want peace like all of us? Chancellor Adolf Hitler is human, isn't he? Of course, he is a Right-wing reactionary.
So what? What about Henry Ford I? Study the interests of
Germany, especially in trade, try to see its side of the case
(you must admit that its grievances are just), negotiate,
resolve conflicts, settle issues, work out problems, and
sign an agreement to your mutual advantage.
Of course, the highest triumph of this kind was the Munich Agreement of 1938. On October I, 1938, the New
York Times announced it in its banner headline as: "AntiWar Pact."
Prime Minister Wildly Cheered by Relieved LondonersKing Welcomes Him at Palace
By Ferdinand Kuhn, Jr.
London, Sept 30-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had
a hero's welcome on this rainy Autumn evening when he
came back to London, bringing the four-power agreement
and the Anglo-American declaration reaffirming "the desire
of our two peoples never to go to war with one another
again."
"For the second time in our history," he told a wildly cheering crowd in Downing Street, "a British Prime Minister has
returned from Germany bringing peace with honor."
Mr. Chamberlain was comparing himself proudly to Disraeli, who came home amid similar enthusiasm after the Ber-
lin Congress of 1878.
A cynical outsider might have said that part of Czechoslovakia has just been given away to Hitler in exchange for
a piece of paper. The purpose of every conqueror is not
fighting, but conquest The fact that Hitler was taking
over part of Czechoslovakia without a single shot fired
and could and would conquer the rest in the same way
meant that he had won a war without any resistance (the
greatest triumph of every conqueror), not that he desired
~<never
to go to war."
There had been nothing like it here since grateful crowds
surged around David Lloyd George during the victory celebrations of 1918. London usually hides its emotions, and all
this exuberance was more astonishing than a ticker tape parade on Broadway.
Women Almost Hysterical
It had more than a trace of the hysterical about it. Most of
Mr. Chamberlain's welcomers seemed to be women, who
probably had not read the terms of the Munich agreement
but who remembered the last war and all it meant to them.
They flocked from little suburban homes to watch the
Prime Minister pass in his car along the Great West Road
leading into London. They stood outside Buckingham Palace
in pouring rain with newspapers over their hats waiting for
him to arrive for a welcome by King George and Queen
Elizabeth.
The crowd set up such tremendous cheers that Mr. and
THEST.JOHNSREVIEW
Mrs. Chamberlain had to appear with the King and Queen
on the
again.
flood~lit
palace balcony as if this were coronation time
And here is a New York Times report from Munich itself:
"Britain and Germany Agree" by Frederick T. Birchall. Munich, Germany, Sept. 30- The whole aspect of European relations has been changed by developments today following
the signature of the four-power agreement over Czechoslovakia in the early hours of this morning.
However, something far more important happened:
The Czechs have consented to the agreement, but far transcending their acceptance in importance to the world at large
are the results of an intimate conversation between Chancel-
lor Adolf Hitler and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in
Herr Hitler's private apartments just before the departure of
the British delegation.
What is the Czech consent to the agreement (that is,
Hitler's conquest of Czechoslovakia) compared in importance to the world at large with an intimate (yes, intimate)
conversation in Herr Hitler's private (yes, private) apartments?
These results were made known in the following joint communique issued after the conversation:
We, the German Fuehrer and Chancellor and the
British Prime Minister, have had a further meeting today
and are agreed in recognizing the question of Anglo-German relations as of the first importance for the two countries and for Europe.
We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German naval agreement as symbolic of the desire of
our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be
the method adopted to deal with any other questions that
may concern our two countries, and we are determined to
continue our efforts to remove probable sources of difference and thus contribute to assure the peace of Europe.
Never has a simpler document been issued in history with
consequences more far-reaching or more pregnant with hope.
If the two men who issued it stick to their resolves the peace
of Europe seems assured for a generation at least.
It is to Czechoslovakia that the New York Times devoted about one-tenth of its editorial space:
Czechoslovakia as it stood before the end of last week was
itself the product of a series of major surgical operations made
in 1919 by the framers of the Treaty of Versaille's. As the
world knows, the results of those surgical operations were far
from uniformly happy. The city of Vienna, which had been
the financial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, became
in many ways a shadow of its former self. The German industries in Bohemia, in becoming part of the new Czechoslovak
State, were torn from most of their previous market in the old
Austria-Hungary. It is partly for this reason that they have suf~
49
�fered so severely that many factories in that district have been
shut down and abandoned, often throwing whole communities into unemployment.
made unmistakably clear to the dictators, who have hitherto
relied upon the threat of force for the achievement of their
ends, that there is a limit beyond which the democracies of
the world will not go. Whatever Hitler may have thought be·
So what was happening to Czechoslovakia was good?
No: there is a serious but.
But if the new territorial amputating and grafting process that
is now going on partly corrects some maladjustments, it is
more likely to create new and more serious ones.
In other words, the New York Times sees Hitler's con·
quest of Czechoslovakia as a split or merger of a corpora·
tion, a mixed bag of advantages and disadvantages.
The message of the editorial is to demonstrate that as
far as the still remaining part of Czechoslovakia is con·
cerned, the new split-and-merger gives it on balance more
disadvantages than advantages. True, it might have been
different:
In a world dominated by pacific sentiments and free trade,
changes in political frontiers might have only a minor economic significance. Trade relations would continue largely in
their accustomed channels, subject to those adjustments
made necessary only by changes in currency, in legal codes,
contract forms and courts, and in the incidence of taxes.
Alas, trade relations are not to continue in their accus·
tamed channels:
But the world today is dominated more than it has been for
generations by nationalism and the doctrines of protection
and self-containment. That is why the amputation of sections
of Czechoslovakia is likely to have so serious an economic effect on the part that remains.
On the editorial page the New York Times published
"Opinions on the Munich Agreement": five letters in all.
The first letter says:
The gains from the Munich settlement for the forces of law
and order are substantial and far outweigh the sacrifices.
The greatest gain of all is that the democracies set out to
enforce peace and succeeded. British and French arms
backed by American moral support brought home to Hitler
that there is a law which he could not defy with impunity-the law of nations, which though trampled underfoot
in China, still has vitality in EurOpe.
The second letter seems to continue the first:
Despite the scramble for settlement on the part of the democracies and their leaders allowing their powerful countries
to be humbled, I think that the Four-Power Pact preserving
the peace of Europe is the greatest tribute to the democratic
form of government.
The third letter assures the good New Yorkers that the
Munich surrender has
50
fore, he knows now that Britain and France are not afraid to
fight and that there are issues for which, if need be, they will
fight.
The fourth letter states that the relevant countries
have been spared untold agonies of slaughter and have saved
billions of dollars by the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia. It is right
that millions in these countries now pray and offer up thanks
for peace ...
And the fifth and last letter deserves to be quoted in
full:
To the Editor of the New York Times:
While it was good politics in Munich for Mr. Chamberlain
and Mr. Daladier not to underscore the important fact that
Hitler retreated shamelessly from the position he took up before the four-power meeting, it is deplorable that the newspapers and the public, instead of emphasizing this outstanding
defeat of Hitler's, concentrate on bewailing what Czechoslovakia lost.
If one thing has been proved beyond doubt at the Munich
conference it was Hitler's realization that threat of force for
power politics does not work anymore, and that the council
table has to replace his former methods.
Obviously, if a threat of force is of no use to Germany's future then Hitler is played out, as there are Germans with
greater competence available to settle its affairs by discussion.
Therefore, for the good of Germany and the rest of the world,
it is Hitler's defeat and not Czechoslovakia's loss that should
be emphasized and advertised.
Alexander Gross
New York York, Oct. 1, 1938
And here four months after this triumph, Chancellor
Adolf Hitler declared like an unreal movie gangster that
the Jews of Europe were his hostages, whom he would kill
off if the United States and other countries came to the
rescue of the rest of Czechoslovakia, which Hitler meant
to occupy in six weeks, or Poland, which he was to invade
late in the year.
Now we can return to February 18, 1975-to these
seven words about the legitimate interests of the Palestin·
ian people which Henry Kissinger duly signed in 1975 on
behalf of the United States government, but the New
York Times deleted.
My Britannica (1970) calls pre-1948 Israel Palestine. The
Arabs who live on the territory or have fled (though the
government of Israel invited them to return, according to
my Britannica) were first called the Palestinian Arabs, to
distinguish them from the Iraqi Arabs, for example. Later
the word "Arabs" was dropped (for brevity?) and they be·
came the Palestinians or the Palestinian people. Now,
surely Palestine must belong to the Palestinians?
AUTUMN 1981
�But there is something called Israel in the area? In reply
to this supposition, the Palestine Liberation Organization
drew in 1968 its "Palestinian National Charter":
The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of
the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage
of time, because they were contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and to their natural right in their homeland, and
inconsistent with the principles embodied in the Charter of
the United Nations, particularly the right of self-determination.2
Still, what is Israel? "Israel is the instrument of the
Zionist movement," answers the Charter. But what is,
then, the Zionist movement?
Zionism is a political movement organically associated with
international imperialism and antagonistic to all action for liberation and to progressive movements in the world. It is racist
and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods.
On October 28, 1974, twenty Arab heads of government meeting at Rabat named the PLO with Arafat as its
leader "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people." The Palestinian Arabs have not elected any
sole legitimate representative, you will say. But who
elected Stalin, the co-founder of the United Nations, to be
the sole legitimate representative there of more than 100
expansion in the Middle East, that the Soviet rulers had
repeatedly tried to crack by means of wars by proxy, and
only an unpredictable counter-attack of Israeli armor had
saved Israel in 1973.
How does one know that Arafat's ~~sovereign state" may
be like Castro's Cuba? But how did one know that Castro's Cuba would be a Castro's Cuba? The New York
Times argued that it would not be: Arafat's "sovereign
state" will be small. But Castro's Cuba was even smaller
compared with both Americas, Africa, and Asia, and yet
look at what it has been doing. There is no harm for the
Soviet rulers to try out Arafat: this is only one move by
one piece on the global chessboard. If the move does not
destroy Israel, some other moves will. If Israel destroys
Arafat, not vice versa, there is no end of spare Arafats in
this world. And if the war spreads to the entire Middle
East, its oil fields will become the first casualty, which will
be of immense benefit to Soviet global strategy, and the
Soviet invasion of the Middle East will be far easier too.
Later, the Soviet rulers will restore oil production in their
Middle East-possibly with Western aid.
On November 22, 1974, the United Nations Resolution
3236 "legitimized the interests of the Palestinian people,"
that is, Arafat's armed group. The Soviet rulers (the "Soviet people"?) voted for it with eighty-eight other "nations" or "peoples," including the Byelorussians or the
Czechs who also figure as (sovereign) "nations" or "peo-
cow a "permanent representation" (a Russian term mean-
ples" because their sole legitimate representative Stalin
wanted it that way. Most democracies, including Britain,
abstained, while a few, including the United States, voted
against. In his speech of explanation of the negative vote,
the United States delegate said that the United States favored the Security Council Resolution 338 of 1973. The
resolution does not mention any Palestinian people, let
alone their interests: it called upon the countries which attacked Israel in the Yom Kippur war and Israel which
saved herself by accident to cease fire in twelve hours and
begin to negotiate.
Pravda's text of the joint document to which Henry Kissinger agreed on behalf of the United States Government
refers to "Resolution 338 ... with due account of the legitimate interests of. .. the Palestinian people." The word
"legitimate" leaves no doubt as to the meaning: "self-determination and sovereign state of the Palestinian
people" in Palestine, as the United Nations resolved. By
having signed the "Joint Communique" the United States
recast its vote in the United Nations, as it were, which
constituted the only news the "talks" and the "Joint Communique" contained and the New York Times extirpated.
This example does not mean that Pravda is truthful by
definition, while the New York Times is mendacious by
nature (as Pravda would assert). The information on the
ing both embassy and consulate). The "legitimate" (in
American side's agreement to "Palestinian sovereignty"
Russian synonymous with "legal" or "law-bound") inter-
that appeared in Pravda showed the Soviet readers that at
the height of so-called detente early in 1975, the Soviet re·
gime was expanding as victoriously as before: the establishment of an "Arab Cuba" at the heart of Israel could
nations of Russia? Arafat is a terrorist? American periodi-
cals I have happened to read at this writing, from the frivolous Time magazine to the sedate Foreign Affairs, explain
that Prime Minister Begin of Israel was once a terrorist
too. True, the PLO killed from June 1967 to September
1979 350 Arabs who disagreed with the PLO, including
Sheik Hashem Khozander, the Imam of Gazda. 3 On the
other hand, I have never heard that Begin ever touched
even the most Arab hair on the most anti-Israeli head in
the pro-Soviet Communist Party of Israel. But the fact
that Lenin killed those who disagreed with him as well,
and George Washington did not, is evidently an irrelevant
minor difference.
In unison with what was or has since become the pre·
vailing view of the American media, not to mention the
media of West-European countries, on July 30, 1974, a
"top-level Palestinian delegation," headed by Arafat was
officially received by Boris Ponomaryov, "head of the International Section of the Central Committee of the Com·
munist Party of the Soviet Union," and in August it was
announced by Pravda that the PLO was to open in Mas·
ests of the "Palestinian people" had thus come to mean
the creation of an "Arab Cuba" to be established at the
heart of Israel, this little hard nut of resistance to Soviet
THEST.JOHNSREVIEW
51
�well mean the destruction of Israel, while the refusal of Israel to have an "Arab Cuba" at its heart would lead to the
"international isolation" of Israel, which would also be
helpful in the achievement of the same goaL
In general, the veracity of Pravda has been improving in
proportion to the growth of the Soviet rulers' global
might When Pravda said on March 6, 1919: "The Soviets
have won throughout the world," and added on the next
day: "The comrades present in this hall" (of the 1st Congress of the International) "will see the establishment of
the World Federative Soviet Republic," that was wildly
untrue. Such a statement today would not be so wildly untrue. Pravda does not now need to make such explicit, extravagant, or premature statements to keep the Soviet
population as well as Soviet allies, vassals, and supporters,
assured as to the "imminent victory of our cause all over
the world." Many Soviet inhabitants, whether they identify themselves with the regime or oppose it, now believe
in the "ultimate victory" of the Soviet regime without any
assurance on the part of Pravda. Because the Soviet regime has matched and surpassed American strategic
power only in the 1970s, it is obvious to them that the Soviet global game of chess has merely begun, and as in
every game of chess, the moves are tryouts, advances, re~
treats, detours, exchanges. Many Soviet inhabitants understand, for example, that the Soviet rulers keep Eastern
Europe on a loose leash just to demonstrate to their
potential vassals in France, Italy, or elsewhere that the latter will enjoy some latitude when they come to power in
their countries-if they behave, of course. Since the Soviet rulers are after the whole globe, they play with their
Eastern European pieces.
was this kind of truth-a truth in keeping with Pravda's
propaganda goaL
Inversely, the New York Times censored out the news
which could prompt some readers to question the view of
the Times that the foreign policy or strategy called detente was working to the advantage of all concerned and,
above all, the United States.
But surely this is a generally expected behavior of an individual or a social group in a democracy. The prosecutor
in a court of justice censors out the defendant's innocence, while the counsel for defense the defendant's guilt
Why should not the New York Times censor out what contradicts its view? The trouble is that the New York Times
has no adequate opposition source or adequate competitor as regards international daily news for American decision-makers. It is the prosecutor (or the counsel for
defense) without the counsel for defense (or, respectively,
the prosecutor). The evidence in the twenty years or so,
beginning with Castro's seizure of Cuba, indicates that
what the New York Times censors out usually remains
censored out in the process of decision-making in American foreign policy, strategy, and defense.
The rest of the New York Times article is sheer verbiage. In contrast to Pravda, it is not a documentary text,
but its own report, which the Times would define as "incisive news analysis" and Soviet decision-makers as Philis-
tine prattle. Whatever it is, it would be misleading in its
own way even if the New York Times had not extirpated
the only grain of news the official text contained.
In this first high-level Soviet-American meeting since Vladi-
What makes Soviet world' conquest so plausible to
vostok and the chill caused by the Soviet abrogation of the
1972 trade agreement, the atmosphere was described as
many Soviet inhabitants is not "Soviet gains" in Europe,
somewhat more formal and slightly more abrasive than in pre-
Africa, the Caribbean, or the Middle East What impresses them is the very fact that the democracies have
been allowing and even helping the Soviet regime to grow
from a militarily backward parochial country in the 1930s
to the global military mammoth of today. Just think what
will happen tomorrow! In 195 3 the Soviet regime still produced 38 million tons of steel a year as against the lO 1 million tons of the United States. In 1978 the Soviet regime
produced 151 million tons of steel, used mainly for military purposes, while the United States produced 124 million, put mainly to civilian uses. What will stop the Soviet
global military mammoth from continuing to outgrow the
democracies? If, having invested in defense since 1947
several trillion dollars, the United States does not yet
know how to defend the Middle East, for example, these
Soviet inhabitants conjecture that the United States will
know how to do it less and less.
In other words, today Pravda can often afford the truth
and thus gain credibility without sowing any doubt as to
vious sessions, but on the whole "joviaL''
The article is a projection of American middle-class life
all over again thirty-six years later-only this time not
onto the totalitarian regime of Germany but of Russia.
The incidental difference is that while the rulers of Germany were, in the columns of the New York Times,
American Right-wing corporation presidents, the rulers of
Russia are American progressive corporation presidents,
the ''imminent victory of our cause all over the world."
pleasant, warm, and forward-looking.
It will be recalled that the "Soviet abrogation of the
1972 trade agreement" the article mentions occurred as a
result of the Jackson-Vanik amendment in Congress
which tried to "attach political strings to Soviet-American
trade and interfere in Soviet domestic affairs," as Pravda
put it. Many top American decision-makers, including
President Ford (whom Pravda quotes on the subject in the
issue under review), agreed that the "Soviet Union" had
a good reason for being offended. And yet the "atmosphere" of the Soviet-American talks was on the whole
The news that the United States government agreed as of
February 18, 1975, to "Palestinian sovereignty," and thus
reneged on its United Nations vote of four months earlier,
dents, the Soviet rulers bear no grudge: Russia, Inc. is future-oriented, optimistic, positive-it looks forward to
52
"jovial." Like up·and·coming American corporation presi·
AUTUMN 1981
�agreements on world peace, international cooperation,
and everything else-in particular in the Middle East, and
this is why the Soviet side is so eager to convene the Geneva conference on the Middle East:
On the Middle East, the Russians have pressed for an early
reconvening of the Geneva conference so that they can play a
more active role. They are co-chairmen with the Americans.
The fact that the Soviet rulers (the "Russians") prepared two wars by proxy to destroy Israel and have been
penetrating the Moslem countries by all expedient means
short of the overall invasion of the entire Moslem world,
does not exist because the Soviet war-civilization and its
rulers do not exist: there is instead Russia, Inc. with its
presidents and lawyers, and naturally, they want to play a
more active role in the establishment of peace in the Middle East-in order to trade with the Middle East, travel
there and enjoy peace in general. What other earthly purposes can a human have?
The United States would prefer to see the Geneva conference reconvened while there was momentum for further
political progress and not as a last-ditch effort to prevent a
Middle East war.
Of course, Russia, Inc. is eager to prevent a Middle East
war. Still greater is its desire to add to the "momentum for
further political progress."
During the discussions, Mr. Gromyko raised the possibility
of an accord to limit arms to the Middle East. But this was in
the context of what would be in the final settlement, not as a
measure to be adopted now.
Actually, "Mr. Gromyko," that is, the Soviet rulers,
meant that the United States would "limit arms to the
Middle East" while the Soviet regime would send them to
their allies, guerrillas, and subversives in the Middle East
so secretly that no intelligence agency of the West would
know (not that it takes any special top secrecy to achieve
this). Anyway, we learn that Mr. Kissinger "dined tonight
at Admiralty House with [British] Prime Minister Harold
Wilson and Foreign Secretary James Callaghan, who just
returned from Moscow."
They compared notes on Soviet relations. The British leaders were the first Westerners to see Mr. Brezhnev since he be·
came ill in December.
Mr. Kissinger reportedly learned from Mr. Gromyko that
Mr. Brezhnev had been suffering from influenza and was
now in "fine health" although he would, by doctors' orders,
perhaps take two more weeks of rest.
A jovial meeting cif corporation presidents and lawyers:
Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Gromyko represent different firms,
of course, but they always swap tidbits of inside info.
THEST.JOHNSREVIEW
Joking with Mr. Gromyko, Mr. Kissinger said he could not
compete with "the oratorical skill" of his colleague . ..
Obviously, no meeting of corporation lawyers is complete without their joking with one another, and since the
entire description is phoney, jokes may be contrived too.
The United States discerned Soviet flexibility on extending
the agreed 150-kiloton limit on nuclear explosions to peaceful
applications.
Yes, flexibility is what also distinguishes Russia, Inc. in
negotiations. In fact, the third part of the New York Times
article is subtitled "A Russian Concession." According to
the Times, it is the Soviet side, not the American one,
which made a concession during these talks. What concession is that?
Having read the two relevant paragraphs of the article,
we learn that the Soviet side agreed that the "Geneva
conference . .. should resume its work at an early date/'
not "as soon as possible," the expression on which the Soviet side had allegedly insisted before. (Is "as soon as possible" necessarily earlier than "at an early date"?) In the
Pravda text of the communique in Russian (which is as
valid as the English text of the document) the expression
is "at the nearest time." So the Russian concession" that
the New York Times espied was lost anyway in the equally
valid Russian text.
While the Soviet side is flexible and makes concessions-as a future-oriented, optimistic, positive corporation should-this is more than can be said about the
American side:
11
Later, on the way to London aboard Mr. Kissinger's plane,
newsmen were told that Mr. Gromyko had urged the immediate reconvening of the Geneva conference on the Middle
East and had accused the United States of bad faith in excluding the Soviet Union from the Middle East diplomacy.
There is no mention, of course, that Gromyko merely
repeated the standard charge Soviet propaganda has been
making: the Soviet side is so eager to negotiate, to be flexible, to make concessions, but the egotistic American side
does not give the Soviet side half a chance in the Middle
East.
To be sure, corporation lawyers rarely agree as soon as
they meet. On the other hand, all issues can be finally resolved. After all, every issue between two corporations
can be reduced to money: who pays whom how much.
And each side will finally decide that it is worth its while
to pay the required sum, settle the issue, and recoup elsewhere the money lost.
The two sides still disagreed on some aspects of the European security conference, but the Americans believe the issues can be resolved.
All that is necessary is good will and legal expertise:
53
�After their talks in the Hotel Intercontinental in Geneva,
Mr. Gromyko and Mr. Kissinger came down to the lobby to
speak with newsmen. Mr. Gromyko said that "on many of the
questions we touched, our positions were close or coincide.''
For Stalin's man, Gromyko, who survived Stalin and
Beria and Malenkov and Khrushchev, to impersonate for
Western consumption a jovial HMr. Gromyko, Russia,
Inc." is about as difficult as for Al Capone or the Godfather to trick school children.
The last sentence of the article adds to the picture of
Hdynamism and genius" of Mr. Kissinger, America, Inc.:
The Secretary will be in Zurich for luncheon with the Shah
of Iran, who is vacationing in Switzerland.
While negotiating on the Middle East (and getting a
concession from the Soviet side), on the European security conference, and even on the extension of the
!50-kiloton limit on nuclear explosions to peaceful applications, he is taking care at the same time of AmericanIranian relations right on the spot, in Switzerland. No
wonder the relations between the United States and Iran
are so good at this writing, what with the American hostages and the rest.
Pravda did not print a word of this verbiage. Why
should Pravda mislead its readers in this way? On the contrary, Pravda readers must know that the enemy made a
concession on "the Palestinian question" because Soviet
might cows the enemy, and this is what detente is about:
Western concessions, servility, self-disarmament, retreat,
surrender, hoping to placate the globally winning Soviet
regime. As for that Philistine prattle, let the Western Philistines consume it-the more the better.
What does Pravda regard as the most important international news of the day? Britain's signing of several extensive Soviet-British documents, each of which Pravda
printed in full. Those who were interested (and I prefer to
read documents rather than their interpretation by the
New York Times) could glean from them some grains of
news.
From "The Soviet-British Protocol on Consultations"
we learn that the Soviet war mammoth and the British
midget are "determined to contribute to the deepening of
the process of relaxation of international tension [the official Soviet Russian-language definition of the word 'detente'] and to render it [the process] irreversible."
The last word is the key. The natural resources of Britain are small compared with those of the United States,
not to mention Russia (the territory of Britain accounts
for l percent of that of Russia proper, excluding Soviet
vassals). When Henry Kissinger launched his detente, the
United States preserved at least the economic ability to
reverse its policy of transfer of American science and
technology to the Soviet military if the Soviet regime
openly invaded Afganistan, for example (at that time a
wild conjecture, of course). But not Britain. "The Soviet-
54
British Protocol" was aimed at making the "process of detente" irreversible for Britain. The definition of this goal
comes up again in "The Joint Soviet-British Statement"
(just as do the "legitimate interests of the Arab people of
Palestine," though Britain had abstained from the United
Nations vote four months earlier). "Irreversible detente":
the impoverished Britain would henceforth be like a hungry little fish on a big strong hook inside the bait of Soviet
imports and exports. The Soviet turn-off of British-Soviet
trade if Britain misbehaved would lead to such deprivations and dislocations that the Government would receive
a vote of non-confidence, not to mention the British trade
unions' wrath. To bite the bait of Soviet trade, Britain offered the Soviet rulers $2.4 billion in trade credits extended over five years: the little hungry fish paid for at
least part of its bait.
In the Soviet strategists' view, Britain is the most resistant country in Europe: it is the only European country
that takes defense at least as seriously (if this may be
called serious) as the United States: British and American
military spending account for almost the same percentage
of their respective GNP's, though the living standards in
Britain are lower than in the United States.
At this writing, I was interested to see how this most resistant country of Europe had reacted to the Soviet open
invasion of Afghanistan. The latest Facts on File carries an
item of three paragraphs entitled "United Kingdom Retaliates against Soviets.''4 The first paragraph can send a chill
down the Soviet decision-makers' spine. Is the little fish
off its big hook?
Great Britain Jan. 26 announced a series of retaliatory measures against the Soviet Union for its invasion of Afghanistan.
The second paragraph will move to laughter even the
most humorless Soviet bureaucrat:
Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington told Parliament that
the government had canceled scheduled visits to London by a
Soviet minister and deputy minister, a performance by the
Soviet Army Chorus, and such ceremonial military contacts
as a planned exchange of naval ships.
The third paragraph announces that the five-year-credit
agreement expires in February (that is right: five years
have passed since February 18, 1975, the date of the New
York Times and Pravda we sampled). Will Britain stop at
least her financing of her transfer of science and technology to the Soviet global war-machine? Oh, no. It will continue to do so Hon a case-by-case basis."
I picked up the British newspapers and learned that two
days later, on January 28, Mrs. Thatcher said in Parliament with awesome gravity:
We have announced [see above] the measures that we shall
be taking with regard to the Soviet Union . ..
AUTUMN 1981
�In addition Mrs. Thatcher said she wanted Britain to
boycott the Olympics (an awesome retaliation in itself).
Alas, the spirit (of Mrs. Thatcher) is willing, but the flesh
(of the hungry little fish) is weak, and many British sportsmen will not inflict on the Soviet regime even the griev·
ous damage of staying home.
One section of "The Joint Soviet-British Statement" as
published by Pravda of February 18, 1975, is subtitled "Bilateral Relations." Here we learn about
the cooperation between British firms and Soviet organizations and enterprises in the field of reclamation of natural resources, including oil, aircraft building . ...
Let us pause here. So British and Soviet aircraft builders will cooperate bilaterally? The Soviet regime has been
producing at least twice as many helicopters and twice as
many combat planes as the United States, even according
to what the United States Department of Defense can observe or detect. Is Britain still dissatisfied? Perhaps Britain
wants to help the Soviet regime to realize its target of pro·
ducing one long-range bomber a day? Are there too few
Soviet transportation planes to carry troops and/or material to any point of the globe?
The documents Pravda published demonstrate how
British science and technology are put at the disposal of
Soviet military growth. Britain had expelled !05 Soviet
agents. But even 10,005 Soviet agents in Britain would
hardly be able to pass so much military-industrial information to the Soviet military. Yet, as of 1975 this all-out mass
espionage was to be called henceforth bilateral cooperation and include all possible forms of transfer of British
.;cience and technology.
Once upon a time Britain acquired colonies in order to
import raw materials from them in exchange for her scientifically or technologically sophisticated merchandise and
thus support her huge population on a small island. On
February 18, 1975, in order to achieve the same economic
goal, Britain made a major step toward becoming a Soviet
colony in economic reverse: that is, a colony which would
supply the Metropolis with her science and engineering in
exchange for raw materials and thus support her huge
population on a small island. In other words, just as Gambia was once a "raw-materials appendage of Britain" (as
Soviet propaganda puts it), so Britain began to move towards becoming a "science and technology appendage" of
the Soviet global military machine, and this is the news
Pravda of February 18, 1975, reported by publishing the
relevant documents.
The New York Times, which had printed the voluminous verbiage of the "Pentagon Papers," did not find an
inch of space for these documents. Instead, the New York
Times printed again a report of its own, from Moscow
"special to the New York Times." As nearly all "reports
from Moscow," the text could well have been written on
the New York premises of the New York Times. It is based
on the same American middle-class projection: the news is
THEST.JOHNSREVIEW
that America, Inc. has been outpaced by Britain, Inc.
which landed a huge hunk of trade with Russia, Inc.:
The announcement of the British credits tended to bolster
Moscow's contention that it could find trading partners elsewhere in the West. In renouncing the 1972 trade agreement
with the United States last month, the Russians expressed
particular annoyance over the low credit ceiling, which is in
addition to about $600-million of loans already outstanding.
The United States does not want to sell on credit what
the Soviet rulers want? Then Britain will:
The credits, which Mr. Wilson said would be less than
£!-billion ($2.4-billion) are part of a broader program for
economic cooperation that was signed today. Mr. Wilson
characterized it as possibly "the biggest breakthrough in Anglo-Soviet trade that I have known."
Trade, cooperation, good relations:
The warm tone on which the British visit ended showed
that relations between the two countries had emerged from
the chill into which they were thrust after London expelled
105 Soviet diplomats on espionage charges in 1971. The
Kremlin accepted an invitation for Mr. Brezhnev, Mr. Kosygin, and Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko to visit Britain.
But why does the Soviet global military mammoth keep
spies in little Britain by the hundred (or by the thousand)?
Because it fears Britain's invasion of Russia? Or because,
on the contrary, Britain is for the Soviet rulers just another Czechoslovakia, or Afghanistan, or indeed, Ukraine?
In terms of the middle-class projection, the only New York
Times answer is that Russia, Inc. kept those 105 spies in
Britain, Inc. in order to improve trade relations between
the two corporations.
Before Henry Kissinger's detente there was a practically
universal embargo on strategic trade with the Soviet re·
gime. After the embargo was repealed, each ally of the
United States began to reason that if it refrained from a
trade deal accelerating Soviet military growth, another
country would seize the opportunity. Henry Kissinger destroyed-possibly forever-whatever economic unity existed among the allies of the United States as against the
Soviet regime. If Hl'nry Kissinger were in charge of for·
eign policy in Russia, for that alone he would have been
put on trial and shot. But since he is on the other side, he
shines at this writing, as ever, and the Soviet rulers cer·
tainly owe him a monument for the destruction of a world
economic alliance against their war~regime.
Anyway, the state of world trade after the undoing of
the embargo on trade with the Soviet regime fits well the
misperception of the New York Times: the world as just so
many corporations vying with each other to sell Russia,
Inc. whatever it wants and on terms it chooses:
Mr. Wilson defended the decision to offer the low-interest
credits at a time when Britain has been hit by recession, while
55
�the Soviet Union has been increasing its foreign currency
holdings with greater oil profits. Moscow has already concluded deals for cash with other Western countries, notably
West Germany.
Or look at France, Inc. Only America, Inc. falls behind,
punishing itself:
The British credit falls short of the $2.5-billion extended by
France in a trade agreement signed last December. However,
it is seven times more than the $300-million limit set by the
United States Congress on Export-Import Bank loans to the
Soviet Union in a four-year period.
Let us now proceed to the third of the five "major [in·
ternational] events of the day" according to the New York
Times.
"World crude-oil prices have begun to sag noticeably
under the impact of reduced consumption by the indus·
trialized nations." No figure for this "noticeable sag." Is it
l, 2, 3 percent? Of what importance was this "sag" if the
OPEC countries had been raising the prices 100, 200, 300
percent? The New York Times ascribes this "sag" to "re·
duced consumption" because this tends to support the
view that the newspaper has been advocating throughout
the 1970s. In his lengthy article (February I, 1980) to
which the New York Times referred editorially with approval and which was put on the Congressional Record
twice in the same month, George Kennan says: "If the
Persian Gulf is really vital to our security, it is surely we
who by our unrestrained greed for oil have made it so."
One wonders whether it is America's greed for the fifteen raw materials without which the American economy
cannot function that has made the rest of the outside
world so vital to American security. Must the United
States overcome its greed for these fifteen critical raw materials and let the rest of the world go Soviet?
The "greatest real threats to our security in the area remain what they have been all along," Mr. Kennan says after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Predictably, the
Soviet invasion is not one of these threats. They are: "our
self-created dependence on Arab oil and our involvement
in a wholly unstable Israeli-Arab relationship." Not the Soviet involvement in this relationship, to be sure.
Let us assume that the United States has overcome its
greed for oil, and so has no need of the Middle East,
which duly becomes Soviet. As a result, the Soviet regime
will have additional hundreds of billions of dollars annually from oil alone, which means as many dollars for Soviet
global military power. Where will the United States take
additional hundreds of billions of dollars annually to invest in defense in order to counter the Soviet investment?
In other words, on February 18, 1975, the New York
Times front-paged an accidental annual or monthly crudeoil price fluctuation to support its view (which is as frivolous as it is lethal) and give it thereby the front-page
weight of a "major event of the day." Naturally, Pravda (or
1
56
1
any other newspaper in the world) did not mention it because it was not an event, whether major or minor.
The fourth "major [international] event of the day" according to the New York Times is another failure of the
Cambodian Government in its war against the "communist insurgents." Here the view of the New York Times
and that of Pravda (that is, Pravda's owners, of course) coincide in the sense that both newspapers assure their
readers that the Cambodian Government is doomed and
the sooner it will fall the better.
The reports on Cambodia in both newspapers are
wrapped in unmitigated gloom (for the Cambodian Government) except one paragraph describing the American
airlift. In Pravda this paragraph is as follows:
Washington, 17. (TASS). The United States has started an
airlift to supply the Phnom Penh regime with additional military material and ammunition. According to the Washington
Post, the first of those transportation planes, DC-8s, which
belonged to American Airlines and which the Pentagon has
chartered, has arrived in the capital of Cambodia.
The corresponding paragraph of the New York Times is:
With the Mekong blockaded, the Americans have expanded their supply airlift from Thailand. The airlift,
technically being handled by civilian contractors but actually
run from beginning to end by the American military, is mostly
devoted to ammunition so food and fuel are increasingly
scarce.
Food and fuel increasingly scarce? But the next para·
graph says that "rice and fuel stocks, if stretched carefully,
can last well over a month and even two months or more."
Does the New Yark Times expect the airlift to carry food
and fuel to the city three, four, or more months in advance? Does New Yark have food and fuel stocks for
three, four, or more months?
The differences between this paragraph of Pravda and
that of the New York Times can be outlined as follows:
Pravda
The New York Times
With Cambodia's defeat made
to seem imminent, Pravda emphasizes American involvement to show that even the
United States is so weak that
it can no longer defend any
country. Whether the planes
belong to American Airlines or
the Pentagon is immaterial.
Both are ultimately at one and
against us.
At the same time, Pravda
does not want to assure its
readers in advance that the
American airlift is ineffective
The New York Times emphasizes the wily wickedness of
the American military: they
have hired civilian contractors
for the airlift, a loophole in the
struggle led by the New York
Times against the American
aid to Cambodia.
The New York Times wants
to assure its readers that anything would be futile: that the
airlift is "mostly devoted to
ammunition," instead of carryAUTUMN 1981
�or futile: no one can predict its
outcome, and Pravda does not
want to commit itself and later
look foolish. Our side is winning, but temporary setbacks
are always possible.
ing also food and fuel to replenish the city's stocks three,
four, or more months in advance. The Cambodian Government is bound to lose, the
American aid must be stopped.
The fifth and last "major [international] event of the
day" according to the New York Times is the theft of pictures at the Municipal Museum in Milan. I am sure that
for a large part of the Western media (such as the other
two major newspapers of New Yark) this was the most important international news of the day or the only such
news worth reporting. Pravda ignored it.
Pravda was called by a Western newspaper the most
boring newspaper in the world. It is true in the sense that
Pravda feels no more obliged to be entertaining than does
the American Congressional Record or a CIA report. But,
having treated the theft as a major international event of
the day, does not the New York Times try to relieve its
boredom not by interesting information, which is so hard
to obtain, but in the same easy way the New York Post
does? Does not the New York Times mix the boredom of
Pravda (minus some of Pravda's grains of information) and
the entertainment of the New York Post?
So much for what the New York Times regards as the
five major international events of the day. Let us now take
a couple of international news items of the New York
Times which are not major events, according to the New
York Times.
On page 8 we find that in the "new winter-spring campaign" in South Vietnam the Vietcong forces, "with large
numbers of fresh North Vietnamese regulars," had "scored
their biggest gains in the Mekong area since the 60s."
This is no major international event. True, some read-
ers of the New York Times could still remember that on
January 27, 1973, the Paris peace agreement on Vietnam
had been signed after years of negotiations. So the Soviet
rulers, who were behind both the war in Vietnam and the
peace agreement in Paris, had treated the United States
But what about vast Soviet help (which is not even
mentioned)? If such exists, it is evidently part of the natural balance of forces. The Soviet rulers are part of the
nature in any country: it is the United States which is extraneous, foreign, aggressive everywhere. A truly minor
event this war is, a reassertion of the natural balance of
forces, a play of nature, as one might say. Who can compare this event to the theft of pictures in Milan or the
noticeable sag of crude-oil prices allegedly as the result of
reduced consumption!
As for Pravda's coverage of this war, here Pravda proves
that it is a totalitarian newspaper. The New York Times
can blot out or distort an event reported by the rest of the
media. But it cannot ignore it forever if the rest of the media persists. Now, according to Pravda, the war does not
exist. Of course, Pravda readers know about it from foreign radios. But Pravda does not risk the report: what if an
American Senator's aide finds such a report in Pravda?
Here you are (he will say): Pravda admits that North Vietnam's perfidious all-out invasion is fully on.
Pravda ran a three-paragraph item entitled "Repulsing
the Violators of the [Paris Peace] Agreement" only about
a month later, on March 14, 1975, after the Soviet rulers
had understood beyond all doubt (if only from the New
York Times' reports and editorials) that the top American
decision-makers regarded the Soviet perfidious all-out attack by proxy on an American ally as something having
nothing to do either with the United States or the Soviet
rulers.
Recently [days, weeks, months ago?] the Saigon administration has extended provocations aimed to undermine the Paris
agreement on Vietnam.
Fortunately, in South Vietnam there already exists the
legitimate government of South Vietnam: the Provisional
Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam (the PRG of RSV). The PRG of RSV will not allow
the "Saigon administration" to violate the Paris peace
agreement.
11
Government as so many fools and used the peace" agree-
ment to prepare and launch an open all-out attack and
win the war. The impression the article creates, however,
is that this attack, brazen, perfidious, contemptuous of
the United States, is some remote war of two obscure
tribes neither of which has anything to do with the
United States, not to mention those jovial corporation
presidents and lawyers of Russia, Inc.
Besides, South Vietnam is not really endangered, according to the article. "So far most of the Communist
gains have come in the more peripheral parts of the
delta."
Some Vietnamese and Westerners therefore believe that
what is happening is a reassertion of the natural balance of
forces, which had been artificially extended in the Government's favor by vast American help.
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
In response to the appeal of the PRG of RSV, the People's
Armed Forces of Liberation of South Vietnam are repulsing
with determination the violators of the Paris agreement.
Then for two weeks Pravda is silent again. On March 28,
1975, Pravda runs a report entitled "Situation in South
Vietnam." What is the situation? The same as before.
True, Pravda now says openly, the Provisional Government of the Republic of South Vietnam governs most of
South Vietnam, and surely South Vietnam must be gov·
erned by its government, not the "reactionary Thieu
clique, stubbornly violating the Paris agreement on Vietnam," as Pravda puts it, quoting the newspaper Nyan Zan
which the "legitimate" government of South Vietnam
publishes.
Pravda does not lie when the truth is to the Soviet rul-
57
�ers' advantage. But when Pravda is called upon to lie, it
lies with the same limitless insolence, professional skill,
and almost inhuman hypocrisy with which it lied on the
6th of November of 1917 when Lenin's troops attacked
the democratic institutions of Russia, while Pravda an·
nounced that we were being attacked.
The other report of the New York Times which it does
not list as a major international event of the day, but which
is remarkable in its own way, is an especially serene lOQQ.
word fantasy by Flora Lewis entitled "Security Talks
Moving to Finale." Since many Soviet decision*makers
are male chauvinists, they would classify this report as a
starry·eyed housewife's chatter rather than (male) Philis·
tine prattle.
There has been a great deal of difficulty over the wording
of the agreements. For example, a Soviet draft used "important" where a Western draft said "essential."
So this is the stumbling block. Otherwise the Confer·
ence on European Security and Cooperation, working on
what was later called the "Helsinki agreements," ushering
in a new era in the history of mankind, is "moving to finale." Take the third section of its epoch·making agree·
ments, for example:
The third section, on human contacts and exchange of information, caused problems last year, but has now been advanced to the point where only a few details are in dispute.
What details?
There was an argument over whether a clause on information should provide for "public access" or "access by the
public."
tution named after Patrice Lumumba, a "hero of African
liberation," has young people from eighty·nine countries.
This is where future Walter Ulbrichts or Fidel Castros
study and are studied in vivo, to be selected in order to be
trained, introduced to their fellows·in·arms, and helped to
come to power in their respective countries: the most am-
bitious and lucrative profession of today, Soviet satrap.
This is the breeding ground for the young personnel of
the Soviet global political infra·structure. This is where
the Soviet global empire is built.
A grand meeting in honor of the 15th anniversary of the
Friendship-of-Peoples University named after Patrice Lu-
mumba, with the awarding of the [Friendship·of.Peoples] Or·
der to commemorate the event, was held on February 17 in
the Kremlin Palace of Congresses.
The Pravda article is heavy, oppressive, monumental, as
befits the builders of the totalitarian world empire. But it
is informative compared with Flora Lewis's daydreams,
for example.
Elected unanimously as the Presidium of Honor was the
Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union, with Comrade L. I. Brezhnev, General
Secretary of the Central Committee, at the head.
This is a university that enrolls young people of eighty·
nine countries. Foreign diplomats and correspondents are
present at the ceremony. Yet even before it begins, these
future doctors, engineers, scientists (and/or subversives,
guerrilla fighters, "revolutionary leaders") of eighty·nine
countries elect unanimously the Soviet Politburo as grand
supranational sovereign over them all, while the present
governments of their eighty.nine countries are not so
much as mentioned.
So in the Soviet regime there will be "public access" or
"access by the public" (the problem is only to decide which)
to exchange of information, not to mention human contacts. The conference is,
The speaker is B. N. Ponomaryov, that same "man in
charge of the globe" who legitimized in the person of Ara·
fat the "interests of the Palestinian people":
as one delegate described it, the only way "to transform detente from just a matter of states to something for individuals,
with human meaning."
Great Lenin was the first man to enunciate and champion
the right of the people of the colonies to self-determination
and national sovereignty. Our country fought for many years
to realize this principle. The debacle of the colonial empires
was the triumph of Lenin's great idea.
As of February 18, 1975, Flora Lewis is still living in a de·
tente which is just a "matter of states" (the invasion of the
state known as South Vietnam, in violation of an agree·
ment, being a remote irrelevant reassertion of the natural
balance of forces). But new agreements (also signed by
Henry Kissinger?) are to "transform detente from just a
matter of states to something for individuals, with human
meaning." As a Soviet lady journalist jeered off the record
on a similar occasion: uOne feels like singing, laughing,
dancing.''
Let us turn back to Pravda. "True to Lenin's Behest:
Patrice Lumumba Friendship·of·Peoples University is
Awarded Friendship·of·Peoples Order." The Soviet insti-
58
What next?
In their struggle for their economic independence, the developing countries are more and more determined to nationalize the property of foreign corporations [the Soviet regime's
property and personnel in these countries being sacred, of
course] and to take other measures assuring their sovereign
right to dispose of their national resources, as well as to con·
duct joint coordinated practical activity in defense of their in·
terests.
HThis course of events," Ponomaryov remarks with
grim satisfaction, "is obviously not to the taste of imperial·
AUTUMN 1981
�ism" (that is, any group which resists Soviet global expansion).
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics challenged them all,
liberated mankind, and saved civilization.
The imperialist powers do their utmost to arrest the progressive changes in these countries and keep these developing
states within the orbit of capitalism.
Our ideological enemies have set afloat the slanderous
myth of "superpowers." Of course, the Soviet Union is a
mighty power. But its might has not been created at the expense of exploitation of other peoples. It has been produced
by our people's labor.
The imperialist powers will fail. Bear in mind growing
Soviet global military might:
However, the international balance of forces has tipped
drastically and continues to change in favor of socialism and
progress [both of which the Soviet Politburo incarnates]. Under these conditions, the imperialists' possibilities to impose
their will on other nations become more and more limited.
The sub text of the message cannot be clearer. Young
people of eighty-nine countries! Do you see what is happening in Vietnam? Our side is winning after the United
States has paid with more than $100 billion and more
than 50,000 American lives to defend its ally against our
side. You will win in your country if you are with us. And
if you are against us, you will lose, as the South Vietnamese who defended South Vietnam are now losing, and the
United States makes believe that this has nothing to do
with them or with us.
We are on the eve of a great day, the thirtieth anniversary
of the victory over Hitlerism. It is common knowledge that
the Soviet Union sustained the he_aviest losses in this war and
made the decisive contribution to the rout of Hitler's Germany, to the liberation of the peoples of Europe from fascism, and to the rescue of world civilization.
How is this relevant to the eighty-nine countries today?
The lessons of World War II remind us of the need to maintain vigilance constantly and wage an uncompromising struggle against the aggressive plans of imperialist reaction trying
to impede the process of relaxation of tension [the official Soviet definition of detente].
Without naming the United States, the speaker makes
it clear that the United States has become a superpower
by exploiting the poor of the world.
In other words, Ponomaryov is propounding what may
be called "global Marxism." According to Marx, the rich
in each country have become rich at the expense of the
poor (who are poor as a result). The poor must rise in arms
and expropriate the rich. "The expropriators are expropriated!" said the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Obviously,
the same can be applied on the global scale to the rich
(countries) versus the poor (countries). There are dozens
of millions of "haves" in the United States, and hundreds
of millions of "have-nots" in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Why not sick these "masses of the underprivileged"
on the "handful of the rich"? It was done successfully in
Russia, Bavaria, Hungary way back in 1918. Why cannot it
be done globally-with the aid of the Soviet global armed
forces?
Ponomaryov's speech may be summed up by the following statement of his: "Domestic national policy of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union has found its extention on the international arena." If, indeed, the Soviet
regime was able to subjugate in the early 1920s the Moslem nations of Central Asia, it can absorb those of the
Middle East, for geographically and historically the Middle East is an extention of now-Soviet Central Asia. If the
Czechs or Eastern Germans fell under Soviet sway with
no more resistance than the Ukrainians or Estonians did,
the same strategic techniques can successfully be applied
to West Germans or North Americans. Ponomaryov is a
universalist: he believes that human nature is basically the
same everywhere-in Moscow, Kiev, Prague, Berlin, or
In other words, on one side, the side of goodness, is the
New York.
Soviet Union, detente, peace, progress, socialism, those
Neither the ceremony nor Ponomaryov's speech are re-
Western capitalists who sell the Soviet rulers strategically
important merchandise on credit, the young people of
eighty-nine countries, world civilization. On the other
side, the side of evil, is Hitlerism, Hitler's Germany, fas-
ported in the New York Times: The Soviet building of a
global totalitarian empire is screened out by the newspaper.
The other news of Pravda and the New York Times reduces to minor items which can be listed as follows for
brief comparison:
cism, all who are against detente, reactionaries, war, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism.
To someone like the philosopher Sidney Hook, this
Manichaean dichotomy may seem absurd. But to many
young people of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and indeed,
Europe and the United States, it may look like an ade·
quate general picture of history today. Some of them may
even believe that the capitalist United States and the
colonialist British Empire were at one with the reactionary Nazi Germany, while the freedom-loving progressive
THEST.JOHNSREVIEW
The New Yark Times
"Syria Bids Arabs Bar A Limited Peace." "Syria" is against
Israeli-Egyptian rapproche·
Pravda
"Syria's Stand." The item
shorter, but no less perfunctory, superficial, empty.
ment.
59
�4
"Makarios Requests U.N.
Council to Meet." "The Cyprus Government of President
Makarios called tonight for an
urgent session of the Security
Council .... Nicosia is believed
interested in the Soviet proposal that the whole Cyprus
situation be taken up at a large
conference." The report does
not cite a word of the Makarios statement.
Statement by Makarios."
"I value highly the stand taken
by the Soviet Union on the
problem of Cyprus, as expressed unequivocally in yesterday's TASS statement,"
declared President Makarios of
Cyprus. " ... We are grateful to
the Soviet Union for its opposition to the Turkish community leaders' arbitrary decision
to proclaim an isolated state."
"Ethiopia, Battling Secessionists, asks U.S. for Airlift of
Arms." The article does not
say or imply that the Soviet regime regards the "military government" of Ethiopia to be on
the Soviet side, according to
Pravda. "United States officials indicated that there was
reluctance to comply with the
Ethiopian request" for arms
because Syria, South Yemen
and Libya will not like it: they
have been aiding the secessionists of Eritrea. The world
is construed by the New York
Times as a mosaic of totally
independent countries: Ethiopia, Eritrea, Syria, South Yemen, Libya.
"For the Sake of Unity." A
300,000-strong demonstration
in the capital of Ethiopia to
support the "military government" in its war to keep Eritrea from secession. It is clear
frOm Pravda that the "military
government" is "on our side."
Small tyrants are likely to be
eventually on the Soviet side.
A tyrant will want the democracies to comply with his tyranny. They will finally waver.
The Soviet rulers will never
waver unless his tyranny is
against theirs.
"Yugoslavs Sentence 15 as
Secessionists." Why Yugoslavs?
Is the regime and "Yugoslavs"
the same?
"Yugoslavia: Subversives on
Trial." The "defendants have
close ties with extremist emigre elements in the West.
'
The other news items do not overlap: Pravda ignores
the news items of the New York Times and vice versa.
The New York Times
Pravda
"The United Kingdom: Can it
Survive?" Secession of various
parts of England: "it is not impossible that the United Kingdom, as we know it today, will
cease to exist."
"Insolent Challenge." Spain
has the insolence of sending
warships to its bases in Africa,
though every sane person
knows that only the Soviet regime can have bases all over
the globe.
"Pakistan Charges Afghan Subversion." "Afghanistan ... has
supported a demand ... for an
independent state to be carved
out of Pakistani territory." No
Soviet involvement at present
or in future is conjectured.
"NO! to Bases." A week of
protest against imperialist (that
is, American or NATO) bases
in the Indian Ocean has begun in Sri Lanka. The global
system of Soviet military bases
is growing without anyone's
protests.
60
"Released Koreans Allege Torture for Confessions." According to this article reprinted
from The Times, London, the
participants in the "demonstrations against the authoritarian constitution" in South
Korea in 1974 have been released and "charge today" that
they were tortured by the
"Korean CIA." Why is the al1leged torturing organization
called the "CIA"? Is the CIA
the world's only institution of
torture?
"The worst days were the
rainy days. I hated them.
The C.I.A. would use the
sharp ends of their umbrellas to prod us around the
cells."
Wait for a rainy day to use umbrellas for torture. The "CIA"
could not use them very well
on a fair day, could it? I doubt
that Pravda would print something so flippant or unintentionally comical.
"Chile: The Tragedy Continues." Pravda is after what may
be defined as an ideal democracy, of the kind the United
States would have been if Senator McGovern had been
elected President, as the New
York Times wished. The motives of the two newspaper~
are different, of course. Pravdd
is after an ideal democracy in
the "target countries" because
it is, according to the Soviet
rulers, the best form of government to be first neutralized
and finally destroyed. Therefore, Pravda is at least as sensitive as the. New York Times to
any violation of an ideal democracy. At the same time,
the article on Chile is very sedate. No torture is alleged, and
the article merely soberly
notes that "even the [Chilean]
authorities admit. that thousands of political prisoners
languish in the prisons of
Santiago alone."
"Saigon Drops Case Against
Six Papers." The Government
of South Vietnam, which the
New York Times calls in its
editorials "totalitarian," has
dropped libel charges against
six newspapers, and so they
can go on publishing allegations of the corruption of the
Government, while the invasion of South Vietnam, a minor event of the day, is on,
to obliterate the "totalitarian"
Government, its alleged corruption, the independent
newspapers, their allegations,
and all.
"Here Where the Chilean junta
will be on Trial." "It is here, in
the Palace of Arts in the capital of Mexico," that the third
session will be held investigating the ''crimes of Chile's military junta." The relevant
"manifesto" has been "signed
by a number of organizations,
including the youth organization of the ruling InstitutionalRevolutionary Party of Mexico." With this sort of social
atmosphere, no wonder the
Soviet rulers were preparing a
Cuba-like coup in Mexico, and
only a Soviet defector frustrated it.
"Ford Preparing Busy Schedule of Trips Overseas in the
FalL" "One source ... said
that Mr. Ford would like to be
on hand to sign personally any
Helsinki agreement." There is
not a hint that the value of this
action is equivalent to Mr.
Ford's being on hand to sign
personally shopping bags before TV cameras, while its
harmfulness goes much
deeper than meets the eye.
"U.S. President's Interview."
Said President Ford, as translated from the Russian of
Pravda: "In the United States
there are many people who realize~and will realize even
better in future-that the abrogation of the Soviet-American trade agreement resulted
from ill-thought-out decisions
in Congress."
AUTUMN1981
�"Gulf Oil Officials in Soviet
Talks." Officials of the Gulf
Oil Corporation started talks
"Preparations for the Conference." No, not the peace conference Flora Lewis reports,
today with the Soviet Government to explore the possibility
but the "power conference"-
of helping to market Soviet
oil."
"U.S. Tuna Men Held in Ec·
uador Are Bitter and in Fight-
ing Mood." A IOOO.word piece
about American tuna fishermen wishing to fight for the
right to fish within the 200·
mile limit off Ecuador though
fifty countries have established the 200·mile limit for
their territorial waters.
"Foes
Intensifying Drive
Against Mrs. Ghandi.''
the "conference of communist
and workers' parties of
Europe."
"Victory of Progressive
Forces." The "candidate of
progressive pardes" was
elected mayor of Kyoto yesterday. Thus, "among the ten
biggest cities of Japan, seven
have mayors representing the
parliamentary opposition, including the Socialist and Communist Parties."
"India: Women's Day." Prime
Minister Gandhi: all women of
the world, unite!
"Vorster Verifies Visit to
Liberia."
Turkey).
"Italians Preparing to Send
"Gambia Yesterday and To-
U.S. Extradition Request for
day" provides a specific illustration of Ponomaryov's global
approach.
Sindona," a run-away Italian
banker.
"Saudi Denies Price Talks
"Riots of Reactionaries" (in
With Kissinger Over Oil."
"Situation on Madagascar."
The "military directoriat"
Kissinger is said to have tried
to impel Saudi Arabia to have
(Pravda would not call "junta"
a junta it favors)" of the Mala·
a heart and bring down the
gasy Republic" smashed the
price of oil sold to the United
States (oh, the power of Kiss·
HQ of the Malagasy Socialist
Party and killed sixteen people
in the process. Pravda regards
inger's diplomacy). However,
Saudi Arabia denies alL
this little massacre of Socialists
as a victory for socialism, that
is, the Soviet rulers' power.
There are several more such news items in both newspapers, but we may as well stop here, observing that in the
volume of international news data, the issue of Pravda (six
pages) roughly matches the New York Times. International
information fills the bulk of Pravda, and its presentation is
mostly concise and factual, if not documentary, while in
the New York Times it is scattered like islands over the
vastness of the newspaper, and is mostly chatty.
The conclusions?
The international information in both newspapers is su·
perficial, easy-to-obtain and insipid (I disregard the enter·
tainment, such as the reporting of a theft in the New York
Times). Both newspapers shape whatever meager information they have to fit their respective views (motives or
goals).
Pravda's mendacity is instrumental: it is a professional
propaganda tool of Soviet global expansion. The mendac·
ity of the New York Times is motivated in particular by its
narrow-minded spineless middle class desire to wrap itself
in its middle-class experience, screen out the outside
1HE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
world, and to substitute an easy fantasy spun out of this
experience. Pravda deceives only others; the New York
Times deceives itself as well.
Apart from individual exceptions, inevitable in any institution, neither newspaper is intelligent or intended for
intelligent readers: certainly the issues under review do
not contain a line which would take more than a mediocre,
conventional, and conformist mind to write. A random
selection of the same number of news items as supplied
by any world news agency would be no less informative.
But all in all, as of February 18, 1975, Pravda presents
the Soviet regime as an expanding global system of power,
with many countries as local arenas of this world struggle.
The New York Times presents the Soviet regime in a far
more false and benign way than the regime presents itself
via Pravda. According to the New York Times issue, the
world is a mosaic of separate countries and local events,
none of which has any bearing on the Soviet regime, seen
as just another chip in this mosaic: a kind of corporation
much bigger than General Motors or Chase, but essentially also seeking-through its representatives-good re·
lations, economic cooperation, and trade.
This parochial world fantasy of the New York Times
makes it on the whole not only uninformative, but
misleading. None of those bits of information which the
New Y ark Times issue contains and Pravda does not can
compensate for this dangerous deceptiveness of the New
York Times dreamland, presenting mankind as its middle
class milieu multiplied to the global scale.
But when all this is said, we must perhaps look at both
newspapers from a higher vantage point.
Quite a few people assume that reality is a certain set of
objects, and so anyone can describe reality no worse than
Einstein or Chekhov-it is sufficient to name objects in
front of you: a house, Mr. Kissinger, a tree. Similarly, it is
often assumed that it is no less easy to describe newschanges of reality: the house has caught fire, Mr. Kiss·
inger is going to Moscow, the tree has grown by ten inches
in one year.
If we look at the New York Times and Pravda through
the eyes of such a Philistine, both newspapers can be said
to describe all the world news there is, and this means all
the reality and all its changes. How and what else can one
describe?
But looking at both newspapers from a higher than
Philistine point of view, it can be said that they have no
sense of reality (the New York Times is more hopeless in
this respect) and hence no sense of changes of reality
known as world news. To claim that the New York Times
presents news about the world at large is the same as to
claim that Philistine twaddle is space-time physics or
literature.
L The Working Press, New York 1966, 71.
2. "The Middle East and North Africa 1973-74," 20th Edition,
Europa Publications, London 1973, 61-62.
3. Middle East Review, Spring 1980, 45.
4. Facts on File, Facts on File, Inc., New York, February 1980, 67.
61
�The Incompleteness Theorems
David Guaspari
[Every mathematician shares] the conviction (. .. which no one has yet supported by a proof) that every
definite mathematical problem must necessarily be susceptible ofan exact settlement, either in the form of
an actual answer to the question asked, or by the proof of the impossibility of its solution.
DAVID HILBERT
An introduction
The Goede! Incompleteness Theorems are perhaps the
most celebrated mathematical discoveries of this century.
I hope to make those celebrations more informed; and, ac·
cordingly, take as my topic not the nature of mathematics
or of the mind-grand things and plausibly related to
Goedel's work-but something rather technical and more
mundane: What, exactly, do those theorems say? What
are the questions to which they constitute some sort of
answer and the new questions to which they give rise?
To understand those questions we must devote considerable attention to some of Goedel's great predecessors:
Frege, Cantor, Russell (and Whitehead), and Hilbert.
The story begins in 1879 with the invention, by Gottlob
Frege, of (formal) logic. This invention was important in
two ways:
l. It was necessary for the elaboration of the so-called
"logicist thesis": the thesis of Frege that arithmetic
is a part of logic; or, as Frege paraphrased it into Kantian terms, that arithmetic is analytic. Russell extended Frege's "logicist thesis" to the claim that all
of mathematics is reducible to logic-that is, that
formal logic provides a fundamental theory, a
grounding, of the whole of mathematics.
2. The devices of formal logic may be used, not to lay
David Guaspari teaches at St. John's College in Annapolis. Most of
his work in mathematical logic has been in set theory and proof theory.
62
out "the" theory of mathematics, but rather as the
basis for rigorous axiomatic theories of geometry,
algebra, set theory, etc. (For the distinction between
"an axiomatic theory of X" and "an axiomatic theory
which reduces X to logic" see section l.) This secondary use of formal logic makes possible a mathematics about mathematics, by providing it with a
precise object of study-formal theories.
Hilbert proposed the invention of just such a theory of
formal systems, umetamathematics" or "proof theory", as
the basis for a radical philosophy of mathematics. The domain of meaningful mathematics was to be reduced, essentially, to the domain of mere calculation. Mathematics
was to be framed within formal theories, and any non-calculational propositions of those formal theories were to be
seen merely as byproducts generated on the way to calculations.
Hilbert wanted to have things two ways: to have the
power of modern methods, while avoiding the difficulty
of explaining or justifying those methods. In order to
understand Hilbert we will therefore need to know something about the methods he wanted so desperately to
save.
I will use Cantor's invention of set theory as a synecdoche for the whole of the modern upheaval. Cantor did
not invent the notion of "set" or "class": he invented set
(or class) theory. Classifications (rather than things classified) became the objects of study, and mathematics became the study of patterns, not things: of "the third position in the sequence of natural numbers", not of "three".
AUTUMN 1981
�After winning his way to this position, Cantor made the
further and frightening step of pressing toward its logical
conclusion (which, we will see, skirts paradox). We will be
interested in Cantor not as a participant in the controversies about the character of mathematics, but as one of the
forces which, by radically altering mathematical practice,
made those controversies urgent.
I
The logicists
Classical logic-more or less a code word for Aristotleis plainly inadequate to give an account of the most elementary sorts of mathematical reasoning, for it gives no
account of sentences involving more than one term expressing generality: sentences such as "Everybody loves
somebody.''
Medieval logicians introduced elaborate theories treating of certain sentences with two general expressions.
Those theories were correct in that they certified the correct inferences to and from such sentences; but they were
both complicated and incapable of extension to more
elaborate sentences; which is evidence that they were just
plain wrong.
What was wrongheaded in medieval logic was the attempt to treat "Everybody loves somebody" as though it
were like "John loves Mary." "Everybody" was to be, like
11
John", a kind of name, referring to certain people who
somehow or other loved a person or persons denoted by
"somebody." The difficulties with this are legion: for
example, a proper name like "Mary" always stands for the
same person, while "somebody" -assuming it ought to be
thought of as standing for someone-can stand even in
the same context for different people: If John loves somebody and somebody is the mayor of Cleveland it does not
follow that John loves the Mayor of Cleveland. Again:
"John loves Mary" is equivalent to "Mary is loved by
John." If "everybody" and "somebody" were genuine
names we would be able to make the same switch. But we
cannot: "Everybody loves somebody" and "Somebody is
loved by everybody" are not equivalent.
In the restricted cases to which their theories applied,
medieval logicians surmounted such difficulties by making distinctions about the various kinds of ways in which
general terms could refer to their objects. Unfortunately
there seemed to be no end to the making of such distinctions, and with such a logic the best one could look forward to was an ever-expanding collection of ad hoc methods
and distinctions.
According to Frege his predecessors were misled by accidents of grammar, such as the accident that "John" and
"somebody" are governed by the same grammatical rules.
The logical structure of mathematical statements-i.e.,
those features in virtue of which statements can legitimately enter into chains of inference-are not systematically displayed (and sometimes not displayed at all) by the
grammar of ordinary speech.
THEST.JOHNSREVIEW
If the logical structure of a sentence is to show on its
face-in its syntax-then a revised syntax and some new
grammatical categories become necessary. Frege's revised
language is not intended to give an exhaustive account of
natural language. It gives no account of metaphors, ambiguities, tenses, modalities, puns, or jokes. Its success
comes to this: the fact that all mathematical argument
(and therefore all deductive argument) can be expressed
in Frege's language and so be made altogether explicit.
(The principal novelty is Frege's introduction of thecategories of "quantifiers" and "variables", which constitute
an analysis of the uses of troublesome general terms like
"somebody." He also discards the "subject-predicate"
analysis of sentences, because of its intrinsic demerits and
because of the requirements of the quantifier-variable
analysis of generalization.)
In addition, Frege listed a small number of rules which
suffice for the purely formal derivation of all valid inferences. By calling the derivations formal I mean this: We
can apply the rules-i.e., determine whether a sentence is
an immediate consequence of some other or group of
others-simply by inspecting the syntax of each sentence
involved; and the procedure for doing so is mechanical. A
machine can check such derivations just as it checks multiple choice tests.
Frege wanted to attain rigor-and he did. Rigor cannot
go any further; controversy over the validity of a proof
came to have the same character as controversy over the
correctness of a long division. Frege had made it clear just
what complete rigor consisted in.
This achievement did not, however, have the desired
practical effect of making mathematical argument completely certain. An attempt to verify the validity of an ordinary prose proof by translating it into Frege's system
will in general involve so many steps that a clerical error
seems no less likely than a logical error in checking the
original informal proof. Nonetheless, the theoretical possibility of rigorously formulating mathematical theories
makes Frege's language and logic, and their kin, analytical
tools for investigations about those theories.
I will from now on call a language and logic like Frege's
a forma/language and the formulation of a theory in such
a language a formalization of the theory. Formalization is
therefore the first step in laying out a completely rigorous
axiomatic theory. It is not a trivial step.
If, for example, we tried to formalize Euclid, we would
immediately be forced to see that the basic terms of geometry are not only those denoting its objects-points, lines,
planes-but also those denoting certain relations among
them: e.g., the relation of incidence, which holds between
a point and a line when the point lies on the line. Symbols
for those relations would have to be included in the language as part of the special vocabulary of geometry. When
we looked for a suitable collection of geometrical axioms
we would come to see that Euclid's unexpressed assumptions largely concern those relations.
63
�In I884 Frege published another book, The Foundations of Arithmetic, this one about the nature of mathematical truths. He was interested not in how we acquire
mathematical truths, or why we happen to believe them,
but in the ultimate justification for believing them. Frege
asserted that the truths of arithmetic and algebra (although
not those of geometry) are truths of logic:
Frege was undertaking to do more than merely to lay
out a formalized theory of arithmetic. I might well frame a
(mere) formalized theory of arithmetic by beginning with
primitive signs for "1 "~ "2", "plus", "times", etc.-signs
which, so far as the theory is concerned, are employable
only as directed by the axioms. From the rules of logic
alone we could then deduce "I=1" and even "1+2=
1 + 2", but not, e.g., "1 + 1 = 2". The specifically arithmetical content of the theory I am describing would have to be
supplied by a list of arithmetical axioms. (The provision of
a suitable list is a mathematically deep, but for our purposes technical, problem.) We need the axioms because
"1 ", " + ", and "2", being non-logical (and therefore arbi-
trary) signs, can stand in no intrinsic logical relations to
one another.
If, however, "1", "+", and "2" are signs which are
themselves defined in other terms, it might happen that a
purely logical explication of those definitions would result
in a deduction of "l + 1 =2". Frege claimed just that, that
plus, times, etc., etc., could themselves be defined in
"purely logical terms," and that from those definitions
alone, and with no need for extra hypotheses, the arithmetical truths would follow.
Arithmetical truths could-and, to be properly understood, should-be regarded as highly compressed abbreviations of logical truths. The statement "2 + 2 = 4" or
''there are infinitely many primes" would be more compli-
cated than, but of the same character as, "A implies A."
Philosophical questions about the certainty and applicability of arithmetic would then be reduced to questions
about the certainty and applicability of logic.
The terms of Frege's proposal require explanation. A
satisfactory account of arithmetic must cover not only
statements like "7 + 5 = 12" but also certain kinds of empirical statements-but not all empirical statements-involving numbers, for there is no need to account for "2 is
my favorite number." The point of contact between arithmetical theory and its empirical application is counting.
The record of a bit of counting-"There are 2 bats in the
belfry" -is what Frege calls a "statement of number."
We must account for the statements of pure arithmetic
and the statements of number.
Next we need to ask what it would mean to "define" 2
at all, and what, in particular, it would mean to cast that
definition in purely logical terms. For Frege it is pointless
to ask what 2 "actually" is. That does not mean that talk
about numbers is talk about imaginings and private fantasies. Rather, to give the meaning of the word "2" is to give
an account of the contribution it makes to specifying the
64
conditions under which arithmetical statements containing "2" are true or false. Whatever does so correctly is entitled to be called a definition of "2".
Here is an example, a purely logical explanation of the
use of "2" in "There are 2 kings of Sparta."
For some x andy, x differs from y and each is a king of Sparta;
and,
it is not the case that there are x, y, and z, each of which is a
king of Sparta and all of which are different.
This explanation is correct; that is, it is true to say that
there are two kings of Sparta in precisely those circumstances in which our elaborate paraphrase is true. Furthermore, the account is perfectly general, being an
account of the role of "2" in all such sentences: to explain
"There are 2 bats in the belfry" we simply replace "king of
Sparta" everywhere by "bat in the belfry." Finally, the
fixed terms of this general explanation (that is, all terms
except "king of Sparta") are purely logical words; and the
non-logical phrases ("king of Sparta", "bat in belfry") occur
only in the simplest way possible, as simple predications.
This account is not a definition of "2". It explains the
role of ''2'', ''3", etc., in particular statements of numberthat is, the adjectival uses "There are 2 X's", "There are 3
X's", etc. It is insufficient to account for the uses of "2" as
a noun, especially for the thinghood we seem to attribute
to numbers by generalizations such as "For every number ... " Frege took the noun-like uses as fundamental. He
argued that it would be incorrect to analyze arithmetical
statements in such a way that numbers (some collection
or other of entities to be called numbers) disappeared altogether. His analysis replaced each appearance of "2" by a
noun phrase denoting, essentially, a certain set or class.
He then explained statements of number as elliptical references to such classes and explained generalizations at
face value as generalization over the lot of them. This
counted as a logical explanation because he regarded a set
as a kind of logical object.
My example has been intended only to show what kind
of thing a purely logical definition is, and to show that
Frege's proposal is: (a) neither opaque nor occult (which
already suffices to set it apart from most accounts of the
subject); and (b) altogether unconcerned with what happens to go on in my mind when I say or believe that there
are two kings of Sparta.
Frege outlined this program (the "logicist" program of
reducing arithmetic to logic) in The Foundations of Arithmetic and carried it out in the two volumes of The Basic
Laws of Arithmetic, the first published in 1893 and the
second, delayed by the discouraging silence which met
the first, in 190 3.
There turned out to be a problem. One of Frege's fundamental notions was that of "the extension of a concept" -what we would now call the set or class of things
AU1UMN 1981
�falling under the concept. He regarded "class" as a logical
notion-and in any event could see no way to do without
it- but pointed out that its treatment was the problematic part of his system. It turned out to be, in a sense, unproblematic-because it made the system inconsistent.
Frege learned of this, while volume two was in press, in
a letter from Bertrand Russell setting out what has come
to be called the Russell Paradox. Russell's paradox is a sort
of liar's paradox. Formulated for a theory of sets, it shows
its sting by demonstrating that an assumption seemingly
fundamental, natural, and innocuous, leads swiftly to a
contradiction. The assumption is that to every property
there corresponds a set, whose members are precisely those
things which possess that property. If we apply this assumption to the property "not a member of itself' and
call the corresponding set R (so that the members of Rare
precisely those sets which are not members of themselves)
we turn up a contradiction by asking: Is R a member of R?
For, R is a member of Ras long as Rs-atisfies the defining
condition "not a selrmember"; which is to say, as long as
R is not a member of R. Frege dashed off a quick and woe-
fully inadequate fix in an appendix beginning, with characteristic detachment, "Hardly anything more unwel·
come can befall a scientific writer ... " and concluding,
hopefully, " ... still I do not doubt that the way to the solution has been found."
Russell was not Frege's adversary, but rather his heir.
Principia Mathematica, published by Russell and Alfred
North Whitehead between 1910 and 1913, advanced even
more sweeping claims for logic: the system of Principia
Mathematica (from now on, PM) was a revision of Frege's
logic which purported to reduce all of mathematics to
logic. That PM sufficed for the derivation of known mathematics, Russell and Whitehead made clear. That it might
justly be called logic they did not. And no one could tell
whether PM would suffice for all future mathematics.
II
Cantor and "Modernism"
Meanwhile, mathematics went on. One of the things
that went on is commonly called a "crisis" -a "crisis in
the foundation of mathematics" -perhaps suggesting to
the innocent (falsely, as it turns out) that mathematicians
around the world were hurling themselves from their of·
fice windows. The central event in this drama was the ap·
pearance of a large array of paradoxes and contradictions
in the theory of sets, the Russell Paradox among them.
The thinking man's reaction might well be ... So what?
Why should the collapse of some particular theory be of
more than local interest? Frege's scheme fell to the
ground and no llcrisis" resulted.
In order to understand why the difficulties with set theory are of interest to other branches of mathematics it is
necessary to understand why set theory has become the
idiom of mathematics.
Set theory was invented by Georg Cantor in a series of
papers published between 1879 and 1897. It is important
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
to know that Cantor's creation of set theory grew directly
out of his work on one of the important mathematical
problems of his day-on the convergence of a particular
kind of infinite series called a Fourier series. just what a
Fourier series is is not important to us, but two things
about Fourier series are: (1) Fourier series are a part of
hardcore applied mathematics. (Fourier introduced them
in order to study heat transfer.) (2) The theory of Fourier
series was, in Cantor's day, at the cutting edge of two important questions: What is the continuum? What is a
function?
If I needed a slogan to characterize the radical features
of twentieth century mathematics I would try something
like this: Functions are things, and things are extensional.
"Extensional" stands in opposition to "intensional", in
opposition, broadly speaking, to any concern for the "in·
ner nature" of mathematical things.
Consider Euclid's definition of "point." That definition
is never appealed to in proofs, and for that reason has no
mathematical interest. Nothing follows from it. The only
way in which something which we might call the "nature"
of a point has any mathematical significance is by way of
postulates about the relations between points and the
other geometrical notions, such as: Between any two
points there is a unique straight line. Euclid's definition of
point is an "intensional" attempt to tell us something
about the "nature" of points.
In contrast, what matters about a function is that certain inputs result in certain outputs. What a function has
by way of a "nature" is exhausted by the record of the in·
put-output pairs, conveniently representable as the set of
all such pairs. Relations are treated in the same way. The
"nature" of the relation "less than" comes to nothing but
a record of which numbers are less than which.
Galling the things of mathematics extensional comes,
grandly and vaguely, to saying something like this: What
interests us about a mathematical object is not its putative
internal constitution, but rather the role which that object
plays in the system of mathematical objects. Mathematics
is about the patterns into which things fall, not about the
things.
The other half of my slogan reads "functions are things."
What is at stake in calling functions things? The account,
I'm afraid, will begin and end in metaphor.
Think of a function as a black box from which; in some
way or other, the input-output record can be extracted.
Then I can, if I want to, take those things, those black
boxes, and put some or all of them into another box-so
that I have a big box full of functions. I offer this merely as
one example of what you can do with things. You can
heap things into big boxes.
I want to contrast this picture of function with another.
In the other a function is not a thmg, but a kind of continuing process, which you cannot put your hands on all at
once and therefore cannot pick up and toss into a box.
What's at issue behind these varying metaphors w11l have
to be considered later.
65
�Let me first give an example of the usefulness of the
first picture-function as thing. Quantum mechanics as·
signs to each thing in the world-electron, atom, cow-a
representative, a function called its wave function. Wave
functions, it so happens, input real numbers and output
complex numbers (the outputs are thought of as representing certain probabilities). All the.se wave functions are
then heaped together in a box called Hilbert Space. What
stands for the world is a box of functions.
Now, one of the other things you can do with things,
beside tossing them into boxes, is to input them into functions. It turns out that momentum, for example, can be
conveniently represented by a function which inputs not
numbers but those boxes in the Hilbert Space, and out·
puts not numbers but other boxes in Hilbert Space. Momentum and its kin, being functions, are therefore things,
and can themselves be heaped in boxes, input into still
other functions, and so on and on. All these entities have
in an important sense the same status as numbers. You
can do the same kinds of things with and to them. (An
aside: This example may give you some idea why it's wildly
wide of the mark to call our mathematics a "science of
quantity.")
To make functions and relations into things, and to be
concerned only with the extensional aspects of those
things, is to make the very fabric of mathematics a search
for patterns and analogies, whose aim it is to exploit the
power of generality. It is important also to realize that
study of the tops of those towers of generality can yield
consequences about things at the bottom. The elaborate
machinery of quantum mechanics yields testable predic·
tions about the behavior of atomic particles. Deep results
in number theory, which concerns the integers, have been
discovered by studying the calculus of complex numbers.
This raises a question to which we will return: Even if
such high-powered methods are helpful for finding theo·
rems and their proofs, are they in some way essential?
Set theory is important not in its details, but because
the point of view which is so conveniently formulable by
means of set theory is fundamental to the current mathematical enterprise. In David Hilbert's famous words: "No
one shall expel us from the paradise which Cantor has cre·
ated for us."
Hilbert was not voicing a consensus. He was uttering a
battle cry. The reception of Cantor's work made plain
deep and radical divisions among mathematicians. Those
opposed to set theory typically argued along lines like this:
Set theory is riddled with paradoxes and contradictions
because it admits as objects "infinite things", such as the
set of all numbers, and the notion of an "infinite thing" is
inherently contradictory. The two metaphorical pictures
of "function" show the same opposition. A function
which is a "thing" is, in general, an "infinite thing" -an
endless ledger of inputs correlated with outputs. A function, which is an "uncompleted process", is never present
all at once, but is a sort of drama at any stage of which only
66
finitely much has happened. The controversy over set
theory becomes "the problem of infinity."
This is not a problem about some alleged power, entity,
or principality called The Infinite. I, for one, have no idea
what that could mean. Nor has it anything to do with God,
goose bumps, mysticism, or eternity. (There is evidence
that Cantor thought: that it had to do with all these
things; that theological considerations vindicated set
theory; and, at times, that set theory had been granted
him by divine revelation.)
It would be better, but still not very good, to say that we
are asking whether there "really are" infinite sets. Part of
the trouble with that formulation (the passionate but redundant "really" gives it away) is that it has an air, wholly
spurious, of being clear and commonsensical, as though
the matter could be settled by an argument like Samuel
johnson's "refutation" of Berkeley: Johnson's proof that
there "really are" stones consisted of kicking some.
The fruitful view, I think, is that the important differ·
ence between the two positions is entirely expressed as a
difference in mathematical practice. In the mathematical
practice of one side infinite sets play the role of things,
and in the practice of the other side they do not. (In our
speech about Hilbert Space functions are assigned the
role of things: they serve as inputs and outputs of functions; they are collectable into boxes; they comprise a domain over which we generalize ... Moreover, that way of
speaking has been fruitful for the physicist as well as for
the mathematician.)
In one sense the practical problems of set theory were
solved in 1907 by Zermelo, who informally described a notion of set that seemed clear and persuasive, and pro·
duced axioms for that notion from which followed all of
the desired consequences of set theory and (so it seemed)
none of the undesired. To opt for Zermelo's set theory
was to opt for treating infinite sets as things. What
grounds might there be for making that choice?
The practicing mathematician might be satisfied by the
fact that set theory provides new terms in which to answer old questions, illuminates the work of his predecessors, and poses interesting new questions. If unimpressed,
however, by Zermelo's framework, he might maintain that
"infinite things" had to lead to contradictions and that
Zermelo's system would eventually tumble. He might hope
to find empirically interpretable consequences of set theory to test against experience. He might be appalled by set
theory's sheer perversity: Cantor said of one of his most
famous results, "I see it, but I don't believe it."
Set theory, in and of itself, is not a fundamental theory.
It is not an attempt to ground or to explain the nature of
mathematics, but is rather the organ of a revolutionary
change in mathematical practice. A set theorist can happily be an opportunist, tinkering with the axioms ad hoc
in order to avoid an awkwardness or a paradox. Set theory
is useful to "foundational" studies because it yields a formalization of all known mathematics, thereby making of
"mathematics" a precise object of study.
AUTUMN 1981
�III
Hilbert's metamathematics
In 1900 Hilbert began to formulate a radically new reason for deciding in favor of set theory, based on the possibility, which he seems to be the first to have fully grasped,
of using formalization as a tool for the investigation of
theories. Frege, well aware that deductions in his system
could be carried out mechanically, insisted on the importance of the fact that those deductions nonetheless had a
meaning. According to Hilbert, the fact that "deductions"
could be adequately guided by mechanical rules freed us
from the burden of trying to assign a meaning to each step.
Thus freed, we are free to see that much of the "meaning" we find in mathematics is nonsense.
Hilbert divided the statements of mathematics into two
classes: "real" statements, which are intuitively meaning·
ful and can be said to be true or false; and "ideal" statements, which are not, and cannot. Let us for the moment
sidestep all dispute about the legitimacy of such a distinction or about where to draw the line, and call anyone who
wishes to make such a distinction "Hilbertian." Let us
also temporarily adopt a "Hilbertian" position much less
stern than Hilbert's own: that the meaningful mathematical statements are the statements of elementary pure
arithmetic, such as "2 + 2 = 3", "There are infinitely many
primes," etc. Accordingly, propositions about real numbers~
calculus, or Hilbert Space are "ideal."
Let us further suppose ourselves to be contentedly employing a formal-and meaningful-theory of axiomatic
arithmetic, and to be one day confronted by Cantor. He
offers us a (non-meaningful) set theory which incorporates
our theory of arithmetic as a small part. Do we accept?
From our "Hilbertian" point of view we can think of set
theory as an ideal superstructure superimposed on a meaningful theory of arithmetic. Suppose it happened to be
the case that any meaningful proposition derivable in set
theory by ideal methods is also derivable by meaningful
methods-i.e., according to our present stance, from the
axioms of arithmetic. Then, in the "Hilbertian" view, the
controversy about set theory would be finessed out of existence. All the ideal machinery could be explained away
as an ingenious engine for facilitating proofs. We would
have saved set theory without giving in to the vulgar requirements of saving the sets; we would establish a paradise without angels.
To ask whether the ideal machinery of a formalized theory is redundant is to ask a precise mathematical question.
By formalizing a theory we make it an object of study. Its
statements are patterns of signs, comparable to positions
on a chessboard; and we possess, analogous to the rules of
chess, specified procedures, colorfully but irrelevantly
called proofs, for singling out certain of the sign patterns,
colorfully but irrelevantly called theorems. So that the
question "Does such and such a statement have a proof
employing no ideal mean?" has exactly the same character as the question "Could such and such a position on
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the chessboard have been reached without White's having castled?"
With some historical justification I will call the proposal
to justify the ideal means of set theory by demonstrating
their redundancy, the "Hilbertian" Program. To carry out
the "Hilbertian" Program we have to prove a mathematical theorem about a theory; and that proof itself must be
above suspicion or our justification would be circular.
This new branch of mathematics, the mathematical theory of formal theories, Hilbert calls "metamathematics" or
"proof theory."
To carry out the "Hilbertian" Program is also to demonstrate that all the meaningful consequences of set theory
are true. For we would be guaranteed that any meaningful
consequence of set theory, however originally obtained,
would also possess an uncontroversial proof, one employing only those arithmetical methods we had previously
been content to employ.
The "Hilbertian" Program hopes for a certain rough justice: that meaningful statements should have meaningful
proofs seems only fair. There is also some evidence in its
favor: many theorems of number theory originally proven
by ideal means have turned out to be derivable from the
axioms of elementary arithmetic. In any event, there is
now out on the table a genuine mathematical question,
susceptible to proof or disproof: Can all those positions be
reached without castling?
The Incompleteness Theorems answer, among others,
that question. Before turning to Goedel's paper, let me
summarize these three introductory sections.
Frege began his work as a participant in one of the great
intellectual enterprises of the nineteenth century-the attempt to make mathematics rigorous. He succeeded in
providing an analysis of mathematical proof which made
the notion of rigor precise and which provided all the
technical tools necessary for the elaboration of rigorous
deductive theories. This analysis led him to the conviction
that mathematics is in fact a part of logic. Neither this
thesis nor his powerful criticisms of other views of mathematics (the first half of The Foundations of Arithmetic is a
model wrecking job) received much notice until they were
partly rediscovered by Russell. Wider interest in the problems of founding mathematics arose not from Frege' s
work, but from the practical need to secure set theory
from paradox.
Hilbert, guided partly by his "faith" -the belief that all
mathematical problems can be solved-and by the specific desire to save for mathematics the generalizing
power of set theory, proposed a radically different foundation. Set theory would be saved by declaring most of it to
be meaningless; and by a proof (which he hoped to carry
out) that set theory could nonetheless be safely employed.
Goedel's 1931 paper "On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems" replies to the characteristic questions of Frege and Hilbert:
Can mathematics be reduced to logic? Are the ideal methods of set theory redundant? Is "mathematics" com-
67
�pletely specifiable? I take this last question to be a concern
of both Frege and Hilbert. Frege attempted to encompass
mathematics within logic. Hilbert's "faith" can be construed as a belief in the possibility of devising a formal system adequate for known mathematics and capable of
proving or disproving every proposition arising within it.
To each of these questions Goede! gives the answer no.
What, then, can mathematics be supposed to be? Goedel's
own view is that mathematics must be understood not as
a body of tautologies, or as the result of our constitutive
mental activity, but as something we discover.
IV A first look at Goedel's theorems
In the first part of his paper Goede! exhibited an arithmetical statement in the language of PM which is independent of PM-i.e., neither provable nor refutable from
the axioms of PM. By itself, that is a striking technical
achievement, and evidence for the fruitfulness of Hilbert's
point of view: If you make theories into objects of study
just look at the surprising things you can find out.
Let us call a theory incomplete if some of its statements
are independent; and otherwise, complete. It might now
seem that we should get to work, promulgating some new
axioms in order to extend PM to a theory which is complete. If we can demonstrate the incompleteness of some
theories we surely ought to be able to demonstrate the
completeness of others. Then we would have justified Hilbert's "faith" by a proof. For a complete formal system
provides the means for solving every problem expressible
in its language.
Unfortunately, Goede! showed more. He pointed out
that his argument applies not only to PM, but to any
formal system which is sufficiently strong (strong enough
to contain grade-school arithmetic). Such a system must
be incomplete.
The last two sentences contain a mild lie. I can easily
describe a complete formal theory by stipulating that the
list of its axioms is to be precisely the list of all true statements of arithmetic. The trouble with that theory is that
we cannot use it. Should someone hand us a purported
proof in that theory we would not be able to appeal to any
general procedure for checking it, for we have no general
procedure for determining which propositions are axioms.
If we intend to use a formal theory in our demonstrations
or to provide a standard for our demonstrations, then we
must at least require that there be an infallible (mechanical) procedure for checking the validity of its proofs. The
First Incompleteness Theorem says that any sufficiently
strong theory with that property (the property that its
proofs can be checked mechanically) must be incomplete.
How does this bear on Hilbert, or Frege, or us? Can all
mathematical problems be solved? One precise way to
construe that question is: Is it possible to construct a usable, complete formalization of mathematics? Goedel's
theorem tells us that the answer is no. Frege's program
seems dead as well. If arithmetic really is logic, then since
68
arithmetic cannot be completely axiomatized neither can
logic be. There would be no general procedure for testing
the validity of proofs in such a so-called logic.
The "Hilbertian" Program is alive only until we ask:
What about Goedel's independent arithmetical statement?
Is it true or false-or, if the axioms of arithmetic (or PM)
contain all that we think we know about arithmetic, does
the question of its truth or falsity even have any sense?
Goedel's paper contained an informal demonstration that
that independent statement is true. His argument can be
formalized and carried out in set theory-proving that set
theory is not redundant. Goede! has provided an explicit
example of a "meaningful" statement unprovable by
"meaningful" means, but provable by the "ideal" methods of set theory. Therefore our "Hilbertian" Program,
and every "Hilbertian" Program which accepts Goedel's
independent proposition as meaningful, fails. (It will be
claimed below that no "Hilbertian" Program can succeed.)
The Second Incompleteness Theorem speaks directly
to Hilbert's (actual) Program, to understand which we
need a brief excursion. Hilbert called himself a "finitist".
He maintained that a precondition to thought is an immediate intuitive grasp of certain "extralogical concrete objects", which must be surveyable "completely in all their
parts" and must therefore be, in particular, finite. It is
only about such things and by means of such intuitions
that we can perform genuine ''contentual" inferences. An
adequate expression of "contentual" inference is the manipulation of signs. The concrete objects considered by
mathematics are the mathematical signs themselves-the
numerals. Accordingly, the "real" propositions are simply
the assertions about particular calculations: "7 + 5 ~ 12",
"2 < 3", '' l =/::. l ", etc. The ''contentual" reasoning by which
we attain to the truth or falsity of these propositions Hilbert calls elementary.
In Hilbert's thought not even the formula "x + 2 ~ 2 + x",
regarded as a shorthand for the assertion that "for every x,
x + 2 = 2 + x", designates a real proposition-for we cannot directly verify the infinitely many instances of true
propositions which it summarizes. Another way to say this
is to say that we cannot really negate that assertion; for
the purely existential claim that "there is some x for
which x + 2 ,P 2 + x", since it points to no particular x, has
no finitistic meaning.
Is any mathematics left? Hilbert is willing to admit the
"ideal" propositions such as ''x + L. = 2 + x", the proposi-
tions of algebras and calculus, etc., but denies that they
have any content in and of themselves. The introduction
of "ideal" propositions is analogous to the introduction
into algebra of~ which simplifies and unifies the algebraic rules. Although the ideal propositions are individually insignificant, the system of ideal propositions is
fruitful by virtue of its ability to simplify and unify, and
the ultimate reason for its success is that it discloses the
structure of our thinking.
To justify the introduction of ideal propositions (and
rules for their manipulation) we need only an elementary
AUfUMN 1981
�proof of the consistency of the resulting system. Hilbert's
Program is the proposal to provide such a proof.
Hilbert's Program is connected with our previous no·
lion of a "Hilbertian" Program as follows. The calculating
rules of grade school arithmetic suffice for the formal
demonstration of every real truth. Those calculating rules
are derivable in, e.g., set theory. Set theory, however,
might also contain a formal refutation of one of those
truths. That is, the only way in which set theory could be
non-redundant (with respect to "contentual" inference)
would be the ruinous way of being inconsistent. Hilbert's
Program, although differently expressed, is merely that
"Hilbertian" Program that corresponds to Hilbert's austere notion of "real".
The Second Incompleteness Theorem says, roughly,
that the means available in a theory are not sufficient to
prove the consistency of that theory; so that the consistency of axiomatic arithmetic-let alone of set theorycannot be demonstrated in an elementary way.
All this needs some explanation, since arithmetic is, after all, about integers and not about formal theories. How
can we even pose the problem "Is arithmetic consistent?"
in arithmetical terms?
The answer is that we communicate with a speaker of
the language of arithmetic just as we communicate with
speakers of other foreign languages-by means of translations. Suppose we wanted to discuss the consistency of
arithmetic with a computer. We could do so be devising a
numerical code in which to signify statements and proofs.
The statement "Arithmetic is consistent" could then be
translated as a lengthy statement, from now on called
CON, about numerical calculations involving the code.
(Those who are worried by this may be justified. The
sense of the claim that the coded translation CON
somehow "means the same as" the original is not immedi-
ately clear.)
Goede! showed that CON is unprovable in axiomatic
arithmetic. Now, axiomatic arithmetic is, I take it, consistent; that is, CON is true under the ordinary interpretation of its signs. Indeed, CON is provable in set theory,
and is therefore another example of an arithmetical truth
which becomes provable as a result of adding to arithmetic the "ideal" superstructure of set theory. This is a
perfectly general phenomenon: no consistent, usable, sufficiently strong theory can prove its own consistency; and
whenever we are able to add to such a theory a suitable
"ideal" superstructure, the consistency of the original the-
ory becomes one of the newly provable arithmetic truths.
This shows that no "Hilbertian" Program can succeed.
An elementary proof that an ideal superstructure is redundant immediately yields an elementary proof that it is consistent. If it is granted that the elementary means of proof,
whatever they may be, are exhausted by the means available in ordinary arithmetic, there can be no elementary
proof of consistency, and therefore none of redundancy.
If we use a theory we are, of course, implicitly assuming
that it is consistent. Nonetheless, that supposition is
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
something over and above the suppositions of the theory.
Whatever convinces us that the theory is consistent lies
somehow outside its purview. That fact is a genuine piece
of news, even though the consistency of arithmetic is not
controversial.
Many mathematical questions which have at one time
or another been topics of active research have been
shown to be independent of the currently accepted axioms for set theory. It is a distressing fact that few of these
problems seem to be solvable by extending set theory
along the lines of its original inspiration; and that, indeed,
many are only known to be solvable by adding to set
theory hypotheses which are at best implausible and at
worst bizarre.
As a result the mathematician-in-the street typically responds to such news about a problem (the news of its independence) by losing interest in it and regarding this as
evidence that however things might have seemed at one
time the problem is not one of central importance. He can
sometimes justly say that he was seduced by set theory
into studying the wrong problem, or the right problem in
the wrong terms; but that would suffice as a general explanation only if the family of set theories were uniquely subject to the Incompleteness Theorems.
V A second look at the
First Incompleteness Theorem
Let me conclude by stating the First Incompleteness
Theorem correctly, in its most radical form, so that it is
tied to no particular formalism or formulation of logic, and
to no particular notion of proof. To do that it will be nee·
essary to look briefly at its proof. Goedel's original argument, which is important, is widely regarded as utterly
mysterious. From this apparent mysteriousness the Incompleteness Theorems derive some of their cachet. I
shall outline a different proof, which shows that the Incompleteness Theorems can be understood as facts about
mechanical procedures.
In 1936, A. M. Turing produced a precise definition of
the notion of "algorithm", or "computing rule" by defin·
ing a kind of paradigm computing agent (now called a
Turing machine). Turing machines can work in any symbolism you like and on any problem you like. We may as
well stick to machines that work on numerical problems.
Machines can provide solutions to calculating problems in
two ways-by decision procedures and by listings. Consider
the problem of determining which numbers are even
numbers. A decision procedure for the property "even
number" works like this: We hand our imaginary computer the name, in some specified notation, of a number;
it calculates awhile and then answers yes or no, according
as the number is even or not. It always answers and always
answers correctly. A listing of the property "even number"
works differently: We sit in front of the computer and
watch it. From time to time it writes down, in some specified notation, the name of a number. Only the names of
69
�even numbers appear in the list, and sooner or later the
name of every even number appears in the list.
There is no general procedure for turning a listing machine into a deciding machine (which might lead one to
suspect, correctly, that some listable properties are not decidable). Suppose I want decisions about the evenness of
6 and 7, and try to use the listing machine to get them. I
sit and wait. Eventually "6" turns up, at which point I
know that the decision about 6 is "yes." I'm still waiting,
but there has been no "7". I can never safely conclude
"no," because, for all I know, were I to wait just a little
longer 7 might turn up in the list.
"Evenness", of course, has both listing and deciding
machines, but there are indeed properties which can be
listed yet not decided. One example is the property of
"being a computer program that will run successfully." If
that were decidable (in some efficient way) life would be a
lot simpler. A Russian mathematician, Juri Matijasevic,
proved in 1971 that there is a listable but undecidable
property P of the following remarkably simple kind: For a
certain (polynomial) equation with "x" among its unknowns, x has property P (from now on, abbreviated
"P(x)"), if there are integer solutions for the other unknowns. That is, P(x) looks like the following assertion,
which I'll temporarily call R(x): There are integers y and z
for which 3xy + 2y2 + x2z +I ~ 0. So that 2 has property R
(or, for short, "R(2)") if and only if there are integers y and
z for which 6y + 2y2 +4z +I ~0.
Here is an outline for a proof of the First Incompleteness Theorem which, in a sense, only restates the fact that
there are such simple undecidable properties. Officially
we are proving a theorem about PM, but to show how
general the proof is, I will point out the only two facts
about PM which will be appealed to. The first is this:
(l) PM can "express" some undecideable
property~e.g.,
the
P(x) mentioned above. (From now on this will be abbreviated
as: PM is sufficiently strong.)
It takes a little effort to say just what "expressing" is.
For example, "+" does not happen to be one of the signs
of PM, but is instead defined in terms of others. So our
rendering of P(x) into the language of PM will be a little
indirect. That, however, is a minor point and will be ignored. I will suppose that the arithmetical signs we ordinarily use do appear in the formal language, so that "P(x)",
"P(O)", "P(l)", etc. occur both in English and in our formal
language. More important is the question: What does it
mean to say that some formula in a formal theory "expresses" the (English-language) notion P(x)? We can put
our rather weak requirement this way: Whatever PM happens to prove about the property is true. More exactly,
should the string of symbols for P(l7) occur among the
theorems of PM, then the English sentence P(17) is true,
which is to say that a certain equation with coefficient 17
has integer solutions. Should "not P(l7)" occur among the
theorems of PM, then we require that P(l7) be false. Weak
70
as this assumption is, we could get by with much less. If a
theory of arithmetic lacked the means to write down simple equations, or had the means but proved falsehoods
about them, it would not be of much use. So, for our purposes, this restriction is no restriction at all. The only theories of interest are those which are sufficiently strong.
The other thing we need to know about PM is this:
(2) The property of "being a theorem of PM" is listable.
For our purposes this is no restriction either, because it
turns out that (2) is a consequence of:
(2 ') The property of "being a proof in PM" is decideable.
I have already argued that a theory is of no use for theorizing if we cannot decide what counts as a proof.
The First Incompleteness Theorem says:
Any sufficiently strong, listable theory is incomplete.
Therefore no useful theory-PM, axiomatic arithmetic,
set theory-is complete; no useful theory can even settle
all the simple questions of elementary arithmetic.
To see the extreme generality of this it might be better
to replace the word "theory" by something like "recordable mathematical activity." We need assume nothing
about symbolism, logic, or the nature of the proofs that result from this activity, except that the activity can treat of
simple equations, and that a machine can decide whether
the record of some bit of activity counts as a proof.
The proof of the First Incompleteness Theorem is a
proof by contradiction. Assuming first that PM is listable,
I will describe a mechanical procedure (from now on to be
called M) which is an attempt at a decision procedure for
Matijasevic's property P. That is, the inputs to M will be
natural numbers and the outputs ''yes" and "no". We
know that there can be no decision procedure for P. That
is, for some input M must either give the wrong answer or
fail to give any answer at all. On the other hand, from the
assumptions that PM is sufficiently strong and complete
it will follow that M is a decision procedure for P, and
therefore at least one of the three assumptions "listable,
sufficiently strong, complete" is false. Having established
that we have established the First Incompleteness
Theorem.
Here is procedure M: Handed an input, say 17, turn on
the machine which lists the theorems of PM. If "P(l7)"
ever appears on the list, output "yes"; and if "not P(l7)"
appears, output "no".
Suppose now that PM is sufficiently strong. Then procedure M, whenever it does give an answer, gives the
right answer. Suppose further that PM is complete. Then
procedure M always yields an answer, because one or the
other of "P(l7)", "not P(l7)" is a theorem of PM and is
therefore bound to turn up in the list. It follows (from all
these assumptions) that M is a decision procedure for P.
AUTIJMN 1981
�That concludes the proof of the First Incompleteness
Theorem. (By juicing this up a little bit we can exhibit
a particular instance of property P which is independent
of PM.)
It might seem that this proof merely transfers the burden
onto the shoulders of Mr. Matijasevic, with his magical
property P. In fact, simpleminded undecideable properties are not hard to find. I chose property P only because it
seems evident that any self.respecting theory ought to be
able to express it.
We can easily tidy up the last loose end by showing why
(2') guarantees (2)-why the theorems of PM are listable.
A proof is a finite sequence of signs from the language of
PM. We therefore begin with a machine that lists all finite
sequences of signs of PM. (It is left to the reader to build
such a machine for himself.) This machine feeds its output to a proof checking machine. (Here is where we make
use of (2').) The proof checker decides which of those sequences are proofs and feeds the legitimate proofs to a
third machine; and that one writes down for us the proposition that each proof proves.
(Note: The First Incompleteness Theorem is itself
proved by elementary means. Although the hypothesis
"PM is sufficiently strong" cannot be so established, the
incompleteness of PM follows from that hypothesis by a
long chain of reasonings of the most elementary sort.)
Goede!' s own interpretation of his work is in some ways
quite cautious: Hilbert's Program has not necessarily been
shown to be impossible, because the notion of "elementary means of proof' is vague.
.
In other ways Goedel's interpretation is breathtaking:
Notice, he says, that the argument of the paper has resulted in a curious situation. Having shown that a certain
proposition {CON, let's say) is undecidable in PM, we
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
have nonetheless been able to determine that it is true.
That is, we have been able to appeal to a standard of truth
and falsity independent of the notions of provability and
refutability in PM. What could be the basis of such a standard of truth? Here Goede! reaches back to one of the
most ancient answers of all-to an independent, extramental world of mathematical objects. We believe in tables and chairs because we see no other way to make
sense of our sensible experience. Goede! feels equally
compelled, in order to make sense of his "mathematical
experience", to believe in the objects of mathematics.
Along this line of argument Goede! has few followers.
Aside from its philosophical difficulties, Goedel's view
must face a fact of our recent mathematical experience:
CON is a proposition which has been cooked up in order
to be undecidable. When we consider those set-theoretically undecidable propositions which have simply been
stumbled upon in the course of doing mathematics, we almost invariably find that we have no idea how to resolve
them or where to look for relevant "evidence."
What, then, do the Incompleteness Theorems say? As
soon as we get beyond the bounds of mere calculation, as
soon as we allow ourselves to enquire whether something
is so not merely for this or that number, but "for every
number"-we can no longer appeal to any systematic
method for obtaining answers. No improvements in mathematics or philosophy can get around that fact.
Philosophy is called on for a clarification-not to discover the address at which the numbers reside (or, perhaps, their convenience mail drop), but rather to give an
account of what we can justifiably mean by those problem-producing generalizations over the (infinite) domain
of numbers. To speak in a slightly loose and pre-Fregean
way: We need an account of the word "all".
71
�Philosophy and Spirituality in Plotinus
Bruce Venable
1 Knowledge as unity with God
The essential insight of Plotinus and, for us, the central
problem in studying the Enneads is that in them the practice of philosophy and the desire for mystical experience
are inseparable. For Plotinus, a philosophy that does not
culminate in mystical experience is an empty speculation;
the most justly celebrated passages of the Enneads, those
that have caused them to be read and cherished, are those
in which, after many pages of arduous dialectic, technical
distinctions, and dense argumentation, he summons the
reader to the state of serene union with God that fulfills
and transcends them. He felt, however, that a personal
religion that strives for mystical experiences without
grounding itself in philosophy is likely to degenerate or go
astray, like the Gnostics, into melodramatic fantasies and
delusions of cheap salvation. For those who regard philos·
ophy or, if you like, science and religion as independent of
one another their mutual dependence in the Enneads
must seem very strange and might seem even to invalidate them both because Plotinus presents neither a coherent rational philosophy nor a genuine piety, but only an
unsatisfactory muddle of the two.
In what sense is philosophy the necessary preparation
for mystical experience? In what sense is mystical experience the necessary culmination of philosophy?
Those acquainted with medieval scholasticism should
be advised that I shall not discuss this interdependence in
the form most familiar to them: the attempt to reconcile
faith and revealed religion with reason and philosophy.
The problem as it appears, for example, in the first question of the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas
does not appear in the Enneads for two characteristic reasons: Plotinus recognizes neither divine revelation nor an
Bruce Venable is at work on a study of Nco-Platonic spirituality. A tutor
at Sante Fe, he delivered this essay as a lecture at St. John's College in
Annapolis on October 22, 1976, and at St. John's College in Santa Fe on
November 5, 1976.
72
independent science of theology UJ1der which the various
claims of revelation and philosophy are reconciled.
The strangeness of Plotinus' view can be somewhat dissipated if we try to peer beyond the fantastic formal complications of the Plotinian system in order to isolate the
ultimate or highest state of existence envisaged by that
system, briefly, a state of unconditioned unity and freedom. It appears in the Enneads twice: as the Good or the
One that is the unknowable first cause in metaphysics,
and again as the self that is the hidden center of the soul.
These two are very similar, if not identical, because, for
Plotinus, to ascend in thought above all created things to
a contemplation of the One is also to descend within the
soul to the hidden depths of the self. Furthermore, just as
a person does not view his self, but rather comes to exist
at that fundamental level, so also a person does not have a
vision of the One, but is rather unified with it. Returning
upon oneself is returning upon one's first cause and in at~
taining to this cause, one meets no stranger, but one's
very self.
Anyone who makes these assertions would consider
religion and philosophy inseparable and even very similar
to each other. But these assertions are rather strange.
Even setting the One aside for a moment as the mystery it
properly is, what about this notion of the self? Where does
it come from, what does it mean, and do we need it at all?
Plotinus, who was perhaps the first philosopher to feel the
need of such a concept of the self, frequently distinguishes the self as more inclusive and elementary than the
soul. The soul means the conscious activities, the acquired traits and personality, as well as the latent contents
and unconscious powers of the intellect, emotions, and
perceptions. The self means something both more primitive and more exalted than the soul. Not acquired or augmented by experience, education, or practice, it does not
present itself directly in any conscious activity, although it
supports and unifies them; the inclusive totality of the
psychic contents and powers, it is also independent of
them, isolated and aloof, unmanifested, unknowable, and
AUTUMN 1981
�unique. It is freedom. When the soul is free, it has withdrawn itself from its conscious life, its scattered thoughts
and feelings, its activities projected outward into the
world, and has gathered its powers into a motionless inward concentration. When it emerges again, the soul rea].
izes that all the goods which previously it sought outside
of itself belong to it naturally, eternally, are proper and intrinsic to itself. The soul is happy.
This description makes it clear that the self, as Plotinus
conceives it, is very similar to the One. It also makes clear
why union with the self will be union with the One. But
why did Plotinus use or even perhaps invent such a concept of the unknown self that is similar to God, when he
had already at hand the perfectly useful notion of the observed soul that is certainly not similar to God? If he had
not used this concept of the self he might have avoided
his confusion, perhaps an accidental one, between philosophy and religion.
Plotinus was certainly impelled by intimate religious desires to create and teach his philosophy. The fervor of his
desire for God is manifest in the Enneads, but something
of its inner meaning has not been shared with us. Because
he expressed his religious desires in the external form of a
philosophy that was in constant conversation with his
great precedessors in the Greek tradition, we can, by reexamining some relevant aspects of that more familiar or
less esoteric tradition, see the innovations of Plotinus in at
least the intellectual context in which he himself considered them and found them necessary. Because of his insistence on the mutual dependence of philosophy and religion,
Plotinus never teaches any religious doctrine, however
intimate its origins, that he would not be prepared to explain, amplify, defend, and fight for on purely philosophical grounds.
There was no philosopher with whom Plotinus' conver·
sation was more intimate than Aristotle. I shall begin,
therefore, with that strange passage in De anima book
three, chapter five that has caused commentators so
much vexation and disappointment.
Aristotle says that in every nature there is something
that is its matter; this is passive and receptive and becomes all the forms of that kind of being. There is also an
active or productive cause that makes all these forms in
the passive matter. It is necessary that these two exist also
in the soul: there is an intellect that makes all the forms
(of knowiedge, presumably) and an intellect that receives
or becomes these forms. The active or productive inte].
lect is like light which makes potential colors actual colors-the light that makes them visible and actually seen.
This active intellect is "separable, impassive, and unmixed." This means that the active intellect is independent of the body. Of these two intellects, Aristotle says,
the potential or passive intellect, which receives the forms
of knowledge, is temporally prior, but only in the individual; in general, the active intellect is prior. This is more
difficult to explain. The first clause seems to mean that in
each individual person, the potential for knowing exists
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
before any actual knowledge. But to say that in general
this is not so seems to imply that there is some other, nonhuman, intellect. Many ancient commentators said, therefore, that Aristotle here refers to the divine intellect.
The view that Aristotle does mean the divine intellect
gains support from his following remark that there is an
active intellect that is eternally thinking; or, as he puts it,
"it does not think sometimes and sometimes not think."
But what follows is again more puzzling: "only when it is
separated is it just what it is and this alone is immortal and
eternal." If ''separated" means "separated from the
human body," then Aristotle refers here to the destiny of
the active intellect of every individual person after the
death of the body. What follows seems to confirm this:
"But we don't remember because the active intellect is
impassible, but the passive intellect is mortal." The most
obvious interpretation of this sentence-although I don't
suppose that its being obvious must necessarily be held to
recommend it-is that every human soul contains two
intellects, an active and a passive; that only the active intellect is immortal, but that this active intellect, when liberated by death from the body, has no personal memory
of ourselves because it cannot receive the impression of
anything merely temporal and transitory, but on\y makes
universal ideas or concepts; the passive intellect does
receive the experiences of ordinary life and is related to
what we should call our personality; but this intellect
perishes along with the body. Thus there would be no personal immortality.
This interpretation was popular enough in antiquity to
cause it widely to be believed that Aristotle denied the
survival after death of any personal consciousness. Aris·
totle appeared to many as an enemy of the hopes for the
afterlife expressed in the Phaedo and the Republic.
This interpretation was not, however, without its opponents, who insisted that by the active intellect Aristotle
means the divine intellect. Many of these commentators
identified the active intellect with the thought of the unmoved mover which eternally thinks only itself. In support
of this identification, they argued that it was impossible to
imagine that Aristotle refers to any human intellect when
he says that the active intellect thinks eternally. But if this
chapter of the De anima concerns the divine intellect
rather than the human intellect, other commentators
wondered why it appears in Aristotle's book on psychology rather than in his books on metaphysics or theology.
So problems remain.
My only reason for discussing what Aristotle means in
this difficult chapter at all is to locate Plotinus in the con·
text of the problems that this chapter caused for ancient
philosophers: the possibility of something like God in the
human soul. It is easy in this context to combine or confuse metaphysics and psychology, as Plotinus seems often
to do. Perhaps it will be possible to combine or confuse
metaphysics and religion as well.
One of the most notorious interpretations of this passage
in the De anima is that of Averroes, an Arabic philosopher
73
�who lived in twelfth-century Spain. Averroes decided that
the active intellect is divine, universal, and immortal,
while the passive intellect is human, individual, and does
not survive the death of the body. An individual human
intellect actually knows only when it is illuminated by the
active intellect, passively receiving from it the forms, essences, or definitions of the things eternally known by the
active intellect. The human intellect is the mere disposition to receive intelligible objects and to suffer knowledge
to occur in it. Knowledge is not an act of the human intellect, because that intellect is purely passive, but only an
event that happens in and to the intellect. The human
person is a particular individual, but knowledge itself remains universal. Nevertheless, the individual's experience
of knowledge is a kind of contact with God. Because, however, the passive disposition of the human intellect perishes with the body, there can be no personal immortality,
no eternal life with God. In the language of religion, the
human individual is of no eternal significance and cannot
be saved. It is passive, transient, and helpless. There is a
conflict between the conclusions of philosophical psychology and the word of God as revealed in the Koran
which proclaims salvations and teaches personal immortality.
The consequences of this interpretation seemed intolerable to St. Thomas Aquinas, writing about a century
later, and he wrote a commentary on the De anima to
prove that the interpretation of Averroes was not in fact
the doctrine of Aristotle. He asked: If, as Averroes, says,
there is no individual active intellect, what sense does it
make to say "This individual person knows"? No sense at
all, St. Thomas thought. He maintained against Averroes
that, distinct from the divine intellect, every human soul
contains an active intellect as well as a passive intellect.
The passive intellect receives from the senses the images
of perceptible things; the active intellect, by its natural
power, extracts from these images their intelligible forms,
essences, or definitions. The active intellect is said to
"spiritualize" the images. In St. Thomas' reconcilation of
the psychology of Aristotle with the teachings of revealed
religion, the active intellect is spiritual in its essence:, sur-
vives the death of the body, and is immortal.
What, according to these interpretations of Averroes
and St. Thomas, is the relation between the individual
soul and the divine truth? Despite the differences between these two interpretations, this relation for both of
them is extrinsic or external. In neither interpretation is
the act of knowledge a co-operation or conversation between the soul and the truth.
For Averroes, the soul is completely passive; it receives
the illumination of the active intellect and experiences
knowledge, but remains, nonetheless, unchanged, without any intelligible content or intellectual power of its
own. The soul receives the truth as an inspired prophet
receives the divine revelation, as a free gift of a God who
exceeds the human capacity to imagine his purposes.
Because the soul is completely passive, it is not trans-
74
formed by the truth, nor can the truth save it, because it
has no immortal part.
For St. Thomas, it is of the soul's destiny and inherent
power to know the divine truth. But the soul constructs
this truth for itself, rather than receiving it from God. The
soul does not require the direct intervention of the divine
intellect to experience knowledge because the soul has an
autonomous and immanent power to know the divine
truth. This situation implies, however, that the soul is isolated; it does not meet, in the act of knowledge, any divine
being, power, or operation. Again, the act of knowledge,
and therefore philosophy, is without religious significance
for personal salvation. Also, as in the theory of Averroes,
knowledge has no specifically individual content. Although
the senses have particular experiences, the active intellect
extracts a uri!versal meaning from them. Individual salvation, therefore, according to St. Thomas, is conferred
upon the soul by an external donation of grace. Although
there is a cognitive content to this.salvation, it is incomprehensible to the human intellect unaided by grace. For
St. Thomas, as for Averroes, the soul, empty and helpless,
must accept its hope of salvation from divine revelation
alone. There is no continuity between its experience in
knowledge of the universal truth and its private desire in
religious feeling for a personal God.
St. Thomas and Averroes sought to resolve, perhaps
successfully, the conflicts that appeared to remain between philosophical psychology and personal religion.
The success of these efforts is not important here, for
these theories are far from anything that happens in the
Enneads. Averroes and St. Thomas begin with a stark contrast and separation of the human and divine intellects;
Plotinus regards them as connatural: of the same nature
and inseparable, they always act simultaneously. He considers human perfection to be a sharing in the divine act
of knowing but he does not want to have anything to do
with grace. Perfection must be real elevation of psychic
life to a higher act of existence, but must not be given to
the soul as something extrinsic to it. Perfection must be
internal and personal, it must be a discovery of and a
proper act of the self. It must also be divine; it must be
contact and union with God.
The difficulty of attaining perfection or even of describing it appears already in Aristotle: there seems to be no internal continuity between the individual human soul and
the universal divine intellect; there seems, therefore, to
be no way for the soul to share in the divine existence
without abandoning its own. In the passage from the De
anima Aristotle never says that he is discussing the divine
intellect, but he must mean the divine intellect when he
says that the active intellect thinks eternally, for surely no
human intellect can be said to think eternally.
With his usual taste for radical solutions, Plotinus says
that the human soul does indeed think eternally. Does
this mean that the human intellect shares what would
seem to be an exclusively divine power? How can an infinite divine power be present in a finite being without
AU1UMN 1981
�compromising the absolute distinction between God and
the soul (a distinction that Averroes and St. Thomas presuppose)? How can one resolve the problems of knowledge,
as posed by. Aristotle in the De anima, as the relation between the active and the passive intellects, without isolating the soul from God and without separating philosophy
from the practice of religion, as Averroes and St. Thomas
did? We seem to have either tgo much unity between
God and the soul or else not enough.
The ordinary philosophical question "How does the
soul get its ideas?" can develop convolutions that involve
the entire destiny of the soul and the religious problems
that surround that destiny. The soul has to be in contact
with God in order to have knowledge at all, but this contact with God threatens to engulf and dissolve the soul in
the ocean of the divine being.
2 Existence as unity with God
I now turn to the question of unity from a metaphysical
point of view, rather than from the point of view of knowledge and its possibility. The question of unity again develops consequences for personal religion and spirituality. It
will be seen again, I hope, that the distinction between
what happens inside the soul and what happens outside
of it becomes vague.
The Pannenides raises the problem of the participation
of material objects in their common, immaterial form.
The problem is seen there as an antinomy of immanence
and transcendence. If the many particular objects truly
participate in the single form, the form becomes immanent in them and is infected with their plurality; if they
partake of the form, they seem to take parts of it, to divide
it, and so do not all have a share of the same integral form
and so cannot all be called by its single name. Yet if the
form remains intact, if it remains untouched by, aloof
from, and transcendent to, the particular objects, it seems
that the particulars cannot participate in it at all.
The philosopher has two problems here: he wants the
form to be transcendent to the particular objects, single
and undivided, because he wants the form to be the authentic, unchanging object of knowledge, distinct from
the uncertain and changing appearances of the particulars, which can be the object only of opinion. At the same
time, however, or perhaps not quite at the same time, he
wants the form to be in some sense the cause of the particulars. This demand seems, however, to imply some contact between the form and the particulars that will violate
the integrity of the form as an object of knowledge.
This antinomy quickly became a traditional point of
argument in ancient philosophy. Most schools maintained
against the Platonists that the forms were in some way
immanent, or embedded, in the material particulars; the
Platonists strove to preserve the integrity and dignity and
the forms by keeping them separate from the sadness and
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
disorder of the material world. One typical gesture in this
direction was the view that the forms were the thoughts
of the divine intellect, the paradigms that guide its creation of the material world.
Eager to affirm the primacy of unity at all levels, Plotinus
would have inclined, as his theory of emanation suggests,
to a theory whereby the particulars, produced immediately by their causes, retain contact with them. His religious language, however, constantly exhorts one to flee
the confusions of this lower world for the true visions and
delights of a divine world somewhere "higher" and certainly separate from this one. The dilemma about unity
looks this way in Plotinus: how can the divine power
create and sustain the sensible world without (l) compromising its own transcendence and unity or (2) destroying
the real multiplicity and diversity of the sensible world?
Either the divine power will be dissipated in the world or
the world will be completely reabsorbed into the monochromatic unity of the greater power that creates it.
Plotinus devotes two long tractiltes to this technically
complex problem. He begins by attacking the Stoics who,
like him, were monists~people who emphasized the unity
of all things, but who, unlike Plotinus, were materialists.
The Stoics tried to solve the antinomy of transcendence
and immanence by making the world-soul present at
every point of the material universe. They diffused the intelligent, creative divine power throughout the world.
Plotinus objects that (l) the divine power is thus thought
of as material and that (2) it loses its unity with itself
because it is spread around on or in other material objects.
(Nothing will make Plotinus accept materialism: he thinks
it degrading. Some of the peculiarity of his own theory of
matter is due to this feeling.) Plotinus further objects that
the Stoic solution is impossible because two separate material things cannot participate in each other, they only
muddle together and lose their mutual independence. If
the world-soul is material, as the Stoics held, then the material world cannot participate in it at all. The world-soul
is left without any power to create or direct it. The objections of Plotinus to the materiality of the world-soul recall
the objections to Averroes' doctrine of the active intellect:
it abolishes the necessary distinctions between the creator
and the created.
The later Neoplatonists such as Proclus betray a desire
similar to St. Thomas Aquinas' in his doctrine of active intellect. They sought to preserve the dignity and integrity
of the transcendent form while allowing the immanent
form to govern the particulars, by distinguishing simply
and sharply between the transcendent forms in the divine
intellect, calling them unparticipated forms, and the
forms immanent in particular material things. The Neoplatonists had nevertheless to explain the real relation between the immanent forms and the transcendent form,
but not, of course, as participation. In their efforts to explain this relation they multiply distinct terms in a relation and then seek to justify their logical continuity~a
procedure that contrasts strikingly with Plotinus' method
75
�of establishing continuity between the transcendent form
and the material particulars.
I call Plotinus' solution the theory of integral omnipres·
ence. Typically, Plotinus accepts everyone's terms and
seeks to solve everyone's difficulties by comprehending
them in a universal theory that explains not only how
things are but also why other philosophers have the par·
tial and therefore false views of things that they do have.
It is a theory of consciousness, of attitudes and knowledge, as well as a theory of metaphysics, i.e., a theory
about the objects of consciousness. First, the metaphysi·
cal side of the theory because it is slightly less paradoxical
than the theory of consciousness, and because this order
provides an edifying climax.
The theory of integral omnipresence is a characteristic
expression of Plotinus' intuition of the universe as a single
spiritual life. In his philosophy, the distinctions of a static
structure of reality were overlaid and dominated by the
notion that this structure is in fact a dynamic interrela·
tionship of spiritual forces. The notion of life as a power
of self-movement and transformation prevails over the no-
tion of existence as formed and completed. Being is pri·
marily power and activity and only secondarily, form and
hypostasis (6.4.9, 23-25).
For Plotinus a form in the divine intellect is a radiance
or a power, illuminating and actualizing the particulars,
rather than an archetype or paradigm separate from them.
The transcendent form is universally present in particular
qualities. Conversely, the particular quality acts as the
form, locally present, although with diminished strength
and intensity. For example, the white color throughout a
bowl of milk is also the white color in two different bowls
of milk, because color is a quality not a quantity and,
therefore, has no parts (IV.2.l; IV.3.2). In more modern
terms, Plotinus equates the intension of a quality, its defi·
nition, with its extension, its range of application.
If the form in the divine intellect is omnipresent in its
spatially-separated and material manifestations, does this
presence not make the form itself spatial and material? If
so, Plotinus will have failed in his attempt to outflank
Stoic cosmology while retaining its dynamic character.
Plotinus attempts therefore to purify his notion of crea·
tion and created diversity from all spatial references, correcting thereby the materialistic implications of his own
imagery of emanation by which he represents the diffusion of infinite creative power into successively' lower and
weaker, but more determinate, forms of existence, desending at last to visible and tangible matter. He takes up
his own imagery and revises it carefully to remove from it
every spatial or material reference.
For clarity's sake the argument has often tried to lead the
mind to understand the origin of multiplicity by making an
image of many radii emanating from a single center. (cf.
5.1.!1, !0-!5). But one must add to this image the idea that
the radii become many while remaining together. One removes, as it were, the lengths of the radii and considers only
76
their extremities, lying at the center, where they are all one.
Again, if you add the lengths again, each radius will touch the
center still. Nevertheless (despite the length of the radii), the
several extremities at the center will not be separated from
the primary center but will be simultaneous with it. The
centers will appear to be as many as the radii which they
touch, but they remain all together. If, therefore, we liken all
the intelligible forms to many centers related to and unified
in one center, but appearing many because of their radii (although the radii do not generate the centers, but only reveal
where they are), let the radii be analogous to the material
things which, when the intelligible form touches them, make
the form appear to be multiple and to be present in many
places. (6.5.5)
In this chapter he uses a spatial image to express a
dynamic notion of causality: the generation of multiple
beings as distinct forces emanating from a single source of
creative power. Plotinus then carefully revises the image
in order to remove from it every spatial or material sugges·
tion: he strives to represent direction without quantity
and forces without a space across which they are extended.
Multiplied and diversified, the power of the creative
cause remains (paradoxically) concentrated and undiffer·
entiated in the cause. The diversity of the created world is
simultaneous with the simplicity of its cause, but utterly
distinct from it because each created being takes a direc·
tion in which it is manifested spatially and materially,
whereas the single cause is free from every specification
and limitation. The relation between cause and effect is
asymetrical; the cause has a transcendent existence be·
cause it is not exhausted in its relation to its effects: the
effects are completely defined by their dependence upon
their cause and their limited and local appearance in the
sensible world. This asymetrical relation is eternal and can
never be reversed. The primacy of the first cause lies in its
infinity and power which contrasts with the structured di·
versity of its effects.
This discussion shows one reason for introducing this
new theory. If all individuals, even the archetypes in the
divine intellect, are not constantly present to their trans·
cendent cause, the One, they will be separated from it
and deprived of its power. They will have no power of
self-subsistence and would perish as heat fades when fire
withdraws. Their death would leave the One as the single,
universal being, the imperishable substrate of its transitory
modes or emanations. A further consequence of particu·
Jar interest is that there could be no personal immortality
of the soul.
Plotinus offers this theory as a solution to the pantheis·
tic and monistic dilemmas encountered by his predeces·
sors. Nevertheless, one must admit that in seeking to solve
all possible difficulties he has invented a theory t)lat is far
stranger than anything his predecessors even imagined.
(I hope that you do not think that I am approaching my
subject frivolously. I have been provoked to this some·
what unscholarly fashion of speech in order to set the
problems aroused by a prolonged study of Plotinus in all
AUTUMN 1981
�their immediacy. Many scholars will blandly present a
bizarre theory like the present one without a hint of why
Plotinus should have desired it at all, without explaining
what sort of satisfaction he might have taken in it.)
The weirdest aspect of this theory is that it seems to
disregard matter entirely. Plotinus was ready for this objection. He points out that the greatest obstacle to understanding his theory is the persistent human weakness that
remains convinced, despite his many demonstrations to
the contrary, that the visible world is real and that consequently the intelligible world must be extended in space
to form and govern it (6.4.2, 28-43). He insists that the
material world is specious, the last feeble manifestation of
intelligible power in the blank and insubstantial substrate
of matter. This manifestation is appropriate only to the
most feeble exercise of thought: the naive opinion that
takes things for what they only seem to be.
Let me hasten to add that Plotinus does not deny that
matter is somehow real; he merely insists that its reality is
not intelligible in itself, but only with reference to the
divine intelligible power that creates, informs, and sustains it and with reference also to the power of human intellect that beholds it and seems to penetrate its deceptive
appearance. Matter is an illusion only in the sense that it
is the most diffused appearance of the divine thought
which recognizes it not as delusion or falsity, but as its
own exuberance and self-revelation. For Plotinus, all mere
existence (for the One is beyond existence) is appearance,
a real apparition of divine energy, in a particular intelligible, psychic, or material form, relative to the level of
consciousness that is able to perceive and understand it.
He insists only that the reality of these appearances is not
in themselves but in their cause because reality means in~
telligibility. All levels of reality are strictly relative to the
levels of consciousness-perception, emotion, discursive
knowledge, pure contemplation-which apprehend them.
The soul ascends to a higher level of reality as it attains to
a higher level of consciousness: the soul ascends to God as
it attains a divine power of thought. A topography of salvation is completely internalized.
This kind of thinking is unfamiliar to us and even Flolinus' contemporaries seem to have been puzzled by it.
Why does Plotinus want to think and talk this way?
Plotinus concludes from the immateriality of the intelligible world that whatever is able to participate in it, participates in it as a whole. Where there is no question of
extension or magnitude, whatever is present to any. must
be present to all (6.4.2, 43-49). The truth of this inference
is easy to see in the case of demonstrative knowledge
which, if it is to be genuine, universal knowledge, must be
the same for all human intellects, despite the differences
in human personalities. Plotinus' idea is another form of
the Aristotelian theorem that the intellect in act is identical with the intelligible in act. If individual intellects know
the identical object of knowledge, they must each become
it identically. Plotinus, therefore, says that participation in
knowledge, in the divine intellect, is identical because
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
knowledge, being immaterial, is equally present to all intellects that know it. The object of knowledge, likewise, is
equally available to any intellect that turns its attention towards it and becomes present to every intellect in proportion to its individual ability. to know it. But the differences
among actually attained knowledges are all on the side of
the individual human intellects; the divine intellect is
equally present to all. But this truth is not too obvious in
the case of existential participation, e.g. human participation in the divine virtues. Why, one may object, does this
participation not also appear uniform? Why in fact does it
appear to be wildly diverse, there being perhaps not a
single form-justice or beauty, for example-that appears
to be evenly distributed in the world? Plotinus answers
that there are manifest degrees of participation because
they correspond to the differing abilities of created things
to accept the impression of the form whose power is
nonetheless present and available to it (6.4.8, 39-40; 11,
3-5). These varying abilities to participate correspond in
turn to different intensities of the desire to receive the
quality or form (5.3.17, 28-32; 5.5.8).
Here Plotinus again uses the vocabulary of psychology
in a metaphysical discussion. But Plotinus is not just careless about his vocabulary: he wants the identification or
confusion of metaphysics and psychology to be an explicit
principle of his philosophy. Free will and not existence is
to be its foundation.
Because divine being is omnipresent and because its
presence is realized in the actual existence of each particular being according to the capacity and desire of each to
receive a divine mode of existence, this relation of the
transcendent power and immanent presence of the divine
being will be valid also for the individual soul. Because,
moreover, all divine reality is both intellectual and intelligible (both thinks and is the object of thought), the soul
shares in divine reality through contemplation, both expanding its knowledge and strengthening its power of
thought. The metaphysical interrelation of transcendence
and immanence is the structure of personal salvation. The
soul is elevated through contemplation to a divine and
universal mode of existence without losing its uniqueness
in that greater power. The divine existence appears as the
individual existence without resigning its transcendence.
This development reveals the importance of the idea of
the self as distinct from all the powers and contents of the
soul. (Compare the argumentation throughout 5.3, 3-4).
The human soul and intellect are manifestations of and
participations in the world soul and the divine intellect.
Just as, in the universe, the world soul and the divine intellect are unified by the comprehensive power of the One,
so, in the individual human person, the individual soul
and intellect are unified by the comprehensive power of
the self, superior to them and usually hidden by them.
Further, just as the One generates the world soul and the
divine intellect out of itself but remains unlimited by their
specific natures and undiminished by their specific activities, so the human self is the real source of the individual
77
�soul and intellect, but a source that remains unaffected by
their diverse natures and acts.
The soul is many things and all things, both the things above
and those below down to the limits of all life. We are each one
an intelligible cosmos, touching the lower world by the
powers of the soul belOw, but with our higher powers attain-
ing the entire intelligible realm. We remain with all the rest of
the intelligible above, but by our lowest edge we are bound to
the world below. (3.4.3, 21-27)
Only the attachment of the soul to a material body dulls
its perception of its continued residence in the divine
world. The soul does not literally descend into a body. Its
only descent is ignorance of its divine origin and nature.
Detachment from the body liberates the higher sensibility
and delivers the soul again to its original beatitude. Salvation, the ascent of the soul to divine life, is therefore selfknowledge; salvation is a re-awakening of the soul from
the torpor of incarnate existence to the eternal world of
its origin and its higher, inner, and secret life. Because the
interior cosmos of the soul mirrors the cosmos of the uni-
verse, the life of the philosopher becoming conscious of
himself is an archetypal personal history in which his individual existence is elevated to the status of an archetype
because it is consciously conformed, through his contemplation, to the pattern of universal being, a pattern that is
always present in his soul as an inherent possibility and
power of existence, the power to transform his life in the
image of the divine realities he contemplates.
As a consequence of the theory of integral omnipresence, a general theory of universal being becomes the
equivalent of the practice of the interior life of contemplation. Because of this equivalence, self-knowledge is
knowledge of God; because knowledge of God is salvation, self-knowledge is salvation.
Or is it? The One is unknowable.
But is the One God? Yes.
But is the One present in us, so that knowledge of the
self can be knowledge of the One? Yes. In the first tractate of the fifth Ennead, after outlining his metaphysics,
Plotinus continues:
It has now been shown that we must believe that things are as
follows: there is first the One which is beyond being, as our
discourse tried to demonstrate, so far as it is possible to dem-
onstrate about such things; next there is intellect and then
the soul. As these three exist in nature, so it is necessary to
believe that they exist even in ourselves. I do not mean in the
perceptible parts of ourselves-for these three are incorporeal-but in those parts that Plato calls "the inner man."
Even our soul, then, is a divine thing and of another nature,
such as is the universal nature of soul. (5.1.10, 1-12)
Plotinus says in other passages that we are joined to the
One, that we touch the ultimate Godhead, by a similar
nature in ourselves. He even says at one point, after hav-
ing described the ethical purification he demands as preparation for the contemplation of divine reality, "but our
78
desire is not to be free of sin, but to be God" (1.2.6, 2-3).
What is the meaning of this dark utterance? It is one
thing, and a thing whose meaning has, I hope, become
somewhat clearer in the course of this essay, to say that
the authentic self is an archetype in the divine intellect, a
self that is therefore unique, divine, and immortal; the
self, on this view, is a determinate aspect of the divine wis-
dom, relative to its limited sphere of manifestation in the
created world. But to assert that the One dwells in the self
seems to make an unrestricted claim for the divinity of
the self, seems to abolish the distinction between the
created self and the ultimate source and desire of all
created existence. Furthermore, because the One is said
to be present in every self and in every form in the divine
intellect, it seems that even the distinction between the
One and the divine intellect, so carefully made and so
strenuously defended, would disappear and with this distinction would disappear all rational justification for
created diversity and multiplicity.
The desire of Plotinus to unify metaphysics and personal religion has caused a serious problem.
3 Mystical Unity
I shall proceed obliquely and by negative contrasts. If
we find difficulties in the system as Plotinus presents it,
let us wonder what it would have been like if it were not as
Plotinus presents it. Specifically, if we see problems in the
distinction between the divine intellect and the One and
in the assertion that the soul can be unified mystically
with both of them, let us consider what the system would
look like without these features. I hope by this procedure
to reveal the appetites of Plotinus in making his system
and his satisfaction in it.
If, then, Plotinus had not posited above the divine intellect another deity, incomprehensible in thought, but attainable in an immediate, non-rational union, his religious
aspiration for union with God could still have been satisfied. He already speaks of the divinization. of the soul
through union with the divine intellect (5.8.7, 32-35;
5.8.10, 39-40; 5.8.11). He could have developed this idea
much as Averroes was to do, by making the conjunction
of the human passive intellect with the divine active intellect the goal of all religious and philosophical striving.
Such a theory would, however, have implied a different
notion of the self than that embodied in the system as Plotinus has it. The self for such a theory would be defined
by its being coextensive with the divine intellect as a system of laws, relationships, and pure archetypes of being.
The self would exist insofar as the truth of the divine intellect, its unity as perfect knowledge, is valid. This theory
implies a fundamentally abstract and impersonal view of
being; the self would be a law of knowledge, coextensive
with the divine intellect, rather than a life or a free will.
(Averroes, who professed this view of human beatitude,
found no need for an additional, personal immortality.)
AUTUMN 1981
�Even if this system included within the divine intellect
the forms of human individuals, the self, although imperishable, would still be defined as a unique point of view on
the finite content of the divine intellect. Its desire for
union with God would have no uniquely determined personal significance. Its immortality would be guaranteed by
the conformity of the intellect to the perfect order of the
divine intellect. This order has two essential characteristics: finitude and necessity. The self, in turn, would be
finite and contained by the necessity that governs all intellectual being. The divine intellect would be the single,
final, and absolutely integrated self and the pattern of all
genuine selfhood.
Against or, more accurately, beyond this notion of selfhood and of divinity, Plotinus sets another, for which intellect and consciousness are not the highest values. His
decision to do this sets him apart from his predecessors in
the Greek philosophical tradition. For Plotinus the two
most important personal qualities are freedom and, dependent upon it, love. It is precisely these two qualities,
insignificant in an impersonal notion of selfhood and
divinity, that Plotinus sought to preserve and exalt in the
mysticism that culminates in union with the One.
The basic affirmation of "intellectualistic" mysticism is
that each human individual is an archetype contained in
the divine intellect. Union with the divine intellect elevates the human intellect to the universality of the divine
intellect, but allows no freedom in that unity. If the self is
preserved as an eternal mode, moment, or aspect of the
divine intellect, its existence is limited and determined by
the necessary causal dependence that creates and maintains it. Such a self is not free and its personal religious
aspirations are ultimately irrelevant because that self will
cease to exist as separate. The intellect sees the One as
the supreme object of metaphysical speculation. Personal
religion desires not to understand the One, but to be
united with it as the object of its love.
This union of love reveals not only a new aspect of the
God that is loved, but also of the self that loves Him. (In
such descriptions Plotinus uses the masculine pronouns
which name a personal God instead of the more usual
neuter pronouns which name an abstract principle or im-
personal cause.) In this union with a personal God, the
self and its love are experienced as infinite and free. The
desire to experience the native infinity and freedom of the
self, in addition to purely metaphysical reasons, motivates
Plotinus' description of the One as itself (or Himself) infinite and free.
Here ·is a passage from the long and careful discussion
of how the One may be said to be free, in which Plotinus
makes it clear that his doctrine about the One's freedom
implies a similar nature in ourselves, a state of isolation
and self-mastery.
When we say that He (the One) receives nothing into Himself
and that nothing else contains Him, intending to place Him
outside of chance, we mean not only that He is free by reason
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
of His attainment of self-unity and purity from all things, but
also that, if we discover a similar nature in ourselves that has
nothing to do with those things which depend upon us and
by which we suffer accident and chance (the body and its
emotions), we mean that by that nature alone we have the
same self-mastery that the One has, the autonomy of the light
that belongs to the Good and is good in actuality, essentially
superior to any intellectual light or goodness. When we ascend into that state and become that light alone, having discarded everything else, what else can we say but that we are
more than (intellectually) free, more than autonomous?
(6.8.15, 8-23)
It would be impossible to state more emphatically that the
discovery of an utterly transcendent God corresponds to
the attainment of a state of personal transcendence that is
the unceasing presence of that God within the self. In
religion, as in metaphysics, there is a union or coincidence
of an immanent power and its transcendent cause.
In this union with God the soul discovers that its deepest ground is not its archetypal being contained in the
divine intellect, that its highest aspiration is not, therefore, to become perfect self-consciousness, omniscence,
and formed existence. Its ultimate uniqueness is a mystery
inaccessible to discursive reason, because its authentic
self is infinite and free. The self is an ideal, a teleological
notion because the self can withdraw itself from its apparent, projected, personality (within whose boundaries it
can have only finite satisfaction) and can thereby discover
its infinity and freedom in union with the infinity and
freedom of the One (6.5.7). The aspiration of the self to
know itself as unique finds its complete satisfaction only
in this union with a God unlimited in activity and uncomprehended by thought. The One is experienced in this
union as one with the deepest point of the self (6.9.11).
But we must return to our problem: how did Plotinus
think that he could get away with this? We must return
because Plotinus himself had no patience with religious
enthusiasm unsupported by philosophy.
Plotinus does not see this problem quite as we do
because he is completely unaffected by incarnational
thinking and probably completely ignorant of it. He
believes that the divine world is omnipresent: its powers
and possibilities underlie every derived existence. The
One is present to the intellect as an innate desire to surpass its self-reflective unity of being and thinking; this
desire, moreover, is prior to the subject-object duality of
intellect precisely because the desire to be at one with
oneself is the presence of the One in the human person as
its innate unity and simplicity. The life of the One persists in the intellect as its inner light which strives to
return from thoughts to its original free and undefined
condition. The One is present everywhere as this spontaneous desire to transcend every internal division, as the
desire of all things for their inherent unity (6.5.1; 6.9.1-2).
Intellect is a principle of diversity and multiplication,
"for intellect is an activity manifest in the expansion of all
things" (3.8.9, 20-33). The One is an act of contraction of
79
�the soul upon itself, a descent into itself, a negative activity that shrinks from the nullity of phenomena mto the
core of the self. All consciousness IS concentratiOn, a
strengthening of the contemplative power upon the inside of the soul. The One appears as the final event of this
concentration. This state is not an intellectual intuition of
the self nor of an absolute unity, but is a coincidence of
the self with the One, not a coalescence of substances but
a coincidence of activities. In this coincidence neither the
transcendence of the One nor the dependence of the self
as created are violated.
Plotinus often recalls the language of the Symposium
when describing this union (1.6.7; 6.7.22; 6.7.34-35). Plato
interpreted erotic passion as the vehicle of personal transcendence into the world of true bemg because eros discovers and actualizes the likeness of the soul to that world.
The sequence of transcendences that conducts the soul to
a final vision of the forms and contact with the truth IS
described in the Symposium as an ascending dialectic of
desire stimulated and desire fulfilled, of beauty perceived
and beauty attained, of love aroused by vision and love at
rest in its object. Plotinus makes one significant addition,
speaking of "beauty perceived and beauty acquired" as
the contemplative soul affectively mmors the dlVlne perfections it beholds. The soul actualizes its visions as
deeper levels of its own virtual existence. Therefore the
dialectic of love in Plotinus culminates not m VISIOn but m
union. But it is a union of lovers that does not obliterate
their distinction, for that would obliterate also their love,
but causes them to forget the distance between them.
This union is two-fold: because it is an attainment of
the authentic self, it occurs within the boundaries of the
soul but because it is union with the One, it is also a certain'transcendence of the soul's individuality. This union
is the mystical counterpart of the metaphysical theory of
integral omnipresence and is a particular application of It.
The One is transcendent because it is the efficient cause
of the lower forms of existence which proceed from it; yet
as their final cause it is immanent in its effects because
they can return to it only by enfolding and concentrating
their activity around the center of their own existence.
Transcendence corresponds to the desire stimulated by
one's unattained good; immanence corresponds to the
tranquil possession of one's good as the part and activity
of one's own self. The soul is not poor: its best part, its
innermost self, is already somehow transcendent (3.5.3,
25-26). The soul does not need to become divine by grace
because its deepest point is already God.
We must put aside all else to remain in that Alone and to
become it, discarding all other attachments. We are impatient
to depart this life and to be free of it so that we may be enfolded upon our own entirety and have no part in us but ~hat
through which we have contact with God. Then it is possible
to see Him and one's self together, insofar as one may speak
80
any longer of vision. It is a vision of a self resplendent, full of
intellectual light, pure, weightless, lightsome, a self that
~as
become God, or rather that is God always, but only then wtth
its Godhead enkindled. (6.9.9, 50-58)
The spiritual meaning of the theory of integral omnipresence is thus made clear. When the soul is saved, it apprehends and possesses its good, it is assumed into and possessed by the more inclusive existence of its good, but II
has not departed from itself in an ecstasy nor has It received a new self by grace; it has only for the first time
realized the good inherent in itself.
.
This union with the God is both the culmination of philosophy (because philosophical contemplation is the only
valid preparation) and also a transcendence of philosophy
(because the union surpasses and temporanly obliterates
the subject-object duality of all contemplation). Phtlosophy is not a mechanical method that. will inevitably supply
the desired mystical experiences (such a view would
violate the freedom of God); the self must prepare·itself
for these experiences and wait (5.5.8; also 1.6.9; 5.3.17,
28-32; 6.5.12, 29-31). The visions of the sober intellect
are annulled by the experiences of the drunken intellect
in love with God (6.7.35). In this sense philosophy is itself
left behind by religion, although it will again be asked to
interpret the experiences at the essentially inferior level
of thought and speech.
The final personal tr')nsformation is to have one's
desire for God and one's vision of God so cldsely united to
one's essential self that the self becomes the pure mirror
into which the final revelation of God is suspended. The
whole sequence of contemplative vision is accomplished
within the soul as a life of theopathy, suffering the divine,
because the transfiguration of these visions occurs only
for the soul that is transformed by them. The important
factor is the correlation of the real apparition of God to
the soul and the soul's degree of inner association with
God, the degree to which it concentrates and strengthens
its inner light into likeness with God.
The ultimate spiritual attainment of the self and the
form of its salvation coincide with the ultimate manifestation of God. The true self, experienced only in union with
the One, is perfect freedom; the ultimate God, experienced only in union with the self, is pure creative spontaneity. The return of the soul through gradual simplifications of intellectual vision to the motionless self reveals at
the same time that self, in its purity and freedom, as the
only perfect revelation of God.
We have returned to the beginning, we have seen Flolinus' idea of the self, its inseparable connection with his
experience of God, and we have solved all problems. I
hope, finally, that it is clear, through th1s discusswn of the
union of the deepest self with the highest God, how the
entire philosophy of Plotinus is but the preparation and
intimation of the silence of that unimaginable splendor.
AUTUMN
I981
�OCCASIONAL DISCOURSES
The Permanent Part
of the College*
By "the permanent part" of the College
in the title of my address, I mean, as you
have probably guessed, you, the alumni.
That is not just an ingratiating way of
speaking devised for the occasion, but it
has some facts in its favor.
Before I explain myself, let me remind
you of an occasion in which many of you
have participated-the president's Senior
Dinner. One part of it that is sometimes
quite moving is the Dean's Toast to theRepublic. If he is feeling thorough, it will
have four parts, ascending in order of
worldly magnitude and then dropping into
intimate immediacy. There will be celebrated the Republic of Plato, which is the
world's first book to set out the program of
a true school, the republic of letters which
is the commonwealth of all those who love
the word, the republic of the United States
of America which is the ground and foundation of our worldly being, and finally, St.
John's College, the living community of
learning.
The question concerning the continuity
of all these commonwealths with each
other, and of each in itself, in other words,
the question in all its range of the continuity of community has always been a preoccupation of mine. As I understand it, it is
an aspect of that question that you, as
alumni, want me to speak about, and I welcome the occasion for becoming clear
about it to myself. So to return to the position of the alumni within the college community.
Consider the students at any time attending the college. Presently they graduate, they go to a first degree of academic
honor and are students in the strict sense
no longer. The Board of the college changes
*Delivered at a gathering of San Francisco area
alumni of St. John's in the fall of 1980.
THE ST.JOHNS REVlEW
all the time; its members have a fairly short
term. Our last president was with us an
amazingly long time-the longest or among
the longest of any twentieth century college president. But he has now sworn not
to set foot on either campus for a year, for
a well-earned period of distance and refreshment. May our new president, whom
you will meet later in the year, be with us
for that length of time which betokens a
good fit!-but it will not be permanently.
And finally, the tutors themselves, who
may seem to you to be truly permanent fixtures at Annapolis and Santa Fe-they too
must retire late in life <!nd become
"emeriti," members of the college by
reason of their meritorious past but now
completed service.
Alumni, on the other hand, are alumni
for good. Their very name proclaims itthey are "nurslings" who have, presumably, absorbed something of the college's
substance. By the college Polity all students, once matriculated, become alumni
of the college, whether they leave with or
without a degree, and no one can retire or
"terminate" them. All other membership
in the college is by choice; that of alumni
alone has in it something analogous to being by nature.
So as nurslings of the institution, alumni
are first of all asked to nourish it in return. I
know very well and have a certain limited
sympathy for the complaint that when the
college communicates with graduates it is
too often about money-exactly the complaint parents have about their student
children. It has to be. Private colleges are
charitable institutions that give their services almost half free. Money-raising is the
price they pay for their freedom to choose
to be what they are. It can be done crudely
or tactfully, but done it must be, by our
president as by all other private school
presidents. Of course, the response is a
matter of choice. That choice may well be
determined not only by a general sense of
responsibility for the continuation of nongovernmental education but also by gratitude. For example, I have a fixed, and fairly
well-kept rule of sending twenty-five
dollars to St. John's whenever the institutions from which I graduated-whom I respected only as the employers of much
admired but very remote professors and
loved not all.-solicit me for money.
But, of course, the notion that the alumni's relation to the college-at least to our
college-begins or ends there is absurd. So
let me now consider the question what
constitutes the after-life of a student from
its most specific to its widest aspect.
First of all, and this turns out to be by no
means a mere formality, the alumni participate in the governance of the college
through their board representatives and informally by the weight of their organized
opinion. That opinion has on occasion
decided issues-such as the proposed
abandonment of our old name.
The college in turn, we all agree, owes its
alumni certain reliable services and wellorganized, substance-informed occasions
for their return. Among the first is the
prompt and effective composition of letters of reference. Among the second are
Homecoming with its seminars, and the exhilarating summer alumni seminars that
take place in Santa Fe. Then there are the
alumni meetings in the various cities, such
as this one. For all of these affairs the
tutors who help with them volunteer their
time and efforts, in acknowledgement of
the permanent bond between them and
their former students.
But the tutors have another kind of
duty~that more informal kind of duty
which, were it not such a pleasure to per-
81
�form, would probably not be very faithfully
observed. It is a duty which, even though it
is more sporadic than undergraduate
teaching, is as serious and as satisfying. It is
to be in some practical sense there for
alumni, to write to in weal or woe, to visit
on the way to a new departure or on a sentimental journey, to bring the conclusions
of life to. Those visits from former students-sometimes there is time only for fifteen minutes of conversation in the coffee
shop-are always talked about among us.
Nothing brings home to us the ultimate
impotence of the profession Of teaching
and the deeply dubious character of the
program as does a visit from a former student who is lost and who attributes that
condition to having been touched by some
unassimilable intimation of paradise or of
hell in this school. Nothing gives so exhilarating a sense of stability in change as the
appearance of alumni who have so well
and truly put the college in the past that it
is equa11y well and truly present in them:
an oracular saying which I am certain will
have some immediate meaning for most of
you, and of which I want to say more later.
But the feelings with which these encounters leave us, from disturbed regret to
a sense that the deliberate benevolance we
felt towards you in your student daysgood teachers are never "close" to their
students-is about to turn into life-long
friendship, are not my present point. That
point is that alumni are in a more than
metaphorical sense returning home, and
have a right to be received in that spirit.
Those, then, are the continuing relations
of the alumni with the college as a home
community, made up of officers and two
campuses and one faculty. Now I come to
the after-life of alumni on their own. How
does the college continue with them? It is
by far the more problematic topic and a
better subject for reflection.
Of course, it too has a practical and organizable part. The alumni organizations are,
as it were, independent extensions of the
college. In bringing former students together in the kind of event which is characteristic of St. John's, in seminars and
lectures legitimated by discussion, they
propagate the life of the college and provide members with the means for continuing to live it at their leisure. For us to hear
that a city has a lively alumni group is to
have a sense of having friends in the world,
82
and to come to such a city, for example, to
San Francisco, is a little like the experience
of the shipwrecked Greek who, being cast
up on a wild coast, saw scratched in a rock
the diagram of Eucid I, 47 and said: "Here
too are humans."
(Let me hasten to add that this feeling is
absurd. Humans, that is to say, people to
talk to, are everywhere. And yet, absurd as
it is, it is also humanly sensible, for it is humanly sensible to feel relieved at finding
one's own.)
This external, organized continuation of
college life away from the campuses is, of
course, only the expression of any inner individual continuity. Let me again begin at
the easy end by giving some plain and practical tutors' answers to the questions about
alumni life.
Alumni should continue reading. I imagine that most of you read quite a bit in the
ordinary course of your lives. Much of that
reading is in so called "papers" -newspapers, position papers, official paperseverything I call to myself "instrumental
junk.'' Mally of you probably also read
reams of poetry and of novels-my own
favorite genre-of that mean range of
excellence which goes down easily and yet
nourishes the imagination. Many of you
will have emerged from the program hungry for history written to that same
standard. I have often thought that the
much-bemoaned heavy tread of our program readings has in the best event this
happy side effect-that it leaves students
with a great appetite-some of you may recall that the Greeks called it boulimia, "oxfamine" -for miscellaneous reading. But
this kind of reading, which we share with
the rest of the literate world, is not what I
have in mind.
I am thinking of a very deliberate effort.
It involves first of all letting the time ripen,
by keeping the thought in mind without
pressing on to the execution. But then,
when you are ready, pick up the program
list. Readiness may be that the new ways of
life which you have, in a healthy zest for
contrast, thrown yourselves into have begun to fail you. It may mean that some specific question has returned to preoccupy
you, or that you see its true shape for the
first time. It may mean simply that you feel
the wave of activity floating you away from
the isle of contemplation.
Pick up the list and choose a text. Then
read it. Read it as experienced grown-ups
reread the books of their youth: with a
twinge of nostalgia for the circumstances
of its first reading and with some wry admiration for the lordly consumption of metaphysics of which you were once capable,
but after that with the critical discernment
which comes from a well-digested, that is
to say, half-forgotten education. That is my
small but precise recommendation for
doing alumni-deeds.
But now the moment has come for matters of larger scope. Let me work my way
into them by dwelling on a dilemma often
discussed or displayed by visiting alumni, a
dilemma at once highly specific to this college and of the widest human importance.
Alumni sometimes arrive with a shamefaced and apologetic air about them. How
have they sinned? They are respected at
their work and loved at home, but now
they have come to the place of accountgiving, and they feel wanting. The matter
is this: they are not living the philosophic
life.
Now that is a difficulty that I can only
imagine a St. Johnnie as being oppressed
by. Other students might be anxious before their teachers for having failed in the
world or even for having lost their soul, but
they would not usually know much about
or honor the philosophic life. I am always
charmed by our students' anxiety because
it shows on their part a willingness to take
root in a deep and wise tradition concerning the good life. But I am also, in turn,
anXIOUS.
Let me backtrack for a moment to be
more accurate. Sometimes there really is
something amiss in these uneasy visitors.
They may have become enmeshed in what
I will simply denominate here by its all too
instantiable formula, "the hassles of contemporary living". Or they are absorbed in
the mild miserie~ of forgetfulness and can't
come to. But more often their account of
their life is full of shy ardor and quiet intelligence. Then I ask myself: what on earth
does he or she, what do we all mean by the
philosophical life?
So the matter needs to be thought out.
Let me give you some of my thoughts,
some long in coming, some thought out for
the occasion.
When the ancient philosophers speak of
the philosophical life, the bios philosophiAUTIJMN 1981
�k6s, one thing is immediately clear. It is a
life and not a profession they are speaking
of. Professors of philosophy have certain
real disabilities in living the philosophical
life. For as professors they have a position
to maintain in the world, and work, not leisure, is their element. It is just the same
with returning graduate students in philosophy. Sometimes they are full of interesting reflections on their activity, but
sometimes they are so lost in their profession that it makes one's heart sink.
Not that tutors are altogether different.
To be sure, one incident that did much to
win my heart for the college was a salary report prepared now almost a quarter century
ago by Winfree Smith.
Its preamble declared that although tutors were paid to live, they were not paid
for their work because that was invaluable.
It was invaluable both in being a pleasure
and the need of their soul to perform and
because its value was incapable of being
quantitatively fixed. But while it is an inner
truth that tutors do not work for wages, it is
an external fact that we are the employees
of a demanding institution, who converse
by appointment, teach on schedule, and
study according to a program-and to miss
any of these official obligations without a
reason is highly unacceptable behavior.
It follows that we too are professionals,
and not free to live a daily life of absorbed
contemplation. But perhaps if no one we
know lives a philosophical life by reason of
even the best loved profession, it is still
true that that life is compatible with any
work, and any work can be done in a philosophical spirit. Let me pursue that.
The life of philosophy seems to me to
have one external condition, leisure, and
one reason for being, the search for truth.
That leisure is not exhausted "time off'
from work, bUt the free time for the sake of
which the other times of one's life are
spent. Of the search for truth let me say
only that it is not only a possibility but a
necessity for most human beings. In whose
life have there not been moments when all
considerations have waned but the desire,
the exigent desire, to know the truth?
The long and short of it is, I think, that
like all fundamental human modes the phil·
osophical life comes in graduated versions
which are continuous and even complementary, and those who come nearest to
living it in some pure form hold its shape in
THE ST.JOHNS REVIEW
trust for those who, from duty or preference, do the world's business.
For in spite of what I said before, there
are protected environments for that life,
and the college is the best place I know for
study and reflection. Its program and its
schedules are, after all, intended to be the
ladder and the handholds in the reflective
climb; most of us certainly I, myself, need
such prescribed paths, since a life wholly
free of stimulants and constraints leaves us
more melancholy than illumined. The
business of our college is in the service of leisure; it is a true schOol, if I m"ay recall to
you the old chestnut, that that word itself
comes from schole, Greek for '~leisure."
Of course, it is for that very reason not
the so-called real world. No one knows that
better than its long-term inhabitants, particularly since they also live out of it, as
neighbors, consumers, taxpayers, voters,
and world-watchers. To be sure, in large
academic conglomerations theoretical megalomania and practical impotence come together in that Lilliputian preoccupation
known as academic politics. But the atmosphere of smaller schools is usually no
more strained than that of an intensely
close family, while the tutors of St. John's,
because of the common allegiance to a program with integrity, form a remarkable
community of friends, willing to talk to and
to trust in each other.
Not only is the philosophical life best
carried on in a special place, it is even most
apt to be carried on by distinctive people.
That distinction seems to me to be less one
of nature or kind than of circumstance and
predeliction. For example, our students approach the leading of such a life by reason
of their being in leisured circumstances,
and most of us tutors come near it more
through our inclination than capacity for
intellection. I know that in saying all this I
can be accused of showing myself a child
of my time and of depreciating the philo·
sophical life. Those would be heavy
charges, but perhaps I must face them in
the question period.
How then is this special life, the life of
philosophy, related to the life of action, if
they are not in principle discontinuous? I
used to think that the movement back and
forth between them was entirely possible.
In particular it seemed to me that someone
who had thought deeply about the world
should be able to act wisely in it. I was
never such a fool as to think that academics or intellectuals would cope particularly
well ·with ruling responsibility, but I was
thinking of philosophers, people whose
thought is not divorced from the nature of
things. The notion of a philosopher kingor queen, for that matter-did not seem
impossible to me. I have not totally recanted, but the facts of life loom larger
now. I honor experience more, though that
is an argument against the activity of the
young as much as of the philosopher. What
matters more is that the rhythm and therequirements of the two lives seem to me
more irreconcilably different. From the
point of view of the life of reflection, the
other life seems unbearable for the continual curtailment of thought and its incessantly instrumental use, for the lack oflong
legatos of development and the hurried
forestalling of spontaneous insight it brings
with it. From the point of view of the life of
action, the inability to reach conclusions
without going back to the primal ameba (as
Elliott Zuckerman likes to say), the ob·
struction of progress on mere principle, the
lack of feel for possibilities, the sheer impotence of those who represent the other life,
must be repellent. I conclude that with
whatever freedom we may begin, at some
time we become habituated to one or the
other of the lives, and we will settle into
our profession and our setting accordingly.
But there is nothing at all in this against
frequent cross-overs. On the contrary, just
as those who make reflection the center of
their life must keep their worldly wits
about them to have anything to reflect on,
so those who do the world's business can
and ought to philosophize, either as a
steady accompaniment of their work, or intermittently, in their times of leisurewhichever fits the economy of their life. I
think our alumni often live just that way.
Would that they knew how close to us they
seem when they do it!
That is what I wanted to say about the
relations between the college as an institution and its alumni.
Now I would like to conclude by consid·
ering how alumni might cope with the college insofar as it is a place and a time in
their lives. I would like to entitle this section: "How rightly to forget the college."
By forgetting I mean, to begin with, a
phenomenon well known to theorists of
learning-and of course, to learners. Most
83
�learning begins in proud but hesitant selfconsciousness and later subsides into a
latent, yet ever active, condition. Such
learning informs the soul as a second nature-it reshapes it with good nourishment
and right exercise. It is in the hope that
something of that sort has happened that
alumni are called alumni. I think much of
that inner shaping, that passage into the
past by which what was once a time in your
life becomes a permanent possession, actually takes place in the decade after you
have left the place itself, and takes a considerable digestive effort.
Let me tell you what seem to me the
signs that the passage has taken place. My
recital will be illustrative rather than
exhaustive, because I am not much enchanted by analytic check lists of the lib·
eral skills and attitudes, and those are, of
course, what I am talking about. If you like,
we can talk more about these in the question period. And my examples will be given
pell-mell, mixing the sublime and the trivial-always remembering though, that
"trivial" originally meant: belonging to the
trivium, the triple arts of language, gram·
mar, rhetoric, logic. Here, then, are some
of the features of that second, that alumninature, which we always recognize with
deep satisfaction:
l. An unpretentious, companionable
closeness to some deep and difficult
books.
2. A fairly wide factual learning of the
sort that is absorbed incidentally, in
the course of trying to understand
some matter.
3. A resourceful recalcitrance toward
all translation, be it from Greek into
latinate English, from common language into technical jargon, from
book onto screen, from original text
to popular paraphrase.
4. A long perspective on our modern
tradition which avoids either kvetchy cavilling or easy riding, because
it is based on some knowledge of our
roots and our revolutions.
5. Knowing that the plural of eYdos is
etde.
6. A carefully cherished ignorance that
texts of mathematical symbols and
of musical notes might be anything
but essentially accessible expressions
of the human soul.
7. A determinedly naive faith in the
possibility of principled political action, supported by a shrewd and
ever-evolving theory of human nature which will neither buckle under
the weight of the world's wickedness
nor invite more of it.
8. A love for the illuminations of the
studies of motion and of life, that is,
physics and biology, and no disposition at all to be taken in by them.
9. As a precipitate of many etymologie::;
studied and many meanings discussed, a constitutional inability to
use even the most current words
without taking thought for their origin and the accumulated burden of
sense they bear.
10. A disposition toward that marriage
of radical reason with reverent respect which was when you were
there, and always will be, the best
mood of the college.
Let me finish by telling the second way
in which the college might pass into a recollection. This way has to do with the fact
that it is the place of your youth. It seems
to me likely that you never had been, nor
ever will be, so young again. Such places of
quintessential youth tend to leave a powerful after-image. McDowell Hall and Peter·
son Student Center become temples
through which float diaphanous figures
swathed in love and logos. Sometimes
when you return, this image may suddenly
fit itself onto the reality-the result will be
pure romance. However, let me try to be
sober about this phenomenon, for it is, I
think, an indispensible instrument in the
shaping of a good life-but only if the col·
lege has become a true object of recollection. By that I mean that you have allowed
life to carry you cheerfully away from its
temporal and spatial coordinates, until the
after-image has in it neither regret nor nostalgia and has become a mere vision.
When those conditions are met, the inner image can and should serve as a source
-a source, not the source-of shapes for a
good life. Then it may provide a paradigm
-a paradigm, not the paradigm-of that
earthly paradise I imagine our alumni as
forever trying to prepare for themselves: a
community of friends held together by a
love of learning. Then you will have put
the college well and truly behind you.
lie policy. But the complexity of the controversies among the great philosophers of
the past should caution us not to expect
easy answers to the questions that are
raised by such an inquiry. Philosophy and
Public Policy is a collection of twenty-one
essays that Professor Sidney Hook has selected from his work over the past thirtyfive years and edited for publication as a
book. Nowhere in this book does the author give more than passing attention to
the important disputes among the great
philosophers. Instead, he offers one admir-
ing essay about John Dewey and one introductory essay of his own on the general
theme of "philosophy and public policy."
Early in this introductory essay, the author summarizes the results of his historical studies: "The most comprehensive as
well as the most adequate conception of
philosophy that emerges from the history
of philosophy is that it is the normative consideration of human values." This definition, though the author gives Dewey credit
for it in another essay, is somewhat reminiscent of Socrates' exhorting us to think
EvA BRANN
FIRST READINGS
Philosophy and Public Policy, by Sidney
Hook, Southern Illinois Press, Carbondale
& Edwardsville, 1980.
Philosophy and politics have enjoyed a
strangely intimate and uneasy relationship
in Western civilization. This curious entanglement, which began no later than the
time of Socrates, remains today at least as
difficult to understand as it ever was. The
historical fact of the relationship should
move every student of politics to inquire
about the influence of philosophy on pub-
84
AUTUMN 1981
�about the pre-suppositions of our ordinary
opinions and activities. Such exhortations
may help move certain people to begin
seeking wisdom, but the definition does
not by itself enable us to distinguish philosophy from ordinary moral reasoning. When
the author tries to provide this distinction,
he encounters difficulties that he does not
surmount. He concedes that philosophic
inquiry is not always about moral phenomena and is not always "morally motivated"
in the usual sense of that term. But he
avoids pursuing the difficulties in the relationship between morality and philosophy
by saying that "[t]he relationships among
the various philosophical disciplines is a
meta philosophical problem, and sti11 open."
At the end of the essay he seems to return
to his original position by saying that "[t]he
philosopher is uniquely a moral seer .... "
But nowhere does he say precisely what a
moral seer is, how he comes to be, why he
does what he does, or what he is good for.
In place of ~m adequate account of philosophy, the author attempts to distinguish
the philosopher by the special skills and
outlook that he might bring to the discussion of public affairs. But the outlook and
skills he describes are available to any
thoughtful man. What Professor Hook
offers is very little more than the uncontroversial standard according to which philosophers' speech, like everyone's, should be
reasonable. That standard is a good one,
however, and I shall try to apply it to the
other essays in this volume, most of which
concern specific political issues.
Perhaps partly because he has not undertaken a thorough examination of the
Western philosophic tradition, Professor
Hook is an extreme liberal, or as he calls
himself in one essay, a "social democrat."
Though he stays well within the boundaries of modern liberal principles, he is not
as crippled by that limitation as many other
contemporary writers are. The cause of
this, I suspect, is that he has the great gift
of common sense. But whatever the cause,
he writes very well when attacking Communists, who subscribe to one of the most
poisonous liberal heresies, and when criticizing liberal fools, whom he calls "ritualistic liberals." Common sense operates best
when dealing with narrow issues, and on
such issues Professor Hook often steps resolutely aside from the sad coffle of liberal
opinion. Confronted with the little tyrannies brought to us by recently fashionable
forms of racism and feminism, he provides
a careful and devastating liberal critique of
what is so euphemistically called "reverse
discrimination." In the same spirit, he
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
shows that William 0. Douglas's confused
and intemperate defenses of political violence are incompatible with the principles
of liberal democracy. And Professor Hook
reminds us that to be a liberal one need not
substitute a fetish about the free speech
clause of the First Amendment for an intelligent interpretation of the Constitution.
But when he takes up topics that are
very general or remote from specific events,
Professor Hook is apt to become confused
and unilluminating. The volume's longest
essay, which is devoted to "human rights,"
displays this shortcoming vividly. In the
fashion of contemporary academic philosophy, the author is much concerned with
defining his terms and defending his definitions. His discussion tends to revolve
around the following statement:
A human right is a morally justifiable
claim made in behalf of all men to the enjoyment and exercise of those basic freedoms,
goods, and services which are considered
necessary to achieve the human estate. On
this definition human rights do not correspond to anything an individual literally
possesses as an attribute, whether physical
or mental. Morally justifiable claims are proposals to treat human beings in certain ways.
Human rights are not names of anything.
They specify procedures-courses of action-to be followed by agencies of the
government and community with respect to
a series of liberties, goods, and services.
If we follow ordinary usage, in which the
term "right" means something justifiable,
the first sentence appears to be little more
than a tautology. Later in the essay, the author uses the terms "rights" and "freedoms" interchangably; while this would
eliminate the tautology, it would leave us
to wonder how a freedom can be a claim to
a freedom.
Much of the essay is devoted to criticizing other definitions of human rights;
these others are worse, and most of his criticisms are appropriate. But not once does
he mention the notion of "natural rights,"
which is the best known-and I believe
also the best-alternative to his own conception. That he means to reject that
notion is evident from his claim in the quotation above that human rights are not
names of anything and are not attributes of
human beings; and his rejection of it is implied even more clearly when he later asserts that human rights "are not derived
from the reason of things or the reason in
God, Nature, or Man." The closest he
comes to offering any evidence against
such a derivation is to point out that bills of
rights are altered and re-interpreted as time
passes. But this fact does not even begin to
prove that the truth about rights has ever
changed or ever will.
Despite its lack of any arguments against
the concept of natural rights, Professor
Hook's essay does contain hints of at least
three grounds upon which that concept
might be discarded. Perhaps an appeal to
natural rights would be rhetorically ineffective in our time because of the power of
cultural relativism among our most literate
and influential citizens; or perhaps "nature" is a term so broad that it induces us
to pay insufficient attention to the particular political conditions within which all human rights are enjoyed and circumscribed;
or perhaps we should rely on human progress rather than reason, nature, or God to
tell us what the limits of human claims and
freedoms should be. There may be some
merit in one or more of these suggestions,
but Professor Hook does not defend them
adequately. His own rhetoric in this essay
is so convoluted and academic that even
such old-fashioned writers as Jefferson and
Lincoln still sound strong and timely by
comparison. And despite the author's frequent insistence on the need to understand rights in their historical context, he
offers some strained interpretations of history; with perfect seriousness, for example,
he treats the Bible's injunction to observe
the Sabbath as a recognition of "the right
to rest and leisure." In general, Professor
Hook tries to talk about rights without
specifying their limits, apparently in the
hope that this will contribUte to the expansion of human rights and human happiness. But this leads him to substitute a
rather hazy optimism about human possibilities for a definite statement about human nature and enduring human needs.
One result is that he pays too little attention to the practical constraints on the expansion of human rights. He defends the
United Nations Universal Declaration of
Human Rights without showing that it can
ever be more than a pious fantasy; and he
acquiesces in Justice Douglas's fabrication
of a constitutional right to privacy without
so much as mentioning the grave political
consequences that this doctrine has had
through the Court's abortion decisions. Before we forsake the notion of "natural
rights," which has been such a central element in our political life, we should wait
for a more solid substitute than the one
Professor Hook offers in this essay.
On occasion, Professor Hook's weak
grasp of general issues leads him to make
statements that are simply astonishing.
85
�One example occurs in an essay on the
rights of victims of crime:
I am prepared to weaken the guarantees and
privileges to which I am entitled as a potential criminal or as a defendant in order to
strengthen my rights and safeguards as a potential victim. Purely on the basis of probabilities, I am convinced that I run a greater
danger of suffering disaster as a potential
victim than as a potential criminal or defendant. It is these probabilities, that shift from
one historical period to another, that must
be the guide to wise, prudent, and just administration of the law.
The crude egoistic utilitarianism of this
statement appears nowhere else in the essay or in the rest of the book. One can easily advocate a firmer enforcement of the
criminal laws without elevating fear for
one's own safety into a principle of justice,
and elsewhere in the essay Professor Hook
does just that. But through this one careless formulation of the principle upon
which the rights of defendants should be
circumscribed, he allows his otherwise reasonable and public-spirited arguments to
seem motivated by a selfish calculation of
his own advantage.
Another example of the author's clumsiness with general formulations occurs at
the end of an essay on political heroism:
The democratic republic that was born in
this hemisphere some two hundred years
ago is the only political alternative ever
devised to mediate, in Lincoln's phrase, "between anarchy, on the one hand, and despotism on the other."
The patriotism of this statement is touching, but the claim is preposterous. The
United States is not the first, let alone the
only, nation to escape the evils of anarchy
and despotism; and an Englishman could
remind us that our republic is not even the
oldest existing alternative to those evils.
Abraham Lincoln, in whose works I have
not been able to find the quotation offered
above, would certainly protest that his position has been distorted. In the First Inaugural Address, Lincoln does say that the
majority principle, rightly understood,
must be maintained lest the country fall
victim to anarchy or to some form of despotism. But Lincoln's whole argument is
directed to the controversies about secession that were burning in America in 1861.
He does not claim that the Union is the
first or only legitimate polity in history, nor
even that it is the best; he says nothing
about other countries, nor about the forms
86
of government that might be suitable to
them.
Not all the disagreeable statements in
the book result merely from the author's
carelessness in formulating his positions. In
one essay, Professor Hook very sensibly argues that the Cold War has been the best
mean between suicidal appeasement and
the terrible dangers that are now inherent
in military warfare between the great powers. But a little later in the same essay, he
makes this remark:
In the past, President Eisenhower, whose
charming and vacuous smile matched his
knowledge of international affairs, and who
confessed.himself stumped by General Zhukov's questions as to what ideals inspired the
West, repeatedly warned us against the dangers of "atheistic communism" as if a communism that was not atheistic would be any
less objectionable.
The language at the beginning of the sentence lacks precision, but the meaning is
clear: President Eisenhower was a buffoon.
It is unfortunate that Eisenhower became
perplexed in the encounter with Zhukov,
but that does not justify this casual and
premeditated display of disrespect; and the
injustice is especially striking since it
comes at the expense of the man who presided over the execution of policies that
Professor Hook has just spent several pages
defending. At the very least, Professor
Hook should explain to us how this buffoon managed to lead our nation through
eight years during which Communist imperialism was successfully contained and
during which prosperity at home grew almost without interruption. But the main
point of the author's sneering remark concerns President Eisenhower's opposition to
"atheistic communism." Does Professor
Hook consider all communism, whatever
its form, equally evil? Was the Oneida
COmmunity as objectionable as the Soviet
Union? Is life in the Israeli religious kibbutzim comparable to life in Cambodia? The
insistent atheism in Marxist-Leninist doctrine is certainly not the only source of its
errors; and the atheism of Communist regimes is certainly not the sole cause of the
horrors that they bring about. But one has
to ask why Professor Hook refuses even to
consider the possibility that atheism might
be one of the soui-ces of Communism's
evils.
The explanation probably lies in the author's own manifest, though unacknowledged, atheism. For reasons that are not
made clear in the book, he fails to state his
position forthrightly. But that position
becomes visible when he calls himself a
''militant secularist.'' And it becomes trans·
parent when he makes, almost in passing,
the following theological pronouncement:
"It is only because human beings build
gods in their own moral image that they
can reasonably hope that the divine com·
mandments can serve as a guideline in human experience."
Professor Hook has included in this vol·
ume Jacques Maritain's graceful and pow·
erful critique of Hook's secular humanism.
The heart of Maritain's position lies in
three propositions: "no society can live
without a basic common inspiration and a
basic common faith"; this faith must in·
elude "convictions ... which deal with the
very substance and meaning of human
life"; and for this purpose no decent substitute for religion has been found. Professor
Hook tries to refute this view by pointing
out the weakness of the logical link between religious faith and allegiance to
democracy. This weakness is obvious, and
it should remind us that tolerance of atheists is not necessarily incompatible with
preserving a decent polity; it should also re·
mind us that strong religion does not guarantee good politics. But Maritain never
denies the Weakness of the logical link: his
claim is that religion, and religion alone,
can provide a society with the durable
common morality that is one necessary precondition of political democracy. Professor
Hook, who maintains that the "validity [of
moral principles] rests upon their fruits in
human experience," offers not a single example of a society that has given up
religion without degenerating into savagery. Nor does he offer any evidence to
show that such a society can be brought
into being; indeed, the poverty of his own
anti-religious faith is manifest in the last
paragraph of the book: "How to inspire, ex·
tend, and strengthen faith in democracy,
and build a mass movement of men and
women personally dedicated to it, is a difficult problem which cannot be treated
here."
Despite its weaknesses, Philosophy and
Public Policy contains much that is sound.
The strengths of the book appear most
clearly in the section on "Heroes and AntiHeroes." The section begins with a loose
and unimpressive general essay on the
place of leadership in democracies. But
when he turns to criticizing the Communists, liberal fools, and leading hypocrites
of our time, Professor Hook emerges as a
powerful and sometimes brilliant polemicist. In a review of a biography of Trotsky,
he shows why even large men cannot be
AUTUMN 1981
�truly great if they cling to Lenin's doctrines. In a discussion of Bertrand Russell's
political ravings, he shows quite clearly
why America's involvement in Viet Nam
may have been moral without necessarily
also being prudent. In an essay on the Hiss
case, he vividly reminds us that this country has indeed recently been threatened by
at least one genuine and dangerous conspiracy. And in the volume's best piece,
Professor Hook destroys Lillian Hellman.
He is brave enough to call her "an eager
but unaccomplished liar"; he is well informed enough to convict her of act after
act of "political obscenity"; and he is generous enough to distinguish her from
Dashiell Hammett, who kept his integrity
despite his colossal political misjudgments.
Because Philosophy and Public Policy
displays so much common sense and anti-
Communist passion, it could be good medicine for contemporary liberalism. And
because the author accepts most of the liberals' leading assumptions, there is no good
reason for them to refuse him a hearing.
tory and progress~makes for the power of
Europe. But Europe also brings corruption:
Hit was Europe, I feel, that also introduced
us to the lie ... we were people who simply
did what we did. But the Europeans could
do one thing and say something quite different. .. It was their great advantage over
us." Salim discovers that a line supposedly
from the Aeneid on a Belgian monument
commemorating the founding of the city
has been altered. It reads: 41He approves of
the mingling of peoples and their bonds of
union"; but in the original the gods warned
Aeneas not to marry Dido, not to mingle
Europe and Africa. "Rome was Rome.
What was this place? To carve the words
on a monument beside this African river
was surely to invite the destruction of the
town."
The self-deluded Europeans are now
gone, driven out by their former subjects,
but their example remains ~n all its ambiguity. The Africans imitate European institutions, buy European goods, and, increasingly, look on Europe itself as a place of
refuge. As his mentor and fellow Indian
Nazruddin explains to Salim on a visit to
London, HAll over the world money is in
flight. People have scraped the world clean,
as clean as an African scrapes his yard, and
now they want to run from the dreadful
places where they've made their money
and find some nice safe country." In London, foreigners from all corners of the
Commonwealth threaten to undermine
unquestioned European values. With a
mixture of irony and dismay, Salim observes that the Arabs in London have
brought with them their black slaves; Britain now tolerates at home the slave trade it
had once stamped out in East Africa. "In
the old days they made a lot of fuss if they
caught you sending a couple of fellows to
Arabia in a dhow. Today they have their
passports and visas like everybody else, and
nobody gives a damn."
The escape to Europe is possible only for
a handful, but the pressures of modern African life~ the insecurity of rapid and random change-foster escapism throughout
the population. Salim realizes that even in
the city "when you get away from the chiefs
and the politicians there is a simple democracy about Africa; everyone is a villager."
In times of trouble the city empties as people return to their villages and the simple
life of the bush, to re-emerge when things
quite down. A new generation of young Africans, however, without ties to the bush,
who know nothing except the empty and
imitative life of the cities, has no place to
retreat. At the same time the country's
leader opens up the countryside to bring
the previously inaccessible rural population under his control.
The dilemma of the "new African" is
symbolized by Ferdinand, a young man
whom Salim befriends. Born in the bush,
Ferdinand goes to school at the Europeanrun lycee, is trained at the Domain (the Big
Man's school for future leaders), and eventually becomes the local district commissioner. Ferdinand is trapped by his own
modern upbringing, and by the precarious
nature of political life, where every official
is at the mercy of the Big Man, who rules
through a talent for playing his enemies off
against one another. At first, Ferdinand is
confused, his mind "a jumble, full of all
kinds of junk." But in the end he achieves
a terrible clarity: "Nobody's going anywhere. We're all going to hell and every
man knows this in his bones ... Everyone
wants to make his money and run away.
But where? That is what is driving people
mad. They feel they're losing the place
they can run back to ... "
The political stratagems of the Big Man
produce temporary peace and prosperity,
but in the end serve only to break down
traditional restraints. When they fail to
quell a rural uprising, the soldiers of a tradi-
NELSON LUND
Nelson Lund teaches political science at the
University of Chicago.
'THE MINGLING OF PEOPLES
A Bend in the River, by V. S. Naipaul, 278
pp., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., !979,
$8.95
V. S. Naipaul's novel, A Bend in the
River, never names the city and country in
which the narrative takes place. Its true
setting, however, is clearly Kisangani
(formerly Stanleyville), the second-largest
city of Zaire (formerly the Belian Congo);
and the mysterious Big Man, the unnamed
country's ruler, is Sese Mobotu, Zaire's dictator for the past fifteen years. Though
Mobotu's Zaire is a poor and ill-governed
Third World country, Naipaul does not
take the stance of an expert trying to
diagnose and cure the 'disease' of underdevelopment. The principal danger he foresees is anarchy 3.nd nihilism, more often
cause than result from the impoverishment that preoccupies the experts.
The disorder and despair which permeate the novel result primarily from the
haphazard coming together of different religious, ethnic, and cultural groups. Naipaul's protagonist, Salim-an Indian
brought up in an Arab-dominated section
of East Africa, educated in British schools,
who now lives in a newly-independent black
African state-embodies Africa's contradictions. The book's great theme is the
disaster this mingling of peoples brings to
Indians, Africans, and perhaps to Europeans as welL
Europe has been the catalyst; it provides
the possibility of self-understanding for
Africans and Indians alike. Salim says: ''All
that I know of our history and the history
of the Indian Ocean I have got from books
written by Europeans ... without Europeans, I feel, all our past woUld have been
washed away, like the scuff marks of fishermen on the beach outside our town." The
ability to detach oneself, to form a distinct
self-image of one's past, present and especially future condition~the source of hisTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
87
�tional warrior tribe are treacherously disarmed and dispersed by an imported force
of white mercenaries. Unable to adopt
commercial or agricultural ways, they form
the nucleus of a new and deadlier rebellion. Official corruption, fostered by the
pervasive insecurity, makes a mockery of
the regime's motto, "Discipline Avant
Tout." The opposition turns by degrees to
unqualified hatred: "When they've finished nobody will know there was a place
like this here. They're going to kill and kill.
They say it's the only way, to go back to the
beginning before it's too late."
Salim too seeks safety, a place of retreat.
He and the other Indian expatriates fight
an ongoing battle with nostalgia and regret,
with the temptation to find refuge in the
past, in the memory of their lost East
African birth place. Unlike his friends who
become rich by acquiring the town's "Big
Boy" franchise, Salim does not forget himself in the successes of commerce. At the
end his property is nationalized, and he be-
88
comes a homeless refugee. He finds his But people are like that about places in
safety in the personal equilibrium, de- which they aren't really interested and
tached and clear-sighted, that shows itself where they don't have to live. Some papers
in the book's opening sentence: "The world spoke of the end of feudalism and the
is what it is; men who are nothing, who al- dawn of a new age. But what had haplow themselves to become nothing, have pened was not new. People who had grown
no place in it."
feeble had been physically destroyed. That,
Salim's hard-won balance does not de- in Africa, was not new; it was the oldest law
pend on condemning those who are inca- of the land." Unlike the manipulative coldpable of such accomodation. He does not blooded ness of the development theorist
explain away the Big Man's machinations or ideological reformer, Salim's detachas 'necessary' or 'progressive'; he appreci- ment comes from experience of the perenates success but rejects the ruthlessness nial laws of the human condition and of
and the denial of the past which so often the ties between personal and historical
accompany it. Naipaul/Salim understands experience.
that Africa's lost balance may be impossible to regain, and that while the losses are
ADAM WASSERMAN
c~rtain, the gains may be illusory. On hearing of the revolution which cuts him off
from his coastal homeland, he is astonished
at the optimism of some of the foreign
papers: "It was exraordinary to me that
Adam Wasserman is a space program analyst
some of the newspapers could have found for the Congressional Office of Technology Asgood words for the butchery on the coast. sessment in Washington, D.C.
AUTUMN 1981
��The St. John's Review
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Radista, Leo
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Brann, Eva T. H.
Jaffa, Henry V.
Josephs, Laurence
Klein, Jacob
Levin, Michael
Collins, Linda
Navrozov, Lev
Guaspari, David
Venable, Bruce
Lund, Nelson
Wasserman, Adam
Description
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Volume XXXIII, Number 1 of The St. John's Review, formerly The College. Published in Autumn 1981.
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The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_33_No_1_1981
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Annapolis, MD
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�Editor's Note
FROM
OUR READERS
'
With this issue the St. John's Review begins to charge
new subscribers. Old subscribers, St. John's alumni and
friends, students and their families will continue to receive the magazine without charge. My desire to turn the
St. John's Review into an unambiguously public magazine
and to win an additional audience prompts this decision.
From now on the St. John's Review will appear three
times a year1 in the fall, winter, and summer-L.R.
Editor:
Leo Raditsa
Managing Editor:
Thomas Patran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
Janet Durholz
Consulting Editors:
David Bolotin,
Eva Brann,
Curtis A. Wilson.
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned comments are also
welcome.
THESTJOHNSREVIEW (formerly The College) is published by
the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland
21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Edward G. Sparrow, Dean.
Published thrice yearly, in the fall, winter, and summer. For those
not on the distribution list, subscriptions: $12.00 yearly, $24.00 for
two years, or $36.00 for three years, payable in advance. Address
all correspondence to The St. John's Review, St. John's College,
Annapolis, Maryland 21404.
Volume XXXIII
WINTER 1982
Number2
©1982, St. John's College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Cover: Thick-billed Murre by J. J. Audubon; photograph courtesy of the
New-York Historical Society, New York City.
Composition: Britton Composition Co.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
ON" 'SEXISM' IS MEANINGLESS"
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Mr. Levin (" 'Sexism' is Meaningless") seems not to be able to
distinguish between what is in fact the case and his personal
prejudices, which he calls "factual beliefs" -a strange term since
if they were factual, they would presumably be knowledge, not
belief. Mr. Levin is, for example, concerned about the degradation of language as exemplified by the use of the word "sexiSm"
which, according to him, either has no reasonable meaning or
"simply encapsulates and obscures" the confusion which feminists have about their subject. To illustrate his notion of rhetorical abuse of language he chooses the word "exploit" which he
says means "to uSe another without his consent." From this definition it is then easy to argue that to use "exploitation" to describe contractual wage labor is to employ a rhetorical trap to
denounce wage labor itself. It was, however, not my impression
that consent, itself a rather tricky concept to analyze, had much
to do with exploitation. So I checked the dictionaries I have
around the house, the Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, the
American College Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary,
and the Oxford English Dictionary, and, curiously enough, none
of them used or implied the word "consent" as part of its definition. To quote just one of the four, the New Collegiate Dictionary, "exploit la: to turn to economic account (a mine); b: to t.ake
advantage of; 2: to make use of meanly or unjustly for one's own
advantage." I quote this not to be pedantic or to score cheap
points, but to indicate hQw Mr. Levin confuses his private view
of the world and language with that shared by most of the rest of
the English-speaking world. "Exploit" and "exploitation" are perfectly legitimate terms to use to describe contractual wage labor
if one believes either that surplus value is at the root of capitalist
profit, or, to be less doctrinaire, if one simply believes that
employers have, on the whole, more power than employees and
can use that power to arrive at less than equitable contracts
-not, I believe, a very radical position.
But we should turn to more substantive matters. When Mr.
Levin asserts in his title that "sexism is meaningless", this seems
to me to have two possible interpretations: l, that the term is
without clearly definable meaning; and 2, that there is no phenomenon corresponding to the term, whatever it might mean in
some loose, confusing way. I believe Mr. Levin to be wrong on
both counts.
As to the meaning of "sexism", Mr. Levin says the following:
" 'Sexism', then, is typically used to describe either the view that
there are general, innate psychological differences between the
sexes, or that gender is in and of itself important." He further as~
serts that "the first view is simply a factual belief supported by a
vast body of evidence, and the second view, however objectionable, is held by almost no-one." "Neither view," he asserts, "is
worth attacking." But, as I understand them, both are worth attacking, because the first is, I think, though clearly a belief, not
factual, and the second is, I believe, held by virtually everyone,
not no-one.
(continued on page 2)
�1
HESTJOHNSREVIEWWINTER82
•
1
I
3
George Dennison
Shawno (narrative)
24
Nietzsche and the Classic
William Mullen
33
The Trivialization of the Holocaust as an Aspect
of Modern Idolatry Robert Loewenberg
44
Proof and Pascal Brother Robert Smith
52
Five Translations
57
The Federal Republic of Germany:
Finlandization or Germanization?
Charles G.Bell
Anne-Marie Le Gloannec
63
Io (poem)
Laurence Josephs
64
Kekkonen, the "Finlandizer"
65
Hephaestus (poem)
Laurence Josephs
66
Mozart's Cherubino
Wye jamison Allanbrook
75
The Fury of Aeneas joe Sachs
Indro Montanelli
REVIEW ESSAYS
83
Objectivity and Philosophical Conversation:
Philosophy and the Mi?Tor of Nature, by
Richard Rorty
review essay by Arthur Collins
90
Afghanistan Fights: The Struggle for Afghanistan,
by Nancy Peabody Newell and
Richard S. Newell
review essay by Leo Raditsa
AT HOME AND ABROAD
98
Letter from Vietnam jean Dulich
FIRST READINGS
102
Laos; Marie-Noele and Didier Sicard, Au nom de Ma?X et de
Bouddha, Revolution au Laos: un peuple, une culture disparaissent, review by Leo Raditsa
106
A Dead Man's Knowledge; Varlam Shalamov, Graphite, review
by Lev Navrozov
Inside front cover-FROM OUR READERS
Michael Levin's "'Sexism' is Meaningless"
and Harry V. Jaffa's "Inventing the Past"
1
�(continued from inside front cover)
To defend the view that there are innate
psychological gender differences, Mr. Levin
says that he doubts that his daughter will
become a quarterback, not because of her
size, weight, and strength, but because of
psychology. I agree with him that it is unlikely that his daughter will become a quarterback, but I also believe that it is almost
equally unlikely that his son will become
one. It is a well-attested "factual belief'
that very few quarterbacks are the sons of
philosophy professors, not because of genetic psychological deficiencies but because
they are raised in homes where athletics is
valued less than other things. I think it is
also very likely that if Mr. Levin raises his
daughter praising her for docility, obedience, and gentleness and raises his son
praising his drive, aggressiveness, and assertiveness that his son will turn out more
aggressive than his daughter. And, in fact,
it is clear that that is, on the whole, how
sons and daughters have been raised. I
hope it is not necessary to rehearse the
whole dreary range of environmental differences that boys and girls are subjected
to, ranging from dressing daughters in
dresses and sons in pants (my wife as recently as the early 1960's taught in a Connecticut school system where girls were
allowed to wear pants only under blizzard
conditions), to spending years with school
books where the boys are doctors and the
girls are nurses looking admiringly at their
superiors, or where the boys are active
while the gids can only passively marvel at
their multi-talented male counterparts.
Certainly Mr. Levin's expectations for his
daughter will have consequences, but it is
less than clear that genetic differences are
the root cause of how she will turn out psychologically. The "vast body of evidence"
which he mentions is, at best, controversial, and to assume that the case is proven
as he does is to commit that marvelous
trick one can sometimes get away with in
geometry, namely to put what you're trying to prove in the given.
As to the second view, "that gender is in
and of itself important," that seems so
clearly true that he must mean something
other than what the words seem to say
when he denies it. Clearly the difference in
the reproductive systems is crucially important, as are differences in average size,
though what the psychological consequences
2
of those differences are is open to dispute, Now, in the extremes, this is clearly true.
and what the social and political conse- However, the amount of overlap between
quences should be are really the central is- women and men in even this test is so great
that it is not clear to me that any important
sue of Mr. Levin's article.
consequences follow. For example, in the
First, however, I would like to address
two other relatively minor linguistic mat- !980 Olympic Games, the winning javelin
ters because they are revealing of the way throw by a woman was 224 ft., 5 in., a disMr. Levin argues. The first is his assertion tance about 4 ft. less than that of the male
that he suspects that "feminists avoid the winner in !948. Even granted that 1980
word 'misogyny' because it carries no con- was a good year for women javelin thrownotations of system." The real reason they ers and 1948 a bad year for men, if I were
do not use it ("avoid" is, in itself, a rhetori- looking for a large group of spear-throwers,
cal gambit to suggest some devious game I would certainly open the competition to
they are playing) is because it fails to de- both men and women, because it seem eviscribe the phenomena they are concerned dent that some women are going to be
with. On the whole, men are not misogy- much better at it than most men. That is,
nists, though the amount of violence di- the statistical superiority of men even in
rected at women is appalling, the incidence this rather uninteresting and loaded inof rape being the most obvious example, stance is not such as to conclude that an
though by no means the only one. On the army of projectile throwers should autocontrary, men like women, when they stay matically be all male. We can note that
in their place. When the recently retired Plato, not a notorious egalitarian or femihead of the Baltimore Police Department, nist (women, after all, are dismissed before
Donald Pomerlau, was under attack for his serious conversation begins), makes a simitreatment of women on the force, he de- lar point in The Republic (456b): "Then we
nied vehemently that he had any preju- have come around full circle to where we
dices against women. He really was fond of were before and agree that it's not against
what he described as "little balls of fluff." nature to assign music and gymnastic to
Now misogyny is clearly not the word to the women guardians." "That's entirely
describe such an attitude, but I think "sex- certain." "Then we weren't giving laws
that are impossible or like prayers, since
ism" is.
Second, let us look at another little ploy the law we set down is according to nature.
of Mr. Levin's. He calls attention to the ug- Rather, the way things are nowadays
liness of "sexism" and comments on its proves to be, as it seems, against nature."
Mr. Levin then moves from this example
"grating sound," suggesting that that very
rather casually to the less obvious "factual
ugliness was the motive for coining it. Perhaps we don't all share Mr. Levin's delicate hypotheses" that women are inferior in
ear, but it should be noted that in the !8th "abstract reasoning" and superior in
century, a "sexism" was a "sequence of six "child-rearing." Here again the evidence is
cards" (OED) and I doubt that its "ugli- anything but clear. It is not clear what a
ness" disturbed anyone. And words like test of abstract reasoning would be; noth''saxophone," "hexadecimal," ''textile," ing that has yet been developed can lay any
and so on seem equally good candidates for claim to validity in judging that ability; and
rejection on grounds of ugliness, though I would certainly not trust Mr. Levin's
Mr. Levin is, I trust, not bothered by them. anecdotal evidence, given his prejudices.
But let us turn to the main issues. I fully That women, on the whole, do less well
agree with Mr. Levin that "better" means than men on the mathematical part of the
nothing without more specification of con- SAT's is true, but the reasons for that are
tent or context. " 'Better'," as he says, not obvious. A few of the many possible ex"must mean better at this or that particular planations are that male students are much
task." The issue then becomes, "Are men more likely to be directed into mathematics
generically better than women at signifi~ classes than female students (anecdotal evicant tasks?" He finds that "men are so ob- dence for this is everywhere), that the imviously better at some things than women" portance of mathematics is emphasized to
that it scarcely bears discussing. His first male students more than to female, or it
example is that men can obviously hurl may be that men are generally better a.t
(continued on page 107)
projectiles much farther than women.
WINTER 1982
�Shawno
George Dennison
A marathon. Euphoria. Sights and sounds in the
corridor of dogs. Finches and morning.
We could hear our children's voices in the darkness on
the sweet-smelling hill by my friend's house, and could hear
the barking of Angus, his dog. At nine o'clock Patricia put
our three into the car and went home. My friend's wife
and son said goodnight shortly afterwards. By then he and
I had gone back to the roomy, decrepit, smoke-discolored,
homey, extremely pleasant farmhouse kitchen and were
finishing the wine we had had at .dinner. It was late August. Our northern New England nights were drawing on
noticeably toward fall, but the cool of the night was enjoyable. He opened a bottle of mezcal he had brought from
Mexico, and we talked of the writings of friends, and of
the friends themselves, and of our youthful days in New
York. He had written a paper on Mahler. We listened to
the Eighth and Ninth symphonies, and the unfinished
Tenth, which moved him deeply. We talked again. When
we parted, the stars, still yellow and numerous in most of
the sky, had paled and grown fewer in the east. I set out to
walk the four miles home.
I was euphoric, as happens at times even without mezcal. For a short distance, since there was no one to disturb
(the town road is a dead-end road and I was at the end of
it) I shouted and sang. And truly, for those brief moments,
everything did seem right and good, or rather, wonderful
and strange. But the echoes of my voice sobered me and I
stopped singing. A dog was barking. The night air was
moist and cool. I became aware that something was calling
for my attention, calling insistently, and then I realized
that it was the stream, and so I listened for a while to its
George Dennison has published The Lives of Children (1969) and Oilers
and Sweepers (1979). His story, "Family Pages, Little Facts: October,"
appeared in the St. John's Review (Winter 1981).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
noisy bubbling. The lower stars were blocked by densely
wooded hills. A dozen or fifteen old houses lay ahead of
me still darkened for sleep.
Angus came with me. He is a pointy-nosed, black and
white mongrel in which Border collie predominates, and
therefore he is bright-eyed and quick-footed, and is amazingly interested in human affairs. He pattered along beside me, turning his head every few seconds to look at me,
and it was as if he were keeping up continually a companionable cheerful jabbering. I spoke to him at one point
and he barked lightly and jumped toward my face, hoping
to kiss me.
Abruptly he sat down. We had come to the edge of
what he imagined to be his territory, though in fact we
had crossed his line several paces back. He sat there and
cocked his head and watched me as I walked away. I had
taken only twenty steps when on my right, with jarring
suddenness, came the explosive deep barking of the German shepherd tethered to the one new house in the valley. Angus sprang up, bracing his legs, and hurled his own
challenge, that was high-pitched and somewhat frantic.
He was answered by a barking that seemed limitless. I
could hear it speeding away, the same challenge repeated
in voice after voice, and growing faint. Surely it passed beyond our village, very likely beyond our state. I was in a
corridor of barking dogs.
A soft projectile of some sort spurted from the shadows
to my right and came to rest not far from my feet, where it
turned out to be a chubby little pug. It was shaking with
excitement and was giving vent through its open mouth
to a continuous siren of indignation. The cluttered porch
it had been guarding suddenly flared with yellow light.
Two elderly spinsters lived here. They rose with the sun,
or before it, as did many of the older folk. The clapboards
of their house had been a mustard color, the trim of the
windows white, but that had been thirty years ago. The
3
�barn beside the house had fallen down, the apple trees
had decayed, the mound of sheep manure was grassed
over. Across the road, in a smaller house, lived a childless
couple related to the spinsters, and they, too, owned a
pug. While the one barked in the road ahead of me, the
other barked silently inside the house, its front paws braced
against the window and its rear paws stamping the back of
a sofa. These dogs I praised for their attention to duty.
They did not alter my mood. Brave as they were, they
were hopelessly affectionate, and I knew it, and passed on
confidently.
But now came a barking that I feared and loathed, more
savage by far than that of the German shepherd. He was
chained to a dying apple tree before a collapsing gray
house, the hard-packed yard of which was crowded with
wheelless cars. The dog was a Doberman. His barking was
frenzied. He leaped at me again and again and was jerked
back by the chain, as by a violent master. Were he free
and approaching me I should certainly try to kill him.
Overlapping these disturbing tones were the melodious
deep tones of the long-legged black hound tied before his
own little house in the strange compound farther on: a
mobile home, half of a barn, some small sheds, a corral, all
huddled before the large trees that bordered the stream.
Nothing was finished. There was an air of disconsolate
ambition everywhere, failure, and disconsolate endurance. The hound himself seemed disconsolate. He was
not tugging at his chain. He did not even brace his feet.
He followed me with his eyes, barking his bark that was almost a baying and was actually beautiful. He cocked his
head and seemed to be listening to the other dogs.
What a racket! What a strange, almost musical hullabaloo! I myself was the cause of it, but it wouldn't cease
when I passed. The sun would be up, the dogs would keep
barking, every bird awake w<;>uld raise its voice, and that
wave of noise would follow the sun right across the land.
More lights came on. The sun had not yet risen, but the
night was gone. It was the morning dusk, fresh and cool.
Birds had been calling right along, but now there were
more. At intervals I could hear roosters. There were only
three. The valley had been noisy once with crowing, and
the asphalt road had been an earthen road, packed by
wagon wheels and shaded by many elms. The elms were
garious good cheer and selfish, robust curiosity. He left
me to consort with a fluffy collie, who was not chained
but would not leave the shed it crouched beside. Now I
passed a small house set back from the road by a small
yard. A huge maple overspread the yard. Beneath the rna·
ple there stood a blue tractor, and near the tractor an
orange skidder, a pick-up truck, two cars, a rowboat, a
child's wagon, several bikes. A large, lugubrious Saint Bernard, who all summer had suffered from the heat, was
chained to the tree, and she barked at me perfunctorily in
a voice not unlike the hound's, almost a baying, but not a
challenge bark at all, or much of one. She wanted to be
petted, she wanted to lie down and be scratched, she
wanted anything but to hurl a challenge ... nevertheless,
she barked. I came to a boxer, tied; a pure-bred Border collie, tied; a rabbit hound, tied; several mongrels, not tied,
but clustered and apparently waiting for their breakfasts.
One, a black, squat hound, had one lame foot and one
blind eye, mementos of a terrible mid-winter fight with a
fox in defense of newborn pups, who froze to death anyway. She barked vociferously, but then ambled out to
apologize and be petted. How fabulous our hands must
seem to these fingerless creatures! What pleased surprises
we elicit from their brows, their throats and backs and bellies, touching as no dog can touch another dog ...
At almost every house there was a dog. At absolutely
every house with a garden there was a dog. One must
have one to raise food, or the woodchucks take it all. A
second car passed me. My euphoria was abating to good
cheer and I was aware that I was hungry. .
I was approaching the turn to my own road. In the crook
of the turn there was a trailer, a so-called mobile home,
covered with a second roof of wood. There were three
small sheds around it, and a large garden out back, handsome now with the dark greens of potato plants and the
lighter greens of bush beans. Near the garden were stakes
and boxes for horseshoe pitching. A few steps away, at the
edge of the stream, there were chairs, benches, and a picnic table. Two battered cars and a battered truck crowded
the dooryard, in which there was also a tripod, taller than
the trailer, made of strong young maples from the nearby
woods. From its apex dangled a block and chain. Bantam
stumps now, huge ones.
Even so, it was beautiful. There were maples and pines
beside the road, a few cows were still milked, a few fields
were still hayed, a few eggs were still gathered from hens,
a few pigs transformed to pork, a few sheep to mutton.
Swallows were darting about. They perched in long
against which three paddles and four inexpensive fishing
rods were leaning. Swimming suits and orange life vests
hung from a clothesline. The house was silent. All had
watched TV until late at night and all were still asleep,
among them my seven-year-old daughter's new-found
friend. The uproar of dogs was considerable here. Six
rows on the electric wires.
were in residence, more or less. The young German shep-
A car passed me from behind, the first.
And Brandy, the Kimber's gray and ginger mutt, trotted
up from the stream and joined me. His hair was bristly, his
legs short. He was muscular, energetic, stunted, bearded
and mustachioed, like some old campaigner out of the hills
of Spain. He went beside me a little way, cheerfully, but
without affection. There was no affection in him, but gre-
herd was chained. The handsome boxer was free; in fact
all the others were free, and with one exception ran to upbraid me and greet me. The exception, the incredibly
pretty, positively magnetizing exception was Princess, the
malamute, who did not bark or move. She lay at her royal
ease atop a grassy mound that once had been an elm, her
handsome wolf-like head erect and one paw crossed de-
4
hens were scratching the dirt near an aluminum canoe,
WINTER 1982
�murely and arrogantly over the other. Her sharply slanted,
almond-shaped eyes were placed close tpgether and gave
her an almost human, oriental-slavic air. It was as if she
knew she were being admired, and disdained response,
but followed me impassively with those provocative eyes.
How stran!lf she was! She knew me well. Were I to ap·
proach her she'd suddenly melt. She'd sit up and lift one
paw tremblingly as high as her head in a gesture of adulation and entreaty. She'd lay her head adoringly to one side
and let it fall closer and closer to her shoulder in a surrender irresistible in its abject charm-"! am yours, yours utterly" -as if pulling the weight of a lover down on top of
her. She ends on her back at such times, belly exposed,
hind legs opened wide, lips pulled back voluptuously and
front paws tucked under in the air. Especially in the winter, when all six dogs are crowded with the eleven humans
into the lamplight of the little home, she indulges in such
tricks. What a press there is then of dog flesh and child
flesh in the overheated room! There are times when
everyone seems glassy with contentment, and times when
bad humor, apparently passing over into bad character,
seems hopeless and destructive. Then there are quarrels
as fierce and brief as the fights of cats, and peace comes
again, usually in the person of Betsy, the mother, who is
mild and benign. She has lost her front teeth and can't afford dentures, yet never hesitates to smile. The children
drink soda pop and watch TV, while Verne, who is deepvoiced and patriarchal, with the broad back and muscular
huge belly of a Sumo wrestler, sits at the kitchen table sipping beer from a can, measuring gunpowder on a little balance scale, loading and crimping shotgun shells, and
glancing at the program on the tube. He is opinionated,
vain, and egotistical, to the point of foolish pomposity,
but he is good-natured and earnest and is easily carried
away into animation, and then the posturing vanishes. He
issues an order, directs a booming word to one of the kids
or dogs, but especially to Princess, who draws effusions
one would not think were in him. "Well, Princess!" he
roars, "Ain't you the charmer! Ain't you my baby! Ain't
you now! Oh, you want your belly scratched? Well, we all
do, Princess! We all do! But you're the one that gits it,
ain't you! Oh, yes you are! Oh, yes!"
This morning I didn't stop to caress the malamute. At
the turn in the road I heard a far-off barking that made me
smile and want to be home. I crossed the cement bridge
and turned into a small dirt road. There wouldn't be a
house now for a mile, and then there would be ours and
the road would end.
Day had begun. There was color in the sky. The moisture in the air was thinning.
The land was flat and the road paralleled the stream,
which was to my right now. Here and there along its
banks, in May, after the flood has gone down and the soil
has warmed, we gather the just-emerging coils of the ferns
called ficjdleheads. Occasionally I have fished here, not
really hopefully (the trout are few), but because the
stream is so exciting. Once, however, while I knelt on the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
bank baiting my hook, I glanced into the water, deep at
that point, and saw gliding heavily downstream a fish I
scarcely could believe to be a trout. What a passion of
helplessness seized mel I would have leaped on it bodily if
that might have succeeded. I learned later that ice had
broken the dam to a private fishpond in the hills and this
prize and many others had· fled down tributaries to the
main stream and the river.
To my left, beyond a miniature bog of alders and swale
lay a handsome small pond. Its outlet joined the stream
fifty yards on, flowing under a bridge of stout pine stringers and heavy planks. The game warden had been here
several times with dynamite, but the beavers had rebuilt
their dam across the outlet, and once again the pond was
eighteen inches higher than the stream. It was not unusual to see them. They had cut their half-tunnels under
all these banks, creating concave, sharply overhanging
edges. I had stood here with the children one night, downstream from the bridge, at the water's edge, looking for
beavers, and two had passed under our feet. It was a windless, mellow night of full moon. I saw the glint of moonlight on the beaver's fur as he emerged from his channel
under the bank, and then I saw his head quietly break the
water. The dark shape of a second beaver, following him,
glided like a phantom among the wavering images of the
moon and trees.
I could no longer hear the barking on the hill. I was very
hungry now, and intermittently felt sleepy, but here between the pond and stream the morning air was endlessly
refreshing and I entered that pleasant state of being
wholly relaxed, utterly drained of muscular energy, yet
suffused by awareness, interest, and approval ... the mild,
benign energies of momentary happiness.
Five or six bright yellow streamers-so they seemed to
be-approached me and sped by, dipping and rising.
They were finches. The pattern of their flight was of long
smooth waves, in the troughs of which they would flutter
their wings to ascend the coming slope, but fold them before the top and soar curvingly over the crest. Sleek as torpedoes or little fish, they would glide downward again into
the next trough and there extend their wings and flutter
them.
Beyond the bridge, the road began to climb. On both
sides vigorous ferns, green but no longer the vivid green of
summer, crowded the sunny space before the trees. There
was a coolness of night in the woods and it poured mildly
into the road, mingling with the warmer air.
Abruptly I heard and saw him, and though no creature
is more familiar to me, more likely to be taken for granted,
I was thrilled to see him, and gladdened, more than gladdened, filled for a moment with the complex happiness of
our relationship that is both less than human and utterly
human. Certainly I was made happy by his show of love
for me. But my admiration of him is undiminished, and I
felt it again, as always. He is the handsomest of dogs, muscular and large, with tufted, golden fur. The sound of his
feet was audible on the hard-packed, pebble-strewn road. I
5
�leaned forward and called to him and clapped my hands,
and he accelerated, arching his throat and running with
more gusto. He ran with a powerful driving stride that was
almost that of a greyhound, and as he neared me he drew
back his lips, arched his throat still more and let out a volley of ecstatic little yips. This sound was so puppyish, and
his ensuing behavior so utterly without dignity, so close to
fawning slavishness that one might have contemned him
for it, except that it was extreme, so extreme that there
was no hint of fawning, and certainly not of cringing, but
the very opposite: great confidence and security, into
which there welled an ecstasy he could not contain and
could not express rapidly enough to diminish, so that for a
while he seemed actually to be in pain. I had to assist him,
had to let him lick my face protractedly and press his paws
into my shoulders. And as sometimes happens ~'l' my euphorias and early morning solitudes, there came over me a
sense of the finitude of our world, and of my own brute
fraternity with the other creatures who will soon be dead,
and I almost spoke aloud to my dog the thoughts that I
was thinking: how much it matters to be alive together!
how marvelous and brief our lives are! and how good, dear
one that you are, to have the wonderful strange passion of
your spirit in my life!
As he wound around me and pressed his body against
mine, I remembered another greeting when I had seen
blood on his teeth and feet. He was three then, in his
prime. I had been away for several weeks-our first parting-and he had been baffled. When I came back I had
reached this very place in the road, in my car, also in summer, when I saw him hurtling toward me. His first sounds
were pathetic, a mixed barking, whimpering, and gulping
for breath. I had to get out of the car to prevent him from
injuring himself. I had to kneel in the road and let him kiss
me and wind around me. He was weeping; I had to console him. And then he was laughing, and dancing on his
hind legs, and I laughed too, except that it was then that I
noticed the blood. He had been in the house, Patricia told
me later, and had heard the car. He had torn open the
screen door with his teeth and claws, had chewed away
some protective slats and had driven his body through the
opening.
He danced around me now on his hind legs, licking my
face. I knew I could terminate this ecstasy by throwing a
stone for him, which I did, hard and low, so that he would
not overtake it and break his teeth. A few moments later
he laid it at my feet and looked into.my face excitedly.
Patricia and the children were still sleeping. I ate breakfast alone, or rather, with Shawno, who waited by my chair.
I had hoped to spend the morning writing, and I went
upstairs and sat at my table. It was ludicrous. The mere
process of holding still caused my eyes to close and head
to fall. Yet I didn't want to sleep, didn't want to abandon
that mood-too rare to be taken lightly-of happiness and
peace; and so I went into the garden and pulled up the
bush beans that had already borne and died, and carried
tall spikes of bolted lettuce to the compost pile. There is a
6
rough rail fence around the garden to keep the ponies out.
Shawno lay beneath it and watched me. I cleared a few
weeds and from time to time got rid of stones by flinging
them absently into the woods. I pulled out the brittle pea
vines from their chicken wire trellis, rolled up the wire
and took it to the barn. After two hours of this I went to
bed. Shawno had gone in akeady and was enjoying a second breakfast with the children. I had forgotten about
him, but as I left the garden I saw by the fence, where the
grass had been flattened by his body, a little heap of
stones. He had pursued every one I had tried to get rid of.
His parents. Ida's delight. His leaping. Children in
the park. An elderly scholar.
When Patricia was pregnant with Ida we were living on
Riverside Drive in New York. One bright October day we
saw a crowd of people at the low stone wall of the park.
Many were murmuring in admiration and we could hear
exclamations of delight. Down below, on the grassy flat,
two dogs were racing. The first belonged to an acquaintance in our building. She was tawny and short-haired
with the lines of a greyhound, but larger and of more massive head and shoulders. She was in heat and was leading the other in fantastic, playful sprints, throwing her
haunches against him gaily and changing direction at
great speed. The male, a Belgian shepherd with golden
fur, was young and in a state of transport. He ran stifflegged, arching his neck over her body with an eagerness
that seemed ruthless, except that his ears were laid back
shyly. The dogs' speed was dazzling; both were beauties,
and the exclamations continued as long as they remained
in sight.
Shawno was the largest of the issue of those memorable
nuptials. He arrived in our apartment when Ida was
twelve weeks old. She looked down from her perch on Patricia's bosom and saw him wobbling this way and that,
and with a chortle that was almost a scream reached for
him with both arms. Soon she was bawling the astonished,
gasping wails of extreme alarm (his needle-point bites),
and he was yelping piteously in the monkey-like grip with
which she had seized his ear and was holding him at arm's
length, out of mind, while she turned her tearful face to
her mother.
These new beginnings, and especially my marriage with
Patricia, overtaking me late in my maturity, ended a period of unhappiness so extreme as to have amounted to
grief. And I found that loving the child, cradling and dandling her, watching her sleep, and above all watching her
nurse at Patricia's bosom, awakened images of my childhood I would not have guessed were still intact. Something similar happened with the dog. I began a regimen of
early morning running, as if he were an athlete and I his
trainer, and I had trotted behind him through the weathers of several months before I realized that my happiness
WINTER 1982
�at these times was composed in part of recovered memories of the daybreak runnings of my youth, that had been
so hopeful and so satisfied as to seem to me, now, paradisal.
The dog developed precociously. He was not a year and
a half old when, in pursuit of sticks or balls that I threw for
him, he was leaping seven foot walls. He was a delight to
watch, combining power and beauty with indolent confidence, though this last, no doubt, was an illusion of his
style, for instead of hitching up his hind legs as he cleared
the obstacle at the height of his leap, he'd swing them lazily to one side, as if such feats were no more difficult than
sprawling on the floor. He became a personage in the park
and soon acquired a band of children, who left their
games to follow him, or who, more correctly, played new
games to include him. It was not only his prowess and
beauty that attracted them, but the extraordinary love he
bestowed on them. He was simply smitten with our race. I
was crossing upper Broadway with him once; he was
leashed; the crossing was crowded. There came toward us
an old gentleman holding a four-year-old boy by the hand.
The boy's face and the dog's were on a level, and as they
passed the two faces turned to each other in mutual delight, and Shawno bestowed a kiss that began at one ear,
went all the way across and ended at the other. I glanced
back. The boy, too, was glancing back, grinning widely. In
fact, the boy and Shawno were looking back at each other.
This incident is paired for all time with another that I
witnessed in New Yark and that perhaps could not have
occurred in any other city. It was in the subway at rush
hour. The corridors were booming with the hammering,
grinding roar of the trains and the pounding of thousands
of almost running feet. Three corridors came together in a
Y and two of them were streaming with people packed far
tighter than soldiers in military formation. The columns
were approaching each other rapidly. There was room to
pass, but just barely. Alas, the columns collided. That is,
their inside corners did, and these corners were occupied
by apparently irrascible men. Each hurled one, exactly
one, furious roundhouse blow at the other, and both were
swept away in their columns-a memorable fight.
I would never have known certain people in New Yark
except for the loving spirit of the dog; worse, it would
never have occurred to me that knowing them was desirable, or possible, where in fact it was delightful. The people I mean were children. What could I have done with
them were it not for the dog? As it was, I changed my
hours in order to meet them, and they-a group of eight
or so-waited for us devotedly after school. Most were
Puerto Rican. The youngest was only seven, the eldest
eleven. They would spread themselves in a large circle
with the dog in the center and throw a ball back and forth,
shouting as he leaped and tried to snatch it from the air.
When he succeeded, which was often, there ensued the
merriest and most musical of chases, the boys arranged
behind the dog according to their speed of foot, the dog
holding the ball high, displaying it provocatively, looking
back over his shoulder and trotting stiff-legged just fast
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
enough to elude the foremost boy, winding that laughing,
shouting, almost singing line .of children this way and that
through the park. I discovered that many of the by-standers I used to see at this time came on purpose to watch
the children and the dog. One elderly, white-haired man I
have never forgotten. He was jewish and spoke with a
German accent, wore a felt hat and expensive coats. He
came to our playground regularly and stood with his hands
behind his back, his head dropped forward, nodding and
chuckling, and smiling unweariedly. His face was wonderful. It was intelligent and kindly, was still strong, still handsome, and it possessed a quality I have come to associate
with genius, an apparent unity of feeling, an alacrity and
wholeness of response. Whatever he was feeling suffused
his face; he did not have attitudes and counter-attitudes
toward his feelings. One sensed great confidence in this,
and great trust in himself. The dog delighted him. It was
the dog he came to see. He deferred to the headlong, boisterous children, who, when Shawno would appear, would
shout happily and in unison, and Shawno would go to
them, bounding exuberantly, but it would not be long before the old gentleman >'vould call him, and Shawno would
leave the children, not bounding now but sweeping his
tail in such extreme motions that his hind legs performed
a little dance from side to side independently of his front
ones. The old gentleman would lean over him, speak to
him and pet him, and the dog would press against his legs
and look into his face.
We usually chatted for a few minutes before I went
home. When I asked him about his work and life he waved
away the questions with gestures that were humorous and
pleading yet were impressive in their authority. One day I
recognized his face in a photograph in the Times, alas, on
the obituary page. He was an eminent refugee scholar, a
sociologist. I discovered, reading the description of his
career, that I had studied briefly with his son at Columbia.
By this time we had moved to the remote farmhouse in the
country and our second child had been born.
Past lives. Streams. An incident in the woods. Ferocity and family concern.
Our house had been occupied by Finns, as had many
others near us. The hill, actually a ridge, sloped away on
two sides, one forested and the other, to the south, open
pasture with the remnants of an orchard. At the bottom
of these fields was a stream, and in an arm of the stream, a
sauna. It was here that the old Finn who had built the
house had bathed his invalid wife, carrying her back and
forth every day until her final illness. From this same small
pool he had carried water in buckets to the garden a few
strides away. The sauna was damaged beyond repair, but
we let it stand; and we brought back the garden, which
now was one of three. For the few years that the romance
of country living endured, it was this garden that I tended
with greatest satisfaction, carrying water in buckets, as
7
�had the old man. Just beyond the sauna a wooded slope
rose steeply. Racoons and deer erttered our field here, and
it was here that the ponies and dog all came to drink.
There were other relics of those vanished lives: handmade apple boxes with leather hinges cut from old boots;
door handles in all the sheds made of sapling crotches; an
apple picking ladder that was a tall young spruce (the bark
was still on it) cut lengthwise down the middle and fitted
with rungs of sugar maple saplings; ten-foot Finnish skis
bent at the tips with steam from a kettle. There were hills
wherever one looked, and there had been farms on all the
hills. Some of the Finns had skied to market. They had
cruised their woodlots on skis. Some of their children had
skied to school.
The hills and ridges are so numerous that in the spring,
while the snow is melting, the sound of water can be heard
everywhere. It pours and tumbles; there is a continual roaring; and when the thaw is well advanced the large stream
in the valley makes the frightening sounds of flood, hurling chunks of ice ahead of it, crowding violently into the
curves, and hurtling over falls so deep in spume that the
rocks cannot be seen. Later, in the hot weather, one hears
the braided sounds and folded sounds of quiet water. The
orange gashes and abrasions on the trunks of trees are
darkening. More trees are dead. The banks of the streams,
however beautiful, and however teeming with new life, are
strewn with debris in endless stages of decay.
The streams have become presences in my life. For a
while they were passions. There are few that I haven't
fished and walked to their source. These have been solitary
excursions, except for the single time that I took the dog.
His innocent trotting at the water's edge disturbed the
trout. Still worse was his drinking and wading in the stream.
I called him out. He stood on the bank and braced his legs
and shook himself. Rather, he was seized by a violent shak·
ing, a shaking so swift and powerful as to seem like a vibration. It shook his head from side to side, then letting his
head come to rest seized his shoulders and shook them,
then his ribs, and in a swift, continuous wave passed violently to his haunches, which it shook with especial vigor,
and then entered his tail and shook the entire length of it,
and at last, from the very tip, sprang free, leaving behind,
at the center of the now-subsided aura of sparkling waterdrops, an invigorated and happy dog. It was at this moment
of perfected well-being that one of those darting slim shadows caught his eye. He was electrified. He hurled himself
into the stream head first, thrusting his snout to the very
bottom, where he rooted this way and that. He lifted his
head from the shallow water, legs braced, and looked in
amazement from side to side. The trout had vanished so
utterly that he had no notion even of the direction of its
flight. He thrust down his head again and turned over
stones, then came up, his streaming fur clinging to his
body, and stood there, smooth and muscular, peering
down, poised in the electric stillness of the hunter that
seems to be a waiting but is actually a fascination. Years
later, after my own passion for trout had cooled, I would
8
see him poised like that in the shallows of the swimming
hole, ignoring the splashing, clamoring children, looking
down, still mesmerized, still ready-so he thought-to
pounce.
During most of the thaw there is little point in going into
the woods. Long after the fields have cleared and their
brown is touched with green, there'll be pools and streaks
of granular snow, not only in the low-lying places in the
woods, but on shadowed slopes and behind rocks. For a
whiie the topmost foot of soil is too watery to be called
mud. The road to our house becomes impassable, and for
days, or one week, or two, or three, we walk home from
the store wearing rubber boots and carrying the groceries
and perhaps the youngest children in knapsacks and our
arms. This was once a corduroy road, and it never fails that
some of the logs have risen again to the surface.
Spring in the north is almost violent. After the period of
desolation, when the snow has gone and everything that
once was growing seems to have been bleached and crushed,
and the soil itself seems to have been killed by winter, there
comes, accompanied by the roaring of the streams, a prickling of the tree buds that had formed in the cold, and a
prickling of little stems on the forest floor, and a tentative,
small stirring of bird life. This vitalizing process, once be·
gun, becomes bolder, more lavish, and larger, and soon
there is green everywhere, and the open fretwork of
branches and trunks, beyond which, all winter, we had
seen sky, hills, and snow, becomes an eye-stopping mass
of green. The roaring of the streams diminishes, but the
spreading of the green increases until the interlocking
leaves cannot claim another inch of sunlight except by
slow adjustment and the killing off of rival growth. Now
the animal presence is spread widely through the woods,
and Shawno runs this way and that, nose to the ground, so
provoked by scents that he cannot concentrate and remains excited and distracted by overlapping trails.
It was in this season of early summer that we came here.
The woods were new to me. I was prepared for wonders.
And there occurred a small but strange encounter that did
indeed prove haunting. We had been walking a woods road,
Shawno and I, or the ghost of a road, and came to a little
dell, dense with ferns and the huge leaves of young striped
maples. Shawno drew close to me and seemed perturbed.
He stood still for a moment sniffing the air instead of the
ground; and then the fur rose on his neck and he began to
growl.
At that moment there emerged from the semi-dark of a
dense leaf bank perhaps thirty steps away, two dogs, who
stopped silently and came no further. The smaller dog was
a beagle, the larger a German shepherd, black and gigantic. His jowls on both sides and his snout in front bristled
with white-shafted porcupine quills. He did not seem to
be in pain, but seemed helpless and pathetic, a creature
without fingers or tools, and therefore doomed. The uncanny thing about the dogs was their stillness. That intelligence that seems almost human and that in their case was
amplified in the logic of their companionship, was refusWINTER 1982
�ing contact of any sort not only with me but with the dog
at my side. Shawno continued to growl' and to stamp his
feet uncertainly. Just as silently as they h~d appeared, the
beagle and the shepherd turned into the undergrowth and
vanished.
I was to see these two dogs again. In the meantime, I
learned that it was not rare for dogs to run wild, or to lead
double lives; and that such pairings of scent and sight were
common. The beagle could follow a trail. The shepherd
had sharp eyes, was strong and could kill.
In the city cars had been the chief threat of Shawno's
life. Here it was hunters. He was large and tawny, and
though he was lighter in color than a deer, he resembled a
deer far more closely than had the cows, sheep, and horses
which in the memory of my neighbors had been shot for
deer-certainly more closely than had the goat that had
been gutted in the field and brought to the village on the
hood of the hunter's car. With such anecdotes in mind. I
discovered one day, toward the end of hunting season,
that Shawno had escaped from the house. At least eight
hunters had gone up our road into the woods. I know now
that his life was not at quite the risk that I imagined, but
at that time I was disturbed. I ran into the woods calling to
him and whistling, praying for his survival and wondering
how I should find him if, already, he had been shot.
Several hours later, his courting finished (probably it
had been that) he emerged into our field loping and pant·
ing, and came into the house, and with a clatter of elbows
and a thump of his torso dropped into his nook by the
woodstove. He held his head erect and looked at me. The
corners of his lips were lifted. His mouth was open to the
full, and his extended tongue, red with exertion, vibrated
with his panting in a long, highly arched curve that turned
up again at its tip. He blinked as the warmth took hold of
him, and with a grunt that was partly a sigh stretched his
neck forward and dropped his chin on his paws.
In February of that winter I saw the beagle and German
shepherd again. We were sharing a load of hay with a dis·
tant neighbor, an elderly man whose bachelor brother had
died and who was living alone among the bleached and
crumbling pieces of what had once been a considerable
farm. He still raised a few horses and trained them for har·
ness, though there wasn't a living in it. I had backed the
truck into the barn and was handing down bales to him
when a car drew up and a uniformed man got out. I recog·
nized the game warden, though I had never met him. He
was strikingly different from the police of the county seat
ten miles away, who walked with waddling gaits and could
be found at all hours consuming ice cream at the restaurant
on the highway south. The warden was large but trim, was
actually an imposing figure, as he needed to be-two at·
tempts had been made on his life, one a rifle shot through
the window, the other a gasoline bomb that had brought
down the house in flames, at night, in winter. He and his
wife and adolescent son had escaped. He was spoken of as
a fanatic, but hunters praised his skill as a hunter. A man
who had paid a fine for poaching said to me, "If he's after
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
you in the woods he'll git you. No man can run through
the woods like him." His large round eyes were a pale blue.
Their gaze was unblinking, open, disturbingly strange.
He addressed the elderly man by his last name. The
warden, too, was a scion of an old family here.
"We'd all be better off," he said, "if you'd kept him
chained.''
His voice was emphatic but not angry. He spoke with
the unconscious energy and loudness that one hears in
many of the rural voices. "He's been runnin' deer, and
you know it. I caught him at the carcass. It was still
kickin' ." The warden handed him the piece of paper he
had been carrying, which was obviously a summons. "I've
done away with him," he said.
We had come out of the barn. The warden opened the
trunk of his car and brought out the small stiff body of the
beagle. Its eyes and mouth were open, its tongue pro·
truded between its teeth on one side, and its chest was
matted with blood. The warden laid the body on the snow
bank by the barn and said, "Come back to the car a min·
ute."
The black German shepherd lay on a burlap sack, taking
up the whole of the trunk.
uyou know who owns that?"
The elderly man shook his head. No emotion had ap·
peared on his face since the warden had arrived. The war·
den turned his blue, strangely un·aggressive eyes on me
and repeated the question. I, too, shook my head. The
shepherd had been home since I had seen him in the
woods: someone had pulled out the quills.
Shawno was barking from the cab of the truck. I had
left the window open to give him air, and the smell of the
dead dogs must have reached him.
After the warden left, my neighbor went into the house
and came back with money for the hay.
"Obliged to you for haulin it," he said, and that was all.
That night, on the phone, I told a friend, a hunter, about
the dogs.
"The warden was right," he said. "Dogs like that can kill
a deer a day, even more. Jake Wesley's dogs cornered a
doe in my back field last year. She was pregnant with
twins. They didn't bother killing her, they don't know
how, they were eating her while she stood there. She was
ripped to shreds. I shot them both."
There was a crust on the snow just then. Dogs could run
on it, but the sharp hooves of the deer would break through
and the ice cut their legs. They spent such winters herded
in evergreen groves, or "yards/' and if the bark and buds
gave out many would starve. Occasionally the wardens
took them hay, but this introduced another problem, for if
the dogs found the snowmobile trails and followed them
to the yards, the slaughter could be severe.
And what of Shawno? I realized that I regarded him
habitually with the egocentricity of a doting master, as if
he were a creature chiefly of his human relations, though
certainly I knew better. I thought of the many cats his fe·
rocious mother had killed. And I remembered how, the
9
�previous fall, while our children were playing with a neighbor's children in front of our house, Shawno had come
into their midst with a freshly-killed woodchuck. He held
his head high and trotted proudly among us, displaying
his kill. It was a beautiful chestnut color and it dangled
flexibly full-length from his teeth, jouncing limply as he
trotted. He placed it on the ground under the large maple,
where he often lay, and stretched out regally above it, lionlike, the corpse between his paws. I was tying a shoelace
for one of the children. I heard a rushing growl of savagery
and out of the corner of my eye saw Shawno spring forward. I shouted and jumped in front of him. One of the
visiting boys had come too close.
I doubt that Shawno would have bitten him. Nevertheless, in that frightening moment I had seen and heard the
animal nervous system that is not like ours, that is capable
of an explosive savagery we never approximate, even in
our most violent rages.
He was with me in the pick-up one day when I went for
milk to a neighbor's dairy. There were usually dogs in
front of the barn and Shawno was on friendly terms with
them. This time, however, before I had shut the motor, he
leaped across me in the cab, growling and glaring, his
snout wrinkled and his front teeth bared to the full. His
body was tense, and instantaneously had been charged
with an extraordinary energy. Down below, also growling,
was a large black hound with yellow eyes. The window was
open. Before I could close it or admonish him, Shawno put
his head and shoulders through it, and with a push of his
hind feet that gouged the seat cover, propelled himself
outward and down on the hound.
There were no preliminaries. They crashed together
with gnashing teeth and a savage, high-pitched screaming.
The fight was over in a moment. Shawno seized him by
the neck, his upper teeth near the ear, his lower on the
throat, and driving forward with his powerful hind legs
twisted him violently to the ground.
The hound tried to right himself. Shawno responded
with siren-like growls of rage and a munching and tightening of teeth that must have been excruciating. The hound's
yellow eyes flashed. He ceased struggling. Shawno growled
again, and this time shook his head from side to side in the
worrying motion with which small animals are killed by
large ones. The hound lay still. Shawno let him up. The
hound turned its head away. Shawno pressed against him,
at right angles, extending his chin and entire neck over
the hound's shoulder. The hound turned its head as far as
it could in the other direction.
The fight was over. There was no battle for survival, as
in the Jack London stories that had thrilled me in my
youth. Survival lay precisely not in tooth and claw, but in
the social signalling that tempered their savagery, as it
tempered that of wolves. It was this that accounted for
the fact that one never came upon the carcasses of belligerent dogs who had misconceived their powers, as had the
hound.
The victory was exhilarating. What right had I, who had
10
' done nothing but watch, to feel exultation and pride? Yet
I did feel these things. Shawno felt them too, I am sure.
He sat erect beside me going home, and there was still a
charge of energy, an aura about his body. He held his head
proudly, or so I thought. His mouth was open, his tongue
lolled forward and he was panting lightly. From time to
time he glanced aside at me out of narrowed eyes. As for
me, I could not forbear looking at him again and again. I
was smiling and could not stop. I reached across and stroked
his head and spoke to him, and again he glanced at me. He
was like the roughneck athlete heros of my youth, who after great feats in the sandlot or high school football games,
begrimed, bruised, wet-haired, and dishevelled, would
walk to the dressing room or the cars, heads high, helmets
dangling from their fingertips or held in the crooks of their
arms, riding sweet tides of exhaustion and praise. And I
remembered a few glorious occasions, after I too had come
of an age to compete, when my brief inspirations on the
field had been rewarded by teammates' arms around my
shoulders.
But more than this, I felt augmented by his animal
power, as if my very existence, both spirit and body, had
been multiplied, as a horseman is animally augmented
guiding the great power of the creature. And I felt protected. It was as if somewhere within me there were still a
little boy, a child, and this guardian with thick fur and
fearsome teeth, who could leap nonchalantly over the truck
we now rode in, had devoted his powers utterly to my wellbeing.
How little of this, how nothing at all of this, came into
my account when I said at home, "Shawno got into a fight!"
Ida and Patricia came close to me, asking, "What happened? What happened?"
Ida had never witnessed the animal temper I have just
described. What she wanted to know was, had he been bitten?
If anyone had said to Shawno what the little boy says in
Ida's Mother Goose-"Bow wow wow, whose dog art
thou?" he could not have answered except by linking Ida's
name with my own. He often sat by her chair when she
ate. Three of the five things he knew to search for and
fetch belonged to Ida: her shoes, her boots, her doll. When
I read to her in the evening she leaned against me on the
sofa and Shawno lay on the other side with his head in her
lap. Often she fell asleep while I read, and we would leave
her there until we ourselves were ready for bed. When we
came for her Shawno would be asleep beside her. On the
nights when I carried her, still awake, to her bed, she would
insist that both Shawno and Patricia come kiss her goodnight, and both would. Usually he would leap into the bed,
curl up beside her and spend part of the night.
When she was five or six we bought two shaggy ponies
from a neighbor, and having fenced the garden, let them
roam as they would. The larger pony had been gelded, but
was still inclined to nip and sport. Late one afternoon I
WINTER 1982
�Down to Searles.
shoe pits by the road and games before supper and at night
under the single light at the corner of the store. Three
roads converged here. One was steep and on winter Sundays and occasional evenings had been used for sledding.
That was when the roads had been packed, not plowed,
and the only traffic had been teams and sleds. Searles's
father-the second of the three generations of C. W.
Searles-though he was known as a hard and somewhat
grasping man, would open the store and perhaps bring up
cider for the sledders. There would be a bonfire in the
road, and as many as a hundred people in motion around
it.
Searles was sixty years old when we arrived. His store
was wonderfully well organized and good to look at,
crowded but neat and logical, filled with implements of
the local trades and pastimes. Searles had worked indoors
for his father as a boy. Later as a youth, he had gone with
a cart and horse to the outlying farms, taking meat, hardware, clothing, and tools and bringing back not cash but
eggs, butter, apples, pears, chickens, shingles. Now when
he bought the pate called cretan, he knew it would be
consumed by the Dulacs, Dubords, and Pelletiers. The five
sets of rubber children's boots were for the Sawyers and
were in the proper sizes. He displayed them temptingly,
brought down the price, and finally said, "Why don't you
take the lot, Charlie, and make me an offer?" He knew
who hunted and who fished, and what state their boots,
pants, and coats were in. A death in the town affected his
business. He saw the price of bullets going skyhigh, put in
several shell and bullet-making kits, and said, "Verne,
what do you figure you spend a year on shells and bullets?"
The owners of bitches, when their dogs were in heat,
were often obliged to call the owners of males and request
that they be taken home and chained. Shawno was gone
for four days. At last the call came. He had travelled sev·
era] miles. When I went for him he wouldn't obey me, was
glassy-eyed and frantic. The only way to get him home
was to put the bitch in the car and lure him. It was pa·
thetic. He hadn't slept, was thin, had been fighting with
other males, and had had no enjoyment at all: the bitch
was a feisty little dachshund. For two days he lay chained
on the porch lost utterly in gloom. He didn't respond to
anyone, not even to Ida, but kept his chin flat between his
paws and averted his eyes. He had gone to bitches before,
but I had been able to fetch him. He had suffered frustra·
tion before, but had recovered quickly. What was differ·
ent this time? I never knew.
Apart from these vigils of instinct, his absences were on
account of human loves, the first and most protracted of
which was not a single person but a place and situation ir·
resistible to his nature. This was the general store.·
The one-story white clapboard building was near the
same broad stream that ran through the whole of the valley. The banks were steep here and the stream curved
sharply, passing under a bridge and frothing noisily over a
double ledge of rounded rocks. There had used to be horse-
come to ... "
In the summer there were rakes, hoes, spades, cultivators, coils of garden hose, sections of low white fencing to
put around flower beds, and perhaps a wheelbarrow ar·
rayed on the loading apron in front of the store. In winter
there were snowshovels, and the large, flat-bottomed snow
scoops that one pushed with both hands, and wood stoves
in crates, and sections of black stove pipe, while in the
window, set up in lines, were insulated rubber boots with
thick felt liners, and two styles of snowshoes, glistening
with varnish. At all times there were axes and axe handles,
bucksaws, wooden wedges and iron wedges, birch hooks, a
peavey or two, many chainsaw files and cans of oil. For
years he kept a huge skillet that finally replaced, as he
knew it would, the warped implement at the boys' camp.
He carried kitchenware and electrical and plumbing sup·
plies, and tools for carpentry, as well as drugstore items,
including a great deal of Maalox. All this was in addition
to the food, the candy rack, the newspapers, the greeting
cards, and the school supplies.
People stopped to talk. Those he liked-some of whom
had sat beside him in the little red schoolhouse up the
road, long unused now-would stand near the counter for
half an hour exchanging news or pleasantries. One day I
heard Franklin Mason, who was five years older than
glanced from an upstairs window and saw Ida leading Liza
and Jacob across the yard, all three holding hands. Jacob
had just learned to walk and they were going slowly. The
ponies came behind them silently. Starbright, the gelding,
drew close to Jacob and seemed about to nudge him, which
he had done several times in recent weeks, knocking him
over. Shawno was watching from across the yard. He sprang
forward and came running in a crouch, close to the ground.
I called Patricia to the window. His style was wonderful to
see, so calm and masterly. There had been a time when he
had harried the ponies gleefully, chasing them up and
down the road without respite, nipping at their heels,
leaping at their shoulders, and eluding their kicks with
what, to them, must have been taunting ease. I had had to
chastize him several times before he would give it up.
Now silently and crouching menacingly he interposed
himself between the children and their stalkers. Star·
bright knew that he would leap but did not know when,
and began to lift his feet apprehensively. Shawno waited ...
and it seemed that the pony concluded that he would not
leap, and abruptly he leapt, darting like a snake at Star·
bright's feet. The pony pulled back and wheeled, obliging
the smaller pony to wheel too. Shawno let them come
along then, but followed the children himself, glancing
back to see that the ponies kept their distance. The children hadn't seen a bit of this. "What a darling!" said
Patricia. "What a dear dog!"
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
uoh 1 it's horrible. I don't practice no more, that's what's
11
�Searles, say testily, ((I seen 'em, 1seen 'em." He was refer·
1
ring to the shingling brackets that had been propped up
prominently at the end of the co[lnter. Searles had known
for two years that Mason wanted to replace his roofing; he
had JUSt learned that Mason had decided on asphalt shingles. "I might borrow Mark's brackets," said Mason, but
he added, in a different tone, scratching his face, "these
are nice, though ... "
People didn't say "Searles's place" but "down to
Searles." "Oh, they'll have it down to Se;rles." "I stopped
in down to Searles." "Let me just call down to Searles."
He was C. W. the third, but had been called Bob all his life.
Of the men in the village he was certainly the least
rural. He had grown up on a farm, loved to hunt and fish,
play poker, drink whisky, and swap yarns. But he had gone
away to college, and then to business school, and had
worked in Boston for three years. He was not just clever or
smart but was extremely intelligent, with a meticulous,
lively, retentive mind. He had come home not because he
couldn't make a go of things in the city, but because he
loved the village and the countryside and sorely missed
the people. He subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and
the New York Times, read many periodicals, was interested in politics and controversy and changing customs.
When I met him, his three children were away at college.
We disagreed irreconcilably on politics. I was aware of his
forebearance and was grateful for it. And I was impressed
by his wit and his kindliness, as when, without reproach or
impatience, he allowed certain desperately impoverished
children to come back repeatedly and exchange their
penny candies; and as when he built a ramp for the wheelchair of a neighbor who could no longer walk but was still
alert and lively.
He was not a happy man. He drank too much to be
healthy, and his powers of mind by and large went unused. Yet one could sense in him a bedrock of contentment, and a correct choice of place and work. He was tall
and bony, carried far too large a stomach, and was lame in
one leg. In damp weather he used a cane and moved with
some difficulty about the store. I came to see that most of
his friends were old friends and were devoted to him. I
learned, too, that he had forgiven many debts and had
signed over choice lots of land to the town, one for a ball
field, another for picnics. His gregarious cocker spaniel,
who possessed no territorial sense at all lounged in the
aisles and corners, and on sunny days ca'u!d be found on
the loading apron under the awning. And it was here, in
front of the store, beside the caramel colored spaniel that
one sunny day I encountered my own dog who had vanished from the house.
'
He leaped up gaily, showing no guilt at all and came beside me when I entered the store.
'
Searles, on the high stool, was leaning over the Wall
Street Journal that was spread across the counter. The moment he raised his head, Shawno looked at him alertly.
Searles smiled at me. "I've got a new friend" he said·
.
12
'
'
and to the dog, "Haven't I, Shawno? What'll you have,
Shawno? Do you want a biscuit? Do you?" Shawno
reared, put his front paws on the counter and barked.
"Oh, you do?" said Searles. "Well, I happen to have
one. "
He put his hand under the counter, where he kept the
dog biscuits that had fattened the spaniel.
"Will you pay for it now?" he said. "Will you? Will you,
Shawno?"
Shawno, whose paws were still on the counter, barked
in a deep, almost indignant way. Searles was holding the
biscuit, not offering it.
. "Oh, you want it on credit?" he said. He held up the
b1scmt, and at the sight of it the dog barked in lighter,
more eager tones. ((What?" said Searles, uyou want it
free? Free?" Again Shawno barked, the eagerness mixed
now with impatience and demand. "All right," said
Searles, "Here 'tis. On the house." He held it out and
Shawno took it with a deft thrust of his head.
I watched all this with a long-lasting, rather complicated
smile.
I said that I hoped the dog wasn't a nuisance.
((Oh, no," said Searles, uhe's a good dog. He's a fine
dog."
And I looked at Shawno, who was looking at Searles
and thought, "you wretch, you unfaithful wretch. Ho~
easily you can be charmed and bought!"
Yet I let him go back there again and again. He'd trot
away in the morning as if he were going off to work, and
then at supperbme would appear on the brow of the hill
muddied and wet, having jumped into the stream to drink:
I didn't have the heart to chain him. And I couldn't
blame him. What better place for a gregarious dog than
this one surviving social fragment of the bygone town?
There were other dogs to sport with, there was the store
itself with its pleasant odors, there was Searles, my rival,
with his biscuits, there were children to make much of
him, and grown-ups by the score. Moreover, there were
cars, trucks, and delivery vans, and all had been marked by
the dogs of far-flung places. We would arrive for groceries
or mail and find him stretched on the apron in front of the
store, or gamboling in the road with other dogs, or standing in a cluster of kids with bikes, or stationed by the
counter inside, looking up inquiringly at customers who
were chatting with Searles.
My jealousy grew. I was seriously perturbed. Somewhere within me an abandoned lover was saying "Don't
you love me anymore? Have you forgotten how I raised
you and trained you? Have you forgotten those mornings
in the park when I threw sticks for you and taught you to
leap, or our walks here in the woods, and the thousand discoveries we've made together?"
Most serious of all was his absence while I worked. I had
built a little cabin half a mile from the house. He had been
a presence, almost a tutelary spirit, in the very building of
it, and then he had walked beside me every day to and
from it, and had lain near my feet while I wrote or read.
WINTER 1982
�Often when I turned to him he would' already have seen
the movement and I would find his eyes waiting for mine.
Those inactive hours were a poor substitute for the attractions of the store, and I knew it, in spite of our companionable lunches and afternoon walks. But what of me?
One day, several weeks after his first visit to the store, I
jumped into the car and went down there rather speedily,
ordered him rather firmly into the back seat, and took him
home. The procedure was repeated the following day.
The day after that I chained him, and the day after that
chained him again ...
Life returned to normal. I took away the chain. He was
grateful and stopped moping. I saw that he had renounced his friends at the store, and I was glad, forgetting
that I had forced him to do it. Anyway, those diversions
had never cancelled his love for me-so I reminded myself, and began to see fidelity where I had established
dependence. But that didn't matter. The undiminished,
familiar love wiped out everything-at least for me.
Eddie Dubord. Sawyer's Labrador. Quills.
Just below us in the woods the stream was speeded by a
short channel of granite blocks, though the millwheel was
gone that once had turned continuously during thaw, reducing small hills of cedar drums to stacks of shingles.
There had been trout for a while in the abandoned millrace, but chubs, that eat the eggs of trout, had supplanted
them.
Upstream of this ghost of a mill, just beyond the second
of two handsome waterfalls, one stringer of a rotted bridge
still joined the banks. Snowmobilers had dropped a tree
beside it and had nailed enough crossboards to make a
narrow path. I had crossed it often on snowshoes, and
then on skis, and the dog had trotted behind, but there
came a day in spring, after the mud had dried, that
Shawno drew back and stood there on the bank stamping
his feet, moving from side to side, and barking. He had
seen the frothing water between the boards of the bridge.
I picked him up and carried him across, and could not
help laughing, he was so big, such a complicated bundle in
my arms who once had nestled there snugly.
Beyond the bridge a grassy road curved away into the
trees. In somewhat more than a mile it would join the
tarred road, but halfway there, on the inside of its curve, it
was met by a wagon trail, now partly closed by saplings,
and it was here at the corner of this spur that my neighbor, Eddie Dubord, built a small cabin similar to my own.
It was summer. The dog had gone with the children to
the swimming hole and I was walking alone carrying a
small rod and a tin of worms. I saw two columns of smoke
ahead of me, thinning and mingling in the breeze, and
then I could see a parked car and a man working at something. The smoke was blowing toward him and came from
two small fires spaced twelve feet apart. The man was
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
blocky and short. He wore a visored cap of bright orange
and a chore jacket of dark blue denim. His movements
were stiff and slow, yet there was something impressive
and attractive about the way he worked. Every motion
achieved something and led to the next without waste or
repetition. He went to one of the fires carrying an axe,
which he used only to lift some pine boughs from a pile.
He threw several on each of the fires. I walked closer, but
stopped again and watched him. We had never met, but I
knew that it was Dubord. He was seventy-four years old.
He had driven the corner stakes to mark the floor of a
cabin, had tied a cord on one of them and had carried it
around the others. Apparently he had already levelled the
cord. I watched him as he picked up a five foot iron bar
and went away dragging a stoneboat that was simply the
hood of an ancient car turned upside down and fitted
with a yoke and rope. He stopped at a pile of stones, and
with his bar levered a large flat stone onto the car hood,
which he dragged back to one of the corner stakes. With
short, efficient strokes he levered the stone onto the
ground. When finally I walked by he was on his hands and
knees firming the stone and didn't see me.
Several days later I went that way again, and without
fully knowing why, stopped to watch him. He had finished the floor and had built a low platform the length of
it, and had equipped the platform with steps. He would be
able to work on the rafters and roof without resorting to a
ladder.
He had assembled several units of studs, rafters, and
cross braces, and now as I watched he pushed one erect
with a stick, and lodged it in the fork of a long pole that
held it while he adjusted it for plumb. He nailed bracing
boards at the sides, and drove in permanent nails at the
base. His concentration was remarkable. It was as total
and self-forgetful as a child's. Later, after I had come to
know him well, I marvelled more, not less, at this quality. I
had seen him at work on almost every gadget the economy
afforded: radios and TVs, pop-up toasters, lawnmowers of
several kinds, snow-blowers, rota-tillers, outboard motors,
locks, shotguns, clocks. On several occasions I had come
close to him and had stood beside him wondering how to
announce my presence ... but it never mattered how: he
invariably looked up with a start of panic, and then
blushed. It was not merely as if his concentration had
been disturbed, but as if some deep, continuous melody
had been shattered. Then he would smile shyly and greet
me in his unassuming, yet gracious, almost courtly way.
He had already roofed the cabin and was boarding the
sides-on the diagonal, as the old farmhouses were
boarded-when we finally met. And as has often happened, it was the dog who introduced us, ignoring utterly
the foolish shyness on both sides.
The smudge fires were going again to drive away the
bugs. A small stack of rough-cut boards lay on a pallet of
logs. Dubord had just hung the saw on a prong of the sawhorse and was carrying a board to the wall when Shawno
trotted up to him and barked. He was startled and backed
13
�away defensively, ready to use the board as a weapon. But
Shawno was wagging his tail in, the extreme sweeps of
great enthusiasm, and he did something he had almost
abandoned since our coming to the country: he reared up,
put his paws on Dubord's broad chest and tried to lick his
weathered, leathery face with its smoke-haze of white
stubble beard. By the time I reached them Shawno had
conquered him utterly. Dubord was patting the dog,
bending over him, and talking to him in that slurred, attractive baritone voice that seemed to have burrs and
knurls in it, a grain and dark hue as of polished walnut,
and that he seemed to savor in his throat and on his
tongue, just as he savored tobacco, black coffee, and
whisky. And of course he- knew the dog's name, as he
knew my name, and as I knew his. It was the simplest
thing in the world to shake hands and be friends.
To hold Dubord's hand was like holding a leather sack
filled with chunks of wood. His fingers were three times
the size of ordinary fingers. He scarcely gripped my hand,
but politely allowed me to hold his. Gravely he said,
"Pleased to meet you," and then his small blue eyes grew
lively behind the round, steel-framed spectacles. "I'd ask
you in," he said, "but there ain't much difference yet between out and in. You got time for a drink?" I said I did,
and he opened the toolbox and handed me a pint of Four
Roses.
His skull was shaped like a cannonball. His jaw was
broad and gristly. Everything about him suggested
strength and endurance, yet his dominant trait, I soon
came to see, was thoughtfulness. He listened, noticed, reflected, though it was apparent, even now, that these
qualities must often have been overwhelmed in his youth
by passions of one kind or another. He had come from
Quebec at the age of twenty, and for almost two decades
had worked in lumber camps as a woodcutter and cook.
He had farmed here in this valley, both as a hired hand
and on his own-had dug wells, built houses, barns, and
sheds, had installed his own electric lines and his own
plumbing, had raised animals and crops of all kinds. In
middle age he had married a diminutive, high-tempered,
rotund, cross-eyed, childishly silly, childishly gracious
woman. They had never had children. They had never
even established a lasting peace. Her crippled mother
lived with them in the small house he had built, knitting
in an armchair before the TV while her daughter dusted
the china knickknacks and photographs of relatives,
straightened the paper flowers in their vases, and flattened the paper doilies they had placed under everything.
Dubord liked all this, or rather, approved it, but felt ill at
ease with his heavy boots and oilstained pants, and spent
his days in a shed beside the house. There, surrounded by
his hundreds of small tools, he tinkered at the workbench,
listened to French Canadian fiddle music on cassettes,
and occasionally put aside the tools to play his own fiddle.
The camp in the woods served the same purposes as the
shed, but promised longer interludes of peace.
I got to know him that summer and fall, but it was not
14
until winter-our family's third in the little town-that
Dubord and I realized that we were friends.
The deep snow of our first winter had made me giddy
with excitement. The silence in the woods, the hilly terrain with its many streams, most of them frozen and
white, but :; few audible with a muted, far-off gurgling under their covering of ice and snow, occasional sightings of
the large white snowshoe hares, animal tracks-all this
had been a kind of enchantment and had recalled boyhood enjoyments that once had been dear to me. I went
about on snowshoes, and Shawno came behind. The following year I discovered the lightweight, highly-arched,
cross-country skis, my speed in the woods was doubled,
and our outings became strenuous affairs for the dog. Often he sank to his shoulders and was obliged to bound like
a porpoise. Except in the driest, coldest snow, he stopped
frequently, and pulling back his lips in a silent snarl would
bite away the impacted snow from between his toes. His
tawny, snow-cleaned, winter-thickened fur looked handsome against the whiteness. When we came to downhill
stretches I would speed ahead, and he would rally and follow at a run.
We had taken a turn like this through the woods in our
third year, on a sunny, blue-skied day in March, and
stopped at the camp to visit Dubord.
I could smell the smoke of his tin chimney before I
could see it. Then the cabin came in view. His intricately
webbed, gracefully curved snowshoes leaned against the
depleted stack of firewood that early in the winter had
filled the overhang of the entranceway.
I could hear music. It was the almost martial, furiously
rhythmic music of the old country dances ... but there
seemed to be two fiddles.
Shawno barked and raced ahead ... and Dubord's pet
squirrel bounded up the woodpile. When I reached the
camp Shawno was dancing on his hind legs barking angrily
and complainingly, and the handsome red squirrel was
crouching in a phoebe's nest in the peak of the roof, looking down with bright eyes and maddening calm. The
music stopped, the door opened, and Dubord greeted us
cheerfully-actually with a merry look on his face.
"You won't get that old squirrel, Shawno," he said.
"He's too fast for you. You'll never get 'im. Might's well
bark ... "
"Come in," he said. ui just made coffee. Haven't seen
those for a while, Where'd you get 'em?"
He meant the skis. He had never seen a manufactured
pair, though he had seen many of the eight and nine foot
handmade skis the Finns had used. He didn't know why
(so he said later) only the Finns had used them. Everyone
else had stayed with snowshoes, which were an Indian invention.
"Nilo Ansden used to take his eggs down to Searles on
skis," he said. The Searles he meant was Bob Searles's father. "He took a short cut one day down that hill 'cross
from your place. We had a two-foot storm all night and
the day before. He got halfway down and remembered
WINTER 1982
�Esther Barden's chicken coop was in the way, but he
thought there's enough snow to get up on the roof. .. and
there was. Once he was up there there was nothin' to do
but jump, so he jumped. Had a packbasket of eggs on's
back. Didn't break a one."
In the whole of any winter there are never more than a
few such sunny days, gloriously sunny and blue. One be·
comes starved for the sun.
He left the door open and we turned our chairs to face
the snow and blue sky and the vast expanse of evergreen
and hardwood forest. He stirred the coals in the woodstove, opened the draft and threw in some split chunks of
rock maple. There was a delicious swirling all around us of
hot, dry currents from the stove and cool, fragrant currents from the snow and woods. Occasionally a tang of
wood smoke came in with the cold air.
As for the fiddle music-"Oh, I was scratchin' away,"
he said. "I have a lot of fiddle music on the cassettes. I put
it on and play along."
His cassette recorder stood on the broad work table by
the window. The violin lay beside it amidst a clutter of
tools and TV parts.
"If I hear somebody's got somethin' special or new, I go
over an' put it on the recorder. Take a good while to play
the ones I got now. You like that fiddle music, Shawno?"
-and to me: "That was a schottische you heard comin'
in."
He was fond of the dog. He looked at him again and
again, and there began a friendship between them that
pleased me and that I never cared to interrupt.
Shawno lay on the floor twisting his head this way and
that and snapping at a large glossy fly that buzzed around
him. He caught it, cracked it with his teeth, and ejected it
with a wrinkling of the nose. Eddie laughed and said,
"That's right, Shawno, you catch that old bastard fly."
The dog got up and went to him and Eddie gave him a
piece of the "rat cheese" we had been eating with our cof·
fee. For a long time Shawno sat beside him, resting his
head on Eddie's knee.
We laced our coffee with Four Roses whisky and had
second cups. The squirrel looked in at the window,
crouching eagerly, its hands lifted and tucked in at the
wrists, and its feathery long tail poised forward like a canopy over its head.
"I built that platform to feed the birds, but he took
over, so I let him have it. That's where the birds eat now."
He pointed to a wooden contraption hanging by a wire
from a tree out front. Several chicadees fluttered around
it angrily. It was rocking from the weight of the bluejay
perched on its edge, a brilliant, unbelievable blue in the
sunlight.
Eddie had hinged a tiny window in one of the panels of
the side window. He opened it now and laid his hand on
the feeding platform, a few peanuts and sunflower seeds
on the palm. The squirrel leaped away, but came back immediately and proceeded to eat from his hand, picking up
one seed at a time. Shawno went over and barked, and the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
squirrel seized one last morsel and fled. Dubord closed the
window and turned to the dog, chuckling. Again the dog
sat with him, this time laying his chin over one wide rubber boot.
I saw his packbasket in the corner. He used it daily to
bring in water and whisky and a few tools. The handle of
his axe protruded from the basket. The basket was of ash
strips, such as the Indians make. I had bought several two
towns away. Dubord had made this one himself.
"The Indians can take brown ash wherever they find
it," he said. "Did you know that? They used to camp
every summer on the Folsom place. Diamond National
owns it now. There's brown ash down there, downhill
goin' toward the pond. I used to trap beaver with one o'
the men, and he showed me."
The basket was thirty years old.
He sipped his coffee.
"Have you met Mister Mouse?" he said.
"Who?"
"Don't know if he'll come while Shawno's here."
Smiling like a little boy, he said, "Keep your eyes open,
but don't move. Don't even blink. He can see it."
He put a peanut on the two-by-four at the upper edge
of the far wall, stepped back from it and stood there making a strange little whimpering sound. Shawno perked up
his ears and was suddenly excited, but I whispered to him,
no, no ... stay.
Again Dubord made the squeaking sound, sucking air
through his lips. Presently, quite soundlessly, a roundeared gray mouse appeared on the ledge, sniffing. It crept
forward a few inches and stopped, sniffing alertly and angling the delicate long antennae of its whiskers this way
and that. It nibbled the peanut rapidly, listening while it
ate, its bulging black eyes glinting with light from the windows and the open door.
Shawno got to his feet ... and that huge movement and
the sound of his claws on the floor put an end to the performance.
We stayed for two hours. He talked of his early days in
the States, and his years in the woods. I could hear the
French Canadian and the Yankee accents contending in
his speech, the one wanting to stress the final syllables,
the other to drawl them. Shawno sat close to him, sometimes upright with his chin on his knee, sometimes lying
flat with his nose near the broad booted foot. Until now all
his friendships had been friendships of play. This was a
friendship of peace. It was one of those rare occasions on
which, perhaps only momentarily, a little family of the
spirit is formed.
It was good sapping weather. The days were sunny, the
snow melting, the nights cold. When we saw Dubord several days later he was gathering sap from the huge maples
near his camp.
A rapidly moving cloud of light gray smoke rolled over
and over in the lower branches of the trees. I skied closer
and saw that it was not coming from the cabin, as I had
15
�feared, nor was it smoke, but steam from a bubbling large
tray of maple sap.
He had shovelled away some snow and had built a fire·
place of fieldstones he had gathered in the fall. The sides
were lined with scraps of metal. The back had been cut
from a sheetmetal stove and was equipped with a metal
chimney five feet high. A shallow tray, two feet by four,
formed the top of this fireplace/stove. It was from the
tray that the clouds of steam were rising.
While I was examining all this Dubord appeared, plod·
ding blockily on snowshoes, pulling a toboggan that I rec·
ognized, since I had helped in the making of it, splitting
out boards from a squared-off log of ash, steaming the
tips, nailing them around a log to cool and set. On the to·
boggan were two five-gallon white plastic jugs, each halffilled with sap. A tin funnel bounced against one of them,
secured by a wire to its handle.
Eddie threw me a furious glance that was scarcely a
greeting. His teeth were clamped and his mouth was
pulled down. I knew without asking that he had been
quarrelling with Nellie, his wife. How long he would have
maintained this furious silence I don't know, but it was
more than he could do to hold out against the dog. A dark,
deep blush suffused his weathered round face. He
dropped the toboggan rope, and smiling helplessly at the
corners of his mouth, bowed his head to the uprearing
dog, petting him with both hands and allowing his face to
be licked.
He took off the snowshoes and put more wood on the
fire. The four foot strips of white birch-edgings from the
turning mill-had been stacked in the fall and covered.
Papery white bark still clung to them. The wood was well
dried and burned hot-the "biscuit wood" of the old
farmhouse kitchens.
The tray was slanted toward one of its forward corners,
and there, with his brazing torch, Dubord had attached a
little spigot. He drained some syrup into a large spoon,
blew on it, tested it with his finger. It was too thin to drain
off.
I helped him pour some of the new sap into the noisily
bubbling syrup. The steam was sweet and had a pleasant
odor.
Several galvanized buckets stood by the fire and we
poured the rest of the sap into them. I noticed that just as
he had not filled the plastic jugs he did not fill the buckets
-an old man's foresight, avoiding loads that might injure
him.
I went with him back to the maple trees, and at last he
broke his silence.
"Was a damn good farm here fifty years ago," he said. "!
wanted to buy it but I couldn't meet the price."
The huge maples lined the road. There were smaller
trees around them, some in the road itself, but the maples
were leafy and well exposed to the sun, and their sap was
far richer than that of forest maples. The boiling ratio
would be forty to one, or better.
Buckets, four to a tree, clung to the stout, coarse-barked
16
trunks waist high, as if suspended from a single belt. They
hung from short spouts of galvanized metal, and were cov·
ered with metal lids that were creased slightly in the middle and looked like roofs.
Since I was helping, we filled the jugs, and soon had
sledded sixty gallons to the fire.
Nellie's canary, whom they had called Buddy, had been
killed that morning. The quarrel had followed its death.
She had been cleaning its cage and had let it out to
stretch its wings.
"She could've put it in the other cage," Dubord said.
He was stirring the boiling sap with a stick of wood, and
in his anger he splashed it again and again.
"It was right there under the bed," he said. "Damn
thing shittin' all over the place! If I come in with one
speck o' mud on my boots she raises hell! I wanted to go
out. 'Don't open the door!' 'Well put 'im in the cage!'"
He thumped the tray as if he meant to drive holes
through it.
"Freddie Latham was outside fillin' the oil tank," he
said. "Nellie's mother'd knitted some mittens for the new
baby, so Nellie says to me, 'Cit Buddy,' and she comes
right past me and opens the door. 'Yoo hoo, Freddie."'
He ground his teeth a while.
"Cit the bird!" he muttered explosively. "What'd she
expect me t'do, fly up an' catch it? Damn thing flew out
the door right behind her and she didn't even notice.
Then she opened the porch door and it flew out that one
too. Damn! If I been holdin' a stick o' wood I'd heaved it
at 'er! You could o' heard her down t'village. 'Save Buddy!'
'Here, Buddy!' 'Cit Buddy!"'
Dubord never glanced at me. His eyes were re-seeing
the whole event.
"He perched on the roof o' the shed," he said, "And I
got the ladder and started U:p with some birdseed, and
Freddie went in and got my smeltin' net. Soon as the bird
saw me gittin 1 close, he flew over an' perched on the ridge·
pole o' the house. Then he flew up to the antenna, and
Nellie's whistlin' to him an' suckin' her lips. 'Eddie, git
that canary record, maybe if we play it Buddy'll come
down.'"
Dubord glanced at me fiercely and demanded: "If he
could hear it up there what'd he want t'come down for?"
"By the time I come down off the ladder the bird' d flew
up to the electric wire. He was just gittin' settled ... wham!
Some damn ol' red-tail hawk been watchin' the whole
thing. I never seen 'im. Where he come from I don't
know. Couple o' yella feathers come down like snowflakes. I thought, here's your canary, Nellie. An' I thought,
enjoy your dinner, mister hawk. You just saved me two
hund'd dolluhs."
Dubord glared at me again and said, "Yessuh! That's
what I said! Two hund'd dolluhs! That's what I spent for
birdseed! I'm tellin' the truth, I ain't makin' it up! And I
ain't sayin' Buddy et that much, I'm sayin' we BOUGHT
that much! You saw him do that Christly trick! You and
WINTER 1982
�the Missus saw that trick the first time you come down.
Sure you did! Yau had the girl with you ... "
The trick he was referring to was something Nellie had
taught the bird, or had discovered, namely, that when she
put his cage up to the feeding platform at the window, he
would pick up a seed from the floor and hold it between
the bars, and the chickadees would jostle one another until one had plucked the seed from his beak, and then Buddy
would get another. Nellie had loved to show this off.
Eddie was still glaring at me. "WHERE DID YOU THINK
THEM BIRDS COME FROM?" he shouted. "We had t'have
them birds ON HAND! We was feedin' a whole damn flock
right through the year so Buddy could do his Christly trick
two or three times a month! In bad weather he couldn't
do it 't all, but we still had t'feed the chickadees."
He paced back and forth by the evaporating tray grinding his teeth and glaring. "I guess I warn't upset 'nough
t'suit 'er," he said "God tamn! Hasn't she got a tongue!"
One last wave of anger smote him and he howled
louder than before, but there was a plaintive note in his
voice and he almost addressed it to the sky.
"IT WAS NELLIE HER OWN GODDAM RATTLE BRAIN
SELF OPENED THE DOOR!" he cried.
And then he calmed down. That is to say, he walked
around the steaming tray panting and lurching and
thumping the sides and bottom with the little stick.
He had brought some blankets in his packbasket and
was planning to spend the night.
He drained off some thick syrup into a small creamery
pail and set it aside to cool. He drained a little more into
an old enamel frying pan and with a grunt bent down and
thrust it under the evaporator tray right among the flames
and coals. After it had bubbled and frothed a while, he
knelt again and patted the snow to make it firm, and scattered the hot syrup over it. When Shawno and I went
home I had a jar of syrup for Patricia and a bag of maple
taffy for the kids.
At around two o'clock the next afternoon I answered
the phone and heard the voice of Nellie Dubord, whose
salutation, calling or receiving, it always Yeh-isss, as if she
were emphatically agreeing with some previous remark.
Eddie had not come home. She knew that he had taken
blankets to the camp, but she was worried.
"!just don't feel right," she said. "]can't see any smoke
up there. I should be able to see the chimney smoke,
though maybe not. Ain't he boilin' sap? I should see that
smoke too. Can you see it up there? Take a look. I guess
I'm bein' foolish, but I don't know ... I just don't feel
right."
I went upstairs and looked from the west windows.
There wasn't any smoke. I skied across.
There was no activity at the cabin, no smoke or shimmering of heated air at the chimney, no fire out front.
Shawno sniffed at the threshold. He chuffed and snorted,
sniffed again, then drew back and barked. He went forward again and lowered his head and sniffed.
The door was locked. I went around to the window. DuTHE ST. JOHNS
REVIEW
bard lay on the floor on his back beside the little platform
bed. He was dressed except for his boots. The blankets
had come away from the bed, as if he had clutched them
at the moment of falling. I battered the door with a piece
of stovewood and went to him. He was breathing faintly,
but his weathered face was as bloodless as putty.
He was astonishingly heavy. I got him onto the bed,
covered him with the blankets and our two coats, and
skied to the road. I saw his car there and cursed myself for
not having searched him for the key. The nearest house
was three quarters of a mile away. I telephoned there for
an ambulance, and made two other calls, then went back
and put him on the toboggan and set out pulling him over
the packed but melting trail, dreadfully slowly.
I hadn't gone twenty paces before the men I had called
appeared. The two elder were carpenters, the young man
was their helper. They were running towards us vigorously, and I felt a surge of hope.
But it was more than hope that I felt at that moment.
Something priceless was visible in their faces, and I have
been moved by the recollection of it again and again. It
was the purified, electric look of wholehearted response.
The men came running towards us vigorously, lifting their
knees in the snow and swinging their arms, and that unforgettable look was on their faces.
Ten days later Patricia, the children, and I went with
Nellie to the hospital. The children weren't admitted, and
Nellie sat with them in the lobby.
Dubord was propped up by pillows and was wearing a
hospital smock that left his arms bare. I was used to the
leathery skin of his hands and face; the skin of his upper
arms, that were still brawny, was soft and white, one
would say shockingly white.
"Sicker cats than this have got well and et another
meal," he said. And then, gravely, "Nellie told me you
went in for me. I'm much obliged to you."
"Did the girls like their candy?" he asked ... and it took
me a moment to realize that he was referring to the maple
taffy, the last thing he had made before the heart attack.
A few moments later he said, 11 How's my dog?" meaning
Shawno, and I told him how the dog had known at once
that something was wrong, and that rapt, shy look came
over his face.
A neighbor came in while I was there, Earl Sawyer, who
after chatting briefly, said to him, "Well, you won't be
seein' Blackie no more."
Dubord asked him what had happened.
"I did away with him," said Sawyer. "I had to. He went
after porcupines three times in the last two weeks. Three
times I took him to the vet, eighteen dollars each time. I
can't be doin' that. Then he went and did it again, so I
took him out and shot 'im, quills and all."
Sawyer was upset.
"If he can't learn," he said. " ... I can't be doin' that.
Damn near sixty dollars in two weeks, and there's a leak in
the goddam cellar. He was a nice dog, though. He was a
good dog otherwise."
17
�Sawyer was thirty-three or four, but his face was worn
and tense. He worked ten hours a day as a mechanic, belonged to the fire department, and was serving his second
term as road commissioner. He had built his own house
and was raising two children.
"I don't blame you," said Dubord. "You'd be after 'im
every day."
"He went out an' did it again," said Sawyer.
There was silence for a while.
"I can't see chainin' a dog," Sawyer said. ''I'd rather not
have one."
"A chained dog ain't worth much," Eddie said.
Months went by before Eddie recovered his spirits. But
in truth he never did entirely recover them. I could see a
sadness in him that hadn't been there before, and a tendency to sigh where once he had raged.
The change in his life was severe. He sold the new cabin
he had liked so much, and spent more time in the little
shed beside the house. I drove down to see him frequently,
but it wasn't the same as stopping by on skis or walking
through the woods. Nor was he allowed to drink whisky.
Nor did I always remember to bring the dog.
Most of the snow was gone by the end of that ApriL
One night Shawno failed to appear for supper, and there
was no response when I called into the dusk from the
porch. I called again an hour later, and this time I saw
movement in the shadows just beyond the cars. Why was
he not bounding toward me? I ran out, calling to him. He
crept forward a few paces on his belly, silently, and then
lay still. When I stood over him, he turned his head away
from me. His jowls and nose were packed with quills. He
could not close his mouth. There were quills in his tongue
and hanging down from his palate. The porcupine had
been a small one, the worst kind for a dog.
He seemd to be suffering more from shame than from
the pain of the quills. He would not meet my eyes; and
the once or twice that he did, he lowered his head and
looked up woefully, so that the whites showed beneath
the irises. I had never seen him so stricken.
I was afraid that he might run off, and so I picked him
up and carried him into the house. This, too, was mortifying. His eyes skittered from side to side. What an abject
entrance for this golden creature, who was used to bounding in proudly!
The black tips of the quills are barbed with multiple,
hair-fine points. The quills are shaped like torpedoes and
are hollow-shafted, so that the pressure of the flesh
around them draws them deeper into the victim's body.
They are capable of migrating then to heart, eyes, liver ...
He wanted to obey me. He lay flat under the floor lamp.
But every time I touched a quill with the pliers, a tic of
survival jerked away his head.
Ida was shocked. He was the very image of The
Wounded, The Victimized. It was as if some malevolent
tiny troll had shot him with arrows. She knelt beside him
18
and threw her arms around his neck, and in her high, passionate voice of child goodness repeated the words both
Patricia and I had already said: "Don't worry, Shawno,
we'll get them out for you!" -but with this difference:
that he drew back the corners of his open mouth, panted
slightly, glanced at her, and thumped his taiL
I took him to the vet the next day, and brought him
back unconscious in the car.
I thought of Sawyer and his Black Labrador, and saw
from still another aspect the luxury of our lives. I did not
go to bed exhausted every night, was not worried about a
job, a mortgage, a repair bill, a doctor's bill, unpaid loans
at the bank. And here was another of the homely luxuries
our modest security brought us: he lay on the back seat
with his eyes closed, his mouth open, his tongue out,
panting unconsciously. Great quantities of saliva came
from his mouth, so much of it that the seat was wet when
finally we moved him.
A walk with Ida. Waldo. Persistence of the city.
Kerosene light and an aphorism. The rock above
the town. Wandering dogs.
Spring comes slowly and in many stages. The fields go
through their piebald phase again and again, in which the
browns and blacks of grass and wet earth are mingled with
streaks of white-and then everything is covered again
with the moist, characteristically dimpled snow of spring.
But soon the sun comes back, a warm wind blows, and in
half a day the paths in the woods and the ruts in our long
dirt road are streaming with water.
Black wasps made their appearance on a warm day in
March, then vanished. This was the day that a neighbor
left his shovel upright in the snow in the morning and in
the evening found it on bare ground. It was the day that a
man in his seventies with whom I had stopped to talk
while he picked up twigs and shreds of bark from his
south-facing yard, turned away from me abruptly and
pointed with his finger, saying, "Look! Is that a bee? Yes,
by gurry! It's a bee! The first one!"
But there was more rain and more snow, and then, alas,
came the flooding we had hoped to be spared, as the
stream overflowed our lower road, this time to a depth of
two feet. For several days we came home through the
woods with our groceries in rucksacks, but again the snow
shrivelled and sank into the ground, and high winds dried
the mud. I saw a crowd of black starlings foraging in a
brown field, and heard the first cawing of crows. The
leaves of the gray birches uncurled. There were snow flurries, sun again, and the ponies followed the sun all day,
lolling on the dormant grass or in the mud. Shawno, too,
basked in the sun like a tourist on a cruise ship. He lay
blinking on a snowbank with his tongue extended, baking
above and cooling below. I pulled last year's leaves out of
several culverts, and opened channels in the dooryard
WlNTER 1982
�mud so that the standing water could reach the ditch.
Early one morning six Canada Geese flew over my head,
due north, silently, flying low; and then.at dusk the same
day I heard a partridge drumming in the woods.
Several days after Easter, when the garden was clear of
snow and the chives were three inches high, Ida came
striding into my room, striking her feet noisily on the floor
and grinning.
"Wake up, dad!" she called. "It's forty-forty!"
She was seven. I had told her the night before how
when she was four years old and could not count or tell
time she had invented that urgent hour, forty-forty, and
had awakened me one morning proclaiming it.
When she saw that I was awake, she said eagerly, "Look
out the window, daddy! Look!"
I did, and saw a world of astonishing whiteness. Clinging, heavy snow had come down copiously in the night
and had ceased before dawn. There was no wind at all.
Our white garden was bounded by a white rail fence,
every post of which was capped by a mound of white. The
pines and firs at the wood's edge were almost entirely
white, and the heavy snow had straightened their upwardsweeping branches, giving the trees a sharp triangular outline and a wonderfully festive look.
The whiteness was everywhere. Even the sky was
white, and the just-risen sun was not visible as a disc at all
but as a lovely haze of orange between whitenesses I knew
to be hills.
An hour later Ida, Shawno, and I were walking through
the silent, utterly motionless woods. We took the old
county road, that for decades now has been a mere trail,
rocky and overgrown. It goes directly up the wooded high
ridge of Folsom hill and then emerges into broad, shaggy
fields that every year become smaller as the trees move in.
We gather blueberries here in the summer, and in the fall
apples and grapes, but for almost two years now we have
come to the old farm for more sociable reasons.
After breakfast Ida had wanted to hear stories of her
earlier childhood, and now as we walked through the
woods she requested them again, taking my bare hand
with her small, gloved one, and saying, "Daddy, tell me
about when I was a kid."
"You mean like the time you disappeared in the snow?"
This was an incident I had described to her before, and
of which she delighted to hear.
"Yes!" she said.
"Well ... that was it-you disappeared. You were two
years old. You were sitting on my lap on the toboggan and
we went down the hill beside the house. We were going
really fast, and the toboggan turned over and you flew
into a snowbank and disappeared."
She laughed and said, "You couldn't even see me?"
"Nope. The snow was light and fluffy and very deep."
"Not even my head?"
"Not even the tassel on your hat."
"How did you find me?"
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
"I just reached down and there you were, and I pulled
you out."
She laughed triumphantly and said, "Tell me some
more."
While we talked in this fashion the dog trotted to and
fro among the snow-burdened close-set trees, knocking
white cascades from bushes and small pines. Often he
would range out of sight, leaping over deadfalls and
crouching under gray birches that had been pressed almost flat by the heavy snows of previous years, and then
he would come closer, sniffing at the six inch layer of wet
snow, and chuffing and snorting to clear his nose. Occasionally, snorting still more vigorously, he would thrust his
snout deep into the snow and then step back and busily
pull away snow and matted leaves with his front paws.
Watching all this, I understood once again that the
world of his experience was unimaginably different from
the world of mine. What were the actual sensations of his
sense of smell? How could I possibly know them? And
how were those olfactory shapes and meanings structured
in his memory? Snout, eyes, tongue, ears, belly-all were
close to the ground; his entire life was close to it, and mine
was not. I knew that in recent weeks complex odors had
sprung up in the woods, stirring him and drawing him excitedly this way and that. And I could see that last night's
snowfall had suppressed the odors and was thwarting him,
and that was all, really, that I could know.
After three-quarters of a mile the trail grew steep, and
the trees more numerous. We could not walk side by side;
I let Ida go in front, and our conversation now consisted of
the smiles we exchanged when she looked back at me over
her shoulder. I watched her graceful, well-formed little
body in its quilted red jacket and blue snow pants, and felt
a peace and happiness until now rare in my life.
Milky sky appeared between the snowy tops of the
trees. A few moments later there was nothing behind the
trees but the unmarked white of a broad field-at which
moment there occurred one of those surprises of country
life that are dazzling in much the way that works of art are
dazzling, but that occur on a scale no artwork can imitate.
I called to Ida, and she, too, cried aloud. The dog turned
to us and came closer, lifting his head eagerly.
The sight that so astonished us was this: several hundred birds, perhaps as many as five hundred, plump and
black, were scattered throughout the branches of one of
the maples at the wood's edge. The branches themselves
were spectacular enough, amplified by snow and traced
elegantly underneath by thin black lines of wet bark, but
the surprising abundance of the birds and their glossy
blackness against the white of the field were breathtaking.
I threw a stick at them. I couldn't resist. The entire tree
seemed to shimmer and crumble, then it burst, and black
sparks fluttered upward almost in the shape of a plume of
smoke. The plume thinned and tilted, then massed together again with a wheeling motion, from which a fluttering ribbon emerged, and the entire flock streamed
away in good order down the field to another tree.
19
�Shawno, who had remained baffled and excluded, resumed his foraging. He stopped and raised his head
alertly, then leaped forward in a bounding, enthusiastic
gallop, and in a moment was out of sight. When Ida and I
came to the spot he had just left, she, too, quickened excitedly, and with no more ceremony than had been shown
me by the dog let go of my hand and ran.
And if I had been a child, I would have followed, since it
was here, precisely here, that due to the lie of the land,
that is, the acoustics of the field, the playful, headlong
gaiety of two voices could be heard quite clearly, a girl's
voice shouting "I did, Leo! I did!" and the voice of her
brother, who was eight, replying, "Ha, ha, hal" and then
both shouting, "Shawno! Shawno!" I stood there and
watched Ida's diminutive figure running alone across the
snowy field in the direction of the house that was still to
come in sight.
I looked back for a moment down the long slope of the
field, towards the woods, the way we had come. I had intended to look for the birds, but our three sets of footprints caught my eye, and I could not help but smile at the
tale they told. They were like diagrams of our three different ways of being in the world. Mine, alas, denoted logic
and responsible decision: they plodded straight ahead,
straight ahead. Ida's footprints, in contrast to mine, went
out to the sides here and there, performed a few curlicues
and turns, and were even supplanted at one place by a
star-shaped body-print where she had thrown herself
laughing onto the snow.
But the footprints of the dog! ... this was a trail that was
wonderful to see! One might take it as erratic wandering,
or as continual inspiration, or as continua] attraction,
which may come to the same thing. It consisted of meandering huge loops, doublings, zig-zags, festoons ... The
whole was travelling as a system in the direction I had
chosen, yet it remained a system and was entirely his own.
The voices of the children grew louder. I saw the dark
gray flank of the made-over barn that was now their
home, and then saw the children themselves, running
with the dog among the whitened trees of the orchard.
These two, Gretl and Leo Carpenter, together with Ida
and myself and Eddie Dubord, complete the quintet of
Shawno's five great loves.
Gretl is Ida's age, Leo a year older. They are the children of Waldo and Aldana Carpenter, whom Patricia and
I have .known for years. But I have known Waldo since the
end of World War II, when we both arrived in New York
from small towns to the west.
Aldana was evidently waiting for me. She was standing
in the doorway, and when she saw me she beckoned. I had
not planned to stop, except to leave Ida and the dog, since
in all likelihood Waldo would be working, but Aldana had
no sooner waved to me than the broad window right
above her swung open and Waldo, too, beckoned to me,
cupping his hands and shouting. Aldana stepped out and
looked up at him, and they smiled at one another, though
his expression was not happy.
20
Aldana was fifteen years younger than Waldo. By the
time I came into the kitchen she was standing at the stove
turning thick strips of bacon with a fork. She looked
rested and fresh-it was one of the days, in fact, that her
entirely handsome and appealing person seemed actually
to be beautiful. She wore a dark blue skirt, a light sweaterblouse of gray wool, and loose-fitting boots from L. L.
Bean. Her long brown hair, that was remarkably thick and
glossy, was covered with a kerchief of deep blue.
"Waldo was up all night," she said to me, having already
urged me to eat with them. The large round table was set
for three.
She said, in a lower voice, ''We are going back."
She meant back to New York.
I had known that they wanted to. Waldo's excitement,
coming here, had had nothing to do with country life. He
had been fleeing New York and an art world that had become meaningless to him. His own painting, moreover, af
ter two periods of great success, was in a crisis of spirit,
and he had begun to mistrust the virtuosity (so he had told
me) that allowed him to cover this fact with achievements
of technique. But the isolation of country life had not had
the rejuvenating effect he had hoped for, and he had been
saying to me for a couple of months, "We won't be staying
forever . .. "
I was not surprised, then, to hear Aldana say that they
were leaving. Nevertheless, it was saddening, and I knew
that the loss, for Ida, would be severe.
I said as much to Aldana.
"We'll certainly miss you," she said. "All of you. All of
us. But we'll be back every summer."
"When are you going?"
"Soon. I don't know."
"How do the children feel about it?"
"We haven't told them yet," she said. "They've been
happy here ... but they do miss New York ... there's so
much to do ... "
I could hear Waldo walking on the floor above our
heads, and moving something. I asked him, shouting, if he
needed a hand. "I'll be right down," he called back.
Aldana looked into the oven, closing it quickly, and I
caught the aroma of yeast rolls.
The handsome kitchen had been the stables of the old
barn. The ceiling was low and was heavily beamed. Narrow horizontal windows ran the entire length of two sides
and gave fine views of our mountains, though today nothing could be seen in them but snowy woods and a misty
white sky. Many leafy plants, suspended in pots, were silhouetted in the white light. At the far end of the kitchen a
flight of open stairs led to Waldo's studio, and there also,
at that end, was Aldana's nook: a pine work table near the
window, on which there were several jars of small brushes,
a broad window-seat with cushions and many pillows, a
stool, more hanging plants, shelves with books and kerosene lamps. She was fluent in Lithuanian, and for two
years, at a leisurely pace, had been translating a cycle of
folktales for a children's book. She had done a great many
WINTER 1982
�gouache illustrations as well, and I knew that the project
'
was nearly finished.
I heard Waldo on the stairs. He stopped part way down,
and leaning forward called across to me, "Do you want to
see something?"
After the whites and blacks and evergreen greens of the
woods it was dazzling to see the colors of his work. He was
noted for these colors. Color was event, meaning, and
form.
Small abstract paintings on paper were pinned to the
white work wall, as were clippings from magazines and
some color wheels he had recently made. Larger paintings
on canvas, still in progress, leaned here and there, and two
were positioned on the wall. A stack of finished paintings,
all of which I had seen, leaned against the wall in the corner.
Waldo had placed the new painting on the seat of a
chair, and we stood side by side studying it. The paint was
still wet and gave off a pleasant odor of oil and turpentine.
Waldo's manner was that of an engineer. Physically he
was imposing, tall and strong, with a stern, black-browed,
grave face that was actually a forbidding face, or would
have been were it not that his underlying good humor was
never entirely out of sight. When he was alight with that
humor, which after all was fairly often, one saw an aston·
ishing sweetness and charm. Aldana, at such times, would
rest her hand on his shoulder, or stroke the back of his
head; and the children, if they were near, would come
closer, and perhaps climb into his lap.
The studio windows were sheeted with a plastic that
gave the effect of frosted glass, shutting off the outside
and filling the space with a shadowless white light.
Beyond one of those milky oblongs we heard a sudden
shouting and loud barking. Ida and Grell were shouting
together, "Help, Shawno! Help!" in tones that were al·
most but not quite urgent, and the dog was barking notes
of indignation, disapproval, and complaint, a medley that
occurred nowhere else but in this game, for I knew with·
out seeing it that Leo was pretending to beat the girls with
his fist, and was looking back at the dog, who in a moment
would spring forward and carefully yet quite excitedly
seize Leo's wrist with his teeth.
"It's a total dud," Waldo said dispassionately, "but it's
interesting, isn't it? Kerosene light does such weird things
to the colors. It's like working under a filter. Look how
sour and acidic it is. It's over-controlled, too, and at the
same time there are accidents everywhere. That's what
gives it that moronic look. I should have known betterI've done it before. When you rob the eye you rob the
mind."
Abruptly he turned to me and lowered his voice.
"We're going back to the city," he said. ''I'm going
down in a couple of days and see what has to be done ... "
I knew that he had not sublet his studio, which he
didn't rent, but owned-a floor-through in a large loft
building.
"We haven't told the kids yet," he said, "but I think
they want to go back. There's so much to do there ... "
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Aldana's voice came up from below. We cut short our
conversation and went down into the warm kitchen, that
was fragrant now with the odors of bacon, rolls, just·
brewed coffee, and fried eggs.
The rosy, bright-faced children stormed in just as we sat
down. Leo and Grell clamored for juice, while Ida looked
at them joyfully. Shawno came with them. He trotted to
Aldana, and to Waldo, and to me, greeting us eagerly but
without arresting his motion or taking his eyes from the
children. "Hi, Hi," they said to me. "Hi, daddy," said Ida.
All three tilted their heads, took on fuel, and with the dog
bounding among them rushed out again as noisily as they
had entered.
The sky was beginning to clear when I left half an hour
later, and it was blue now, but a pale, wintry blue. A light,
raw breeze was blowing.
I crossed the dooryard without calling to the children.
They were throwing snowballs at Shawno, except for Ida,
who was tagging along. They ran among the budded but
leafless apple trees, while the dog, who did not under·
stand that he was their target, kept leaping and twisting,
biting the snowballs with swift snaps that reduced them to
fragments.
I went alone down the snowy road to the right, toward
the river. Little clumps of snow were falling wetly from
the roadside trees.
I had been cheerful coming through the woods with Ida
and the dog, but now a familiar sadness began to creep
through me. There was an objective cause in the fact that
our friends were leaving, but I knew that this was not the
cause, the cause was old, and in truth I didn't know what
it was. It was as if this sadness, which at times was
touched by homelessness, were a zone between the animation I felt in the presence of others and the firmness I
felt in the solitude to which finally, after many years of
loneliness, I had been able to attain. And I was obliged to
pass through this zone, though I had passed through it
thousands of times already.
My solitary footprints were the only markings on the
short spur from Waldo's house to the back road, but as
soon as I made the turn I found myself walking between
the muddy tracks of a car. In ten minutes I stood on the
high ledge that overlooked the river and that invariably I
came to when I walked this way.
The river was broad in this stretch, and was still heavy
with spring flood. The water was dark. Huge pieces of ice
were strewn in a continuous line on the steep bank across
from me. The ice had been dirty with debris a week ago,
but now temporarily was white.
Two miles downriver lay the town, on which all such
villages as ours were dependent. There were its hundreds
of houses, its red roofs and black roofs, its white clapboard
sidings, its large, bare-limbed shade trees, all following the
slopes of the hills. I could see the gleaming belltowers and
white spires of the four churches, the plump wooden cupola of the town hall, also white, and several red-brick
business buildings. It was a lovely sight from this angle,
21
�but it no longer stirred me. Just the opposite. The town
was spiritless and dull, without a public life of any kind, or
any character of its own, but the usual brand names in the
stores and the usual cars on the streets.
Just this side of the town, the elegant timbered latticework of a railroad trestle crossed the river high in the air,
emerging from evergreens on one bank and plunging into
evergreens on the other.
Halfway to the trestle, where the hills, for a short distance, gave way to lowland, the broad pasture of a dairy
lay in a sweeping bend of the river. Its tall blue silo and
unpainted sheet metal barn stood close to the highway,
uphill from the fields. Black and white cows, a herd of
Holsteins which I knew numbered a hundred and fifty,
progressed across their snowy pasture toward the river, as
if without moving.
There came a loud metallic scraping and banging from
the gravel pit below me. A bucket-loader was scooping up
gravel. It swivelled and showered the stones heavily into a
waiting truck, that quivered under the impact. Another
truck, as I watched, drove down the long incline to the
riverbank.
I went home by the same route, thinking chiefly of my
work, that had become a kind of monastery, I had had to
empty it of so many things.
Shawno and the children were still playing, but they
were no longer running. Ida and Gretl were holding the
two sides of a flattened cardboard box, quite large, and
Leo, wielding a hammer, was nailing it to the rails of a
broken hay wain by the house, apparently to be the roof
of a hut. The dog sat near them, more or less watching. I
didn't call or wave, but Shawno saw me. He responded
with a start ... and then he did something I had seen him
do before and had found so touching I could not resent:
he pretended that he hadn't seen me. He turned his head
and yawned, stood up and stretched, dropped abruptly to
the ground with his chin on his paws, and then just as
abruptly stood up again and moved out of sight around
the house. What a display of doggy craftiness! It makes me
smile to remember it-even though I must now say that
this was the last that I saw him in the fullness of his life. I
did see him again, but by our bedtime that night he was
dead.
I went back alone through the woods, walking on the
footprints we had made that morning. In a scant three
hours the snow had become both wetter and shrivelled. It
was no deeper than three inches now, and was falling
noisily from the trees, leaving the branches wet and glistening.
At the bottom of the first hill, where I had to jump
across a little stream, and where that morning I had lifted
Ida, I noticed the footprints of two deer. The deer had
gone somewhere along the stream and then had come
back, running. I hadn't noticed the tracks that morning ... but I wasn't sure.
Instead of going home, I turned into the little field at
the far end of which my cabin/studio was situated. Every-
22
thing was quiet, the fresh snow untouched. I was halfway
across the field when I caught a movement in the sky.
High up, drawing a broad white line behind it, a military
jet drifted soundlessly. A moment later the thunderclap of
the sonic boom startled me ... and as if it had brought
them into being, two dogs stepped out of the woods behind my cabin. Or rather, one stepped out, a brown and
white collie, and came toward me. The other, a solemnlooking rabbit hound, stood motionless among the trees.
I thought I recognized the collie and called to it. It came
a few steps, and then a few steps more. It stood still when
it heard my voice, then it turned and went back to the
other dog, and both vanished into the woods.
I built a fire in the cabin, in the cast-iron stove, and
spent the rest of the day at my work.
Before the house at night.
As was my custom, whether I had done the cooking or
not, I mixed some scraps and pan rinsings with dry food
and went to the door to call Shawno, who ate when we did
and in the same room. Ida had come home that afternoon
with Patricia, but Shawno had not.
Half an hour later, after we had finished eating, and
while the water was heating for coffee, I went outside
again and called him, but this time I went across the road
and stood before the barn. The lie of the land was such
that in this position, and with the help of that huge sounding-board, my voice would carry to Waldo's fields, at least
to the sharp ears of the dog. I shouted repeatedly. As I
went back to the house I thought I saw movement on the
woods road we had travelled that morning. I was expecting to see him come bounding toward me, but nothing
happened and I went into the house.
We finished our coffee and dessert. Liza was staying
overnight with the twins she played with. Patricia sat on
the sofa with Jacob and Ida and read first a picture book
and then a story of Ernest Thompson Seton's, that enchanted Ida and put Jacob to sleep.
I telephoned Aldana. She said that the dog had left
them shortly after Patricia had come in the car for Ida. He
had stayed like that often with Leo and Gretl and had
come home through the woods at suppertime.
I put the porch light on and went across to the barn
again. I was preparing to shout when I saw him in the
shadows of the woods road, at the same place in which I
had thought I had seen movement before. A turbulence
of alarm, a controlled panic raced through me, and I ran to
him calling.
He lay on his belly. His head was erect, but just barely,
and was not far above the ground. He pulled himself forward with his front paws, or tried to, but no motion resulted. His hind legs were spread limply behind him. His
backbone seemed inert.
I knelt beside him and took his head on my knees. He
WINTER 1982
�was breathing so faintly that I doubted if any air was
reaching his lungs. I heard my own voice saying in the
high-pitched, grievously astonished tones of a child, "Oh,
dog, dog ... "
I ran my hand down his body. Near his lower ribcage,
even in the shadows, I could see a dark mass that here and
there glistened dully. It was smooth and soft, and there
jutted out of it numerous fine points sharper than a saw. I
.was touching the exit wound of a large-calibre bullet, in·
testines and shattered bone.
I put my face close to his and stroked his cheek. He was
looking straight ahead with a serious, soft, dim gaze. He
gave a breath that sounded like a sigh because it was not
followed by another breath, and instantaneously was heavy
to the touch.
I stayed there a long while with his head on my knees,
from time to time crying like a child.
I heard the front door open and heard Patricia calling
me. A moment later she was kneeling in the mud beside
Tiffi ST. JOHNS REVJEW
me saying, "Oh, oh, oh . .. " in a voice of compassion and
surpnse.
We conferred briefly, and I went indoors.
Ida sat on the sofa, in the light of the floor lamp, looking
at the pictures in the Seton book. Jacob lay asleep at the
other end of the sofa.
I said to her, "Ida, something has happened ... " and
knelt in front of her. She saw that I had been crying, and
her face whitened.
I said, "Shawno has been hurt very very badly ... " I did
not want to say to her that he was dead. "He's out front,"
I said. "Come."
She said, "Okay" quickly, never taking her eyes from
mine. She gave me her hand and we went outside, into
the road, where Patricia still knelt beside him just beyond
the light from the porch. She was bowed above him and
was stroking him. She looked up as we approached, and
held out one hand for Ida, but with the other kept stroking
his head, neck, and shoulders.
23
�Nietzsche and the Classic
William Mullen
Quod si tam Graecis novitas invisa fuisset quam
Horace
nobis, quid nunc esset vetus?
If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece,
Balanchine
how will you ever get it finished?
T
O ASK WHAT CONSTITUTES A CLASSIC
is to ask
what kind of civilization we inhabit. Imagine, for the
sake of contrast, a purely archaic civilization in
which the paradigms for thought and action are so definitively expounded in the foundation myths that innovation is excluded altogether_ Then imagine, as its opposite,
a purely scientific civilization in which the piecemeal
progress towards greater knowledge and control relentlessly renders every aspect of the past an object for amusement and contempt If we like to think we have put the
first kind of civilization behind us forever (assuming it
ever existed) and yet have still not entirely succumbed to
the second (assuming it could ever entirely win out), our
conviction is somehow due to the presence of classic
works in our midst, holding at bay both the tyranny of the
past and the tyranny of the future by continuing to inspire new works in the present.
The usual lament of the classicist, of course, is directed
against the tyranny of the future, and the more threatened
he becomes by the ascendancy of science, the more Egyptological he becomes in his techniques-mummification of
the classics at all costs. But I am more interested in considering here the opposite threat, the tyranny of the past itWilliam Mullen is a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His book,
Choreia: Pindar and Dance, will appear in the summer of 1982 (Princeton University Press).
24
self, and its only true check, the continuous creation of
new work fine enough to take a place beside the old. The
reason we secure the presence of classic works among us
is not that they are so fine that we can never equal them
but, on the contrary, that they are so fine that they will always challenge us to equal them.
In his earliest writings on the Greeks, Nietzsche pointed
out that it is no accident that the people from whom our
finest instances of the classic are taken was one that
pushed the principle of competition to its limits, in the
spheres of poetry and art no less than athletics and politics. 1 But the power of competition to incite the artists of
our civilization to do their best is inadequately shown by
its place in the culture of a single people, for competition
between peoples as well as within them has long been a
governing principle for us. The complex civilization of the
West assumed its essential form when the Romans worked
out a truce with Greek culture whereby classic status was
granted to Roman imitations that could join their Greek
models in rank without replacing them. This notion of a
highest rank that remains open to expansion is one to
which the word itself points, the Latin classicus originally
designating someone who belonged to the highest of the
five classes into which Roman citizens were divided when
the roll of the army was called.
Classics, of course, can only be so designated by later
generations. "Le classique," as Valery put it, "c'est ce qui
WINTER 1982
�vient apnes." As a new work comes into the light it may
well seem to rival the classics of the past for brilliance but
it is impossible to say at the time whether it will also rival
them for durability. And the question of durability becomes particularly problematic when one considers that
while some classic works exist as objects-paintings, statues, buildings-others exist as performing events-music,
dance, theater. In the case of the art object the materials
of which the work is made give a preliminary guarantee of
durability and it is only a question whether the work will
continue to be valued enough to be maintained in a position of honor. In the case of the performance event, however, durability can be achieved only by revivals, where all
is at hazard because there is no guarantee that the revival
will house the original informing spirit. And the difficulty
becomes acute when one considers that the original Greek
classics in the medium we call "poetry" were actually of a
dual nature, being performance events when they first appeared and turning into classics only after being stripped
of their musical and orchestic accompaniment in order to
become durable as texts. The work done by the classic
masters of Greek music and dance has completely van·
ished, both the work done to accompany poetry and whatever autonomous masterpieces may have been executed
in these media. In what sense, then, do we really possess
the classics of Greek poetry at all, and what is it we are doing when we set about to "equal" them?
If the question of durability is made difficult by the fact
of the variety of artistic media, then we must ask what is
the ground of this variety in the first place. In order to
come into its proper flowering, a work of art must be pres-
ent to the senses as well as the mind, and the fact that we
possess five different senses is in itself enough to necessitate a variety of media that can appeal to them either severally or in combination. The variety of media is in effect
one of the conditions apart from which we would be unable to experience art at all, for it flows from our bodily
existence in time as well as space. And works of the performing arts, which require fixed periods of time to be
unfolded before us, by that very fact also require that we
accept the element of transience in their conditions of
presentation. It should be clear, then, that this is a quint·
essentially Nietzschean subject I have in hand, since it has
ultimately to do with the status of the bodily and the tern
poral. The desire for the old works of art that are kept
present to be rivalled by new ones turns out to be grounded
in the disposition·of a healthy civilization to set high value
on the presence in its midst of works by which the human
senses are exalted. It is in new work, before the mind has
set about to gain distance by reflection and categorization, that the element of sensuous presence is most obviously compelling; and by juxtaposing new work with old
we remind ourselves of the importance of remaining open
to the same intensity of sensuous presence in the classics
themselves as well as their recent rivals, even when, as in
the Gase of the performing arts, this means exposing ourselves to transient revivals in the absence of the original
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
production. Nietzsche himself had a zest for theorizing
about the differences among the various artistic media,
and I should like, therefore, to try to extend some of his
leading ideas in the course of exploring the nature of the
classic as it is incarnated in different kinds of works of art
and different conditions of presentation.
B
EFORE DOING SO, however, it is best to acknowledge
at the outset how quickly these ideas come to grief
when transferred from the realm of art to the realm
of politics. Throughout his writing there runs a notion
which, color it how one will, remains irreducibly offensive,
namely, that a statesman aiming at greatness should consider himself an artist and other human beings his medium. Curiously enough, this monster first rears its head
in an early essay on "The Greek State" in which Nietzsche
praises Plato precisely for his cool willingness, in the Republic, to treat all other citizens as mere tools and means
for the production of "the Genius." 2 That Plato's ideal Genius was meant to be a philosopher and a scientist rather
than an artist, Nietzsche proposed, is only a regrettable
consequence of his appropriation of Socrates' negative
judgment on art, and should not distract us from the essential point that on the matter of treating citizens as a
Mittel-the German word for both "means" and "medium" -Plato had got things right.
I suggest that the very oddity of this way of reading the
Republic has the advantage of forcing us to face one of
the gravest questions raised by the speakers of that dialogue as they devise a city in speech rather than in deed. It
was Hannah Arendt, using an Aristotelian distinction, who
suggested that the reason the program of the Republic
would lead to such oppressive political consequences if actually implemented is that it is based on a mistaken substitution of the category of fabrication for that of action. This
is so because the craftsman (and the Greek language did
not explicitly distinguish between artificers and artists)
must first contemplate in solitude the mental model of
what he wishes to make-its idea, shape, or form, whence
the Platonic "idea" -and must then use violence on the
medium at hand in order to realize that model as best he
can. (Compare, for instance, Republic SOla and 54la.) In
raising her objections to the analogy between craftsman
and statesman, Arendt's immediate concern was to show
how the violence implicit in it was actualized when Marxism declared the "making" of a classless society an end
which justified any "means" and hence any treatment of
one's "medium." 3 But she might equally well have given
an account of the justification of violence by Nazism
through reference to its esthetic goals, for it is well-known
how many esthetes flocked to the early Nazi movement
and how belief in the supremacy of German art served as
a stimulus to the task of creating racial purity. In order to
transform the rough block of the citizenry into the fair
statue of the state one must be prepared to hack off the
25
�racially or physiologically sick and not to flinch if this human marble happens to make cries of pain as it is hewn.
To see the notion of men as both "medium" and "means"
in its most virulent form one needs to turn to Nietzsche's
late notebook jottings collected posthumously under the
title The Will to Power. "To keep objective, hard, firm in
executing a design-this is something artists are best at.
But when one needs men for that purpose (as do teachers,
statesmen, etc.) then the calmness and coldness and hardness quickly disappear. In natures like Caesar and Napoleon one can get a sense for jdisinterested' work on their
marble, whatever may have to be sacrificed by way of
men." 4 In the face of passages like this the convenient notion of Nazis as coarse literalizers of Nietzsche's refined
metaphors breaks down. Here a proto-Nazi esthete would
find just the sort of encouragement he needed to emerge
from his esthetic cocoon into totalitarian practice. 5 It is no
exculpation of Nietzsche to argue that he expressed contempt for the particular analysis that was later to come to
power, namely, that he preferred racial mixture as a better
breeding technique than racial purity. He is as explicit in
theory as the Nazis were in practice in his contempt for
the ethical principle at issue, whose classical formulation
is Kant's imperative always to treat human beings as ends
and never solely as means.
T
to Nietzsche's complexity, however,
we must take seriously the parenthesis in the jotting
just quoted, in which he mentions as instances of
those who must use men as their medium not only statesmen but also teachers. Insofar as the contents and methods
of an educational system are not entirely pre-legislated
and supervised, there is a temptation to see something of
the artist's prerogative over his material in the way the
teacher exercises authority over his students, and in fact
metaphors of "molding minds" and "shaping characters"
are seldom absent in discussions of the way educators
transform the young. We do not feel uneasy with these
metaphors because in a society of specialists we like to
think that the various things that need to be taught are in
various hands and that accordingly some kind of benign
separation of powers holds sway. The good is taught by
the parents inculcating morality at home, the true by the
teachers transmitting knowledge at school, and the beautiful by the artists passing on skills in their studios. The
nature of the authority of the molders of the young becomes more provocative, however, when we turn from
the problematic pluralism of the present to a highly integrated society like that of archaic Greece. I am referring
now not to the theoretical programs of Plato's Republic or
Laws but to the realities of the city in the time of Pindar
and Aeschylus.
In these archaic cities the choral poets who train young
dancers to perform sacred odes in public spaces are granted
authority simultaneously to teach them singing, dancing,
26
O DO )USTICE
morality, and the tales of the tribe. In Athenian tragedy
the authority the playwright exercises over his performers
is complicated by the fact that as part of a dramatic fiction
the chorus members assume personalities other than their
own and doff them when the play is over, so that even
though they are allowed to participate in the ritual only
if they are able-bodied and free-born male citizens of
Athens, it is not these aspects of their identity which their
role in the play is exhibiting to their fellow-citizens. In a
Pindaric ode, however, the free-born young men or young
women of the city perform in propria persona and are expected by their elders to believe in the words they recite
as they dance. The elders would have dismissed a poet for
training the youth in odes that exhibited bad morals no
less than bad dancing, false tales no less than false notes.
Not that we need sentimentalize the matter by assuming
that every single member of a Pindaric chorus was a good
Boy Scout and did in fact acquire the morals Pindar had to
teach him. Enough that through participation in many
choral events a young person would be trained in the public quality of morality and learn by instinct how he was expected to act. (Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.)
Moreover, by making these young dancers the mouthpieces for what his civilization most valued, the poet was
in effect arranging a spectacle in which truth and goodness were fused with beauty, and unabashedly so. In all
this the dancers are unquestionably the medium of the
poet, but far from being denied their human dignity by
such treatment they are in fact led by it, educatively, from
the confusion of adolescence to the bracing norms of
adulthood.
EADERS OF The Birth of Tragedy will notice quite a
difference between my very Apollonian account of
these Pindaric dancers and Nietzsche's very Dionysian one of the tragic chorus. His dancers are empowered
by their song and dance to doff their identities and merge
with the primordial unity, while those I have preferred to
fix my gaze on are rather bringing their identities into perfect focus, declaring by song and dance the essence of
what it is to be a free-born and able-bodied young man or
woman in a particular city 6 Moreover, the dithyrambic
improvisations in which Nietzsche wishes to see both the
origin and the essence of the tragic chorus would seem
to have dispensed with pre-arranged choreography altogether and to require at most a leader who impersonates
the hallucinated god, whereas the odes of Pindar require
the poet's presence in the city not only as leader of the
dance during performance but also as choreographer and
chorus-trainer beforehand.' The choreographer's engagement with the dancers as the medium in which he executes a. meaningful design is in effect an aspect of dance
which Nietzsche ignores in preference to some more mys~
tical situation in which the dancers improvise through
direct contact with the powers of nature. Consider his
R
WINTER 1982
�characterization of the tragic dancers in the last sentences
of the very opening section of the book. "Man is no longer
artist, he has become the work of art: the artistic power of
all nature, to the highest delight of the primordial unity,
makes itself manifest in the thrill of intoxication [Rausch].
The noblest clay, the most costly marble, Man, is here
kneaded and hewn, and to the chisel strokes of the Diony·
sian world-artist sounds out the Eleusinian mystery-cry:
'Do you bow down, Millions? Do you divine your Creator,
World?' " 8 Both the metaphor from sculpture and the
mystical HDionysian
world~artist"
here betray Nietzsche's
unwillingness to consider the choreographer's art on its
own terms. Indeed, throughout his writings he takes infinite delight in dance as an activity and a metaphor, but
never once considers it as an artistic medium and never
mentions a single choreographer or ballet.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was positing the
chorus as the essence of the Dionysian in order to work
out an Hegelian scheme according to which the actors
represented the essence of the Apollonian and tragedy as
a whole constituted some higher synthesis in the history
of Greek genres. In order to fill in this scheme, he had to
posit Homer as the earlier type of the Apollonian, and
then lay Archilochus and Pin dar on the bed of Procrustes
as successive types of the Dionysian. Soon thereafter he
abandoned the whole Hegelian construct and began to
call in question the superiority of Athenian culture itself,
so that in the notes for We Philologists he is to be seen
playing with such tantalizing propositions as the following: "Athenian tragedy is not the supreme form we might
think it is. Its heroes are too much lacking in the Pindaric
quality."' I am, therefore, not interested in lingering to
discuss his earlier distortions, but wish rather to see what
his later use of the Apollonian/Dionysian distinction has
to say about the effects of various artistic media on those
who experience them, as artists, as participants, and as
spectators. The essential text lies in two consecutive
"Skirmishes of an Untimely Man" in Twilight of the Idols. 10
Here he restates his earlier association of the Apollonian
experience with the painter, the sculptor, and the epic
poet, and the Dionysian with the actor, the dancer, the
musician, and the lyric poet; but now he shows greater sophistication in suggesting both the physiological bases of
the distinction and the historical development which both
categories of media have undergone. In Apollonian art, he
theorizes, it is the artist's eye which is engaged, with the
result that the existence of the work as an object separate
from him is brought to the fore; while in Dionysian art,
the whole muscular and nervous system is engaged, with
the result that the artist'·becomes a mimic of whatever inspires him and hence a participant in the event which the
work of art becomes. The media of modern man are the
result of a process of specialization. The poet, the musician, and the choreographer, who used to be united in a
single performing artist who led the dance, are now three
separate specialists who do not necessarily form part of a
performance at all.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
A
S HEIDEGGER HAS SUGGESTED, Nietzsche's usual
interest in his characterization of art seems to be in
the state of the artist as he creates rather than in
the independent quality of the resultant work of art or the
particular modes in which the work is experienced by others11 This is the state Nietzsche calls Rausch- rapture, intoxication, frenzy, the feeling that "rushes" over the artist
and carries him beyond himself into creation-and it is
significant that in the sections just referred to in Twilight
of the Idols, the Apollonian artist is said to experience
Rausch no less than the Dionysian, only through the eye,
rather than the nerves and muscles of the rest of the body.
But in these sections the term Rausch is actually being
used by way of prelude to another, the famous "will to
power" itself. And, surprisingly, Nietzsche here assigns
the will to power a medium of its own, architecture. "The
architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollonian
condition: here it is ... the intoxication [Rausch] of the
great will that demands art. Architects have always been
inspired by the most powerful men; the architect has always been under the 'suggestion' of power. In architecture ... the will to power means to make itself visible ...
The highest feeling of power and sureness comes to expression in the great style."
Since elsewhere Nietzsche goes so far as to say that everything in the world is simply one form or another of the
will to power, one is at first perplexed. 12 Surely the will to
power will also be at play in the various states (Rausch
whether of the eye or the whole body) in which artists
turn to other media, and surely the resultant works of art
will also bear witness to it. Moreover, insofar as all art
brings things into full presence to the senses-into visibility, audibility, surface-why is it in architecture especially
that "the will to power means to make itself visible"?
Nietzsche is no longer interested now in setting up any
medium as a synthesis of Apollonian and Dionysian conditions, but rather in designating architecture as a medium that stands apart from them both and brings the will
to power into appearance in a special way.
A clue to his thinking here lies in the fact that this is
one of the rare occasions on which he mentions not only
the creators and participants in works of art but also their
patrons. To speak of these "powerful men" at whose b!'hest the architect creates a building is to raise the question of its purpose. In order to bring a great building into
being, an architect must employ more durable materials
than any other kind of artist, must claim more space, mobilize more resources, and give more commands. Above
all, he must consult more closely with the desires of his patron, whether individual, institution, church, or state, and
if the patron has commissioned a great building, then
these desires will reach beyond mere functionality. Whatever the intended function of the building might be, its
coming into appearance as a work of art shows that the
power of its patron is possessed of the will and the means
to stability and endurance. The patron will understand
this as well as the architect, and the cooperation of the
27
�two will always ultimately be with a view to the final effect of the building on other people. Churchill's saying,
that we shape our buildings and our buildings then shape
us, needs to be more precise. It is architect and patron
who shape the building, and it is us they are aiming to
shape by it.
I suspect, then, that Nietzsche sets such value on architecture precisely because it fuses the categories of art and
politics. And the suspicion is increased by the striking fact
that his favorite way of praising the Roman Empire is in
architectural metaphors. The most manic expression of
this association comes in The Antichrist: "Is it still not un·
derstood yet? The imperium Romanum . .. this most admirable work of art in the great style, was a beginning, its
construction was calculated to give proof of itself over millenia-to this day no one has ever again built in such a
way, has even dreamed of building in the same measure
sub specie aetemi! This organization was stable enough to
support bad emperors: the accident of individuals ought
to be insignificant in such matters-first principle of all
great architecture." 13 The praise continues into the next
section, which describes the Romans' act of consolidating
the classical heritage as "the will to the future of man, the
great Yes to all things made visible as the imperium Romanum, visible for all the senses, the great style no longer
merely art but rather become reality, truth, life . .. " 14
Underneath the dithyrambic phrasing it is not hard to
grasp the essential characteristics of architecture that
make it easy for Nietzsche to identify it with the will to
power. Any ambitiously constructed building is meant to
last longer than the lifespans of its builders and to be used
by future generations. These generations will be molded
by both the functional and the esthetic aspects of the
building. Architect and patron cooperate to cast the spell
of their power over the future both in art and in life, and
we may accept the legitimacy of this ambition without being forced to debate the morality of political ambitions for
the expansion of an imperial system in space. Roman ar~
chitecture remains our great symbol of the ambition to
make cultural institutions endure through time.
of art in its own right but also both a functional means
and a compelling symbol for the process by which a civilization honors its classical works. And as part of this process it also helps to create a space in which the new work
can be juxtaposed to the old, an act no less essential to a
healthy civilization than the preservation of the classics
themselves. To see a work of modern art exhibited in a
museum built in the neoclassical style is an experience
which, common as it may be, has some meaning if we consider the tension between old and new which these conditions of presentation intend to symbolize.
ITH ROMAN ARCHITECTURE as a paradigm, then,
I wish to bring this meditation on artistic media
to its proper culmination by offering a few examples of the ways in which some of the best works of art our
civilization has to offer have themselves symbolically acknowledged, as part of their own conditions of coming
into being, the crucial tension between the old and the
new, between that which is preserved in presence and
that which comes into presence for the first time. Buildings are not the only works of art capable of making such
acknowledgements, nor were the Romans the only people
to be conscious of their importance. I shall therefore include examples from poetry and dance as well as architecture, and take them from the earliest as well as the most
recent phases of the West. What I am looking for are cases
in which it is clear that an artist is not merely presenting a
new work of art by itself without any reference to its conditions of appearance, but on the contrary is going out of
his way to insure that the new work have old ones in its
background, and that the transience of the conditions of
its first appearance be assured of being transformed into
the durability of the conditions of preservation that will
attend it if its bid for classic status is successful.
My example from the earliest phase will be an ode of
W
Pindar, whose poetry is in many ways more archaic even
than that of Homer. The Fifth Nemean, one of his most
Mozartean compositions, is a victory ode, or epinician, for
a boy pancratiast from the island of Aegina, famous in antiquity both for its athletic statuary and its temple archi-
I
PROPOSED AT THE OUTSET that our civilization in its
essential form came into being only when the brief but
glorious artistic achievement of Greece was preserved
by the Romans in such a way that their own artistic efforts
might be juxtaposed to it. This is a process which it is one
of the most important tasks of architecture to make possible. It does so in one sphere by sheltering and setting in
relief those other works of art which endure as objects,
and in another by shaping a space for the performing arts
in which they can take on scale and project themselves to
a particular audience. If one includes churches and temples as well as museums and concert-halls, the comprehensiveness of architecture's roles becomes clearer, for
one is then speaking of sacred art and ritual performance.
A work of architecture is thus not only an enduring work
28
tecture.
To compliment his hosts, Pindar begins by having himself and his chorus of Aeginetan boys claim, as they strike
up the dance, that "I am no statue-maker, to fashion
sculptures at holiday as they stand on their own pedestals," an opening sally which may well have been underscored by choreography imitating sculptural positions for
a split second before whirling merrily on. In standard epinician form, the ode goes on to praise the boy victor, and
then to make its way back, by a series of allusions and
partly told stories, to the foundational age of the earlier
Aeginetan heroes, including the founding father Aeacus
himself, who had once saved all Greece from a drought by
supplicating his own father Zeus for rain. Finally, in its
last line and a half, the ode returns to the present and
WINTER 1982
�praises the athletic victories of the boy's grandfather in
the following language: "At the portals of Aeacus bring
him crowns luxuriant with flowers, in the company of the
blond Graces." The "portals of Aeacus" here are the fore·
court of a shrine to that hero at the center of the city,
fronting the agora, where victory dances were normally
performed. This shrine was decorated with friezes depict·
ing the same event alluded to in the ode, the moment at
which Zeus showed favor to Aeacus by showering on the
parched land; such moments of favor typically form the
climax both of the odes' mythical language and of their
choreography. Since the forecourt of hero-shrines was a
traditional place for erecting statues of victorious athletes,
the dancers may have been referring to a ritual custom according to which victors might have their crowns placed
on the statues of ancestors who had themselves been victorious in earlier games. Whether or not this is the case
here, it is clear that some kind of offering of flowers is being made before the shrine as the ode comes to its end, an
act carried out in stylized motion which is to be thought
of as a continuation of the ode's ritual choreography.
All we have left of this lovely event is the concluding
phrase quoted earlier about the portals of Aeacus and the
blond Graces: 7r/Jo8Vpoww llAtcxKofJ &ve~wv trouhvTlx 4>EPe
an</Jom;,,ara avv ~av8afs X&pwmv. Fully conscious that
his language is destined to endure as a memorial text, Pindar seems to be playing here, as often at the conclusion
of his odes, with the implication that as the never-to-be
repeated victory dance draws to its close the language
which it has sustained is begining to move into its own immortality as a text. He is seeking a symbol of the ode's
dual nature, as transient dance and as enduring text, and
he finds it in the contrast between the luxuriant flowers
out of which the young victor's crown has been woven
and the magnificently sculpted stone of the statues and
friezes at the front of the ancestral shrine. Nor is Pindar
satisfied to allude to this contrast by the language alone;
he seems also to have arranged to draw it into the circle of
the ode's choreography, by having the flowers placed in
the forecourt of the shrine at the very moment when the
language falls still and the motion of the dancers continues in silence. To this ritual motion the vivid archaic
smiles on the faces of the ancestral athletic statues and
the heroic friezes are witness, in that acclamation between living and dead which can be fully mutual only if it
is made in silence.
And somehow present in all this, through the invocation of the final phrase, is the consort of the Graces themselves, goddesses of the transient comeliness of dancing
and flowers, who as immortals can themselves never fade.
Through the fostering by these divine presences, as well
as by Father Zeus and Father Aeacus, the new work of the
poet has blossomed into public performance and is now
about to reach the moment at which it will cease to be a
ritual dance and begin to be a durable text. It is taking its
place among the immortal stone masterpieces by which
the center of the city is adorned, and by the act of naming
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
these masterpieces and declaring its place among them, it
becomes a monument to its own occasion. The old and
the new are thus made in the most essential way to belong
to each other, and the same is true of the transient and
the durable; it is a belonging registered by the combination of the several media at the occasion of the performance. The old and the durable are present as sculpture,
the new and the transient are present as dance, and sover-
eign over all is the language of the ode which both declares these dualities and transcends them.
SHALL NOT TRY to claim that such a blaze of civic splendor has been equalled by any poetic event of recent times.
If there is an absence at the center of our civilization it
may lie just here: in our inability to agree on any objects of
reverence deeply enough to summon forth our best poets
and have them arrange spectacles at the centers of our cities in which the young both embody and share our agreement in the course of their performance. Efforts to mount
such spectacles in the Twentieth Century have usually
been totalitarian parodies, and it takes only one look at
films of the Nuremberg rallies to make most people flee
back to pluralism with a sigh of relief.
Acknowledging this difficult absence, then, I nevertheless have no desire to end with yet another eloquent
grouse against the age. As Nietzsche puts it in one of his
aphorisms on the classic, "Both classically and romantically minded spirits ... are preoccupied by a vision of the
future, but the former out of the strength of their time,
the latter out of its weakness." 15 The more classically
minded tack here, the one which refuses to lapse into
complaining out of weakness, would be simply to let one's
eye rove in a fine frenzy until it lights on the best work
now being done and then to ask whether anything like the
same interplay of the old and the new, and of the durable
and the transient, is to be traced in the conditions in
which it comes into public appearance. The artists I wish
to honor by this kind of inquiry work in media which lie at
the two extremes of the spectrum I have proposed in
speaking of the combination Pindar arranges. They are
George Balanchine, whose repertory of dances currently
being offered at the New York City Ballet is acknowledged
to be one of the greatest choreographic achievements in
the century, and I. M. Pei, whose career seemed to reach
its peak recently with the opening of the East Building of
the National Gallery in Washington. And, as it happens,
next to both artists stand patrons worthy of them, respectively Lincoln Kirstein and Paul Mellon, whose roles and
intentions also deserve to be honored by reflection.
I
T
HE LEVEL OF EXCELLENCE at which the New York
City Ballet is performing right now is rather terrifying. One risks nothing in calling it currently the finest dance company in the world; the knowledgeable go
further and prophesy that what we have been seeing for
29
�Figure I: The architect's concept sketch, showing the existing network of streets
and the relationship between the National Gallery (West Building, left) and the new
East Building. The altitude of the larger of the two triangles which comprise the
new building prolongs the long axis of the old building. The numbers in the upper
part of the sketch refer to square feet of space in the two buildings. (Figures 1 and 2
courtesy I. M. Pei & Associates.)
the last few decades will someday be as legendary as Diaghilev's Ballet Russe. Balanchine has been choreographing
new works for this company uninterruptedly since 1935,
and his presence has set the finest dancers in the world
knocking at its doors. Since the company lacks a "star system," the number of dancers of the highest rank it can
admit is, like my definition of the classic, theoretically susceptible of indefinite expansion. These resources of talent
have in turn enabled it to maintain a prodigious repertory
from season to season, so that in the winter and spring
seasons of 1980-81, some forty Balanchine ballets were
performed in addition to those of the company's other
choreographers. The sense of superabundance is heightened yet further by the variety of musical scores represented. Of the musicians who have written expressly for
ballet, Balanchine prefers to choreograph to scores of his
fellow Russians Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, but he has
also choreographed a series of masterpieces in homage to
Bach, Gluck, Mozart, Brahms, Bizet, and others. Coming
away from an evening with a strong program, one feels
that by some miracle time has been collapsed and the
highest graces of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries have been made present together in the
same theater, not as objects but as living bodies performing at the limits of skill under the direction of a master
fully capable of rising to the scores he has selected.
Modern technology is of course hard at work trying to
pin down these wonders, the choreography by dance notation and the performances by videotape, and Balanchine himself has lived to contemplate the production of
his works by many other companies around the world
whose stagings he has neither supervised nor seen. Some
speculate that his preponderance will only be augmented
after his death and might have something of the same
30
daunting effect as Beethoven did on later writers of symphonies, but all talk of monumental permanence is pleasantly mocked by the man himself. "I want to make new
ballets .... If you made a borscht, you'd use fresh ingredients. If you were asked to write a book twice, you'd use
new words. People say, what about posterity? What do
you preserve, I ask? A tape? What counts is now. Nobody
will ever be the same again. And I don't care about people
who aren't born yet." 16 If one wants to seek the frame of
permanence in which all this new work is held, it is to be
looked for not in recording techniques but in the concept
of repertory which Lincoln Kirstein has so well articulated.
"Increasingly, however, what pleases our audiences is rep~
ertory-illuminated, to be sure, by .well-trained dancers
.... Stars are replaceable by emergent students; choreography, in repetition, persists." 17 In any given season's of~
ferings of the New York City Ballet, there will be two or
three new works by Balanchine and two or three of his
own versions of the Nineteenth Century classics, and
both categories will be set in relief by thirty-odd of his
pieces choreographed since 1935 and deemed worthy of
repeating. Some of these are already granted classic status
by the audience, and in the rapidly changing world of
dance, anything preserved for as long as fifty years is
shown to be a classic by that very fact; others, more recent, are still making their bids and may eventually be
dropped and never revived again. The point to be stressed
is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The
consort of new and old works which this repertory maintains in performance is as healthy an image as our time
has to offer of that imperturbable ceremony, refusing to
be retarded or accelerated, by which the ranks of the classic are augmented.
T
O MOVE FROM THE STATE THEATER OF NEW
YORK to the East Building of the National Gallery in
Washington is to feel these equations change their
terms and yet remain the same. The original gallery was
completed by Andrew Mellon in 1941 as a gift to the nation, and the new free-standing extension was completed
in 1978 by his son Paul, with the superbly understated designation "East Building." The very Roman piety of the
son to the father is registered by the fact that both buildings are of marble from the same quarry in Tennessee,
and though the new building looks lighter in color now, its
stone will deepen to the same hue as that of the old in a
matter of decades. In his uncompromising demand for the
highest quality of execution, Paul Mellon sustained a
tripling of costs during construction, and the building's
prime location at the end of the Mall closest to the national Capitol only accentuates the contrast between the
level of quality to be achieved by private versus public
wealth. The old main gallery (now called the West
Building) is itself the most harmoniously executed of all
the neo-classical buildings on the Mall, and it is to the
glory of the East Building that it harmonizes with the old
WINTER 1982
�one in proportions and quality of design while speaking its
own assured modern idiom. By his choice of axes and
shapes I. M. Pei has in fact accommodated the new
building not only to the old one but also to the original
design for the streets of the city which dates back to 1791.
L'Enfant's whole system of traffic circles, with radial
avenues leading out from them and cutting diagonally
across the grid of the other streets, is generated by the two
major axes he projected from the Capitol building, one
leading along the Mall to the Washington Monument and
the other along Pennsylvania Avenue to the White
House. The East Building is situated just at the point
where the angle between these two axes from the Capitol
begins to create trapezoidal city blocks, and the building is
itself a trapezoid bisected into two triangles whose angles
observe those of the avenues outside. Moreover, Pei has
used these angles as his governing principle not only in
the shapes of the building's two halves but also at many
other levels of detail, from the space-frame over the vast
and airy central court down to the very shape of the
blocks in the floors. Thus should one's eye ever drop to
one's feet it would encounter, there too, in the very cut of
the marble, an homage to the design commissioned by our
own founding father for the city to be named after him.
In all these details of execution, then, there is manifested on the part of patron and architect alike a desire
that the new should take its place beside the old in a tension whose vibrancy only enhances the harmony that underlies it. This desire reaches its most dramatic realization
in the contrast between the actual way the two galleries
are intended to be used. The function of the reposeful
West Building is, now as always, to house the permanent
collection of the National Gallery, while one of the principal functions of the energetic East Building is to provide
space for temporary exhibitions, the new genre of internationally organized blockbusters that has emerged in the
last few decades. The central court of the East Building
gives a view of all levels of the building in the manner of
an opera-house, and the ('performances" for which this
Figure 2: An elaboration of the two·triangle plan of the East Building. The larger
triangle {divided by the arrow) contains public spaces-the central court and the
galleries, for example. The smaller (lower part of the sketch) is devoted to secondary
uses such as the study center. (The small figure in the upper right shows a preliminary sketch of a triangular building on the existing trapezoidal plot of ground.)
of course,
the name of Nietzsche has vanished altogether. I
should ·like to think, however, that far from implying
his irrelevance I have been paying him the right kind of
tribute. It may be that his greatness is less that of a philosopher, if by that word we mean one who offers us an account of the world and a guide to life through examination
of universals, and more that of a critic, if by that word we
mean one who leads us to make exacting perceptions and
valuations of the particular. By his sustained refusal to
slander the body, the senses, and the moment in all its
transience, Nietzsche gave us a fresh sense of what is at
stake when we submit ourselves to the power of a work of
art in the plenitude of its presence. But to consider what
is necessary for that plenitude means to consider the nature of the immortal, the monumental, the classic. And it
F
ROM MY ACCOUNT OF RECENT WORK,
means, finally, to be strong enough to sustain an irresolu-
court provides ''intermissions" are in fact going on around
ble paradoxical desire-the desire to be witness to a "new
the building's sides in the various galleries and towers,
where space has been left open by the architect, so that it
can be shaped anew by the curators through use of temporary walls designed for each specific exhibit. The East
Building is, in other words, a place for festivals, whose brilliance is inseparable from their transience 18 Patron and
architect have incorporated into the function of the new
building an element of festival brilliance which will stand
in perpetual tension with the marmoreal achievement of
its fundamental design. I should, therefore, like to offer
the two buildings together, with their complementary
styles and complementary functions, as my final image of
the interplay between the new and the old, and the durable and the transient, which a healthy civilization has the
sense and the will to sustain. Here too, as with dance repertory, the ceremony of the classical is, in Pindar's phrase,
classic" as it comes into being.
at perpetual ((holiday on its own pedestal."
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
l. See "Homers Wettkampf' in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Karl
Schlechta, Munich 1966, III, 291-299. Hereafter all references will give
the title and section number of the work and then the volume and page
number in Schlechta. Unless otherwise stated all translations are my
own.
2. "Der Griechische Staat," Werke, III, 285-286.
3. The essential text in Arendt is The Human Condition (Anchor Books
Edition 1959), Chap. 31, "The Traditional Substitution of Making for
Acting," 197-206.
4. Der Wille zur Macht, no. 975, Werke, III, 850. Though Schlechta
abandons the section numbers of earlier editions of Nietzsche's Nachlass collected under the title Der Wille zur Macht, he provides in his fifth
volume (609ff.) a concordance by which a given section can be found in
his own edition.
5. Nor will it do to maintain that these notebook jottings remained unpublished by Nietzsche because he could not bring himself to recommend in public the adoption of such a stance of hardness. Consider the
quotation from Zarathustra with which he concludes Gotzen-Dam-
31
�merung: "All creators are hard. And you' must think it blessedness to
press your hand on millenia as on wax,-/-Blessedness, to write on the
will of millenia as on bronze,-harder than bronze, nobler than bronze.
Only the noblest are completely hard." (Werke, II, 1033) Compare this
with the laudatory remarks on Caesar and Napoleon in the same book,
"Streifzuge eines Unzeitgemassen" nos. 38, 44, 45, 49, Werke, II, 1015,
1019-1022, 1025. To be fair, however, it must be added that the connection between the artist's hardness on his material and the statesman/
general's hardness on human beings is not made explicit anywhere in
Gotzen-Dammerung but rather left as a hint, a not-too-esoteric doctrine.
6. Nietzsche shows himself quite conscious of the distinction: "The
young women who march solemnly to the temple of Apollo, laurel in
hand, and sing as they go a processional song, remain who they are and
maintain the names they possess as citizens; the dithyrambic chorus is a
chorus of transformed beings for whom their past as citizens and their
social position has become oblivious." Die Geburt der TragOdie no. 8,
Werke, I, 52. The second half of his characterization, however, is incomplete, for in all the tragedies we possess (as opposed to hypothetical
original dithyrambs), the dancers who have doffed their own identities
have donned others which are equally precise: those of old men, women,
slaves, foreigners, sailors, etc.
7. Nietzsche's assumption is based on the much-disputed statement of
Artistotle (Poetics l449a9) that tragedy arose &1rO rCJv to'~apxOvrwv rOv
tneUpap,{3ov, "from those who led off the dithyramb." For a very nonDionysian critical discussion of this passage and of Nietzsche's use of it,
see Gerald F. Else, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, New
York 1965, 9-15.
8. Die Geburt der TragOdie no. l, Werke, I, 25.
9. "Notes for 'We Philologists,'" trans. William Arrowsmith, ARION
N.S. l/2, 1973-1974, 361.
10. Nos. 10 & II, Werke, II, 996-997.
11. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Pfullingen 1961, Vol. I, "Der Wille zur
Macht als Kunst," particularly the chapter entitled "Der Rausch als
asthetischer Zustand," 109-126.
12. Der Wille zur Macht no. 1067, Werke, III, 917.
13. Der Antichrist no. 58, Werke, II, 1229.
14. Der Antichrist no. 59, Werke, II, 1231. Cf. GOtzen-Dammerung,
"Streifzuge" no. 39, Werke, II, 1016. Nietzsche was also fond of alluding
to Horace's claim that in his three books of odes he had erected a monument more durable than bronze: exegi monumentum aere perennius
(Odes III, 30.1). Earlier in Antichrist no. 58 he uses the phrase aere perennius to characterize the whole Roman Empire, and in the last section of
Gotzen-Diimmerung, "Was lch den Alten Verdanke" no. l, he names
32
Figure 3: View of the East Building from the vicinity of the east entrance of the
original National Gallery, looking in approximately the same direction as the arrow
points in Figure 2. (Photo by Tom Farran.)
Horace and Sallust as his two great stylistic models and says that "Even
in my Zarathustra one can recognize a very serious ambition for Roman
style, for the 'aere perennius' in style." (Werke, II, 1027). See also MorgenrOte no. 71, Werke, I, 1059. In Zur Genealogie der Moral, '"Gut und
BOse,' 'Gut und Schlecht"' no. 16, he praises the nobility of Roman inscriptions, a category which combines architecture and writing (Werke,
II, 796).
15. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, "Der Wanderer und sein Schatten," no. 217, Werke, I, 965.
16. New York Times, "Arts and Leisure Section,'' Sunday, AprilS, 1979,
D 17.
17. Lincoln KirStein, Movement and Metaphor, New York 1970, 10.
18. Compare Lincoln Kirsteip's remarks on the lobby of the State
Theater of New York: "Philip Johnson built a festival ambiance in lobby
and promenade. Performances commence when audiences first enter
the houses which frame them; large theaters are more than shelter. Intermissions which link units of repertory are happy times for appreciation, disagreement, sharings of what has just been seen and heard."
New York City Ballet Souvenir Book, 1975.
WINTER 1982
�The Trivialization of the Holocaust as an
Aspect of Modern Idolatry
Robert Loewenberg
1
The Holocaust, the murdering of the Jews on Hitler's
principle that a "thorough eradication of even the last
representative and destruction of the last tradition"
should be realized, is the most mysterious event of modern
times, and perhaps the most characteristic. 1 Mysterious
and characteristic as well is the subsequent trivialization
of the Holocaust in Western discourse by those, especially
Jews, who profess detestation of Hitler and Nazism. The
trivialization of the Holocaust, and not its denial, for ex·
ample, by the Right, is the most significant post-Holocaust
phenomenon at our disposal for the purpose of understanding the Holocaust.
The charge of trivialization supposes certainly a justification of the view that the Holocaust is not trivial. One
must establish that Hitler's choice to eradicate the Jews
and Judaism instead of Armenians or Biafrans is what
makes for the Holocaust's particularity. The mystery of
the Holocaust, in other words, is not the murdering of innocents, or the number and manner of their killing. The
description of Hitler's murdering of the Jews as a holocaust constitutes a claim, a narrowly tribal one in some
minds, that the gassing of Jews was not solely a murdering
of innocents demonstrating man's inhumanity to man.
Rather the Holocaust was a murdering of another kind
that demonstrates profound truths. This claim is explored
in this essay in connection with the suggestion of Emil
Fackenheim that the Holocaust was the result of idol worship.'
Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, Robert
Lo~wenberg has written Equality on the Oregon Frontier (University of
Washington Press, 1976) and articles on the history of the American
Northwest and on values in writing history.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The purpose of this essay is to locate the sources of trivialization and not to detail it-the latter a task that has
been undertaken by others 3 The best evidences of trivialization are found in the most likely places, in common
speech and in academic discourse. In both instances the
quite prominent involvement of the Jews in the trivializa·
tion of the Holocaust underscores the several points to be
developed in this study.
At the first level, that of common speech, trivialization of
the Holocaust is especially visible in the rights movements.
Here the language of the Holocaust and of European
Jewry is readily affixed to circumstances of victimization.
Civil rights proponents are inclined to refer to a Negro
ghetto as an "Auschwitz" or to the denial of a lunch program as "genocide." The denial of civil rights is fascist
while support of civil rights is in some ultimate sense Jewish. This perception of the rights movement and of Judaism is commonplace among liberal Jews today. Judaism,
1
once self-understood as chosenness or ' particularism," is
now to be conceived as universalist. Judaism's universalism has suggested to some advanced or Reform rabbis
that traditional or orthodox Judaism may itself be Nazi.
Accordingly, there has been a growing tendency in pro·
gressive circles to disavow the holiday of Chanukah,
which marks the defeat of Hellenists by a band of religious
zealots, as fascism.
Developments of this type at the popular level are informed by academic conventions regarding what is
thought to be praiseworthy about Judaism. At the aca·
demic level the trivialization of the Holocaust is, in fact, a
function or product of the insistence that Judaism is es·
sentially antireligious, actually a forerunner of secular and
atheistic humanism. The real Jew is the non-Jewish Jew.
This view, deriving from the distinction between universalism and particularism, is part of a larger vision of his-
33
�tory and human affairs in which the Holocaust is, above
all, an attack upon mankind. In this view of things, Nazism
and Hitler are perceived as reactionary, the enemies of
progress, secularism, and democracy. Thus Hitler was
among those "demonic enemies," as two Jewish writers
have recently and typically said, "of modernity."' As for
Mein Kampf, it is considered "deeply barbarous," a book
"to end books. "5 The Third Reich demonstrated once and
for all the evil of nationalism or particularism, of hierarchy
and authority. Nazism vindicated an opposite set of prin·
ciples: egalitarianism, universalism, internationalism, and
tolerance.
Scholars in fields other than German history, especially
if they are Jewish, are not hesitant to use the Holocaust as
in some respects a model and metaphor. A famous exam·
pie is Stanley Elkins' astonishing comparison of death
camp inmates with American slaves. Interestingly, the
comparison was offensive to some historians on the
ground that slaves did not behave as the Jews were alleged
to have done by Elkins. In other words, the comparison as
between murder and enslavement was not faulted, only
the suggestion that slaves behaved like death camp inmates. Uses of this type explain in part the popularity of
so-called Holocaust studies, a new academic subfield.
It is the burden of this essay to suggest that trivialization of the Holocaust partakes of the same philosophical
sources that informed the actual Holocaust itself. The hatred of Judaism (not equivalent to hatred of Jewish
people), whether in destroying Jews or in trivializing their
destruction, reflects neither prejudice nor fascist militarism, but a disordering of the terms of being, a disordering
of the relationship of the One and the many. This disordering and its consequences we call idolatry. Perhaps no
Jewish writer has done more to explore this question than
Emil Fackenheim.
Fackenheim's study of the Holocaust is notable for its
daring. He dismisses certain sanctified cliches of Holocaust literature, and ignores the taboos of normal political
theory. For example, Fackenheim does not suppose that
religion is an end equal to all others, but, on the contrary,
that it is "the most serious question facing a serious man."6
In this, Fackenheim offends behaviorists and secular humanists at once. But having done so, Fackenheim is free
to disregard as unhistorical and reductionist those accounts of the Holocaust which limit our apprehension of
Hitler or of Mein Kampf either to the influences upon
them or to behavioral inferences from them. Similarly, he
does not engage in a certain type of theologizing which,
by proposing that the Holocaust demonstrates the non-existence and irrelevance of God, suggests rather the nonexistence and irrelevance of any serious Jewish theology.
Fackenheim takes Nazism at its word and considers its
deeds in light of its word. In this he adopts the commonsense approach of Werner Maser, the outstanding historian of Mein Kampf. "To explain Hitler and to understand
the period of history over which he exerted so decisive an
34
influence," Maser has written, "nothing can be so impor~
tant or informative as Mein Kampf . ... Hitler clung faithfully to the ghastly doctrine set out in Mein Kampf."'
But the ghastly aspects of Mein Kampf are not always
the obvious ones. Hitler was an idealist, or one who is devoted to what modern liberal scholarship considers the
highest goal, freedom. Fackenheim takes note of Hitler's
idealism. The idealistic element in Mein Kampf is not outwardly ghastly. For example, Hitler writes of his wish to
replace one "spiritual" doctrine with another. He does not
idolize force in this matter. "Every attempt at fighting a
view of life by means of force will finally fail," he observed, "unless the fight against it represents the form of
an attack for the sake of a new spiritual direction." 8 This
new spiritual direction is what necessitates the "thorough
eradication" of Jews. Hitler seeks a "new . .. view of 1ife." 9
Hitler's ghastly doctrine aside, he was a moralist. Conversions and mere persecutions ofjews he regarded as destructive of idealism and immoral in other respects. 10 As
for persecutions, "every [one] ... that takes place without
being based on a spiritual presupposition does not seem
justified from the moral point of view." 11 Traditional Judeophobia failed to express "the character of an inner and
higher consecration, and thus it appeared to many, and
not the worst, as immoral and objectionable. The conviction was lacking that this was a question of vital importance to the whole of mankind and that on its solution the
fate of all non-Jewish people depended." 12
The eradication of Jews and of all Jewish things Fackenheim rightly considers to derive from a worshipping of
false gods or idolatry. Nazism sought to make the trinity of
Yolk, Reich, and Fuehrer into one. Hitler's purpose was to
replace the people, who are representative of the principle that God is One, with "eternal Germanity" as one. In
order to establish the significance of idolatry, Fackenheim
has recourse to Jewish sources. Idolatry is "false 'freedom,'" in particular, idolatry is the "literal and hence total
identification of finiteness with infinitude." 13 What relation exists between ancient idolatry and modern idolators?
The ancients were preoccupied with the problems of false
worship and false gods. Moderns are secular and do not
believe in gods. Fackenheim does not forfeit his fundamental discovery that Nazism is idolatrous by suggesting
the Nazis were antimodern pagans. He does not dilute or
caricature the rabbinic teaching on idolatry, but insists
that Nazism is the "most horrendous idolatry of modern,
perhaps of all time." 14 In making this his starting point,
Fackenheim assures us that he intends to show that
Nazism and its objectives were not trivial. Of course idolatry is not trivial in Jewish terms where it serves as a
counter to Judaism itself. But idolatry is also not trivial in
absolute terms. Rather it reflects a disordering of the relationship of man to nature and to the "divine Infinity."IS
Fackenheim points out that the ancient rabbis regarded
"one who repudiates idolatry is as though he were faithful
to the whole Torah. By this standard," says Fackenheim,
WINTER 1982
�"any modern Jew would be wholly faithful." 16 But it goes
without saying that modern Jews are not wholly fmthful
even though they do repudiate the w'orship of idols or
images. Does this not indicate the irrelevance of the rab·
binic teaching, and by implication the irrelevance of Juda·
ism? Fackenheim refers to the following talmudic passage,
a characteristic utterance regarding idolatry, to suggest
why such questions are not well-founded.
When someone in his anger tears his clothes, breaks utensils,
throws away money, this should be viewed as though he worshipped idols. For this is the cunning of the evil inclination:
today it says 'do this,' tomorrow, 'do that,' until it finall~ says
'go and worship idols' and he goes and does it. ... What 1s the
alien god that dwells in a man's body? The evil inclinationP
The danger of idol worship is not the "ludicrous anti·
climax" moderns suppose it to be. 18 Instead moderns who
suspect they are not subject to idol worship because they
are indifferent to the gods have fallen prey to idolatry
without even knowing it was a temptation. In the case of
Nazism, Fackenheim explains, idol worship is based in the
same feelings of ancient idol worship, that is, in "infinite
fear, hope, pleasure or pain." But the object of worship in
Nazism, namely the unity of Hitler, Yolk, and Reich, is
not recognized as an ido].I 9 On the contrary this object is
understood to bring about the liberation from "idolatrous
thralldom." In other words, modern idolatry understands
itself to be liberation or "demythologization." As Facken·
heim puts it, "the truth in this new false 'freedom' is that,
negating all worship, it negates all idolatry in the form of
worship. This new idolator takes himself for an enlight·
ened modern."20 Moreover, because the modern idolator
is enlightened, he scorns idols as mere sticks and stones at
the same time that he condemns all worship as superflu·
ous. But the idolatrous essence, the identification of finiteness and infinitude, survives like the duck inside the
wolf in the tale of Peter. "Because [the infinite feeling of
the modern idolator] is infinite, it does not vanish ... It
thus acquires the power of generating what may be called
internalized idolatry."21
Fackenheim recognizes two forms of modern "internalized" idolatry and distinguishes "internalized religion"
from both. Hitler's idolatry Fackenheim calls "idealistic."
It identifies finiteness with infinitude in making the finite
infinite. Nazism is "absolute whim ... the extreme in fini·
tude." 22 Naturalistic or empiricist idolatry is marked by
positivist and relativistic "anti-absolutism." It identifies fi.
niteness with infinitude in making the infinite finite; the
"degradation of the infinite aspect of selfhood to a false fi.
nitude."2' The so-called value-free perverters of Dewey
and Freud, but not Dewey or Freud themselves, are naturalist idolators according to Fackenheim because they
deny all goals, including even those of Dewey and Freud
that "man should make himself into the natural being he
is." 24
Internalized religion is carefully distinguished from idola·
THE ST, JOHNS REVIEW
try, whether of the idealistic or naturalistic sort. It would
be "a fatal error to confuse" internalized religion and inter~
nalized idolatry, says Fackenheim. 25 The knowing denial
of the divine Infinity, that is, the "raising [of an individual
or a collective self] to infinity in ... [the] very act of demal,"
is "internalized religion," not "internalized idolatry," when
this denial "issues, not in an atheistic rejection of the Divine but rather in its internalization. " 26 This situation, al~
tho~gh it "raises the specter of a modern, internalized
idolatry," is kept from becoming idolatry in the "modern
... philosophies ... [of] Fichte, Schelling, Hegel," because
"finiteness and infinitude are ... kept firmly apart." And,
what is true of these "idealist" philosophers is also true of
the "humanistic atheists ... Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche." The identification of finiteness and infinitude is
here "as firmly (if not as obviously) rejected ... by the fact
that Divinity vanishes in the process of internalization, to
be replaced by a humanity potentially infinite in its modern 'freedom' ... The potentiality never seems to become
quite actual." In sum, internalized religion is an ~~authen
tic challenge" to the divine Infinity which should be respected by Jewish and Christian thinkers. Internalized
idolatry, on the other hand, is "demonic perversion."27
Above all this distinction is rooted in the "honest rationality" of' the philosophers. Unlike idolatrous parodies of
thought which are "the product, not of reason, but of passion," the philosophers are not idolatrous.28 Naz1sm, mternalized idolatry, is a denial of the divine Infinity. At the
same time it is a literal and hence total identification of
finiteness with infinitude. Although Hitler was "no emperor-god ... and the Yolk, no worshipping community,"
yet the "will of a Fuehrer" and the will of the Yolk was the
sole reality. The object of idol worship is the will, internalized in Yolk and Fuehrer who are one. Nazism is a "bastard-child of ... the Enlightenment." 29
Fackenheim has undoubtedly pointed us in the direction of uncovering the source of the Holocaust's mystery.
The ground of idolatry or the identification of finitude
and infinity is false freedom. But Fackenheim's further
distinction between internalized idolatry and internalized
religion is not sound.
.
The philosopher's impulse, which does not deny the divine Infinity but which seeks only to bring the divine, "as
it were ... in[to] the same inner space as the human self,"
is surely an idolatrous aspiration 30 More important, .this
impulse participates in the same aspiration which informs
such demonic perversions as Nazism. The remainder of
this essay is devoted to exploring this suggestion and its
implications for the question of the trivialization of the
Holocaust.
2
Fackenheim's distinction between internalized religion
and internalized idolatry is outwardly commonsensical in
that thought is always different from action. But this dif.
35
�ference is especially inappropriate' as a distinction in the
case of the great philosophies, all of which sought to identify thought and act at some level. Commonsensical as
wen is the unmistakable difference between any of the
great philosophies and the comparatively low level theorizing of Hitler. But differences of this type have no philosophical relevance. Moreover, Fackenheim is himself
compelled to recognize the, to him, quite troubling compatibility of Heidegger and Nazism.
Heidegger's was "one of the profoundest philosophies
of this century," Fackenheim observes, and surely he was
an exponent of internalized religion. As late as 1946, however, Heidegger failed to recognize "radical evil" in the
Holocaust. Fackenheim considers this failure a "philosophical" one, not a challenge to the distinction between
internalized religion and internalized idolatry. 31 But Fackenheim does not explain how Heidegger's "philosophical
failure" differs from idolatry. One wonders if perhaps
there is no distinction between this philosophical failure
and idolatry or, put another way, if there really is a distinction between internalized idolatry and internalized religion.
Let it be noted here, before we consider this possibility,
that historically at least, there is no reason to suppose any
such distinction ever existed. Karl Liiwith has observed
that "nihilism as the disavowal of existing civilization,"
and not internalized religion, "was the only belief of all
truly educated people at the beginning of the twentieth
century." 32
Whether Heidegger is a nihilist or if nihilism is idolatry
are matters outside the present concern. But that Hitler
explicitly disavowed existing civilization and identified it
with judaism will not be doubted. Certainly it is this disavowal that Heidegger found "great" in Nazism. As for
Heidegger' s own statements against anti-Semitism, they
cannot be given much weight as evidence of a philosophic
intention as against an idolatrous one. The tradition of
modern philosophy is, of course, marked by hostility to Judaism1 as Fackenheim's study, among others, shows, even
as this hostility is almost always hedged about with the liberal's disdain for all "prejudice," especially for anti-Semitism.
A final observation about the great philosophies considered from the standpoint of Fackenheim's defense of the
distinction between internalized idolatry and internalized
religion is the supposed "authenticity" of the great philosophies. Consider that Fackenheim exempts Hegel from
an idolatrous identification of finitude and infinity, saying
he "reaches the Fichtean goal [of a divinized moral self],
but does so in the realm of thought only." Marx too is no
idolator, according to Fackenheim. Insofar as the theorist
of world communism realized that "society [is] as yet far
from classless," he did not identify the finite and the infinite.33 But one may question if these are plausible distinctions or authentic ones. Can Hegel or Marx, of all thinkers,
be defended on the ground that the idolatrous tendency of
an identification of finitude and infinity was not idolatrous
because it was limited to the realm of thought? Precisely
36
the identification of thought and act was their objective.
Hegel did not doubt the realm of thought would succeed
to action, in particular to the Prussian state. Certainly
Marx did not scorn the prospect of a classless society. The
distinction Fackenheim insists upon is here again not a
theoretical but a circumstantial and historical one. One
must look rather far to find a more pertinent example of
internalized idolatry, a knowing identification of the divine Infinity dwelling in a man, than Hegel's Wissenschaft
der Logik:
[The] logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason,
as the realm of pure thought. This realm is the truth as it is
without veil and [for itself]. It can be said, therefore, that this
is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence, before
the creation of nature and a finite mind. 34
We may not say of Hegel that he has taken "care [that] ...
the possibility of idolatry is ... recognized and avoided." 35
But the distinction Fackenheim would have us credit
between the great philosophies and demonic perversions
of them rests on what is itself a fatal error. Honest rationality, said to separate products of reason from those of
passion, in fact confoupd~ reason and passion.
Concerning the distinction between reason and passion,
it must at least be noted that the tide of modern political
philosophy, in which Leo Strauss noted three waves, is
dominated by philosophies of passion. 36 Beginning with
Machiavelli, who substituted glory for virtue, and Hobbes,
who replaced glory with power, the great philosophies
have been notable for their rejections of reason, whether
in hallowing folk minds as expressions of a general will or
in the sanctification of history as an expression of nature
or idea. In the third and present wave of modernity inaugurated by Nietzsche, the West has been inclined to think
"that all human life and human thought ultimately rests
on horizon-forming creations which are not susceptible of
rationa1legitimization."37
This historical consideration regarding passion and reason is not irrelevant to the distinction Fackenheim would
have us accept between the philosophies and Hitler. We
live at a time when it is the nearly universal presumption
of political thinkers that man is not a political being but is
instead an amorphous or "free" being, to be shaped by
history, by labor or by change. This presumption, a reversal of the understanding of Aristotle, is related to another
Aristotelian principle which modern political thinkers
have also reversed. This principle is that "the mind is
moved by the mover." 38 Reason, in other words, the an~
cients regarded as "revelation," not as a thing man-made. 39
These two related reversals of classical thought by moderns bear directly on our subject. They are the bases for
modern idolatry and for the too easy supposition that idolatry is not a modern possibility, or that honest rationality
is a hedge against such a possibility. The identification of
finitude and infinity in Nietzsche, one of Fackenheim's
great philosophers, is complete because the identification
of making and thinking is complete.
WINTER 1982
�In Nietzsche, thought is action, in particular it is vitalisrq. When Nietzsche internalizes the divine infinity (or
the One), his idolatry is not simply in the realm of thought.
It is palpable idolatry because thought is act in Nietzsche:
The greatest events-they are not our loudest but our stillest
hours. Not around the inventors of new noise, but around the
inventors of new values, does the world revolve; it revolves inaudibly40
And Zarathustra counsels:
'Will to truth' .... A will to the thinkability of all beings; this I
call your will. You want to make all being thinkable.4 1
Nietzsche's method is rational insofar as it is autonomous
and free, but it is openly passionate as well. What is art in
Nietzsche is system in Max Weber. Weber is the formulator of the principle of honest rationality as the basis for
the distinction between morality or idealism and immorality, the distinction informing Fackenheim's defense of
the great philosophies.
Weber's distinction between idealism and immorality
derives in part, as will be clear shortly, from his conviction
that facts and values are heterogeneous. It is not irrelevant
to add that Weber's teaching that only facts are knowable
while all judgments regarding values are relative continues
to inform both a naturalistic social science in which "value
judgments" are impermissible, and neo-Kantian secular
humanism in which the facts are said to be value-laden.
Academic social studies, in other words, must also be affected by the critique of honest rationality.
The context of Fackenheim's invocation of honest rationality is Weberian. But in a critique of Weber of the
profoundest kind, Strauss has shown the falsity of the distinction between products of reason and of passion fashioned by honest rationality.42 Honest rationality, or the
principle of freedom according to which one is free in the
degree that he is "guided by rational consideration of
means and ends," is said to be nihilistic.43 Strauss's critique
of Weber bears directly and with great force upon the subject of this essay and upon the question of idolatry.
According to Weber, reason, particularly in the determining of moral imperatives which appeal to intellect (unlike merely cultural or personal values and wants to which
our feelings are subject), is the glory and dignity of man.
Not choosing and not valuing is the equivalent of appetitiveness and passion. "Man's dignity, his being exalted far
above all brutes, consists in his setting up autonomously
his ultimate values, in making these values his constant
ends, and in rationally choosing the means to these ends.
The dignity of man consists in his ... freely choosing his
own values or his own ideals."44 Commitment to a value
which appeals to our reason Weber counted idealism.
But Strauss reminds us that the justification for this
view of idealism is a scientific understanding of values,
that is, an understanding that facts are possessed of transhistorical or universal character while values are relative
THE ST. JOHNS REVJEW
and discrete. Because the truth about values is said to be
inaccessible, a scientific and rational, as well as an honest
approach to values must be neutrality toward values. And
yet indifference to all values is precisely what Weber
counts as baseness. Freedom and rationality suggest a rational hostility toward theory. But this suggests an espousal
of unfreedom or passion. It is no accident that this hostility
to values and to theory is embodied in naturalistic social
science (behaviorism), and in the value-laden humanism
which frequently opposes it, that is, in those two forms of
academic social studies that grew out of Weber's distinction between facts and values. Thus, the positivist regards
theory as unempirical. He makes indifference to all causes
or Hopenness" a cause. At the opposite extreme stands
the humanist who dignifies all causes in the name of freedom and dignity regardless of whether a cause appeals to
our mind or to our passion. HA cause that appeals no further than 'the sphere of one's own individuality,' " the vitalism of Nietzsche, counts as a cause.45 The first position
is formalistic and self-canceling, and the second is simply a
doctrine of power. Weber, in sum, having undertaken the
defense of idealism as freedom and commitment to a value,
ultimately dignifies mere personal preferences and willing
as idealistic.
The distinction between idealism and appetitiveness
fades into freedom as such, as the distinction between values and facts, ought and is, collapses into an identity of
ought and is. The final formulation of Weber's ethical
principle would then be " 'Thou shalt have preferences'an Ought whose fulfillment is fully guaranteed by the Is."46
Honest rationality, the choosing of values as called for by
intellect as against acceptance of values which appeal to
our feelings, is obviously arbitrary. Why be honest or rational? Reason and passion, idealism and appetitiveness
are morally equal on the principle of honest rationality, or
rather there is no such principle.
Fackenheim's distinction between the great philosophies
and Hitler is subject to the same nihilistic consequence attaching to the distinction between idealism and immorality
in Weber. This would suggest that the distinction between
internalized religion and internalized idolatry is also inadequate. In fact, Fackenheim has not done full justice to
the rabbinic teaching, perhaps because he has done more
than full justice to the great philosophies.
Fackenheim's critique of the rabbinic teaching does not
do full justice to judaism. Certainly the rabbis would not
have supposed that the false freedom of the great philosophers in bringing the divine Infinity into the same space
with a human being was an "authentic challenge" to be
taken seriously as religious and not idolatrous. The rabbis
were not liberals for whom challenges to the divine Infinity counted as authentic. One cannot maintain that Nazism is idolatrous while consenting to an Hellenic gloss on
the rabbinic teaching. That "the Hellenic spirit of free inquiry ... is not rooted in judaism," as Husik has correctly
observed, is a fact that moderns find difficult to accept.47
37
�Concerning the subject of idolatry, one might even say
that this spirit of free inquiry is the essence of the yetzer
hara, the evil inclination. The divine Infinity which occupies the same inner space with the philosopher cannot be
God. Such an occupant, the rabbis say, is precisely "the
alien god." This is the god that says, "do anything," i.e.,
be free. Freedom, or the evil inclination, is the alien god.
In a word, freedom, understood as "false freedom," is
idol~
atry, even though we know it is today "a mark of intelligence and progress ... [to praise] serious consideration of
alien gods."48 Evidently the matter of "internalization"
has been the rabbinic interpretation from the start.
3
The Jewish teaching on false freedom is not ambiguous.
False freedom is false Exodus from Egypt. It is the making
of the golden calf while Moses is at Sinai preparing to deliver the Torah, or true freedom, to Israel. The remainder
of this essay is devoted to modern idolatry in two embodiments. First is the idolatry associated with the consideration of man as an animal lacking reason and a soul. Here
man exits from or escapes his condition as a being of more
than animal elements. Let us call this form of idolatry the
Mehan exodus, following Eric Voegelin, who locates the
contraction of man's being into a "power-self" as the
means of "concupiscental exodus" in the Melian dialogue
detailed by Thucydides.49 There is, in addition to the
Mehan exodus, a second embodiment of idolatry, or gnostic exodus. In gnosticism, men renounce the trappings of
their mortality, including history and culture, as if to bring
about, at God's expense, the conditions of perfection
symbolized in the garden of Eden. At the level of popular
and of academic discourse, these embodiments of idolatry
are understood in the language of political jargon as Left
and Right. This language does not intend religious meanings. Nonetheless, the present purpose is to suggest that
conventional political discourse misunderstands the difference of Right and Left, which it considers only political. The division, and opposition, of Right and Left, rather
than the content of either Right (Melian) or Left (gnostic),
is idolatry in its modern form.
It goes without saying that a judgment that Right and
Left touch religious aspects is offensive to much political
science. 50 But not all scholars are content that religious
questions should be divorced from political theory. Allan
Bloom has observed that "what is perhaps the most serious question facing a serious man-the religious question
-is almost a matter of indifference-" to political writers
in our time. This indifference is found in John Rawls, for
example, whose study of equality is considered by many
to be a significant contribution. But Rawls considers religion "just another one of the many ends that can be pursued in a liberal society."'!
Again it is Bloom who has pointed out that modern political writing which evades the serious questions also
38
evades the easy historical ones, inviting sloppiness and errors of fact. One may say, however, that what is most consistently mistaken by modern writers such as Rawls is the
involvement of political writing in idolatry. Rawls's equation of all ends is precisely idolatry of the gnostic type.
Knowledge that all ends or values are equal is not a human possibility, but a divine one. Must not metaphysics
and religion, dealing with questions about ends, be more
serious than other pursuits in a liberal society or in any society? If Nazism is idolatry, a political science such as
evinced in the work of Rawls is precluded from studying
it. One cannot undertake a study of Nazism as idolatry in
the context of modern political science because this science is implicated in idolatry. The following survey of Nazism as idolatrous suggests the nature of this implication.
The idolatry in Nazism is found in connection with the
Biblical teaching on freedom. The story of the Exodus is
an explication of true and false freedom. True freedom is
the recognition of God, and the recognition that follows
from the recognition of God, that man is radically distinct
from animals as well as from God. Man is neither raw desire nor spirit, man is
in~between
or in the metaxy, to use
the pertinent Platonic term. False freedom, in contrast, is
the freedom or exodus from the metaxy, symbolized in
the making of the golden calf, by which men simultaneously attempt to be gods themselves and to sanctify raw
desire.
The Exodus of the Jewish people is plainly not one
from Egypt but to Israel. Exodus from Egypt is marked
above all by wandering and by a desert. Moreover, the Exodus from Egypt and the opening of the Red Sea are not
effected by the Jews but by God. The Exodus is no war of
national liberation. Most important, to consider the Exodus as though it were a mere war of liberation from Egyptian bondage is idolatry. Thus, when the Israelites make
the golden calf they proclaim: "These are your Gods, 0 Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt." 52
But this is a lie; the golden calf was newly made by the
Jews. But then who split the Red Sea if not God or the
golden calf? Naturally, it must have been the Jews: God is
a projection or superstition; freedom is man's work and
man is the maker. Exodus is then freedom or the exercise
of human will: absolute whim. It is the liberation to do as
one lists, to wander. Exodus is the freedom not to wait for
Moses: to go to Israel or not. But of course the Bible
teaches that this is all false.
The calf makers are idol worshippers; they are slain.
They have forfeited reason by equating their whim or freedom with rationality. They made the same error that
Strauss detected in Weberian idealism or honest rationality. And, as in the Weberian instance, the mistaking of
whim for rationality is equivalent to animality or mere desiring. The calf makers are considered as animals. In one
of the most famous expositions of idolatry in the Bible,
Nebuchadnezzar is punished with the loss of his reason
and sent to forage in the manner of oxen for his failure,
WJNTER 1982
�demonstrated in his making of a gold,en idol, to recognize
that "the most High rules in the Kingdom of man." 53
Only reason, by which I mean the revelation that God
and not man is the maker of all things, can distinguish be·
tween exodus as false and as true freedom. A calf is a thing.
All things perish. Things come into being and go out of
being. The bush that burns but is not consumed is a sign
of divinity because it does not perish. Being remains,
namely, the process of coming into being and going out of
being remains. This process is known only to man who
alone among things possesses reason or soul. This permits
him to see the sign of the burning bush and to understand
it. This recognition indicates that aspect of man's being,
spirit or soul, which is not a thing. We call this aspect of
perception immortality.
Freedom is false when men pretend they are animals or
gods. The literal and hence total identification of finiteness and infinitude is a form of idolatry because such
identification is a willful disordering of reality. Idolatry is
the knowing denial of the doctrine which founds Judaism,
or monotheism: "Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord is your God, the
Lord is One." The Biblical exposition of this principle, set
in the Exodus or Passover story, specifies idolatry as false
freedom or exodus from the metaxy. There are two modes
of exodus or false freedom.
Men may escape the metaxy or the conditions of human being in the direction Fackenheim calls naturalism
by identifying as finite those aspects of being which are
infinite. 54 The insistence that man is an animal who invents God for the sake of satisfying behavioral imperatives
is idolatrous in this sense. The value-free principle is a
doctrine of raw power, as are its derivatives, for example,
the "open society," and certain versions of equality and
free speech. Justice, which regards all value claims as equal,
is achievable only by enforcement of absolute toleration
and permissiveness or by enforcement of sameness and
intolerance in the name of humanity. 55 Force is inevitable
in either case to insure absolute permissiveness or absolute
conformity, since it cannot be the case that values will not
clash, or that self-control will be considered a value superior
to others.
In fact, the sole means of avoiding the arbitrary dilemma
of tolerance is to undertake a transformation of the self,
that is, to undertake the elimination of the self or amour
propre. In other words, this doctrine of freedom entails a
reordering of the relationship of the One and the many
whether in the reformation of selves into a general will or
into Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer. As we shall see in
Hitler's case, work makes free because it destroys egotism.
In particular, freedom as work eliminates rewards based
upon skill. The individual is thus merged into the collective self. Freedom from values as the meaning of freedom
is simply power or will. We have already called this freedom from values the Melian exodus, after Thucydides:
"Men . .. rule wherever they can."56
Hitler's conception of right was certainly Melian. Alan
Bullock, who has called this aspect of Hitler's thought
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
<(crude Darwinism," notes that "no word occurs more fre-
quently in Hitler's speeches than 'struggle.' "57 "The
whole work of Nature," according to Hitler, is "a mighty
struggle.'' Again: "The first fundamental of any rational
Weltanschauung is the fact that on earth and in the universe, force alone is decisive."58
Voegelin explains that the "fictitious identity of conquest with reality can be achieved by identifying reality
with a humanity contracted to its libidinous self."" The
modern forms of this aspect of false freedom, according to
which values, and thus judgments concerning them, are
historical and ultimately identical to personal desire, is
embodied in historicisms of mind or spirit. In other words,
Melian exodus denies to philosophy all but historical and
pragmatic aptitudes. The difference between the ancient
and modern expressions of this exodus is the hint of tragic
fatality in the ancient and the absence of this hint in its
modern forms. The Athenian conquerors retain, "in the
background ... the tragic consciousness of the process."
They too will be massacred in time. Modern movements,
on the other hand, sink "to the untragic vileness of the
ideologist who cannot commit the murder he wants to
commit in order to gain an 'identity' in place of the self he
has lost, without moralistically appealing to a dogma of ultimate truth." 60
The dogma to which Hitler appealed was the Thousandyear Reich, eternal Germanity. This vision he conceived
as freedom and the elimination of Judaism. Freedom and
the replacement of Judaism with Germanity would prepare the way for a reconciliation of mankind. These objectives were exactly dogmas of ultimate truth for the sake of
committing murders. Moreover, these dogmas were the
instruments for the formation of selves.
We need not doubt Hitler used the word "struggle"
many times or that he identified morality with power. But
his object was not solely power. His murderous intention
was not arbitrary or irrational. Hitler's doctrine of the
blood is the key to the other side of Nazism and simultaneously to the idolatrous aspect of the great philosophies.
Hitler's notorious sacrifice of military goals so as to destroy the million Jews of Hungary reflects his commitment
to the doctrine of the blood. The doctrine of the blood is
an inversion of the doctrine of the soul. 61 Speaking often
of uour people" and "eternal Germanity," Hitler's purpose was to effect the "reconciliation of mankind/' or "all
non-Jewish peoples.''62 Nazism emerges as a counterJudaism at this point. The "purity of the blood ... [will]
enable our people to mature for the fulfillment of the mission which the Creator of the universe has allotted also to
them.''6l This, the "higher motive of national policy and
never narrow particularism" explains why the "State has
nothing whatsoever to do with a definite conception of
economics or development of economics."64 Nazism was a
moral doctrine of freedom for which race was the form.
As persecution of the Jews was immoral in Hitler's thinking, so the purity of German blood was not a medical or
39
�an anthropological doctrine, even though it had import at
such levels. One suspects we hear neither the hypocrite
nor the psychopath say, as Hitler did in 1932, "Let them
call us unhuman. If we save Germany, we shall have done
the greatest deed in the world .... Let them say that we
are without morality. If our people is saved, we shall have
paved the way for morality."65 The doctrine of the blood
introduces the gnostic aspect of Nazism.
Hitler's identification of right with power included the
second mode of exodus from the metaxy, or gnosticism.66
But the liberation of the spirit from the body in modern
gnosticism is not for rare men or for the elite as among an-
cient gnostics. The modern way of liberation is release
from the ego and egotism. The spirit, in other words, is no
private vision, it is a shared thing, for example, blood.
Modern gnosticism is distinguished from its ancient
forms in the same way that modern power politics differs
from Melian exodus of the ancients. For the ancient gnostic who strove to separate the soul from things, the instrument of liberation was the individuaL The soul with its
source in the divine was not thus denied. Liberation of
the souls of modern gnostics is altogether a thing of groups
which replaces the divine as the soul's source. Accordingly
modern gnosticism calls for the losing of the self as spirit.
The soul of modern man is liberated from the prison of
spirit, as well as the prison of the body, in becoming a thing
that does not perish, i.e., in submerging the ego in an immortalizing thing such as blood, sex, or excrement.
Consider Hitler's doctrine in connection with the tradition regarding the self extending from Rousseau. Since
Rousseau's description. of the self as formed by society, in
particular by the division of labor and the advent of property, there has evolved the idea that one's authentic self is
beneath the roles imposed by social life. Liberation is then
a release from property and its social and other derivatives.
Because this conception takes its rise in the doctrine of
the state of nature, or the doctrine that man has no nature
or telos, true personality or selfhood is freedom as such, or
becoming. At the same time, this vision of freedom imposes a conception of the self as selfless. Selflessness or
true selfhood is tantamount to compassion, and this is
how Rousseau defined it. The good self is not selfish in a
literal and a moral sense. The true self is not an I, but we.
This reversal of the classical and Jewish concept of the
self is part of everyday speech in which a self is virtuous if
it is selfless.
The tradition of this mode of thinking is long and considered honorable. It stretches, for example in American
letters, from john Humphrey Noyes who hoped to "extinguish the pronoun I," and replace it with "the we spirit,"
to Norman 0. Brown." Brown suggests that the "boundary
line between self and the external world bears no relation
to reality." Liberation for Brown is release from self by
means of return to the pre-socialized conditions of polymorphous perversity. The Hhuman consciousness can be
liberated from the parental (Oedipal) complex only by be-
40
ing liberated from its cultural derivatives, the paternalistic
state and the patriarchal God."68
This conception of self, including the role of man as
maker of God, is the one we have detected in Nazism. The
liberation from God, thus the liberation of the self, establishes the idea of freedom, of exodus from the metaxy.
The power to free the soul from the body is brought about
by freeing the self from an L The I perishes. What remains
is a thing possessed of the characteristics of God, that is,
of oneness. Those basic and selfless elements which outlast
the individual have become the instruments of immortality. What perishes excessively-excrement, sexuality,
blood-are now the bases for oneness and everlasting life.
Donatien de Sade uncovered these principles two centures before Hitler put them into practice. "What we call
the end of the living," said de Sa de (in praise of the motto
that "the freest of people are they who are most friendly
to murder''), "is no longer a true finis, but a simple trans-
formation ... of matter ... [D]eath is hence no more than
a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one
existence into another."69 Here in palpable form is the
identification of finitude with the infinite exposed by
Fackenheim. But Hitler is not a "parody" of the great philosophers. In assuming a material and communal replacement of the divine as the source of man's freedom,
Hitler's attack upon Judaism substitutes German blood
for the souL Hitler would, in this way, immortalize or
make infinite a finite thing. Hitler insists that judaism is
the negation of German blood-judaism is a race, not a
religion-exactly as Marx insists that judaism is the negation of communism-the god of judaism, he says, is
money. But if we consider, in Hitler's case, the actual doctrine of blood in judaism where it serves as a symbol of
the soul, Hitler's gnostic intention stands out boldly.
The Nazi's blood was his souL As a Jewish symbol that
had become an object of worship, the Nazi doctrine of the
blood is in truth "an absolute falsehood." 70 The blood as a
substitute for the soul of man is false. In judaism the blood
is typically considered to be in the soul only when the
body is alive. "The flesh whose blood is still in its soul,
shall ye not eat. ... Blood ... belongs to your souls." 71
This is plainly because the soul is not a thing. Preservation
of the blood of generations, what Hitler believed to be the
jews' purpose, and what he hoped to make the German
purpose, was to create oneness and immortality, as it
were, the salvation of souls. Jewish pollution of the racial
stock of others, imperiling the survival of non-jewish humanity, robbed souls by interruption of the transmission
of blood. In Nazism the soul is in the blood. The soul is
preserved after the ego dies, and because it is, the race is
preserved.
The doctrine of blood is false because it is wholly a distortion of the order of being. The source of human freedom is not the absence of the divine and its replace. men! by a Nazi or a communist community. It is hardly a
coincidence that both Hitler and Marx considered the
elimination of jews and judaism to be a condition for the
WINTER 1982
�establishment of their projects. 72 In both cases the extinguishment of the divine in the name of a man-made creation of freedom and of human being is critical. As for the
racist aspect of Nazism (and for the scientific and class
aspects of communism), they are perhaps best described
as opiates for the proletariat and the intelligentsia respectively.
The blood is then the soul made matter, an absurd idea.
The characteristic of the soul is immortality. What can it
mean to proclaim that the soul is not spiritual or that
some thing, perishable by definition, is immortal? What
aspect of a person does not perish? The answer, embodied
in the doctrine of the blood is: that aspect of a person
which is neither an ego nor a soul. Of course there is no
such thing. But what did Hitler think this thing was? Of
course he supposed it was freedom. The masses shall enter into the service of freedom once they understand that
the Jew intends the "enslavement, and with it the destruc·
tion, of all non-Jewish peoples."73 Blood is the oneness of
soul of the German people. Oneness will come about by
the destruction of vanity or egotism, the opposite of
oneness.
Egotism must be destroyed. But how is this possible?
By destroying the people of egotism. This is the people
that hides behind a false, unenlightened doctrine of elec·
tion and the divine as One. This people, the representa·
tive of the false God of spirit, and therefore the enemy of
oneness or the German people, is the Jews. "The Jew is
the mortal enemy of our people," said Hitler, because
"the Jew is ... nothing but pure egoism."74 And thus this
destruction of Jews is part of the means for liberation,
namely work. The people become one as they give over
their egos to the community. The doctrine that man is
one is egalitarianism.
"Egalitarianism," said Erich Fromm, uis not sameness
but oneness."75 Hitler's doctrine is egalitarian in the deep-
est and purest modern sense. As such, Nazism is the purest distillation of modernity. When Hitler proclaims that
"the Jew forms the strongest contrast to the Aryan" because only the Aryan is willing to give his "life for the exis·
tence of the community," he intends to be taken at his
word. 76 Giving up one's life for the community calls for
the relinquishment of ego. The means of doing so is of
course not prayer. Everyone knows, Hitler said, "a nation
cannot be freed by prayer." 77 Rather the way to freedom
is work. Work creates oneness in the process of effacing
egos. Work "establish[es] the equality of all in the moment
when every individual endeavors to do the best in his field
.... It is on this that the evaluation of man must rest, and
not on the reward." 78 Work makes free. Hitler promises
freedom from the ego, that is, from death, from anxiety,
by promising immortality in this world. This is the mean·
ing of Hitler's doctrine of the blood. It is the foundation of
the "everlasting [German] people." 79
It is correct to say, with Fackenheim, that Hitler is no
emperor-god; nor are the Yolk a worshipping community.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
It is Germanity in its immortalizing sacrifice of egos that
is God or one. This is the everlasting German people in
whose name Hitler professed to speak. The Jews, who are
said to live on behalf of an everlasting God, the God who
is one because man and all things are many, are the obvi·
ous spiritual power to be destroyed.
Hitler's idolatry is unmistakable. It reflects a disordering
of the relationship of the One and the many. Man is en·
joined, in the name of salvation, to leave his place in the
metaxy that he may assume full freedom. In the language
of political science Hitler's Melian exodus is fascist or
right-wing. Here, only power counts because all values are
equal, making law the rule of the stronger. Man is an animal. To this, Hitler's obvious or familiar side, is added the
other more subtle and as it were saintlier side. This is the
idolatry of gnosticism whereby men singly or together
take God into themselves or into their ideals.
Hitler's case suggests that modern idolatry cannot fail
to be both Melian and gnostic. We do not often, however,
credit Hitler's gnosticism or realize the Melian aspects of
gnostic or liberal idealism when it is expressed in the seductive language of opposition to Melian realism. The position of Judaism is obviously not the only representative
of the principles idolatry must oppose. It has long, however, been symbolic of all the enemies of idolatry. The hatred of Judaism is an aspect of modern if not all Western
idolatry, that is, of the impulse arising from the horror of
existence and the desire to leave the condition of the
metaxy. Consider the case of Jean Sartre, whose philosophy is the most recent great philosophy considered by
Fackenheim.
Sartre is the outstanding figure of left-wing humanistic
atheism. His insensitivity for Judaism, together with his
well-known sympathy for persecuted Jews, troubles Fack·
enheim. It may well be the case, Fackenheim thinks, that
Sartre's position is the product of his view that "an individual's freedom is ... destroyed by a divine Other," i.e.,
by God.BD But Fackenheim does not sufficiently consider
the effect the doctrine of freedom works upon Judaism.
Sartre' s view of freedom is idolatrous. It depends on the
replacement of the One with freedom. But this freedom,
gnostic in form, is not theoretically stagnant. It leads
somewhere. It leads to Melian exodus, that is, it permits
Sartre to say that he does not know if anti-Semitism is
"wrong or right" in socialist countries. 81 But Sartre would
know if racism is wrong or right. Is this another "philosophical failure" as in Heidegger's case?
The process we find in Hitler-from self-conscious Melian exodus to an unintended gnostic exodus imposed upon
him by the core of his project or the replacement of the
divine with the human-we also find in Sartre. In Sartre,
however, the order of exodus is reversed. Sartre's replacement of God with freedom is ultimately an assault upon
theory or reason; it is the idolatry we have discovered in
Hitler which does not distinguish reality from history or
the struggle for power. Accordingly Sartre must ultimately
41
�look to history, as had Hegel and Marx, as the source of
human reason. The individual's freedom then becomes a
matter of struggle against history in the manner of neo·
Kantians or Emersonians who look to the vanishing of
swine and madhouses brought about by an impulse of
spirit or will. But this is the same gnostic denouement into
which a crude reasoner such as Hitler evidently stumbled.
Hitler is not a bastard-child of the Enlightenment, only a
relatively childish enlightener. His erstwhile opponents,
those who have trivialized his deeds, are less childish but
not less idolatrous.
Trivialization of the Holocaust is the failure to consider
Nazism idolatrous. This failure is due to the implication
of the trivialization of the Holocaust in the sources of idolatry. Trivialization of the Holocaust accords what Fackenheim suggests is a posthumous victory to Nazism. 82
The Holocaust, according to two Jewish students of the
subject, is an example, unique in its excess, of how men
mistakenly put obedience above other, better traits. Seeking a model or prototype of this human failing in Western
civilization the authors hit upon the Akedah, the binding
of Isaac by Abraham, his father. Their reasoning is as
follows:
[In] the Judea-Christian tradition ... wrongdoing is utterly
clear . .. [It] is unauthorized pleasure. It is also very clear that
hardly anywhere in this tradition is there any story or statement to the effect that 'Thou shalt not obey legal orders from
superiors if they seem [sic?] atrocious to you.' Abraham, who
was prepared to obey the directive to murder his son Isaac as
a demonstration of his faith in the superior being Jaweh, is
not condemned for his blind obedience, but rather held up as
exemplary. 83
It is Abraham, the first Jew and the man who defied all
other men on earth in proclaiming God as the measure of
all things, who is here said to be the cause of the Holocaust. In other words, the cause of the Holocaust is
Judaism. Here, to be sure, is a literal trivialization of the
Holocaust. Obedience to Hitler by German Nazis is
counted the equivalent of obedience to God by Abraham
(and Isaac). It is clear the authors, Kren and Rappoport,
consider obedience to God or to Hitler the same because
honest rationality calls upon social scientists to regard all
objects of valuation as equal. The authors, as we say, do
not believe in God. But we have already suggested the
source of this atheism is not a theological investigation. It
is an opinion regarding theory, or rather the supposed
necessary limit upon theory imposed by the effort to insure man's freedom.
Harry Neumann has called social science of this type
modern Epicureanism because it seeks tranquility of mind
on the principle that Hfreedom from pain is man's summum bonum." If all ends are equal, if "no favoritism would
be shown to any particular claim," any suggestion of superiority or of divine election constitutes an impertinence, a
threat to science and peace. The equation of obedience to
God and to Hitler presupposes the equality of ends. But is
42
not knowledge of the "superhuman vantage point" reserved to God? This is the vantage point assumed by modern Epicureans who insist that "philosophy's quest to the
answer of the question of the good life is over." The good
life is freedom from pain and the good is pleasure. For this
reason modern Epicureans consider religion evil and
threatening. Religion cannot promise freedom from pain
as the equivalent of the good. Religion does not claim that
all ends are equal. In this religion and philosophy are together the enemies of "modern Epicureanism's final solution. " 84
In saying that Abraham was a model of "blind obedience" that should be despised, Kren and Rappoport wish
plainly to indict Judea-Christian civilization as the source
of the Holocaust. Above all, Judaism is the source of the
Holocaust.
The case of Abraham, the first Jew and the father of
Judaism, is undoubtedly pertinent to the subjects of obedience and idolatry. Abraham was the son of Terach, an
idol maker. Obedient to God, he cast his father's idols into
the fire. But Abraham was not a rebellious or whimsical
son. Hitler and Rimmler were obedient only to whim, to
themselves, and they cast people into furnaces. In other
words, the Nazis proceeded on the principle that Kren
and Rappoport believe to be the great truth after the
Holocaust, that "there is no morality per se, because there
is no immutable religious or legal standard for human behavior."85 Precisely the Nazis confounded pleasure, authorized or not, with the good. Abraham understood the
good to be distinct from pleasure, from his whim, because
he did not suppose he possessed divine knowledge to
regard all claims as equal. In recognizing reason he recognized its source. For this reason he rejected his father's
unreason or idolatry.
Abraham's obedience to God was disobedience to the
atrocious rule of men. More important, Abraham defied
Nimrod, the first "mighty man upon the earth ... a crafty
hero before God."86 The significance of Abraham's defiance of Nimrod could not be greater for an understanding
of idolatry. Nimrod is the founder of political idolatry, the
first to suppress men lefneh hashem, in God's name. Nimrod claimed the superhuman vantage point as his own.
Terach brought the idol-hating Abraham to Nimrod, but
Abraham did not recant. Nimrod, indulging an impulse
evidently natural to political idolators-it was of course to
become Hitler's trademark-cast Abraham into the fiery
furnace. But Abraham survived. Abraham is the founding
symbol, also in fire, that God and not man is the measure
of all things. Like the burning bush, Abraham becomes a
sign of the One that does not perish. But Abraham's
brother, Haran, supposing Abraham's survival demonstrated Abraham was now the new king, followed him into
the fire and, of course, he died.
Naturally, Judaism survived the burning of Jews by Hitler. Hitler, like Nimrod, was mistaken in thinking the soul
is a thing. Hitler was also mistaken in thinking man is a
god who can defy the order of being and assume the suWINTER 1982
�perhuman vantage point. As for the, trivialization of the
Holocaust, its source is the incapacity to distinguish the
blind obedience of Haran from Abraham's obedience.
Haran, unlike Abraham, obeyed any authority indiscrim·
inately, because he held that there is no morality per se.
l. Adolf Hi tie<, Mein Kampf, New York, Houghton Mifflin [1925, 1927],
1939, 221.
2. Emil Fackenheim, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought, New York 1973.
3. See, for example, Edward Alexander, "Stealing the Holocaust," Midstream, November, 1980, 46-50.
4. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Yehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the
Modern World: A Documentary History, New York 1980, vii.
5. Dorothy Thompson, "A Review of Mein Kampf' in Hitler, Mein
Kampf, ii.
6. Allan Bloom, "The Study of Texts," in Melvin Richter, ed., Political
Theory and Political Education, Princeton 1980, 122.
7. Werner Maser, Hitler's Mein Kampf: an Analysis, London 1970, 11.
8. Mein Kampf, 223.
9. Mein Kampf, 221.
10. Mein Kampf, 155.
11. Mein Kampf, 221.
12. Mein Kampf, 155-56.
13. Fackenheim, Encounters, 189.
14. Fackenheim, Encounters, 175.
15. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
16. Fackenheim, Encounters, 173.
17. Quoted in Fackenheim, Encounters, 178.
18. Fackenheim, Encounters, 179.
19. Fackenheim, Encounters, 217.
20. Fackenheim, Encounters, 187.
21. Fackenheim, Encounters, 187.
22. Fackenheim, Encounters, 194.
23. Fackenheim, Encounters, 196.
24. Fackenheirn, Encounters, 196.
25. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
26. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190-91.
27. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
28. Fackenheim, Encounters, 192.
29. Fackenheim, Encounters, 197, 187.
30. Fackenheim, Encounters, 191, 194.
31. Fackenheim, Encounters, 217, 223.
32. Karl LOwith, Nature, History, and Existentialism, Evanston, Illinois
1966, 10.
33. Fackenheim, Encounters, 191.
34. G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, New York 1969, 50.
35. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
36. Leo Strauss, "What is Political Philosophy?" in What is Political
Philosophy and Other Studies, Glencoe, Illinois 1959,9-55.
37. Strauss, Political Philosophy, 54.
38. Aristotle, Metd.physics l072a30.
39. Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, Baton Rouge 1974, 188-190.
40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Walter Kaufman,
ed., The Portable Nietzsche New York 1960, 243.
41. Kaufman, Nietzsche, 225.
42. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago 1953, 35-80.
43. Strauss, Natural Right, 44.
44. Strauss, Natural Right, 44.
45. Strauss, Natural Right, 46.
46. Strauss, Natural Right, 46.
47. I. Husik, "Hellenism and Judaism," Philosophical Essays, Oxford
1952, 13.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
48. Harry Neumann, "Torah or Philosophy? Jewish Alternatives to
Modern Epicureanism," The Journal of Value Inquiry, 1977, 23.
49. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182, 181.
50. Eugene Miller, ''Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry," The
American Political Science Review, 66 1972, 796-817.
51. Bloom, "The Study of Texts," 122.
52. Exodus, 32:4.
53. Daniel, 4:25.
54. Fackenheim, Encounters, 196.
55. Neumann, "Torah or Philosophy?" 23.
56. Quoted in Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182. "Of the gods we be·
lieve, and of men we know, that by a necessity of nature they rule wher·
ever they can. We neither made this law nor were the first to act on it;
we found it to exist before us _and we shall leave it to exist forever after
us; we only make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, if you
were as strong as we are, would act as we do."
57. Alan Bullock, "The Political Ideas of Adolf Hitler," in Howard Fertig
ed., The Third Reich, New York 1975, 352.
58. Adolf Hitler, Speech, 13 April 1923; Adolf Hitler, Speech, 2 April
1928, quoted in Bullock, "The Political Ideas of Adolf Hitler," 352.
59. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182.
60. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182.
61. Mein Kampf, 221.
62. Mein Kampf, 442, 217.
63. Mein Kampf, 288-89.
64. Mein Kampf, 841, 195.
65. Adolf Hitler, Speech 1932, cited in Mein Kampf, 402n6.
66. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, Chicago 1952, 107ff.
67. John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms, Philadelphia
1870. Reprint edition titled, Strange Cults and Utopias of Nineteenth
Century America, New York 1966, vii, 626.
68. Norman 0. Brown, Life Against Death, New York 1961, 155.
69. Donatien A. F. de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, Paris 1795, in
Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, eds., The Marquis de Sade, the
Complete Justine Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, New
York 1965, 330-1, 333.
70. Fackenheim, Encounters, 188.
71. Genesis, 9:4, 5.
72. "[T]he emancipation of society from Judaism" is equivalent to the
emancipation of man from exchange, "the bill of exchange [being] ...
the real god of the Jew." Because "Judaism attains its apogee [and its
"universal dominance"] with the perfection of civil society," the destruction of Judaism is equivalent to and necessary for the realm of free·
dam or the abolition of civil society. Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Ques·
tion" in T. B. Bottomore, ed., Karl Marx Early Writings, New York 1964,
40, 37, 38. Note the remarks of Erich Fromm on this topic in the forward
to this volume, iv-v.
73. Mein Kampf, 442.
74. Mein Kampf, 416, 487.
75. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, New York 1956, 15.
76. Mein Kampf, 410,412.
77. Mein Kampf, 988.
78. Mein Kampf, 647.
79. AdOlf Hitler, Speech 26 March 1936 in N. H. Baynes, ed., The
Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April, 1922-August, 1939, 2 vo1s. New York
1969, II, 1317.
80. Fackenhdm, Encounters, 209.
81. Fackenheim, Encounters, 211.
82. Fackenheim, Encounters, 207.
83. George M. K:ren and Leon Rappoport, The Holocaust and the Crisis
of Human Behavior, New York 1980, 141.
84. Neumann, "Toiah or Philosophy?" 17, 20.
85. Kren and Rappoport, The Holocaust, 142.
86. Genesis, 10:8-9.
43
�·Proof and Pascal
Brother Robert Smith
To F. H. and to my friends just off Bambury Road
In his lecture, "Power and Grace," Douglas Allanbrook
said of Pascal:
One final question: what does Pascal's attitude toward
proof have to do with him personally, with Pascal as a
man?
For both Thrasymachus and Pascal, however, the voices of
power and persuasion are the only thinkable ways of talking
about politics. Reasoning about politics with any purity of discourse is foolishness. In reading over this pensee [103], most of
you have probably been struck by the lack of anything that
could be called . .. dialectic . .. the complete absence of premises . .. Pascal seldom argues: he states persuasively what is to
him the case. 1
Allanbrook may have been flattering us. When we hear
Pascal speak we may often be so dazzled by his epigrams,
his examples, and his similes that we do not think to ask
whether he is talking reasonably. It might not occur to us
that one example does not necessarily prove a general
statement or that his lack of dialectic is consciously antiphilosophical.
.
.
In his lecture, Allanbrook made good hts charges agamst
Pascal: that Pascal says we have no power to discover justice that according to Pascal we cannot know the differenc~ between a just and an unjust action, and that justice
has no power in this world.
These are shocking charges. They ought to make us ask
questions about Pascal himself. Did he reject argument
on all matters? Not only about politics, but about all that
is important in our lives? Why? What substitute for reasoning, for dialectical inquiry and proof dtd he propose?
How does Pascal proceed in a typical section of the Pensees? Does he argue? What is his attitude toward dialectics, toward philosophical inquiry in the tradition of Plato
and Aristotle, or theology, as practiced by St. Augustine
and St. Thomas? Does Pascal argue about philosophy and
theology or does he "state persuasively what is to him the
case" and. no more?
A second consideration. Aside from his practice in the
Pensees, what does Pascal think of proof itself? Does he
think it impossible? If it is possible, when is it so?
A tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, Brother Robert Smith professed membership in the Order of Christian Brothers in 1939.
A lecture read at Annapolis on October 30, 1981.
44
1 Happiness
How can Pascal set out to defend the Christian religion
without resort to argument? He says he intends to show
that religion is not contrary to reason, to make it attractive, to make good men wish it were true, and, fmally, to
show that it is true. Wh at d o " sh ow, " " rnake, " an d "' "
ts
mean to him?
First a few remarks on the order, or lack of it, in Pascal's
text. Until forty years ago, when the work of a man named
Lafuma appeared, editors had arranged Pascal's thoughts
at their discretion. Lafuma showed that Pascal had tentatively chosen some thoughts for a work, an Apology for the
Christian Religion, for which the Pensees are only the
working notes. Pascal decided on twenty-seven numbered
headings like Order, Beginning, Conclusion. Not quite
chapters, they appear to be divisions of a whole work.
With his thoughts written out helter-skelter on large foho
sheets, he selected those that related to his division headings, strung them together with needle and thread, and
placed them in packets, each packet with a headmg. Lafuma was the first to realize the significance of these arrangements, especially the titles and needlework. Oth~r
arguments have since been advanced to conflfm Lafum~ s
view that Pascal selected about one th!rd of the matenal
included in what we know as the Pensees for his projected
work.
I have chosen to examine Section Ten of those thoughts
selected from the Pensees. It is called The Soverign Good. I
have picked it because it provides a good ~xample of Pascal's last, provisional arrangement, and gives a clear picture of his procedure:
The sovereign good. Debate about the sovereign good.
That you may be content with yourself and the good things innate in you.
There is some contradiction, because they [the Stoics) finally
advise suicide. Oh, how happy is a life we throw off like the
plague! (147)
WINTIR 1982
�Second part. Man without faith can know neither true good
nor justice.
'
All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However
different the means they may employ, they all strive towards
this goal. The reason why some go to war and some do not is
the same desire in both, but interpreted in two different ways.
The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is
the motive of every act of every man, including those who go
and hang themselves.
Yet for very many years no one without faith has ever reached
the goal at which everyone is continually aiming. All men
complain: princes, subjects, nobles, commoners, old, young,
strong, weak, learned, ignorant, healthy, sick, in every country, at every time, of all ages, and all conditions.
A test which has gone on so long, without pause or change,
really ought to convince us that we are incapable of attaining
the good by our own efforts. But example teaches us very little. No two examples are so exactly alike that there is not
some subtle difference, and that is what makes us expect that
our expectations will not be disappointed this time as they
were last time. So, while the present never satisfies us, experience deceives us, and leads us on from one misfortune to another until death comes as the ultimate and eternal climax.
dence Pascal would have preferred this order. Number 148
should perhaps precede 147 because 148 begins with a
general statement of Pascal's point in this section: "Man
without faith can know neither true good nor justice."
This expression, "without faith," reminds us of the place
of Section Ten in the Apology. In saying, "Man without
faith," so absolutely, so uncompromisingly, without any
nuance or admission, Pascal runs head-long against a philosophical and theological tradition that he knows and refuses to follow. He does not turn to Aristotle, who was
known to the men around him, or to St. Thomas, whom
he had read selectively, or even to St. Augustine, who says
that the philosophical writings of the ancients, especially
those of Cicero, helped him on the way to his conversion
in the garden. (St. Augustine, for example, thanks Cicero's
lost work, Hortensius, for his turn to the search for wisdom
instead of the pursuit of political and financial success.)
Unlike Aristotle, who had a great deal to say about happi·
ness in the Ethics, and even defined it, Pascal does not
refer to human experience for his understanding of happiness. Instead, he says, "Man without faith can know
neither true good nor justice."
Pascal expects his reader first to despair of finding guidance by his reason. He hopes then he will be receptive to
the religious alternative.
The first sentence in the development of Section Ten
What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim
but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all
that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries
in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things
that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are,
though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled
only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words,
by God himself.
reads:
God alone is man's true good, and since man abandoned him
it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to
take his place: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages,
leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war,
famine, vice, adultery, incest. Since losing his true good, man
is capable of seeing it in anything, even his own destruction,
although it is so contrary at once to God, to reason, and to
nature.
How do we react when we hear this sentence? Pascal
expects us to agree. Very likely he is not mistaken, for the
contrary is too unlikely.
Pascal, however, does not even offer the weak argument that the contrary is too unlikely. He expects us to
agree without question, and he is willing to proceed with
that unexamined assent.
Some seek their good in authority, some in intellectual inquiry and knowledge, some in pleasure.
has not been discussed. We think we know well enough
Others again, who have indeed come closer to it, have found
it impossible that this universal good, desired by all men,
should lie in any of the particular objects which can only be
possessed by one individual and which, once shared, cause
their possessors more grief over the part they lack than satisfaction over the part they enjoy as their own. They have realized that the true good must be such that it may be possessed
by all men at once without diminution or envy, and that no
one should be able to lose it against his will. Their reason is
that this desire is natural to man, since all men inevitably feel
it, and man cannot be without it, and they therefore conclude ... (148f
A word on the numbering of the thoughts within the
sections. In Section Ten, Lafuma, relying only on his
judgement, put pensee 147 before 148. There is no eviTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
All men seek happiness.
We are not aware that the crucial term, "happiness,"
what the sentence, "All men seek happiness," means, and
that is all Pascal needs. In contrast, Aristotle, who began
his discussion of happiness in the Ethics with just such an
unexamined use of the word, devotes the whole of Ethics
I and most of X to clarifying what the word means.
Section Ten continues:
All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However
different the means they may employ, they all strive towards
this goal. The reason some go to war and some do not is the
same desire in both, but interpreted in two different ways.
The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is
the motive of every act of every man, including those who go
and hang themselves.
Something extraordinary is happening in these sentences. Pascal has got us to agree that "happiness" applies
indiscriminately to anything that man seeks. We have
45
�agreed that, to use his example, there is no difference between leading a charge and leading a peace march.
Had we realized how Pascal was using the term, most of
us would have questioned whether happiness in that
vague sense is the goal of all man's efforts. Most of us
think "happiness" is a term with many complex meanings. We think that what we are doing now is better or
worse, more or less conducive to happiness, than what we
were doing, say, two years ago. We think there are kinds
and degrees of happiness.
Pascal has made us accept uncritically an apparently obvious statement containing a term whose meaning seems
equally obvious. With the acceptance of that statement,
we have been led to agree that all the things we strive for
are the same. Am I characterizing Pascal fairly?
Already wary of the consequences of our uncritical acceptance of the obvious, we will be even more suspicious
of what follows:
Yet, for very many years no one without faith has ever reached
the goal at which everyone is continually aiming.
Once more, we have a general statement. This statement is not, however, offered without discussion. We are
asked to accept it because there are indications in our experience that it is true:
All men complain: princes, subjects, nobles, commoners, old,
young, strong, weak, learned, ignorant, healthy, sick, in every
country, at every time, of all ages, and all conditions.
The opening sentence seems plausible because we know
that we all complain, and so we cannot imagine anyone
else not complaining. In that case, he would be, well, odd.
No, everyone complains. A parade of characters passes
through our imagination-all complaining as we imagine
them. So we agree.
Without protest, we are accepting a new definition of
happiness. Happiness now means "something that satisfies
us completely." Only when happiness means complete
satisfaction does our complaining show that no one has
reached happiness without faith. Because all men, including ourselves, complain, they cannot be. completely satisfied, i.e. happy. Everything comes out so clearly and with
such assurance that we agree. No one, including ourselves,
is happy. But, you will agree, Pascal's procedure does not
amount to an argument.
Tacitly and guardedly, Pascal admits that his conclusion
is open to question:
A test which has gone on so long, without pause or change,
really ought to convince us that we are incapable of attaining
the good by our own efforts.
By saying, "really ought to convince us," Pascal protests
too much. He raises the possibility that we have not been
convinced that we are incapable of attaining the good by
our own efforts. Why do we all keep scurrying about so
46
much when we really ought to know that all our efforts
are doomed to failure?
But example teaches us very little. No two examples are so exactly alike that there is not some subtle difference, and that is
what makes us expect that our expectations will not be disappointed this time as they were last time.
Pascal says we keep scurrying about because we think
that the future will be different. We think that we will be
happy next time because then, everything will turn our
way, to our complete satisfaction. We think this because
we want to, not because we are convinced by proof.
Pascal's argument that mere reason leads to despair
would be conclusive if our failure to be completely satisfied was the same thing as complete misery. Then we
would not get out of bed in the morning. In fact, though,
we do get some satisfaction out of writing our essays, such
as they are, and hope to write better ones. There is more
than a "subtle difference" between failing to be completely satisfied and suffering complete misery. We are
not fools to keep on hoping to improve our situation. A
more modest definition of happiness might make us accept some complaint. Even the chance to complain may
occasion a certain happiness.
I know this may sound unfair to Pascal. I am not without question granting him his definition, and so I lead you
to doubt his word. Pascal would not be at all surprised by
what we have done, nor would he think us guilty of bad
manners. I am pointing out that Pascal has, without saying so, substituted a definition of happiness derived from
faith for one derived from ordinary experience. A definition from faith, which restricts happiness to the complete
and unqualified happiness that comes from seeing God
face to face, supports his argument and will find acceptance among his readers if they are believing, though nonpracticing, Christians. The Apology was, in fact, addressed
to such Christians.
So, while the present never satisfies us, experience deceives
us, and leads us on from one misfortune to another until death
comes as the ultimate and eternal climax.
A man without a conventional religious upbringing
would be unprepared for Pascal's assertions that "the
present never satisifies us" and "experience deceives us"
or Hleads us on from one misfortune to another." He would
be even more unprepared for the assertion that death is
the "ultimate and eternal climax." This is the language of
sermons heard in childhood. It is useful for evoking sentiments felt then. Someone who has these sentiments to recall will follow the whole resounding periodic sentence in
the way Pascal intends. Someone who has not been exposed to religious oratory is not so likely to follow it
unhesitatingly.
I am saying that this enthusiastic tone will seem sincere
and justified to a reader who can bring to the text religious
WINTER 1982
�associations from childhood. Those qf us who have a deep
religious background, strengthened by childhood memories, will be carried along by Pascal's prose to his conclu-
do the things we did when we believed, the responses will
follow, revived by the automatism of habit:
sion: the present never satisfies us, experience deceives us
For we must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as
much automaton as mind . .. habit provides the strongest
proofs and those that are most believed. It inclines the autom-
with its endless variety and promise of something better,
we are led from failure to failure until lastly, our life ends
in a crash-the last resounding crash-death.
The text we have been studying is a powerful piece of
rhetoric, worthy of a sermon in the grand tradition, be·
cause, like all successful oratory, it ties the speaker's mes·
sage to sympathies dormant in the hearer's memory. Like
a speech in a dramatic production that makes a character
come to life, Pascar s prose succeeds in evoking our own
experience. Racine realized this when, smarting under
Pascal's boutade that a good playwright was as bad as a
public poisoner, he told the authorities at Port-Royal that
their darling Pascal was himself a dramatist in the Provin·
cia! Letters.
Pascal, in fact, has been practicing oratorical art. He be·
gan with something that any reader could accept without
reflection. He went on to talk about our futile search for
happiness. Those readers whose experience confirms
what they read, believe him because they find the truth of
his words in themselves, just as Pascal claimed to find the
truth of Montaigne' s words in his own, not Montaigne' s,
experience.
Pascal's discourse is, then, limited to those who have
had a conventional religious upbringing in childhood. His
discourse is like a discussion among a closed circle of
friends who agree on what is desirable but differ as to how
to achieve it.
To get his hearers to turn towards God, Pascal relies on
reviving deeply ingrained beliefs dormant in their memo·
ries. When he began the Pensees, he must have thought of
making the Apology a series of letters like the Provincial
Letters:
A letter of exhortation to a friend, to induce him to seek. He
will reply: 'But what good will it do me? Nothing comes of it.'
... The answer to that is 'the Machine.' (5)
After the letter urging men to seek God, write the letter about
removing obstacles, that is the argument about the Machine
... (11)
What does he mean by the "Machine?" It is the response
that arises in us when we see something that once moved
us deeply, in a new context:
The fact that kings are habitually seen in the company of
guards, drums, officers, and all the things which prompt automatic responses of respect and fear has the result that, when
they are sometimes alone . .. their features are enough to strike
respect and fear into their subjects ... (25)
The "Machine" also helps to recall dormant religious
sentiments. We who once actively believed can again experience the responses we made when we believed. If we
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
aton which leads the mind unconsciously along with it. (821)
In addressing this audience of those who once strongly
believed, Pascal defines happiness as the result of a direct
vision of a personal God, whom we know even as we are
known:
What else does this craving for happiness . .. proclaim but
that there was once in man a true happiness . .. an infinite
abyss which can be filled only ... by God himself. (148)
Does Pascal believe this reliance on faith is our only
hope for knowing anything about happiness? Cannot we,
with our reason, our good sense, explore experience and
discover something worthwhile? Does Pascal go so far as
to reject the possibility that man can acquire for himself a
high .and noble happiness? He does.
Debate about the sovereign good.
That you may be content with yourself and the good things innate in you. (147)3
The quotation is from Seneca and it is given so that
Pascal can immediately reject it:
There is some contradiction, because they [the Stoics] finally
advise suicide. Oh, how happy is a life we throw off like the
plague!
With this sarcastic comment, Pascal dismisses Seneca
and all others who find in man's nature a genuine good
capable of being the basis for a moral life. Man, in his fallen nature, cannot find any of the good things that Seneca
attributes to him.
God alone is man's true good, and since man abandoned him
it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to
take his place: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages,
leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war,
famine, vice, adultery, incest. Since losing his true good, man
is capable of seeing it in anything . ..
Pascal does not think that we can ever come to know
what is best by reasoning about our own nature or the
things around us. We have not succeeded in rising to that
knowledge and we never will.
2 Proof
From Section Ten, a single, though typical, section of
the Pensees, we have gotten some idea of the Pascal's conception of the limitations of philosophical inquiry. We will
be more confident we know his mind if we look at another
47
�work where he discusses proof and qur ability to produce
it. In a short essay called, On the Geometrical Art, he says:
To show how to make unbeatable proofs . .. all we have to do
is to explain the method that geometry uses, for geometry
teaches it perfectly by example.4
[Attempts to clarify these truths] confuse everything, and de-
A few lines further he says:
What goes beyond geometry, is beyond
ness because such knowledge cannot come to the level of
speech. Geometry falls short of the highest method of
proof.
.
We should not try to clarify these first truths, known
from the heart. Attempts to clarify these truths bring obscurity and disagreement. We are better off without them:
us.5
stroying all order and light, destroy themselves and get lost in
inextricable difficulty.8
We know the truth not only through our reason but also
[Geometry] does not define any of these things: space, time,
movement, number, equality, nor large numbers of similar
thirigs, because these terms naturally designate the things
which they signify for anyone who knows the language . .. and
any clarification which one might wish to bring to them will
bring more obscurity than instruction.9
through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first
principles ... like space, time, motion, number .. it is on such
knowledge, coming from the heart and instinct, that reason
The passage immediately following shows the limits of
philosophical discourse, in Pascal's conception:
Reason cannot go beyond geometry, the model of perfect reasoning. How does geometry serve as a model for
reasoning? In the Pensees we read:
has to depend and base all its argument The heart feels that
there are three spatial dimensions and that there is an infinite
series of numbers, and reason goes on to demonstrate that
there are no two square numbers of which one is double the
other. Principles are felt, propositions proved, and both with
For there is nothing weaker than the discourse of those who
wish to define these primitive words. What necessity is there
for explaining the word "man?" What advantage did Plato
think he was offering us in saying that man is a featherless
certainty though by different means. (110)
biped? As if the idea which I have naturally and which I can-
Pascal speaks of knowledge we have through the heart
as sentiment (751), from sentir, "to feel," "to sense." The
connection is more than verbal. Through the heart we
have knowledge that is certain and cannot be doubted
but, like our knowledge of "green" or "soft," cannot be
expressed.
Geometrical reasoning is perfect because it begins in
the knowledge of the heart:
Geometry only sustains things that are clear and unchanging
through natural reason. That is why geometry is perfectly
true, since nature supports it where reasoning fails. This
order, the most perfect on the human level, consists not in defining everything or demonstrating nothing, but in remaining
on the middle ground of not defining things that are clear and
understood by all men, and of not defining all others, of not
proving what is known by all men, of demonstrating all
others.
Like Pascal's favorite theologian, St. Augustine, we
know what time is as long as we do not try to say what it is.
We know what time is because our heart tells us what it is.
When we try to clarify what is already clear in its own way,
we only add confusion. Nothing that we know is clearer to
us than time or number. Time and number are examples
of first known truths, which cannot be clarified:
Geometry, when it has arrived at the first known truths, stops
there and asks that they be granted, since it has nothing more
clear from which to prove them.?
The first known truths are geometry's strength and its
weakness. They are its strength because they give geometry a universally agreed starting point. They are its weak-
48
not express were not more exact and more sure than the one
he has given me in his useless and even ridiculous example,
since a man does not lose his humanity by losing his two legs
and a capon does not gain humanity by having its feathers
removed. 10
In a moment of euphoria, Pascal said that to be a
geometer is the most beautiful profession in the world.
Geometry, however, cannot define its starting points. Pascal exalts geometry at the same time that he casts doubt
on other inquiries that attempt to define their starting
points. Geometry is the best thing man can do on his own.
In contrast, Plato believed that philosophy should begin
with the study of "primitive words" such as space, time,
and equality. He urged apprentice philosophers to start by
inquiring into the greatness, the smallness, and the equality of their fingers.
Just as when he held that the true good could only be
found in faith, Pascal by refusing to inquire into the nature of space, time, and equality rejects much of the work
of philosophers before and after him.
But there is a more serious obstacle to achieving a full
grasp of the world through geometry. In its three branches
~movement, number, and space-geometry lies between
the infinitely great and the infinitely small:
Consequently . .. [the three branches] are all contained between nothingness and the infinitely great . .. and they are infinitely removed from either of these extremes. 11
Man is not to conceive of these two infinities but to admire them. Their contemplation will keep man from making any rash statements about the whole of the universe
or the combination of its parts. The world is a sphere
whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is
WINTER 1982
�nowhere. Our discourse can start with the inexpressible
data of the heart, but these do not correspond to any starting point in the universe. Worrying ab,aut whether Copernicus is right makes no sense. We will never have a sense
of the whole, we can have no hope of reaching an end, a
limit. We must remain in an unpretentious middleness. At
no stage of our intellectual journey are we any further
along than when we started.
Descartes is right in thinking that things are put together out of matter and motion, but when he hopes to
construct in thought a world so like the one God made
that one cannot tell the difference between the two, the
two infinites will mock him.
Descartes useless and uncertain. (887)
Because they failed to contemplate these two infinities, men
have rashly undertaken to probe into nature as if there were
some proportion between themselves and her. (199)
We have no starting point, no fulcrum for the lever that
is supposed to move the world: the infinities " ... meet in
God and in God alone."
Geometry, the best of the sciences, cannot help us say
where we are. Even if it could:
... we do not think the whole of . .. [geometry} is worth one
hour of trouble. (84)
Remember, though, that geometry, despite these limitations, " ... alone observes the true method, while all
other discourses are by natural necessity in some sort of
confusion. 12
3 Morality and Politics
What does Pascal think about other forms of discourse,
discourse which, because it is beyond geometry, is also beyond us?
Pascal thinks there are only two domains in which men
aspire to excellence: science, on the one hand, and moral~
ity and politics on the other. He thinks we cannot succeed
in either domain because each demands that we obtain
the unattainable, namely, a comprehensive grasp of the
world.
We have, in a preliminary way, seen how little Pascal
thinks of our ability to see what is good. Because of this inability, we cannot establish moral order in our lives. Without faith, we have no reason to say that incest is inferior to
anything else that attracts men. Without grace, selfishness
is our ultimate guide.
In Allanbrook's lecture, we meditated on our inability
to discover what justice is and our consequent inability to
establish any political order. We are living in an insane
asylum, Pascal says. How could Plato or Aristotle, in the
Laws or the Politics, pretend to show us just ways of living
in society? They had no such intention. They were not serious when they wrote those books. They knew enough of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the world to see that laughing with friends is our only serious occupation:
... When [Plato and Aristotle] amused themselves by composing their Laws and Politics, they did it for fun. It was the
least philosophical and least serious part of their lives: the
most philosophical part was living simply and without fuss.
If they wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a
madhouse. (533)
Since we live in an insane asylum, it might be useful to
ask our fellow inmates to treat one another less cruelly:
One cannot ask the insane to discover justice.
If we leave the matter there, you may wish to dismiss
Pascal as a misanthrope. It is fairer to try once more to see
things as he sees them before we bid him farewell. Let us
look at a passage where he describes the real difficulties of
any talk about human authority. A present-day writer on
Pascal says that the following passage is a paradigm of the
insuperable difficulties that Pascal thought stand in the
way of not only political, but of all discourseY
... Ordinary people honor those who are highly born, the
half-clever ones despise them, saying that birth is a matter of
chance, not personal merit. Really clever men honor them,
not for the same reason as ordinary people, but for deeper
motives. Pious folk with more zeal than knowledge despise
them regardless of the reason which makes clever men honor
them, because they judge men in the new light of piety, but
perfect Christians honor them because they are guided by a
still higher light.
So opinions swing back and forth, from pro to con, according
to one's lights. (90)
Pascal's statement here is anti-Cartesian. Descartes
held that if we could not persuade others of our meaning,
we did not know what we were talking about. Pascal says
we cannot persuade others unless they share our starting
point in discourse. Not normally transmitted by one
speaker to another, the starting point is given from nature, as in geometry, or by custom, or by private experi~
ence, or by faith.
Anybody who does not see the wider bearing of the passage we are about to study, might dismiss it as a piece of
baroque rhetoric, an example of Jansenist obsession with
the Fall of Man. But Pascal means what he says, in this instance, to apply to all human discourse.
For Pascal, the pattern of all knowledge about matters
moral or religious is illumination from above, and no dis~
course can be successful without it. With illumination
from above, lesser truths are made valid. Without it, they
are misleading.
Pascal has listed five successive opinions:
l. Ordinary people honor those who are highly born.
In an earlier pensee, he tells us the dark grounds for this
honor:
49
�I am supposed not to honor a man dressed in brocade and at-
tended by seven or eight lackeys. Why! He will have me
thrashed if I do not bow to him. (89)
Our ordinary man thinks as he does because he fears
the strong arms and stout sticks of the lackeys who follow
their expensively dressed master. Don Giovanni frightens
Leporello into submission by reminding him that stout
thugs ready to use their whips will punish his failure to
obey.
2.... the half-clever ones despise them [the highly born], say·
ing that birth is a matter of chance, not personal merit.
Pascal himself takes this view when he asks whether
sailors would allow someone to direct a ship at sea merely
because he was the first-born son of some nobleman.
Birth is not enough to determine the command of a ship.
Why should it be accepted for the rule of a country?
3. Really clever people honor them, not for the same reason
as ordinary people, but for deeper motives.
Pascal tells us their motives. Reason cannot discover
any universally accepted sign of legitimacy apart from custom or bring forth any laws that all men will think are just.
As soon as people begin to dispute about who should rule
them or whether the commands of the rulers are just,
there will be the greatest political evil-civil war. A really
clever man will know that we can never be sure about
right or wrong and that convention only determines who
rules us, president, king, parliament. The clever man will
say we should leave well enough alone because things will
only get worse through civil war. Protest against injustice
arouses passion-and passion may lead to rioting in the
streets, repression, or anarchy.
4. Pious folk with more zeal than knowledge despise them
[the highly born] regardless of the reason which makes clever
men honor them, because they judge men in the new light of
piety.
Here Pascal seems to be thinking of people who, in the
enthusiasm of new converts to religion, think that one
need not care about political matters or even fear civil disorder. They may be well-advised to place their hopes in
heaven, but they are short-sighted in not realizing what a
great evil civil war is in this life, a life that they and others
must share.
We should pause here to note how "opinions swing
Dack and forth, from pro to con" among the four groups.
Two groups say we should honor those highly born, two
say we should not. The two groups who say we should
honor them do not say we should do so for the same reasons. Neither do the two groups who say we should
despite the high-born.
Most important in all this is the extreme, perhaps insurmountable difficulty that those who hold one set of opin-
50
ions have in persuading those who hold other opinions. In
abject fear of the whip, an ordinary man like Leporello
does not need to be convinced to obey because of the
evils of civil war. He probably will never be detached
enough to think about the matter. Leporello does think
for a moment how unjust it is that he should remain outside as a sentinel while his master disports indoors, but
the mention of the whip makes him forget that thought.
Those who fear civil war will probably riot want -fo give
their reasons for enduring present evils to men like Leporello. They will also find it discouraging to argue with halfclever men who hope in the future and do not fear civil
war because they have not experienced it.
The new converts, who believe they have nothing to
learn from others, are similarly isolated and unlikely to be
able to talk to any of the others.
What of the fifth opinion?
5.... but perfect Christians honor them [the high-born] because they [the perfect Christians] are guided by a still higher
light.
Perfect Christians share Pascal's belief that we should
submit to those who hold power over us because we are
thereby submitting to God. God has ordained that the unjust power of rulers should weigh upon us in punishment
for original sin.
The first four explanations are all consistent with the
last one. If it is true, they all can be partially true as well,
even if they do contradict one another. Rulers do have the
power to frighten and punish us. We are in this slavish
state because an angry God has left us prey to the passions of the strong because we rebelled against him. Fear
belongs to a fallen nature. So does the cruelty of the
powerful toward the weak. The doctrine of the Fall accounts for Leporello's fear of Don Giovanni.
The doctrine of the Fall also accounts for the second
explanation, which holds the highly born in contempt.
Men are all equal in the state of innocence. None are by
nature superior. All are subject only to God and because
of him are well-disposed toward one another. Because of
the Fall, however, the restraints on human behavior have
been removed and the strong unfairly try to dominate the
weak. Their domination is unjust in itself, but that injustice is our reward for having rebelled against the only naturally superior ruler. The second explanation is both true
and incomplete. The fifth explanation confirms and completes its truth.
The third explanation, that of the really clever, who
fear civil war and on that account respect authority, is
based on experience. It is consistent with the fifth reason,
that of the perfect Christians.
The fourth explanation, that of the zealous convert,
though religious, is insufficient because it does not consider the crucial religious truth-that only the redeemer
can redress the Fall.
WINTER 1982
�The Fall and Redemption are the ~ey that resolves the
conflicting opinions about authority. That key opens the
understanding to whatever truth is contained in any hu·
man opinions. Pascal is calling all valid discourse about
moral matters-matters other than geometry-"ciphered
language." The doctrine of the Fall and Redemption
breaks that code. Supplied by faith, it illumines our
searching just as our instinctive knowledge of number illumines our geometrical quest. This key is given by God.
Those to whom he does not give it wander in the incompleteness of one of the first four partial truths. Only with
the fifth explanation, that of the perfect Christians, can
we preserve what validity lies in each of those explanations while avoiding their limitations, their semi-falsity.
Pascal would consider this account of the incompleteness of our knowledge of a prime political matter a paradigm of our knowledge in general. All knowledge of what
is important, of what is true for man and for the world, is
fragmentary.
_ Like the two infinities, all knowledge meets and is comprehended in and by God. Only those who see him face to
face will see clearly the general truths. Goodness, justice,
and happiness are revealed only dimly and in faith to
those who have the key of the Fall and Redemption.
Pascal uses the language of seduction when he wants to
make us feel as he does about these matters. God overcomes our resistance, he says, by an overpowering delight,
not by argument or proof. Pascal thinks God gives us the
ability to accept enlightenment, the will to surrender, because of Christ's death for us. Not only does he not think
we should look for arguments, he believes that to hope to
achieve enlightenment by them is blasphemous. To obtain moral knowledge by human means would make the
Cross useless. (808).
To know what Pascal thinks is true, we would have to
see within ourselves what he sees. By his own principles,
he can only hope to point us in a direction that leads us
on. He can remind us of the advantages of accepting
Christian doctrine. But Pascal also thinks that God must
move us to accept in order for us to yield. Short of that experience and lacking an interpretation of it that would be
identical with Pascal's own, all that we can do is look at
Pascal himself.
Before we leave him, let me read one passage where he
tells us how alone he felt in the world. Let us hear Pascal
describe what must have been his state of mind before the
religious experience on the night of Monday, November
23, 1654, that made him turn to God.
When . .. I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and
man left to himself with no light, as though lost in a corner of
the universe . .. incapable of knowing anything, I am moved
to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying
desert island, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of
escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive
people to despair. I see other people around me . .. I ask them
if they are better informed than I, and they say they are not.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Then these lost and wretched creatures look around and find
some attractive objects to which they become addicted and
attached. For my part, I have never been able to form such
attachments ... (198)
How consistent his language is with what must have
been his feelings! Never having been able to form any attachment to people or things around him, Pascal speaks of
those who have as "wretched and lost." We can see how
much religious reassurance and enlightenment must have
meant to him.
It need not be true that Pascal always felt the way he
did in this passage. "Never" may be a hyperbole justified
by the depth of his revulsion for things or people he no
longer admired. "Never" shows how unimportant they
were to him when he wrote those words.
Another sign of this solitariness is the harshness with
which he speaks about love, the passion of love:
A man goes to the window to see the people passing by; if I
pass by, can I say that he went there to see me? No, for he is
not thinking of me in particular. But what about a person
who loves someone for the sake of her beauty; does he love
her? No, for smallpox, which will destroy beauty without destroying the person, will put an end to his love for her.
And if someone loves me for my judgement or my memory,
do they love me? me, myself? Where then is this self, if it is
neither in the body nor the soul? . .. we never love anyone ex-
cept for borrowed qualities. (688)
How much must it have meant to such a man to have
felt that he knew that God cared for him, and that Christ
had died for his sake. We who remain outside this experience will remain unaffected by his account. Some of us
may even want to say that he is describing a delusion.
There is no need to argue about the matter. Nothing
could have been more important for Pascal than a revelation which, in his own words, brought him "certainty, cer-
tainty, peace." From the high point of that experience he
henceforth judged all else.
It will be no surprise to us that he could not prove what
he said, or, indeed, successfully point to it.
1. Douglas Allanbrook, ''Power and Grace," The College, January 1977.
2. All quotations from the Pensies are from the translation of A. J.
Krailsheimer, New York 1966.
3. Seneca, Ep. 20.8.
4. Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres Completes, Louis Lafuma, ed., Paris 1963,348.
Translations by Brother Robert Smith.
5. Pascal, Oeuvres, 349.
6. Pascal, Oeuvres, 350.
7. Pascal, Oeuvres, 351.
8. Pascal, Oeuvres, 351.
9. Pascal, Oeuvres, 350.
10. Pascal, Oeuvres, 350.
11. Pascal, Oeuvres, 352.
12. Pascal, Oeuvres, 349.
13. Louis Marin, La critique du discours, Paris 1975, 372~374.
51
�Five Translations
Charles G. Bell
By Victor Hugo, past eighty years old
Ave, Dea: Moriturus te salutatA judith Gautier
La mort et Ia beaute sont deux choses profondes
Qui contiennent tant d'ombres et d'azur qu'on dirait
Deux soeurs egalement terribles et fecondes
Ayant Ia meme enigme et le meme secret.
0 femmes, voix, regards, cheveux noirs, tresses blondes,
Brillez, je meurs! Ayez !'eclat, !'amour, l'attrait,
0 perles que Ia mer mele a ses grandes ondes,
0 lumineux oiseaux de Ia sombre foret!
Judith, nos deux destins sont plus pres l'un de !'autre
Qu'on ne croirait, a voir mon visage et le votre;
Tout le divin ab!me appara!t dans vos yeux,
Et moi, je sens le gouffre etoile dans mon arne;
Nous sommes tousles deux voisins du ciel, madame,
Puisque vous etes belle et puisque je suis vieux.
Death and beauty are two somber loves,
As deep in blue and shade as if to say:
Two sisters, alike fecund and destructive,
Bearing the burden of one mystery.
Loves, voices, looks, tresses dark and fair,
Be radiant; for I die. Hold light, warmth, solaceyou pearls the sea rolls in waves up the shore,
You birds that nestle, luminous, in the forest.
Judith, our destinies are nearer kin
Than one might think to see your face and mine.
The abyss of all opens in your eyesThe same starred gulf I harbor in my soul.
We are neighbors of the sky, and for this cause,
That you are beautiful and I am old.
Charles Bell is a tutor at St.John's College, Santa Fe. These translations are a sequence from a forthcoming collection of poems, The Five-Chambered Heart.
52
WINTER 1982
�. Goethe: Se/ige Sehnsucht (1814)
Sagt es niemand, nur den Weisen,
Wei! die Menge gleich verhonet:
Das Lebendige will ich preisen,
Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet.
In der Liebesnachte Kiihlung,
Die dich zeugte, wo du zeugtest,
Dberfallt dich fremde Fiihlung,
Wenn die stille Kerze leuchtet.
Nicht mehr bleibest du umfangen
In der Finsternis Beschattung,
Und dich reisset neu Verlangen
Auf zu hoherer Begattung.
Keine Ferne macht dich schwierig,
Kommst geflogen und gebannt,
Und zuletzt, des Lichts begierig,
Bist du, Schmetterling, verbrannt.
Und solang du das nicht hast,
Dieses: Stirb und werde!
Bist do nur ein triiber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.
Sacred Lust
Tell the wise; the many lour,
And make ignorance their shame;
Say I praise the living power
That hungers for a death of flame.
Love-nights breed us as we breed:
In the candlelighted cool,
Feel the gates of dark go wide
For the moulting of the soul.
From its woven bed of shadows
Mere enclosure falls away:
Love spreads new wings to the meadows
Of another mating play.
Tireless, upward; spaces dwindle;
Nothing hems declared desire;
God is light and light will kindle,
And the moth wings leap in fire.
Know, until you learn to weave
Each flame-dying into breath,
Everywhere you haunt the grave
Of the shadowed earth.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
53
�Petrarch (1304-74): Sonnet XI,
After Laura's Death
Se lamentar augelli, o verdi fronde
mover soavemente a !'aura estiva,
o roco mormorar di lucide onde
s'ode d'una fiorita e fresca riva,
Ia 'v' io seggia d' amor pensoso e scriva;
lei che '1 ciel ne mostro, terra n'asconde,
veggio et odo et intendo, ch' ancor viva
di sl lontano a' sospir miei risponde:
"Deh perche innanzi '1 tempo ti consume?"
mi dice con pietate: "a che pur versi
degli occhi tristi un doloroso fiume?
Di me non pianger tu, che' miei dl fersi
morendo eterni, e nell' eterno lume,
quando mostrai di chiuder, gli occhi apersi."
If birds' lament, green leaves' or tendrils' stir
To the soft sighing of the air of summer,
Or through the wave-wash at the petalled shore
Of a clear stream, crystal's liquid murmur
Sound, where I sit bowed to the forest floorHer, whom heaven showed and earth now covers,
I see and hear and know, as if the power
Of her live voice responded from afar:
"Why do you spend yourself before your years?"
She asks in pity. "Or wherefore and for whom
Pour the wasting river of your tears?
You must not weep for me. My life became,
Dying, eternal; and to eternal light,
The dark, that seemed its closure, cleared my sight."
54
WINTER 1982
�Catullus, 55-54 BC: Attack on Caesar
for his favorite Mamurra (#29)
Quis hoc potest uidere, quis potest pati,
Nisi impudicus et uorax et aleo,
Mamurram habere quod comata Gallia
Habebat ante et ultima Britannia?
Cinaede Romule, haec uidebis et feres?
Et ille nunc superbus et superfluens
Perambulabit omnium cubilia
Vt albulus columbus aut Adoneus?
Cinaede Romule, haec uidebis et feres?
Es impudicus et uorax et aleo.
Eone nomine, imperator unice,
Fuisti in ultima occidentis insula,
Vt ista uestra diffututa mentula
Ducenties comesset aut trecenties?
Quid est alid sinistra liberalitas?
Parum expatrauit an parum elluatus est?
Paterna prima lancinata sunt bona;
Secunda praeda Pontica; inde tertia
Hibera, quam scit amnis aurifer Tagus.
Nunc Galliae timetur et Britanniae.
Quid hunc malum fouetis? aut quid hie potest
Nisi uncta deuorare patrimonia?
Eone nomine urbis opulentissime
Socer generque, perdidistis omnia?
The man who can face this, the man who can take it,
Is whored himself, a drunk, a swindler. Mamurra
Laps the fat of crested Gaul and farthest Britain.
Pansied Romulus, you see this thing, you take it?
How he struts his way through everybody's bedroom,
Like a white dove, a white-skinned soft AdonisPansied little Roman, you take it in, you bear it?
You are like him then, as drunk, as whored a swindler.
And was it for this, Rome's only great general,
You conquered the remotest island of the West,
To feed this screwed-out tool of yours, Mamurra?
See him spend, twenty or thirty million? First were
His own estates, then the loot of Pontus, then of SpainHear Tagus, the gold-bearing river. They say the Gauls
And Britains fear him? And you love the mongrel? Both
Of you, Caesar, Pompey? While he swills oil of patrimony?
For this, like in-laws, father and son,
You have sluiced wealth and all of the world-city.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
55
�SanJuan de la Cruz (1549-1591)
Cancion de Ia subida del Monte CarmelaThe Ascent of Mount Carmel
En una noche oscura,
con ansias en amores inflamada,
oh dichosa ventura!
sali sin ser notada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.
In the dark of night
With love inflamed
By luck, by chance
I rose unseen
From the house hushed in sleep.
A escuras y segura
por Ia secreta escala, disfrazada,
o dichosa ventura!
a escuras, en celada
estando ja mi casa sosegada.
Safe in the dark
By a secret stair
My luck, my chance
And night for a veil
I stole from the house of sleep.
En Ia noche dichosa,
en secreto, que nadie me veia,
ni yo miraba cosa,
sin otra luz ni gu1a,
sino Ia que en el corazon ard1a.
By chance of night
By secret ways
Unseeing and unseen
No light, no guide
But the flames that my heart gave-
Aquesta me guiaba
mas cierto que Ia luz de mediod1a,
adonde me esperaba
quien yo bien me sab1a,
en parte donde nadie pareda.
Led by those rays
Surer than day
I came where one waits
Who is known to me
In a place where none seemed to be.
Oh noche, que guiaste,
oh noche amable mas que el alborada,
oh noche, que juntaste
Amado con amada,
amada en el Amado trasformada!
Night that guides
Purer than dawn
Night that joins
Lover and loved
And the loved into Lover changed.
En mi pecho florido,
que entero para el solo se guardaba,
all! qued6 dormido,
yo le regalaba,
y el ventalle de cedros aire daba.
In my flowered heart
That is only his
He lay in sleep
Lulled by the breeze
The fanning of my cedars gave.
El aire del almena,
cuando ya sus cabellos esparda,
en mi cuello her1a
y todos mis sendidos suspend1a.
Down turrets that air
With hand serene
As it stirred in his hair
Gave my throat a wound
That took all sense away.
Quedeme y olvideme,
el rostro recline sobre el Amado,
ces6 todo, y dejeme,
dejando mi cuidado
entre las azucenas olvidado.
I ceased, I was gone
My face to his own
All passed away
Care and all thrown down
There among the lillies where I lay.
con su mano serena,
56
WINTER 1982
�The Federal Republic of Germany:
Finlandization and Germanization?
Anne-Marie Le Gloannec
Is the Federal Republic of Germany headed for "finlandization"? Since Zbigniew Brzezinski detected neutralist leanings in West Germany nearly three years ago, the
charge has often been made. On both sides of the Atlantic, analysts and politicians and West German opposition
parties have followed the former National Security Adviser
in asking themselves about the Federal Republic's eastward slip. The most polemical have pointed to supposed
neutralization plans (the famous "Bahr Plan") and Bonn's
deplorable "Atlantic coolness" as something unusual, even
shocking, in a government that had supported American
policy with few reservations, even in the seventies. Others,
more prudent and at first loath to adopt conclusions they
regarded as hasty, have nevertheless discerned the first
signs of "finlandization" in the policies followed since the
winter of 1979. Rather, of "self-finlandization" or "voluntary finlandization." For we are dealing in this instance
not so much with neutrality imposed by the Soviet Union
as with a policy deliberately chosen by Bonn to soothe an
unduly touchy neighbor.
Richard Lowenthal, who is thought to have conceived
confuse the views of what the Christian Democratic-Socialist opposition calls the "Moscow wing" of the Social
Democratic Party with those of the governing Social Democratic-Free Democratic coalition. For instance, despite
his moral authority, Herbert Wehner did not speak for the
SPD majority-and even less so for the governing coalition
-when he called the Warsaw Pact's arms build-up defensible in the winter of 1979-80, and when even more recently
he did what he could to take the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan for the reaction of a power on its guard. Wehner's
controversial remarks in any case provoked opposition that
reached the center of his party. Moreover, the inclinations
of Helmut Schmidt's character, the makeup of the coalition, and the differences natural between party leaders
and men-in-office see to it that not even the SPD itself inspires government policy.
Even though the opinions of Social Democrats, snipers
or not, cannot be attributed to the government wholesale,
the government itself is not beyond suspicion. There is
plenty of evidence in relations between Moscow, Bonn,
and Washington: the West Germans' irritation with Ameri-
the term ufinlandization," calls "self-finlandization" ab-
can ((human rights" policy; their initial evasion of, then
surd. And in any case the Berlin political scientist holds
that neither term does justice to West German political
reality. The Federal Republic of Germany itself denies
that it wants to steer "a course between the blocs." In the
spring of 1980, it should not be forgotten, Chancellor
Schmidt did not succeed in hiding his annoyance at some
analyses (in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) that at-
hesitant and limited support for, President Carter's counter
reprisals after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan;
their cautiousness at plans for the neutron bomb, and later
in regard to deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles; their lack of enthusiasm for the consolidation and expansion of the Atlantic alliance. Until recently, all signs
seemed to indicate that in loosening its Atlantic ties, Bonn
sought to forestall Soviet suspicions and objections, and
tacked the readiness "to appease" and the inconsistencies
of the government 1
In the past few years West German politics undeniably
betrays a number of ambiguities. One must not, however,
Anne-Marie Le Gloannec is on the staff of the Centre d'Etudes et de
Relations internationales de la Fondation nationale des Sciences Politiques in France. This article first appeared in Commentaire 14, Summer
1981.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that in its wish to please Moscow, it reserved its criticisms
for its American ally. The new administration in the United
States does not appear about to win over Bonn completely
to its views on East-West policy.
We must not forget that German-American tensions
have a specifically Western dimension that comes of profound differences over economic policy and the export of
nuclear technology. In these two areas, pressures from
57
�Washington have caused bitterness, even exasperation,
on the other side of the Atlantic. Also, German-American
relations have always been susceptible to the conflicts
that exist in any alliance. In our examination of present
tensions and "slipping," we should avoid yielding to the il·
lusion of an over-idyllic past. In the fifties and sixties the
two partners entertained suspicions of each other. When
Washington sought agreement with Moscow, West Ger·
many feared Washington would drop it. And the American
administration feared Bonn's too-close understanding with
its Soviet neighbor.
Are the present transatlantic misunderstandings the
same as in the past-or have they changed with the change
in the relative strengths of the United States and West
Germany? In any event, are they great enough to justify
Bonn's apparent weakmindedness towards Moscow? Does
the loosening of transatlantic ties necessarily tempt West
Germany to "appease" the USSR? In other words, are
German-American relations and German-Soviet relations
a zero-sum game? Finally, is it really a question of pusillan·
imity and appeasement? Perhaps Bonn desires to play an
independent role, neither too pro-American nor too antiSoviet? As Raymond Aron asked:
Do the Europeans shrink from American leadership because
they have come to have confidence in themselves or because
the power of the Soviet Union frightens them? Or is there a
third reason that subsumes the other two: the decline of
America?2
Beyond Electoral Turmoil
With detente in danger, the disagreements between the
United States and West Germany have never appeared
deeper. What might have passed a few years ago as simple
disagreements over particular policies-over human rights,
or the arms build-up-have now spread over the whole
range of economic, military, and political relations between East and West, and after the Soviet intervention in
Afghanistan have come to bear on fundamental questions:
the nature of East-West relations, and more specifically
the assessment of Soviet ambitions and the development
of a suitable Western policy. Does the Soviet Union seek
to take advantage of local instability when the occasion
arises? Or does it pursue a policy of systematic expansion?
Should the West pursue detente, or return to containment?
Despite various shades of opinion, the Carter administration was pretty much united in its perception of a will
to expand in Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. In West
Germany, however, the various party leaders expressed
widely differing opinions that ranged from one extreme to
the other. The opposition leaders, Hans Kohl and FranzJosef Strauss, as well as the CDU's military affairs specialist
Manfred Woerner, reached conclusions similar to Washington's. Herbert Wehner, as already mentioned, saw the
move as a defensive measure; Willy Brandt minimized the
importance of the intervention. These reactions were
hardly surprising, for they came from the opposite sides of
58
the political chess board. The same cannot be said of the
attitude of Chancellor Schmidt, who did not see fit to interrupt his vacation, and who in his New Year's address
showed little of his usual vigor in his condemnation of the
Soviet operation. A few days before had he not declared
that Soviet leaders, far from being adventurers, desired
peace?
The nature of the Soviet intervention-surgical operation or act in a drama of expansion-raised the question:
what would become of Europe? Those who adopted the
hypothesis of expansion could not escape the fear that
sooner rather than later Berlin, Hamburg, or Paris would
suffer the fate of Kabul. A groundless fear, according to
Schmidt and his minister of foreign affairs-who considered the intervention "reversible" and thereby reduced it
to an anomalous case, limited in time and place. From
there it needed just a step to invoke the "divisibility" of
detente-a step some took, even though the FrenchGerman communique of February 1980 condemned the
concept.
There should be no exaggeration of the differences in
understanding between Chancellor Schmidt and Strauss.
Strauss denounced the Soviets' global ambitions, but
nonetheless still agreed with his political rival that Moscow did not want to unleash a Third World War. Schmidt
wanted detente to be divisible, but still claimed the dangers of the new balance of power in Asia or the Persian
Gulf region, and, consequently, for Europe. In the chancellor's perspective, the divisibility of detente did not
excuse West Germany or Europe from all action. He considered it of importance, however, not to react too harshly,
especially in the resort to sanctions. The Afghan crisis,
Schmidt would say in the course of 1980, did not recall
Europe in 1938-39 and Hitler's expansion-but 1914 and
the incapacity to master international difficulties. Such is
the explanation of Germany's silence in regard to American sanctions-a policy Germany judged inappropriate
and even dangerous.
It was actually as if almost in regret that Chancellor
Schmidt declared himself in favor of the Olympic boycott
that President Carter demanded, and he contented himself
with an embargo on strategic products and with symbolic
declarations at the same time that he refused sanctions
against the Soviet Union for its military intervention. This
was a compromise between the political necessity of supporting the American protector and the fear that America
would unleash the crisis. It was also a compromise between the Social Democratic Party that followed Willy
Brandt in his opposition to retaliatory measures and Foreign Minister Genscher, who favored a demonstration of
Atlantic solidarity. Ever ready to demonstrate its proAmericanism and to demand usacrifices," the opposition
had a field day denouncing the governing coalition's recantations and ((neutralist" leanings.
If one may trust certain public opinion polls, however,
~~neutralism" may respond to the wishes of a significant
minority, and in some cases, a majority, of the West GerWINTER 1982
�man population. Asked whether they wished for "greater
independence of the Federal Republic of Germany from
the United States" or "unconditional support of American foreign policy," 49 percent of those polled answered
"yes" to the first question (with 29 percent "no"), and 52
percent said "no" to the second (with 26 percent "yes").
Forty-five percent of the respondents believed that the
military neutrality of both Germanies "would make a fit
contribution to the maintenance of peace. " 3
The significance of these results should not be overestimated, quite apart from the debate over the reliability
of the methods used by different West German polling organizations. Since the beginning of the Federal Republic,
West Germans have favored a policy of neutrality. Sometimes a minority, sometimes, notably in the second half of
the fifties and during the seventies, a majority. When
questioned, however, not simply about the policy they
would like to see Bonn follow, but about the military position they prefer for the Federal Republic, only a few declare themselves for neutrality. The most that can be said
is that Social Democratic sympathizers, people under
twenty, and people with advanced education, are more
likely to favour neutral status than the rest of the population. 4 In the majority, West German public opinion remains as much attached to NATO as to the American
military "umbrella" that it expects will protect it in the
event of a Soviet threat.' To be sure, in 1980 public opinion
continued to believe in the possibility of war (58%). Most
Germans, however, did not believe that Moscow's resort
to force in Afghanistan called into question the detente it
damaged. And in 1981, most Germans favored a policy of
conciliation.' All in all, the coalition's attitude seems to
answer public expectations better than the opposition's.
The legitimate distinction between the Social Democratic-Liberal line and the Christian Socialist opposition
does not mean that lines are clearly drawn and policies
consistent. Despite their disagreements over the nature of
the crisis and the immediate measures to take, the government and the opposition were closer than they would
have liked people to think. In contrast to Washington, no
German political party, much less German public opinion,
was eager to question detente. The pace of official East·
West contacts slowed down in the early spring of 1980,
but it soon picked up again. Strauss was not the last politician to make his appearance in Communist capitals. (Unlike the government, however, the opposition says it is
ready to risk detente the better to preserve it.) Moreover,
in favor, in various degrees, of resumption or pursuit of
disarmament negotiations, both the governing coalition
and the opposition recognize the need for strengthening
NATO to restore the East-West military balance,' and for
providing economic, political, and military aid to countries close to the Soviet Union (Pakistan, Turkey, and
Greece; the cultivation of ties with the Islamic countries).
Lastly, except for those Social Democrats who, like Willy
Brandt, seem to give European solidarity first priority,
both sides emphasize the importance of the GermanTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
American alliance (even though the opposition appears to
consider it more important than the government).
The old divisions between the left and right wings of
the Social Democratic Party have reappeared with greater
force than ever in the last few months, really in the last
two years, to shake the Social Democratic consensus on issues of external security. This was especially evident when
Karsten Voigt, among others, appeared to question the
delicate compromise that emerged from the party conference on December 1979 (the Doppelbeschluss, or double
resolution). Voigt, the Social Democratic spokesman for
the parliamentary commission on foreign affairs, judged
early in 1980 that the lack of progress or results in the arms
limitations talks mortgaged the deployment of American
missiles in Europe. Social Democratic deputies also undermined the foundations of Bonn's policy towards the
Atlantic alliance by opposing arms sales to Saudi Arabia
and by proposing reductions in military spending. The
joining of this leftist opposition with groups as diverse as
the German Peace Union (DFU), close to the Communists, the churches, and the ecologists; the coordination of
pacifist movements, opponents of nuclear power, and the
extra-parliamentary opposition (APO) around the same
issue, a sometimes violent coordination whose capacity to
make a sensation does not necessarily mean it enioys a
wide following-all this disturbs the balance at the heart
of the SPD, without, incidentally, sparing the Liberals,
(FDP), and forces the governing coalition into a weak or
rigid position. Witness Helmut Schmidt's recent remarks
on Soviet policy, or on the pacifism of young Germans.
Much of the leadership and of public opinion, undeniably, would like, in one way or another, to see Europe as
an island of peace precisely because it wishes it were one.
There would then be no more worry about sanctions or rearmament; more costly decisions could be avoided. To
calm oneself with the attribution of reassuring intentions
to the Soviets-is that not already "finlandization" of a
sort? 8
The Ostpolitik and its Fragile Gains
People have outdone themselves in repeating that
detente brought tangible benefits to the Germans-and
until recently one could believe that the Ostpolitik bore
fruit in every area. The status of West Berlin, guaranteed
by the four powers in September 1971, assured that city
some military and political security and, in theory, reduced
the risks of a sudden Soviet seizure. With the fundamental treaty signed in October 1972, the two Germanies
resumed relations pretty much broken off since the beginning of the sixties. During the seventies, several million
West Germans visited East Germany each year, and several
hundred thousand East Germans went to West Germany.
Over fifty thousand East Germans have settled permanently in the Federal Republic. Thanks to a significant
audience for West German television and the development of trade, West Germany makes its presence felt be-
59
�yond the Elbe. In negotiating the, treaty of 1972, the
Social Democratic-Liberal coalition meant to maintain
and strengthen the ties between the .two Germanies and
thereby keep alive the idea of German nationhood. If we,
however, may believe West German public opinion, that
holds that the two states are growing further and further
apart, and if we believe certain analysts who report the
development of two distinct national consciousnesses, we
are led to ask whether the coalition has really reached its
goal.
These measures have, in any case, improved the lot of a
good many people and permitted a relative "normalization" of relations between the two Germanies. Bonn also
normalized relations with other Socialist capitals. In recent
years, over half a million Soviet, Rumanian, and Polish citizens of German origin have been allowed to settle in the
Federal Republic; the volume of West German trade with
these countries has quintupled since 1970. Chancellor
Schmidt figured along with Valery Giscard d'Estaing
among the preferred partners of Edward Gierek.
This relative ((normalization" of relations with Eastern
Europe, rather than any immediate gains, give the Ostpolitik its historical significance. By abandoning its revisionist claims and by no longer making German unity a
prerequisite for detente, West Germany ceased troubling
its Eastern neighbors and importuning its Western all-ies:
it made itself ordinary, and thereby undid the mortgage
that up to then had weighed on its foreign policy. With
this added maneuvering room and with a measure of prestige won for it by its skill in negotiation-not to mention
its considerable economic strength-the West German
government could now make its voice heard in international councils. German participation in the Guadeloupe
summit in January 1979 surprised some observers. But her
presence represented the logical outcome of previous diplomatic activity. This growth in West Germany's power
could not, however, obscure the fact that the gains of the
Ostpolitik depended, at least in part, on the goodwill of
the Soviets and their East German allies. The border incidents, the harrassment, the pin-pricks in West Berlin, during the sixties, were there to remind everybody. In spite of
everything, West Germany was not a state like any other.
Even without considering the 17 million East German
"hostages" of the Soviet Union, the Federal Republic remains extremely vulnerable: on the front line of battle, it
would be devastated in both a conventional and a nuclear
war-but with all that it remains powerless to assure its
own security by itself.
This special characteristic and its liabilities give the Soviets a political bargaining advantage that they have not
failed to exploit, when international tensions or the internal
weaknesses of the Socialist camp have provoked a more
rigid attitude in the Kremlin, or when Moscow hoped to
divide NATO by isolating West Germany. NATO's decision of December 1979 to strengthen its theater nuclear
forces in Europe, the deterioration of East-West relations
after Afghanistan, and the threat of destabilization in Po-
60
land, have revivified Soviet and East German pressures
and threats. The Soviets reminded the West Germans in
the summer of 1980 that their territory would be the first
and worst casualty in a nuclear exchange-and that American protection was not certain. Following that, the East
German authorities decided to restrict severely all travel
between the two countries. They also let it be known that
West Berlin could suffer the consequences if Bonn changed
the conditions of inter-German trade (in the event of Soviet intervention in Poland).
It is hardly surprising then, that the West German leaders attempt to keep detente alive, to continue to enjoy its
benefits, that they wish to slow further worsening of the
international climate, since they would be among the first
to suffer, or even that they censor their words or actions
in anticipation of Soviet objections. Bonn, for instance,
refused to respond with reprisals to East Berlin's affront
after the elections. It has since, it is true, contemplated
not renewing the "swing" accords-credits without interest granted to East Germany-if East Germany did not
rescind its decision. Such a display of deliberate firmness
was successful in 1973, when East Berlin also had decided
to increase the amount of obligatory currency exchange
for travellers entering East Germany. But circumstances
are now different. There are grounds for fearing that, unwilling to risk detente, Bonn finds herself without recourse. In such an event, powerlessness would succeed to
deliberate firmness.
Everything, including the vulnerability of her economy,
glaringly evident for a year now, has contributed to make
West Germany either directly or indirectly susceptible to
international tensions and pressures. Extremely dependent on world trade for her raw materials and energy, and
for the export of her finished goods, West Germany seeks
to diversify her raw material sources and her new markets.
Her trade with Eastern Europe and the USSR represents
a little less than 6 percent of her total foreign trade, but
certain sectors and industries export a larger proportion of
their production to the East: the exports of Mannesmann,
and Hoescht made up almost 9 percent of their output in
1979. By 1985, 30 percent of West German imports of natural gas will come from the Soviet Union.
Is there not a danger that in allowing this dependence
West Germany is granting the Soviets the means to exercise pressure and influence over her? Without entering
into the broader debate on the advantages of East-West
trade (structural advantages for the East, sectorial advantages for the West), we should note the disagreement
among experts on the threshold of independence. At the
Soviet Union's and West Germany's announcement of an
agreement on natural gas (whose conception had been
made public at the moment Chancellor Schmidt in Moscow condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), the
Americans warned West Germany against dependence on
more than 30 percent of any product from any one country. In contrast, German experts set the critical threshold
at 40 percent. The political dimensions of this labyrinWINTER 1982
�thine quarrel need to be remembe,ed: American objections and West German defiance.
In my opinion, the danger, if there is one, lies else·
where. The fear is not of Soviet pressures or threats of an
embargo. Nor is it deplorable that Bonn is reluctant to enact strict economic sanctions that the business community
would not hear of, and which the Christian-Democrats
might not have applied with any greater vigour had they
been in power. Sanctions, it turns out in retrospect, are of~
ten evaded.
What is questionable is "Arms-of-Peace" thinking itself,
the kind of thinking that impelled Egan Bahr' s remark
that it is "necessary to institutionalize the interest in the
maintenance of peace through large-scale economic projects beneficial to both parties."' Chancellor Schmidt
apparently shares the same perspective, for he favors the
establishment of long-term contractual economic relations between West Germany and the Soviet Union. In
1977 he even tried (in vain) to have the Bundestag solemnly ratify the Soviet-German twenty-five year commer·
cia! accord. The desire to bind the Soviet Union with a
network of contracts is like trying to tie Gulliver down.
This is the policy of the West German government, specifically, of the Social Democratic-Liberal coalition. Instead of resorting to sanctions it prefers to take advantage
of the commercial and financial ebb and flow to buy concessions and guarantees. But mutual economic ties do not
necessarily guarantee the partners' political goodwill, especially the goodwill of a centralized and authoritarian regime
-when Bonn risks excessive conciliatoriness because of
its anxiety to protect investments or because of its respect
for treaties (its rationale in the question of sanctions).
West German government and business circles showed
the political and economic powerlessness of this attitude
during the Polish crisis. Poland's creditors felt obliged to
lend her more money to save her from bankruptcy. At the
same time Bonn, haunted by the memory of 1968, refrained from gestures or statements that might give the
Soviets an excuse to intervene. For these two reasons
Bonn found itself even less desirous and able to attach political conditions to its loans to Warsaw. 10
As in the early sixties, West Germany's Eastern policy
shows no innovation. In the sixties, however, she had
nothing to lose. Now, any revision might endanger the
Ostpolitik's accomplishments, both the more immediate
(increased human contact) and the less tangible (security
and relative independence). To preserve these benefits,
Bonn no longer gives priority in her dealings to peoples in·
stead of governments, to "change" instead of "reconciliation." It is undoubtedly time in West Germany for a fresh
debate on the ultimate goals and means of the Ostpolitik,
a debate the coalition in power has up to now appeared to
wish to avoid.
An Actor in Search of a Role
The Soviet leadership that in 1980 raised some doubts
about the effectiveness of America's military umbrella,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
knowingly touched a raw nerve in Bonn. More than once
in the past Europeans have questioned American ability
and willingness to deter or repel a Soviet attack-doubts
more than ever justified by the progressive change in the
Soviet-American military balance since the beginning of
the seventies. The mutual "neutralization," to use Helmut Schmidt's word, 11 of Soviet and American strategic
forces, along with Soviet conventional and nuclear superi·
ority in Europe, separates the United States from Euro·
pean territory more than ever before, for it is not certain
that the U.S. would be willing to engage its strategic forces
in the case of a limited Soviet attack on the old world.
Western Europe and especially the Federal Republic of
Germany, a "state on the front line" without her own nuclear capacity-and subject not only to Soviet pressures
but also to Washington's goodwill-finds herself singularly exposed as long as war remains a textbook hypothesis. The decision of the NATO Council in December 1979
to deploy medium-range missiles in Europe starting in
1983 and at the same time to begin negotiations with the
Soviet Union on the reduction of theater nuclear forces,
will make up for Europe's military inferiority without,
however, undoing her political powerlessness: the mere
presence of Pershing and cruise missiles under American
control will not reassure further the Europeans against
the risk of American indifference; and the propaganda
campaign the Soviets unleashed from the fall of 1979 to
the summer of 1980 shows that they will hardly forgo the
crudest sorts of intimidation.
The uncertainties of the American commitment, and
Washington's demonstrated relative indifference to the
military balance in Europe, have led Bonn to its own initiatives to protect its interests: the call for the strengthening of European middle-range nuclear capacity, and, at
the same time, for negotiations for the reduction and re·
balancing of Soviet and NATO theater nuclear forces.
Bonn counts on both reinforcement and negotiation, the
United States tends to stress reinforcement. Is the coali·
tion yielding to pacifist tendencies that hold sway inside
the Social-Democratic Party? Certainly. But realistic considerations also guide it: the stationing of middle-range
nuclear arms on her territory that spares West Germany
neither political pressures nor destruction in the event of
nuclear war, will serve as a bargaining chip for the West in
the negotiations-negotiations that, thanks to Helmut
Schmidt's diplomacy in Moscow in June 1980, will open
without preconditions.
Both the relative success of the chancellor's mission to
Moscow and President Carter's suspicion beforehand that
the chancellor might trade his commitments for the proposal or acceptance of a moratorium 12 served only to reinforce a sense of isolation in West Germany, a sense that it
could hardly count on its American ally (not to mention
the disturbing effect of the failure of the raid in April1980
to save the hostages in Tehran).
Even more serious, the West Germany that doubted
the authority and efficacy of American leadership, also
61
�was losing faith in American values~at least in its conception of American values. The United States no longer
held a fascination for West German elites. 13 With the
United States itself in the throes of self-doubt how was it
to escape such disillusion? Such circumstances make it
easier to understand the government's and public opinion's tardy and lukewarm show of solidarity with Washington during the winter of 1979-1980. In their criticisms of
American policy and sometimes of the bases of Atlantic
solidarity, the West Germans seem unobtrusively to give
way to indifference to the Atlantic Alliance and to retreat
upon themselves 14 Those under twenty, significantly,
tend more to neutralism than their seniors.
This indifference and withdrawal is no easier to reverse
because concealed. Even if the new U.S. administration
succeeds in the restoration of America's political and
moral authority, and, at the same time, in respecting the
wishes of her allies, West Germany will no longer be the
model ally, Washington's right arm. As we have seen, the
Ostpolitik and the changes in the international system in
the seventies have combined to fashion a stronger, more
independent, and more self-confident Federal Republic of
Germany.
Until very recently, Bonn still refused a role consonant
with her power. In May 1978, Helmut Schmidt declared
at the U.N., "I speak in the name of a country that is neither able nor desires to assume the role of a Great Power."
Under a constant barrage of criticism for almost thirty
years, called too Atlanticist or not enough, too revanchist
or too accommodating toward the East, Bonn steered a
middle course without making waves. Barely two years
ago, however, the chancellor took to different words: he
demanded heavier responsibilities and a greater role for
his country. Even public opinion in West Germany conceives a powerful Federal Republic, more readily than in
the past-20 percent for enormous, 47 percent for great,
influence on the international scene15 All this has not
kept the government, nor in all likelihood public opinion,
from recognition of the limits of this influence, particularly in its relations with Eastern Europe, and of the political and moral constraints that still weigh upon its actions
-limitations that Bonn and the people sometimes find irritating. In contrast to the fifties and sixties, West German leaders dare assert themselves among their allies at
the same time that they exercise the greatest discretion in
t!Jeir dealings with the countries of Socialist Europe-all
in all a curious reversal.
The contrast between confidence toward the West and
timidity toward the East, the distortions that come of the
combination of economic might and military weakness,
the ambiguities of the Federal Republic's international
role, drive the Germans to question themselves. Once the
first enthusiasms faded-the enthusiasm for reconstruction under the auspices of the pax americana and the enthusiasm for a certain conception of Europe-the erosion
of the myth of economic invulnerability and a certain disenchantment with Social Democracy opened the way to
62
the uncertainty and insecurity that, according to Richard
Lowenthal, springs of cultural and political rootlessness. 16
The search for identity, with certain intellectuals as selfappointed scouts, compounds in Germany the malaise
general in Western democracies. My analysis, if correct,
should hardly occasion retrospective surprise-at least insofar as in the last ten years the Ostpolitik has encouraged
inter-German contacts and rekindled the concern of West
Germans for the Germans in the East. That the East German United Socialist Party's (SED) policy of ideological
demarcation-Abgrenzung-with its transplantation of
undesirable East German intellectuals to West Germany
has revived the awareness of German identity and the
search for it-that would be an irony of history. The
search for identity does not, however, necessarily amount
to the desire for national unity-as the declarations of
Guenther Gaus, former permanent representative to East
Berlin, and the public debate that followed tend to show.
Strong but vulnerable, faced with equally unsatisfactory
alternatives when it comes to political and military security, still afflicted with a "deficit in legitimacy" and with a
loss of cultural identity, West Germany is in some sense
an actor in search of a role. There is no certainty that she
will find this role either in a political union of Europe that
Walter Scheel and Hans-Dietrich Genscher recently did
what they could to revive or in the Franco-German dimension. Based on real but limited complementarities,
the Franco-German marriage rests on a double misunderstanding. West Germany, without doubt, relies more than
France on the Atlantic Alliance and on the continuation
of American protection. The defense of her national interests, however, which lie in Central Europe, will drive her
to greater Gaullism than France. It is a paradox that a
greater consciousness of her own interests and of her distinctive particularity could very well lead the Federal Republic to a certain kind of "finlandization." 17
Translated by Lisa Simeone, Philip Holt and
Preston Niblack
1. See especially Fritz Ullrich Fack, "Der Nebellichtet sich," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 23, 1980, and "1st das Friedenspolitik?"
FAZ, May 23, 1980.
2. Raymond Aron, "L'hegemonism sovietique: An I," Commentaire 11,
Autumn 1980, 358. (translation in The St. John's Review, Summer 1981,
20).
3. Poll said to have been made in March 1980 at the request of the
Chancellor. Cited with no further reference by the weekly Der Spiegel,
18, 1980, "Mit den Amerikanern nicht in den Tod."
4. I rely here on polls conducted by Emnid (especially those reported in
Informationen, Emnid-Institut, 5, 1980) and by the lnstitut fur
Demoskopie Allensbach (files).
5. See especially Werner Kaltefleiter, "Germans, Friendlier but Apprehensive," Public Opinion, March-May 1979, 10-12. See also Gebhard
Schweigler, "Spannung und Entspannung: Reaktionen im Westen," in
the excellent collection of Josef Fullenbach and Eberhard Schulz (eds.\
Entspannung am Ende (Munich 1980). Schweigler gives the following
characterization of German pUblic opinion: "Because of the complexity
of West German security policy, public opinion in the Federal Republic
appears to hide its head in the sand in blind reliance on NATO's deterence."
WINTER 1982
�6. See the Emnid poll in Der Spiegel, March 2, 1981, and the poll in Le
Point 442, March 9, 1981; The International Herald Tribune, April14,
1980.
7. Even if the government, despite earlier commitments, is not prepared to devote 3 percent of its gross national p[oduct to military spending.
8. Pierre Hassner, "Western European Perceptions of the USSR,"
Daeddlus, Winter 1979, 114.
9. The first assessment of the Ostpolitik in Die Zeit, December 14, 1973.
10. In the winter of 1980-81 the government-more particularly, the
Minister of Foreign Affairs-showed some firmness (at the heart of the
common market) in dissuading the Soviet Union from intervening.
11. Cf. the lecture Helmut Schmidt gave on October 28, 1977, at the Institute of Strategic Studies in London.
12. President Carter suspected that Chancellor Schmidt, who declared
himself in favor of a three-year moratorium, actually wanted to put an
indefinite freeze on the deployment of tactical forces in Europe.
13. See Gunter Gillessen, "Defiziten im deutsch-amerikanischen Verhalltnis," FAZ, July 31, 1979, as well as Martin Hillenbrand, former U.S.
ambassador to West Germany; "The United States and Germany" in
West Gennan Foreign Policy, 1949-1979, Wolfram Hanreider ed., Boulder,
Colorado, 73. See also the recent article by the Vice-President of the
Bundestag, Annemarie Renger, "Das Buendnis an einer Wegmarke,"
FAZ, April4, 1981.
14. See the words of Guenter Grass, Sarah Kirsch, Thomas Brasch, and
Peter Schneider to the Social-Democrats of Schleswig-Holstein: "Don't
let the American government that since the war in Vietnam, has lost
the right to launch moralizing appeals, draw you into (a policy that could
lead to the destruction of all life on this planet)." Quoted in "mit den
Amerikanern nicht in den Tod," Der Spiegel, 18, April 28, 1980.
15. R. Wildenmann poll, cited by Martin and Silvia Greiffenhagen, Ein
schwieriges Vaterland: Zur politschen Kultur Deutschlands, Munich 1979,
315. See also Dieter Bossmann, Schueler ueber die Einheit der Nation,
Frankfurt-am-Main 1978, 249.
16. Richard Lowenthal, "Incertitudes allemandes," Commentaire, 6, 979.
17. As Fritz Stern has aptly observed, "Germany in a Semi-Gaullist Europe," Foreign Affairs, Spring 1980. For a plea to anchor West Germany
in the Franco-German community within a united Europe and in the
Atlantic Alliance, Joseph Rovan, "De !'Ostpolitik a l'auto-neutralisation?," Politique Internationale, 10, Winter 1980-81, 85-100.
Io
Under a cloud, milky she stood,
Garlanded, surprised by her cow
Voice after love, and by his wife
In a fine rage planning revenge,
Skillful as Maupassant. The gadFly stung her beauty lumbering
Inside bovine embarrassment
To lurch through a sea she hardly
Noticed, though it was named for her.
A long time galloping, her flowers
Withered as an old joke, she came
To seed on Egypt, so arid.
That good girl, transformed by the careLessly human god-his quick loveLay in the hot desert, panting
Slow birth on monumental sand
Where every grain seemed in the heat
An eye watching her terrible
And unprivate delivering.
lAURENCE JOSEPHS
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
63
�Kekkonen, the "Finlandizer"
Indro Montanelli
One of the few voices that rose in protest on March 12,
1940, when the government in Helsinki announced that
Finland, bled dry after four months of heroic resistance,
had sued Russia for armistice, was the voice of a deputy of
the agrarian party. Urho Kekkonen said that Finland's sur·
render turned the blood split up to then into a "useless
sacrifice.''
I was not surprised. I knew him. A man of the people,
son of a game warden, Kekkonen had fought as a boy un·
der the flag of Mannerheim in the war of liberation from
Russia in 1919. His nationalism even drove him to a bit of
sympathy for fascism. He wanted war to the death, "heroic
suicide." I thought that such ideas would not get him very
far in the politics of a country that, abandoned by the West
and overwhelmed, had to resign itself to the role of satellite of the U.S.S.R.
I was much surprised, therefore, at the news in 1956 that
he had succeeded Paasikivi to the presidency of the Re·
public. With some worry-for I am a great friend and admirer of Finland-I asked myself how the Russians would
take it. As it turned out the Russians took it so well that
for twenty-five years they not only put up with the presidency of Kekkonen but urged his reelection-and now are
doing all they can to delay his retirement.
I do not know how Kekkonen, with his political past,
won their confidence. But I cannot conceive he resorted
to duplicity, because he did not have it in his character.
For he had not only the shrewdness, but also the abrupt
straightforwardness of a peasant. And perhaps it was just
this abrupt straightforwardness that won him the respect
of the arrogant victor. In 1950 Paasikivi, who knew men,
entrusted him with negotiations on which the survival of
Finland depended-negotiations that had failed two years
before. The story goes that Stalin took to him among other
reasons because of his capacity to hold his liquor, which
even the Finns considered phenomenal. In any case, for
the agreement he brought home, Kekkonen received the
reward of the office of prime minister. From that moment
Paasikivi of his own accord arranged to leave him his own
office, the presidency of the Republic.
Kekkonen assumed the presidency in 1956 at an espe·
cially dramatic moment. The government of Finland had
One of the great journalists of Europe, Indro Montanelli is editor and
founder, nine years ago, of the important newspaper, Il Giornale Nuovo.
This article first appeared in II Giornale Nuovo on October 16, 1981.
64
refused to allow the Soviet government to station troops
in Finland, and Moscow had broken diplomatic relations
with Helsinki, a move taken for a prologue to invasion. At
the Kremlin Kekkonen succeeded in fixing things up. But
four years later the crisis broke out again. Kekkonen
showed up alone in Novosibirsk for a stormy, nine~hour
exchange with Khrushchev. In Moscow there were ru·
mours that they had also let loose with slaps. Questioned,
Kekkonen replied only: "I was not slapped." Even if the
story is not true, the fact that it was told tells quite a bit
about Kekkonen's diplomacy in the face of the Russians.
In the last twenty-five years Kekkonen has done his best
to "finlandize" Finland. He had no other choice-and he
succeeded. Finland is the only satellite of the Soviet Union
where fundamental democratic liberties are respected and
whose door is open to the West.* I do not think that this
miracle is all Kekkonen's doing. Above all it is Finland's
doing and the doing of what even Kekkonen in his youth·
ful nationalistic extremism had called "the useless sacrifice." In fact nothing was more useful than that sacrifice.
Because of it Finland was not erased from the political
map of Europe like the three other Baltic countries, Esto·
nia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In those four months of hellish
winter war on the isthmus of Karelia, the Russians learned
at their own expense of what stuff the Finns were made
and that they could not take their subjection for granted.
Just this always escapes the promoters of the "finlandiza·
tion" of Europe. They forget that to finlandize themselves
the Finns in twenty-five years have dared look Russian
might three times in the face-in 1919, in 1939, and in
1941; that they have inflicted unforgettable defeats and
losses on those unspeakable battlefields; that they sacri·
ficed the best of the best of two generations. And defeated,
they did not bow their heads. The victors demanded trials
11
of War criminals." Instead of suffering a Nuremberg trial,
the marshall who led them against the Russians three times
became president of the Republic. The Finns found only
one "war criminal," Tanner, a former Social Democratic
minister whom they sentenced to ten years. Upon his re·
lease they reelected him deputy and president of the party.
*On February 5, 1982, in the General Assembly at the United Nations,
Finland along with all the free nations of Europe (except for Austria,
Spain, and Turkey, who abstained, and Greece, who voted in favour)
and the United States, Canada, Israel, Japan, Australia, New Zealand,
and Fiji-twenty-one in all-voted against a resolution punishing Israel
for the extension of jurisdiction to the Golan Heights.-LR
WINTER 1982
�As for the Communists, they were and remain a minorityand outside the government. Even' the Russians trust
Kekkonen more than the Communists.
There is no finlandization without Finns. In other
hands-for love of my country I shall not name names-it
does not take much to imagine what would become of
"finlandization": the rush to servileness, zeal outdoing
zeal, bulgarization.
According to news from Helsinki coming through Stockholm, Kekkonen, eighty years old and suffering from a
stroke, is now providing-with deliberation-for his succession. I do not think there is much to worry about. For
even if the finlandizer goes, Finland remains.
Translated by Leo Raditsa
HEPHAESTUS
Thrown away, damaged, thrown down, falling
Broken, limited except the hands, eyes;
Only the will intact, the need braced against
Those wrong legs, ugly and mechanically bad.
Still godlike, inventive craftsman holding
Metals in the indestructible brazier, that flame
Tempering what could be tempered-not his legsBut unchangeable beauty; and seeing it,
Praising it in the armor of the beautiful doomed!
Of Achilles who wept for love in the pursuit of glory.
Hephaestus the gifted dwarf, the talented lover
Of the garb of beauty, striking gold shell
To curve with his skill, grown warm
Over the breast of the more fortunate hero
In whose fame, in whose sulking annointment
The sound of the hammer rang like bells in a dream.
LAURENCE JOSEPHS
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
65
�Mozart's Cherubino
Wye Jamison Allanbrook
Cherubino makes his first entrance in Le nozze di
Figaro midway through the first act, as Susanna is angrily
reflecting on the pretensions of her old enemy Marcellina,
the Countess's blue-stocking governess, after an angry encounter with her:
Va' Ia, vecchia pedante,
Dottoressa arrogante!
Perche hai /etta due libri,
E seccato Madama in
gioventu .. . '
Cherubino brings with him a literary aura of a gentler sort:
while Marcellina clings to pedantry as the emblem of her
superiority, lovestruck Cherubino is not learned, but a
natural poet. He hands Susanna a love song which he has
written, either to one woman or to all (when she asks him
what to do with it, he gives her leave, "with transports of
joy" as the stage directions have it, to read it to every
woman in the palace 2). When she chides him for his impetuousness,3 he answers her in song. Unlike ''Voi che
sapete" -Cherubino's rendition, in Act II, of his own
composition, accompanied by Susanna on the Countess's
guitar-the lovely "Non so pili" is not intended as a real
performance. Yet it has much in common with the later
aria-staged-as-love-song.
Obvious similarities are their closely related key signatures C'Non so pill" in Eb major, ''Voi che sapete" in Bb),
their duple meters, and the prominence in them both of
winds and horns. But, more significantly, in an opera
whose arias are dominated by dance rhythms both pieces
are clearly meant to be apprehended as sung poems, "Non
so pill" as well as HVoi che sapete," even though in the
first case the plot does not suggest an actual performance.
Not measured gestures, but measured words seem to be
the native element of Cherubino's song.
This article comes from a book, The Motion of Character: Rhythmic
Gesture in "Le noz:ze di Figaro" and "Don Giovanni," that the University
of Chicago Press will publish in the fall of 1983.
66
Cherubino's nature unfolds gradually in the course of
the first two acts. A page in Almaviva's castle and probably the Countess's godchild,' at first he seems just a minor character, a member of a detachable subplot. Yet he
ultimately acquires transcendent importance as a touchstone for all the other characters in the opera.
The three principle occasions one has for observing
him in the first two acts are these two solo arias and,
strangely enough, a scene in which he himself is entirely
mute-his romp with Figaro at the end of Act I, "Non
pili andrai," where Figaro playfully initiates the boy into
the joys of war. When Cherubino's "second nature" is
made explicit, it becomes clear that this brilliant march
aria is actually a hymn to the young page, to his figure and
to his powers. But it is necessary first to examine Cherubino's literary idiom: to establish that it is indeed literary,
in HNon so pill" especially, and to discover what its
precise resonances are.
"Non so pili" is divided into two sections. The text of
the first half of the aria consists of two stanzas each containing three ten-syllable lines, and a fourth with nine
syllables:
Non so piu cosa son, cosa faccio . . .
Or di fuoco, ora sono di ghiaccio . . .
Ogni donna cangiar di colore,
Ogni donna mi fa palpitar.
Solo ai nomi d'amor, di diletto
Mi si turba, mi s'altera if petto,
E a par/are mi sforza d'amore
Un desio ch 'io non posso spiegar/5
In rhyme scheme the two stanzas are united by end
rhyme-aabc, ddbc. The first three lines of each stanza
have f~minine rhymes, but the c rhyme (palpitar, spiegar)
is masculine. Mozart sets the poem in a quick alia breve
(2/2) with a single bass note "plucked" on every beat
while the other strings 11 Strum" an accompaniment-the
WINTER 1982
�orchestra is a stand-in for the performer's guitar. Traditionally in popular musical settings pf Italian poetry the
metrical foot (anapests here) established the basic rhythm
of each member, while the number of syllables dictated
the primary and secondary stresses and the cadence;6 the
same principle seems to be in operation here. A rhythmic
germ with an anapestic shape
is repeated three times in each line, with a secondary
stress on the third syllable and a primary stress and cadence on the ninth. Each of the first three lines closes
with a feminine ending
JJ/JDJOjJJ
but the anapest is preserved in the fourth for a masculine
ending and thus a full stop. In order to direct attention to
its integrity as a unit line of a poem, each line is carefully
set off from the next by a quarter note rest: 7
/
'~:p
f
f
Example l
Furthermore, all repetitions are of)"hole lines, and not of
single words or phrases abstracted from their lines, as
would frequently occur in most arias.
All these elements work together toward the apprehension of the regular poetic rhythms of the aria. But there is
a musical problem with a series of lines or a series of stanzas:
"one thing after another" militates against the dramatic
curve of a piece which gives it conviction of a beginning,
middle, and end. In a poem read aloud, meaning, and to a
lesser extent rhythmic variations, provide a sense of crisis
and resolution where it is wanted (as it is not always in a
lyric poem). But in an operatic aria, particularly in Classic
music where climax always has to do with the dramatization of a departure from and return to a certain harmonic
place, a series of lines does not make a period, nor a series
of stanzas a fully shaped whole.; Mpzart always has to alter
the line and verse forms slightly to provide the contractions in .the material, the critical imbalance which creates
the demand for balance-regularity- to return. To shape
the first stanza into a period, Mozart works an augmentation, with syncopation, on the anapes_tic line:
original phrase:
in augmentation:
with syncopation:
n IJ n
J Jl IJ
J J IJ J J ]J J J IJ
J J ]JJ J fJ J..l']J
This transmutation of the regular anapests permits a
sense of closure at stanza's end while still carrying a suggestion of the poetic meter of the verse.
The second stanza raises the problem of the shaping of
the larger-scale formal elements of the aria. The usual
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
plan of an aria in Classic music begins with a statement of
the home key and then modulates to the key a fifth above
it, the dominant (this corresponds to the conventional
term ((exposition" of a "sonata form"). It then moves back
to the home key, or tonic, either directly or after a motion
through a few other keys in order to diffuse the power of
the dominant. This motion through foreign keys (the "development" of a sonata form) I call the X-section.8 Mozart
decides to locate the rhythmic crisis of "Non so piu" early,
in the move to the dominant, and creates it by first exaggerating regularity, then breaching it. He sets the first two
lines of the new stanza carefully as lines of poetry, but in a
somewhat different manner than before: the short syllables of the head anapest are lengthened to occupy an entire measure, a metrical adjustment which doubles the
breathing space between unit lines (two beats instead of
one), and results in leisurely-musically uncompellingphrases of 3 + 3:
IJ. Jli n J n !J J 3 ~IJ.JIJ JJJ OIJJ 3>1
These relaxed phrases, however, create a launching pad
for the motion to the second key area, a motion which is
paralleled by a transformation of the poetic diction which
is charming and dramatically apt. His words about the
movements of his own passion move Cherubino out of
the measured artifice of his verse to sing in a more direct
and passionate style. The three-measure phrases quicken
to urgent and breathless two-measure units,9 the harmony, also quickening, darkens to a diminished seventh
chord on the word desio ("desire"), 10 and desio is itself repeated a fourth higher as the Eli slips down to an Eb and
the beginning of a strong Bb cadential formula:
'"
]f,
r'
x•
Example 2
The repetition of the word desio is governed by an exclusively musical necessity: for the first time in the aria a single word is repeated, lifted from its unit length of poetry,
and it weakens the illusion that the singer is performing a
canzona. But it brings a passionate intensity to this important cadence which would be lacking if the strumming
metrical regularity were retained. Thus in retrospect the
introduction of the leisurely three-measure line length at
the beginning of this period serves to intensify the effect
of the contractions of desire at its final cadence. The great
wit in this manipulation lies in Mozart's realization that
after the lulling regularity of the poetic lines phrases measured purely musically-"aria-style" -would appear as
the accents of true passion, rendering the final cadence
on the dominant "heartfelt" and thus structurally strong. II
67
�"Non so pill" has no formal X~section, moving immedi~
ately back to Eb and a repetition of the opening period. (A
detail in the bass line of that repetition is further confirmation that Mozart intended the aria to be apprehended
as sung verse, as opposed to dance or declamation. At the
opening the bass played only roots of chords, as if to stress
the affinity of the orchestra with a "giant guitar" playing a
simple chordal accompaniment. Since by the return of
the tonic the poetic form is firmly established, the bass
can be put to a different use; compare the following measures with the bass line of example number 1:
1'1·
51
W.'bt• 1 "I p ra II $J ~lh p
jt' J sIr '-
Example 3
In the return the bass has been freed from its mimetic role
to add some contrapuntal interest, implying that it was
under some constraint before.) The fifty-one measures
ending with the repetition of the opening material represent the main body of the aria, a strophic song adapted by
clever modifications to the exigencies of the key area process. The forty-nine measures which remain, an extended
coda, introduce Cherubino the poet's special subject matter-the pastorale. Its text moves Jove out into the country:
Par!o d'amor veg!iando,
Parlo d'amor sognando:
A!l'acque, a!l'ombre, ai manti,
Ai /ion; al!'erbe, ai fonti,
A!l'eco, a!l'arta, ai venti
Che if suon de' vani accenti
Portano via con se."
The second time through, the text is set to a musette with
tonic pedal point, Cherubino and the violins taking the
skirl (ms. 72-80):
Example 4
The pastoral affect, which comes to dominate the opera
in its last two acts, makes a modest entrance here. Cherubino, the young court page, would surely have read or
heard some pastoral poetry. Here he mimics his models,
naively imitating Tasso, perhaps, or another Italian poet
of the pastoral mode. Yet the literary reference, and its
support in Mozart's canzona-like setting of the text, are
not merely for the sake of a convincing characterization of
the youthful poet. In "Voi che sapete" the literary frame
broadens to include Dante, and Cherubino's donne, by
then no longer the vague generality "Women" but clearly
68
Susanna and the Countess, will receive from him homage
of a more profound sort. In "Non so piu" the tremulous
youth who, if no one else will listen, tells his love to himself," becomes a creature in his own pastoral landscape;
the poet is rightly not quite at home within the narrow
bounds of Almaviva's castle.
Cherubino sings the canzona of his own composition
early in Act II, at the behest of Susanna, who is anxious
to comfort the Countess after some tactless words of
Figaro's have left her sad and distracted. Furious at the
Count, Figaro speaks with cruel banter to the Countess
about the Count's attempts to seduce Susanna. He exits
after having enjoined the two women to help him in a plot
to humiliate the Count which may involve new dangers
and humiliations for the Countess, for to set it in motion
the Count will receive an anonymous note about an assignation which the Countess has supposedly made with a
lover. To draw her mistress's attention away from her
troubles, Susanna suggests that Cherubino perform his
composition; the diversion is a welcome one, for Cheru~
bino wants to pay court to the Countess and the Countess
to put her unfaithful husband from her mind. Susanna indulges them both in a moment of loveplay, her indulgence in itself an act of Jove.
The loveplay must, however, be merely an innocent
tableau. It is crucial to da Ponte's and Mozart's conception of their story that the relationship between Cherubino and the Countess be treated less suggestively than it
was in Beaumarchais's original. They took pains to eliminate certain passages from Le mariage de Figaro which
suggested more than a delicate flirtation between the two.
Whereas in Le mariage the Countess often seems to be
hesitating between two lovers, in the opera Cherubino is a
pet, and never a real source of temptation. In Act II, scene
iii, of the play the Countess excitedly prepares herself for
Cherubino's arrival as one would for a lover. Da Ponte in
the corresponding scene (the recitative before this aria)
has her instead sadly lament the improprietous conversations Cherubino overheard when he hid in the chair in
Act I. He omits a scene from the Beaumarchais (IV, viii)
between the Countess and the Count in which the
Countess expresses surprising anguish over the departure
of Cherubino from the castle. The text of "Voi che
sapete" is another of da Ponte's interpolations. In Le
mariage Cherubino sings, to the tune "Malbroug s' en
va't'en guerre," a ballad-like poem about a particular lad's
intense devotion to his godmother. Da Ponte's text, on
the other hand, is conventional and impersonal, addressed
not to one donna, but to the collective donne:
Voi che sapete
Che cosa e amor,
Donne, vedete
S'io l'ho ne! cor. 14
WINTER 1982
�The change is a material one: it is important to Mozart's
conception of Cherubino's role in the opera that he be
more "in love with love" than with any particular object
of his desires.
Again, as in "Non so pili/' the text is plainly a poem,
consisting of seven four-line stanzas with abab rhyme
schemes:
2. Quello ch'io provo
f::i ridiro;
E per me nuovo,
Capir no! so.
5. Ricerco un bene
3. Sento un affetto
6. Sospiro e gemo
Pien di desir
Ch'ora e diletto,
Ch'ora e martir.
Senza vo!er,
Palpito e tremo
Senza saper,
4. Ge!o, e poi sen to
L'alma avvampar,
E in un momenta
Torno a gelar.
Fuori dime,
Non so chi'/ tiene,
Non so cos'e.
7. Non trovo pace
nario had a characteristic stress on the fourth syllable, and
was often set as a galliard: IJ J J IJ J I .16
Mozart's musical line reflects the same stress, although
not the galliard's triple rhythms:
These two measures constitute a unit length, corresponding to one line of poetry, which will be deployed in various
multiples as the aria progresses.
The first verbal stanza-and first period-consists of
four of these lengths (eight measures), brought to closure
by a four-measure cadential phrase (ms. 17-20). The first
two measures of this phrase are poetically anomalous,
smoothing over the quinario rhythms to provide a rhythmic and melodic climax which drives home the cadence,
and its second two measures are a rhythmic rhyme with
the second of the unit lengths:
Notte ne di:
Ma pur mi piace
Languir cos/. 15
Its sentiments are pure Cherubino. Again, as in "Non so
pili/' Mozart must set the poem as a convincing song, unw
derlining its literary origin. Furthermore, since in "Voi
che sapete" opera's great artifice and the reality are oneCherubino is actually meant to be singing-the stanzaic
nature of the piece must be more than just a suggestion.
Yet a straight strophic construction with the same music
repeated seven times will be monotonous, while the usual
key-area plan is too dramatic, obscuring by its spirited
curve the necessary poetic element of formal repetition.
Mozart solves the problem in much the same way as he
did in "Non so piil," combining the key-area plan with
outlines of stanzas asserted by attention to the configurations of Italian metrics. In "Voi che sapete," however, the
solution is even more of a triumph. Neither element is
submerged at the appearance of the other, and Mozart's
attention to the detail of the text is exquisite.
In 2/4 meter, Andante, "Voi che sapete" opens with a
gesture which could in theory be a slow contredanse:
But the stately harmonic rhythm of the opening, underlined by the plucking of Susanna's guitar (pizzicati in all
the strings), militates against the usual rhythmic excitement and compression of a key-area dance form. Cheru·
bino's music is ingenuous and leisurely, lacking the urgency
of dance. Clearly at the outset the principles of syllable
count and of the integrity of a unit line of poetry set the
limits. "Voi che sapete" uses the five-syllable line or quinario (the second and fourth lines of each stanza are quinarios with the fifth syllable verbally but not musically
mute-it is sounded in the orchestral introduction). QuiTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
In the truncated orchestral introduction this cadential
phrase serves as a neat consequent member for two unit
lengths:
I~'"
~~:;-
,~~~ &1 1Ipr1IrIJI11 r 'I Q' f3 •Iiii' iJrl r jj1i It rt zj
,
anl.u.At..f
J t
c.tnJ'<!flt"'"f-
I
Example 5
Once one knows the aria, however, the consequent
sounds tacked on: it is clear that the introduction is a compression and that the proper mode of the aria is the expansive spinning-out of poetic stanzas rather than the
antecedent-consequent symmetries of dance. After the
first period the consequent will be withheld until the two
crucial moments of closure which remain-the end of the
"exposition" and the final cadence of the aria. All the
other stanzas will be left open-ended, "poetically," rather
than "musically" conceived.
The second poetic stanza (ms. 21-28) moves to the
dominant of the dominant, F major, preserving the rhythm
of the preceding stanza's first eight measures except for a
few small variations. The modulation introduces the first
dark harmony of the piece, a d-minor triad, aptly on the
word nuovo ("new") for a nice poetic touch. The third
poetic stanza opens in F major, the proper key of the sec·
ond key area. Once the dominant has been achieved, all
that is lacking is the characteristic confirmation of the
new harmonic place. This stanza, like the second consisting of eight measures modelled on measures 9-16, only
postpones confirmation. Each four-measure member
ends on the dominant of F major, and the interest of the
69
�stanza is in a madrigalistic touch-a pretty painting of the
contrast between diletto and martir ("pleasure" and "torment"): diletto receives an ornamental division, while
Cherubino's warblings turn dark ori the word martn (an
f-minor chord and an augmented sixth), as the pretty
youth sings prettily of the pangs of love:
~
~
"'
Cl.'o#I'JI. ~ .11- kf·fto
..1_1_
'F ;r'
:I-
!-Jl
~
~
j•,
J,l·-~-~
J .L
""t-
*·
\r
Example 6
The conventional pathos of the turn is delicately comic.
The next stanza constitutes one of the critical moments
in the juggling of musical and poetic priorities, the problem being how to bring the second key area to an emphatic
close while preserving a sense of the repetition natural to
a strophic song. At this moment in "Non so piu" Mozart
breached poetic regularities, having first rather exaggerated them. Here he takes the opposite tack, violating a
firmly established principle of the key-area plan by closing
the exposition in an alien key. At the outset of the new
stanza (m. 37) the bottom of the C-major triad (V of F)
drops out:
The X-section begins with a harmonic move toG minor
and a new stanza-the fifth one-in rhythm essentially
resembling the second and third:
In ''\nnlJ. \
• Jfl ffflh nn !D Jn
' J n n J, J n !H J lffl .fff'lll J
; J n Jm J J n J J n J ; J
n
n
J~
J>
ms. 21-28
ms. 29-36
ms. 45-52
Again the text is apt for the harmonic motion, speaking of
Cherubino's search for a good outside of himself, the nature and whereabouts of which he does not know. G
minor is conventionally "outside" the place just abandoned, and the modulation to it is open-ended,_ "searching" (passing through G as V of C ~nd then backmg up to
a G tonic through an augmented stxth to D). But the ftrm
harmonic cadence at the end of the stanza (stanzas 2 and
3 both ended on a dominant, not a tonic) gives the lie to
the charmingly melodramatic words of Cherubino's
quest, settling gently back in a harmonic place and reasserting by its sing-song rhythmic rhyme the frame of the
poem.
In "Non so piu" Mozart disturbed the regular poetic
rhythm during the move to the dominant, balancing that
gesture against the return and expansive pastoral coda.
The balance is different in "Voi che sapete:" the rhythmic crisis helps to weight the eighteen measures of thereturn against the forty-four measures of "exposition." Now
for the first time the repetitive trochees
IJnJJJI
- "I_.,
Example 7
The entire stanza is set in Ab major, a key with a remote
and cool relation to the tonality of the aria. The strange
modulation is suited to the text-Cherubino's description
of the fire and ice of infatuation-and rationalized by the
repetition of the four-measure consequent which closed
the first period: it makes here a solid rhythmic rhyme back
to that cadence in order to counterbalance the harmonic
aberration. Thus by a brilliant manipulation of the elements which he set up as "musical" and "poetic" premises at the beginning of the aria, Mozart has managed a
convincing close to the second key area without at all
abandoning metrics. The strange key (a side-slipping modulation instead of the usual drama of the move up to the
dominant) and the eight-measure rhythmic rhyme-yet
another stanza-are unconventionally undramatic. (Literal end rhyme between the first and second key areas is
unusual, since the dramatic point of the new key area is
the movement to the new harmonic place.) Yet the fourmeasure consequent-marked as having a umusical"
function because it diverges just enough from the regular
strophic rhythms to act as a closing gesture-can still signal forcefully the end of a major formal section. Thus the
second key area of the canzona is dramatic in asserting an
essentially undramatic gesture-the rhythmic repetitions
of verse.
70
and the constant four-measure units lose their hold. Urgent and breathless sixteenth notes with an iambic stress~ffliR J' 'ffllh• fflifl J' nfl'ljl'
... - I .. -1"' - I "'-/
begin a long-arched nine-measure phrase which culminates
on the dominant (m. 61). Five of these iambic phrases ornament a chromatic scale in the bass which overshoots
the dominant by one note. A four-measure trochaic unit
length emerges from the iambs and the phrase backs
down to F, the dominant of Bb, ending in a harmonic and
rhythmic rhyme with stanzas 2 and 3. The text is appropriately breathless; for the first time two stanzas constitute one sentence, and the antitheses pile up to a climax;
"I sigh and moan without wanting to, I quiver and tremble without knowing it, I find no peace night or day, and
yet it pleases me to languish this way." These two stanzas
of text are crammed into the nine measures of music. The
rhyme, which provides a mimetic pause on languir (vii' of
V, m. 60) restrains their breathy passion;
/
..
.....
~
/1""*""~ ..
:
"'
r· e* ,..f-k ~ J,:
Jo.'f
p«r ,.;
..
.. "
.,.
,,,_ .,-k
(1-
"
~
Example 8
WINTER 1982
�Cherubino seems for a moment to step outside his formal
song, overwhelmed with emotion. Yet his outburst does
not violate the studied dramatic effects of a charming !tal·
ian song, since the end rhyme once again asserts the
frame of the poem. The piece plays itself out in a return
to the tonic and to the first stanza of text -a final rhyme
both of key area and of canzona. The four·measure conse·
quent makes its third and fourth appearances to provide
the rhetoric of cadence.
Cherubino is indeed a strange invention; some specta·
tors find him repellent, others merely silly. Certainly da
Ponte and Mozart went out of their way to underline his
mixed nature. A young and blushing girl, dressed as a boy,
tremulously singing the cliches of passion with a cool and
vibrato.free voice-the creature before us must be very
special. One expects him to dance-the established rhyth·
mic idiom of the opera-and his dance turns to song. His
conventionally melodramatic gestures-the chromatic turn
on the word martir for example-suggest a moonstruck
adolescent, yet suddenly his song turns to a cool and sub·
tie Ab major, a strange and otherworldly place, laid out but
never explored. Early adolescence is a peculiarly amor·
phous time of life, when youth is androgynous and uncle·
limited-unsure of what it is or what to expect from the
people around it. Cherubino knows of himself only that
he does not know himself, and he is strikingly undiscrimi·
nating in his relationships. "I no longer know what I am,
what I do," he confesses; "every woman makes me blush,
makes me tremble." The decision to compose the role for
a young woman did more than simply ensure a convincing
portrait of adolescence, however. It kept Cherubino from
being particularized and "embodied," located in a real
place and time like the other characters in the opera. He is
the only character who is "placeless," not generated and
defined by the manners of a particular social world (which
is one reason for his failure, when left to himself, to dance,
for affecting a particular social dance gesture must mark
him as a member of a particular class). More precisely, he
off triumphantly, accompanied by an entire military band
which Figaro has summoned up from nowhere. "Non pili
andrai" is an exuberant romp for the trio (Susanna is on
stage, although she does not sing), and a coming·of·age for
a dreamy adolescent engineered by his affectionate but
realistic "older brother," Figaro.
The aria is cast in rondo form. In its main section and
first episode Figaro describes Cherubino as he is now and
in the other sections as he will be on the field of battle,
both in a comically exaggerated style. Of Cherubino now
Figaro says:
Non piu andrai, farfallone amoroso,
Notte e giomo d'intomo girando,
Delle belle turbando il riposo,
Narcisetto, Adoncino d'amor.
Non piu avrai questi bei pennacchini,
Que/ cappello leggero e galante,
Quella chioma, quell'aria brillante,
Que/ vermiglio, donnesco color."
The music to which the first stanza is set is a C·major
march in 4/4 time with a dotted upbeat. Its opening mo·
tive consists almost exclusively of C·major triads, with a
rousing military fanfare to the words "disturbing the
beauties' beauty·sleep," a musical mixed metaphor which
becomes a substantive trope both in the aria and in the
opera. Here the mixture is one of amorous language and
military music, whereas in the first episode of the rondo
(ms. l5ff.) two musical styles mingle: amorous music in·
sinuates itself into the martial ambiance. Describing
Cherubino's appearance in a gently mocking idiom, Fig·
aro alternates a gavotte rhythm with the orchestra's
march:
Viol,.,. II
/1'-..
is "out of place/' for he is not in his proper home and his
genealogy is left unclear. There is, however, one sympa·
thetic portrait of Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro which
may help to make sense of his changeling natureFigaro's description of the boy in his aria at the end of the
i>•'.ta.· .,. ...;1\Wii bo: }"'........~-
R,..,JJ
ltJJ
p
t~
d.;. ,.,.·,
I
I
T
Example 9
first act, his "battle song," "Non pill andrai."
Following the Count's announcement that Cherubino
must leave the castle, Figaro, fond of the page and amused
at-some would say jealous of-his adolescent love pangs,
wants to sweeten the bitterness of his banishment from
his amorous playground. He sings for Cherubino an aria
containing consolation, paternal advice, and encourage-
ment, interlarded with affectionate jibes at the boy's
youth and cynical comment on the nature of that glorious
endeavor, war. Since Figaro is always actor and illusionist,
Cherubino can't simply walk off to war; he must march
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
A little Adonis on his way to battle deserves a mixture of
erotic and military gestures; the march and the coy gavotte
with its pastoral and amorous connotations are a wholly
appropriate conjunction here, and Figaro revels in them.
The brief gavotte dissolves into a dominant pedal, which
calls back the original march theme (m. 31). Figaro's fancy
is afire: after repeating the march he launches an enor·
mously expanded episode (ms. 43ff.)-the description of
Cherubino at the front-returning to the same dominant
pedal and bedroom march (m. 78) and adding a coda. Orig·
71
�inally the march gesture, found p~incipally in the strings,
was merely the orchestral accompaniment; now it becomes
a presence on stage, brought to life as a real military
march. Mozart calls on the full colors of the orchestra:
strings alternate with winds and brass, including trumpets, and the tympani sound for the first time. Figaro, no
longer singing a human vocal line, imitates a trumpet
voicing battle calls:
Example lO
In measure 61 the strings drop out entirely and a full military band plays a new march, suitable for the field and not
at all singable. In the coda this field march returns, and
the stage directions read "Partono tutti alia militare;" 18 in
this playful aria about playing the imaginative has drawn
playfully near to the real, with the help of the "realistic"
rhythms and colors of music.
Figaro's description of Cherubino goes a long way toward explaining some of the paradoxes which surround
him. There is much about the "little Cherub" which
evokes another moonstruck child, an antique deity-the
figure of Eros-Cupid. The imagery of the libretto of Le
nozze di Figaro, thoroughly pastoral, is also frequently
classical. Much of this language centers around Cherubino himself; even Basilio calls him "Cherubino, Cherubin d'amore," hinting at the connection with Eros, and to
Figaro in this aria he is a "little Narcisetto, little Adonis of
love." The classical and the pastoral were for the eighteenth century two genres inextricably mixed. The shepherd-lovers of late eighteenth-century pastoral pieces are
inevitably given classical-sounding names, often drawn directly from the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil;
they are distant descendants of that tradition. At the end
of the opera Figaro is moved to draw the connection himself: just after Susanna sings her beautiful pastorale,
"Deh, vieni," musings on the theme of the correspondence between the twilight night and the state of a lover's
soul (and meant to tease Figaro for the absurdity of his distrust of her), he is drawn, coming to interrupt her purported rendezvous, ironically to style himself as Vulcan,
and Susanna and the unknown lover as Venus and Mars.
The pastoral diction and musette of "Non so pili" place
Cherubino squarely in the Arcadian tradition; as Eros he
presides over the couples in the opera-the indigenous
deity of pastoral love.
The pastoral Eros of Le nozze di Figaro is very different
from whatever Eros presides, for example, in Don Giovanni. There Eros wounds, and often disastrously; he
strikes Donna Elvira just as Virgil's Cupid cunningly
pierced the breast of Dido with a fatal love for Aeneas. In
Figaro, on the other hand, Eros is love through his very
vulnerability. In his openness to all love and love for all, he
72
touches Susanna, Figaro, and the Countess, and makes
the Count suspicious and edgy, although Almaviva is
plainly never quite sure why he should distrust the young
page. The Count ought to worry less about the possibility
of Cherubino seducing the Countess and more about the
efficacy of Cherubino's selfless brand of love, which Almaviva is incapable of comprehending. In the dogma of
Cherubino's eros, being moved by someone is equally as
important as one's own su<;cess in moving the other toward oneself. Cherubino celebrates passion in the strict
sense of the word-the joys and pains of suffering the object of one's affections to move one. When in the finale of
the second act the Count gasps out "Rosina" (II, 15, 229230), he is beginning to learn about this "being affected."
Cherubino's relationships with Susanna, the Countess,
and Figaro reveal the many facets of his special "affection." One erotic thread runs through them all: an aliveness to the physical qualities of the beloved-his walk, his
gestures, the sound of his voice-so that merely glancing
at the beloved gives one an involuntary start. Cherubino
presides over many relationships not explicitly erotic. He
is fond of Susanna, and calls her sorella ("sister"), she
dresses him up like a doll, and they banter and plot like
brother and sister. When in Act II they are caught in danger together they behave like two frightened children. Yet
Susanna affectionately appreciates Cherubino's beauty;
his physical presence moves her. "Che vezzo, che figura!/
Mirate il bricconcello,/Mirate quanta e bello!" 19 she cries.
Cherubino's affection for the Countess is more explicitly
erotic; he steals her ribbon for a magic talisman, and she is
obviously fluttered by his presence. When Susanna admires him the Countess turns away abruptly, snapping
"Quante buffonerie!"20 as though to remind herself to keep
her distance from the charming boy. Rosina is not a middleaged matron, but a young girl recently married and suffering from the inattention of a philandering husband. But, as
I have already pointed out, Mozart and da Ponte treat the
erotic side of their affection more delicately than did Beaumarchais, combining it with Cherubino's hero-worship of
his handsome and benevolent godmother; if anything,
Cherubino's stammering when he speaks to the Countess
makes her seem more matronly than she actually is.
Despite his awkwardness and naivete, his constant facility for annoying, all the characters in the opera find themselves moved in some way by this absurd child. The
Count's exasperation at Cherubino's ubiquity goes deeper
than he realizes. When he cries "E mi fara il destino/Ritrovar questa paggio in ogni loco!"21 he is only admitting to
the boy's disturbing influence on all the loves and friendships in the opera. The affection between Susanna and
the Countess also patterns itself on Cherubino's eros:
awakened by each other's admirable qualities, they move
toward each other and toward friendship. The opera is in
fact about the friendship between the two women and its
possibility-how trust and affection can exist between
two people who share nobility of character, but not of
rank. Now it can be seen more clearly why it is fitting that
WINTER 1982
�Cherubino be a poet. The androgynous Eros-Cupid, neither young nor old, male nor female, .human nor divine,
sings a song which celebrates the passions which Susanna
experiences gladly, the Countess perforce sadly, which
the Countess is too dignified, Susanna too matter-of-fact,
to express outright. The utterly conventional poetry of
"Voi che sapete" from its first line suggests another, less
conventional poet and a more serious intent: "Donne
ch'avete intelletto d'amore"22 is the first line of Dante's
sonnet sequence about the fine discipline of love, and the
abstract quality of its language is a reflection of the tradition in which erotic love sets the soul on the path to
higher things. Cherubino the poet is celebrating the two
women themselves; the opening words of his song sweep
them into his court. He identifies them as "donne che
sanno che cosa e amor, che hanna intelletto d'amore."2 3
He dubs them secular Beatrices, mediums for the workings of Eros. A special aura surrounds them; comprehend-
ing "che cosa e amor," they are gifted with a surpassing
vision of the way things are. (The Countess, it should be
pointed out, returns the compliment, in "Porgi, amor,"
her aria at the opening of Act II, addressing her petition
there to the god of love, Cherubino-Eros.) Furthermore,
by addressing the two women indiscriminately as donne,
Cherubino reveals the special bond between servant and
mistress; initiates, at least, can address them on equal
terms. This relation fittingly comes to light reflected in
the eyes of its catalyst, Cherubino d'a more.
We return in a roundabout way to Figaro and "Non pili
andrai." There exist various interpretations of what Figaro is up to in the aria. It may be perhaps just what it
seems~Figaro's attempt to divert Cherubino from the
sorrows of parting~or, as some have suggested, actually
an attack on Cherubino, teasing banter meant to rub salt
in the wounds, stemming from Figaro's jealousy of the
boy's appeal for the ladies or from a plebeian's resentment
of the aristocratic page 24 In the latter case an aside which
Figaro makes to Cherubino just before the aria~"Io vo'
parlati/Pria che tu parta"' 5 ~is taken as a bullying invitation to a later showdown, whispered so that Susanna can't
hear. That aside, however, has a further audience~the
Count and Basilio. Although many editions have them
leave the stage just before the aside, in the 1786 libretto
(and in the corresponding scene from Le mariage de Figaro) they do not leave, and indeed witness the whole of
Figaro's performance; the scene is rarely played this way,
and loses most of its significance as a result. A scrap of dialogue from the beginning of Act II, just before Cherubino
sings "Voi che sa pete," clarifies the intent of the aside immediately. Figaro is expounding to the Countess the plan
for the Count's humiliation, which involves dressing
Cherubino as Susanna and sending him to the rendezvous
with the Count. Then Figaro says to the Countess, "Il picciol Cherubino,/Per mio consiglio non ancor partito . .. " 26
He plainly wants words with the boy here in Act I not in
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
order to vent his jealousy or class resentment, but to keep
Cherubino from leaving the castle, so that they can lay
plans about the plot he mentions in Act II. Thus all
through "Non pili andrai" Figaro is foresworn to keep
Cherubino back from battle; he has no intention ofletting
the Count disturb the ornamental life of the "amorous
butterfly, flitting around night and day." In the course of
the plot the lad will have to be disguised as a maiden, but
the task takes almost no effort; already his checks have
"that blushing, womanly color." By celebrating the imminent departure as if in rueful assent to it, Figaro's affectionate romp with Cherubino is meant to keep the watching Count off the scent.
Yet the artful dodge has deeper overtones. If Cherubino is the presiding genius of the opera, offering a paradigm of the right way to love, the moment of romping joy
must be more than a sugar-coated pill for a charming
young rascal and a dodge to deceive the Count. "Non pili
andrai" establishes an important relationship between Figaro and Cherubino. Least of all is Figaro teaching Cherubino; he is describing Cherubino, celebrating CheruCherubino, and enlisting Cherubino.
In the first case, Cherubino's comportment on the
stage will not in itself spell out his "second nature." We
need the comments of another observer who will single
out details which consolidate the scattered impressions
generated by "Non so pili." We hear Cherubino called a
"little Narcissus, little Adonis of love," have our attention
drawn to his "little feathers," his "sparkling air," his
"blushing, womanly color," and our impressions are confirmed; it was right that the youth reminded us of that
other love child, the pagan cherub Eros.
Secondly, Figaro celebrates Cherubino. Susanna and
the Countess need not be embarrassed about being moved
by Cherubino, even in his guise as a page; for women to
amuse themselves decorously with the castle mascot is
perfectly proper. Figaro must also be touched by the
power of the strange youth, but to show it is for him a
more delicate matter. Both Figaro and Cherubino are
male, and while they are near the same age, Figaro has attained his manhood. On the other hand, Figaro may be a
little jealous of Cherubino's luscious youth. Circumstances
prevent their sharing the innocent playmate-friendship of
Susanna and Cherubino. Later, at the end of the opera,
Figaro turns away momentarily from the graces of the two
women, giving in to the darker passions of jealousy and
distrust. It is important that he show here that his primary
attachment is to the court of Cherubino, and not to the
selfish brotherhood of the Count and his satellites. Figaro
will rarely reveal how Cherubino moves him; a fraternal
romp in which all three join is one of the few occasions
where it is possible. Figaro shows his affection for Cherubino by exercising for the boy his imaginative talents;
"Non piu andrai" is a moment of uloveplay" between
Cherubino and Figaro.
Finally, Figaro enlists Cherubino. Figaro in his tribute
to the page admits the power of Cherubino's kind of pas-
73
�sian. Only this eros will unite all the conspirators, later on
even moving an unlikely ally like Marcellina over to their
side (when she sees Figaro as if for the first time, and is
genuinely moved by the person of her son). To arm Eros·
Cupid with arrows and shield was an ancient conceit.
Here in "Non pill andrai" Figaro is arming Cherubino,
girding him for the struggle to come. In fact the figure of
the "bedroom soldier," usually the matter of vulgar jokes,
becomes in Figaro an emblem for the righteous of the
opera and for the right kind of passion; the gentle Count·
ess moves to a mixture of lyric and military modes in
"Porgi, amor," and in the finale to Act III a ragged band of
militants for Eros executes a stirring march, the uniformed Cherubino at their head, before they outmaneuver
the Count once again. The gesture of the military march,
taking off from Cherubino's imminent field commission,
becomes a testimony to trust in the powers of human af.
fection when matched against the assailing brutishness of
men. "Amor vincit omnia": the lyrics of Cherubino the
poet celebrate this maxim in all its delicate compulsion.
l. "Go on, you old pedant, you stuck-up lady scholar; just because you
once read two books, and annoyed Madame in her youth ... " (I, v,
75- 78).
2. "Leggila alia padrona,/Leggila tu medesma,/Leggila a Barbarina, a
Marcellina,/Leggila ad ogni donna del palazzo!" ("Read it to my mistress, you read it to yourself, read it to Barbarina, to Marcellina, read it
to every woman in the palace").
3. "Povero Cherubin, siete voi pazzo?" ("Poor Cherubin, are you
mad?").
4. In the original of Le nozze di Figaro, Beaumarchais's Le mariage de
Figaro, the Countess explains that Cherubino is related to her family
and is her godchild (1, x). Da Ponte omitted the scene in which these
lines occur, but the Countess is referred to as Cherubino's comare or
godmother (by Susanna-!, v, 86). It was customary to take nobJe.born
boys into noble households as pages.
5. "I don't know what I am, what I'm doing .... Sometimes I'm on fire,
sometimes I'm all ice .... Every woman makes me blush, makes me
tremble. At the mere names of love, of pleasure, I grow agitated, my
heart skips a beat, and a desire which I cannot explain forces me to
speak of love!"
6. See Putnam Aldrich, Rhythm in Seventeenth-Century Italian Monody
New York 1966.
7. Lines three and four of the first stanza might seem to be an anomaly
in an anapestic scheme because of the string of six eighth-notes with
which they begin:
Q-.~.,; do11·n4.. CM·11'.fr- ,1; e~-/D-r~
n1nn
J JJ/JJ
But the first eighth-note on the syllable don- is an appOggiatura varying
the line by embellishing the all-important word donna; it does not distract from the underlying rhythm.
8. For a more detailed discussion of the reasons for substituting these
terms for the more conventional ones, see Leonard G. Ratner, "Harmonic Aspects of Classic Form," Journal of the American Musicological
Society 2, 1949, 159-68.
9. Measure 22, using for the first two lines the syncopation from the
earlier cadence.
10. Measure 27-vii7 ofF, the new dominant. Or the Db could be regarded as a chromatic appoggiatura to a V~ of V; the effect is the same.
ll. Ordinarily to register "truest" passion in the middle of an operatic
aria the character moves from strictly measured music to the freer
74
rhythms of recitative. For example, in the finale to the second act of
Figaro, in the midst of a spirited 4/4 interchange between the Count
and the Countess, he calls her suddenly by her Christian name and she,
deeply stung, answers him in a phrase of recitative which brings the
rhythmic action to an abrupt halt (II, 15, 230-233). In "Non so pill" the
strictly "poetic" setting is apprehended as the artifice, and the singer
need not resort to declamation to register his natural voice.
12. "I speak of love when I'm awake, I speak of love when I'm dreaming: to the water, to the shadows, to the mountains, to the flowers, to the
grass, to the fountains, to the echo, to the air, to the winds, which bear
away with themselves the sound ofthe empty syllables" (ms. 54-91).
13. "E, se non ho chi m'oda,/Parlo d'amor con me"-the last two lines
of the text of "Non so pill."
14. "Ladies, you who know what love is, see if I have it in my heart."
15. "I shall tell you again what I'm feeling; it's new for me, and I don't
know how to understand it. I have a feeling full of desire; sometimes it's
pleasure, sometimes torment. I'm cold, and then I feel my soul all
ablaze, and in a moment I'm cold again. I'm looking for a good which is
outside of me; I don't know who has it, or what it is. I sigh and moan
without wanting to, I quiver and tremble without knowing it, I find no
peace night or day, and yet it pleases me to languish this way."
16. Alddch, 103-133.
17. "No more, amorous butterfly, will you go flitting around night and
day disturbing the beauties' beauty-sleep, you little Narcissus, little
Adonis of love. No more will you have these fine little feathers, that light
and rakish cap, that sparkling air, that blushing, womanly color."
18. "All exit in military style."
19. "What a bearing, what a face! Look at the little colt, see how beautiful he is!" (II, 12, 89-92).
20. "What foolishness!" (II, 12, 119).
21. "And will destiny make me find this page everywhere!" (II, viii, 8385).
22. "Ye women who comprehend love ... "
23. "Women who know what love is, who comprehend love ... " My
sentence is a conflation of the opening line of the aria and the opening
line of Dante's poem.
24. This suggestion is made by Siegmund Levarie (Mozart's Le nozze di
Figaro: A Critical Analysis, Chicago 1952, 72), and by Frits Noske ("Social Tensions in Le nozze di Figaro," Music and Letters, January 1969,
52). Because it is important ammunition for those who see the opera as a
revolutionary comedy in the tradition of its original, and not as a pastoral
romance about the nature of true attachment, as it seems to me to have
become, this suggestion needs refutation. It depends partly on the assumption that Figaro, while he defers to Cherubino in public, addressing him in the second person plural at the beginning of this scene ("E
voi non applaudite?"), is in private insolent (he addresses Cherubino
thereafter exclusively as tu).
But since all Figaro's remarks except for one aside are overheard by
the Count and Basilio (see above), there is actually no distinction made
here between public and private. According to the original libretto, Figaro's final words to Cherubino before the aria ("Farewell, little Cherubino. How your [tuo]fate changes in a moment!") are said with feigned
joy (finta gioia)-the public prevails. Furthermore, although Cherubino
is probably of gentle birth, he is nevertheless a child, not in his proper
home, and in a position of service; ordinary protocol will probably not
apply. The issue of Cherubino's aristocracy never seems to be a live one
in his relationships with Susanna and Figaro, and so tu is no more necessarily insolent than voi defers. Susanna calls Cherubino voi perhaps for
the same reasons as the Countess does-to keep the attractive and
amorous boy at arm's length. And Figaro's tu to Cherubino is probably
affectionate, his one public voi a perfunctory attempt, before he warms
to his role as fond older brother, to conceal from the Count and Basilio
their relationship as friends and-as I shall show in a moment-future
conspirators.
25. "I want to speak to you before you leave."
26. "Little Cherubino, who on my advice has not yet left ... " (italics
mine).
WINTER 1982
�The Fury of Aeneas
Joe
The story Homer tells in the Iliad begins with the eruption of the anger of Achilles. As the twenty-fourth book of
the poem opens, that anger has reached its greatest intensity. Achilles "let fall the swelling tears, lying sometimes
along his side, sometimes on his back, and now again prone
on his face; then he would stand upright, and pace turning in distraction along the beach of the sea ... (At dawn,)
when he had yoked running horses under the chariot he
would fasten Hektor behind the chariot, so as to drag him,
and draw him three times around the tomb of Menoitios'
fallen son, then rest again in his shelter, and throw down
the dead man and leave him to lie sprawled on his face in
the dust ... So Achilleus in his fury outraged great
Hektor." (24. 9-22) The wrath which has withstood the
events of twenty-three books has swollen into a rage
which denies Achilles sleep, food, or the cessation of his
tears, a rage which breaks forth in monotonous acts of revenge which do not relieve but frustrate and provoke.
Achilles now walks the circular path at the center of anger
in which it is quenchless, infinite.
But the Iliad is not finally the story of the victory of anger over Achilles, because Zeus has one last scheme. He
arranges for Priam to visit Achilles, to stand before him
risking his wrath, to ask in person for pity. Priam kills the
anger of Achilles by displacing it with the grief of Achilles,
which can meet and merge with the grief of Priam and
come to rest in mutual comforting. Here is Homer's de~
scription of that last and least-expected turning point in
the Iliad: as Priam ends his words to Achilles, saying, " 'I
put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my
children,' " Homer continues, 10 So he spoke, and stirred in
the other a passion of grieving for his own father. He took
the old man's hand and pushed him gently away, and the
A tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis, Joe Sachs delivered this lecture in Santa Fe on September 18, 1981, and in Annapolis on October 2,
1981.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Sachs
two remembered, as Priam sat huddled at the feet of
Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor and
Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos. The sound of their mourning moved in the house.
Then when great Achilleus had taken full satisfaction in
sorrow and the passion for it had gone from his mind and
body, thereafter he rose from his chair, and took the old
man by the hand, and set him on his feet again, in pity for
the grey head and the grey beard, and spoke to him and
addressed him in winged words." (24. 506-17)
Book twenty-four ends with one last Homeric dawn, in
which the doomed people of Troy celebrate the burial of
their beloved Hector with fitting ceremonies and a glorious feast. Such was the burial of Hector, breaker of
horses, only because, between his wrath and his own imminent death, Achilles rejoined the human community.
The climax of the Iliad, then, is the moment when Achilles remembers his father. That moment, which pierces his
heart and lets the anger drain from it, will not add a day to
his life or to the survival of Troy, but it does make supportable the enormous weight of grief which has built in
Achilles, in Priam, in the Trojans, and in the hearer or
reader of the poem.
Virgil's Aeneid is, above all else, a reply to the Iliad and
Odyssey and a rejection of the kind of comfort Homer offers. I have set before you at length the moment into
which Homer puts a power which counterbalances all the
horror and pain of the Iliad because Virgil frames the
Aeneid with two echoes of that moment. Twice in the
Aeneid, in scenes of battle, the image of Aeneas' father
comes into his mind. On the first occasion, Aeneas is looking at Priam, and the memory of his father stirs him to action. The scene is in Book two, but it is a flashback to the
beginning of Aeneas' story, and the memory of his father
marks the beginning of his undertaking of the deeds to
which he has been called. On the second occasion, Aeneas
has just watched a young man die whom he killed, and
75
�whose father he is about to confront. The two characters,
Lausus and Mezentius, evoke memories of Hector and
Priam for the reader, and in Aeneas a memory of his father which occasions a moment of understanding. This
scene is in Book ten, but it is a direct preparation for the
understanding of the concluding lines and action of the
Aeneid. Thus the climactic moment of the Iliad is present
in the first and last events in Virgil's story, and in both
cases it is put in a perspective in which its power is acknowledged but its weight is lessened.
In Book two of the Aeneid we watch alongside a helpless Aeneas while Achilles' one deed of comfort and kindness is desecrated by Achilles' son. Listen as this third
generation speaks to the first: " 'Carry off these tidings; go
and bring this message to my father, son of Peleus; and
remember, let him know my sorry doings, how degenerate
is Neoptolemus. Now die.' This said, he dragged him to
the very altar stone, with Priam shuddering and slipping
in the blood that streamed from his own son. And Pyrrhus
with his left hand clutched tight the hair of Priam; his
right hand drew his glistening blade, and then he buried it
hilt-high in the king's side. This was the end of Priam's
destinies ... Now he lies along the shore, a giant trunk, his
head torn from his shoulders, as a corpse without a
name." (2. 547-58) As Neoptolemus sinks back into the
horror from which his father had emerged, the words
"This was the end of Priam" overtake and destroy the
calm of the words "Such was the burial of Hector."
Aeneas can do nothing for Priam, since he watches
trapped on a roof-beam of the wrecked and burning palace. But as he watches Priam die, he remembers his own
father, and all his helpless loved ones whom he has left at
home while he fights a useless battle to vent his rage at
the conquering Greeks. It seems that the memory of his
father will recall Aeneas to the deeds the ghost of Hector
has asked of him: to let Troy fall, and carry himself and
Troy's holy things across the sea. Like Achilles, Aeneas
has been wasting himself in the effort to exact the satisfaction of revenge from his enemies, and like Achilles he
is restored to himself in remembering his father. But just
as we begin to expect Aeneas to return to save his father,
wife, and son, and leave revenge behind, his eye lights on
Helen. In that sight his father's need of him is forgotten,
and a blind fury to destroy the cause of so much evil overwhelms even his capacity to keep that evil from reaching
those dearest to him. As Aeneas' sword is about to fall on
Helen, his goddess-mother grabs his arm. Venus sends
him to save his family, after showing him that not Helen
but the gods are responsible for the destruction of Troy.
But the violent arresting of Aeneas' arm when it has been
set in motion by the strongest longing in his heart leaves
behind a feeling of frustration which is not released until
the last lines of the poem. That is the beginning of the
story of Aeneas' journey. Let us try to understand how it
speaks to Homer.
The healing of Achilles' anger is the last event in his
story, and nearly the last in his life. It is enshrined forever
76
by the structure of Homer's story, which makes it the resolution of twenty-three books of tension. Achilles' story
moves out of anger, through pity, to a peace in the midst
of war. But does Homer's framing of that story reveal or
distort? Does his emphasis convey the true weights of
things? Virgil carries Homer's story beyond Homer's ending, to submerge Achilles' humanity in the brutality of his
son and Hector's glorious funeral in the hideous, headless,
nameless corpse of his father. But more important, Virgil
appropriates the climactic moment of the Iliad to make it
a fleeting mood which has no lasting effect, none in the
world and none in the heart of Aeneas. The Iliad ends
with a frozen picture of a pendulum at the top of its
swing: the picture is beautiful but that of which it is a picture is unstable. If only the dualities in our lives could be
laid to rest by our embracing of their wholesome sides, if
only the death of anger could be an overcoming, once and
for all, of its power over us, then the world might be a turbulent but finally a simple good place, and evil our own
fault. But dead anger rises again; the self-destructive passions can be seen for what they are and still reassert their
power over us. The poet Homer can show us things that
make us glad, but is that seeing what we need? The anger
of Aeneas recurs throughout the Aeneid, and both its ebb
and its flow are destructive. One of the principal teachings of the Aeneid is that rage is ineradicable from the human heart, because its cure is worse than the disease. Let
us watch as Aeneas' eyes are opened to this ugliest of
truths, in Virgil's second echo of the climax of the Iliad.
The worst man in the Aeneid is undoubtedly Mezentius,
a tyrant who tortured his subjects for sport until they rebelled and he escaped. Thousands of those subjects unite
with Aeneas in his Italian war, solely for the chance to kill
Mezentius. Without any good reason, as Virgil puts it, another thousand remain loyal to Mezentius, among them
his son Lausus, called breaker of horses. When Aeneas
wounds Mezentius with a spearcast, Lausus, his valor
awakened by his love for his father, prevents Aeneas'
sword from falling, giving his companions the chance to
save Mezentius and drive back Aeneas. Fury rises in Aeneas as he is once again thwarted on the point of killing a
thing of evil, but as he waits in shelter for all his enemies'
javelins to be thrown he calms down, and shouts at La usus
to be sensible and withdraw. When Lausus insists on
fighting him, a greater anger surges in Aeneas, and in that
rage he kills Lausus.
At whom is Aeneas angry? Can it be at Lausus, whom
he has no desire to fight and for whom he has nothing but
admiration? As Aeneas looks at La usus' dying face he sees
the image of his own love for his own father, and gives the
dead Lausus to his companions for honorable burial. It is
at this moment that the transformation in the heart of
Achilles resonates most strongly in the Aeneid, but Aeneas felt his pity before Lausus was dead, and would have
spared him had he not been driven to a resurgence of his
dead anger. To understand the killing of Lausus is, I think,
to be halfway to understanding the killing of Turnus,
WINTER 1982
�which would be equivalent to understanding the whole
Aeneid. Let us keep trying.
'
Lausus loves a father whom no one could respect. His
motive is therefore pure, irrational love, with no other
support. By painting Mezentius as unrelievedly, monstrously evil, Virgil makes the central choice of Lausus'
life be between love and everything that makes sense.
Even further, the circumstances of the battle force Lausus
to measure the strength of that love, since after he has
saved his father's life he could retreat honorably, and
must decide whether to do so or to throw away his life.
Unrestrained love and loyalty are, for Lausus, consistent
only with what is wild and reckless: to attack Aeneas and
die. Both Lausus and Aeneas have a long time to think
about this before it happens. There is an irrational and inescapable logic at work in the scene: the better a man Lausus is the more is it necessary that he die in a bad cause,
and the more fully Aeneas recognizes his goodness the
more necessary is it that he kill him, and not do him the
insult of refusing his self-sacrifice. The rage which supplies the motive power for the killing Aeneas has no heart
to commit is a rage brought about by his recognition of
the way in which both Lausus and he are trapped.
Achilles and Priam, suffering the worst private grief,
could draw together in mutual recognition and give each
other what each needed most. Priam gave Achilles deliverance from his anger, and Achilles gave Priam the means
and the time to unite with his city and his dead son in one
last civic festival. In the corresponding Virgilian recognition scene, it seems that Lausus can give Aeneas nothing,
and Aeneas can give Lausus only death. With the image
of his own father in mind, Aeneas asks the dead Lausus,
"Miserable boy, what can I give you now? What honor is
worthy of your character?" (10. 825-6) He gives to the
corpse the weapons in which it found its only happiness,
and gives the corpse itelf back to its own people, to be
mingled with the ashes and shades of its ancestors, wondering aloud if that will matter to anyone. Finally, he dedicates to La usus the only gift in his power which can solace
such a miserably unhappy death: the resolve to make his
own greatness such that there will be no shame in having
fallen beneath it. Thus La usus has given something to Aeneas-the burden of another obligation to the dead. The
Homeric comfort of the sharing in human community is
not available either to Lausus or to Aeneas. Lausus, whom
Virgil introduces in Book seven as a young man worthy to
be happy, had the wrong father, and he cannot but be the
son of his father. Aeneas likewise cannot escape being the
man on whom Trojans, Italians, and gods depend to stand
divided in war from Lausus, and be his killer. The Homeric world, whatever divisions may be within it, makes a
whole; the Virgilian world is too full of purposes too
deeply crossed to be composed, ever.
Am I going too far in reading in an intensely painful but
small tragic event a vision of a tragic world? Is not Virgil's
theme the bringing of law to the world? Are not the tragedies of Lausus and Turnus and Camilla and Nisus and
1
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Euryalus and Pallas and Evander and Amata and Dido
and Palinurus the events which Virgil shapes into the
transformation of the world into a place in which such
things will no longer happen? It is true that the bringing
of the world to peace under law is the theme of the Aeneid,
but we must not let anyone but Virgil tell us what Virgil
thinks about that subject.
We hear of it first, early in Book one, from Jupiter. He
tells Venus that Aeneas' Roman descendents will be the
lords of all things, without limits in time or place, that one
of them, meaning Augustus, will carry his empire to the
Ocean and his fame to the stars, and in doing so allow the
rough ages of the world to become gentle under law. And
here are Jupiter's last words: "The gruesome gates of war,
with tightly welded iron plates, shall be shut fast. Within,
unholy Rage shall sit on his ferocious weapons, bound behind his back by a hundred knots of brass; he shall groan
horribly with bloody lips." (293-6) Forty lines devoted to
triumph and glory seem to dissolve in four lines of ugliness. One's gaze is turned not outward, to a world finally
free of the source of war, but to the struggling caged being
confined within. The last words of this first picture of
Rome are not of victory or victors but of a victim, Furor,
and of the sights and sounds of his pain. Why is rage presented as a person? Why is a reader who is incapable of
enjoying a description of torture made to sympathize with
the cause of war?
Three lines after this ghastly and troubling portrait we
hear for the first time in the poem the name of Dido. One
third of the poem of the founding of Rome is the story of
Dido, and more than a third of its impact is carried by Virgil's presentation of her. One famous commentator has
said that Virgil was "no master of the epic art" because he
allowed such things as the sufferings of Dido to overwhelm his efforts to glorify Rome. Another has said that
the Aeneid is the first wholly successful epic ever written,
because it is the first to have the unity attained previously
only in dramas, a unity evident primarily in the complete
merging of the Dido story into that of the triumph of
Rome. Each commentator is half-right. The Aeneid is unified, but not around the figure of Augustus; Dido is the
most powerful figure in Virgil's composition, but not by
accident. The theme of Rome's bringing of a new age of
law to the world enters the poem, modulates to a strange
sadness, and passes over into the story of Dido. Dido's
story is deeper than Rome's, and illuminates it.
Dido is, to begin with, in the same situation as Aeneas,
and she has handled that situation so well that everything
about her gives hope to Aeneas at a time when he has
none. She too has been driven out of her own country and
been responsible for the lives of a band of fellow-refugees.
She too has had to find a new life in the strange and unknown lands of the West. She has won a place for her people by winning the respect of neighboring rulers, and under
her leadership, her subjects are building the conditions of
a healthy communal life: fortifications, houses, a harbor, a
theater, a senate. Already built, in the center of the city, is
77
�a temple to Juno, filled with scenes of the Trojan War.
The work under way is to Aeneas a vision of happiness,
and the completed work feeds his soul. One of the other
Trojans sees in Carthage a city with the power to impose
justice on the proud and a ruler with the goodness to
spare the defeated. We will hear almost the same words
spoken in Book six as an exhortation to Rome. The story
of Dido, smaller only in geographical scale, begins where
the story of Rome aims.
Dido's Phoenician Carthage, where Aeneas tells the
tale of his long wanderings, is, like the Phaiakian Scheria
of Alkinous and Arete, a city ruled by virtue and strong intellect. Dido herself, like Penelope, is a woman with the
dignity to keep arrogant suitors at a distance. And the hospitality, the capacity to permit another to be at home in a
place that is not his own, that is so beautifully depicted in
the Odyssey, is enjoyed by Aeneas nowhere but in the
home of Dido. In Virgil's re-casting of Homer's story of
Odysseus, almost all its places and people are condensed
into the story of Dido. Like the Iliad, Homer's Odyssey is a
story of the recovery of human community. Its culmination is the restoration of political order to Ithaca. But Dido's story reverses the Odyssean motion from anarchy to
order, from savagery to serenity. In the midst of his journey Odysseus is cursed by a one-eyed monster, a nonhuman being who lives outside all law. At the end of his
stay in Carthage, Aeneas too is cursed by a being who is
outside all law and community, and that monster is Dido
herself.
Why was Dido so successful as a ruler? I think Virgil's
briefest answer can be found near the end of Book one:
because her soul was in repose, because in turn her heart
was out of use {resides animas desuetaque corda, I. 722).
Since the death of her first husband, she tells her sister,
Aeneas alone has caused her judgment to bend and her
soul to totter. (4. 20-3) The empty pathways which the
flame of love once burned through her have not closed or
healed. The ancient flame is still within Dido, just as a living rage is still behind the gates of war which Augustus
closes with force and with law. In Latin, the name of Augustus' victim and that of Dido's conqueror are the same,
furor. Virgil's one brief portrait of a happy city is of Carthage under the rule of Dido for only so long as the furious
love within her is out of use. In the Odyssey, political community is displayed as the natural and the only life which
realizes what it is to be a human being. In the Aeneid, political life is presented as depending upon the inhuman
constraint that Dido practices upon herself and Augustus
exerts on the world. Carthage thrives on Didp' s serene
control, and collapses into disarray when she falls in love.
Many readers have seen in the fate of Dido a dangerous
example which Aeneas must see and learn to avoid. Such
readers see the foundations of the political life in Aeneas'
rejection of her. Like an oak tree in the Alps shaken by the
North wind, Aeneas suffers from love and care for Dido,
but he withstands their fury. Reason holds firm against
passion and duty vanquishes desire. One pities Dido, but
78
rejoices that Aeneas does not let his own pity become a
morass in which the hopes of his son and of the world
would be lost. But Aeneas is bound to Dido not just by his
love for her, which is his to control if he can, but by the
fact that he has allowed her to love him. That is not passion but choice, and to reverse it is not duty but betrayal.
In the simile of the oak tree, it is Aeneas' mind which
overcomes the care in his breast, but that is merely the
overcoming of the last obstacle to a choice he has already
made. The widespread interpretation according to which
Aeneas' rejection of Dido is a victory of the rational and
political over the passionate and personal does not stand
up to a moment's scrutiny. He has already told Dido that
he loves her less than he loves the remnants of Troy
which he had been bidden to carry to Italy. (4. 340-7) His
choice is personal through-and-through. And in setting
out for the city he will build in Italy, Aeneas knows that he
is leaving Carthage in wreckage. (4. 86-9) His choice is political through-and-through as well. Aeneas cannot choose
otherwise than he does. He has gotten himself into a fix
from which there is only one way out. But he cannot pretend that what he does is not a betrayal. Aeneas does not
understand his destruction of Dido as he will later understand his destruction of Lausus, but we need not be fooled.
But if Aeneas' abandonment of Dido cannot be praised
as an act of Stoic virtue, must it not be given its due as an
act of piety? Twice Aeneas tells Dido that his leaving her
for a bride and kingdom in Italy is not by his own will but
in accordance with what is fated, and we have known from
the second line of the poem that Virgil is writing of a man
whose deeds are compelled by fate. But what is the nature
of that compulsion? What does Virgil understand fate to
be? He tells us that Dido's death was not only undeserved
but unfated (4. 696), and, narrating a battle in Book nine,
he tells us that if Turnus had hesitated a moment to break
the bolts on one gate, Rome would never have come to be
(9. 757-9). In order to understand what Virgil has written,
we must conceive a fate that is both limited and fallible.
The Latin fatum contains all the meanings of our word
fate, but in it they are derivative meanings. Never absent
from the Latin word is its primary sense of a thing spoken
or uttered. And Virgil does not present the speech which
is fate as an irrevocable decree, but uses the word with
verbs meaning to call or to ask. The source of fate is a mystery in the Aeneid, but the nature of its action is evident.
Fated outcomes are known to some among the gods and
the shades of the dead, but are brought about only by human beings who must be lured, persuaded, or tricked. Every device of rhetoric must be used, because fate in the
Aeneid remains always and altogether subordinate to human choice.
The fall of Troy in Book two, for example, is a fated
event. The destruction of the city is completed by Neptune, who shakes the walls and uproots the foundations
from the earth, but neither he nor any other god acts so
directly until the conquest of the Trojans by the Greeks is
an accomplished fact. First, an indecisive war has been
WINTER 1982
�carried on for ten years. Second, the Greeks have concealed their best fighters in a counterfeit religious offering
left on the beach of Troy. Third, a lying story told by a
Greek has aroused the pity of the Trojans and inclined
them to bring the fatal horse into their city. But beyond
all the strength, cleverness, and rhetorical skill of the
Greeks, one more element was necessary, without which,
Aeneas says years later, Troy would still be standing: the
minds of the Trojans had to be made left-handed (2. 54-6);
they had to be brought confidently to trust that the divine
purpose was opposite to what it truly was. One respected
Trojan leader, Laocoon, priest of Neptune, would have
held Troy against all the resources of Greeks and gods,
had he not been made to seem to be profaning a sacred offering. Laocoon pierced the horse with a spear, before Sinon told the Trojans that their prosperity would depend
on treating the horse with reverence. At that moment a
pair of gigantic snakes came across the sea and the land,
making straight for the small sons of Laocoon, and killing
them and him. That horrible supernatural spectacle was
the call of fate which the Trojans answered to their own
rmn.
That which is fated must be recognized, interpreted, assented to, and carried out by human beings, who may be
mistaken or may have been deliberately deceived. Aeneas
is responsible not only for his choice to answer his fate,
but also for the judgment that what fate calls him to is
good. The half-understood future that could be brought
about by Aeneas' deeds does make a powerful claim upon
him, but so does the life of Dido, which he has allowed to
become dependent upon him. No one but he can make
the final decision that the former claim is more worthy of
respect than the latter. That Aeneas is not comfortable
with his choice is obvious when he begs Dido's ghost for
understanding and absolution. Her stony refusal and undying hatred make it forever impossible for anyone to say
that his choice was right. And the unforgettable example
of Laocoon makes it equally impossible to take any comfort in the reflection that Aeneas' choice was fated.
There is a powerful presence in the Aeneid of the inescapable, but it is not the same as nor even entirely compatible with the fated. The divine call which pulls one
toward the future may be refused or defeated, but the human entanglements which grasp one from out of the past
cannot be escaped. Aeneas can abandon Dido, but he can
never be free of the pain of the knowledge that he has betrayed the love and trust he had once accepted from her.
The true fatalism of the Aeneid is not a sense of the inevitable triumph of what is to be, of a healing and elevating
future, but a sense of the sad burden of all that has been,
of past choices and rejections that one has not gotten
beyond.
Readers are sometimes puzzled by a character in the
Aeneid who is mentioned repeatedly but to whom Virgil
seems deliberately to have given no human features or
qualities. He is the closest companion of Aeneas, but we
never hear either speak to the other. He is the true or
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
trusty Achates, whose name has become an idiomatic label for a devoted friend, but he seems to be nothing more
than a label; we do not know who Aeneas' friend is or
what he is like. But Virgil often gives his characters names
which are descriptive in Greek. A Greek soldier whom Aeneas encounters on Sicily and whose story he trusts is
called Achaemenides, "still a Greek." An aging boxer who
rouses himself to win one last fight is called Entellus, "mature" or Hat an end." A monster who seems to delight in
evil itself is called Cacus, "the evil one." As a Greek word,
Achates would name ''one who grieves," one whose spe·
cia! or characteristic business is to grieve. Never absent
from the side of Aeneas in anything he does is the true or
trusty grieving one; never, in the Aeneid, does hope overcome grief.
The burden of grief which one feels through the last
two-thirds of the poem is thus explicitly figured in the person of Achates as Aeneas' second self. The inescapability
of the past is also figured by Virgil in one of the great central images of the poem, that of the labyrinth. We hear of
it first in Book five, in connection with an intricate display
of horsemanship by the Trojan children, but the words
are too strong for their immediate occasion. The sons of
Troy are said to be entangled in "an undiscovered and irretraceable wandering" (5. 591) as in the dark and ambiguous Labyrinth of ancient Crete. Aeneas soon sees a carved
image of that Labyrinth on the walls of the Sibyl's cave,
when he begins his journey in Book six to the land of the
dead. The Sibyl tells him that it will be easy to enter that
land, but to retrace his way to the upper air, "this," she
says, "is work; this is labor." (6. 126-9) We are made to
think of the Trojans' journey to Italy as labyrinthine, and
to expect Aeneas' return from Hell to be especially so. We
are startled, then, at the end of Book six, when Aeneas' return to the upper world is no trouble at all. Notoriously,
that return is through the gate of false dreams. Great ingenuity has been expended by many interpreters to remove
the taint of falsity from Aeneas' mission, but it cannot be
done. Aeneas returns to earth with his soul burning with
the love of coming fame, and that is a false exit from the
land of the dead, the place of Dido. The Labyrinth image
is still with us, the sense of betrayal of Dido's love has not
been left behind, and the Sibyl is right: what lies before
Aeneas is the true labor. He has not left the place of the
dead; he will carry it with him wherever he goes.
The war in Italy which occupies the last third of the
Aeneid has a labyrinthine structure. When Turnus enters
the Trojan camp in Book nine, he is pressed back to the
walls and carried back to his comrades by the Tiber before
there is any decisive outcome. In Book ten, when Turnus
has killed Pallas, he and Aeneas fight toward each other,
but juno lures Turnus away from the battlefield with a
phantom-Aeneas made of wind. In Book eleven, when
there is a truce, Aeneas and Turnus are both eager to submit to single combat when a double misunderstanding
makes the war resume; the two men finally catch sight of
each other across a plain, just as night falls. In the last
79
�book, Turnus' goddess-sister, disguised as his charioteer,
keeps carrying him away when Aeneas catches sight of
him. It is only in the last lines of the poem that Aeneas
reaches the center of the maze. The monster he finds
there is not Turnus, now humble, resigned to death, and
gracious in defeat. What is the meaning of Aeneas' last
furious act of violence? What does the maze of war and
frustration that stands between Aeneas and his final confrontation with Turnus have to do with the false exit from
the land of the dead by which Aeneas seems to have entered his labyrinth?
The strange and abrupt ending of the Aeneid collects
into itself all that has gone before it. It is a vivid culmination of the theme of the labyrinth, but that image in turn
takes its meaning from a chain of connected images of
which it is part. The first of these images is Aeolia, the
vast cave of the winds in which, we are told, angry tempests rage in indignation at the mountain which confines
them (l. 53-6). Unrestrained, those winds would destroy
the seas, the lands, and heaven itself. Therefore jupiter,
here called the omnipotent father, confined them and
gave them a king skilled to know when to loosen, when to
draw in, their reins. Can the word omnipotens be intended seriously in this context? It seems that it cannot
mean more than "stronger than anything else," so that
even the winds can be brought under the control of the
strongest one. If jupiter were truly able to do anything, he
could change the nature of the winds, or destroy them
and replace them with others just as useful and not as
dangerous. Could it be that one with the power to choose
otherwise would judge it good to design a world in which
hurricanes must sometimes be unleashed? The single
word omnipotens leaves that question hanging over the
poem.
The second image in the poem which picks up the
theme of caged fury is one we examined earlier: Furor,
rage itself, removed from the world and imprisoned behind the iron gates of war. What we found strange in that
picture was the presentation of rage personified as an object of pity. We saw then that the image of Furor led directly into the story of Dido and that her story was of the
unleashing of furor within her. It is in the story of Dido
that the two earlier images begin to make sense. Dido is
ruined because she is capable of loving without restraint.
The years of her self-denial make possible the existence of
Carthage, because the chiefs of the surrounding countries
respect her fidelity to her dead husband, and because it
gives her reign a dignity and stability under which her subjects thrive. But her sister, who loves her, does not want
Dido to continue that life. Royalty does not fulfill the
longings caged within Dido.
When Venus wants to bind Dido to Aeneas by means of
lust, she begins by arousing in Dido tenderness for a small
child. Once Dido falls in love with Aeneas, her ruin is assured, but she only becomes vulnerable to falling in love
by first feeling a loving response to a child. Would Dido
have been better off if a child sitting in her lap could
80
arouse no irrational longing in her childless heart?-if intimate contact with a child left her feeling no more than
the general benevolence she had for all her subjects? If
not, if a cold, loveless life is never choiceworthy, then the
omnipotent father was right to leave the furious and destructive things in the world, and Virgil was right to grieve
over the imposition of law on the earth. For even a mother's love is potentially furious, as we see it in the mothers
of Euryalus and Lavinia. And the loving, irrational desire
to have a child of one's own is inseparable from all the raging loves and hates within us. It is not the political life
which fulfills us, if Virgil is right, but the loving attachments to particular other people, which also make us vulnerable to frenzy, madness, and war.
Virgil uses the cave of the winds and the gates of war as
images of the human soul, which always encloses irrational longings and loyalties capable of furious emergence
into the world. Madness, as of Lausus, anger, as of Aeneas, rage of battle, as of Turnus, passionate love, as of
Dido, prophetic frenzy, as of the Sybil, and poetic inspiration, as of Virgil himself: these are the meanings my small
Latin dictionary gives for the word furor, the name Virgil
gives to the being at the center. And what is the labyrinth
which surrounds the center? It is, I think, Virgil's picture
of any life which ignores or denies the furious things at
the center. Aeneas leaves the land of the dead glorying in
his vision of the Roman future, only to find in Italy the
same intractable opposition he has left behind in Dido,
and finally to yield to it in himself. And Augustus subdues
the proud of all the world, only to become a monster of
pride himself.
In Book eight a fourth image joins the winds, the gates
and the labyrinth. In the land of King Evander Aeneas
sees the rock on which the Senate of Rome will one day
stand, and learns that it once enclosed the home of a murderous, fire-breathing, half-human monster named Cacus.
From the "proud doorposts" of this senseless killer there
had always hung rotting, severed heads of his human victims. (8. 195-7) Evander tells how Hercules killed the
monster and exposed his dark cavern to the light of the
sun. Commentators routinely take the triumphant Hercules as a '~symbol" for Aeneas, who overcomes the monsters
of unreason, Dido and Turnus, and for Augustus, who will
overcome war itself. One who reads Evander's account
not as a symbol but as a story, though, must feel some unease as Hercules, before he can kill Cacus, must become a
thing of fury and frenzy himself. Hercules' triumph is not
an example with which one can be quite comfortable.
Book eight ends with a hundred lines describing the future glories of Rome depicted on Aeneas' shield, culminating with Augustus sitting in triumph over conquered
peoples from all the nations of the earth. In a characteristic stroke, Virgil says that Aeneas rejoiced in the images,
ignorant of the things, so that once again a portrait of
Rome just fails to come into focus as a sight at which one
could be glad. The attentive reader will have seen that Augustus on the shield hangs the spoils of all the world on his
WINTER 1982
�"proud doorposts," a phrase used qnly of him and of
Cacus. The same spot is still the home of a monster, but
the new one ravages the whole world-'
There are two kinds of motion in a labyrinth. The outward motion is an illusion of progress away from something. It is the more pitiable, because the more ignorant,
of the two kinds. It characterizes the march of imperial
Rome outward over the world. It is seen in what Virgil
calls in Book six the "proud soul of Brutus the punisher,"
expeller of the Tarquins, the first to rule as consul, who,
"for the sake of beautiful freedom" put love of country and
praise ahead of everything else and killed his own sons.
Virgil calls him "unhappy father, no matter what posterity
may say of his deed." (6. 817-23) And Augustus cannot escape the same human vulnerability that Brutus tried to
deny. A few lines later in Book six, the entire spectacle of
the shades of the heroes of Rome is immersed in grief
over Marcellus, the young man Augustus adopted and
named as his heir, but who died when he was twenty. No
political order holds any answer for or relief from human
troubles. It is after Aeneas hears the infinity of grief over
Marcellus in his father's voice, that he looks back over the
souls of his triumphant offspring, recovers his own love of
fame, and returns to the world through the gate of false
dreams.
But Aeneas is no Augustus. He is too aware of the losses
and pains of others for his own proud illusions ever to last
for long. Aeneas for the most part moves in the other direction, inward in the labyrinth. This is the direction of "if
only." If only Helen were dead; if only Dido could be
made to understand; if only Lausus would see reason; if
only Turnus would surrender. Aeneas never uses his quest
for political glory as an excuse to turn his back on a human being in distress, but he cannot relinquish that quest,
on which so many others depend, and he can never quite
find his way to the center of the source of distress to remove its cause. At the beginning of Book eight, the last in
a long succession of divine apparitions comes to Aeneas.
The old god of the Tiber tells him that his troubles are
near an end, and that home and rest await him. He must
fight and win a war with the Latins, but for once help will
be available. Inland along the Tiber live Arcadian Greeks
ruled by King Evander. They will happily join Aeneas in
his fight and he can put an end once and for all to the
troubles he has carried with him for so long and in which
he has involved so many others.
Aeneas does find welcome and help in Evander's city,
Pallanteum. As in Carthage, he finds too much welcome
and too much help. It turns out that Evander once met
Aeneas' father, and adored him with youthful love. The
gifts Anchises gave him seem to be the only signs of
wealth Evander has allowed to remain in his city. (8. 15569) History repeats itself in Pallanteum, in a double sense.
As with their fathers, Pallas is fired with a loving admiration for Aeneas. As he joins with him, we see in one brief,
lovely scene, a greater closeness between the two than we
ever see between Aeneas and his own son. (10. 159-62)
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
But Aeneas' recent Carthaginian history repeats itself at
the same time: from Evander and from Pallas, Aeneas has
again accepted the loving gift of a human life, entrusted
to his care. Pallas seems to think Aeneas can answer the
deepest questions of his life, but the two men know each
other only for a day. When Pallas arrives in Latium he
begins to fight, and two hundred lines later he is dead.
Like every young man in the Aeneid, excepting only Iulus,
who is deliberately kept out of the fighting, Pallas dies at
the moment of his greatest valor. That is the theme of
Book nine, in which, in Aeneas' absence, only young men
are fighting. It is embodied in the figure of Euryalus,
whose longing for glory leads him to put on the shining
helmet of one of his victims, immediately to become a victim because that shining makes him an easy target. (9. 35966, 373-4) It is embodied, too, in the similes of Book nine,
which liken the young warriors to beasts of prey which, if
they are daring and successful predators, become a danger
to men and an easy prey. Pallas cannot escape the Virgilian logic of glory and death.
The saddest words of this saddest of poems are spoken
by Aeneas to the corpse of Pallas: "The same horrible fate
of war calls me from here to other tears; hail from me eternally, dearest Pallas, and eternally farewell." (11. 96-8) In
the last lines of the poem, Aeneas recognizes that there is
no such thing as an eternal farewell. The dead live as
sources of obligation, and neither death nor any ceremony
can cancel such debts. If Dido can be assimilated to a
larger purpose, then she did not live. If Lausus' decision
to throw away his life were not acknowledged as binding
his adversary, then Lausus would not be recognized as the
source of his own choices. And if Pallas can be forgotten
for the sake of the living, and the greater number, then
Pallas himself is accorded no worth at all. Human worth
does not fit in any scales. Its claims are unconditional.
We admire Aeneas in the war books of the last third of
the poem because he always seeks the sanest and most
sensible solutions for his enemies as well as for his own
people. We rage along with him when trivial, irrational
causes produce and prolong the slaughter. Aeneas longs
for peace and for harmony with all the tribes in Italy. And
what does Turnus fight for? For wholly selfish reasons
and for the joy of fighting. Must he not be cut down like
the irrational thing he is, so decent citizens might get on
with the business of living in co-operation? To see that
this is not how Virgil regards Turnus, listen to this simile
with which Turnus goes out to fight: "He is delirious with
courage, his hope already tears the enemy: just as a stallion when he snaps his tether and flies off from the stables, free at last to lord the open plains, will either make
for meadows and the herds of mares or else leap from the
stream where he is used to bathing and, wanton, happy,
neigh, his head raised high, while his mane sweeps across
his neck and shoulders." (11. 491-7) Turnus is young,
strong, brave, and handsome. He is not made for submission to a foreigner who arrives saying he is destined to
marry his fiancee and be his king. In the line following the
81
�simile of the stallion, Virgil brings 'Camilla into the poem,
to fight beside Turnus. She is in .instant and complete
communion with Turnus. The freedom and the lordship
of Italy is theirs by birth and by nature. Each of them is
crushed by what Aeneas has brought to Italy, but each
dies with the sentiment that something unworthy has
happened.
At the end, when Turnus lies wounded at Aeneas' feet,
we begin to hear again the familiar echoes of the end of
the Iliad, but this time they are like a deceptive cadence in
a piece of music. Turnus asks Aeneas to remember his
own father and to return him, alive or dead as he prefers,
to his father. But as Aeneas begins to relax, and we expect
the gesture of reconciliation that Aeneas has tried so hard
and so often to make to come finally as a healing ending to
the poem, Aeneas instead remembers Pallas, and kills Turnus in fury. Why? It is his seeing the belt of Pallas, which
Turnus is wearing as spoil, that precipitates the deed.
What does Aeneas see when he looks at the belt? I think it
is not too much to say that he sees in it everything that
has happened to him through the eight years and twelve
books that have gone before.
The belt is carved with a legendary scene of fifty bride-
82
grooms killed on their wedding night. It recalls the spectacle
Aeneas watched from the roof of Priam's ruined palace,
with its fifty bridal chambers for his sons. (2. 503-4;
I 0. 497 -9) It must, too, re-open the wound of the memory
of the bridal chamber he himself shared so briefly with
Dido. And as showing men cut down in their youth, it must
remind him of much that has happened around him in
the war just fought. But more than anything else, it brings
back to him Pallas, to whom he could not succeed in saying good-bye. As he kills Turnus, Aeneas calls Pallas "my
own." His acceptance of the call of fate prevented Aeneas
from dying alongside his own people in his own city of
Troy. It prevented him from remaining loyal to his own
lover, Dido. But the gods have now left Aeneas alone. The
last act of the poem is the first one that is unequivocally
Aeneas' own, and on his own, though inclined toward a
characteristic and politically sound act of kindness, Aeneas commits a furious and painful murder out of love.
Turnus dies rightly feeling that his death is unworthy of
him. But Aeneas, finally at the center of the labyrinth of
his own life, could not let Turnus live and be worthy of
the gift of Pallas' life and death. In the inevitable conflict
of unconditional claims, one can only cling to one's own.
WINTER 1982
�REvmw EssAY
Objectivity and Philosophical Conversation
Richard Rorty's Pht!osophy and the Mirror of Nature
ARTHUR COlliNS
Men have confident beliefs which they take to be knowledge,
and then it sometimes turns out that what was confidently believed is discarded and replaced by contrary beliefs, perhaps just
as confident. Such convictions can be important beliefs at the
heart of a whole way of looking at the world. Naturally philoso·
phers have concerned themselves with this instability in our beliefs, and they have tried to find permanent foundations for our
claims to know anything. With foundations our knowledge is reliable and objective; without foundations our pretensions to know
collapse into the beliefs we happen to have. Discourse with no
foundations seems to reduce to a flux of opinions, for we have no
way of determining which opinions are really grounded and
which are not. But where shall we find foundations for knowledge, and how shall our claims to know such foundations themselves be insulated from the possibility of error and replacement?
Discussions of the objectivity of knowledge were already sophisticated in Greek philosophy. Protagoras held that no objec·
tive foundation of a belief can get beyond the fact that it seems
to be true to the man who holds it. All beliefs, then, are true for
those who hold them, and grounding is an illusion. So Protagoras
proposed to substitute the contrast: healthy versus unhealthy belief for the unavailable contrast: objectively grounded belief versus mere opinion. If this report of Protagoras' doctrine from
Plato's Theaetetus is reliable, Protagoras was the first pragmatist.
Socrates opposed this relativism and Plato's theory of Forms is
an effort to articulate foundations of knowledge solid enough to
enable a philosopher to rule against one man's conviction and in
favor of another's on objective grounds. The preponderance of
philosophers since Plato have defended the idea of objective
knoWledge and pursued its foundations. A minority including
Nietzsche and the American pragmatists have more or less sided
with Protagoras.
This conflict is the theme of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature.* The thesis of the book can be summarized
in two general claims: The first is that modern philosophy has
been dominated by an essentially Cartesian and mistaken idea of
inner representations as the foundation of knowledge of all outer
realities. The second claim is the assertion of a sweeping historical and pragmatic relativism about human knowledge. In rejecting Cartesian inner mental representations, Rorty contends that
the dominant modern program that sought to furnish foundations for knowledge is a complete failure. In his general relativist
view, Rorty asserts, with Protagoras, that the objectivity philosophers have looked for cannot be found at all and knowledge can
have no foundations.
The conception of inner representations as the necessary
starting point for all knowledge is what Rorty calls "the Mirror of
Nature." The mind is this mirror. Descartes and most thinkers
after him place the source of objectivity in the knower's mind
rather than in any specially apprehended outer reality such as
Plato's Forms. Epistemology has been promoted since the Renaissance as a kind of bogus science that ·confirms its hypotheses
in terms of the ultimate evidence we find reflected in the mirror
of the mind. Rorty says that the rejection of this spurious epistemology will bring with it huge changes in philosophical practice.
This first claim is powerfully argued and richly illustrated, and
Rorty's many-sided discussion of it repays study.
According to his second general claim, Rorty' s Protagorean
relativism, philosophers are deceived in thinking that there can
be objective reasons for preferring one view of things to another.
In the course of exposition of this relativist view, Rorty denies
that science can be understood to attain a progressively better
approximation to the truth. He finds that we cannot successfully
segregate meanings and facts. We cannot distinguish features of
a conceptual scheme and truths that are asserted within and
*Princeton University Press, 1979
Review.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Arthur Collins has published articles in many philosophical journals. He has previously contributed "Kant's Empiricism" (July 1979) and "The Scientific
Background of Descartes' Dualism" (Winter 1981) to the St. John's
83
�with the help of that scheme. So we qmnot suppose that earlier
scientists were talking about the same reality that we speak of, but
saying different things about it. Thus there is no way in which
we can see ourselves as the proprietors of a better understanding
of the same world. Our distinctions between conceptual truths
and factual truths, and between mathematical propositions and
empirical facts, are not absolute. Such distinctions are always dependent upon our own contingent decisions and relatively transient objectives of our discourse. There are no privileged truths,
no absolutely secure modes of reference, no irrefragible assertions about meanings, and no incorrigible data of sense. All these
candidates for an Archimedean fixed point in epistemology turn
out to be moveable. Our intellectual undertakings, systems, and
theories are endlessly adjustable in many ways and subtle ways,
but nothing is permanent and there is no given point of contact
with the real, no unchanging frontier between our thought and
what we think about.
Unlike his rejections of the Mirror of Nature, which is limited to
a particular conception of objectivity (the Cartesian conception),
Rorty's general relativism does not leave room for a contrast between the situations of philosophy and science. In rejecting traditional Cartesian epistemology, Rorty says that philosophers
have mistakenly tried to copy what scientists legitimately do. But
when he advances from this critique to a relativistic rejection of
the very idea of objectivity, Rorty asserts that philosophers and
scientists are alike in their susceptibility to the mistaken idea that
rational investigation can lead, and has led, to a better and better
understanding of things. There are no thought-independent
truths to be sought by philosophers or scientists and no objective
methods to be adopted by either.
Rorty is right to reject what he calls the Mirror of Nature. He
is also right to say that it has exerted an enormous and mostly
bad influence on modern thought. But he seems to think that if
we don't have Cartesian foundations for our knowledge we must
become relativists. If the Mirror of Nature is no good, there is
nothing else. That means that Rorty himself is still under the
spell of Cartesian thinking about the mind and knowledge. He is
agreeing that if there is to be objective knowledge at all, there will
have to be Cartesian foundations for it. If this is Rorty's assumption, it would account for the fact that he moves so easily from a
penetrating critique of the Mirror of Nature to the general repudiation of objectivity. On the whole Rorty treats these two very
different views as if they were one and the same reaction to the
history of modern philosophy. This is a mistake.
1
The goal of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is an assessment of the claims and prospects of contemporary philosophy,
especially the broad current of thought finding expression primarily in English, called "analytic philosophy." Rorty identifies
the most important historical roots of the modern outlook in the
pervasive influence of Descartes' philosophy of mind and in
Kant's two-sided philosophical project: the identification of objective knowledge and the demonstration of the inescapable
though disappointing limits of such knowledge. The Mirror of
84
Nature is really Descartes' invention. Descartes imposed on subsequent philosophers, and prominently on the British empiricists,
the job of trying to get from a perfect acquaintance with inner
mental representations (which are taken to exhaust our ultimate
evidence) to knowledge of extra-mental reality. This project,
which is hardly represented in classical thought, determines the
characteristic schedule of solipsistic problems which are the first
business of all modern epistemology. Endless variations within
this Cartesian epistemological framework have been articulated
since the seventeenth century. As recently as 1949, in the Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle aptly called Cartesianism "the official
doctrine." Russell, Moore, Santayana, Carnap, Ayer, Chisholm,
and Sellars are some of the best known twentieth century philosophers whose projects are decisively influenced by this tradition.
This is so even though some of these thinkers have expressly rejected Cartesianism and tried to break its hold on philosophy.
Rorty's repudiation ofthe Mirror of Nature is the repudiation of
this tenacious idea.
The Kantian contribution to the modern outlook is, Rorty
says, the idea of a universal system for judging and comparing
the credentials of all intellectual undertakings. In Rorty's terminology this is the "transcendental turn" which projects a scheme
for the universal "commensurability" of all doctrines, theories,
and beliefs. The rejection of this idea is Rorty's relativism. It is an
error, he says, to suppose that all our thinking belongS to the
same intellectual space within which views can always be tested
against one another and choices forced by a fixed rational procedure. Accepting the idea of such a universal scheme, philosophers
have thought of knowledge as a matter of gradual convergence
on the truth.
Rorty, however, allows no concept of truth external to the particular pragmatically judged intellectual constructions that men
make in grappling with the world. In their pretense to occupy a
viewpoint outside all viewpoints, Kantian foundationalists are
dogmatic and self-deceptive. Their claims to permanent judgments and fixed tests conceal the creative and constructive play
of human intelligence under the guise of ever-closer conformity
to truth. For Rorty, what we take as known can have no foundations apart from acceptance in the unending interplay of human
discourse. Accepted truths, systems, and sciences have the value
that they do have because they confer an understanding on
things that enables us better to negotiate our existence, not because they approach more closely to the final truth about things.
In this view, Rorty substitutes the idea of the utility of belief for
the discarded idea of objective truth, much as Protagoras substituted healthy belief for objectively grounded belief.
There can be no epistemological foundations and Rorty thinks
pursuit of them should stop and is going to stop some time soon.
Foundationalism has so contaminated the structure of philosophical thought and so determined the content of modern philosophy that its rejection will mean the end of most of what we
know as philosophy. When current practices have been abandoned, science will still be science, and scientists will continue to
generate and discard their own standards of admissibility. But, if
Rorty is right, epistemology will no longer be credited as a kind of
preliminary science. The philosophy of mind has been develWINTER 1982
�oped almost entirely in the service of Mirrqr-of-Nature projects,
so it too is finished. The same is true of the bulk of the philosophy of science. Language has become, for analytic philosophers, the refuge of foundationalist pretensioD.s which are denied
appeal to the mind by contemporary hostility to dualism. As a
consequence, philosophy of language is mostly "impure," Rorty
says. It has been fatally infected by the epidemic passion to find
objective foundations somewhere. Most of the aspirations of
philosophical logic and ontology, including the resurgent essentialism encouraged by Kripke, are also to be cancelled in the
coming purge. Even the value-oriented branches of thought
have been hopelessly compromised by foundationalist schemes
that try to identify the cognitive part of discourse involving values and to relegate the rest, in the positivist manner, to emotion,
arbitrary preference, and taste.
Rorty thinks that some kind of philosophy will survive the
coming demise of foundationalism and objective pretensions. He
admits that he is vague about the contents and purposes of this
philosophy of the future:
Our present notions of what it is to be a philosopher are so
tied up with the Kantian attempt to render all knowledge
claims commensurable that it is difficult to imagine what philosophy without epistemology could be. (357)
The predictions that Rorty does make are the least convincing and
the least appealing part of his book. He sees the tendency of things
to come in -the continental hermeneutics movement (H. G. Gada mer, in particular) and in philosophical "deconstruction" (Derrida). He endorses a considerable list of European existentialists,
structuralists, and phenomenologists whose writings are as longwinded as they are difficult to grasp clearly. Rorty says that the
new philosophy will be "conversational" without being exclusive
and competitive. Philosophy will be "edifying" which contrasts
with misguided efforts to be "systematic." Philosophical discourse will be "abnormal" in the sense of Thomas Kuhn's "abnormal science"; that is, it will take place without the benefit of
an inherited framework of standards and methods shared by a
consensus of those participating. 1 Philosophy will be open, pluralistic, even "playful." It will abandon its agressive assertiveness.
The work of philosophers will become more like activities in art,
politics, and religion.
Rorty does not succeed in saying (in fact, he does not try) what
will be the subject matter or the goals of the conversations to
which philosophers will contribute when they have given up the
hopeless search for objective foundations. Nor does he say why it
is that anything such a philosopher could say might strike us as
edifying. It often seems as if he is only dreaming of something
nice that otherwise unemployed philosophers can apply their talents to when most of the things they now do have been abolished.
2
Like most radical relativists, Rorty is not entirely consistent.
His examination of analytic philosophy finds that this whole enterprise is mired in the Cartesian-Kantian "problematic." Analytic philosophers are prominently guilty of presuming that they
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
have at least our concepts or conceptual schemes at their disposal. The accessibility of his own concepts is alleged by an analytic philosopher to be the source of the necessity and objectivity
of his conceptual analyses. Rorty rejects this allegation and the
philosophy it tries to legitimize. But his own arguments are full
of points which are indistinguishable in their standing from the
views he rejects as lacking any credentials at all. For example, he
finds that Locke's confusion of explanation and justification is
one of the great influential errors of modern thought. Maybe he
is right. But, in what sense can Rorty allow himself access to
what is really "explanation" and what "justification" while denying that analytic philosophers have access to concepts and thus a
basis for their analyses? He praises Wilfred Sellars for not offering "a theory of how the mind works" or a theory "of the 'nature
of concepts'." He describes a claim Sellars makes as "a remark
about the difference between facts and rules" (187). The use of
the informal word "remark" for the praised opinion of Sellars
and the weighty word "theory" for the bad views Sellars avoids
sounds like an effort to deflect the question. If the foundation of
this "remark" about facts and rules is not a kind of conceptual
analysis, then what is it? Again, Rorty says in the context of the
possibility of foundations for knowledge:
The question is not whether human knowledge in fact has
"foundations," but whether it makes sense to suggest that it
does-whether the idea of epistemic or mo.ral authority having a "ground" in nature is a coherent one. (178)
This kind of claim about what makes sense and what does not,
and what is and is not coherent, is just the sort of thing that analytic philosophers propose all the time. If their pretenses to know
what makes sense and what does not are empty, then what gives
substance to Rorty's identical pretenses?
These inconsistencies are predictable. As Socrates said of Protagoras, a relativist is always in trouble when he tries to assert
anything. He naturally thinks his relativism is objectively correct
and he thinks the foundationalist thinkers he opposes are objectively wrong. It is hard to see how a relativist can say less than
this and still have an intelligible position.
Rorty's general relativism sometimes appears to undermine his
own best insights. He is attracted by John Dewey's thinking be~
cause Dewey emphasized the social character of knowledge as
opposed to the solipsistic stance of Descartes. Similarly, in psychology Rorty thinks that a healthy materialism that is not a reductive mind-brain identity theory will supercede the confusions
of Cartesian philosophy of mind. Perhaps these are very sound
convictions to have. They fit ill with relativism. If we are to appreciate the validity of physiological psychology do we not have
to suppose that idealism is objectively wrong? It is not just another alternative conversational stance for philosophy. Rorty
thinks a materialist philosophy will survive the prevalent philosophical errors. Why? Surely he thinks we will be left with the
body and its relation to all our intellectual functions after the illusions of the Mirror of Nature have been dispelled. If so, this
material subject matter must be objectively available to us. In the
same way, if we are to base our understandings, like Dewey, on the
irreducible social context of discourse and knowledge, we must
85
�take that context as something that the world objectively contains. There really are other people with whom we speak and interact. How can we praise Dewey's vieW if we say that even these
convictions about social reality are just "optional descriptions"?
Even Rorty's customarily sensitive historical judgments are
sometimes distorted by his application of a set of standards to the
views he rejects which he cannot apply to his own views and
those he endorses. For example, he simultaneously praises Jerry
Fodor and condemns Kant in this passage:
The crucial point is that there is no way to raise the sceptical
question "How well do the subject's internal representations
represent reality?" about Fodor's "language of thought." In
particular there is no way to ask whether, or how well, the
products of spontaneity's theories represent the sources of receptivity's evidence, and thus no way to be sceptical about
the relation between appearance and reality. (246-7)
This passage actually describes Fodor's view in terms which do
not distinguish it at all from Kant's. Rorty knows that Kant's theory of the mind and empirical reality also rules out scepticism
"about the relation of appearance and reality" and, therefore,
deserves whatever praise Fodor deserves on that count. But
Rorty's rhetorical usage of the Kantian terminoloy (''spontaneity"
and "receptivity") seem to imply that Kant held the opposite and
that Fodor's stand is an improvement and a correction.
3
Rorty is entirely right to say that epistemological illusions are ·
responsible for the spurious format of scientific theory-building
that many modern philosophies have adopted. Mirror-of-Nature
thinking leads directly to this format. If our knowledge has to
start from acquaintance restricted to inner representations, such
as seventeenth-century ideas or twentieth-century sense-data,
then the mere assertion that there is an extra-mental world
stands in need of defense. In the absence of a successful defense,
we have no reason at all for thinking that there is any subject
matter for sciences like physics or biology to investigate. So a preliminary philosophical theory is needed to vouch for the existence of a subject matter for all other sciences. Empiricists have
constructed a great many such "theories" which introduce material objects only in hypotheses that are supposed to be accepted
because they explain the patterns we encounter in our mental
experiences. Here the philosopher imitates scientific theories
that posit unobserved atoms in hypotheses that explain observed
combining weights of elements, or that posit unobserved heavenly
bodies in hypotheses that explain observed orbital perturbations.
When philosophers argue in this way they are making epistemology into a hypothetico-deductive science. Philosophers then posit
unobserved chairs and tables to explain observed perceptual experiences! It is a virtue of Rorty's critique to release us from this
misapplied model of scientific thinking.
When we have fully rejected the Mirror of Nature, a lot of this
"scientific" philosophy will automatically be eliminated. This is
very much to be hoped for, but it gives us no reason at all for
thinking, with Rorty, that these misguided epistemological thea-
86
ries will be replaced by the incommensurable badinage that he
sees coming. In fact, a significant scientific influence in philosophy is unaffected by Rorty's critique. For philosophers of the
empiricist, rationalist, and analytic traditions, quite apart from
theory-construction, scientific influence in philosophy has meant
a tough-minded independence, it has meant adherence to the
ideals of self-criticism and clarity, and it has meant the open ac~
ceptance of tests of one's ideas in competitive intellectual confrontations. Rorty's general relativism and his predictions for the
future appear to depend on rejecting these wholesome influences along with the inapplicable pattern of hypothetico-deductive theory construction. The elimination of Cartesianism and
its aftermath, however, does not show that there is anything
wrong with these ideals, nor with their adoption in philosophy.
Rorty claims that once the epistemological bias is eliminated
there will be a general change in direction in philosophy which
will not be limited to those disciplines directly engendered by the
Mirror of Nature. It is in this spirit that he says that language
tends to replace the Mirror in the continuing but spurious foun~
dationalist projects of anti-dualist analytic philosophers. This is a
sensitive insight. Perhaps it is generally true in philosophy today
that real advance in understanding is only attained with the recognition that all theorizing is out of place. Our intellectual needs
are mischaracterized and our confusions made permanent insofar as we think that what is required is something like a theory.
This may be the clearest and most enduring part of Wittgen~
stein's elusive teaching. Here is Saul Kripke's appreciation of the
same thought in the context of theories about reference and
names:
It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong. You
may suspect me of proposing another theory in its place, but I
hope not, because I'm sure it's wrong too, if it's a theory.2
If this attitude is right we have inherited a conception of philosophical thought which deforms our actual problems by forcing
them into the mold of scientific theory. The harmful conception
goes beyond the influence of the Mirror of Nature. To say that
we should stop this deforming and forcing is good, but that in it~
self does not show anything about what philosophers should do
instead, and it bodes nothing for relativism. The understandings
that survive misguided foundationalism ought to be, per se, more
objective, not less objective, than the illusory pursuit of philosophical theories where such theories can accomplish nothing.
4
Under the influence of Kant, most philosophers, according to
Rorty, have accepted the idea of the universal commensurability
of all opinions. Like the idea of theory-building in philosophy,
the idea of commensurability is modelled on scientific practice.
Scientists intentionally try to sharpen opposed views in order to
force a showdown which only one view will survive. The process
of sharpening differences and forcing choices is only feasible if
the holders of different opinions share a general framework
within which their views are commensurable. Rorty thinks that
WINTER 1982
�there is such a general framework which permits commensuration withiri particular sciences, or maybe wit,hin the whole scientific enterprise at a particular time. But there is no permanent
commensurating framework for science through all lime, and no
framework that embraces scientific,. moral, artistic, and philosophical activities all at once. There may be some great truth in
this view about commensurability. If so, Rorty's exposition of
that truth is inadequate. His discussions of incommensurable
discourse never get beyond the unresolved tension between insightful critique and disastrous relativism.
Can there be such a thing as discourse that does not presuppose a shared commensurating framework of meanings? How
can speakers get as far as conversation without commensurability? The framework of shared meaning may not suffice for formulation of a means for resolving differences, but this does not
establish incommensurability. Inability to resolve differences is
notorious, for example, in economics, but no one will conclude
that views on the effects of monetary policy are, therefore,
incommensurable.
We would, I_think, say that the views expressed in two different
poems are often incommensurable. To the extent that we would
say that, we would also say that poems do not make assertions in
any ordinary sense. If two speakers do make genuine assertions
for one another's benefit, that is, if they produce sentences that
they mean to be true and mean to be taken as such, then. they
must also hold out the hope, at least, that they can find some
way of telling whether their assertions are compatible OF ihcompatible, that is, they must presuppose commensurability. They
cannot be indifferent about this and simply go on with the conversation. So commensurability seems to be indispensable for
participation in a conversation in which assertions are made. It
may be that this is too rigid a conception of commensurability
for exhibition of the point that Rorty wants to bring to our attention about the multiple enterprises of the human intelligence.
He offers us no guidance on a less rigid conception.
These abstract difficulties find concrete illustration when we
turn to Rorty's examples of incommensurable discourse. He calls
Marx and Freud edifying philosophers whose discourses are incommensurable. He criticizes those who try to draw the thought
of these figures into the "mainstream," and that means those
who want to make the doctrines of Freud and Marx commensurable with other opinions and theories about psychology, physiology, economics, history, and morals. Rorty's relativism is out of
hand here.
We may all agree that the insights and theories of Freud and
Marx are hard to connect with less revolutionary patterns of
thought about man. These two are similar in that they both construct self-contained schemes of things with relatively clear internal rules for investigation and interpretation (though this is a
problem for these systems). Furthermore, for their initiation
such systems may depend on an exceptional willingness to ignore prevailing rules and concepts and entrenched opinions.
Rorty is sensitive to all this insulation of these radical theories
from the rest of the universe of thought. But this insulation is
necessarily only partial. Thinking, no matter how radical, must
preserve substantial contact with preexisting thought. This is the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
minimum price of intelligibility. Marx and Freud, in particular,
certainly do respond to earlier views and they both expect their
work to be preferred to other doctrines on rational grounds, even
on "scientific" grounds. Freud connects his work in straightforward ways to the international psychiatric thinking of his time.
He incorporates in his thinking some large ideas from earlier
German philosophy, and he openly commits himself to the ultimate commensurability, even the. reducibility, of his psychological
theory to the workaday conceptual scheme o£ physical medicine
and physiology. Similar points apply to the doctrines of Marx.
These thinkers regarded their own views as commensurable with
the "mainstream" and only in the setting of that commensurability were they able to think of their own views as important.
The question of commensurability arises for Rorty only when
he thinks about two beliefs that seem to be opposed. Freud's
opinions seem to be incommensurable just because he says such
things as, "Slips of the tongue and lapses of memory are intended." Assertions like this seem to be in flat contradiction to
our ordinary opinion that slips and forgetting are unintended.
Furthermore, there is something especially troublesome about
the seeming opposition of Freud's claim to the ordinary view
about slips and lapses of memory. The ordinary view is not
merely a widely held empirical belief. It belongs, rather, to a
framework of shared meanings. We all think, though we don't articulate such thoughts much, that a verbal performance is not a
slip, by definition, if it fulfills the speaker's intentions. This
comes, in some sense, from the meanings of "a slip'' and "intentional." Similarly, it is not just that we have found that people do
not intentionally forget things. They cannot intentionally forget
because doing anything intentionally entails knowing what you
are doing. If you knew what you were forgetting, that wouldn't
be forgotten. Within the context of this limited illustration, I
think it is this special character of Freud's opposition to ordinary
thinking that leads Rorty to the contention that his doctrines are
incommensurable and his philosophy edifying. Freud's view cannot be commensurated with the mainstream because it conflicts
with the framework of meanings within which assertions about
intentions and slips and forgetting can be logically related to one
another.
There is something in this. Freud expresses views which are
not only new opinions in psychology but which also deform the
accepted system of meanings within which psychological assertions are customarily formulated and compared. Freud does not
discuss these deformations himself. He seems to be far from fully
aware of them. But he is certainly not simply making false statements with the old concepts. He is trying to make true statements with altered concepts. No one seems to know just where
Freud violates the traditional system of interrelated concepts
and beliefs and where he relies on a common fund of meanings
in order to communicate anything at all. Now we have to ask,
Where does incommensurability fit in here? Can we say that
Freud is not really opposing established views but merely "sending the conversation in new directions," as Rorty thinks the new
non-foundationalist philosophers will? Can we agree that Freud's
opinions may become the prevailing belief by simply replacing
without ever confronting earlier opinion?
87
�I think that we must try to reconcile, or to choose between,
Freud's doctrines and the ordinary beliefs with which they seem
to conflict. For example, we can attempt reconciliations that
stress the unconscious status of the intentions Freud finds. We
can try reformulations of Freud's views that capture the spirit
without the conceptual deformations, for example, ascribing intentions to a subagent for behavior that is unintended by the
whole man. And we can try to soften the apparent rigidity of the
ordinary system of meanings by calling attention to non-psychoanalytic contexts, such as brain bisections, where the contrasts
"intended/unintended" and "forgotten/not forgotten" come
under remarkable pressure. These are suggestions for "continuing the conversation," and it may be that Rorty has in mind just
this development of conversational philosophy. But these efforts
at understanding Freud are also nothing short of efforts at making his thinking commensurable with the thinking of others. If
we are not trying to make Freud's ideas commensurable in such
ways, then we are just not trying to understand him. It will not
do to call this failure to understand edification or respect for a
kind of creativity.
Quite a bit of just this not-trying-to-understand is presently
done in the intellectual world. It generates the familiar self-enclosed cultish point of view in which unexamined and deformed
terminology become an insider's rhetoric. When this happens,
the failure of commensurability will not promote a democratic
conversational mentality. The very fact that there are still such
things as Freudianism and Marxism is in part a measure of the
extent to which incommensurability seals off thinking from the
give and take of ideas which Rorty values.
5
Rorty's thinking is very well-informed and he always tries to
use the views of other philosophers as guideposts even in cases
where he does not want to follow them. Throughout his book he
says that Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger have been his
greatest guides, showing him the path out Of epistemological
foundationalism. These three thinkers all reject the schemes
that have grown out of Cartesianism, and they all attack the Cartesian root and not just the modern branches. But Rorty actually
has little to say about the views of any of these three. In the
fourth chapter, which he calls the "central chapter of the book,"
he examines instead, and in quite a bit of detail, much more recent analytic philosophy and, in particular, the views of Sellars
and Quine._ It is as though these tough-minded analysts, who do
not reach the relativism he adopts and whom Rorty himself calls
"systematic philosophers," help him to see the virtues of the
much vaguer and more relativistic doctrines of Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. According to Rorty's exposition, Sellars
clearly grasps the hopeless defects of "the Myth of the Given,"
and all the foundationalist programs that have been based upon
it. His appreciation of "the logical space of reasons" marks Sellars's perception of the indispensable contrast between causal explanation and justification. But Rorty finds that Sellars remains
committed to the illusion of "analysis," which is the idea that
our concepts are, in any case, accessible to us, so that we can
88
make entirely secure judgments as to what is and what is not true
of these concepts. Just here Quine's thinking is most important.
Quine's rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction is aimed at
precisely this presumption of the availability of our own concepts as unshakeable support for analytic judgments. Rorty sees
the two ideas: (i) the incorrigible data of sense, and (ii) incorrigible
access to our own concepts as the twin supports of contemporary epistemological foundationalism. Therefore, a combination
of Sellars's critical rejection of the first view and Quine's rejection of the second, a combination that neither Sellars nor Quine
fully attains, is just what Rorty wants in order to disenfranchise
foundationalism.
Throughout Rorty's work there is erudition, sensitivity, and
much truth. At the end there remains a large gap in his argument. The failure of Cartesian foundationalism does not establish relativism. Rorty seems uncbaracteristically insensitive to
the problems of internal coherence bf relativism, problems that
have been known since Socrates criticized Protagoras. Even
Rorty's appeal to the painstaking work of analytic philosophers
seems odd, since they are, in his own characterization, systematic philosophers whose work would have to appear to be a waste
of time dominated by baseless illusions from the vantage point of
edifying conversational philosophy. Sellars and Quine are both
philosophers whose thinking is pervaded by the idea of science.
Given Rorty's meticulous presentation of their doctrines, and
given his appreciation of the clarity (Quine's anyway), the penetration, and rigor of this, the best philosophical thinking of the
analytic school, his final position that seems to applaud all the
voluminous obscurantism now produced in Europe is disappointing.
There is another kind of inconsistency in Rorty' s thought which
is understandable, maybe even attractive, if not altogether acceptable. At several points in his discussion, Rorty seems to draw
back from his own radical conclusions as though in recognition
of the fact that they are in themselves so profoundly unsatisfying. In this mood, Rorty describes the anti-systematic conversational philosophy he endorses as essentially reactive and critical.
Such philosophy demands a correlative systematic and objective
philosophy. Without systematic philosophy to react to, edifying
philosophy is nothing at all. In consequence, Rorty seems to envision a cyclical alternation between systematic and critical philosophy, each of which has its purposes and legitimacy:
Great systematic philosophers are constructive and offer arguments. Great edifying philosophers are reactive and offer
satires, parodies, aphorisms. They know their work loses its
point when the period they were reacting against is over.
They are intentionally peripheral. Great systematic philosophers like great scientists build for eternity. Great edifying
philosophers destroy for the sake of their own generation. (369}
Here Rorty seems to agree with my judgment that his conversational philosophers, left to themselves, do not have anything to
talk about. The only real views ever at issue are those of philosophers who look for objective truths. These truths try to be universally commensurable in that they are to be tested against all
comers. If this is Rorty's view, he may be right to oppose a partieWINTER 1982
�ular conception of foundations, but it hardly makes sense to oppose the very idea of objective knowledge daims.
It seems that Rorty might envision something like this: Some
day, through the reactive efforts of thinkers such as himself and
the great figures he admires (Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein), the program of the Cartesian Mirror of Nature will be set
aside and it will no longer have any appreciable hold on the philosophical imaginations of men. When that day arrives, a philosopher considering objectivity, rational methods, and truth will not
be planning to relate his beliefs to any supposed inner magazine
of perfectly apprehended representations. Of course, under
these circumstances edifying philosophers will have nothing to
say. Their conversations will have dried up as a consequence of
their own success. Their work will have "lost its point," as Rorty
puts it. Now, at this stage, we could imagine that there would be
no further philosophy produced at all out of a recognition that
any new objective theory is bound to have the same deficiencies
as its predecessors, or we could imagine a new systematic project
that is not obviously susceptible to the criticisms raised in earlier
reactive phases. When he says that edifying philosophy is essentially reactive, Rorty seems to me to envision the latter development, and in some passages I think he expressly foresees a future
return to thought with objective foundations. However Rorty's
speculations on this point come down, neither of these outcomes is compatible with the general relativism that he presents
in most of the book. For if there is no further systematic project
in the offing, then conversational, creative, and edifying philosophy is not a true successor to the philosophy we have known but
merely a final winding down of philosophy. And if further sys·
tematic projects are to be expected when conversationalism has
lost its point, then Rorty must concede the inadequacy of his
own arguments for relativism. If objective philosophy has a real
future, then we are not entitled to rule it out generally in favor of
pragmatic relativism.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
In this dilemma we can see that Rorty has become ensnared in
the very traps he detected in foundationalist schemes. A relativist
allows that, within the context of relevant human activities and
needs, one assertion may be warranted and another assertion not.
But the effort to elevate the concept of warranted assertibility to
that of objective truth allegedly fails because it presupposes that
we can abstract from any particular context of activities and
needs, or it presupposes that there is one all-embracing context.
This is the viewpoint beyond all viewpoints that Rorty repudiates. But his own efforts at characterizing the plural projects of
human intelligence have engendered just the same presupposition. Rorty thinks that he can assess objective projects from a
perspective in which they are a mere phase inevitably overcome
in the next phase of reactive criticism. The reactive phase, in
turn, is ultimately sterile and needs replacement by further objective efforts. Thus we are to see the intellectual life of man as a
permanent vacillation between the illusion of theory and the impotence of criticism. Perhaps this view can seem to be acceptable and not simply a form of despair, because possession of it
seems to embody a higher objectivity and understanding. But
really there is no such point of view and no occasion for despair.
It is impossible to accept a permanent role for systematic philosophy and at the very same time to repudiate the idea of such philosophy. Rorty's picture of alternating objective and reactive
phases of philosophy does invite us to regard his relativism as a
higher objectivity, but this is not so much a virtue of his account
as it is a contradiction in it.
I See Kuhn, T., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago 1962.
2
Kripke, S., "Naming and Necessity," in Davidson, D., and Harman, G.,
editors, Semantics of Natural Language, Dordrecht.Holland 1971.
Quoted from the slightly revised reissue, Naming and Necessity. Cambridge 1980.
89
�R:Evmw EssAY
Afghanistan Fights
The Struggle for Afghanistan
by Nancy Peabody Newell and Richard S. Newell*
LEo RADITSA
Le regime des Seleucides ne constituaitcependantnullement un
regime colonial dans le sens oil nous 1' en tendons aujourd'hui.
Comme ils n'avaient aucun zele missionaire, et ne cherchaient a
ameliorer ni la religion ni les egouts d~ leurs sujets, mais laissaient les indigenes aussi crasseux et aussi heureux qu'ils l'avaient
ete auparavant, la dynastie ne donna jamais lieu a aucune insurrection de leur part.
E. J. Bickerman
On December 8, 1978, just after signature of treaty between
Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, like the Soviet treaties with
Vietnam, Angola, and Ethiopia, the New York Times said, "Instead of being a strategic highway to India, as the Victorians
feared, Afghanistan looks more like a footpath to nowhere."! But
catastrophe teaches provincials geography. In the last three years
Kabul has become almost a household word. And people have
slowly come to grasp that places few had heard of before 1979,
Kandahar, Jalalabad, Mazar-i-Sharif, are not about to become
family estates of the Bonaparte family. The Afghans are fighting
to almost everybody's amazement in the West-and the rest of
the world.
This ignorance does not come from scarcity of books or lack of
involvement with Afghanistan. We have been more involved
with Afghanistan since 1945 than the British in the nineteenth
century.2 This.ignorance comes from lack of judgement.
In contrast to nineteenth-century accounts, largely written by
British officers in India, and to the diplomatic correspondence
the British government published at the time of the Afghan crises of 1836-42 and 1873-79, the writings in this century, especially those after 1945, betray little grasp of Afghan history. They
obscure fundamentals that nineteenth-century writings stressed:
*Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London 1981, 236 pages.
90
The difficulties of access that Afghanistan opposes on all
sides to an invading army, surrounded as it is by the vast
tracts of mountain and desert, the former only to be traversed
by surmounting steep ridges and threading narrow defiles
where a few hundreds of well-armed and resolute men could
effectually oppose the passage of as many thousands, entitle
it to be considered in a military sense, as one of the strongest
countries in the whole world, whilst the manly independence
of its hardy inhabitants, their sturdy valour, and their skill in
the use of weapons of war, to which they are trained from early
boyhood, combine to render them far from despicable oppo·
nents, especially on their own ground, for even the disciplined
warriors of Europe ... Afghanistan is the great breakwater established by nature against an inundation of northern forces
in these times. [Emphases minep
In the nineteenth century the British knew Afghanistan less
but saw it more clearly and respected it more. They knew less
but what they knew counted for more.
And wear~ busy relearning some of it-but it is already very
late. In its contrast with Richard Newell's earlier book, The Politics of Afghanistan (Cornell University Press, 1972), The Struggle
for Afghanistan betrays this relearning, for unlike the earlier
work it concentrates on events.
And events are teaching us what we should have known: that
Afghanistan is not a typical country of the so-called "Third
World" -a term that serves largely to undo nations, and to excite
them to undo themselves, by blurring the distinctions between
Leo Raditsa writes frequently on events in the world for Midstream
(most recently, "The Source of World Terrorism," December 1981). He
recently published a monograph on the marriage legislation of Augustus, "Augustus' Legislation concerning Marriage, Procreation, Love
Affairs and Adultery" (in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Roemischen Welt,
Berlin !981, II, 13).
WINTER 1982
�them-because it never experienced direct colonial rule and until1973 had a monarchy (not, of course, in ,the European sense)
that had lasted for more than two hundred years; because in its
many isolated valleys traditions of self-rule and assembly prevail
that are hundreds of years older than the monarchy. And that
just these traditions of self rule and their unwritten constitution
-and not the 1964 written constitution which in retrospect
turns out to have hastened the destruction of the monarchy
-give Afghanistan the strength of resistance: in May 1980 a traditional assembly-a jirgah-brought 916 representatives of
groups fighting in all parts of Afghanistan to Peshawar.
Based on the recognition of the fastness of the territory,
(greater than France) and of the courage of its peoples, British
policy in the nineteenth century supported Afghan independence-which meant independence from Russia and Russia's
manipulation of Persia-at the same time that it did not interfere with Afghan internal politics and its way of life except for
commerce. In the nineteenth century, the amirs of Afghanistan
carried on prolonged subtle and difficult negotiations with the
British government of India and much less frequently with missions of the Tsar-negotiations that betrayed a remarkable grasp
of relations between European nations and Afghanistan's place
in them, and a recognition that their capacity to cope with their
place in the world did not mean they had to become like the nations they dealt with. 4 The crises of 1836-42 and 1873-79 came
about when Britain forsook its own policy of support for the independence of Afghanistan, and interfered directly and unnecessarily in Afghan affairs.
The crisis that came to a head in 1878 and that, incidentally,
precipitated "The Second Afghan War," started in Europe in
1873, and especially in 1875, with the revolt of the Christian
provinces of the Turkish Empire, Herzegovina and Bosnia. Austria, Russia, and Germany, with Italy and France, in early 1876
demanded reforms of the Sublime Porte-demands that Britain
supported only after the Sultan's request. In May Bulgaria rebelled, in late June and early July, Serbia and Montenegro-in
the expectation of support from Russia. In September 1876, Turkey's brutal suppression of rebellion in Bulgaria reported in the
Daily Mail aroused public opinion and sent Gladstone out of
retirement to denounce in Parliament a government that countenanced such atrocities-a furor that hindered the British government's support of Turkey. With the failure of another attempt,
in this instance sponsored by Britain, at negotiations with the
Porte, Russia declared war on Turkey on April 27, 1877. Her
troops approached Constantinople in December.
In response to the threat to Constantinople, Disraeli summoned Parliament two weeks early and announced that the prolongation of fighting between Russia and Turkey might require
precautionary measures. In February 1878, the British fleet sailed
through the Dardanelles to Constantinople; British troops, some
from India, arrived in Malta, and, with Turkish consent, in Cyprus. War between Britain and Russia appeared possible.
In response to Britain's resort to troops from India, Russia mobilized an army of fifteen thousand men (whose size was exaggerated to thirty and eighty thousand men in the reports that reached
India) in Russian Turkestan along the borders of Afghanistan
and sent a mission into Afghanistan. At first in response to inTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
structions from London and then on his own, the viceroy of India
treated with the amir in Kabul for the establishment of a British
presence in Afghanistan, especially in Herat. Aware that the
pressure on Afghanistan came from the crisis in Europe and despite the insistence of his friends and associates that he sacrifice
the independence of Afghanistan in the choice between Russia
and Britain, the amir prolonged negotiations in pursuit of the inherited policy of preserving Afghanistan's independence by neither yielding to Britain and the British government of India or
Russia. The expectations of his delay were fulfilled when the
powerful nations of Europe came to an agreement with Turkey,
which deprived it of much of its territory in Europe, in July 1878
in Berlin, just at the moment of the arrival of the Russian mission in Kabul In part out of ambitious obstinacy-he apparently
dreamed of pushing the frontier of British India beyond the
Hindu Kush-and in part because of the slowness of communications, the viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, entered Afghanistan
with ill-prepared and badly equipped troops from the army of India, and started "The Second Afghan War" -after the resolution
of the crisis in Europe.
It had been the same in the crisis of 1838-42, "The First Afghan War." Britain had become embroiled in a war of succession
in Afghanistan on the side of the "legitimate" king after it had
foiled a Russian-manipulated attempt of Persia to seize Herat
from Afghanistan before it occurred. In 1838, in a letter meant for
Lord Palmerston, that accepted, without acknowledging it, Britain's understanding of recent events, the Russian diplomat,
Count Nesselrode, reaffirmed. with admirable clarity and nuance
the traditional policy toward Afghanistan, now generally identified with the catchword, "the buffer state":
La Grande Bretagne, comme la Russie, doit avoir a coeur le
meme interet, celui de maintenir la Paix au centre de l' Asie,
et d'eviter qu'il ne survienne dans cette vaste partie du globe,
une conflagration generale. Or, pour empecher ce grand
malheur, il faut conserver soigneusement le repos des pays intermediaires qui separent les possessions de la Russie de celles
de la Grande Bretagne. Consolider la tranquillite de ces contrees, ne point les exciter les unes contre les autres en nourrissant leurs haines mutuelles, se horner a rivaliser d'industrie,
mais non pas s'engager dans une lutte d'influence politique;
enfin, plus que tout le reste, respecter l'independance des
pays intermediaires qui nous separent; tel est, a notre avis, le
systeme que les 2 Cabinets ant un commun interet a suivre
invariablement, afin d'empl!:cher la possibilite d'un conflit entre 2 gran des Puissances qui, pour rester amies, ant besoin de
ne passe toucher et de ne passe heurter au centre de l'Asie. 5
The intelligence of British policy towards Afghanistan in the
nineteenth century was in part Afghanistan's doing. The Afghans
inflicted spectacular defeats on the British in the two instances,
in 1838-42 and 1878, in which they blundered into violating
their policy, defeats which brought the British Parliament
enough to its senses to have the government of India withdraw
its forces without being driven out.
In the story of these events there is nothing more instructive
than this capacity of the British government and public to learn
from errors-and Afghan courage. This capacity to acknowledge
error made the British blunders in Afghanistan different in kind
91
�from the present Soviet attempted conquest. In contrast to the
British, the Soviets, because they do not recognize opposition
and, as a result, have no parliament that can publicly acknowledge error, will not leave Afghanistan unless driven out. What officer in the Soviet army could say the words Lieutenant Vincent
Eyre published in London in 1844 and 1879!
We English went on slumbering contentedly, as though the
Afghans, whose country we had so coolly occupied, were our
very best friends in the world, and quite content to be our
obedient servants to boot, until one cold morning in November we woke up to the unpleasant sounds of bullets in the air,
and an infuriated people's voices in revolt, like the great
ocean's distant, angry roar, in a rising tempest.6
The unwelcome truth was soon forced upon us, that in the
whole Afghan nation we could not reckon on a single friend.?
Even a generation after the Second Afghan War the disasters
and the blunders of each war were vividly remembered and discussed clearly.
But Afghanistan was not to keep European ways out forever.
In the twentieth century the monarchs of Afghanistan, in varying degree, began to suffer the attractions of Europe they had resisted in the times of her greatest confidence. At the same time
the political experience they inherited allowed them to appreciate the full seriousness of the self-destructive convulsions that
overwhelmed Europe. "The Europeans demonstrated to the Afghans and other non-Western peoples that Western culture was
capable of self-destruction. Afghan modernists were confronted
with the realization that Europe did not have all the answers to
the needs of modern society," Newell sensitively observed of the
effects of the First V\'orld War on Afghanistan in his first book.
Fearful as they were, those convulsions intensified, rather than
weakened, Afghanistan's entanglement with Europe, because
they made it clear that Britain and Europe, with Russia turned
inside out in 1917, and refugees from Soviet Turkestan in
Afghanistan in the early twenties to prove it, no longer had the
control that the exercise of the traditional policy toward Afghanistan required.
Untill945, the monarchs remained capable of controlling the
European influence they encouraged: only their misjudgement
occasioned the excesses that occurred. But after 1945, they lost
control over the pace of "modernization" in part because of the
breakdown and reversal in the traditional policy toward Afghanistan that occurred, more or less unacknowledged, after the British left India in 1947.
At the end of 1948, with Europe still in ruins and Britain out
of India, the Afghan minister of national economy asked the
United States, without stating it in those terms, to take up the
traditional Western policy toward Afghanistan. At the same time
that he acknowledged the central government's need for arms
for domestic control, he foresaw that Afghanistan would fight
for the West in the war now actually going on:
._..it [Afg~an~sta~] wants U.S. arms in order to make a positive contnbubon m the event there is war with the Soviets.
Properly armed, and convinced of U.S. backing, Afghanistan
could manage a delaying action in the passes of the Hindu
92
Kush which would be a contribution to the success of the
armed forces of the West and might enable them to utilize
bases which Pakistan and India might provide.
Ab?ul Majid referred repeatedly to the "war", indicating his
behef that a war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. is inevitable, and said that when war came Afghanistan would of
course be overrun and occupied. But the Russians would be
unable to pacify the country. Afghanistan could and would
pursue guerrilla tactics for an indefinite period. a
Several years later, in the early nineteen-fifties, the United
States decided as a matter of policy to refuse military aid to Afghanistan for fear of offending the Soviets, and because they
judged that no amount of military aid could defend Afghanistan
from a determined Soviet conquest-an expectation Afghanistan's previous history and the events of the last three years
belie.
After the American refus;l, Prince Daoud, prime minister
from 1953 to 1963, turned to the Soviet Union for military and
economic aid. After Bulganin's and Khrushchev's visit to Kabul
in 1955, the Czechs in 1956 supplied the first arms to the Afghan
army, and Afghan officers, eventually as many as 200 a year,
went to school in the Soviet Union.
At first Soviet aid projects meant to attract attention with
quick results: in 1954 a highly visible, twenty-thousand ton grain
elevator in Kabul whose grain, although mostly supplied by the
United States, was often mistaken for Soviet; the paving of the
streets of Kabul, a project rejected as unimportant by the United
States. But soon the Soviets concentrated on projects that would
count when it came to force: besides equipping and training the
army, exploration for natural gas and oil and minerals, jet airports, communications, and spectacular all-weather roadsroads that with their reenforced bridges now bear Soviet armor
and gas _decontamination equipment into Afghanistan. In 1956,
the Soviets offered credits for a road through the Hindu Kush
with a tunnel at the Salang pass which would cut one hundred
and fifty miles and two days from the distance between northern
Afghanistan and Kabul A few years later, work started on another road from the Soviet border to Herat and Kandahar.
Despite the warnings of writers in the West alarmed by the
ominous possible uses of the roads, the governments of the
West, first the United States but then, as Europe recovered economically from the war, France, Italy, and Germany chose to
compete with the Soviets exclusively in economic terms. They
helped agriculture, improved the southern roads, organized an
airline, built airports and hydroelectric projects, improved local
education on all levels, sent Afghans abroad to study-"education" to turn out fateful for the country. In contrast to Soviet
money which was lent against barter arrangements for agricultural produce and for raw materials, like natural gas, whose terms
have never become public, gifts made up eighty percent of
American aid to Afghanistan until 1967.
The United States' decision to compete on unequal terms, in
economic but not military aid-which represented itself as a continuation of the old policy under a new name, "non-alignment,"
instead of "buffer state" -actually amounted to an unacknowlWINTER 1982
�edged reversal of the old policy, for it substituted engagement in
Afghanistan's domestic affairs for support of its independence.
The West's unwillingness to recognize the new policy's reversal
of the old blinded it to its greater risks-risks that plainly acknowledged would have made undeniable the recklessness of
fostering change within Afghanistan without supporting its independence. Did Afghanistan need an army, which the United
States allowed the Soviets to control, for anything except standing up to the Soviets?
We pursued the inherently more dangerous policy, because
we feared the bluntness and explicitness of the old. The old policy faced the risk of war-and appreciated Afghan courage and
Afghanistan's formidible natural defenses-the new policy ignored the possibility of war (and true to its evasiveness, acts as if
nothing is happening, now that war has occurred!) in the protestation of good intentions and the condescension of the assumption
that the Afghans could not resist a determined Soviet attempt at
conquest. In retrospect, in pursuit of this policy of changing Afghanistan's domestic life without supporting its independence,
the West appears unwittingly to have cooperated with the Soviets in undermining the central government of Afghanistan
(which both it and the Soviets mistook for the country).
The new policy with its almost exclusive preoccupation with
Afghanistan's domestic affairs had another fateful consequence
besides the forgetting of Afghanistan's past. It forgot where Afghanistan was. It forgot how the world was put together. It forgot
that the independence of Afghanistan meant the safety of Pakistan and India, and to a degree of Persia, the Persian Gulf, the
Sea of Arabia. Because of this readiness to forget that Afghanistan was an actual country in a specific place that came of not
facing the possibility that Afghanistan might have enemies, Afghanistan despite our greater involvement in it appears to us
much further away than in the nineteenth century.
Admittedly, the British in some sense had it easier, because
they did not have to defend India without being there-and being there, and riding and walking everywhere they went, they
knew how the world was put together. But there are deeper
causes for this incapacity to see that countries are in specific
places and to remember their past. So-called ideological competition serves to blind people to the past and to what is actually going on before their eyes. Besides the diplomats of the West,
much of the youth in Kabul and many in the government fell for
this ideological brooding which does not distinguish between
one country and another: forgetful of their monarchy's political
experience and their country's independence and self-rule they
took themselves for any country in the "Third World" -an expression which, Irving Kristol has profoundly pointed out, exists
only because of the UN's capacity to spread its illusions.
After ten years, in 1963, the king dismissed Prince Daoud as
prime minister. In his concentration on winning money from
abroad for economic development, Daoud had suppressed all political activity except for the distraction of agitation for the "autonomy" of the Pushtun peoples in Pakistan-agitation meant to
foster the illusion of "national" unity and coherence. The foreign money for improving Afghanistan's "infrastructure" and for
education had produced the beginnings of a middle class (about
one hundred thousand by 1973) but not the increase in producTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tion for the trade the new roads meant to facilitate. Largely dependent on the Kabul government, the new middle class spent
its money for imported goods instead of investing in light industry and agriculture.
In an attempt to make up for Daoud's neglect of politics, the
King in 1963 appointed a committee to draft a new constitution.
Approved by a traditional countrywide tribal and ethnic assembly-a national jirgah-the new written constitution betrayed
the divided mind of the monarch-and his hesitations. At the
same time that it granted parliament legislative powers and excluded the entire royal family, except the king, from political office, it granted the king control of foreign and military affairs, the
appointment of the cabinet, veto of legislation, and the dissolution of parliament. At the same time that it sought the consent
of the people, it attempted to preserve the absolute powers of
the king: "The King is not accountable and shall be respected by
all." (Article 15)
Of the 209 members of the 1965 Parliament, the first elected
with universal suffrage, 146 were tribal and ethnic leaders, 25 religious leaders. There were only four deputies from Kabul, four
women, four from the newly founded People's Democratic Party
of Afghanistan (PDPA), among them Babrak Karma] and Hafizullah Amin. Traditional authority, status, wealth, not political issues,
decided most of the electoral contests, especially in the country.9
The king attempted to mediate between this parliament
(largely from the country) and the Westernized Afghans in the
government in Kabul. At the same time as he called himself the
"founder of the progressive movement in Afghanistan," the king
attempted to explain his reforms in Islamic terms. The king's ambivalence betrayed itself in his vacillations in regard to the independent press he alternately tolerated and suppressed, and in his
refusal to approve a law parliament passed for the establishment
of parties that might have in the course of time, a generation-but as it turned out there was to be nowhere near that
amount of time, brought the country into the politics of the city.
Unwilling to risk the organization of the popular will of the country through parties, the king unwittingly encouraged clandestine
groups in Kabul and the other cities of Afghanistan- where less
than ten percent of Afghanistan's estimated fifteen million people live.
In all its ambiguity the new constitution brought an explosion
of political action, outside parliament, at the University and on
the streets of Kabul. For the first time, less than two years after
the dismissal of Daoud, in 1965, organized Marxist-Leninist
groups, especially the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan,
appeared in Kabul During the debate for confidence for the first
cabinet under the new constitution in October 1965, the police
and the army killed at least three high school and university students in demonstrations in the streets. In October 1968, students
prevented the enforcement of a law on education they did not
like. In May 1969, an unimportant matter precipitated a general
strike that closed the University until November. In November
1971, new exam requirements provoked another general strike
that rapidly assumed political character, and again closed the
University for five months.
In the absence of other political organizations, Babrak Karmal
and other representatives from the tightly-organized People's
93
�Democratic Party of Afghanistan often dominated debate in parliament at the same time that their coffirades manipulated crowds
at the university and in the streets. But the students did not need
much encouragement. Western and Soviet money during the ten
years of Daoud's prime-ministership had increased the numbers
of students, but not the quality of education. In primary and secondary schools throughout the country, the teachers, often with
only a few years more study than their students, persisted in rote
instruction that allowed students little discussion or initiative. In
Kabul language difficulties plagued the University: in the sixties
about one hundred professors from abroad lectured in six languages, with the result that the one European language Afghan
students chose to learn determined the· education they got.
There were not enough books: of the hundred thousand books
in the library, the bare minimum for a university, eighty percent
were in English. Also, students wanted to study "letters," fashionable and customary. But the country needed technicians. By
the end of the sixties, Afghans in Afghanistan who had returned
from graduate study abroad numbered five hundred-and in Afghanistan, in contrast to many "Third-World" countries, most
had returned.
Out of this chaos came many students more ambitious than
qualified-and in addition unemployable-good prospects for
the political agitation and the clandestine organizations bent on
undoing the world in the name of bettering it. In some ways a
grotesque magnification, and to some extent a reflection of the
battling that undid many western universities in the same years,
this chaos had more brutal-or, at least more obvious-consequences in Afghanistan.
At its founding in january 1965, PDPA openly declared its allegiance to Soviet foreign policy and the Soviet model. Like many
organizations that cannot cope with opposition, it succumbed almost immediately to the hatred of faction. Each faction had a
newspaper that bore its name: Khalq (Masses), was closed down
by the government in 1966 after five issues, because of vilification of Western influences and of the royal family, and Parcham
(The Banner) lasted until 1969. By 1971, Pareham began to
organize Marxist-Leninist cells in the army, especially among
junior officers-and perhaps to establish contact with Prince
Daoud in forced political retirement, who was to destroy the
monarchy in 1973 with its help. At the same time that it kept up
open and close relations with the government and the army, the
Soviet Union secretly financed and manipulated the organizations meant to undermine them, Parcham and, to a lesser extent,
Khalq. In this situation in which the street counted for more
than a parliament that could not muster the will to legislate, the
king unnecessarily contributed to the heady disorienting atmosphere in Kabul by siding with the Arabs-and the Soviet Unionagainst Israel in the international propaganda war that sought to
undo victory on the battlefield in 1967.
In retrospect it is clear that the present war for Afghanistan
started with Daoud's destruction of the Monarchy in 1973-an
event whose significance was hardly appreciated at the time by
commentators not used to valuing inherited institutionsiO_and
that was hardly remembered in the catastrophe of 1978. Up to
1973 there had been abdications and struggles for succession, but
no direct attack on the monarchy. The only institution of the cen-
94
tral government that had survived more than a generation, the
two-hundred year old monarchy, enjoyed real respect among
educated and uneducated Afghans alike, who called it the
"Shadow of God." Such an enormity required a prince like
Daoud, who was also cousin and brother-in-law of the king, but
a prince with a mind confused by "progressive" ideas-and
with an army ready to obey him in part because of Parcham's
infiltration.
With the exception of some tribesmen, the countryside did
not react to Daoud's destruction of the monarchy, probably because they did not realize that Daoud intended to do away with
the monarchy, rather than substitute himself for the king, and
because they were used to defending themselves from the monarchy rather than defending it. With the monarchy gone, restraint
gradually disappeared in Kabul.
In his proclamation of a republic after his seizure of power,
Daoud called the king a "despot." Despite his promises to turn
the king's "pseudodemocracy" into real democracy, he adopted
the Marxist program and pro-Soviet foreign policy of Parcham.
He emphasized the bloodlessness of his coup at the same time
that he admitted eight murders. 11 The Soviet Union offered
much military and technical aid to the new regime that it, India,
Czechoslovakia and West Germany quickly recognized. For the
authority of the king which rested on the consent of the tribes,
Daoud tried to substitute the fascination of his personality-and
the distractions of his Marxist program, meant for the students
and intellectuals of Kabul whom he mistook for the people of
Afghanistan.
A little more than a year after his seizure of power, Daoud began to undo the Communist infiltration of his regime. In 1975 he
expelled the Parcham leaders. In 1977 he dismissed forty Sovie~
trained officers and began to send officers for training to Egypt
instead of the Soviet Union. Despite his success in undoing
Communist infiltration in at least the top positions in his regime-but not in the army-Daoud still did not, or could not,
conceive a program other than Communist: democracy, in his
1977 constitution, turned out to mean a one-party state that
recognized no opposition.
After its expulsion, Parcham, probably upon Soviet instigation, came in 1976 to an understanding with Khalq, that had
from the beginning considered Daoud too "reactionary" to support. At the same time, in order to lessen dependence on the
Soviet Union, Daoud conciliated Pakistan and turned for aid to
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and, more importantly, Egypt and
Persia. Aware of Soviet and Marxist infiltration in Kabul, the
Shah had already in 1974 offered two billion dollars in credits,
mostly for the construction of a nine-hundred mile railway to
connect Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat with Persia and the world
outside. Several hundred thousand Afghans had gone to work in
Persia and the states along the Gulf. In early 1978 a few months
before his murder and the destruction of his regime, Daoud
visited Sadat, who had recently won the attention of the world
with his visit to Jerusalem.
But it was too late. Unable to defend the status-quo because of
his destruction of the monarchy, Daoud could neither go backward nor forward. That he got into most trouble over women's
rights tells something of the disorientation in Kabul that abWINTER 1982
�sorbed Daoud to the point that he forgot the countryside. 12 He
had become a European in spite of himself. In the end those
who did not hate him would not support him.
Unlike the seizure of power of 1973, the coup of 1978 brought
much murder: guesses ranged from two to len thousand dead.
Carefully planned (according to Khalq, as early as 1975) and carried out by some of the same officers who had seized power in
1973, the coup of 1978 was precipitated by the unexplained
murder of Mir Akbar Khyber, an important leader of the Parcham
faction-one of seven political murders in the last months of
Daoud. Frightened by Khalq-Parcham demonstrations of mourning and defiance that numbered, perhaps, ten thousand, the first
demonstrations against him, Daoud ordered the arrest of the
most important Communist leaders. Either inefficient or infiltrated, Daoud's police allowed one of these leaders, Hafizullah
Amin, after his arrest, to write detailed instructions to army and air
officers to begin the seizure of power the next morning, April 27.
With air battles, spectacular in their precision, and intense street
battles, the coup took a relatively long time, something like
thirty-six hours, time enough for decisive mediation by Western
ambassadors who understood the significance of eventsY
The April 1978 coup brought a mounting fury of intrigue between one faction after another in Kabul and an attack on the
countryside that by early 1979 had provoked violent resistance
throughout Afghanistan. Open in its hatred of the destroyed
monarchy and the murdered Daoud, the regime at first sought
to win confidence at home and abroad with its denial of Marxism
and Communism. Its first proclamation acknowledged God. In
an interview with Die Zeit, Taraki, a leader ofKhalq and the new
President of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, denied
disingenuously that the violence of the seizure of power aimed
at anything other than democracy. 14 A leading expert on Afghanistan scolded the New York Times for calling the coup Communist.15 But soon the fancies that justified their violence overwhelmed the new leaders' capacity to distinguish their seizure of
power from an uprising of all Afghanistan, a "revolution." "But
he [Taraki] insisted on calling himself the leader of a revolution,
not a coup. The conviction that the masses were behind them
would lead Taraki and the clannish Marxist leadership to disaster."
Unwilling to know themselves in the distasteful role of despots,
which in any case was beyond their justification, the new leaders,
within a few months of their seizure of power, took the measures
that Montesquieu taught provoked the ruin of despotism: with
totalitarian arrogance which, unlike the open cruelty of despotism, knows no limits, they attacked Afghan customs and religion
in the name of freedom In October 1978 they unfurled a new
flag for Afghanistan, modeled after the flags of the Soviet Socialist
Republics, which by substituting red for Islamic green undermined their Islamic pretences before the whole country. In November they announced reforms that interfered with customs:
compulsory education; limitation of marriage price; required licensing of all marriages and prohibition of marriage before the
age of eighteen; prohibition of usury in customary credit arrangements between the poor in the country and their money
lenders; redistribution of three million acres of the best landmeasures all ·taken without adequate study of the conditions
they ostensibly meant to correct.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Used to heady "progressive" pronouncements of reform from
Kabul, the Afghans did not react until the arrival in the countryside of bands of fanatic Marxist university and high-school
students as government officials, backed by the well-paid and
radicalized police, showed them that the new regime, in contrast
to Daoud, meant what it said. Tribal and religious leaders who
resisted were arrested and executed.
The attempt to enroll by force all school-age children (up to
then families had voluntarily enrolled about fifty percent of their
boys but only ten percent of their girls) in schools of Marxist indoctrination in which Russian substituted for English amounted
to an attack by the privileged young of Kabul on the authority of
the parents in the countryside. Based on the crude brutality of
the expectation that the expropriation, and destruction, of the
top two percent of the population would free the rest from "oppression" and, even more cynically, win their allegiance to complicity in murder, and robbery, the land reform program ignored
many of the realities of land tenure in an old and poor country
only incipiently sensitive to economic differences. Despite the
recent appearance of something approaching a rural proletariat
of no longer independent nomads, a "majority of farmers and
herders appear not to be hopelessly poor" (by Afghan standards)
and own their own land. The uncertainty that came with the expropriation showed itself in a one-third drop in the spring wheat
harvest in 1979. In the Newells' judgement the abruptness of the
marriage reform shows that it aimed, not at the "emancipation
of women," but, like the compulsory Marxist education program,
at undermining families in order to expose individuals to "social
engineering." The resort to force in all these measures provoked
explosions of resistance throughout Afghanistan-resistance that
coalesced after Kabul showed its readiness to depend on Soviet
force, with its treaty with the Soviet Union on December 8, 1978.
With the countryside in resistance throughout Afghanistan by
the beginning of 1979, uprisings took hold of the cities: in March
1979, in Hera~ the Afghan city closest to Persia, perhaps five
thousand people, in a city numbering eighty-five thousand, including all known Soviet advisers and Khalq members, were
murdered, often with savage atrocity-an event that wants a
Livy to find its proper place in Western history; in April in Jalalabad Afghan soldiers, ordered to attack resistance groups outside
the city, killed their Soviet advisors in mutiny and fled to the resistance, after suffering defeat from loyal government and, according to some reports, Soviet troops. There was violence also
in Kandahar, Pul-i.Khumri, and Mazar·i-Sharif.
The first purges took place just two months after the KhalqParcham seized Kabul: in July, Hafizullah Amin expelled Babrak
Karmal and five other Parcham leaders to the exile of ambassadorships in eastern Europe and jailed hundreds of Parcham
members. Reckless, arrogantly confident that the Soviets needed
him more than he them, in some sense an amateur, with illusions of independence, for unlike Soviet trained Parcham members, he had learned his Marxism on American campuses,
Hafizullah Amin defied the Soviets in his fanatic impatience, only
to become more dependent on them. For instance, Soviet advisors, whose numbers increased from fifteen hundred at the
time of the coup to at least five thousand by the early summer of
1979 to ten thousand at the time of the invasion, often took the
95
�places in the ministries and elsewhere, of the Parcham members
Amin purged. By driving events beyoll,d anybody's control, Amin
probably more than anyone precipitated the Soviet attempt at
conquest that began with his murder.
Even as he jailed Parcham members and prepared the measures that by provoking rebellion in the countryside would make
him more dependent on the Soviets, Amin convinced visiting
American "experts" in the summer and fall of 1978, and apparently, the American ambassador, who saw him frequently, that
he could turn Afghanistan into a Communist country without
succumbing to Soviet domination. This fanciful expectation
came of the illusion, which led to the support ofTito in 1948 and
in the last ten years to the support of Communist China, that
the enemy is just another nation, Russia, and not Communism
that seeks domination by destroying governments of every sort.
Even the murder of the American ambassador in early February
1979 in a Soviet-directed attempt, supposedly, to rescue him
from unidentified terrorists, did not awaken the West to the
seriousness of the situation not only in Kabul but throughout
Afghanistan-and to the increase in Soviet penetration. After
all, what free nation makes a fuss about the murder of an ambassador? The United States which had up to then ignored
Amin's treaty with the Soviet Union meekly withdrew even further from Afghanistan after uttering its first disapproval of the
Communist regime. Perhaps nothing more shows the participation of Western diplomats and journalists in Amin's illusions than the sensation caused by Amin's foreign minister's
outburst against Soviet "unreliability and treachery," less than
three months before the invasion-in the fall of 1979. At the
same time Amin began to plot against his closest associate Taraki
who may have been in touch with Babrak Karmal and other Parcham members during his enthusiastic reception in Moscow in
September 1979.
Speculation about Soviet motives for invading Afghanistan on
December 25 with eighty-five thousand troops (soon to number
one hundred thousand) serves largely to continue the evasion
that kept Western journalists and governments from anticipating
the danger of attempted conquest throughout the preceding six
years, and taking action against it before it occurred-even after
intelligence reports of Soviet troop movements along the northern
bank of the Oxus River early in December 1979. According to
the Newells, Amin's defiance of the Soviets and his successive
purges of their favorites, Parcham and then Taraki, drew the
Soviets to attempt the conquest of Afghanistan. But the struggle
between factions that turned murderous in the end was at most
a precipitating cause. The reason for the attempted conquest is
that the Soviets can not face the uprising of almost a whole nation, of almost all the Afghans, not for their "world revolution"
but against it. "The most self-defeating aspect of Khalq's program was its failure to give those elements of the population it
championed anything they could recognize other than trouble.
As a consequence, Khalq ignited one of the most truly popular
revolts of the twentieth century." (Emphasis mine.)
In appearance abrupt, the attempted Soviet invasion of Afghanistan actually brought to a head a generation of active infiltration
in Afghanistan. Already in 1950, the year Spanish, incredibly, attained equal priority with English-and four years before the ap-
96
pearance of a ten-thoUsand copy edition of a Russian-Vietnamese,
Vietnamese-Russian dictionary-students at Soviet language
schools studied Pushtu.
To the surprise of both the Soviet Union and the United States,
it turned out, however, that without an open fight Afghanistan
was not for the stealing. Suddenly, the courage of the Afghans
rediscovered the buffer state, under all the obfuscations about
"non-alignment," and the wisdom of nineteenth century diplomacy. But the courage that was too much for the Soviets was
also too much for the West. The United States too could not
cope with the courage of men ready to fight, almost with their
bare hands and without waiting for support, against the soldiers
of a regime that terrifies it and the other leading nations of the
world. The Soviets tried to destroy the men of this courage; the
United States cynically took their destruction for granted. "The
primary inadequacy of American policy lay in the fact that it immediately conceded Afghanistan. Carter conveyed that concession even in his strongest denunciations of the invasion."
The unreality of the West's response showed itself in the ludicrousness of Western statesmen's remarks and proposals for
Afghanistan. Without blushing, the government of Germany remarked on the divisibility of detente, a remark which, if it meant
anything at all, meant that Germany expected Europe to be conquered last or next to last-and without fighting. Fresh from
handing Rhodesia to Mugabe with the acclamation of the whole
world, Lord Carrington proposed "non-alignment" for Afghanistan, just at the moment when the Soviets were lost in the attempt, and denying it, to destroy the buffer state, for which
"non-alignment" had been for a generation a kind of codeword
that obscured the realities of its survival both to the West and
the Soviets: the courage of the Afghans and nature's gift of
fastness.
The United States' admission that it would fight for the Gulf
of Persia but not by implication help the men and women resisting aggression in Afghanistan, showed for perhaps the first time
since 1945 that it was reduced to defending natural resourcesnot freedom. Against this shameless-and unintelligent, for it
forgets Afghanistan's strategic position (but mountains and courage do not appear in the defense budget)-admission of a policy
of expediency, nobody said a word. Least of all those who, with
the mindlessness of the "educated," had been quick to assume
that the lust for profits had driven us to fight for Indochina. The
consequences of preferring expediency to the defense of freedom-as if aid to those ready to fight for freedom in Afghanistan
were not expedient!-shows itself in the United States' readiness
to cater to the whims of Saudi Arabia and to forget that the importance of Israel comes not because of its ties with American
Jews, but because it has the reliable daring strength that can only
come of democracy-the only democracy in the Middle East ex·
cept for Turkey whose moderate temporary military dictator·
ship, terrorism's bitter fruit, now begins to awaken the contempt
of those who can only recognize freedom in its absence. It also
shows itself in the prevarications of our relationship to China, itself occasioned by our abandonment of Indochina, especially in
the refusal to recognize that China, which has not said a word
for Poland (but totalitarian countries fear nothing more than a
meaningful word), is more ruthless than the Soviet Union, and in
WINTER 1982
�the readiness to make embarassing compromises of dubious legality in the support of Taiwan. But the truth is that the struggle
that counts, and the only one we can win, r~ally win-and without major war, but at the risk of small wars in which individuals
but not whole populations die-is for freedoffi. We were in Indochina because of freedom.
United States and Western evasiveness shows itself most in its
incapacity to face up to the Soviet use of gas in Afghanistan, reported already in May 1980 by Newsweek-and in Laos since
1976, and in Cambodia-and to supply the Afghans openly with
elementary weapons and simple medicines. The Soviet resort to
gas in violation of two international treaties is an international
issue, that is, an issue that affects all countries if there ever was
one. It occurs at a moment when the government of the United
States, against its desires and probably unnecessarily, has yielded
to the importunity of some of Europe for arms control negotiations for both middle and long-range nuclear strategic weapons.
To enter into such negotiations in the knowledge that the Soviet
Union is violating two international treaties against the use of
gas, amounts to saying we will negotiate with you no matter
what you do. That is not to negotiate, but to yield without acknowledging, and even knowing, it-just what totalitarian countries mean by "negotiate." The only newspaper I know of that
has shown courage in facing up to Soviet use of gas, the Wall
Street Journal, is right in its judgement that the enormity of the
outrage is too much for the government.
Because the Afghans dare fight the Soviets we are afraid to
help them, not fight along with them, but simply to help. There
have been reports in the American press that the government
has seen to weapons for the Afghans from the beginning. But
then why the secrecy? And why President Reagan's casual remark in the first months of his presidency that he would aid the
Afghans if they but asked? 16 Do we really live in a world in which
Sadat dared say that he sent old weapons from East Europe, apparently paid for by the United States, to people fighting for
their homeland against brutal aggression with more or less their
bare hands in cold and heat we can barely imagine-but the
United States does not?
Whatever the truth of these rumors of covert aid to the
Afghans from the United States, every report I have read from
men who have dared enter Afghanistan and every report the
Newells cite tells of the absence of modern weapons, especially
of ground to air missiles, and of simple medical supplies. 17 We
may send some weapons, but they do not get through.
The underlying reasons for Western refusal to help the Afghans are not pretty. Fear, first of all And then condescension.
We are quite used to pitying the weak whom the Soviets, in
much of the world, know how to turn into unwilling victims of
their own hate and resentment, but not to respecting the brave.
Who are these unlettered rustics with their World War I rifles to
teach us courage? Who are they to fight for their country and us,
unasked?
The sixty to two hundred resistance groups, often acting on
their own and, thereby, baffling Soviet planning, draw their cohesion and authority not from European parliamentary institutions and "political" ideas, which served largely to destroy the
Monarchy and bring the European civil war to Afghanistan, but
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
from age·old tribal assemblies that make binding majority deci·
sions, assemblies where speakers with age, wisdom, courage and
brilliance in speaking, and lineage exercise the most influence.
That we take it for granted that these are ineffective and primitive tells a good deal more about us and our distance from the
past that made us than it does about the Afghans. For these institutions resemble those of Homer, who lived only a hundred generations ago.
The British in the nineteenth century were much closer to
that past. In 1841 Vincent Eyre knew who had marched in
Afghanistan before him-"a country hitherto untraversed by an
European Army since the classic days of Alexander the Great."
As a result Afghanistan was closer to them than Europe to Af~
ghanistan. In contrast, the Afghans now know the intimacy of
our minds and what Afghanistan means to us better than we
who can barely catch sight of their country in the distance. Several months ago, the leader of the National Liberation Front of
Afghanistan, Sayed Ahmed Gailani, explained the strategic and
moral significance of the war for Afghanistan to an Italian journalist with a clarity beyond most officeholders in the West:
The Pakistanis have done their Islamic duty by us, not only
because of solidarity, but also because they realize that in the
eventuality of the consolidation of their grip on Afghanistan,
the Russians already plan a blitz through Pakistani Baluchistan that would bring them to the Sea of Arabia-in the ful·
fillment of a dream of centuries. The Sea of Arabia means oil
and the strangulation of Europe. The Europeans either do
not grasp this sequence of events-or pretend they do not.
In answer to the reporter's question: "What would the Afghans like from Europe?" Gailani said:
A bit of solidarity, if not for humanitarian reasons, for the vulgar reasons of expediency. Would you dedicate to us a few of
those peace marches that occur everywhere often in favour of
our invaders. You walked for Vietnam where the two great
powers collided. You might walk for us, a country where nobody collided with anybody, which has been invaded in the
coarsest colonial fashion, the fashion we escaped in the time
of the British and which now comes to us from Moscow.
We ask ourselves over and over again: How can Europe, hypersensitive Europe, who rises to her feet for Chile and Cambodia, find the strength to close her eyes to our instance, the
most shameful of all?
Our fight can have three great consequences: the liberation
of Afghanistan from an invading army, the rescue of Pakistan
from probability of a similar fate, the frustration of the plan to
encircle Europe. Unless it is just this that you want-to be
encircled. 18
Tucked away in the pages of the New York Times several
weeks ago, the U.S. Army chief of staff remarked almost as a
matter of course that the Third World War had started in Af.
ghanistan. 19 It may also be won there. But there is not much time.
1. "Keeping Cool about Kabul," New York Times, December 8, 1978.
2. In his proposal on March 12, 1948 to President Truman to raise the
American Diplomatic Mission in Afghanistan from Legation to Em-
97
�bassy, George C. Marshall observed" ... that the American Community
in Afghanistan is now larger than that oLany other foreign state." Foreign Relations of the United States, Part 1, V {1948), 490-494.
3. Vincent Eyre, The Kabul Insurrection of 1841.42, London 1879, 1-2,
63. Published on the occasion of "The Second Afghan War," this second edition of Eyre's The Military Operations at Cabul, which ended in
the Retreat and Destruction of the British Army (London 1843) contains a
long introduction, not included in the first edition.
4. For an account, extraordinary in its intelligent subtlety, of the nego·
tiations that broke down in the crisis of 1879, see H. B. Hanna, The Second Afghan War, 1878-79-80, London 1899, 2 vols., especially I, 1-285.
5. Correspondence Relating to Persia and Afghanistan, London 1839, 261.
6. Eyre, Kabul 2, London 1879, 53-54.
7. Eyre, Cabul1, London, 1843,29.
8. FRUS, Part I,V (1948), 490-494.
9. Christine F. Ridout, "Authority Patterns and Afghan Coup of 1973,"
Middle East Jouma/29, 2, 1975, 165-78.
10. Without distinguishing between the king and the monarchy, the
New York Times called the King "conservative" the day after the coup,
July 18,1973. The next day, in perhaps a typographical error, it reported
that "Afghanistan had been ruled by the monarchy for 43 years." Two
days later, on July 21, 1973, C. C. Sulzberger assured everyone that
there was no significant difference between the King and Daoud: "Af·
ghanistan was no democracy under King Zahir nor will it be under President Daoud."
The former American Ambassador to Afghanistan (1966-73) Robert G.
Neumann ("Afghanistan Under the Red Flag," The Impact of the Iranian
Events upon Persian Gulf and United States Security, Washington, D.C.
1979, 128-148 also barely notices the disappearance of the monarchyprobably because the intensity of intrigue and gossip in Kabul robbed
him of perspective.
11. According to the New York Times ofJuly 26, 1973, Daoud stated: "I
can safely say that this was in every sense a bloodless coup. It not only
enjoyed the complete cooperation of all branches of the army but also the
support of all people, particularly the intellectuals and youth." (Emphasis
mine.)
12. Robert G. Weinland, "An Explanation of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan," Center for Naval Analyses, Alexandria, Virginia 1981,7. For
an example of the disproportionate interest in the position of women in
a country with more tractable and pressing problems like a high infant
mortality rate, see the ideological but interesting study of Erika Knabe,
Frauenemanzipation in Afghanistan, Germany 1977.
13. See the interesting article by Hannah Negaran {pseudonym for an
Afghan), "The Afghan Coup of April 1978: Revolution and International Security," Orbis 23, 1, Spring 1979, 93-113. The reluctance of
Afghans even abroad to speak of events in Afghanistan openly betrays
the nearness of the violence that appears so far away.
14. Die Zeit, june 9, 1978.
15. Louis Dupree, New York Times May 20, 1978: " ... an enlightened
press should avoid the loose use of the term 'Communist.' All should examine the words of the new leaders carefully for governments, like persons, should be considered innocent until proven guilty."
16. New York Times, March 10, 1981. For the indications, all from unidentified sources, that the United States sends arms to the Afghans,
Carl Bernstein, "Arms for Afghanistan," The New Republic, July 18,
1981, 8-10.
17. I cite only the most recent reports: II Giornale Nuovo, December 2,
1981; Neue Zuercher Zeitung, December 20-21, 1981; Foreign Report,
January 7, 1982.
18. Il Giomale Nuovo, October 29, 1981.
19. New York Times, January 3, 1982.
See also the important article by Pierre and Micheline Centlivres,
"Village en Afghanistan," Commentaire 16, Winter 1981-82, 516-525.
AT HOME AND ABROAD
LETTER FROM VIETNAM
Hanoi, ecological city
Four A.M. at my hotel, right in the middle of Hano~ near the Grand Theatre. The
crowing of roosters from the yards nearby
awakens me. Not-to-be-believed! Thirty
years ago, at the age of thirteen, I had last
seen this colonial city that looked more like
a French provincial town-with, however,
every feature of an urban center-than a
capitol. In thirty years the regime has managed to rusticate Hanoi at the same time
that its population (not counting the new
suburbs) has quadrupled to 800,000.
98
In that early morning's walk and in the
following days, I saw other sides of the city's
"ecological" transformation. With the exception of a few public buildings, no new
housing had gone up within the city limits.
Banana trees, vegetables, chicken cages,
pig pens take up every square foot of the
gardens of the villas of the past. Fertilized
by the excrement of fowls and little pigs that
are raised like dogs, a vegetable green spills
from the terraces of even small apartment
houses. The inhabitants are even encour-
aged to take up part of the sidewalk to plant
fruit trees-or vegetables that the urine of
passing children waters.
Interior spaces are laid out with the same
ecological concern. Each individual takes
up an average of one and a half square
yards. He eats, sleeps, studies, works, and
entertains on a bed made of one large
wooden board. Thin panel-partitions and
balconies under the ceilings quadruple the
available space. Four to five households
now live in the space once taken up by
WINTER 1982
�one. This crowding makes for the mutual
surveillance the State desires. In the course
of time, however, it may make for loyalties,
and even connivance against the state's
hostility.
The housing crisis
Unventilated and usually dark, these low
houses in the center of town are still preferable to the recently and poorly constructed
dormitory houses of the suburbs that break
down into slums within four to five years.
They are preferable because the life of the
streets makes footage in front of these
houses worth a mint in rent or in sale price.
With their stands set up there, small craftsmen and peddlers earn ten times more than
state employees, even despite heavy taxes
and the necessity of restocking in the open
market.
In the suburbs humidity and mould
crumble the walls; doors and windows don't
shut; the stairwells stink; running water
reaches only to the second floor; the waste
drainage system is inadequate or nonexistent. Coming home from factory or office,
men and women have to carry pails of water
to the third, fourth, or fifth floor, and, for
fear of theft, in addition, their bicycles.
These houses in the suburbs are not available to anyone who wants them. Heroes of
labour and high-level state and party offi·
cials have preference; others may leave
their names on a waiting list that may drag
on four or five years. But money can always buy the right to rent from those who
enjoy preference.
The state also builds housing for those
who can pay lavishly for associative ownership-four to eight thousand dong down,
the rest in monthly installments, with salaries in the range from 50 to 200 dong a
month. And yet because of the crises in
housing the waiting lists for co-ownership
of these apartments are long: illegitimate
favors and illegal transactions are the rule.
The discrepancy between the earnings
of employees and bureaucrats and what
they spend always bewilders foreigners. A
family of four with two working adults
spends an average of 500 to 600 dong for
essentials: food, clothing, medicine, travelbut the two salaries together hardly add up
to 200 dong. How do people make up the
difference? This is one mystery in the everyday life of a citizen of Socialist Vietnam.
Small in size, the apartments hold a bewildering amount of stuff. Refrigerators
and TVs take center stage; then sewing
machines, radio-cassettes, thermos bottles,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
dishes, kitchen utensils, clothes, canned
and dry foods, table, chairs, bed; even a
mo-ped or a bicycle kept away from thieves
,-all crammed into a poor lodging of twelve
to twenty square yards.
No paintings, no vases with flowers. Even
in the homes of intellectuals, there is no
room for aesthetics. Only one picture hangs
on the wall, high above the many shelves
filled with useful objects-the portrait of
Uncle Ho, outward sign of loyalty to theregime, and protective talisman against the
indiscreetness of the cultural police.
Meant for lawns and children's play, the
space between houses was turned two years
ago into vegetable gardens with plots for
each apartment. Every family gets two
square yards of land for vegetables and its
pig or chickens. Dogs-traditional guardians of the Vietnamese house, children's
playmates, and a special holiday delicacyare nowhere to be seen. Utility and survival
are the only things that count.
The inhabitants of sprawling suburban
projects in Hanoi should count themselves
lucky in comparison to the half of Hanoi
dwellers who swarm in areas that have no
sewage system. On rainy days, it takes acrobatics to keep your knees dry crossing the
muddy lanes in these slums infested with
flies, mosquitoes, and rats. Thirty to fifty
people share a common toilet, a sink, a tiny
kitchen. Despite the single-story houses,
the population density makes the pollution
from the garbage and excrement left uncollected in the humidity among swarming rats
far worse than in the areas overwhelmed
by the exhaust of cars in Western cities.
The institute of health of Hanoi reports
the highest incidence of respiratory and intestinal maladies in just these areas that
the tropical heat makes ideal for the prolif·
eration of bacteria. And yet it is these streets
which house the favorites of the regime,
the proletarians of the workshops and factories-except when these rural-born workers still keep a house in the surrounding
countryside, fifteen or twenty kilometers
outside the city.
Urban life
In Hanoi people travel mostly by foot or
on bicycle, which should please the world·
wide ecological movement-except for the
anarchy of traffic. Fatal accidents occur
daily in the wild swarm of cyclists that
thread daringly between trucks driven by
young "bodoi" drivers still used to jungle
paths. No one pays any attention to the
traffic lights that hardly ever work because
of power blackouts. Without looking ahead
or behind drivers turn right or left. The
young policemen who casually direct traffic are completely overwhelmed. A cigarette
will do if you are stopped for a violation.
After dark, the undiminished traffic of motor·
bikes in the unlighted streets and boulevards
of Hanoi causes serious collisions between
cyclists-and fatal crashes between trucks
and motorbikes.
The use of electricity is severely restricted. With its frequent and prolonged
power cuts, Hanoi becomes a little village
after nightfall. Except for the embassy area
and the houses of the top men, darkness
covers the city. Ostensibly, the energy is
saved for the sake of factories and country
agricultural machines. But such darkness,
in a city of a million people, increases crime
-thefts, break-ins, rapes, prostitution in the
parks, juvenile delinquency. By depriving
the urban proletariat of its one relaxation,
TV sets and radios, it also invites a noticeable rise in a birth rate already rising at an
alarming thirty percent a year. One saying
in Hanoi goes: "I bury my joy deep in the
belly of my wife, and from year to year my
family grows."
Socialist "work"
Like space, time, especially work-time, is
used ecologically. The factories, workshops, and offices have realized the dream
of all Western ecologists, the two-hour day.
A worker, who barely lives five days on his
monthly salary, gives the Party-State its
due: two hours. The other six he keeps for
the pursuit of his private interests. In factory Number X in Hanoi, the team of mechanics makes spare parts for a series of
underground bicycle, kitchen-, and household-ware workshops. They draw upon the
state's raw materials, which rarely arrive at
the same time. This excess of some materials and absence of others equally necessary,
excuses non-fulfillment of quotas and leaves
workers with nothing to do. But since it is
the rule, the socialist rule, that machines
must run unceasingly, workers more often
than not turn the machines to practical advantage-instead of letting them run on
emptily. With the surplus materials or with
scraps that have a way of piling up, they
make themselves objects not forseen in the
plan. Garment workers have a way of cutting large scraps from the textiles the fac·
tory provides-scraps that they turn into
pretty blouses at home for their own use
or, more often, for sale on the open market
in competition with factory goods. When
99
�occasionally the local marketing of factory
"surplus" materials, or of items made out
of them, arouses the suspicions of the economic police, truck-drivers cart the illegal
merchandise away to sell along the roads in
the country~much to the delight of the
peasants, who usually have to do without
manufactured goods.
With such a duplication of effort, socialist enterprises have no chance of reaching
the goals they negotiate with the stateunless they indulge in the common practice of altering the books. The failure to
meet production goals, however, compels
managers to multiply expensive overtimea move that in turn encourages the workers to increase the amount of overtime by
further reducing their productivity during
the regular day.
For twenty years the Party-State has
thundered against the waste and theft of
the public property and means of production of the nation. But the workers and employees feel even more robbed and exploited by a state that pays them wages too
low for their biological reproduction. Who
is the thief here? That is the question.
Short of shutting down its own enterprises
-a move which it will never bring itself to
make-the state can always hold its managers "responsible" to more easily dismiss
them. But the system survives the removal
and replacement of advisors, unchanged.
Workers in distribution and service are
not to be outdone by factory colleagues. According to the Party's daily paper, the People, the Peoples' control committees from
a sample of 500 state stores exposed the following covert practices: the employees of
state stores keep the best of the merchandise, sometimes all of it, for themselves; in
food stores, employees sell customers flour
and other grains after buying up all the rice
for themselves; in the bicycle store M. K.,
the employees together buy up all bicycles
and tires for their own use and especially to
resell at large profit to relatives and neighbours; at a state "supermarket," Bach Hoa
in Hanoi, the shopper who asks for a piece
of fabric, a thermos bottle, a ballpoint pen,
a notebook, or a bar of soap, can expect the
automatic response of the saleslady, "All
out" -but he knows for a fact that a buyerspeculator ready to share his profit with
the saleslady could take home a good supply. Even for rationed items for which you
have coupons you often have to buy your
place in the long lines made up oflittle professionals between the ages of eight and fifteen. This mafia of buyers-speculators in
connivance with the salespersons, whose
wages rarely exceed twenty-five dollars a
month, infests almost all the state stores in
100
Hanoi and in the other cities of Vietnam.
In this racket, the buyer and saleslady
never deal alone but in concert with every
one of their colleagues-and with the omnipresent agents of the police.
Widespread corruption
The transportation business is just as riddled with corruption. It often takes weeks
to get the authorization necessary to move
from one city to another, and, especially,
from north to south-and just as long again
to get a train or bus ticket. The train ticket
from Hanoi to Haiphong, three dong at the
official state price, is available only on the
black market for ten times the price. State
officials take an unlimited number of "business" trips, often with their families. Employees of the railroad and bus lines sell at
least a third of their tickets to "relatives"
and friends who then renegotiate them on
the black market. The price of airplane
tickets is prohibitive. And yet the Vietnamese travel constantly, both to visit friends
and family and, more often, to speculate
on the significant differences in the price
of merchandise in different regions.
At least once a week the party papers accuse a bus or shipping line of misappropriating hundreds of tons of rice or wheat
flour. But the denounced crimes go unpunished. Prompt enough in handing down
harsh verdicts against their political enemies, public tribunals are slow and indulgent towards economic delinquents whose
hands are no dirtier than anyone else's.
The gangrene of corruption does not
spare the most "sacred" sectors of socialist
society, health and education. The managers and staff of hospitals and clinics skim
off substantial amounts of the medicine
and food intended for the sick. Managers
report an inflated number of beds or patients. If the state maintains it cannot meet
such inflationist demands, the patients
have somehow or other to pay for the supposedly free services and medications. In
this condition of severe scarcity and blatant inequalities, it seems only natural that
hospital workers attend to their own wellbeing before treating the rest of the people.
In the socialist system there are at least
three types of hospitals: those for the people, those for the middle-level bureaucrats,
and those for the higher officials of the
Party-State. Within each type treatment
varies according to wage or salary scales.
Everyone in Hanoi knows that the large
hospital, "Viet-XO" (Russian-Vietnamese)
admits only high-level officials, who are assigned to wards according to salary. Before
explaining his symptoms, a sick man who ar-
rives at a hospital must show his party card
or his certificate of salary.
The hard times of 1980 showed the weakness of the Vietnamese academic system. At
the start of the 1980 school year, the regime
took pride in an enrollment of 13 million,
from nursery school to secondary school,
and a teaching staff of 300,000.
At the material level, the academic system is totally inadequate. The buildings (including those made of wood and corrugated
iron or mud) barely suffice for a third of the
students. Classes are organized in shifts:
morning classes from seven to eleven or afternoon ones from one to five are for youths
following a normal course of studies; evening classes, from six to ten, are for adults.
Children are left to themselves a good half
of the day. The youth organizations cannot
cope with their numbers. They often loiter
in gangs in the parks or in the streets of the
suburbs. In the present hard times, children
help their families in their unofficial workshops or do their own small-time peddling in
front of state stores, train stations, movies,
and theatres. Some of them prove to be excellent pickpockets. A walk after dark in certain areas of Hanoi and Saigon is ill-advised.
In 1980, the students or their parents had
to buy textbooks and notebooks, often at
high open-market prices. In many schools,
students have neither paper nor pencils to
copy down the lessons of teachers, who cannot keep up standards. After school, students and teachers run into each other in
the pursuit of small deals on the sidewalks.
The teachers I interviewed said they had
never known their profession so debased
and humiliated. Their poverty wages allow
them no time for advanced study, for research, or self-instruction.
Secondary-school teachers with classes
preparing for degrees or for college entrance
are a bit better off. They reserve their best
teaching for those students whose parents
can pay extra for special lessons. To pass
the entrance and graduation exams of universities and technical schools, you had
better be the child of high-ranking officials
in the regime, or be able to afford large payoffs-or be a genius. The certainty that
their students, unless they are ready to go
till the soil in the New Economic Zones,
will be unemployed after graduation from
high school or university, discourages many
honourable teachers. In the south, the lot
of students and their teachers seems even
more desperate. There, in addition to the
material deprivation common to all Vietnamese, the newly "liberated" suffer the psychological torment that comes of not being
able to absorb socialist education based on
Leninist indoctrination.
WINTER 1982
�Indoctrination
Instruction in "revolutionary vigilance,"
even and above all towards one's parents
and relatives, replaces the teaching of mo·
rality. The outcome of an individual's exams depends in large part on his political
history and on the political history of his
parents and grandparents. As they say in
the South, "Hoc tai thi ly lich": "Study
with your brains, compete with your political past."
(Students in the South are divided into
four categories:
A. Militant, or belonging to the family
of a party militant;
B. Worker, or child of a worker-family
which did not work for the old regime;
C. Child of a petty official or non-ranking
military man of the old regime. Petty bourgeois origin;
D. Men who worked for the old regime,
or child of parents who held high positions
in the old regime.)
University professors and researchers
must keep strictly to "the eight valuable
hours of socialist work." A professor of
medicine from the faculty of the University of Paris, fifteen minutes late for his lecture, often puts up with the reproaches of
his doorman-comrade.
The regime appoints officials, recruited
from the illiterate peasantry, to watch over
the activities of Southern intellectuals
barred from all teaching. Former professors of literature and law hang on in untenured positions at the Institute of Research
in the Social Sciences. Others who are in
shape pedal bicycle-taxis. All of them
dream of leaving their country~now become a foreign land-even though not
many years ago most took part in the struggle against the American presence. The
Southern intelligentsia is most pitiable.
The regime distrusts the quarrelsome habits it took on in the long struggle against
the American war. To make matters worse,
the Stalinist conception of a proletarian
science and technology radically different
from, and far superior to, bourgeois science, still holds sway over Vietnamese
Communist bureaucrats.
During a national congress of the
Writer's Union, in Hanoi in May 1980, in
celebration of thirty-five years of literary
production under the regime, Nguyen
dinh Thi, famous writer and ex-president
of the union, conceded: "Over thirty-five
years of independence and socialist construction, we have seen a host of writers
and poets emerge, but not a single literary
work." This outrageous admission earned
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
him the total suppression of his play,
"Nhuyen Trai a DOng Quan," commissioned by the Party's Central Committee
: to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the
national hero, general, chief of state, and
poet. Party censors accused him of playing
down the great man's victorious resistance
to the Chinese army of occupation in his
overemphasis of his hero's time of disgrace
-and of implicitly slandering the present
socialist regime in his critique of the despotic monarchy of that time. The fate of
this party writer, producer of some twenty
novels extolling the anti-colonialist and
anti-imperialist struggles and the construction of socialism, sheds a harsh light on the
predicament of not-so-conformist writers
and artists.
Painters and musicians are encouraged
to take up subjects that will build socialism,
and socialist love of country and of work.
Eastern or Western Impressionism, abstract painting, and painting of nude figures are on the index. A squad from the
cultural police descended upon the studio
of painter B one day to seize his paintings
of too-delicate young girls, and to teach
him to draw "a hand with all five fingers."
The censors classify music into three
fundamental groups: red, yellow, and blue.
The radio broadcasts red or revolutionary
music, martial in its rhythms and lyrics, all
day long. Yell ow music, romantic and softening like the former music of the South or
agitated like the Western "disco" music, is
passionately condemned. Finally, blue music, like classical music and the light music of
the West, is to be listened to in moderation.
Repression is so severe that many intellectuals confess that they do not dare to
write their thoughts and real feelings, even
privately. They do not dare pursue unorthodox ideas for fear these might slip out in
conversation with an unreliable colleague
or in the course of police questioning. The
motto of Buddhist and Christian monks,
"Banish impure thoughts," has become a
party order to the subjects of the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam.
In twenty-five years of socialism, at least
sixty famous writers and artists have
known banishment, expulsion from the
Party, reeducation through work in camps.
Professor Tran Due Thao, once a student
and professor at the :Ecole Normale Superieure of Paris, is the most notorious
case. For requesting more freedom in university teaching and in literary and artistic
expression, and particularly for daring to
criticize the anti·intellectual Stalinist practices of the Party, he was arrested in 1958,
subjected to self-criticism and sent to tend
cows in a reeducation camp in the High
Regions. Upon his return to Hanoi in early
1960, he was barred from teaching and
publishing. In exchange for a food allowance, he translates works of Marx and
Lenin. Denied hospital privileges, he must
depend on the help of friends in case of illness. Since 1971, at the request of some intellectuals of the French Communist
Party, the Vietnamese Communist Party
authorized Tran Due Thao to publish
some articles on the philosophy of language in the French journal La Pensee.
Country life
Compared to country life, the cities with
all their poverty seem to the Vietnamese
peasants like little heavens-for they still
have medicines, white rice, sugar, cigarettes, and all sorts of amenities. Despite
Party propaganda, the young people (students or graduates) sent to the country see
that the peasants are even more exploited
than the urban proletariat. Unable to bear
the harsh conditions of country life, the ostracism of local officials, the ignorance the
Party fosters in the peasantry, most of
these young people sneak back to the cities.
Organized into cooperatives that have
collectivized all the means of production,
land, and equipment, the peasants take
their work in the collective rice paddies in
resignation for a corvee for the Party. They
control neither the production plan nor the
distribution that allots them the bare minimum of food: forty-four pounds of paddy
per person per month in a good harvest,
about thirty percent of total production.
The rest must be sold to the state at ridiculously low prices. The manure, agricultural
equipment, and other items of everyday
use supposedly supplied by the state at low
prices are available in far from sufficient
quality or quantity.
With the exception of Party schools for
the children of the political bureaucracy,
the schools, which are free, offer no prospect of advancement. Because in 1980 the
medical clinics had no medicines, the peasants had to seek their medicines in the cities at black market prices. To survive they
must, in addition to the eight hours of socialist work on the rice paddies of the cooperative, put in as much or more time on
their family plots. The productivity of
these individual plots, that taken together
make up five to seven percent of the communal lands, surpasses the collective rice
paddies six or seven times.
Thanks to a tropical climate that knows
no harsh winters, the peasant may, with
101
�deft rotation, manage four or five harvests
a year: one of rice, one of potatoes or corn,
two or three of kidney beans, soy beans,
tomatoes, squash, tobacco, etc. He takes
his tools and fertilizer from the cooperative's stocks.
Convinced the state exploits him, the
peasant flaunts a high rate of absenteeism.
In his five to six hours on collective land,
the peasant prepares his strength for the
pursuit of much more lucrative work at
home: truck farming, pig and poultry raising, handicrafts or peddling. In consequence
of these arrangements, young researchers
from Hanoi, engaged in a survey of rural
life, were astonished to find thirty-hour day
schedules for peasants: eight hours of work
on the cooperative farm, eight more of work
at home, eight hours for sleep, four hours
of domestic activities (kitchen work, housework, childcare ... ) and one hour for relaxation or political meetings.
The family economy resorts to all available labor, from six-year-old children tore-
tired grandparents. The children are given
the least burdensome tasks, such as babysitting or watching the pigs and poultry.
But the children's work in the family interferes with their schooling: most Vietnamese peasant children quit school after the
elementary grades.
The yield of the family plots not directly
consumed at home fetches prices on the
open market in the cities from eight to ten
times higher than in state stores. Only this
parallel economy, which the State tolerates
in suspicion, allows the peasant to add
enough to the meager collective-farm food
rations to satisfy his basic needs for clothing, housing, health, transportation, social,
and cultural life.
More spacious than city homes, half the
houses in the country in the North are now
solidly built, with brick walls and red tile
roofs. Not the productivity of the cooperatives, as the regime would have it, but
twenty years of desperate work on plots of
individual land have built these houses.
This article appeared in 1981 in the autumn issue of Commentaire.
Eight years ago the writers, a physician
and a professor of education at the top of
French professional life-Paris-and about
to join the Socialist Party, accepted an invitation from the French Ministry of Foreign
Affairs to spend five years in Laos. With
their three infant daughters they arrived in
Vientiane, for an at first sight "mad adventure" that reflection had told them actually
amounted to an "extraordinary opportunity," on September 14, 1974-little more
than six months before the Communist
conquest of South Vietnam that they enthusiastically took for the "liberation" of
Indochina. Despite their expectations, their
eyes were alive enough to see what went
on before them-and their souls strong
enough to stand the pain of their sight.
Every Communist victory in Vietnam
brought the Communist Pathet Lao nearer
to power. A little more than six months after the signature of the Paris accords to end
the Vietnam War January 23, 1973, a Provi·
sional Government of National Union was
formed in Laos in which Communist ministers matched right wing minist~rs in pairs.
Even the police was reduced to powerlessness by the resort to pairs: a Communist
accompanied each American-uniformed regular policeman. The conquest of Saigon in
April 1975 made possible-in addition to
the Khmer Rouge conquest of Phnom Penh
-the "Liberation" of Vientiane and the
seizure of power in Laos by the revolutionary committees supported by the Pathet
Lao on August 23, followed by abdication
of the king on November 29 and the decla·
ration of the Peoples Democratic Republic
of Laos on December 2.
The more the Communists in Vientiane
The state may complain that the oblig·
atory deliveries of produce from the cooperatives leave much to be desired-and
sometimes do not occur at all. At fault,
however, are not the collective-farm members, who receive only thirty percent of the
harvest-but the middle-men who each
skim something off the surplus: officials of
the cooperative, of the commune, of the
district, and of the province; managerial,
administrative, military, and political officials. In the endless "bureaucracy" in Vietnamese rural society, there is an official for
each four or five workers.
Hdnoi, November 1980
JEAN DULICH
Translated by Colette Hughes
Jean Dulich is a pseudonym for a Vietnamese.
FIRST READINGS
LAOS
Au nom de Marx et de Bouddha, Revolution au Laos: un people, une culture disparaissent, by Marie-Noele and Didier Sicard
InterEditions, Paris 1981, 207 pages.
Laos has long since returned to the strategic insignificance for which, one judges,
nature intended it and for which its inhabitants unquestionably yearn.
J. K. Galbraith
New York Times
January l, 1982
This is a real book, a book that had to be
written. Like most such books it is also a
story of self-education. It has an awkwardness, not to be confused with ineptness,
that tells in its dreadful simplicity indelibly
of experience.
102
WINTER 1982
�tighten their grip on Laos, the more they unity, and equality between the various
fall into dependence on the Communists peoples of Laos. Who could object? People
of Vietnam. For instance, the arrest in responded to the regime's call with undeniMarch 1977 of the king, whose legitimacy , able eagerness: after thirty years of guerrilla
the Communists had made a great show of warfare they yearned for reconciliation.
respecting in their years of infiltrating the Since all were to take part, reconciliation
royal government, came a few months be- meant meetings which people in the beginfore the signature of the treaty of "friend- ning attended with enthusiasm.
ship and cooperation" (july 18, 1977) with
This readiness to trust the regime's offer
Vietnam that spelled out the "special rela- of reconciliation and attend its meetings
tions" that obtain between the two coun- was, in the Sicards' retrospective judgetries in national defense, the arts, radio, ment, a mistake that could not be undone,
press, education-and secretly traced a new for the regime had no intention of keeping
frontier between the two countries.
its promise of reconciliation. "Caution! If
To some extent the Communist seizure you trust in good faith, if you honestly deof power in Laos amounts to a disguised sire an understanding, know that under
North Vietnamese conquest. But the North their apparent frankness and good will your
Vietnamese ascendance, like almost every enemies of thirty years' standing intend to
other fact in Laos, has to be denied. Since remain that way." "The function of the pothe "friendship" treaty, expression of anti- litical meetings is to invite people to tie
Vietnamese sentiments brings eight years their own hands of their own free will."
in the camps. Haircuts, accents, and the
At these meetings, that took place in the
availability in butcher shops of dogmeat, a beginning two or three times a week, on
Vietnamese delicacy Laotians despise, be- short notice, at any time of the day or night,
tray the Vietnamese, who disguise them- individuals had to demonstrate their adherselves in the uniform of the Pathet Lao. ence to propositions that changed with beOnly the Thai kids, for the moment safe wildering rapidity. There was no question
beyond the wide Mekong, dare refer openly of objecting or expressing one's thoughts.
to the North Vietnamese domination of The ever-changing line had to be repeated
Laos: they call the Laotian children on the as if one meant it. The primary experience
other side, "dog-eaters."
of these meetings was that one can be made
Because they were less obviously brutal to assent to anything: the writers agreed at
and murderous than the Communists in one of these sessions that foreign reporters
Cambodia and Vietnam, the Communists should be kept out of Laos, because their
in Laos thought they could undo Laos with- news might hurt the "revolution." At least
out anybody, either Laotian or foreigner, made to appear to assent to anything. " 'I
noticing. At a time of exclusion of foreign- am sure that ninety percent of us make beers not from the socialist countries from lieve we agree. But do we have any other
Vietnam and Cambodia, they allowed men choice .... '" "To give up speaking, means
and women like the Sicards the freedom of dying to yourself and thereby to others."
the country. This confidence of the ComAnd the self-betrayal requires actions as
munists in Laos that they could get away well as words. Often, the betrayal of friends.
with anything that was not unmistakable Or symbolic "political" action: on a night
-and with their, in appearance, frank and in December 1977 the whole population
open manner they won the Sicards at first- suddenly turns to digging trenches to defend
makes the Sicards fear that "the 'normal' the "revolution" from imminent attack beworld of tomorrow will perhaps be closer to cause the line holds that Thai "imperialism"
the world of Communist Laos than our threatens the nation.
own."
In addition to frequent political meetings,
In the beginning, immediately after the there are weekly sessions of self-criticism at
seizure of power, the new regime offered work and, especially at the university,
reconciliation. In contrast to the old gov- monthly rehearsal of political thoughts in
ernment it promised to explain all its ac- writing-"autobiographies" that allow no
tions: people would no longer be ruled from fact or feeling to escape the great simplistic
the outside without explanation, but would divide "before and after the revolution." At
themselves take part in decisions. All were self-criticism sessions a person criticizes
to help realize progress, reconciliation, himself before suffering the criticism of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
everybody else. In grand self-criticism sessions, an individual, for instance, a young
woman, pregnant by a professor who has
fled across the Mekong, faces a thousand
people on her feet for six hours. These criticism sessions serve to isolate individuals
-and at the same time to make them feel
responsible for their isolation. "'The most
painful thing is not to be able to speak
openly to anyone. Out of fear, we use ambiguous language. But the torture is unbearable.'" They reinforce each person's
sense of his own powerlessness and of the
force of the state without limits-which
cannot be distinguished from everybody
else and from oneself-that does what it
pleases with impunity. The forced writing
of "autobiographies" makes individuals feel
that Party cadres can see through them-as
one student put it. But again they are the
ones making themselves transparent.
In 1979, four years after the seizure of
power, Party cadres addressing these meetings openly confessed the deceptiveness of
their initial offers of reconciliation:
Now that you have advanced in your
study of our politics, you can realize that
we never had the slightest intention of
carrying out the program announced in
1975. The announcement of the program
was simply a step necessary to reassure
the people, to win their acceptance of
us- in order to reach the only and glorious goal of socialism.
Reconciliation that looked like an offer
to negotiate meant only to disarm the people and turn them to their own oppression.
"Between brotherly countries there are
never negotiations-there is only one reality: the correlations of forces." Negotiation,
even the demand for an openly acknowledged surrender instead of the offer of reconciliation, would have meant the Party
recognized limitations, acknowledged another will than its own, another world than
the mind of Lenin. The seizure of power,
therefore, does not bring the end of fighting
but continuation of fighting by other means:
fewer are murdered but almost all made to
lead themselves to a living death. "To reduce the forces of the enemy to powerlessness without fighting them, that is the
greatest victory."
But such a victory has no end, it needs
triumph after unacknowledged triumph,
for an acknowledged triumph would mean
103
�recognition of limitation. After the -.seizure
of power, the life in a person which•might
lead him to say or think something unexpected and obvious, to say "no," bec'omes
the enemy. In order to survive physically
the individual must never cease denying
that life-the reason for the frequency and
unexpectedness of meetings, self-criticism
sessions and the rest. "This process of education/reeducation really means learning
to cover up your individuality and turning
yourself into a skeleton or body of marblethe only stuff fitted to this society."" ... biological existence becomes the only point
of reference that does not arouse suspicion .... "
You cannot read the Sicards' account of
the Pathet Lao's exploitation of the yearning for pe"!ce and reconciliation to continue
war without combat-but not without murder-without wondering what it tells about
big international "negotiations" with the
Soviet Union and China. Ever since 1944,
the back and forth between the yearning
for peace and the failure of negotiations,
for instance, the failure _to conclude a
peace in Europe, has served to keep many
people from realizing that the Second
World War continues in a succession of
wars-small only in the sense they are not
total-which served to ideologize and
polarize the perceptions, especially of
"elites," throughout the world in unprecedented fashion. (And polarization of perception means paralysis of the capacity to
see what is going on and to make common
sense judgements: in terms of the struggle
to destroy men's minds, all wars since 1944
have been waged throughout the whole
world.) The terror at nuclear extermination, and the negotiations to soothe it, are
major weapons right now in the struggle to
destroy the remnants of Europe's freedom.
The pursuit of settlement through negotiation played a role in the destruction of
South Vietnam. Those who should most
study this book, diplomats, will probably be
the last to read it.
Besides political meetings, forced-voluntary labor also continues the war after the
seizure of power without guerrilla combat.
It acts out the theses of political meetings.
Everywhere at all times individuals must
look active. In the morning before work in
front of the ministries they water vegetable
gardens to foster the self-sufficiency of
Laos-gardens whose produce is not gath-
104
ered, for the point is to sow, not necessarily
to reap. After work there are calisthenics
and sports. At the university the grounds
show continuous regimented activity-in
contrast to the easy-going leisure before the
''revolution."
The point of this labour is not to accomplish anything but "to realize a concept for
a moment": to show that the people together can do anything-and the individual
alone nothing. Like the "discussions" at
meetings it is largely gesture, but gesture
with the purpose of turning people to their
own oppression-with the excuse that it
will earn them entrance into the "socialist
fraternity." Sometimes the forced-voluntary
labour accomplished the opposite of its intention. For instance, because of the failure
to consult the "reactionary" experts of the
past, ditches dug from the Mekong to irrigate the rice paddies drained them. "The
display of energy in labour has only one
purpose: to express vengeance, the vengeance of the fighters of the Pathet Lao on
those who collaborated or waited, upon
those who thought the nation could come
to independence without turning Communist. And those who suffer this vengeance
must not only undergo it-they must
desire it."
Like the political meetings, the forcedvoluntary labour turns people into accomplices in their own oppression. That everybody suffers makes the suffering easier to
bear. The satisfaction people feel at the
sight of others, once their betters or their
elders, suffering like themselves, blinds
them almost against their will to the system
that crushes them.
But they want somebody to blame for
their self-inflicted misery. "I will bear oppression, the absence of liberty, hunger,
the hardness of life on condition that I can
let my aggression loose on somebody whom
I can hold responsible for my misery. To
survive and overcome my misery, I am ready
to turn in my neighbour-even at the cost
of my moral consciousness." And the readiness to turn in neighbours also means the
nations nearby still outside the "socialist
fraternity."
In this book that describes a society turning into a camp, there is little about the
camps that are nevertheless a distinct unmentioned presence. At the center of the
life left in Laos, the Sicards were about as
far away from awareness of the camps as
anybody could be within Laos. Behind the
still dead waters of a dam about sixty kilometers from Vientiane, there are islands
with a series of camps of increasing severity.
On the first of these islands, one for women,
one for men, open to the world in the boast
of the regime, weaving, basketry, gardening, songs, and dancing "mildly reeducate
parasites-drug addicts, the young unemployed, juvenile deliquents, criminals, lepers,
and prostitutes. The Sicards were turned
away upon their arrival to visit these islands. In other camps there are something
like fifty to sixty thousand officers, soldiers
and civil se~vants of the royal governmenT
-about 2 percent of the population of
Laos. Upon the seizure of power, the officers and soldiers of the royal army went
willingly to political meetings that, in their
instance, turned immediately, brutally into
a concentration camp.
Everybody exists with the unexpressed
fear that they too might disappear into these
camps. "The talk is of freedom, but in reality there is fear and spying." The students
of the Sicards disappeared, it turned out
never to return, often on the excuse of fortyday political meetings or of study abroad in
eastern Europe. "Seven of my students disappeared in October 1975. Arrested because
they insisted on thinking for themselves
and because they could not conceive that
their classmates would use their lives to
dress themselves in progressivism's rags."
A student, a cadre in the Party, obscure
and incapable before the "revolution," now
full of that feverish energy whose characteristic is that it cannot focus enough to accomplish anything, who has the power to
decide which students can go home or
abroad, who makes a show of not going to
his home village for his mother's funeral
(for the Party has become his parents), goes
to a splendid dinner at the house of a
young woman, a classmate. In self-criticism
session the next day at the University, he
denounces her for keeping "bourgeois"
ways. The anger of the Sicards leads them
to the despairing realization that normality
has come to mean such betrayal: people
make believe they take it for granted.
A society that turns into a camp means
paralysis-literally the freezing of movement, not only in private and traditional
life-that is, feeling and thought-but of
actual physical movement, simply getting
around. At night patrols, meant to protect
WINTER 1982
�that sometimes arrest arbitrarily, discour- body else but themselves-as capable of
age circulation. In Vientiane, people are re- anything-and with impunity.
duced to walking because of the scarcity of ' The attack on tradition and the rigidifipublic transportation, and because other cation shows itself perhaps most in the noise
means meet with disapproval: cars show that replaces traditional music and even
privilege, tricycle taxis "exploit" drivers- traditional sounds like the calls of farmers
who as a result without customers must to their water buffaloes. From five-thirty in
work in the fields in the country_ The "rev- the morning, martial music in alternation
olutionary" salute, the clenched fist, like with political announcements blares from
the Hitler salute in Germany, replaces the loudspeakers at almost every comer in Vientraditional, now "reactionary," greeting, tiane. At the hospital and elsewhere there
hands together with a slight bow of the is singing of "revolutionary" songs and
head 1 The young walk apart from each music-which makes the traditional and
other and no longer hold hands. Dress ancient music look somehow out-of-place
changes from the elegance and fresh care and ridiculous. "For the first time in Laos I
that once distinguished one individual from saw that people no longer lived music with
another, to the disguise of monotony: hair their hands and bodies ... they listened rigid
can no longer be worn long, nails painted; in silence." "We can do nothing about it. It
Ho Chi Minh sandals made of tires replace is the people's will," officials told Sicard in
traditional footwear; above all, no jeans; no answer to his complaint that the earsplitting
American cigarettes except in secret; the noise at the hospital disturbed the-seriously
uniform jackets of the liberation army for sick. Like the meetings and the forced volstudents.
untary labour, the noise aims to destroy the
The attack on the spontaneous centers capacity to think-or, at least, to hear your
on the goodwill that informs private and tra- thoughts. At one point Sicard, to his astonditional life: it desires to violate and devour ished bewilderment, comes upon a tradiit. More than ten people cannot meet with- tional Laotian orchestra at the hospital
out permission. Marriages also require per- playing "revolutionary" martial music. Sudmission-and occasion political speeches. denly, the players stop playing but the music
Upon requesting permission for a tradi- continues: the orchestra had made believe
tional Laotian party, a baci, for a newborn it played the music that came from recchild, a couple is asked whether it has for- ords. "Laotian easygoingness makes it imgotten that the "revolution," too, is an in- possible to keep up subterfuge for a long
fant. Not ready to attack Buddhist priests time."
directly, the Party drives them to violate
In the name of return to traditional Laotheir vocation in its exercise. For instance, tian medicine-that had at first stirred Si~
they are told to preach hatred of "Ameri- card-lepers, later accused of "spying for
can imperialism" or to work to avoid arrest the Americans for pay," no longer receive
for "parasitism" -both violations of their antibiotics. The paralysis of life also shows
tenets. Individuals must give the traditional itself in hunger and the incapacity to protest
alms to monks in secret for fear of accusa- against it. The significance of the recurtion for "abetting parasitism." As a result rence of food in her students' grammatical
of this interference individuals and families examples finally comes to Mrs. Sicard: they
now do secretly the things they did openly have nothing to eat between five-thirty in
"before the revolution" -and suffer guilt the afternoon and eleven-thirty the next
and conflict, for they must risk their lives morning-but they had been ashamed to
to live in their accustomed manner. They tell her until questioned! Time rigidifies
experience the state-that is, almost every- also into universal Socialist time: the dates
of Stalingrad, the "October Revolution,"
obliterate the Buddhist festivals of custom
that bore no fixed dates. "The only reality is
1. For an essay showing exact parallels in Nathe undeniable existence of a society that
tional-Socialist Germany, and stressing, like the
Sicards, the acquiescence and cooperation of inmakes its power to crush felt at every modividuals in their own oppression in order to
ment."
survive, see Bruno Bettelheim, "Remarks on
Escape is the only resistance. Since 1975,
the Psychological Appeal of Totalitarianism,"
three hundred thousand have fled-around
(originally published in 1952) in Surviving, New
Ymk 1979, 317-322.
!0 percent of the population. Of the about
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
three hundred thousand Hmong tribeSmen
who fought with great bravery alongside
the Americans and the South Vietnamese,
seventy-five thousand have fled, fifty thousand have been murdered-many by Vietnamese and Soviet gas attacks since 1975
or 1976, largely ignored by a press that has
too long taken self~hatred for indignation.
To flee one's native land forever always
leaves scars that last for generations. But
for Laotians, more timid and with less ex~
perience of the world than Westerners,
flight from their native land means the end
of everything. They flee because of their
children, they remain because of their parents. They flee because they feel "nailed"
to a past they will never be able to live
down: not to have fought for the Communists means to have made the wrong choice
for all time. In the beginning, scornful and
uncomprehending of those who fled, the
Sicards ended up helping anybody they
could to flee. They tell a story emblematic
of Western callousness and the incapacity
to grasp the significance of events at the
moment of their occurrence. At about four
in the afternoon at the luxurious swimming
pool of the Australian embassy along the
Mekong river, a woman, tipsy or unconscionable, rose as if at a football match to
cheer a swimmer she had just noticed making his way toward the shore of Thailand.
The head went down under the surface at
the sound of a shot from an until-then-inattentive Pathet Lao guard. With its disappearance, she collapased when, and perhaps
because, it was too late.
Except for the daring of these flights, the
Laotians do not protest or resist. Brought
up never to show their emotions, they pre~
tend not to notice what is going on. They
are helpless before this seizure of power
and conquest called "a revolution" that exploits every weakness of their character, es~
pecially their incapacity to yield to their
rational anger and to defend themselves.
They are helpless before the onslaught that
above all-and in this it differs from the
clas~ical despotisms of the past described
by Montesquieu-makes them complicit in
their own oppression.
Unlike many observers the Sicards do
not feel this helplessness differs in kind
from the helplessness of the West. "We fear
that this change we lived through in Laos,
in the heart of Indochina, has a universal
meaning. For what is at stake is not simply
105
�a political phenomenon, not simply some
abstract correlation of forces, not simply
the replacement of one culture with another. This is the death of man, and riddle
of riddles, with his own consent.''
The last most terrible pages of this book
tell of the Sicards' own helplessness. Didier
Sicard demanded antibiotics, available in a
nearby ward reserved for Party cadres, for
an adolescent dying of meningitis. He was
told to mind his medicine and stay out of
politics. He demanded vitamins to treat the
alarming increase in cases of beriberi. A
commission of Soviet doctors replied they
knew of no beriberi in Laos. The Sicards
are overwhelmed by the realization that
they did not get through to the men responsible for the outrages all around them.
They take their helplessness for the helplessness of the Laotians. Perhaps, like the
Laotians, they proved incapable of undoing
their good manners. At the end of their account they bravely print the criticisms of a
friend, an anthropologist who left Laos with
them after ten years: "Do not fool yourselves, you were quite popular in spite of
everything. They never did you the honor
of hating you. We were all class enemiesbut hardly dangerous. You began to try their
patience only at the end with your criticisms and unceasing talk. Then you really
became a nuisance with your readiness to
help people escape across the Mekong and
your visits to the refugee camps in Thailand.
But on the whole you were tolerated. They
took you for too idealistic to be taken seriously."
They observe profoundly that the Communists feed on merely verbal opposition
because they know how to outbid and turn
it to ridicule. (An observation reinforced by
the recent revelation that one of the most
outspoken energetic anti-communists in
Saigon government circles was actually a
Communist agent-the Wall Street Journal,
February 10, 1982.) "To argue with them
means you have already surrendered. Pay
attention to what they do-not to what they
say."
They observe with fear that "this flight
into an imaginary world (really the world of
another, of Lenin?) paralyzes the capacity
to oppose, to say no." They ask themselves;
"Who can be against the declaration that
history is progress? What can you say against
Hate excited in the name of Solidarity?
Against the extirpation of a culture in the
name of Progress? The words are Peace,
Independence, Neutrality, Democracy,
Prosperity-what can you say in their faces?
Are we to say they are not true? That the
truth is that instead of Peace there is war,
instead of Independence, dependence on
Vietnam, instead of Neutrality, alignment
with the Soviet Union, instead of Democracy, totalitarianism, instead of Prosperity,
poverty? But in the name of what? In the
name of whom? What are we defending?"
Events in Laos are much nearer to us
than we dare imagine, just because we take
them to be so far away. For in the name of
freeing itself from Europe, from which it
had achieved formal independence in 1954
at the time of the Geneva accords on Vietnam, Laos has been abandoned by the West
and itself to the European civil war, the
war that did not stop after victory in 1945.
LEO RADITSA
A DEAD MAN'S KNOWLEDGE
Graphite, by Varlam Shalamov, translated
by John Glad, 287 pp., Norton, 1981,$14.95.
One day in 1929, a gifted, decent, indeed
noble young man of 22, Varlam Shalamov,
disappeared. The Western expression "arrested" does not describe the situation. After a brief, ghost-like reappearance in 1934,
he disappeared again, presumably forever.
Yet, miraculously, in 1950 he came back
from the other world. He entered the other
world a tall, powerfully built, handsome
youth, and emerged an invalid, an old, sick
man.
The other world had a very prosaic geographic location: Kolyma, some fifty miles
from American territory, beyond the Arctic
Circle.
106
This is Shalamov's second book published in the West. What is it? Short stories?
No. Apparitions from Kolyma are beyond literature or scholarship or essays.
Shalamov tells what Dante would call
"strange narratives."
Right on the cover of the book and in
the reviews of his previous book, Kolyma
Tales, Shalamov has been compared with
and to Solzhenitsyn. Why? Both are Russians who were in "Soviet prison camps."
Jack London tells a story of a French policeman not able to distinguish between
two natives until one of them explained
that he was small and stout, the other tall
and thin.
Shalamov says about an Andreyev, an
old prisoner (who is himself), gazing at the
newer Kolyma prisoners:
These were living people, and Andreyev
was a representative of the dead. His
knowledge, a dead man's knowledge,
was of no use to them, the living.
According to Victor Nekrasov, a Russian
writer in exile, Shalamov lives in Russia in
poverty and obscurity, completely forsaken
and forgotten by his relatives and whatever
friends he had, except for one devoted person who comes to see him.*
F arne, literature, politics, Russia, greatness, Tolstoy~all that Solzhenitzen, immensely ambitious and immensely successful, wanted in his youth and wants nowburned out in Shalamov. Hark to a dead
*Shalamov died on January 17, 1982.
WINTER 1982
�man's knowledge. Andreyev's neighbor
was crying.
Andreyev, however, stared at him without sympathy. He had seen too many
men cry for too many reasons.
These reasons are then described by
someone who no longer belongs to the humanity that weeps-by God or by angels or
by the dead.
The only touch of literature Shalamov
affords is an occasional final punch linethe last sentence of the narrative. In
"Dominoes," a prison doctor (a prisoner
himself) whose privileges (such as a separate room) made him a semi-god in the eyes
of ordinary prisoners, has a fancy (gods and
semi-gods do have fancies) to play a game
of dominoes, and his favorite ordinary prisoner is escorted to the doctor's room by
another prisoner.
In the divine privacy of the room, a di, vine orgy unfolds: the semi-god treats the
mortal to some porridge and bread, and
they drink tea with sugor(certainly the food
of semi-gods). Hours fly by in this heavenly
bliss, and after a game of dominoes, apotheosis follows: the mortal is treated to a cigarette which he smokes almost in delirium.
Ecstatic, he says goodbye to the semi~
divine doctor and walks out of the room
into the dark corridor. The punch line: the
other prisoner had waited for him by the
door all these hours (in the vain hope to get
a crust of bread or a cigarette butt).
Some reviewers invoked Dostoyevsky's
"Notes from the House of the Dead." Shal·
amov says, with his terse, lustreless, dead
man's scorn: "There was no Kolyma in the
House of the Dead."
Or: "Dostoyevsky never knew anyone
from the true criminal world." Even criminals in the Russia of Nicholas I and serfdom
(the first, ferocious half of the nineteenth
century) were not real criminals compared
with criminals in post-1917 Russia.
Kolyma. What's the moral of Shalamov's
life? Of anyone's Kolyma life? There is
none. Every minute of Kolyma life is a
"poisoned minute."
There is much there that a man should
not know, should not see, and if he does
see it, it is better for him to die.
Shalamov saw. The tragic mask he speaks
through is his death mask.
LEV NAVROZOV
FROM OUR READERS (continued from page 2)
mathematics than women. On the verbal
part of the SAT's, scores are about equal.
Perhaps women, in their passive way, read
more and hence become better readers
and so overcome their intellectual deficiencies and test as equals to men, or perhaps
they are equal. Both the math and verbal
parts of the examination demand reasoning ability, and so no conclusion can be
drawn from these results. In the absence of
solid evidence, it seems to me incumbent
on us to treat men and women as equals
rather than assuming inequalitieS and thus
injuring those who, though equal (or often,
be it noted, superior), are treated as..inferiors.
As for child-rearing, it is my impression
that as men spend more time with their
children, many of them become quite proficient at rearing them (sometimes even
better than their wives). Again this may be
a case where habit and prejudice are seen
as laws of nature.
Mr. Levin claims that child rearing is
highly valued by all but feminists. What is
the measure of that valuation? In a society
in which the value of one's work is measured either in terms of money or public
honor (usually the former), child-rearing
seems among the least esteemed jobs.
Nursery school teachers, kindergarten
teachers, and day-care workers, not to
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
mention mothers, get about as little money
or public recognition as it is possible to get.
It is true that those who prefer to have
women at home rather than in the workplace have tried to puff motherhood and
family publicly, but they draw the line at
considering raising children sufficiently
important work to make mothering a qualification for, say, social security. Rather, it
seems to me that the respect paid to rearing children is the kind one typically gives
to those who relieve us of difficult and, on
the whole, unappealing tasks to keep up
their morale. Though I think it is certainly
the case that managing a household well
requires a variety of skills, managerial, financial, social, and political, it is equally
certainly the case that women trying to return to the work-place after years of raising
children and managing households are
treated as if they had been idly passing
their time and had no useful skills, unlike
their male counterparts, who, whatever
paid employment they have had, are treated
as eminently employable. If Mr. Levin really
does value child-rearing, not in some abstract "Yes, the future of our nation depends on h6w our children are raised" way,
but by actually valuing the people who do
it, I commend him; but I think he is part of
a small minority of men.
I do not wish to belabor the issue, but we
should consider at somewhat greater length
the issue of what "sexism" means in terms
of treatment of women in the work-place.
Mr. Levin introduces "a complaint of dubious relevance" at this juncture: namely,
that "judging people on the basis of what is
usually true is unfair to the unusual." His
response to that "dubious objection" is that
"expectations must be based on what is
generally, even if not universally, true."
But this response is inadequate for at least
two reasons. First, "what is generally true"
is sometimes true because of historical circumstances. When Dr. Johnson, a man not
full of the prejudices of his time, met and
was so impressed by the intellect of Fanny
Burney that he offered to teach her Greek
and Latin, he was not permitted to by her
family, most strongly by her brother, be·
cause it was inappropriate for English ladies
to learn Greek and Latin. It was indeed
"generally true" that English ladies were
not classicists, but it by no means followed
from that historical fact that they could not
or should not be. What we are accustomed
to seeing is often the result of a history of
discrimination, and we should not be misled into thinking that what is "generally
the case" is generally the case for good reason. Custom sometimes misleads us into
107
�finding invalid reasons for those appearances, as, for example, the notion of' women's genetic incapacities. The notio~ that
women are genetically lacking either'. certain abilities or psychological traits t:[anslates into their not being considered on
their own merits. Employers have not always employed the "brightest" or the most
skilled, despite Mr. Levin's claim, because
prejudices have prevented them from seeing the talents in front of their eyes or
because they prefer to hire those with
whom they are psychologically more comfortable (see, for example, the study of hiring practices of monopoly and non-monopoly companies of Harvard Business School
graduates by Alchian and Kessel in H. G.
Lewis's Aspects of Labor Economics). Since
Mr. Levin, for example, is convinced of the
inferiority of women in "abstract reasoning" as distinguished from "twenty questions", I would assume that women in his
philosophy classes would be looked at
somewhat differently than men, and his
judgements of students might reflect his
"factual beliefs". The Supreme Court,
after all, knew in much the same way as
Mr. Levin does, that it was perfectly appropriate for women not to be permitted to
practice law (in an 1872 decision the court
ruled that 111inois was within its rights to
deny women admission to the bar). Mr. Justice Bradley's opinion is strikingly like
Mr. Levin's. He, too, claims that "the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which
belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it
for many of the occupations of civil life."
He, too, is not a misogynist. He is in sympathy with the "humane movements" which
have for their object "the multiplication of
avenues for women's advancement." But
this should not be construed to mean that
they should have free admission to those
professions which require "that decision
and firmness which are presumed to predominate in the sterner sex." We can now
laugh at such closed-mindedness, but common sense must have made this home
truth seem obvious to those justices and, in
fact, they had, not surprisingly, never seen
successful women attorneys. Women trying to enter medical schools faced much
the same kind of prejudice, though different rationalizations for the prejudice were
found. And, even when women have been
able to get the jobs for which their abilities
fitted them, they have traditionally been
108
paid less than men. For example, in a lawsuit brought against the U. of Maryland, it
was determined that women were paid, at
the same ranks, in the same departments,
and with the same qualifications, several
thousand dollars less per year than their
male colleagues. And the U. of Maryland is
by no means unusual in this respect. The
most recent figures comparing the salaries
of male and female academics (The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 25,
1981) showed that women on full-time,
nine-month appointments earned, on the
average, approximately 15% less than their
male colleagues. And this difference does
not result from the fact that women tend to
teach in the less highly paid departments
such as the Arts and Humanities. The salaries of women teaching in the Arts were
only 74% of the men's salaries while in the
Humanities the women earned 86% of
what the men ·earned. The only area in
which women's salaries came close to
men's was, curiously, Physical Education,
where women were only 6% behind. And
if it should be objected that women are
paid less because they have earned their
doctorates only recently and hence are
concentrated in the lower academic ranks,
or that women change jobs less frequently
because of family ties, or that they are more
likely to interrupt their careers for childrearing, a study by the National ResearcP
Council (see the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 2, 1981) shows that "Objective
factors alone cannot account adequately
for the career differences which exist between male and female Ph.D.'s." And this
discrimination continues despite "affirmative action" programs which, according to
the study, have not produced "reverse discrimination." I would suggest that sexism
on the part of those doing the hiring and
promoting is the cause of these disparities.
The relatively new issue of equal pay for
comparable work is the old story in new
guise. The jobs open to women simply paid
less than men's jobs, and the differences
had nothing to do with skill, arduousness,
responsibility, or any of the other distinctions one might draw. The only significant
distinction was whether men or women
were doing the work. For example, when
almost all elementary school teachers were
women, elementary school teachers were
paid significantly less than secondaryschool teachers, many of whom were male.
As men began to move into elementary
school teaching, the salaries began to
equalize, and today, in most school districts, all public school teachers are paid on
the same scale. The work didn't change,
only the workers.
Second, we have a long-standing and
rightly respected tradition in this country,
one not always followed but one worth preserving, that people are to be judged on
their individual merits or lack thereof, not
by their belonging to some particular
group, religious, ethnic, or sexual. To act
counter to this deliberately is to invite a
system in which we are judged, not by
what we can do, but by some general notion
of what the group we belong to is capable
of. This seems to me to be a pernicious
doctrine and one to be opposed strongly.
We should note, in closing, that similar
prejudices in the guise of natural laws have
been operative for centuries. The notion of
a decadent "Jewish physics" could only
make sense because it was obvious that
Jews were greedy, treacherous, and dishonest, though clever. Without such prejudices
based on what was obvious to most, the
idea would have been still-born. The presumed obvious inferiority of blacks was
necessary to make slavery a reality and a
morally justifiable institution. Just as "racism" and "anti-semitism" are genuine words
describing genuine facts about the world,
so is "sexism," and to fail to see the evidence of it around one seems to me to be a
case of willful blindness.
GEORGE DOSKOW
St. John's College
Annapolis, Md.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review
... Sexism, according to Professor Levin,
is meaningless, for what it purports to
describe is really the honest recognition of
reality. Facts are facts: there are innate differences between men and women it is only
sensible to recognize ....
But consider this: the illiteracy of the
poor in former days was "confirmed by
experience countless times"; would it
therefore now be correct to assume innate
differences between rich and poor individuals? And would it be fair to deny a job to a
poor person on the assumption of his personal illiteracy? Most of us would agree
not, yet this is precisely what we do to
women in our society. We deny them opWINTER 1982
�portunities based on historical experiences
which have little to do with their innate
abilities or present circumstances, and
much to do with past conditions.
As a female scientist "comfortable in
milieus demanding aggression," I can easily
define sexism (haVing personally experienced it) as the assumption that a generalization true of some persons of a given
gender is necessarily applicable to anyone
of that gender, and the consequent denial
of an opportunity which would otherwise
be granted.
... And what of the exceptional
woman ... ? Prof. Levin would accuse me
of being "perniciously utopian" to expect
exceptional talents to be recognized, but
does not the advancement of society depend upon the recognition, and utilization,
of exceptional talent? ....
Prof. Levin is co.rrect that no one promised me at birth that I would enter the field
most suited to my talents, but having one
way or another managed to do precisely
that, do I not now have the right to be
judged on the basis of my achievements
and experience, without regard to my gender,
as I would expect to be judged without regard to my race or religion? And yet in spite
of my proven ability to work in dominantly
male environments, I am invariably asked
in job interviews how I will "manage," as if I
were a deaf-mute or paraplegic, as if my experience proved nothing. This is the meaning of sexism. That Prof. Levin fails to
understand the meaning of this word in no
way disproves that the word has meaning.
But what of the innate differences between men and women? I would not deny
that men and women "differ significantly";
few feminists do. I do maintain, however,
that with the exception of tasks requiring
great physical strength, these differences
(which Prof. Levin noticeably fails to enumerate) do not necessarily, or even generally, make men any more competent at
holding jobs, solving problems, or wielding
authority than women. Different, yes; better no ....
... apart from the gross biological features, we just don't know what the innate
differences between men and women are,
because we don't know how to distinguish
the. effects of social conditioning from genetic determinism. But to deny that social
attitudes have any impact on human behavior is clearly absurd ....
... in attempting to justify the sexist attitudes which women encounter as the natural result of historical experience, Prof.
Levin actually demonstrates the need for a
"women's movement." He cites the examTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ple of a professor who, used to encountering 1'inferior philosophy examinations"
from female students, comes to expect pre1
cisely that. (Should we ask who this profesl)Or might be?) His expectation is in fact
fulfilled by his own prejudiced perception.
This expectation is changed only by a "run
of good female tests," i.e., the woman must
first prove herself where a man need not.
She must, in fact, initially perform better
than that man in order to get the same
grade, in order to compensate for her professor's bias. Hence for women to obtain
equal recognition of their talents they must
change society's expectations; i.e., they
need a public umovement," a public declaration of intent.
Finally, albeit reluctantly, I must take issue with Prof. Levin's implication that to
be a feminist is to hate men, tacitly or
overtly, and that a woman who engages in
traditionally male activities is ~·m at ease
with her essential identity." As such an accusation can neither be proved nor disproved, Prof. Levin rna y further suggest
with impunity that such a woman "cannot
very well admit this to herself: no ego can
support such self-hate, such ·loss of
meaning."
Well, Prof. Levin, you may refuse to believe this, but I do not hate men. Indeed I
am close to both my father and my two
brothers and am romantically involved
with a wonderful man whom I hope, in
time, to marry. I also have every intention
of having children (by my lawful wedded
husband, I might add), although it may
take some time to work out the logistics of
doing so. How is it possible that I love men,
children, and science? ....
NAOMI 0RESKES
Unley
South Australia
To the Editor of the St. John's Review
I enjoyed the Autumn 1981 issue of the
Review, especially Harry Jaffa's remarkable
article, "Inventing the Past," which taught
me much about my adopted country.
One article, in my opinion, failed to
reach the high standards of this issue.
Michael Levin's" 'Sexism' is Meaningless"
does less than justice to either editor or
author, whose tastes, thinking, and attitudes are, I know, sympathetic to women,
their goals, aspirations, and difficulties.
Some of the article's arguments are clever,
but they have nothing to do with tbe subject at hand. In fact it is hard to say what
the subject at hand is, since Mr. Levin sets
up as a straw man the extreme rhetoric of
the "feminist,'' and then proceeds to ridicule it at the same shrill level. Much of the
discussion about feminism is certainly embarrassing and, as Mr. Levin says, confusing. Instead of helping to clear away the
confusion, the author adds to it by trivializing the argument.
It is silly to say that "sexism" is meaningless. It obviously means something important to a great many people, or he would
not be writing an irritated article against it.
His opening words point out the emotion
the subject calls forth. Should this emotion
not have alerted him to the fact that there
must be more to it than mere silliness? According to his own argument, the obvioUs
is often true, and people should trust their
own commonsense perceptions, feelings,
and beliefs. Are the perceptions of those
against whom he is arguing not bound to
have some validity? It seems perverse to
deny that there was a need for changes in
law and attitudes. Ten years ago I would
never have received a sizeable raise to put
me on the level of the men in my department had it not been for pressure to comply
with the new government rulings. Today
Time-Life has women writers, the Naval
Academy has women midshipmen, and it
works out fine-or at least as imperfectly as
usual. Some "obvious" things are true,
others are not, and it is part of growing up
to learn to distinguish between them.
Most surprising to me is the fact that an
article on "sexism" fails to mention the only
real difference between men and women,
the only difference which is not merely statistical and therefore endlessly arguable in
individual cases. (It need not maher to a
woman mathematician that there are few
other women mathematicians. A creative
person will always be different.) In not
mentioning that women are the only ones
who can and do bear children, Mr. Levin
agrees with 11 feminists" who strangely also
ignore this fact. Lysistrata, and Medea, said
they would rather face the enemy three
times than bear one child. Today, though
science has eliminated the dangers of
childbirth and-they say-fear of pregnancy, women have not changed in this respect. They are still usually responsible for
raising the children they bear; and raising
children is probably more difficult, not less,
than it was in the past.
The subject is highly charged, it seems
to me, because it is the area where public
and private can least easily be disentangled. Reason and emotion, individual and
family converge. How does a legal system
deal with this situation, ensure justice, and
allow freedom? How do men and women
109
�react, and children cope? Abortion legislation and ethics, open adoption r~Fords,
child welfare, ERA, pornography-all
these are highly emotional issues. And the
discussion is so often embarrassing beCause
it touches us personally, on the level of our
intimate feelings and fears. The irrational,
secret fears men and women have towards
each other are surely part of life; where
there is magic, as between a man and a
woman, or a mother and child, there is fear
as well.
Mr. Levin deals only with surface irritations. Does he mean-though he does not
say it-that many problems being discussed are part of life, private, and can
never be solved by political means publicly,
but only worked out privately, with as
much good will and understanding as
possible? His occasionally clever and amusing, irritated and irritating article has not
helped us to understand. And even today,
we need philosophers who will do that.
LARISSA BONFANTE
Professor of Classics
New York University
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Mr. Levin has a point in his article
"'Sexism' is Meaningless" (St. John's Review, Autumn 1981). Many women are angry with men and for no apparent reason.
He concludes that a feminist is angry because she has "lost the sense of the values
peculiar to her sex." This conclusion is possible only if the word "sexism" is meaningless. I suggest that Mr. Levin has simplified
the argument and in so doing has missed
the case where "sexism" does have meaning.
Anger is a result of facing something
that you want to change but cannot. What
can't be changed does not have to be a law
of nature. An individual may become angry if he or she is treated in a way he or she
does not like. If this treatment stems from
applying characteristics true, in general, of
either sex to an individual of that sex, it is
"sexism." Mr. Levin denies that anyone
holds the belief that gender is intrinsically
important. It is true that men and women
are different and that some characteristics
are generally true of men and some of
women. Because I can generalize this way,
I can know a lot about someone immediately. If I meet a man, I know that chances
are he is more aggressive, better at math
and stronger than I am. He may later prove
to be none of these, but they are fair assumptions. This is not "sexism." All I am
saying is that most men are like this and
110
chances are that this individual will fit into
the generalization. I accept that gender is
intrinsically significant. I can be called
"sexist" only ifl am unable to see this man
in any other way than that which fits my
preconception. When a woman is angry at
all men, that too is "sexism." Sexism is the
attitude which holds that the differences
which exist between men and women in
general can be applied, without qualifications, to individual men or to individual
women. It is exactly the belief that gender
is intrinsically important in evaluating individuals. If this is not accepted as the definition of "sexism," then "sexism" is indeed a
meaningless word.
By this definition of "sexism," the word
seems to be susceptible to exactly the same
problems in application as Mr. Levin
points out with the use of "exploitation."
There is a stable central case, that between
individuals, and vaguely peripheral ones,
the judgment of men and women in gen~
eral. Mr. Levin, then, is ignoring the ''stable central case" which gives this word
meaning and focussing on those "vaguely
peripheral ones" to which it is not applica~
ble. "Sexism" has no meaning when ap~
plied to groups. It is entirely a question of
the treatment of individuals.
If "sexism" is not,_ in fact, meaningless,
the question arises whether "anti-discrimination" legislation is an appropriate solution. Can an individual ever be considered
not by the general rule but as an individual
through the law? The law is impersonal
but it is made personal by the judicial system. You are judged in a trial, in which you
are faced by individuals. You and your situ·
ation are judged as a particular one. The
sole purpose of the judicial system is to
interpret the law and to apply it to particular cases. Women should have the right of
recourse under law if they feel they are being treated unfairly. This, however, is a
negative solution. The other side is the
question of affirmative action. Should
quotas be legislated? People should have
the right to hire whomever they wish, yet
will people recognize that women can do a
good job if they do not see many women
working in responsible positions? The generality of the law makes it impossible to
solve this dilemma theoretically. The real
issue is not one of the meaningfulness of
"sexism," or of the ability of the law to address it, but of the extent to which legislation can be justified in doing so.
KATHARINE HEED
Annapolis, Md.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Mr. Levin uses the word "feminist"
with the same thoughtlessness and vehemence with which he claims feminists use
"sexism."
The author characterizes a feminist as a
woman who believes there is absolutely no
difference between the sexes and, therefore, objects to the, in her opinion, prevalent view that men are superior to women.
He also asserts that. feminists secretly know
there is a difference between men and
women although they profess otherwise.
As a result they are filled with self-loathing
and, in classical Freudian behavior, transfer their loathing onto men, the world, and
nature. Mr. Levin's very general argument
does not document this serious accusation.
Why does the request that people be
looked upon each as an individual meet
such rage? It seems reasonable that girls,
like boys, should perfect their talents in
sports, mathematics, physics, biology, literature, or language. Why shouldn't women
expect to have a career after they leave
school, and to receive the same pay as a
man for the same work? Most women will
have to work when they leave school. Mr.
Levin implies that the only permanent jobs
which have evolved naturally for women
are those of telephone operator and
mother. Where has Mr. Levin been if he
has not noticed that society has changed
drastically, not only over the past twenty
years, but since the Industrial Revolution
put women in factories? How can a woman's right to continue at these jobs but also
at others requiring physical or intellectual
ability be denied? Levin thinks it can be beqmse women lack the necessary aggression.
When Mr. Levin writes ''The discomfort
of women in milieus demanding aggression
has been confirmed by experience countless
times," I must question whose experience.
To survive, women must be aggressive.
More than half the households in the
United States require two incomes for sup·
port. Thousands of women work to support
families by themselves. Because women
pay taxes they deserve protection from the
government against discrimination.
Aggressive behavior is not limited to the
office. Perhaps Mr. Levin has never experienced shopping, especially in a bargain
basement or in a department store during a
big sale. Five minutes in Loehman's would
change even Mr. Levin's mind about ag·
gression. Perhaps Mr. Levin never has had
to return an unsatisfactory article of clothing or of food, or to argue about being overcharged for a service. No one can deny that
driving children to school or oneself to work
WINTER 1982
�requires aggression. Many women perform
at least one of these tasks daily.
Mr. Levin's expression "people think"
makes his argument less cogent. The people I know don't think the way Mr. Levin's
people do. My experience, both at St.
John's and in my job, shows me that a
woman is expected to perform tasks, both
academic and secular, as well as she can,
i.e., as well as a man.
On such a serious question which involves the lives of over half the population
of the United States, why does Mr. Levin
think he can dismiss legitimate demands
with the generalization "people think" or,
even worse, "ordinary people think"? How
can he attack with such vehemence "feminists" whose work and political beliefs he
does not clarify? Isn't his article merely
pOlitical cant?
ELOISE PEEKE COLLINGwOOD
Annapolis, Md.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
... What is one to make of a philosopher
who identifies "essential identity" and "significance" with gender and who lets a simple comma serve as the only argumentative
transition in the statement that "Women
differ physically from men, and act differently"? Our bodies are ponderous and
absorbing fates, each one different, but we
are capable of directing them in moral actions and of giving them meaning with our
discourse. We do not increase our chances
of finding meaning when stereotyping is
deemed reasonable and factual. Prof.
Levin worries about tiny firefighters when
he might have been watching the Olym·
pies, but the variety of biological "fact" is
acknowledged even by him, despite his
confusion of instances and hypothetical
classes, instinct and behavior, and biology
and politics (for the last of which we have
another useful neologism, "racism," to give
suffici~nt historical warning).
The implication that troubles me more is
the denial of the brilliance and achievement of St. John's women and, manifested
right here, their unequal share in recognition. And the damage to both the taught
and the teacher if anyone should seriously
think that "if a professor has found over
many years that females write inferior philosophy examinations, it is reasonable for
him to anticipate that the next female philosophy examination will be inferior." A
nice ambiguity toward the end there: who,
after all, in the philosophical life is the
marker? In a society more severely maledominated and oligarchical than our own,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
and no less stultified, Dante submitted
himself under correction to "donne
'ch'avete intelletto d'amore." Such intelletto might get us all a better grasp of
public understanding and the cardinal virtues and help us distinguish the vicious circle of self-congratulating conventions from
the deep imperative of mutual liberation.
E. C. RONQUIST
Concordia University
Montreal, Canada
continue to enjoy the right to select national leaders, who routinely involve all of
us in crises that could destroy civilization
as we know it and, indeed, could destroy
the world and its ecosystems.
If the United States must remain militarily strong, women can help us do so. As a
feminist, I even dare hope they may help a
little to humanize the military.
LEON V. DRISKELL
Professor of English
University of Louisville
Louisville, Ky.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Professor Michael Levin's article "'Sexism' is meaningless" (St. John's Review,
Autumn 1981) so frequently violated stan·
dards of argumentation that I found it hard
to take seriously. Nevertheless, I suspect it
may do considerable harm, chiefly because
it appears in your publication-the standards of which have seemed to me generally high. I cannot undertake here to point
out all of the essay's faults, but I have selected one which seems to me particularly
flagrant.
Because it suits his purposes, or because
he is not paying attention to what he
writes, Professor Levin equates conscription with battle readiness. The issue of
conscripting women, particularly in times
of peace, must be separated from such issues
as degrees of aggressiveness and tolerance
of the stress of combat. When Professor
Levin writes that the "pivotal objection to
conscripting women has nothing to do
with any inherent 'inferiority' of femaleness, everything to do with the ability of
women to fight," he is guilty of grievous
equivocation.
Many a Norman has been conscripted to
do clerical work, administrative work, or
strategic work. Many a Norma has done
similar work in the private sector (with relatively higher pay, enormously greater freedom of choice), and some of those Normans
have been maladroitly thrust into combat
though no more aggressive or tolerant of
"the stress of combat" than their female
counterparts.
Conscription means yielding one's free~
dam of choice, but it does not automatically mean going into battle. Neither does
abandoning sex discrimination mean that
all of us-men and women-must give up
our differences or share bathrooms. Re~
turning from Korea some years ago, I
found that many of my male friends and all
of my women friends had been going
ahead with their lives while I submitted to
military regimentation. Meantime, all of us
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
I will not address Mr. Levin's callous misrepresentations of the positions of those of
us whose active vocabulary includes the
word "sexism," although anyone interested
in reasoning as opposed to sophistry could
not but take offense at the many misrepresentations in his article. I will, however, as
a social scientist in training, challenge Mr.
Levin, or anyone else, to present me with
clear evidence that " ... there are general,
innate, psychological differences between
the sexes." Mr. Levin claims that this is
" ... simply a factual belief, supported by a
vast body of evidence." I know of no such
"evidence" that can be drawn from the social science disciplines and that would withstand close scrutiny. If Mr. Levin's evidence
is drawn from disciplines or traditions other
than the social sciences, I would certainly
not object to seeing that as well. I ask him
to produce the evidence, and all can debate
it, and we will debate the larger question of
upon what basis is one able to make reasonable statements about human nature and
behavior, and what should be the method
of verification for such statements. These
are issues that members of the St. John's
community can get their teeth into, but in
order to do so we must move away from
the unsupported statements made by Mr.
Levin. Furthermore, I ask Mr. Levin to
produce this evidence because I believe
that the ultimate truth and validity of his
argument depend upon it.
I would like to make one further statement. (This should be allowed an irate alumnus.) I was deeply disturbed by the decision
to print that article. It was so clearly biased,
so badly reasoned and argued, in places simply so silly, that it does not represent St.
John's College well. Mr. Raditsa is using
The St. John's Review to propagate his own
political philosophy. I will not debate here
whether it is a good philosophy, or a correct one, I would only raise the question of
111
�whether it is the purpose of The Review to
propagate it. I think not. I also think that
his doing this is only made more unbearable
by the fact that he is in the process presenting us with articles which insult our illtelligence. I wonder if Mr. Raditsa does not care
more about propagating his political philosophy than he does about serving St. John's.
He must certainly see that the two goals are
not identical, and that he was made editor
of the St.john's Review to do the latter and
not to do the former at the latter's expense.
DAVID E. WOOLWINE
Princeton, New Jersey
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
As an alumnus of St. John's College, I
was morally and intellectually affronted by
your decision to print the article, " 'Sexism' is Meaningless," by Michael Levin, in
the recent issue of The St. John's Review.
Has The St. John's Review become such a
mouthpiece for right-wing views that it will
print anything which supports them-even
an article of such patently poor scholarship
and moral insensitivity as Michael Levin's
piece? The factual and logical errancies of
the article are manifest, and scarcely need
refutation. The flagrant moral callousness
of the article is more serious, flying as it
does in the face of obvious injustice, first
by belittling and denying the history and
continuing reality of that injustice, then by
supporting and sanctioning it. If the article
had been titled not " 'Sexism' is Meaningless" but rather " 'Racism' is Meaningless"
or even "'Anti-Semitism' is Meaningless,"
would you have printed it? Let the Editorial
Staff examine its memory and it will discover how the arguments put forward by
Mr. Levin, and similar unsupported claims
of "scientific" evidence, have previously
been used to "prove" the genetic, moral,
and intellectual "difference" of blacks and
Jews, supporting institutionalized bigotry,
the denial of civil liberties, and unequal
opportunities in housing, education, and
employment.
STEPHANIE SLOWINSKI
Princeton, New Jersey
112
Professor Levin replies:
Those of us who persist in noting that
men and women differ are so regularly accused of being "for discrimination" that
my wife dubs this "The Ritual Missing of
the Point." The point, of course, is that the
typical man does differ in certain systematic
ways from the typical woman. It is no one's
fault, and people are within their rights to
use this patent fact in making judgments.
Within their legal rights?, some correspondents ask. Certainly. Anyone who thinks
that individuals should be treated as individuals will repudiate the quota mentality
that has settled on our public officials like a
disease. Quotas should be repealed and
abandoned immediately. I also believe that
laws against discrimination are unsupportable. They conflict with liberty of association. If I choose not to hire you because of
your looks (or sex, or color, or religion) I
withhold from you my consent to enter into
an agreement. I am not thereby thwarting
your will or interfering with your liberty,
since you do not have any prior right to my
consent. Unless you regard me as your slave.
Some confusion has arisen about the
Norma-Norman example. I was simply repeating the sort of thing feminists cite. In
fact, this so-called "Pygmalion effect" has
not been scientifically replicated, and what
is more, educators are now generally agreed
that the ordinary methods of classroom instruction are somewhat biased in favor of
girls, who are temperamentally more inclined to sit still for lessons.
As for my Freudian analysis: in addition
to the evidence cited in the references to
Ed Levine, there is also some suggestive
work by S. Deon Henderson on the rising
female crime rate and its possible relation
to anomie. Unfortunately, as Miss Henderson herself reports, investigation into the
adverse effects of feminism is an absolutely
taboo topic in sociology. No one will touch
it. That is probably why we have no psycho·
social profile of the typical feminist, even
though social scientists will normally rush
to study just about anything. So, even
though I lack medical credentials, someone
has to begin suggesting hypotheses. I should
note as well Frances Lear's concession (The
Nation, 12/12/81) that "lesbians make up
a large portion of the volunteer work force"
in feminist political organizations, which I
take as some further confirmation.
I agree with Miss Heed that anger is often prima face evidence of a wrong; often,
but not always. Sometimes it is a symptom
of dysfunction.
I stress again that I approve as much as
anyone does "treating each individual as
an individual." With little faith that repeti·
tion will convince my more splenetic correspondents of my good faith, I turn to some
more specific points.
l) Neurologists like Restak and Pribram,
endocrinologists like Money, and even selfdescribed "feminist" psychologists like Mac·
coby and Jacklin have found that by four
months male and female newborns respond differently to such variables as speech
tone and exhibit neurological differences.
Benbow and Stanley found that 10-12 year
old girls who both tested as well as the ablest
boys on math aptitude tests and reported
finding math as much a girl's as a boy's subject, did less well than the same boys on
more difficult math aptitude tests. At the
upper levels of ability, innate differences
appear most clearly. Some people still tell
each other that all this is "social conditioning" (whatever that might mean). Some
people also still believe the Earth is flat.
2) A woman should indeed be free to do
what she wants. Who denies that? But even
sanguine feminists have lately admitted to
"logistic problems" in pursuing a career
and raising a family. Even the EEOC has
lately admitted that the famous wage dis·
crepancies between men and women are
entirely due to voluntary decisions women
make-e.g., having babies during their
prime career advancement years. The feminist "solution" tends, unhealthily, to be
advocacy of government intervention.
3) That there are bad arguments for jew·
ish covetousness does not rule out good
arguments for gender differences. Since no
one is planning concentration camps for
women, the implied analogy is even more
absurd. In fact, all questions about racial
and ethnic differences are empirical, in
many cases still open, and worth investigating. Given the number of Japanese Nobel
Laureates in physics, I would be neither
surprised nor displeased to learn that Japanese are smarter than the rest of us.
WINTER 1982
�Editor's Note
On Harry V. Jaffa's
"Inventing the Past"
The policy of the St. John's Review is '
to publish writing addressed to important
questions. Some of these questions are To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
disturbing as the response to Professor
Levin's article shows. Such open invesHarry V. Jaffa's article, '~Inventing the
tigation and discussion is in the tradi- Past," (Autumn 1981) was interesting and
tions of St. John's College. The views valuable, but I was bothered by his slightexpressed by the writers in the St. John's ing reference to the protests and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. He
Review do not necessarily reflect the
speaks of the people involved as seeking a
opinions of the editor.
minority veto upon majority action, as trying, ' 4 in behalf of their Thoreauvian consciences," to "arrest the process of constitutional government."
I question whether the events of the sixties and early seventies actually fit the
categories of "majority action" and "constitutional government." To mention some
of them: in the election of 1964 the majority
elected Johnson as President after he denounced Goldwater's proposal for extensive bombing of North Vietnam-and after
the election, he did just what he had denounced. The Vietnam war was waged, of
course, not after a declaration of war by
Congress as provided by the Constitution,
but on the basis of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which itself was passed by Congress
after it heard misleading testimony by the
Administration.
Coming to 1968, the majority elected
Nixon, who had a plan to end the war-and
then waged it for four more years and included a secret bombing of Cambodia.
I submit that these events certainly do
not fit the categories of majority action and
constitutional process, and to talk as if they
do is to talk about a dream world.
THOMAS
RALEIGH
Cocheton, New Yark
Professor Jaffa replies:
Mr. Thomas Raleigh questions my assertion that the demonstrators against the
Vietnam war, or some of them, were attempting to "arrest the process of constitutional government." He does so on the
ground that the actions of the United
States, in prosecuting the war, were themselves unconstitutional
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The principal ground of his objections is
that the war was not waged "after a declaration of war as provided by the Constitution, but on the basis of the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution, which itself was passed by
Congress after it heard misleading testimony by the Administration."
The war in Vietnam was a limited war,
and the United States has prosecuted
many such wars without a formal declaration by the Congress. Among these have
been the naval war with France, during the
presidency of john Adams, Woodrow Wilson's war with Mexico, many Indian wars,
and, above all, the Civil War. The last, our
greatest war, was from the point of view of
the Lincoln government a "rebellion." To
have asked for a declaration of war against
"rebels" would have been to confer upon
them a political status that it was the whole
point of the war to deny. This points up
the paradox that there are circumstances
in which a declaration of war may defeat
the policy for which the war is waged.
Such was the case in Vietnam. Rightly or
wrongly, the Johnson administration (and
later that of Nixon) thought that North
Vietnam itself should not be invaded, and
that this "privileged sanctuary" could not
be maintained once a formal declaration of
war had been made. It was feared that if
North Vietnam was invaded that China
would intervene, as it did in North Korea
in 1950.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was not the
sole basis for the prosecution of the war.
Not a man or gun was sent to Vietnam except upon the basis of appropriations made
by the Congress. And not a dollar was appropriated, except upon the basis of extensive-sometimes exhaustive-hearings by
committees of both houses, and after
debates and votes in both houses. The
Congress authorized every step that the
administration took, and the American
people participated in such authorizations
through their elected representatives. The
opposition to the prosecution of the war
was extremely intense, and extremely vocal, but no one can rightly say that their
rights were ignored or suppressed.
To say that the American government
acted unconstitutionally in Vietnam is to
say that a free government cannot act in
such circumstances except upon something
like unanimous consent. This is absurd.
113
�The St. John's Review
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Annapolis, Maryland 21404
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Radista, Leo
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Durholz, Janet
Bolotin, David
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Allanbrook, Wye Jamison
Brann, Eva T. H.
Dennison, George
Mullen, William
Loewenberg, Robert
Smith, Brother Robert
Bell, Charles G.
Le Gloannecc, Anne-Marie
Josephs, Laurence
Montanelli, Indro
Collins, Arthur
Dulich, Jean
Navrozov, Lev
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Volume XXXIII, Number 2 of The St. John's Review, formerly The College. Published in Winter 1982.
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The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_33_No_2_1982
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Annapolis, MD
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Text
Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan
_
I
_,;
rY
. . . have m the past three years set up at Annapolis the only liberal arts •,..c~l~ e
m the United States.
This book describes what they have done; it ts a tribute to what t ey a
'
~
Barr
Mr.
St.
M R.summerand 1937 Buchanan came totheir John's Col~ e
to put into effect
answer to ~~e
of
major problems in liberal education today-the problem o o o
f
many people can go to college for four years, become b chel
arts, and still be uneducated. Their answer is the now amous St.
Johns Program, which consists principally in the Cu~d
discussion of the works of about one hundred and sevente~ut~rs
in the Western tradition.
~
From the beginning one of Mr. Barr's chief ·function
sident of the college has been to explain the St. John's P
to
assorted
the general public. He has made innumerable speeches
Rotary clubs, chambers of commerce, groups of educl'toiT," l_d
domestic clubs; has written magazine articles, has started a~d
on a series of radio programs describing activities at t~e,
and in general has played the role of public spokesm
or t e
college-a role to which his congenial and somewhat
ular
o
pefsonality is well fitted. Just as important has been h.
keep the college from falling off the financial brink it as been
teetering on for the past several years. Yet even though
very busy performing as college politician and master ~y
M
fieT k\>t
"'~"' in the New Program<lm< '" "'""""History 26
M,. ''"<Oil fu.rl,
·' ll•cl<
seminar
and to teach
popular course in the Old Program. Perhaps his most
characteristic from the student point of view is the fa
knows most of them well enough to address them by
t
st
g
e
st
~
names.
Mr. Buchanan as Dean of the college has necessaril
ad to
·
n
concern himself with the internal affairs of the college.
task has been to arrange the actual working structure o = i culum, to determine the subject matter and schedule of cia es, o
o~
provide the order and locus in which the various parts
gram function-in short to guide and co~ordinate the wo actua 1y
done on the great books. Besides his work on the curreue
serves as a reference point for disciplinary matters, and, n con£ r~
ence with members of the administration, faculty, and stu
y,
determines the great policies on which St. John's operat~
from his administrative duties Mr. Buchanan acts as the~eader o"\
the Junior seminar.
t:.__..
Even though separately they have different functions~~ad
inistrative men, both Mr. Barr and Mr. Buchanan are ss ta y
a · g
teachers, are working for the same end, and as a team ar
St. John's a liberal arts college which, oddly enough, tef'!y a"Jd
practices the liberal arts.
~
6
:c
~
�Editor's Note
FROM OUR READERS
With the Winter 1982 issue the St. John's Review began
to charge new subscribers. Old subscribers, St. John's
alumni and friends, students and their families will con·
tinue to receive the magazine without charge. My desire
to turn the St. John's Review into an unambiguously pub·
lie magazine and to win an additional audience prompted
this decision. The St. John's Review will appear three times
a year, in the fall, winter, and summer-L.R.
ON " 'SEXISM' IS MEANINGLESS"
Editor:
Leo Raditsa
Managing Editor:
Thomas Parran, Jr.
Editorial Assistants:
David Carnes
Janet Durholz
Consulting Editors:
David Bolotin,
Eva Brann,
Curtis A. Wilson.
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned comments are also
welcome.
THEST)OHNSREVIEW (formerly The College) is published by
the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland
21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Samuel S. Kutler, Dean.
Published thrice yearly, in the fall, winter, and summer. For those
not on the distribution list, subscriptions: $12.00 yearly, $24.00 for
two years, or $36.00 for three years, payable in advance. Address
all correspondence to The St. John's Review, St. John's College,
Annapolis, Maryland 21404.
Volume XXXIII
SUMMERI982
Number 3
©1982, St. John's College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4 720
Cover: Page 6 of the nineteen forty St. John's College Yearbook.
ComPosition: Britton Composition Co.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
After reading Mr. Doskow's letter answering Michael Levin
("'Sexism' is Meaningless" St. John's Review Autumn 1981), I decided to abandon temporarily my subjugation as housewife and
respond to Mr. Doskow's myopic view of human nature. In his
letter Mr. Doskow accuses Mr. Levin of various "prejudices" concerning women. In so doing he examines the condition of women,
past and present, under two false assumptions. The first false assumption is that women have been forced by men to stay at home
and rear children. The second is that women are still being forced
by men to stay at home and rear children. Underlying both assumptions and embedded in the fabric of his letter (though nowhere stated explicitly) is the further assumption that the habit
of centuries has no connection with and is a violation of the laws
of nature. (It is, however, open to question whether or not Mr.
Doskow accepts the existence of permanent standards which
dictate certain modes of human behavior.) In answer to Mr.
Doskow' s first assumption, I must cite a book by George Gilder
called Sexual Suicide in which Gilder claims that men never forced
women to stay at home and rear children. In fact, women, because of the nature of female sexuality (which includes the processes of pregnancy and childbirth) have traditionally required
men to marry them and provide for the upkeep of the resulting
children. Male sexuality, according to Gilder, is characterized by
indiscriminate and temporary liasons, and only the necessity of
fathering a woman's children causes men to embrace monogamy. If Mr. Doskow would pause in his ruminations on the
plight of women and read the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, he would see there a clear demonstration ofthe necessity,
imposed by women upon men, that men marry in order to establish themselves in civilized society. The second assumption is
false because women are now encouraged to play more roles in
society than we ever have in human history. The present education of women encourages masculine, not feminine qualities.
Mr. Doskow assumes that the "environmental differences
boys and girls are subjected to" are responsible for different
forms of behavior in boys and girls and hence the "subjugation"
of the latter. (I would like to know what the term "environmental
differences" signifies-barometric pressure, or humidity???) I
can't disagree with the claim that girls have usually been educated
with their feminine characteristics in mind-receptivity, for example-until now. Mr Deskew does not bother to address himself to the question of whether or not it is proper to prepare girls for
motherhood, and I tend to think that he considers motherhood
such a casual affair that education regarding it is unnecessary.
The modern liberal has placed himself in the uneasy position of
asserting the primacy of early childhood development in the correct functioning of society, while maintaining all along that anyone-mother, father, daycare worker, psychologist, teacher(continued on page 2)
�.HESTJOHNSREVIEWSUMMER1982
3
St. John's under Barr and Buchanan: the Fight with the Navy
and the Departure of the Founders ]. Winfree Smith
20
Schiller's Drama- Fulfillment of History and Philosophy in
Poetry Gisela Berns
31
Some Chinese Poems
39
That Graver Fire Bell: A Reconsideration of the Debate over
Slavery from the Standpoint of Lincoln Robert]. Loewenberg
51
Sophocles' Ajax and the Ajax Myth Philip Holt
62
Toward Reading Thomas Aquinas
translated by julie Landau
Thomas]. Slakey
REvmw EssAY
68
Updike and Roth: Are They Writers? John Updike's Rabbit
Is Rich, and Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound review
essay by Lev Navrozov
�can assist in said developlnent equipped
with nothing more than a brief course of
training. Motherhood involves much more
than a course in applied social sciences,
however. For one thing, only a mother can
do it: that is, a woman who has given birth
to or accepted as her own through adoption an utterly dependent human person.
The commitment made is physical, emotional, and instinctive. It is the most powerful bond between two people in nature.
The idea that "mothering" can be accomplished by anyone but a mother is analogous to the suggestion that the function of
husband or wife could be performed by
someone hired for the purpose: the essential personal involvement which constitutes
a marriage would be absent. Motherhood,
then, is a role which demands a participation which is intrinsically connected with
the very soul of the mother; a participation
which never ceases to exist and never ceases
to demand the selfless cooperation of the
mother in a natural process which entails
the separation of the beloved (the child)
from the lover (the mother) with the cooperation and encouragement of the lover. In
this way the natural order provides for the
existence of society. It is only the personal
element in motherhood-"my child" vs.
"the child" which ensures the possibility of
moral education; moral actions are, fundamentally, not performed out of self-interest.
If I die for my country it is not because in
doing so I consider myself to be performing
a rational act, but because it is my country
and I love it. If this personal element, that
is, the task of "mothering" as performed by
a mother, is absent in child-rearing, then
the soundest basis for moral actions is removed from society. Given, then, the importance of the position of a mother to a
society, one must surely admit the necessity
of preparing potential mothers for such a
role.
Mr. Doskow seems to believe that nature
makes no significant distinction between
men and women. He also claims, implicitly,
that habit must necessarily be a perversion
of political and social truth. That nature
and convention, or habit, are distinct is not
to say that they are apposed, and it is here
that Mr. Doskow makes his mistake. That
education is purposive (which it necessarily
is) does not mean that it is a violation of
nature, and Mr. Doskow assumes that
2
throughout his letter without bothering to
substantiate his claim. In this he seems to
fall prey to a vice common to those who assume that human nature is malleable or
nonexistent: he neglects the problem of
necessity. Although political society is an
institution, that is, it is made by men, it
must do more than provide us with the opportunity for happiness. It must be able to
withstand the vicissitudes of fortune; it
must last. Although my tutors at St. John's
succeeded in giving me a phobia of secondary sources, I must cite a story I have had
occasion to read many times since I graduated. It is about three pigs and their varying abilities to survive in the "wide world"
after they leave home. The smart pig, of
course, worked hard at building ·a brick
house while the other pigs played. The
practical pig survived and protected his
brothers because he was able to provide for
protection against the gluttonous wolf. Mr.
Doskow's sentiments about the "rights" of
women reflect the finer sensibilities of the
less sensible pigs-it would be nice if society were constructed in such a way that
everyone could do what he wanted. Yesterday my son brought home a social studies
newsletter his kindergarten class reads.
This particular issue featured the story of a
female coalminer. In fact, every newsletter
he brings home features a woman doing a
job ather than rearing children and keeping
house. I have not yet seen an elementary
school textbook describe child-rearing as a
job particularly suited to women (so much
for evidence in favor of the "subjugation of
women" theory). What these newsletters
(and I think Mr. Doskow) forget to take
into consideration is .the fact that someone
has to raise the children and women usually do a better job of it than men. But
like every other job one must be trained to
perform it, and habit serves to reinforce aspects of motherhood which would otherwise be difficult to endure.
Men perfect themselves in political
society. That perfection rests on the qualities of each man and is accomplished by
means of his nature and not by its subjugation. Education is the means by which
common and permanent standards are
communicated to individuals in such a way
that each man participates, often unknowingly, in the propagation of aims which are
intellectually accessible to only a few men.
It is this unthinking participation in the
preservation of the moral health of society
by means of the family (which is the first
and most effective school) which Mr.
Doskow calls "prejudice". We must consider men and women not as interchangeable parts in a machine, units possessing
"rights", but as members of mankind,
working in cooperation for the greatest
good possible. Men are such that the greatness of one man shines on all of us, just as
the infamy committed by one man calls
the rest of us into question. When Father
Brown, of the Chesterton stories, explained
the method he used to discover the identity
of a murderer he said that he "became"
the murderer and hence could imagine the
circumstances of the crime and identify
the culprit. Father Brown understood that
what connects us to each other is not a superficial similarity of abilities or sympathies
but a common late. This unity shows itself,
strangely, in our ability to perform the various and separate functions necessary to
the well-being of a political society. In a
stable society these accomplishments-the
different kinds of work done by its members-will benefit both the fathers and
mothers who perform their work and the
society as a whole. Just as a mother raises
her child knowing that he will, if all goes
well, cease his dependence on her and become a father or mother in his own right,
our satisfaction at being citizens rests to
some extent on our capacity for selflessness.
The success of work depends on its being
performed in a political framework, and
upon this political nature of work depends
the stability of society. Those who complain of "prejudice," when differences between men and women are recognized by a
society in the education of its children are
apparently unable to make the essential
connection between human nature as expressed in habit and the higher aims of
society, which utilizes habit to further its
own aims and protect itself from decay. To
disregard the primacy of motherhood both
in a woman's life and in the larger context
of society is to disregard the fundamental
basis for moral education and the place
nature holds in our society. If Mr. Doskow's
objections to "prejudice" lie in a fundamental difference between his opinions
and the aims of this regime, then he should
{continued on inside back cover)
SUMMER 1982
�St. John's College under Barr and
Buchanan: the Fight with the Navy
and the Departure of the Founders
J.
Winfree Smith
Public Interest and Internal Changes under
Barr and Buchanan
The St. John's curriculum, differing so radically from
the curriculums of most American colleges, evoked wide·
spread interest as soon as it was inaugurated. In Decem~
ber 1938 Walter Lippmann wrote a column that appeared
in many newspapers in which he praised the St. John's
way. He praised it primarily because it promised a recov·
ery of an understanding of the principles on which the
American Republic was founded, the understanding that
the founding fathers had because of their own study of
the classics. HI do know," he wrote, ''that in this country
and abroad there are men who see that the onset of barbarism must be met not only by programs of rearmament,
but by another revival of learning. It is the fact, moreover,
that after tentative beginnings in several of the American
universities, Columbia, Virginia, and Chicago, a revival is
actually begun-is not merely desired, talked about, and
projected, but is in operation with teachers and students
and a carefully planned course of study." He concluded
with the prophecy: "I venture to believe that ... in the fu-
These pages are taken from Chapters IV, V, and VI of J. Winfree
Smith's history of St. John's College from 1937 to 1958, which the St.
John's College Press will publish in 1983. The work draws on many un·
published sources in the St. John's College Archives, in the Buchanan
Files at Houghton Library, Harvard, and elsewhere.
J.
Winfree Smith has been a tutor at St. John's College since 1941.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ture men will point to St. John's College and say that there
was the seed-bed of the American Renaissance." 1
There were many who wanted to know about the revival
as it was in operation. A series of articles in the Baltimore
Sun in January 1939 gave vignettes of what was going on
in the tutorials-' The freshmen in their mathematics tutorial were wrestling with some of the most fundamental
questions in mathematics raised by their investigation of
Book 5 of Euclid in the context of the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes. The same freshmen in their Jan·
guage tutorial were making careful analyses of Greek
sentences and were translating Plato's Meno, using the
Greek they were learning to try to find out what was happening in that dialogue, why Socrates said what he said, or
asked what he asked, and what Meno's answers might
mean in the development of the dialogue. The sophomores
were enthusiastically engaged with Apollonius' Conics,
being in a position to contemplate the beautiful logical
and analogical structure of the first book of that work,
which they had recently finished reading. In their language tutorial they were translating from a chapter of
Augustine's Confessions, and producing the following:
"They [Augustine's friends who wanted him to write the
book] are desirous to hear me confess what I am within;
whither neither eye, nor ear, nor understanding is able to
dive; they desire it as ready to believe me; but will they
know me?" This led to a lively discussion of Augustine's
effort at self-knowledge and of whether one can know
oneself thoroughly.
About a year later Life magazine sent to the college
Gerard Pie!, who later became the founder and publisher
of Scientific American 3 Pie! brought with him an excel-
3
�lent photographer and together they produced with words
and pictures a quite accurate and attractive account of St.
John's with the new program in operation. There was a pic·
ture of Buchanan leading a seminar, of a student, Francis
Mason, in rapt contemplation of one of Euclid's regular
solids, of a group of students in the snow using an instru·
mentwith which Aristarchus (third century B.C.) made measurements from which to calculate the sizes and distances
of the sun and moon. A two-page spread showed a shelf of
the great books with those translated by St. John's faculty
clearly marked. These pictures and the accompanying
story, both concise and complete, gave a great boost to the
enrollment. In the fall of 1940 ninety-three freshmen
enrolled as contrasted with forty in 1938 and fifty-four in
1939. People sometimes referred to the class of 1944 as the
"L"~e cIass ." ...
t1
Criticism from Outside and Inside
and Effect of World War II
Hutchins, Adler, and Barr were not simply advocates of
a different kind of college education from what was to be
found in American colleges and universities generally.
They were constantly attacking college education in insti·
tutions other than St. John's. Barr in a public address
would say such things as: "Modern college education is
being conducted in a new tower of Babel staffed by pro·
fessors often proud of their own ignorance, its corridors
crammed with bewildered students learning a hodgepodge
of useless skills and becoming increasingly unintelligible to
one another and to the world they face." Hutchins and Barr
were devastatingly witty, and this made their attacks all the
more effective and provocative. Hutchins and Alder tended
to blame John Dewey and his followers for much that they
considered wrong with American college education.
It was understandable, then, that there were various
counterattacks and especially from the followers of Dewey.
Dewey himself in August 1944 published an article in For·
tune called "A Challenge to Liberal Thought." The article
did not refer by name to any of the challengers except
Robert Hutchins. It did mention Hutchins's "theological
fellow travelers." It did not mention St. John's, but it was
generally taken to be directed at St. John's because of such
sentences as: "The idea that an adequate education can
be obtained by means of a miscellaneous assortment of a
hundred books, more or less, is laughable when viewed
practically."1 Dewey concluded from Hutchins's claim that
human nature is everywhere and always the same that
Hutchins must also think that the principles governing
human conduct are unchangeable, that they are to be
found not by experimental inquiry or direct observation,
but in books. He saw this partly as a reversion to antiquity
but even more as a reversion to what he considered to be
4
the anti-scientific dogmatism of the Middle Ages. Dewey
himself was, of course, particularly concerned that education should follow the way of experiment and observation
as much in the study of man and society as in the study of
non-human things. He saw this way as closely linked with
freedom of inquiry made possible by democracy and with
the technological control of nature. Hutchins and his
friends were, in his opinion, anti-scientific, anti-democratic
dogmatists, mindful only of the past and oblivious to the
present.
In the issue of Fortune for January 1945 Alexander
Meiklejohn had "A Reply to John Dewey." Meiklejohn
quite naturally supposed that Dewey was attacking the St.
John's curriculum, and his reply was largely a defense of
that curriculum.
Against the charge that the St. John's way of studying
the past led to dogmatism, to the acceptance of some set
of beliefs held by somebody in the past, he pointed out
that in reading and discussing the great books a St. John's
student meets not just one set of beliefs, but many con·
flicting sets; that he "will find Protagoras at war with Plato,
Kant at war with Hume, Rousseau at war with Locke,
Veblen at war with Adam Smith, and he must try to understand both sides of these controversies."' To the charge
that reading a miscellaneous collection of great books in
the four college years is laughable as a way of education,
when viewed practically, he replied that, for all the startling audacity of having college students read many such
very difficult books, the studying of these books was not
irresponsibly done, being subject through careful discussion to guidance, correction, and criticism. Against the
charge that St. John's ignores the way of experimental in·
quiry and observation, he pointed out that every student
at St. John's was required to devote half of his course of
study to the learning of science and of mathematics as the
'language' upon which scientific achievement depends.
In regard to this disagreement between Dewey and
Meiklejohn, it should be noted that they both assumed
that the St. John's kind of education involved an interest
in the past as such. That was, and still is, incorrect. Teachers and students have no interest in studying the past as
past. They have an interest in reading certain books that
were written in the past because those books raise impor·
tant perennial questions, questions which are always live
and present questions if we let our thought get hold of
them. Moreover, St. John's was and is perhaps more radi·
cal than either Dewey or Meiklejohn was. For Dewey,
while acknowledging that a study of the past is necessary
for understanding the present, was quite sure that modern
thought represents a tremendous gain over ancient and
medieval thought. Meiklejohn, though quite clear about
such thinkers as Hume and Kant, nonetheless thought
and supposed it to be a basic postulate of St. John's that
"from the time of the Greeks until the present the knowledge and wisdom of men have been growing." Actually, at
St. John's it would be a question whether there has been
SUMMER 1982
�such growth, a question not so easily answered if by wisdom is meant the wisdom about the whole of things. While
one could hardly deny that there has been a tremendous
growth of 'knowledge' in the modern natural sciences, of
which St. John's tries to take sufficient cognizance, it is
not easy to decide whether Plato or Hegel were closer to
the knowledge of the whole of things. ·
Dewey's response to Meiklejohn was a letter to Fortune
in which he said that he had not been referring to St.
John's at all in his "A Challenge to Liberal Thought."
The philosophy I criticized [he wrote] is so current and so
much more influential than is the work of St. John's, there are
only a few sentences in my article even indirectly referring to
St. John's. Rightly or wrongly, I had not supposed that the
program and work of St. John's was of such importance as to
justify my use of the pages of Fortune in extended criticism of
it, especially as a number of effective criticisms of it had already been made. 3
The criticisms to which he was referring were principally those of Sidney Hook, which had appeared in the
New Leader of May 26, 1944, and June 3, 1944, and were
later included in a book entitled Education for Modern
Man under the title "A Critical Appraisal of the St. John's
College Curriculum." Some of Hook's criticisms were the
same that Dewey had made of Hutchins and Hutchins's
"fellow travelers." He claimed that the people at St. John's
thought that man has an essential unchangeable nature
and that the unchangeable truth about man's nature and
about all things can be learned because it is written down
in ancient and medieval books, that to possess these truths
all one has to do is to read those books. He mentioned that
it was the hidden assumption in the philosophy underlying St. John's that "the true answers to our problems can
be found by assaying the heritage of antiquity and the
Middle Ages."4 He recognized that in studying books written in ancient Greece the St. John's people were not seeking to know Greek man but to know about human nature,
but he seemed to think that what one learns directly from
a Greek book is only something about Greek man. He
raised the question others have raised through the years,
of why there are no Chinese or Hindu books in the St.
John's list, why, granted that the reading of ancient literature develops the imagination, the reading of ancient oriental literature might not produce an imaginative sympathy
with the problems and experience of those Eastern people
with whom we have to deal and will have to deal. He attacked what he considered to be the St. John's doctrine
that there is "transfer of learning." Presumably he was referring, for example, to the assumption that in studying
the grammar of one language one can learn certain things
that appear universally in language, the knowledge of
which will be profitable in learning any language and in
learning how language may be a means of inquiry or may
convey truth about things. He also attacked the view that
a good way to learn mathematics and science is through
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the reading of classical works in those areas, and he invoked the formidable names of Richard Courant, Bertrand
Russell, and Albert Einstein in support of his attack, all of
whom in letters from which he quoted supposed that what
was in question was a study of the historical development
of mathematics and science rather than an understanding
of what is fundamental in them through sharing and exploring the thought of the original discoverers. Those responsible for the St. John's curJiculum never supposed
that it would always be the case that the original discoverer of a science or a scientific theory would make a more
intelligible presentation of it than someone else. That it is
usually the case is not something known a priori, but is a
matter of the long experience of both ways of presentation.
Some of Sidney Hook's criticisms were justified. Barr's
harsh judgments of other colleges went too far. Barr had
no doubt made exaggerated claims when he said that the
St. John's students were going to read every one of the
books on the list in its entirety. It was certainly debatable
whether the whole St. John's curriculum were suitable, as
Barr maintained, for all students of college age. It was certainly conceivable that a college student might learn as
much from analyzing a bad book such as Hitler's Mein
Kampf as from reading a good or a great book. All of these
were points that Hook made. But on the whole his "critical appraisal" was based on misconceptions. One reason
that he had so many misconceptions was that he assumed
that anything Hutchins or Adler said St. John's would endorse. This illusion on his part was understandable in view
of Hutchins's lose connection with the college, first as a
member, and then as chairman, of the board, and also in
view of Adler's position as lecturer at the college and his
constant support of it in public utterances. Hook referred
to Adler both as Hutchins's mentor and as the "mentor of
the St. John's educators." 5
Hook should nonetheless have known better, since before writing his articles for the New Leader he had had
several letters from Buchanan that attempted to limit and
define their differences. These letters indeed affirmed
"the rational scientific nature" of metaphysics, politics,
and religion. Buchanan could hardly expect Hook to agree
that metaphysics and religion were scientific. At the same
time, he explicitly refused to deny "the rational scientific
nature" of social studies, which he knew Hook would
strongly affirm. He vigorously resisted the charge of indoctrination, insisting that he would "defend the freedom
of the intellect and the will in considering them [the studies mentioned, especially metaphysics and theology] in
such a way as to show that indoctrination in them is impossible."' Later on he wrote urging Hook to come to the
college and lecture; he mentioned several possible topics:
"Karl Marx," "The St. John's Brand of 'Indoctrination'"
(as Hook saw it), "The Scientific Method, Intelligence and
Society."7 He suggested that such a lecture would be of
great aid in the lively controversies that had been going on
within the college now that there were faculty and stu-
5
�dents who had read the whole list of books, were caught
up in the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns,
and had engaged in considerable debate about Marx.
It was not possible for Hook to visit St. John's at that
time, and by the time he published the New Leader articles
the character of the exchange of correspondence that he
had with Buchanan made the visit increasingly unlikely. It
became clearer and clearer that his principal target was
Adler, but Hook could never come to terms with Buchanan
as long as Buchanan failed to repudiate publicly those
statements or positions of Adler with which Buchanan
disagreed. On January 26, 1943, Hook wrote to Buchanan:
I am glad to learn that you haven't joined the neo-Thomist
"gang." I don't recall Using the word, but now that you have
used it I think it quite apt. A "gang" is a group of people who
are unalterably committed to a vested interest or doctrine,
even if truth, honor, and justice be elsewhere . .. . A large number of people, however, believe, apparently on insufficient evidence, that doctrinally you are approaching the neo-Thomists
more closely than one would. expect on the basis of your personal outlook and better knowledge of your earlier philosophical position. As the leading spirit of an important educational
enterprise I think you should be concerned about the generality of this impression. I am taking the liberty of suggesting that
it would be helpful if you found an opportunity to state publicly what you thought about the doctrine of neo-Thomism
from its sacred theology to its educational philosophy.8
In spite of disagreements with Adler, Buchanan could
not repudiate him ip any way that would be satisfactory to
Hook. With his view that metaphysics and theology, even
if not wholly identical with any metaphysics and theology
of the past, were the sciences that would give unity to all
knowledge, Buchanan could not well repudiate the neoThomists in a way that would be satisfactory to Hook.
After the New Leader articles severely critical of Barr as
well as of Adler, the exchange between Hook and Buchanan became more and more acrimonious. Buchanan
kept inviting Hook to come to St. John's, spend a while,
and see for himself. Hook refused to come on the ground
that, if he came and found that things were just as he expected, Buchanan would discover one reason after another
to explain why he had not been able to put his ideas into
execution.
Buchanan did not in any of his letters to Hook reply to
the question about oriental classics. His position on the
subject was, however, made clear in a reply that he wrote
in the spring of 1940 to a letter that made a plea for the inclusion of such classics in the list of great books:
Four yecirs [he wrote] is a short time for reading the books we
already have on the list. If I did not think people would go on
gradually studying the books these lead to I should think we
were a complete fake. We are doing the first reading of the
few books which will initiate us to the study of all the things
6
we should know, including other books. I think the great books
of the Orient .are included in that perspective?
Clearly, Chinese and Hindu books were not in principle
excluded from the St. John's curriculum.
The students at St. John's have, on the whole, not been
critical of the conception and plan of the curriculum. Perhaps in many cases their decision to attend St. John's
rather than some other college has meant an acceptance
of that conception and that plan. Most of the students'
criticism has been to the effect that the college, while be·
ing right and quite articulate about its aims, did not in per·
formance live up to its aims. Not much of this criticism
was expressed until the program had been in operation for
a few years. Many of the first new programmers within a
very short time began to look back on their student days
as a "golden age."
The golden age probably never existed. There was indeed a certain excitement among the first new program·
mers which arose not simply because significant learning
is exciting but also because of their belonging to a group
who were engaged not in an experiment, but in something
new in relation to the conventionalities of other colleges.
One record of student commentary and criticism was
the college yearbook, the student editors of w):Jich, during
the Barr-Buchanan era, were exceptionally intelligent and
perceptive. The nineteen forty Yearbook mentions what
are called "difficulties" .encountered in the first year of
the program, difficulties that were said to have been overcome or to be in process of being overcome. The difficulties
seem to have been caused by the demands on the stu·
dents' time that went beyond those of the officially announced curriculum. There were lectures for all students
twice a week, each of which lasted from two to two and
one-half hours. There were, in addition, supplementary
lectures on Platonic dialogues. There was a special tuto·
rial for practice in writing in addition to the language tu·
torial. To discuss the dialogues of Plato in seminar fashion
was no doubt a more Socratic way of getting into them
than by listening to lectures. In any case, the supplementary lectures were soon eliminated, practice in writing was
assigned to the language tutorial, and the number of lee·
tures reduced to one a week with an hour and a half as the
time limit. "The greatest difficulty this class [the first new
program class] has met so far in connection with the cur,
riculum," the nineteen forty Yearbook reported, "has been
the laboratory. After the class had roamed aimlessly for a
year or so in its lab work a method of instruction has been
developed that runs much more smoothly and is better
correlated with the rest of the Program." 10
The entry of the United States into World War II
brought many changes in the college. In October 1939 the
St. John's Collegian took a poll among the students to get
their opinion about United States policy in relation to the
war which had clearly begun in Europe. Eighty-one students responded to the five questions that were asked.
The questions and the results of the poll were as follows: 11
SUMMER 1982
�l. Should the United States give immediate armed sup-
port to the European democracies?
Yes
No
Noopinion
8
72
1
2. Should this country assist England and France by filling, as far as possible, their demands for munitions
and commodities such as food, raw materials, and
manufactured goods?
Yes
No
34
42
No opinion
5
3. Should America pursue a policy of strict isolationism
concerning European affairs?
Yes
38
No
41
No opinion
2
4. Do you think Britain and France should attempt to
make peace with Germany at this stage of the war?
Yes
No
Noopinion
21
55
5
5. In case of this country's engaging in the present war
in Europe, would you volunteer before a draft were
effected?
Yes
No
No opinion
27
55
4
In over a hundred colleges throughout the country similar polls were taken and with similar results. At that time
American college students were strongly opposed to sending American troops to support England and France but a
larger percentage (42 per cent) than was the case at St.
John's were willing to volunteer if England and France
were in danger of defeat.
Student opinion at St. John's seems to have changed by
the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
When the news of Pearl Harbor came, there was, according to the nineteen forty-two Yearbook, much talk among
the students about enlistment. A college meeting was
called the day after and the students expected Barr and
Buchanan to plead with them to stay at least until June
1942. Barr did not plead with them to stay. Having made
the point that only a few ever take part in what the young
might consider the romantic adventures of war, he suggested a definite choice either to enlist or to stay and work
at studies. He even suggested that it might be their duty
to stay; he believed that it was of the utmost importance
that gopd thinking about war and peace should go on while
the country was at war, and that colleges, especially St.
John's College, should not close, but stay open and think
about war and peace. Buchanan at the same college meeting spoke of the problems that would arise in the relation
of the college to the townspeople who, as the country became more and more involved in the war, would judge
and condemn those young men who were studying God
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
knows what when they ought to be fighting in defense
of their country. The editor of the Yearbook, John Louis
Hedeman, ended his account of this meeting with the report that "for the most part, students, thinking things
over, found that a year or even two or three in the army
did not appeal to them and went back to their seminars to
discuss the same problems in the light of ages past." 12
The college administration took various steps to prepare the students in what they thought might be useful in
the war. There was a three-hour course once a week in
radio. There was a course in navigation. Franz Plunder, a
sculptor and boat-builder, who also possessed many other
skills, taught a group of about sixty persons the intricacies
of the gasoline engine, for, as the nineteen forty-two Yearbook put it, "no one knew which St. Johnnie might be
stranded in a tank somewhere on the battlefront, where
there would be no hardware store and mechanics for him
to turn to."ll The press poked a certain amount of fun at
the "great books" college for this course in the gasoline
engine. Actually the course was in line with Buchanan's
view that there is a training of the .intellect that happens
in the learning and practice of the manual arts as well as
the liberal arts. Also, Buchanan knew that one learns quite
a bit of physics if one acquires a full understanding of all
the transformations of energy that take place in the internal
combustion engine.
Whether these courses were in fact useful to many of
the students when later they were in military service is
doubtful. But at the time they helped them to feel that
they were not just engaged in talk about the war but were
doing something. In spite of the talk that went on in meetings to discuss the war, and in spite of the activities just
mentioned, the war did not have a great impact upon the
college during the session of 1941-42. Many students,
through joining the reserves, were able to finish the year.
All students, not just the reservists, were required to take
part in military drill, which all accepted, though some
found it irksome. It was in the following session that the
war really began to have a big effect. At the beginning of
that session there were 173 students enrolled. By the end
of the year there were fewer than a hundred. When the
next session began, there were only forty-two in the three
upper classes. Only seven of the ninety-three in the "Life
class" remained to receive degrees in 1944. Not only were
students leaving in droves for military service, but faculty
were leaving too, among them some who had contributed
most to get the program established and to make it go:
George Comenetz, Catesby Taliaferro, John Neustadt,
and Raymond Wilburn. There were also very promising
newcomers on the faculty who had hardly been at the college a year before having to leave for military service or for
some employment related to the war effort.
The president and the dean thought that it would be
fitting to mark with a ceremony the departure of students
for the war. During the 1942-43 session there were twp
occasions when a solemn ceremony was held in the college's Great Hall, and all those leaving for the war took the
7
�Ephebic oath administered by Barr. This oath was once
taken by Athenian youth as they were going off to war:
outstanding faculty was considered a serious injury to successful study within the program. Said Campbell,
I will not disgrace the name of my country and I will not desert my comrades in the ranks. By myself and with my fellows
I will defend what is sacred, whether private or public. I will
hand on my country not lessened but greater and nobler than
it was handed down to me. I will hearken diligently to those
The advent of the war, although unable to affect the Program, certainly introduced deficiencies into the teaching of it.
A good faculty is absolutely essential to good participation in
duly charged with judging, and I will obey the established laws
and whatever others the people with common consent establish. And if anyone attempts to overthrow the laws, or not
obey them, I will not stand idly by but by myself and with all
my comrades I will defend the law. And I will honor the religion of my fathers. The gods be witness of these things.l4
There were some who wondered how American youth
could honor the religion of their fathers and at the same
time call upon the Greek gods to witness their oath. But
everyone felt the seriousness of the occasion. Some of the
young men who took the oath were to give their lives in
combat. Many were to follow Barr's admonition, given on
that occasion, not to forget in the midst of all the irrationality of war that there is still such a thing as human reason. Many, too, would return when the war was over.
Obviously, the college had to take some drastic steps if
it were not to close its doors. It was decided to admit as
freshmen at the beginning of every term fifteen-year-olds
who had not finished high schooJ,I 5 and also to add a summer term to the three terms already current. In this way a
fifteen-year-old could complete his college course in three
years and do so before being subject to the draft. With the
admission of freshmen in June and September 1943 the
total enrollment went up to 138, and it never again fell as
low as it did in the spring of 1943. In the fall of 1946, when
the accelerated schedule had already been abandoned,
the return of veterans shot the enrollment up to 253.
The yearbooks for 1944 and for 1945-46, edited by
Robert Campbell and Eugene Thaw, reflect a considerable amount of self-criticism on the part of students and
also criticism of the college. The loss of such a large portion of the students in 1942-43 was very depressing for
those who remained, who, if they were not wondering
when they themselves might have to leave, were agonizingly asking themselves whether staying in college and
studying were the best thing to be doing when their
friends were engaged in a war, the outcome of which was
so important for human life on this planet. "We neglected
our studies," Campbell wrote in the· nineteen forty-four
Yearbook, "and sought diversion .... We became adept
and ingenious at excusing our own vices and our facility in
this respect usually manifested itself in criticism, not of
the Program itself (for we knew too well its necessity, goodness, and consequences) but of the way in which it was being applied." 16 The students do not seem to have shared
Buchanan's opinion that the books are the teachers and
that the faculty are decidedly of minor importance. The
loss not only of some of the best students, but also of
8
the program by the student body. It may be argued that the
books are, after all, the teachers, and that the student learns
from them rather than from the faculty, the latter being only
the means leading the students to the end, but from this it
would be difficult to conclude that the quality of the means is
unimportant. 17
He found the faculty who had come to replace those who
had left definitely inferior.
Also the great number of young freshmen and the small
number of upperclassmen, so Campbell thought, destroyed
the learning community as a community, even if individually some students were doing better work than they had
done before. The juniors and seniors, instead of communicating to the freshmen customs and habits conducive to
the kind of study most suitable for success within the program, retired into small groups and left the freshmen to
produce, or not to produce, their own traditions.
"The Iron Age" was the title given to the next yearbook, edited by Eugene Thaw, which was a two-year book
since the drafting of two editors into military service had
prevented the production of a yearbook in 1945. The title
indicated that the two years covered were being thought
of as a period of decline from an earlier 'golden age', but
also along with the dedication to Virgil it indicated a hope
for a golden age to come. The yearbook spoke of a "trend
of decline" in all sections of the program except the formal
lectures. It complained of student lethargy and of inadequate preparation for tutorials with the result that much
routine work which should have been done outside of
class had to be done in class. The claim was made that the
seminars had suffered as a consequence. The tutorials
were called the "mainstay of the program" as the place for
the acquisition of skills to be exhibited and tested in the
seminar. (<The seminar," it was said, His the finished product of the program, accomplished and consummate, however, only to the degree of success in tutoria1." 18
In the fall of 1945 there was a change in schedule from
five one-hour tutorial classes a week to three classes with
normal length of an hour·and-a-half. This was thought to
have produced improvement in the quality of the tutorials.
But it was set down as a disadvantage that the new scheduling had made it impossible for a student to attend alanguage or mathematics tutorial other than the one to which
he had been assigned. The mere fact that a student might
want to attend another such class with the expectation of
getting a better understanding than he had got in his assigned class pointed to the strong student opinion that it
mattered very much that the tutors were unequal in teaching ability and in their grasp of what they were teaching.
As Campbell had done in the nineteen forty-four YearSUMMER 1982
�book, Thaw made a plea for a place for the fine arts within
the curriculum. Music as a fine art has, since the time of
Barr and Buchanan, had some place in the curriculum.
Concerts have been given on certain Friday evenings in·
stead of lectures. Herbert Swartz in 1938, Elliott Carter in
1940, and Nicholas Nabokov in 1941 were all added to the
faculty in large part because of their musical knowledge
which, it was expected, would enable them to suggest how
music as a fine art might fit into the curriculum and also
to sponsor and supervise music as an extracurricular activ-
ity. None of them remained very long and little came of
their efforts. When Carter and Nabokov were at the college there were seminars on musical compositions 1 but the
musicians were at odds with Buchanan, who thought that
one should study the scores without listening to and without ever having listened to the sounds represented by the
staves with their whole notes, half notes and quarternotes,
etc., and without even knowing that those marks might refer to sounds.
In August 1937 Buchanan had written on the subject of
the college and the fine arts to an inquirer:
In our study of liberal college education, we have been forced
to consider the bookish classics as the basic medium of our
teaching. There is a sense in which great books are works of
fine art; on the other hand, we realize very vividly that we are
ignoring, or seeming to ignore, the classics in the fine arts
proper. When we have consolidated our program, we shall
turn very definitely to the problem of teaching the fine arts as
well as the liberal arts. In the meantime we shall proceed tentatively with extracurricular activities in the fine arts. 19
Buchanan had a theory about the fine arts, namely that
at the Renaissance they had become substitutes for the
sacraments. He no doubt would have liked to have St.
John's discover the right way of combining divine arts,
liberal arts, fine arts, and manual arts. During the BarrBuchanan era, however, little was done to encourage the
study of works of fine art besides musical works. Edgar
Wind of the Warburg Institute gave some excellent lectures
on the School of Athens, the frescoes of the Sistine ceiling, and Hogarth, but that was about all. When later Jacob
Klein became dean, he even called in question the meaningfulness of the term "fine arts" as applied in common to
music and the visual arts. Herbert Swartz, in a radio talk in
1939, explaining the place of music in a liberal arts college
program, argued that what music, painting, and sculpture
have in common is that they are end arts rather than useful
arts, arts the products of which are to be understood and
enjoyedfor their own sake rather than arts the products of
which are to be used. In any case, whether works of music, painting, and sculpture are all of the same kind or not,
Eugene Thaw in the nineteen forty-five-forty-six Yearbook
wrote convincingly, "It seems not too much to ask an undergraduate college concerned with producing well-educated men to take notice of Michelangelo and Pheidias." 20
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The Fight with the Navy in War Time
and the Departure of Barr and Buchanan
This is a strange, and perhaps incomprehensible, story.
The struggle over the possible acquisition by the Navy of
the St. John's campus had three distinct episodes. Its outcome was favorable to St. John's in the judgement of nearly
everyone except Barr and Buchanan, whose departure
shortly thereafter astonished nearly everyone. The first of
these episodes began in 1940. It was announced to the
faculty in September of that year that there was a rumor
that the United States Naval Academy, whose grounds
are separated from the St. John's campus only by a street, 1
wished to acquire the campus. Admiral Wilson Brown,
then Superintendent of the Naval Academy, and Stringfellow Barr, who had very amicable relations with each
other, went together to Washington on October first to
appear before the Senate Appropriations Committee who
were considering the question of the acquisition of the
campus by the Navy for the expansion of the Academy.
An exchange of correspondence between Barr and Brown
occurred shortly after that. Barr wrote, "It seems to me
desirable that I should repeat to you in writing what I
then stated to the Committee. You will recall that I was
asked by Senator Byrnes [)ames Byrnes, later Secretary of
State] what would be my attitude as President of St. John's
College towards a proposal by the Navy Department to
purchase the College in order to expand the present facilities of the Naval Academy. You will also doubtless recall
my reply that as President of the College I would urgently
recommend to the trustees that they reject such a proposal unless it could be clearly demonstrated that the exigencies of the national defense program required the
Naval Academy to secure our property rather than other
available land."'
Shortly after that the Secretary of the Navy, Frank
Knox, stated that the Navy would make no attempt to
take the St. John's campus provided that St. John's agree
to two conditions laid down by President Franklin Roosevelt: (1) that the college not dispose of her property without first notifying the Navy and giving the Navy a chance
to purchase it; (2) that the land not be used for any other
purpose than that of the college and that no other than
college buildings be erected upon it. Agreement on the
second condition put an end to an attempt by the Annapolis Housing Authority to take by condemnation one and
a third acres of the campus as a site for low cost housing
for white people of moderate income. Barr was only too
glad to assent to these conditions-and by january 31, 1941,
he was able to report to the St. John's board that "the
question of the Naval Academy's acquiring the property
of the College was now definitely settled." 3
The second episode was very brief. It occurred in july
1942 when the United States was already at war, and the
Navy was faced with the necessity of expanding its facili-
9
�ties for the training of officers. On July 15, Barr wrote to
Knox reminding him of positions taken by St. John's and
the Navy when Wilson Brown had been Superintendent
of the Academy, and reporting that an aide to the then
superintendent had appeared on the campus to look it
over to see whether it could be used as an indoctrination
school for Naval Reserve officers. He went on to say, "It is
most doubtful whether the College could survive transplanting," but continued, "I am certain you will not construe this letter as an objection to the Navy's defense
[presumably of the country]." The secretary replied that
such surveys as the aide was making were being made at
institutions in many places and that there was no specific
proposal about the St. John's campus 4
The third episode, the dramatic culmination, began early
in 1945. On February 28 of that year, Barr reported to the
board as follows:
Because of persistent and increasing rumors that the Navy
Department is about to seize St. John's College or that the
I told him [Roosevelt] of Senator Tydings' inquiry regarding St. John's College. He said he thought it was desirable to
acquire the St. John's grounds and buildings but would like to
see the buildings preserved. I told him I shared his feeling and
reported Admiral King's suggestion that we grasp the nettle
firmly and go across the river to acquire land for expansion of
the Academy. The general conclusion was:
a) Acquire St. John's
b) Keep the buildings and grounds intact
c) Proceed with acquisition of land across the river for
further additions to the Academy.
This entry in Forrestal's diary supports Admiral King's
statement to Mrs. Howard that the rumor had "substantial basis in fact.'' No one connected with St. John's knew
of this meeting with Roosevelt, but, because the persistent
rumor did appear to have a basis in fact, the Board, no
doubt with the approval, if not under the prompting of
Barr and Buchanan, on April21, 1945, formulated the following statement of policy to be sent to Secretary Forrestal:
State of Maryland might 'acquire' the College (possibly in order later to 'decide' to hand it over to the Navy Department) I
ought to report to you what facts I possess.
On February 13, 1945, Delegate Bertram L. Boone (D. 5th,
Baltimore) introduced a bill in the Maryland House of Delegates calling for appointment of a commission to examine the
possibility of the State's taking over St. John's. In presenting
the bill, Mr. Boone announced, 'The thing is going to pot.'
The next day I stated in the press that 'St. John's College is
not for sale,' and a 'spokesman' for the Navy Department
said, 'The Navy has no present plans for the acquisition of St.
John's College.'
Meanwhile, Mrs. Douglas Howard, widow of Captain Howard, once Dean of St. John's College, had written Admiral
Ernest King, who is an intimate friend of hers, urging that the
Navy Department disassociate itself from the Navy-Realtor
clique, a clique that has now resorted to defamation of the
College in order to squeeze it out of town. Mrs. Howard
showed me Ernie's reply which was to the effect that the
rumor has substantial basis in fact, that the Academy was to
be approximately double its size and that the most available
land for this expansion was our campus and the three blocks
of residence property between the Academy and King George
St. Admiral King stated that the matter would be decided by
the President at the end of this month. I have since learned
that Admiral Wilson Brown, formerly Superintendent of the
Academy and most friendly to the College, now once more
Naval Aide to the President, has several times blocked seizure.
I am personally disinclined to pull wires to prevent seizure.
The Navy, it should be reported, feels more threatened than
we do-by the California delegation in Congress, which is
working to get a part of their establishment here moved to the
Coast. This fact is known to the business element of Annapolis, who therefore feel the College is standing between them
and their bread and butter. The College's relations with the
town have, therefore, never been more painful during my
administration.5
On March 9, James V. Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy,
and Admiral Chester Nimitz had lunch with President
Roosevelt and, as F orrestal reports in his Diary:6
10
(1) The present uncertainty, aggravated by irresponsible
rumors of imminent condemnation of the College's property,
is harmful to the morale of the College, to its relations with
the Annapolis community, and to the College Administration's ability to exercise its function wisely or to plan intelligently for future building now in prospect. An immediate
understanding with the Navy Department is accordingly
imperative.
(2) This Board is entrusted with and proposes to fulfill the
continuing responsibility of carrying on vigorously the function of the College, and cannot deal with its property as mere
real estate and buildings. The Board believes that this function could be carried on elsewhere, in spite of obvious problems and difficulties, if an adequate site and the means of
acquiring it could be made available. The Board, however,
feels that it cannot properly or intelligently consider removing the College from its historic site in Annapolis unless the
Navy Department formally represents to the Board that acquisition of the College property is required in the national
interest. The Board, obviously, could not undertake to pass
judgment on the decision of the Navy Department. Nor does
the Board propose to interpose any objection to such acquisition, provided that the arrangements permit the Board, in its
judgment, to continue to carry on the work of the College,
and to discharge its legal and moral obligations to its college
community, including faculty, students, alumni, the benefactors, creditors, and the State of Maryland.
(3) The Board respectfully records its conviction that the
Navy Department has a genuine responsibility in the premises to dispose of the present damaging impasse by plainly advising the Board at this time whether or not it now requires
the College property for the national welfare; and furthermore, whether or not present plans for the future will require
it. [Statement of Policy, Buchanan Files, Houghton Library,
Harvard University.]
This statement of policy was the crucial document in
the whole affair. Whereas Barr's letter to Knox four years
earlier had said, "It's doubtful whether the College could
SUMMER 1982
�survive transplanting" this statement says "The Board believes this function [the function of educating] could be
carried on elsewhere in spite of obvious problems and difficulties, if an adequate site and the means of acquiring it
could be made available." Also, whereas in 1940 Barr had
said that he would recommend that the trustees reject the
proposal for acquisition unless it could be clearly demonstrated that the exigencies of the national defense program required the Naval Academy to secure the College
property, etc., this statement makes no mention of clear
demonstration but asks that the Navy Department formally represent to the board that "acquisition of the College property is required in the national interest." It goes
on to say that the board "could not undertake to pass
judgment on the decision of the Navy Department," that
the board does not "propose to interpose any objection to
such acquisition whether by formal condemnation or negotiation, provided that the arrangements permit the
Board, in its judgment, to continue to carry on the work of
the College," etc.
The admirals and the Secretary of the Navy little knew
what this statement of policy was going to get them into.
They understood it as tantamount to an offer. That this
was the Navy's interpretation is clear from the subsequent testimony of Admiral Moreell, Chief of the Bureau
of Yards and Docks, before the Senate Naval Affairs Committee. Admiral Moreell stated, "The acquisition of the
adjoining property [the St. John's campus] has been under
consideration for a number of years, but the Department
has not advanced this project due to the reluctance of the
board of governors and visitors of the college to dispose of
this property. The college authorities, however, have recently expressed a willingness to dispose of the property
to the Navy Department in the event that it is needed in
connection with the Naval Academy." 7 It certainly appeared to the admirals that St. John's was ready to let the
Navy have the campus provided the Navy did no more
than declare the acquisition necessary in the national interest and provided that the college receive sufficient
compensation to enable it to continue elsewhere as the
distinguished liberal arts college it had become.
The board's action, interpreted as it was by the Navy,
precipitated the Navy's final and most serious attempt to
acquire the St. John's campus. On April 27, 1945, Secretary Forrestal wrote to Thomas Parran, chairman of the
St. John's board and at that time Surgeon General of the
United States: "It now appears that the expansion of the
Naval Academy will require the acquisition of the present
property belonging to St. John's College." But he had not
declared that the acquisition was necessary in the national
interest. On May 5 Dr. Parran, in a letter to Secretary Forrestal, inquired when the Navy would acquire the campus
since plans for the removal of the college would require
more definite knowledge. A month later Forrestal replied
that negotiations would begin immediately.' The Naval
Affairs committees of the Senate and the House still had
to approve the acquisition, but the Secretary of the Navy
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
seems to have had little doubt that they would. On May 7
Buchanan wrote to Robert Hutchins:
Perhaps you ought to know my opinion of certain events
here. You will have seen our communication with James Forrestal. You may not have heard the reply. It is that the expansion of the Naval Academy will require the acquisition of the
St. John's campus. Action waits on Congressional appropriation. What had appeared in prospect as a desirable event is,
because of numerous circumstances, becoming a crisis.
Where do we go and how? Do we go or not?9
Hutchins replied, "You really say something when you say
the Naval Academy requires the campus and is merely
waiting for an appropriation. This sounds to me like an
Opportunity." 10
What was the event desirable in prospect? Was it the acquisition of the campus by the Navy? And was the "Opportunity" that of moving the St. John's program from a
place where, as Buchanan thought, the Navy was always
making it difficult to pursue the program? A letter of
about the same time from Buchanan to Senator Wayne
Morse claimed that the Naval Academy dominated Annapolis commercially, was pandered to by the city and
county governments, and that the state government paid
more attention to the Navy than to the public welfare_Il
He clearly thought that the mere presence of the Navy
was damaging not only to the college, but to the town and
to the state and to the citizens of the town and of the
state.
As early as June 1944 he had written in a letter to his
son Douglas,
Winkie and I have today been wondering again how to extricate the program from this place. It is now quite clear that the
academy is what has kept this poor little college sick for almost a century. We can't see how we move alive but we can
see that we ought to have done so a year ago last January
when we had to decide whether we would suspend operations or take youngsters. We should have suspended; a great
deal of damage to the idea itself has. resulted from our noble
decision to carry on.
A year later he wrote, "The Navy has turned the town into
a little Fascist community governed by greed and fear."
What caused the event desirable in prospect to become
a crisis? For one thing, alumni tend not to think of the college they have attended as an invisible chartered entity
which might exist on other land and in other buildings
than those in which they used to eat, sleep, study, and
learn. So it was with St. John's alumni. The president of
the Alumni Association, William Lentz, a Baltimore lawyer, wrote Senator Radcliffe on behalf of the association,
protesting the annexation of the campus by the Academy.
He stated that the alumni "feel that it is detrimental to
the national interest to emasculate a college of liberal arts
unless the most pressing and urgent national necessity requires it," and expressed the opinion of the alumni that
11
�"it should not be left solely to the Navy to determine
whether that existed,"i2
The public generally seemed to view what was happening as a fight between the Navy with the power of the big
federal government behind it and little St. John's. Almost
immediately the people of Annapolis and people all over
the country took sides. The Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun in editorials opposed the Navy's taking the
campusY The Post proposed in a front page editorial that,
because of the importance for national security of the
naval and air bases in the Pacific, there should be established a second naval academy on the Pacific coast. Several senators from western states were in support of that
proposal. Josephus Daniels, who had been Secretary of
the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, in a letter to the Post
supported a Pacific coast Academy as opposed to expanding the Academy in Annapolis. The businessmen of Annapolis became alarmed. They wanted the business that
would necessarily result from doubling the brigade of midshipmen and hence greatly increasing the payroll of the
Academy. They were fearful that Annapolis might lose
the Naval Academy, and their fear was strengthened by a
statement from Lansdale Sasscer, the Congressman for
the Congressional district in which Annapolis lies, to the
effect that, if a second academy were established on the
west coast, "The education of midshipmen will be rapidly
transferred to the West Coast Academy and Annapolis
will become only a specialist or post graduate school. ...
we have got to either press for the expansion program at
the Naval Academy which includes the taking of St. John's
... or else lose the Academy." The mayor of Annapolis,
William U. McCready, reminded his fellow Annapolitans
that the Naval Academy brought to the community $17.5
million in annual payroll.
In the meantime Buchanan had discovered the Dartmouth College case. Dartmouth College was incorporated
by royal charter in 1769. After the American Revolution
and in the course of a controversy between the Republicans and the Federalists of that time, the New Hampshire
legislature changed the college charter in such a way as to
replace the self-perpetuating body of trustees with a stateappointed body of trustees and a board of overseers. This
would have transformed what had been a private college
into a public one directly under the control of the state
government. The state court of New Hampshire upheld
the act of the legislature, but the Supreme Court of the
United States reversed the decision. Chief Justice John
Marshall, delivering the opinion of the Court, argued that
the acts of the legislature were unconstitutional because
they were in violation of Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution which declares that "no State shall ... pass any
bill ... impairing the obligation of contracts." The royal
charter was regarded as a contract establishing a corporation and therefore not subject to change by the legislature.
There is perhaps a superficial resemblance between the
New Hampshire government's attempt to change the institutional character of Dartmouth and the attempt by
12
the Navy in 1945 to acquire the St. John's campus. In each
case there was an action on the part of government against
a liberal arts college. But the federal government in 1945,
unlike the New Hampshire government in 1816, was not
attempting to alter the terms of the charter with which
the state legislature had incorporated St. John's in 1784
and hence was not "impairing the obligation of a
contract." Moreover, the Naval Affairs Committees were
concerned that St. John's receive adequate compensation
for the campus and buildings so that the College could
continue as the same incorporated entity on another site.
Buchanan, however, saw St. John's as leading a fight on
behalf of all liberal arts colleges as the old trustees of Dartmouth had fought and won a fight that had implications
for all liberal arts colleges in America. It was his ambition
to get the United States government to abjure the exercise against liberal arts colleges of the power of eminent
domain. As he wrote to his son Douglas on July 9, 1945,
"The big question is whether the right of eminent domain
could be challenged under the Dartmouth case. I think it
could be if one wanted to build a case." Recalling that it
was St. John's that in Aprill945 had first suggested negotiations with the Navy, he said in a statement to the Board
on July 31, 1946,
We were important members, albeit revolutionary members,
of the great liberal arts college family. We were ready to take
on the responsibilities of leaders in that family, and to fight
our own battle without their help if necessary or to fight their
battle for them if it could be seen that way. 14
It is a recognized principle that the federal government
may exercise the power of eminent domain and acquire
property whenever it is "necessary and proper" for it to
do so in order to carry out any of the powers conferred on
it by the Constitution,!' and it may do that by condemnation proceedings if no other way is open. It would seem
that no exception could be made in the case of liberal arts
colleges. The question, however, of the necessity and propriety of the Navy's takihg the St. John's campus remained.
No one voiced any desire to destroy St. John's as an invisible chartered entity or as such an entity embodied in
persons and buildings. For many Annapolitans it was just
a question of money. If the Academy were expanded in
Annapolis, that would mean more money for the town. If
the federal government compensated StJohn's financially
in a way that would make it possible for it to continue
with its liberal arts program elsewhere, why should reasonable persons object? The editor of the Annapolis Evening
Capital did go so far as to say,
In cold logical fact, Annapolis has been given the choice between allowing the expansion of a great national institution,
the only one of its kind in the United States and one which
guards the safety of the people and a college which is but one
of many similar educational institutions.l 6
On June 27, 1945, a five-man House Naval Affairs subcommittee, of which Congressman Sasscer was a member,
SUMMER 1982
�visited Annapolis to inspect possible sites for the expansion of the Academy. They also interviewed two Annap·
olis real estate men to inquire about possible sites for the
relocation of St. John's. The realtors suggested two sites
near Annapolis. One was at Holly Beach farm, the Labrot
estate at Sandy Point, nine miles away. The other was at
Hillsmere on the South River, five miles away. A Baltimore architect, James R. Edmunds, who was then president of the American Institute of Architects, after studying
the situation, indicated several other possibilities for the
expansion of the Academy than the purchase of the St.
John's campus. 17
The St. John's board, including Barr and Buchanan,
were indeed concerned, as the statement of policy of
April 21, 1945, shows, with having the wherewithal to
continue the function of the college on another s1te m the
event that the Navy were to take the campus. But they
meant what they said when they made removal of the college conditional upon the Navy's representing to the Board
that acquisition of the college property was necessary m
the national interest. They may have come to mean a little
more than they said, since Buchanan was soon to talk
about requiring the Navy not simply to "declare" but to
"find" national interest. Neither the House committee
nor the Senate committee on naval affairs had up to this
point made any formal declaration. Nor had the Secretary
of the Navy. There were hearings before the committees
during June 1945. Richard Cleveland, then secretary of
the board, appearing before the Senate Committee on
June 20, attempted to make sure that the committee understood what importance the board attached to the declaration of necessity:
First, the Board makes clear that it will cheerfully accede to
genuine national necessity if such necessity, as distinguished
from convenience, is formally declared by the Navy. We now
assume that the function of making such a determination and
declaration of national necessity has been transferred from
the Navy Department to the Congress [i.e. the Congressional
committees]. The Board waives the privilege of arguing national necessity, but waives this privilege on condition that
the terms of acquisition permit the Board, in its judgment, to
continue to do its duty to the college community. While waiving conditionally the right for itself to argue the issue of necessity, the Board would be disappointed if the Congress did
not exhaustively explore that issue. We respectfully suggest
that in the distinction between necessity and convenience
there is an issue much more significant in America's future
than the continued life of this little college . ...
If this Committee should determine that acquisition of the
College property is not in the national interest, we respectfully urge that the basis of that determination be made so explitit and so decisive that no rational persons can ever again
raise the issue. We would first prefer to stay in Annapolis under conditions which would guarantee our future security. If
that security is compromised, we would prefer to move to a
site where no overshadowing neighbor holds the power of
eminent domain . ... If the air is once cleared, we have no
fear of our ability to live near the Naval Academy in harmony
and mutual respect.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Perhaps this is no Dartmouth College case. But it is being
watched all over this nation by citizens who hope that this
war has not been fought in vain. 18
It seems that the committees and the Navy Department
still did not grasp what St. John's was after in asking for a
declaration of national necessity. 19 At a meeting in Secretary Forrestal's office on July 20, 1945, at which Senator
Walsh, Chairman of the Senate Committee and Congressman Vinson, Chairman of the House Committee and various naval officers were present, and after they had agreed
on the project of expanding the Academy by acquiring
the St. John's campus, "the Secretary suggested (and it
was adopted as the course of action to be pursued) that
Admiral Jacobs prepare a letter for the signature of the
Secretary to the Trustees of the College outlining the results of this meeting-i.e., that because of the needs of
the post-war Navy the Academy must be expanded, that
the Navy intends to acquire the property by negotiation if
possible, or by condemnation if necessary."20
I think it unlikely that the Board had received or knew
of this letter when they met the following day. 21 Buchanan
was obviously disappointed with what had, or had not,
happened at the board meeting. For the day after in a
lengthy statement to the board, after referring to "eight
years of startling success of the St. John's program," he
berated the members for not pressing hard enough for a
declaration about national interest. He said,
The Statement of Policy of April 21st recognizes and embraces our highest duty as trustees in the present situation,
namely to 'find' national interest. It does this by refusing to
give or sell the campus or discuss damages until national interest is 'found' by due process of law . .. finding na~ional interest allows of two courses, negotiation and condemnation.
The Navy has chosen the former. On a pfevious occasion
[probably in 1942] we chose condemnation and the Navy
withdrew.
He went on to say, "This campus is essential to this College and its defence is therefore a part of the essential obligation of its trustees." He tried to frighten the board by
saying that they could possibly be indicted for not fulfilling their function as trustees, and threatened to resign
from the board as a vote of lack of confidence in them 22
Whether there was some communication with the Navy
Department or the committees during the following week
is not clear. On July 27, probably as a consequence of the
July 20 meeting in Forrestal's office, Senator Walsh (D.
Mass.), the chairman of the Senate committee, was writing a letter to Talbot Speer, president and publisher of the
Evening Capital. He wrote that the Senate committee had
taken no action except to authorize the Navy Department
to enter into negotiations with the authorities at St. John's
to see if an agreement on price could be reached." He affirmed his understanding that the college would remain in
possession of the campus for the next academic session. A
postscript shows that, no sooner had he dictated the letter,
than it was brought to his attention that this would not
13
�satisfy th~ St. John's board. He was given the impression
that what the board wanted was simply action by the two
congressional committees to authorize the Navy Department to acquire the campus as distinguished from negotiation with a view to agreeing on a price. This authorization
he proceeded to obtain from House Committee and a majority of the Senate Committee by the next day.
On August 4 a special committee of the St. John's board
meeting in Baltimore decided on the basis of published reports that the congressional committees had not met the
first of the board's conditions. They agreed that they
should not at this point compromise their position by entering into any negotiation; and they requested Cleveland
to seek a personal talk with Senator Walsh.
Cleveland met with Walsh on August 15 at the senator's
office and, while he was trying once more to make the college's position clear, Vinson walked in. So he got to talk
with the chairmen of both committees. Apparently, almost up to this point they had believed, perhaps because
of the Statement of Policy of April 21, that St. John's
wanted to sell the campus without any fuss. They had
now begun to understand that this was not the case. According to Cleveland, Senator Walsh seemed to get the
point about the declaration of national necessity, though
Congressman Vinson did not. Vinson "stated emphatically
that he thought his committee would find national interest if that was what we wanted."24 Both chairmen declared that the action of their committees up to that time
had not authorized condemnation but only negotiation
and agreed that nothing would be done until the Congress
reconvened on September 5, after which hearings would
be held. At a hearing in the fall on October 2, the Board
stated flatly that they "would not willingly sell the historic
campus at any price."25
About this time Buchanan used the Collegian, the student newspaper, to report to the college as follows: "With
the help of Mr. Edmunds the College was resting its whole
case on the architectural problem and alternative solutions [for the expansion of the Academy] instead of the
campus. It should be noted that the full force of the attack
[St. John's attack on the Navy) was actually Socratic irony,
tending to make the Navy produce its wind egg ....
"October 24th has been set as the day for the formal decision by the House Committee. Will the College celebrate with hemlock or a feast in the Mess Hall in Bancroft? We shall discuss immortality26 while the ship returns
from Aegina.
"Proposed toast in case it is drunk in hemlock:
Here stood
St. John's College
The first liberal arts college
To be condemned by
The United States Government
1784-1946
They knew not what they did." 27
14
October 24 came and went and there was no announcement from Washington. In a new formal statement of policy dated November 21, 1945, the board reviewed the
events since April and asserted that it was unfortunate
that the project had proceeded so far before the record
could be set straight on this simple but vital point. They
expressed their belief that the Navy had not proved that
the acquisition of the St. John's campus was necessary in
the national interest. "It is now clear," they said, "that the
extensive testimony before the Committees fell far short
of establishing national necessity for this unprecedented
use of the power of eminent domain; that failure of the
Committees to act after their long and exhaustive inquiry
is in itself evidence that no such necessity exists. In the
light of these developments in the long interval since the
Board's statement of policy, made on April21, 1945, that
statement is no longer a realistic or relevant statement of
the Board's duty as trustees, and is hereby withdrawn.
The Board therefore regard the unfortunate episode as
concluded, and trust that the Naval Academy and St.
John's are now free to proceed in mutual respect and harmony, as neighbors, to get on with their respective functions." They urged the congressi0nal committees to declare
the acquisition not necessary in the national interest and
urged the Secretary of the Navy to withdraw the project,
stating their belief that the government should make a public declaration that "the Government does not intend to acquire in any manner, the campus of St. John's College." 28
Nothing conclusive was heard from the Naval Affairs
Committees or the Navy Department until well into the
next year. In the meantime Paul Mellon, who had been a
student at St. John's in 1940-41 and who had, by generous contributions over the years, kept the college going on
a year-to-year basis, wrote to Stringfellow Barr,
Ever since last June I have been interested in setting up an
initial endowment for the St. John's Program. I have been deterred from action by doubts as to whether St. John's College
could keep its campus. I have felt that if it could not, it might
be more in the interest of American education to find a
stronger institutional vehicle to develop the education program which you initiated at St. John's.
I am therefore placing at the disposal of the Old Dominion
Foundation securities currently producing an income of
$125,000 per annum, which may be used for the purpose of
developing the type of education now carried on at St. John's
College and for other similar purposes. I am instructing the
Trustees of the Foundation that they may rely on your personal judgment as to whether St. John's can be expected to
preserve the campus or whether some other college you may
designate will better carry out my intention and thereby become the beneficiary of these funds. 29
When later Mellon agreed to contribute a total endowment of $4.5 million, it looked as if St. John's College
might for the first time in its history become financially
secure. But the question whether it would or not depended on the outcome of the Navy affair. At the same
SUMMER 1982
�faculty meeting at which Barr announced Mellon's intention to endow the program, whether at St. John's or elsewhere, he also announced that "the Chairman and the
Secretary of the Board were requested to visit the Senate
and House Committees on Naval Affairs in an attempt to
clarify the relation of the College with the Navy." Evidently the committees had still not formally declared that
the only possible way for the Navy to expand its facilities
for training officers (it being assumed that such expansion
was necessary for the security of the United States) was by
acquiring the land and buildings of the college.
On june 8, 1946, Thomas Farran, the chairman of the
St. John's Board, received a letter from Secretary Forrestal
which read as follows:
I have recently been informed by the Chairman of the
House Naval Affairs Committee that his Committee on
May 22, 1946, adopted the following resolution regarding the
utilization of St. John's College Property for expansion of the
Naval Academy:
'Whereas, a proposal has been made that the expanding
program of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis,
Maryland, requires the acquisition of the adjoining site of St.
John's College,
'Whereas the Naval Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives has held long and exhaustive hearings thereon,
and
'Whereas upon careful consideration it is the sense of this
committee that the National Emergency neither justifies nor
warrants the proposed acquisition of St. John's campus. Now,
therefore, be it resolved
'That said proposed acquisition officially known as Project
No. 460C of the Real Estate Division, Bureau of Yards and
Docks, Navy Department, is hereby disapproved.'
I am happy to advise you that the Navy Department acquiesces in this action of the House Naval Affairs Committee.
The Department was most reluctant to undertake the acquisition of the college property for the required expansion of
the Naval Academy in Annapolis since the Department
recognizes that only considerations of extreme national
necessity would justify the taking of the campus of a liberal
arts college . ...
It is believed that the present considerations of the House
Naval Affairs Committee and the Department . .. coupled
with the fact that the Department has other plans for the expansion of the Academy in Annapolis, makes it possible for
the college to pursue its plans with assurance that it will be
secure on its historic site for the foreseeable future . ...
A few days after Forrestal's letter the Senate Naval Affairs Committee followed the example of the House Committee. Dr. Farran observed that this action consequent
upon the House Committee resolution and the secretary's
letter, drove "the third nail in the coffin" of the project to
take the campus.
Cleveland, who knew that Barr and Buchanan wanted
from the Congressional committees a strong statement
that it was not the policy of the United States government
to use the power of eminent domain against liberal arts
colleges, had been engaged in some activity behind the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
scenes to get from the House committee a statement that
would satisfy them and keep them with the program at St.
John's in Annapolis. He even persuaded Carl Vinson,
chairman of the House Committee, who had already written a letter saying that the committee's resolution wrote
"Finis" to the project, to write a second stronger letter.
But in spite of the death and burial of the project, and in
spite of this stronger letter, and in spite of Forrestal's
declaration that only extreme national necessity would
warrant the government's taking the property of a liberal
arts college, and in spite of the assurance given about the
foreseeable future, Barr, after consulting with Buchanan,
decided that the securities promised by Mellon should not
come to St. John's. He suggested to the board that the St.
John's campus be turned over to the State of Maryland to
provide educational facilities for the state since the state
would be better able to protect the campus and that the
board should seek a safe place for the college. In the event
that the board did not accept his suggestion he would resign and "seek another college for the program." Buchanan
had said the year before that the campus was essential to
the college, and Barr had said that it was doubtful whether
the college could "survive transplanting." Now they were
saying something else.
Barr has always maintained that he was not satisfied
that the Navy had given any substantial assurance that
there would not be another attempt to take the campus. 30
But that was not his only reason, and probably not his
principal reason, for taking the money elsewhere. He
thought that he could not dispense with the help of Buchanan in continuing the program on another site under
the charter of St. John's or in establishing the program at
another college. 31 Buchanan would probably have left St.
John's even if the fray with the Navy had not occurred. In
early january 1945 he was already beginning to withdraw
from the full exercise of the office of dean. At the first faculty meeting of that year he reported that new adult education duties he had taken on in the District of Columbia
would necessitate the reduction of his decanal duties. On
January 18, 1945, Barr sent a memorandum to the treasurer instructing him that the dean's salary had, at the
dean's request, been reduced by the board from $5,500 a
year to $3,000 a year in view of other salaried employment
undertaken in Washington. He would continue as "the officer of instruction," i.e., as chairman of the Instruction
Committee, and as adviser to students in relation to their
studies. Buchanan himself in a letter to Cleveland about
two years later wrote: "If things had gone as usual, I would
have resigned during this year [1945-46] to go into adult
education or something else. I never was made for an administrator." On june 1, 1946, he announced that he would
take a year's leave of absence. It seemed clear to everyone
that the unique role he had played for the eight years that
he had portrayed as "eight years of startling success" was
coming to an end. In addition to that, as Barr describes it,
while he himself was exhausted from the fight with the
Navy, Buchanan was both tired and sick.32
15
�The board had, since 1937, been guided in practically
everything by Batr and Buchanan. They failed, however,
to concur in the opinion that there was just as much danger as ever that the Navy would soon again seek possession
of the St. John's campus. They were unwilling to abandon
the campus and move the college and the program, and
they were also unwilling to resign as trustees of St. John's
and become trustees of some other college yet to be char·
tered in Maryland or some other state. They had been
convinced by Barr and Buchanan of the worth of the program, and they were resolved to continue it at St. John's
and in Annapolis. They tried, but failed, to persuade Barr
and Buchanan to reconsider.
Buchanan professed surprise at the board's decision. In
fact, in a memorandum of July 31, 1946, addressed to them
he declared that it was "surprising to all" that the board
had decided to continue the St. John's program in Annap·
olis "even when it was clear that the original pilots could
not honestly take the risk as they saw it and weighed it." 33
He, nevertheless, spoke of the ready respect commanded
by the board's insight and courage, but also asserted that
the board's action did not "convince the ex-pilots that
their return would be safe or wise." He already had plans
for a larger enterprise which would grow from the cooper·
ation of St. John's and the new college. The aim was the
eventual establishment of a university which would be
composed of (1) a graduate school for research in the "liberal arts and philosophy," (2) an adult school with many
communities, and (3) several undergraduate colleges. For
the immediate future the new college somewhere other
than at Annapolis would, with the Mellon gift as endow·
ment, be a "small model of the whole." In addition to a
small undergraduate school, it would include a committee
on the liberal arts to become a nucleus of the graduate
school, "and it would be situated in a place suitable for
"cooperation with a lively industrial community in adult
education." He even suggested that for a certain period of
transition there be one board and one president for St.
John's and the new institution.
Looking back over the nine years, he commented on
the successes and failures of the program. While denying
once more that the program was an experiment designed
to prove or disprove an hypothesis, he affirmed that there
had been a common search for a true liberal arts college
and that the search was based on guiding principles and a
common comprehensive sphere for exploration. There had
been found a pattern of the liberal arts as embodied in the
great books and it had proved to be "workable, versatile,
instructive, fruitful, and heuristic." He spoke of the "high
level of teaching and learning we had already achieved be·
fore the war" as well as of serious sickness caused by the
war. The case for the endowment could now be based, he
mailltained on achievement rather than "mere paper
1
promises.''
The Navy affair itself he cited as evidence of the college's growth and strength. He assigned as a reason for the
college's suggesting negotiations with the Navy in the
16
statement of April 21, 1945, the desire to "discover and
clarify the foundations of our own existence." He meant
more than the particular and local factors affecting the existence of St. John's. He meant, as he had said earlier, that
St. John's had been leading a fight on behalf of all liberal
arts colleges insofar as their existence depends upon the
policies of the federal government.
A few days after this memorandum of Buchanan's the
board made public the following announcement:
The Board wishes to record publicly its deep satisfaction at
the favorable termination ofthe Navy Department's proposal
to acquire the campus of St. John's College and joins heartily
in the gratification expressed by Secretary Forrestal that this
solution will make it possible for the College and Naval Acad·
emy to continue their long history as friendly neighbors . ...
The Board believes that this solution . .. places the College
in a stronger position than it has been in its long history to
press forward with plans for the future . ...
The firm foundation now achieved in Annapolis also makes
it possible sometime in the near future, to further the estab·
lishment elsewhere of an additional college to carry on the
program developed and now secure in Annapolis. Fortunately
a generous gift for this purpose makes it practicable . ...
In furtherance of this project the Board has agreed to re·
lease Mr. Barr from the presidency of St. John's College as of
July l, 1947, or such other date as may be determined, in or·
der that he may take over the leadership of the proposed new
college. 34
Buchanan in a letter to Adler gave his own very different account of what had happened:
The Board, primarily Dick Cleveland, had not earlier imag·
ined, say nothing of believed, that Winkie was actually thinking
of weighing old St. John's and making an objective decision
on his findings. They therefore had thought only of their and
his efforts to set things straight in Annapolis and were them·
selves ready to settle for anything that the Navy and the Con·
gressional Committees would do; no one in his right mind will
refuse four and a half million dollars because of an uncertain
future.3 5
He proceeded to describe a meeting in Paul Mellon's
office in Washington at which he and Barr were present
together with Mellon, Adolph Schmidt, and Thomas Parran. Parran spoke for the Board. Buchanan's version of
what he said is as follows:
First the Board was determined to continue the St. John's
Program in Annapolis; I am sure this implied that the pro·
gram, like the library for instance, was the property of the
Board, copyrighted and patented in the name of the College.
We would be stealing if we took it elsewhere and taught it,
and they would tell the public so. Second, Winkie was tired
and probably sick like me, and he ought to take a leave of ab·
sence this year to recover his right mind and allow the decision to be postponed. Third, if Winkie insisted on accepting
the endowment to go elsewhere, he should give it to some institution with which he would have no personal connection.
Farran delivered these threats in the presence of Mellon and
SUMMER 1982
�Schmidt. They behaved admirably ... Mellon and Schmidt
were very clear about their original intention and their full
confidence in Winkie.
At the November faculty meeting in 1946, Barr announced the formation of a foundation to be known as
Liberal Arts Incorporated to be a formal instrument for
acquiring property for the new college. 36 He further stated
that Liberal Arts Incorporated might eventually become a
"higher governing board for both colleges." At the December meeting he informed the faculty that the site of
the new college would be the Hanna estate in the Stockbridge Bowl in western Massachusetts, that his resignation would take effect on December 31, 1946, and that
john S. Kieffer had been appointed acting president by
the board.
By this time Buchanan had left and was living in Richmond, Massachusetts, not far from Stockbridge. In a letter to Richard Cleveland in late November he made as a
tentative proposal that Liberal Arts Incorporated take
over the financial and educational direction of St. John's
from the trustees "exactly as Winkie and I had taken it in
1937 except that this time we would recommend other
personnel to do the job on the spot." 37 He added, "I wish
with all my heart that the Board had had confidence in
Winkie and me and had wished to come with us- .. -The
new enterprise has lost immeasurably by the Board's refusal to come with us. We have some money but we have
lost a college. I saw that this was so and that it was intended
to be so when you read your announcement to us. Winkie
and I have lost nine years of work unless you and the
Board relent and give us some help. I am not regretting
our decision but I am suggesting that you are making the
cost maximum." The board of St. John's made no re·
sponse to the proposal that Liberal Arts Incorporated be
given responsibilities that were not properly theirs.
Shortly thereafter, in a letter to Hutchins, Buchanan
recorded his reflections about what had happened at St.
john's 38 He claimed that a controlled search for a liberal
college had been started, that some liberal arts had been
set into motion within a framework of great books, that
there was enough initial success to justify that kind of
practice and that certain things had to be added, such as
the graduate school to sharpen the focus on subject matter, and full commitment to adult education. "It is also
clear," he went on, "that the next thirty or forty years offer a desperately receptive world for us to bring light to.
As I have said in print, this is the day of the liberal college
which has been waiting for twenty-four hundred years to
be born." In the same letter he says "we don't know what
we have been studying and teaching, and we ought to find
out."
The inconsistencies in Buchanan's statements make it
difficult to know what he was thinking. On the one hand,
he had reported to the board that the first eight years of
the program were "eight years of startling success." On
the other hand, he says that he and Barr will have "lost
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
nine years of work" if the board don't follow in his footsteps. On the one hand he says he doesn't know what he's
been studying and teaching. But on the other, he thinks
that he and his associates will bring light not just to a few
who might be interested in "the liberal college," but to
the world. Presumably he means more than a little light,
since it is something that the world has been waiting for
since the time of Plato and Aristotle.
Buchanan tried to get his old friends, Adler and McKeon,
to join him and Barr in Massachusetts. He also tried to get
Hutchins, Van Doren, and Meiklejohn to leave what they
were doing and join the new enterprise. All refused. A few
of the St. John's faculty were invited; they too refused, believing that the outcome of the contest with the Navy was
decisive and that there was much more uncertainty about
the new college than about the future of St. John's in Annapolis. Liberal Arts Incorporated, as Acting President
Kieffer announced to the faculty on january 11, 1947,
would contribute $150,000 to meet the operating deficit
that year at St. John's. It was understood that this would
fulfill the intention of Liberal Arts Incorporated to cause as
few difficulties as possible for St. John's, and that by the
summer of 1948 the two colleges would be independent
but free to enter into any form of cooperation that might
at the time seem wise.
It became clear early in 1947, less than a month after
Barr's departure from St. John's, that he was running into
difficulties in founding the new college. On january 25 he
wrote to Paul Mellon, "The size of the endowment was
measured to fit an entirely different problem from the
new one we now face. It would have run St. John's well.
But St. John's already had a campus, a plant in good order,
and equipment." Around the middle of the year he requested Mellon to release the entire benefits of the endowment fund to Liberal Arts Incorporated for other use
than the establishment of an undergraduate college. Mellon refused to do so on the ground that it had been his
intention only to endow a "college for undergraduates
similar in size and curriculum to St. John's." He noted in a
letter to Barr of june 24, 1947, "Through circumstances
beyond your control that project now appears unfeasible,
if not impossible, within any reasonable amount of time,
chiefly due to lack of qualified teachers and adequate
building funds." 39 Barr, however, has claimed that the
whole effort was sabotaged by Donald Shepard, who, as
vice-president of Mellon's Old Dominion Foundation,
had a good deal to do with the terms of the disposal of the
funds. 40 It was announced to the St. John's faculty at the
first fall meeting in 1947 that on August 1 Liberal Arts Incorporated had met in Stockbridge and decided to abandon the project of a new college. "U npropitiousness of
building," it was said, "and difficulties of cooperating with
the Old Dominion Foundation were the chief reasons for
the decision. "41 The endowment fund reverted to the Old
Dominion Foundation.
Thus ended the last attempt of Barr and Buch;man to
form an institution which would be a beacon for colleges
17
�and universities to follow. They did not in the succeeding
years keep in close touch with St. John's College and
knew very little about what was happening at St. John's.
There were a few times when they returned, upon invita·
tion, to lecture or to speak at Class Day or Commencement. One such occasion was Class Day in 1948 when both
Barr and Buchanan spoke. Buchanan in his speech urged
that the liberal arts should have a subject matter and that
the core of the St. John's curriculum should be, not metaphysical (which had earlier been his constant theme), but
political. A few days later, when he had returned to Massachusetts, he wrote President Kieffer a letter in which
he told him that the decision that Kieffer and the board
thermore that he never knew to what extent he had laid
the foundations for a building that through many vicissitudes, was to increase in worth.
Barr, reflecting upon these events many years later,
could say of his decision to leave St. John's and to use the
Mellon money to start another college, "I don't claim for a
second I made a ·wise choice."43
Unless othenvise indicated, all records of meetings of the faculty and of the
Board of Visitors and Governors are located in the archives of St. John's
College in Annapolis.
11
made to continue the program in Annapolis was Stupid
and blind and therefore highly irresponsible to the vision,
highly misleading to the community, and disloyal to whatever leadership Winkie and I provided."42 He claimed that
the original program was "a revolutionary blueprint, an
attempt to subvert and rebuild education," that it was a
bull-dozer "inside a Trojan horse which was to be let loose
once the walls of the sacred city were passed and left behind." He said, "I fought the Navy fight, with the few who
cared, out of piety to the sacred city" .... There were no
reinforcements, and there was no outside recognition of
the sacred city, only a faint sentimental wish to live in the
ruins." He maintained, presumably referring to the agree-
ment that St. John's should have the income from the
Mellon endowment until July I, 1948, that he and Barr
had a fit of personal generosity which did not blind them
but blurred their vision, and that out of their clear vision
of what was the only hope for the program together with
their blurred vision produced by the board's bad decision
had come "the ordeal of Stockbridge which could only
commit suicide because of its high courage and generosity
to St. John's." He said that "the program should be laid on
the shelf and forgotten," that it was "not even a pattern to
be laid up in heaven and beheld, but a poison corrupting a
household at St. John's" and that because of its being at
St. John's it "would become a poison wherever it was
tried." He asserted that he and Barr had in 1937 made "a
mistaken historical judgment and a bad educational prediction" and that they should be counted out of any plans
that Kieffer and the people at St. John's might make.
Scott Buchanan had over a period of twenty years invested an enormous amount of love and work in formulating, planning, and trying to bring into being, whether at
St. John's or elsewhere, what had come to be called the St.
John's program. At this point it seemed to him that it had
all come to nothing. The tragedy, if it is to be dignified by
that name, is not that he had failed, or that the program
had failed, or that others had failed him, but rather that
he could not question the wisdom of actions that by denying the college the endowment it otherwise would have
had, jeopardized the existence of the only college where
had been established, however precariously, the program
for which he more than anyone was responsible, and fur-
18
Chapter IV
1. Walter Lippman, "Today and Tomorrow," New
Tribune, December 27, 1938.
2. Baltimore Evening Sun, January 23, 24, 25, 1939.
3. Life magazine, February 5, 1940.
Yorl~
Herald
Chapter V
1. John Dewey, "Challenge to Liberal Thought," Fortune, August
1944.
2. Alexander Meiklejohn, "A Reply to John Dewey," Fortune, January
1945.
3. John Dewey, Letter to the Editors, Fortune, March 1945.
4. Sidney Hook, Education for Modern Man, New York 1946, 209.
5. Hook, 2!, 213.
6. Buchanan to Hook, November 10, 1938, St. John's College
Archives.
7. Buchanan to Hook, December 15, 1942, St. John's College
Archives.
8. Hook to Buchanan, January 26, 1943, St. John's College Archives.
9. Buchanan to Emily S. Hamblen, April27, 1940, St. John's College
Archives.
10. Nineteen Forty Yearbook, 15.
11. St. John's Collegian, October 27, 1939, 1.
12. Nineteen Forty-two Yearbook, 14.
13. Nineteen Forty-two Yearbook, 25.
14. Nineteen Forty-three Yearbook, 20.
15. Robert Hutchins thought this a good idea anyway, believing that
the last two years of high school were usually wasted.
16. Nineteen Forty-four Yearbook, 7.
17. Nineteen Forty-four Yearbook, 8.
18. Nineteen Forty-five-Forty-six Yearbook, 11.
19. Buchanan to H. G. Cayley, August 25, 1937, St. John's College
Archives.
20. Nineteen Forty-five-Forty-six Yearbook, 13.
Chapter VI
1. In 1868 the Naval Academy had purchased from St. John's a triangular piece of land of which a part of King George Street is one side.
2. St. John's Faculty Minutes, September 1940.
3. St. John's Board Minutes, January 13, 1941.
4. Buchanan Files, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
5. St. John's Board Minutes, February 25, 1945.
6. Diary of James V. Forrestal, Copy in the Navy Operational Archives,
Naval History Center, Washington, D.C.
7. Record of the hearing before the Committee on Naval Affairs of the
U.S. Senate (June 20, 1945). Navy Library, Washington, D.C. Cf. the
testimony of Captain T. R. Wirth, representing the Superintendent of
the Academy, at the same hearing.
8. Copies of letters in Buchanan Files, Houghton Library.
9. Buchanan to Hutchins, May 7, 1945, Buchanan Files, Houghton
Library.
10. Hutchins to Buchanan, May 9, 1945, Buchanan Files, Houghton
Library.
SUMMER 1982
�11 .Buchanan to Senator Wayne Morse, undated, Buchanan Files,
Houghton Library,
12. Baltimore Sun, April.1945.
13. Baltimore Sun, July 3, 1945; Washington Post, July 30, 1945.
14. Dean's Nine Year Report (1946), St. John's College Archives.
15. Cf. the Supreme Court decision in Kohl v. United States (1875).
16. Evening Capital, October 22, 1945.
17. Testimony before the House Naval Affairs Committee, October 9,
1945.
18. Statement of Richard Cleveland before the Senate Naval Affairs
Committee, June 20, 1945.
19. Captain T. R. Wirth indeed stated at the Senate Committee hearing
of June 20, "Acquisition of the St. John's property is urgently required in
the national interest to provide the area determined to be essential to
the continuance of the Naval Academy mission: the fundamental education and training of the number of young men required for the commissioned personnel of the United States Navy." This, of course, was
not an official declaration of policy by the Navy Department or the
Committees.
20. Diary of James V. Forrestal, copy in the Operational Archives,
Naval History Center, Washington, D.C., 403-4.
21. Minutes of the Board for 1944-47 are missing.
22. Buchanan Files, Houghton Library.
23. Evening Capital, August 1, 1945.
24. Memorandum by Richard Cleveland to the St. John's College
Board, St. John's College Archives.
25. Statement of Policy by the Board of Visitors and Governors of St.
John's College, with reference on Navy Department proposal to acquire
the St. John's campus (November 21, 1945), St. John's College Archives.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
26.
the
27.
28.
29.
Buchanan had discovered from studying the Dartmouth case that
charter of a college confers upon it immortality.
Dean's Report, St. John's Collegian, October 19, 1945.
Statement of Policy, November 21, 1945.
Mellon to Barr, appended to the St. John's Faculty Minutes for
April 27, 1946.
30. Transcript of a recorded conversation with Allan Hoffman, July 27,
1975: "I thought, why not put an end to it by putting the College where
the huge beast couldn't suddenly attack again? And it was clear that a lot
of people in the Navy were damned determined to attack again." Since
1946 there has been no attempt by the Navy to take the campus. St.
John's College Archives,
31. Hoffman conversation.
32. Hoffman conversation,
33. Memorandum to the Board of Visitors and Governors, July 31, 1946,
St. John's College Archives.
34. Announcement by the Board of St. John's College, August 3, 1946,
Buchanan Files, Houghton Library.
35. Buchanan to Adler, August 14, 1946, Adler Files, Institute for
Philosophical Research, Chicago.
36. St. John's Faculty Minutes, November 2, 1946,
37: Buchanan to Cleveland, November 20, 1946, Buchanan Files,
Houghton Library.
38. Buchanan to Hutchins, December 5, 1946, Buchanan Files,
Houghton Library.
39. Buchanan Files, Houghton Library.
40. Hoffman conversation.
41. St. John's Faculty Minutes, September 15, 1947.
42. Buchanan to Kieffer, June 8, 1948, St. John's College Archives.
43, Hoffman conversation.
19
�Schiller's Drama-Fulfillment
of History and Philosophy in Poetry
Gisela Berns
Friedrich Schiller, the great German dramatist at the
end of. the eighteenth century, was not only a great poet,
but also a great historical and philosophical thinker. A
contemporary of the Founding Fathers of this country
and akin to them in thoughts and feelings about the political issues of the time, Schiller was inspired by the ideas of
the ancients in their striving for human excellence, but
committed to the ideals of a modern world in its fight for
the rule of law, based on the recognition of human free·
dom. At a time of social and political revolutions, Schiller
believed that art, and only art, through its mediation between the senses and reason, might be able to prepare
man for the difficult task of governing himself. Schiller's
drama-from The Robbers (started at the time of the Declaration of Independence) to William Tell (finished at the
time of jefferson's first presidency)-deals with one
theme: the problematic relationship between freedom
and rule. Focusing on great revolutionary ideas like the
conflict between nature and convention, explored in The
Robbers and in Intrigue and Love, or on great revolutionary figures of history like Fiesco, Don Carlos, Wallenstein,
Mary Stuart, The Maid of Orleans, and William Tell, all of
Gisela Berns, a Tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis, delivered the
original version of this essay as a lecture in Annapolis on February 26,
1982. Its main theme is the subject of her forthcoming book, Schiller's
Wallenstein~Fulfillment of History and Philosophy in Poetry.
20
Schiller's plays, even The Bride of Messina, modeled on
the Oedipus story, wrestle with the problem of freedom.
In recognition of this historical role, Schiller was awarded
honorary citizenship of the French Revolution (that the
document, issued in 1793, did not reach him till 1798,
long after the revolution vanquished its signer, Danton,
Schiller always considered an ironic reminder of the problematic nature of freedom).
An account of Schiller's life1 and work,2 culminating in
a discussion of Wallenstein, his highest artistic achievement, shall show in what sense he understood poetry to
be a fulfillment of history and philosophy.
Schiller's life, from 1759 to 1805, was, except for his early
childhood and the beginning years of his marriage, a
never ending struggle. First against a tyrannical ruler, later
against poverty and prejudice, finally against a fatal illness
which racked the last fifteen years of his short life. A
struggle it was, this life of Schiller's, but what a glorious
struggle! A testimony to man's ability to overcome or, in
Wallenstein's proud words, to the conviction that "it is
the mind which builds itself the body." 3 Schiller's father,
by his own report, offered a prayer at Schiller's birth:
And you, Being of all beings! You I begged, after the birth of
my only son, that you would add to his strength of mind what
I, for want of education, could not reach.4
Schiller's early plans of studying theology were rudely
shattered by the interference of the Duke of WurttemSUMMER 1982
�berg in whose newly established military academy the
promising sons of the country were educated towards
various professions. Separated from his family, Schiller
spent his young years, from age thirteen to twenty-one, in
an atmosphere of oppressive regimentation. After a year
of broad general education in sciences and humanities,
with strong emphasis on philosophy, Schiller, at first,
studied law, later, because "bolder" and "more akin to
poetry," medicine. A cross between medicine and philosophy, his dissertation On the Connection between Man's
Animal and Spiritual Nature for the first time explores a
theme to surface again and again in Schiller's poetry.
The great breakthrough of his passion for poetry came
after Schiller, at sixteen, had been introduced to Shakespeare. Emboldened by his love for Shakespeare, he was
obsessed with the idea of writing a play that would expose
all the evils of conventional society. Full of admiration for
the ancient heroes of Plutarch and the modern sentiments of Rousseau, Schiller, for years, feverishly and passionately worked on his Robbers. Forbidden to read or
write poetry, he risked life and liberty in the production of
this first play of his. With the performance of The Robbers, in 1782, at the famous theater of Mannheim, Schiller
gained immortal fame and lost his homeland. Hailed by
one reviewer as the coming "German Shakespeare,'' 5 he
was ordered by the Duke, under penalty of arrest, to stop
writing anything but medical works. With the help of a
young musician, Schiller, in disguise, fled to Mannheim
where he hoped to find support for his life as a poet. Even
there he had to spend months in hiding, at work on his
Fiesco and Intrigue and Love, before the authorities accepted him. In a letter of 1783, possibly meant to hide his
whereabouts from the Duke, Schiller toyed with the idea
of emigrating to America. Undecided among medicine,
philosophy, or politics, he envisioned a life in the New
World that, above all, would allow him to be a poet:
But tragedies, for that matter, I shall never cease to writeyou know my whole being hangs on it.6
A contemporary of the Founding Fathers of this country, inspired by the ideal of human freedom, and set on
writing tragedies (no matter what profession he would
have taken up in this New World), Schiller might have
given us that sorely missing drama on the American Revolution. Such a drama (as Harold Jantz, in his article William Tell and the American Revolution, suggests7) could
have been written either from the British point of view
(something like Aeschylus' Persians) or from the American
point of view (something like Schiller's William Tell).
In the spirit of revolution, Intrigue and Love, a "Bourgeois Tragedy," scourges the nobility's injustices against
the lower classes, most poignantly in the heartrending account of the forced recruitment of German troops to be
sold to the British for the Revolutionary War in America.8
With The Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa, a "Republican
Tragedy," Schiller, for the first time, strikes a theme
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
found, in one form or another, in all his subsequent plays:
the tragedy of the great political hero who, for the sake of
his vision of a more perfect world, destroys the existing
world, including himself.
After the "Storm and Stress" of The Robbers, Fiesco,
and Intrigue and Love, Schiller, in 1787, reached a first
classical height with Don Carlos-not only because of his
change from rhythmic prose to verse, but even more
because of his sovereign treatment of the theme, the conflict between revolutionary idealism and imperialistic realism. The stark contrast between good and evil of Schiller's
earlier plays turns to a dark and haunting complexity in
Don Carlos. The tragic beauty of Don Carlos has moved
more than one great writer after Schiller to integrate parts
of it into their own work: Dostoyevsky, the theme and setting of the "Grand Inquisitor" story in The Brothers
Karamazov; Thomas Mann, the burning admiration of
Tanio Kroger for the breathtaking scene in Don Carlos,
where the king, the absolute ruler of the catholic world, is
said to have wept-a scene to which Mann, in his late
Essay on Schiller, confesses to have "early given his homage."' Apart from its literary influence, Schiller's Don
Carlos always had a political voice and was felt to be a
threat to tyrants. During Hitler's Third Reich, both William Tell and Don Carlos disappeared from the German
theater. As Oscar Seidlin, in his article Schiller: Poet of
Politics, reports:
A quarter of a century ago, when darkness descended upon
Schiller's native country, a darkness that was to engulf all of
mankind in the shortest possible time, a theater in Hamburg
produced one of Schi11er's great dramatic works, Don Carlos.
It is the play which culminates in the stirring climax of its
third act, the confrontation scene between King Philip of
Spain and the Marquis Posa, the powerful verbal and intellec~
tual battle between the rigid and autocratic monarch, con~
temptuous of mankind and gloomily convinced that only
harsh and tyrannical suppression can preserve peace and
order in his vast empire, and the young, enthusiastic advocate
of revolutionary principles, who demands for his fellow citi~
zens the untrammeled right to happiness, the possibility of
unhampered self~development and self~ realization of every in~
dividual. The scene rises to its pitch with Marquis Posa's
brave challenge flung into the king's face: "Geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit!-Do give freedom of thought!" When this line,
one of the most famous in all German dramatic literature, resounded from the Hamburg stage in the early years of Hitler's
terror, the audience under the friendly protection of darkness
burst out, night after night, into tumultuous applause. So
dangerous and embarrassing to the new rulers proved a single
verse of the greatest German playwright, who by then had
been dead for fully a hundred and thirty years, that the management of the theater was forced to cut out the scandalous
line. But the audience, knowing their classic well enough
even if it was fed to them in an emasculated version, reacted
quickwittedly: from that evening on they interrupted the per~
formance by thunderous applause at the moment when Mar~
quis Posa should have uttered his famous plea on the stage_,.
and did not. After these incidents the play was withdrawn
from tlie repertoire altogether. 10
21
�In prepar,ation for Don Carlos, Schiller had occupied
himself more and more with historical studies and, finally,
published a History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands from the Spanish Rule. This comprehensive, dramatically written work, in 1789, won him a professorship
at the University of Jena. Besides lecturing on Universal
History and Aesthetics, Schiller devoted himself to his
second major historical work, the History of the Thirty
Years War, later to become the basis for his monumental
trilogy on Wallenstein, the imperial general of the Thirty
Years War.
The summer before settling in )ena, Schiller had met
Charlotte v. Lengefeld, his future wife, in whose circle of
family and friends the young poet, every evening, read
from Homer and the Greek tragedians. Filled with a kind
of Grecomania, Schiller threw himself into translating Euripides' Iphigeneia in Aulis, an activity he hoped would
give him classical purity and simplicity. In a letter to the
sisters v. Lengefeld Schiller writes:
My Euripides still gives me much pleasure, and a great deal
of it also stems from its antiquity. To find man so eternally
remaining the same, the same passions, the same collisions of
passions, the same language of passions. With this infinite
multiplicity always though this unity of the same human
form. 11
In the spirit of those days, Schiller composed a long
melancholy poem, The Gods of Greece, that laments the
disappearance of beauty and nobility from the modern
world:
"Als die Cotter menschlicher noch waren,
Waren Menschen gbttlicher.
When the gods still were more human,
Men were more godlike.
This immersion in Greek antiquity-and the study of
Kant that followed-became crucial for Schiller's aesthetic writings.
A terrible illness of Schiller's, in 1791, stirred rumors of
his death. At the discovery that Schiller was still alive,
months later, a circle of admirers in Denmark prevailed
upon the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Augustenburg to
ease the burden of the poet's daily existence and, for a
few years, bestow a pension on him. Schiller accepted, full
of joy over the unexpected freedom to devote himself to
the "formation of his ideas":
Serenely I look to the future-and if the expectations of
myself should prove to have been nothing but sweet illusions
with which my oppressed pride took revenge on fate, I for one
shall not lack the determination to justify the hopes two excellent citizens of our century have placed in me. Since my
lot does not allow me to act as benefactor in their way, I shall,
nevertheless, attempt it in the only way that is given to meand may the seed they have spread unfold in me into a beautiful blossom for mankind. 12
22
With the same mail, Schiller ordered Kant's Critique of
Pure Reason. Earlier that year, in the throes of his illness,
reading the Critique of Judgement had convinced him
that nothing short of a thorough understanding of Kant's
philosophical system would satisfy him. For three years, a
long time in so short a life as Schiller's, he studied Kant
and wrote his own philosophical essays: On Tragic Art, On
Grace and Dignity, On the Sublime, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, and On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. On
the Aesthetic Education of Man he wrote, as a gesture of
gratitude, in the form of letters to the Duke of Schleswig·
Holstein-Augustenburg.
Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man sketches
out a history of mankind from a state of nature to a state
of civilization, where the progress of the species towards a
fulfillment of human nature depends on the fragmentation of nature in the individual. Schiller complements this
view of history, reminiscent in part of Rousseau's Second
Discourse, with the hope that a higher art might restore
the totality of nature, destroyed by art in the process of
civilization. Far from romantic longing for a "Golden
Age" of nature, Schiller exclaims:
I would not like to live in a different century and have worked
for a different one. One is as much a citizen of one's time as
one is a citizen of one's country.B
At the beginning of his poem The Artists, a panoramic
history of mankind, written in 1789, Schiller speaks of
man as "the ripest son of time, free through reason, strong
through laws," standing "at the close of the century" in
"noble, proud manliness":
Wie schOn, o Mensch, mit deinem Palmenzweige
Stehst du an des Jahrhunderts Neige,
In edler stolzer Mannlichkeit,
Mit aufgeschlossnem Sinn, mit Geistesflille,
Voll milden Ernsts, in tatenreicher Stille,
Der reifste Sohn der Zeit,
Frei durch Vernunft, stark durch Gesetze,
Durch Sanftmut gross, und reich durch Schatze,
Die lange Zeit dein Busen dir verschwieg,
Herr der Natur, die deine Fesseln liebet,
Die deine Kraft in tausend Kampfen tibet
Und prangend unter dir aus der Verwildrung stieg!
Like Hamilton, in Federalist One, and Madison, in Federalist Fourteen, Schiller calls his contemporaries to the task
of deciding the fate of mankind:
Der Menschheit Wtirde ist in eure Hand gegeben,
Bewahret siel
Sie sinkt mit euch! Mit euch wird sie sich heben!
The dignity of mankind is in your hands,
Preserve it!
It sinks with you! With you uplifts itself! 14
Both Hamilton and Madison speak of the people as the
ones to decide the case:
SUMMER 1982
�Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they
have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and
other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for
antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? To this
manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and
the world for the example, of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theater, in favor of private rights and
public happiness.
Schiller, however, as in the Prologue to Wallenstein,
judges the artists to be responsible for the legacy of mankind:
Und jetzt an des Jahrhunderts ernstem Ende,
Wo selbst die Wirklichkeit zur Dichtung wird,
Wo wir den Kampf gewaltiger Naturen
Und ein bedeutend Ziel vor Augen sehn,
Und urn der Menschheit grosse Gegenstande,
Urn Herrschaft und urn Knechtschaft wird gerungen,
Jetzt darf die Kunst auf ihrer SchattenbD.hne
Auch hohern Flug versuchen, ja sie muss,
So1l nicht des Lebens Bohne sie beschamen.
Now at this century's impressive close,
As actuality itself is turned
To art, as we see mighty natures locked
In struggle for a goal of lofty import,
As conflict rages for the great objectives
Of ffian, for masterdorn, for freedom, now
Art is allowed assay of higher flight
Upon its shadow stage; indeed it must be,
Lest it be put to shame by life's own stageY
consciousness of the Moderns. Anticipating much of
Hegel's philosophy of history, both in perspective and in
formulation, Schiller portrays man's historical development
as progress from a naturally to a rationally given form of
humanity 18 In homage to this kinship of thought, Hegel
chooses two lines from Schiller's early poem Friendship as
Finale of his Phenomenology of the Spirit. The slight
change he makes in speaking of "Geisterreich" ("realm of
spirits") rather than "Seelenreich" ("realm of the soul")
points, I think, to a crucial difference between Hegel and
Schiller. The fragmentation of human nature in the individual for the sake of greater differentation in the species
moves the tragic poet more than the philosopher:
But can it be that man should be fated to neglect himself
for any end? Should nature, through her ends, be able to rob
us of a perfection which reason, through hers, prescribes for
us? It, therefore, must be false that the development of the
single faculties necessitates the sacrifice of their totality; or
even if the law of nature tended there ever so much, it must
be up to us to restore, by a higher art, this totality of our
nature which art has destroyed. 19
Aiming at a balance between reason and the senses,
Schiller (who, in 1793, was rereading both Kant's Critique
of Judgement and Homer's Iliad) uses a Homeric simile:
Reason herself will not battle directly with this savage force
that resists her weapons and, as little as the son of Saturn in
the Iliad, descend, acting herself, to the gloomy theater. But
from the midst of the fighters she chooses the most worthy,
attires him, as Zeus did his grandson, with divine weapons
and, through his victorious power, effects the great decision. 20
Anticipating an objection to his concern about aesthetic
education in a time of social and political revolutions,
Schiller claims that the "path to freedom" leads through
"the land of beauty." 16 The contemplation of beauty, because of its mediation between the senses and reason,
might be able to prepare man for the challenge of freedom. Looking back to the beginnings of civilization, Schiller states:
This use of Achilles as symbol of noble, and sometimes
tragic, beauty is only one of many in Schiller's work. In his
poem The Gifts of Fortune, Schiller extols the honor the
gods bestow on Achilles, in his poem Nenia, their lament
over him at his death. The idea, symbolized by Achilles, of
truth manifesting itself in beauty, and therefore speaking
to us through the senses as well as reason, implies a new
appreciation of the senses:
Nature does not make a better start with man than with the
rest of her works: she acts for him, where he cannot yet act
himself as free intelligence. But it is just this which makes
him human that he does not stop at what mere nature made
him to be, but possesses the power through reason to retrace
the steps which she anticipated with him, to transform the
work of compulsion into a work of free choice and to elevate
the physical necessity to a moral one.
The path to divinity, if one can call a path what never leads to
its destination, is opened up for man in his senses. 21
Deeply conscious of the challenge,
that the physical society, in time, may not cease for a moment,
while the moral one, in the idea, forms itself, that for the sake
of man's dignity his existence may not be endangered,l7
Schiller strives for a model of humanity that combines the
natural beauty of the Greeks with the historical selfTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Clearly in answer to Plato's Republic, Schiller considers
"the priority of the sensuous drive" in man's experience
"the clue to the whole history of human freedom.""
In a highly dialectical sequence of steps, Schiller presents first the synthesis of the senses and reason in man's
contemplation of beauty, then the synthesis of the material and the formal drive in man's play drive, and finally
the synthesis of the physical and the moral necessity in
man's aesthetic freedom. Aware that aesthetic freedom, as
a state of being, is only an ideal, but that, as momentary
balance between the senses and reason, it is part of our
human experience, Schiller proclaims one of the most
provocative sentences of his work:
23
�Man plays only where, in the full sense of the word, he is
man; and he is fUlly man only where he plays.B
The freedom of the aesthetic state that results from a balance between the necessity of the moral as well as the
physical state Schiller considers the "highest of all legacies, the legacy of humanity":
It, therefore, is not only poetically permitted, but philosophically right, if one calls beauty our second creator. For although she only makes our humanity possible and, for the
rest, leaves it up to our free will how far we want to actualize
it, she shares this trait with our original creator, nature, who
likewise provided us with only the capacity for humanity, but
left the use of it -to our own determination of will. 24
Like Plato and Hegel, before and after him, Schiller understands man's development from a natural to a moral
being in terms of an analogy between the individual and
the species. But where Plato and Hegel insist on the sovereignty of reason over the senses, Schiller claims that "the
path to the head has to be opened through the heart," for
the species as well as for the individual: 25
The dynamic state can only make society possible by overcoming nature through nature; the ethical state can only
make society (morally) necessary by subjecting the single to
the general will; the aesthetic state alone can make society actual because it consummates the will of the whole through
the nature of the individuaF6
In explanation, Schiller maintains that "beauty alone we
enjoy, at the same time, as individuals and as species, that
is, as representatives of the species."
Interpreters of Schiller's aesthetic theories have always
wondered whether, for Schiller, the aesthetic or the moral
state is finally the highest form of humanity. Like Meno' s
opening question about virtue, this dilemma has no direct
answer. In terms of actual achievement, the moral state
presents the height of human perfection, the aesthetic
state an ideal comparable only to the life of the Olympian
gods:
But does such a state of beautiful semblance exist, and
where is it to be found? As need, it exists in every finely tuned
soul, as reality, one might find it, like the pure church and the
pure republic, only in a few select circles, where not mindless
imitation of the ways of others, but inherent beautiful nature
guides human behavi(_)r, where man goes through the most
complex situations with bold simplicity and calm innocence,
and neither finds it necessary to offend another's freedom in
order to assert his own, nor to throw away his dignity in order
to exhibit grace. 27
This combination of Grace (Anmut) and Dignity
(Wiirde), an ideal realized among the Greeks but lost in
modern times, Schiller sees preserved in Greek works of
art:
24
Mankind has lost its dig11ity, but art has saved and preserved
it in significant stones; truth (Wahrheit) lives on in semblance
(Tiiuschung), and from the copy (Nachbild) the original (Urbild) shall be reconstituted."
This perspective, for Schiller, defines the artist's relationship to his time:
The artist certainly is the son of his time, but woe to him if,
at the same time, he is its pupil or even its favorite. Let a beneficent deity snatch the suckling betimes from his mother's
breast, nourish him with the milk of a better age and allow
him to reach maturity under a far-off Grecian sky. Then,
when he has become a man, let him return, a s_tranger, to his
own century; yet, not in order to please it with his appearance, but terrible as Agamemnon's son, in order to purify
it. The material he certainly will take from the present, but
the form from a nobler time, yes, from beyond all time, borrowed from the absolute unchangeable unity of his being. 29
This comprehensive task of the artist, to span the whole
history of human civilization in an attempt to give mankind its fullest possible expression, Schiller discusses more
specifically in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. Understanding the poets as "preservers and avengers of nature,"
he distinguishes between two types, the Naive poet as
''being nature,'' the Sentimental poet as ''seeking nature.''
Expressive of two states of mankind, Naive poetry of a
union, Sentimental poetry of a separation between man
and nature, both forms of poetry, in different ways, show
a perfection of art: Naive poetry, as "imitation of reality,"
by fulfilling a finite goal, Sentimental poetry, as "presentation of the ideal," by striving for an infinite goal.
Schiller's terms Naive and Sentimental might sound
confusing at first. They certainly do not mean what they
mean today. The Naive poet, like a god behind his work,
lets the world speak for itself. In this sense, Schiller considers not only Homer, but also Shakespeare and Goethe,30
Naive poets. The Sentimental poet, on the other hand, an
intellectual presence in his work, reflects on the world he
portrays. In this sense, Schiller considers most modern
poets, including himself, Sentimental poets.
Striving for an ideal of poetry, Schiller wonders whether
and how far a work of art might combine classical individuality and modern ideality. To "individualize the ideal"
and "idealize the individual," in Schiller's eyes, would not
only constitute "the highest peak of all art," but also serve
as that "higher art," expected to restore the totality of
human nature which art had destroyed in the process of
civilization.
Understanding On Naive and Sentimental Poetry "so to
speak" as ua bridge to poetic production" 31 Schiller, again,
begins to write poetry-first philosophical poems, later
ballads and historical dramas:
I have, at the same time, the intention, in this way to reconcile
myselfwith the poetic :Muse whom, through my falling away
SUMMER 1982
�to the historic Muse (a fall indeed) I have grossly offended. If I
should succeed in regaining the favor of the god of poetry, I
hope tO hang up in his temple the spoils which I have labored
to obtain in the realm of philosophy and history, and to dedi~
cate myself to his service forever. 12
In 1795, Schiller writes to Countess v. Schimmelmann:
You wish, in your letter, that I continue in the poetic path
which I have entered. Why should I not, if you find it worth
your while to encourage me in it. Also by heeding your advice
I only follow the inclination of my heart. From the beginning,
poetry was the highest concern of my soul, and I only left it
for a time in order to return to it richer and worthier. 33
Encouraged by his friendship with Goethe, Schiller lived
the last ten years of his life for poetry. A constant source
of inspiration for both of them, this friendship had started
with a famous conversation in july of 1794. On the way
home from a meeting of the Society for Natural Science
in )ena, Goethe had outlined his Metamorphosis of Plants
to Schiller who, still a Kantian, had retorted: "This is no
experience! This is an idea!" To which Goethe, with courteous irony, had replied: "I certainly should be glad to have
ideas without my knowing and even to see them with my
eyes." In a letter following this conversation, Schiller
sums up the difference between them:
Your spirit, to an extraordinary degree, works intuitively,
and all your thinking powers seem to have compromised on
the imagination, so to speak, as their common representative.
... My mind works really more in a symbolizing way, and
thus I am suspended, as a kind of hybrid, between concept
and imagination, between rule and feeling, between technical
head and genius. This, especially in former years, has given
me a rather awk~ard appearance, in the field of speculation
as well as in the art of poetry; for, usually, the poet overtook
me where I was supposed to philosophize, and the philosophical spirit where I wanted to write poetry. Even now, it happens to me often enough that imagination disturbs my
abstractions and cold reason my poetry. If I can master these
two forces to the point that, through my freedom, I can assign
each one its limits, a beautiful fate shall still await me .... 34
Another friendship, with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the
great scholar in classical languages and literatures, was
crucial for Schiller's understanding of his relation to the
Ancients. In a Jetter of 1795, Humboldt writes:
I believe I can justify this seemingly paradoxical sentence that
you, on the one hand, are the direct opposite of the Greeks,
since your products exhibit the very character of autonomy;
and that, at the same time, you, among the moderns, again
are closest to them, since your products, after Greek ones, express necessity of form; only that you draw it from yourself,
while the Greeks take it from the aspect of external nature,
which is likewise necessary in its form. Wherefore also, Greek
form resembles more the object of the senses, yours more the
object of reason, even though the former, finally, also rests on
a necessity of reason, and yours, of course, also speaks to the
senses. 35
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
After the completion of his Bride of Messina, in 1803,
Schiller reminds Humboldt of this earlier exchange of
theirs:
My first attempt at a tragedy in strict form will give you
pleasure; you will be able to judge from it, whether as contemporary of Sophocles I might have been able to carry off a
prize. I have not forgotten that you called me the most
modern of all newer poets and, therefore, thought me in opposition to everything that could be called ancient.36
In an introduction to the publication of their correspondence, twenty-five years after Schiller's death, Humboldt
reminisces:
What every observer had to notice in Schiller, as characteristically defining, was that, in a higher and more pregnant sense
than perhaps ever in anyone else, thought was the element of
his life. Continual authentic intellectual activity almost never
left him, and only yielded to the more violent attacks of his
bodily illness. It seemed to him relaxation, not strain. This
showed itself especially in conversation for which Schiller
seemed most truly born. He never sought for a significant
topic of discourse, he left it more to chance to bring up the
subject matter, but from each he led the conversation to a
more general perspective, and after a few exchanges one
found oneself in the middle of a mind-provoking discussion.
He always treated the thought as a result to be reached together, always seemed to need the interlocutor, even if one
remained conscious of receiving the idea merely from him
.... Moving above his subject matter with perfect freedom,
he used every sideline which offered itself, and so his conversation was rich in words that carry the feature of happy creations of the moment. The freedom, however, did not curtail
the investigation. Schiller always held on to the thread which
had to lead to its end. 37
~chiller's gift for friendship which, throughout his life,
moved him, whether face to face or in letters, to engage in
conversation, found its early expression in a letter of April
1783:
In this wonderful breath of the morning, I think of you,
friend-and of my Carlos ... I imagine---Every poetic work
is nothing but an enthusiastic friendship or Platonic love for a
creation of our head .... If we can ardently feel the state of a
friend, we will also be able to glow for our poetic heroes. Not
that the capacity for friendship and Platonic love would simply entail the capacity for great poetry-for I might be very
able to feel a great character without being able to create it.
But it should be clear that a great poet has to have, at least,
the capacity for the highest friendship, even if he has notalways expressed it. 38
Schiller's return to poetry, and to dramatic poetry in
particular, begins with a work which stands out in many
ways. In the center between his four earlier and four later
plays, Schiller's Wallenstein, his only trilogy, surpasses the
25
�others both in subject matter and in poetic form. Like the
Republic among Plato's Dialogues, Wallenstein, among
Schiller's plays, in one dramatic poem of epic dimensions,
encompasses all the earlier and later themes.
Alternating between a stricter and looser dramatic
form, Schiller, in the last five years of his life, completed
Mary Stuart, a "Tragedy" about the Scottish queen and
Elizabeth I; The Maid of Orleans, a "Romantic Tragedy"
about Joan of Arc and her mysterious fight for France;
The Bride of Messina, a "Tragedy with Choruses," modeled on the Oedipus story; and finally William Tell, a
"Drama" about the Swiss fight for independent unity. Of
these later four plays only William Tell, Schiller's last
finished play (1805), is not a tragedy. Different from
Schiller's other heroes, Tell avoids the abyss of tragedy
because he does not presume any power beyond the
limits of republican government.
The translations of such diametrically opposed works as
Shakespeare's Macbeth (1801) and Racine's Phi!dre, (1805)
reveal the range of Schiller's dramatic sensibility as much
as his own poetic work.
The summit of that work, both in content and form, is
Schiller's Wallenstein, a modern historical drama about
the imperial general of the Thirty Years War. An account
of the last few days of his life that ends with his treason
and his assassination, Wallenstein confronts us with the
issue of war and peace as an expression of the tragic situa~
tion of man. Disregarding religious and political interests,
Wallenstein, a new Caesar, claims to be the only one able
to unify Europe. This ideal, though noble in itself, turns
into a treacherous weapon in the hands of lesser men and
thus, indirectly, is responsible for Wallenstein's tragic fall.
As Lincoln, later, formulated it in his Perpetuation speech:
Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task
they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition
would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a guber-
natorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these
places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a
Napoleon?-Neverl Towering genius disdains a beaten path.
It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.- It sees no distinction in
adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected
to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to
serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any
predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.3 9
Like the Divided Line in Plato's Republic, Schiller's
Wallenstein, divided into the poet's Prologue and three
plays, leads from the realm of the visible to the realm of
the intelligible, from the realm of imagination and opinion to the realm of understanding and thought. Preceded
by a Prologue about the intricate relationship of life and
history to art and nature, the Wallenstein trilogy confronts
us first with Wallenstein's "shadow image," emerging
from the opinions of his soldiers, then with his "public
26
self,"' surrounded by his family and his generals, and finally with his "private self," suspended between the freedom of his heavenbound reflections and the necessity of
his earthbound actions.
The first dramatic poem after many years of historical
and philosophical studies, Wallenstein presents a fulfillment of Schiller's poetic ideal. As Hebbel's Schiller in his
Aesthetic Writings claims:
Unter den Richtern der Form bist du der erste, der einz'ge,
Der das Gesetz, das er gibt, gleich schon im Geben erfullt.
Among the judges of form, you are the first one, the only
Who, in the giving, fulfills already the law that he gives.
Schiller's "law" of aesthetic form, more than anything
else, implies a union between the natural grace and dignity of the Ancients and the historical self-consciousness
of the Moderns.
Even in Schiller's historical narrative of the confrontation between the Emperor, defending Catholicism, and
Gustav Adolf of Sweden, fighting for Protestantism, the
rise and fall of Wallenstein in the service of the Emperor
strangely suggests the story of Achilles. The historical figures and events of the Thirty Years War seem to fit the
poetic panorama of Homer's Iliad, where the natural enmity between Agamemnon, the ruler, and Achilles, the
hero, almost outweighs their national enmity against Hector, whose humanity encompasses both their natures. At
the end of his account of Wallenstein's role in the Thirty
Years War, Schiller writes:
Thus Wallenstein, at the age of fifty, ended his action-filled
and extraordinary life; raised by love of honor, felled by lust
for honor, with all his failings still great and admirable, unsurpassable if he had kept within bounds. The virtues of the ruler
and hero, prudence, justice, firmness and courage, tower in
his character colossally; but he lacked the gentler virtues of
the man, which grace the hero and gain love for the ruler.40
In answer to this Epilogue of the historian, the Prologue
of the poet promises:
Von der Parteien Gunst und Hass verwirrt
Schwankt sein Charakterbild in der Geschichte,
Doch euren Augen soli ihn jetzt die Kunst,
Auch eurem Herzen, menschlich naherbringen.
Denn jedes Ausserste fiihrt sie, die alles
Begrenzt und bindet, zur Natur zun1ck.
Blurred by the favor and the hate of parties
His image wavers within history.
But art shall now bring him more humanly
And closer to your eyes and to your heart.
For art, which binds and limits everything,
Brings all extremes back to the sphere of nature. 41
In the Preface to his Bride of Messina, Schiller speaks of
the relationship of historical truth to poetic truth or, as he
calls it in On Tragic Art, to the truth of nature:
SUMMER 1982
�Nature itself is only a spiritual idea, which never falls into the
senses. Under the cover of the appearances it lies, but it itself
never rises to·appearance. Only the art of the ideal is favored,
or rather shouldered with the task to grasp this spirit of the
whole and to bind it into bodily form. Though never before
the senses, this [type of art}, because of its creative power, can
bring it (the spirit of the whole} before the imagination and
thus be more true than all actuality and more real than all experience. From this it follows by itself that the artist cannot
use a single element from actuality as he finds it, that his work
must be ideal in all its parts, if it is supposed to have reality as
a whole and agree with nature.
Striving for a form of art that would be true both to historical reality and to nature, Schiller, in his Wallenstein,
surrounds the modern world of the Thirty Years War with
a mythical horizon of Homeric overtones- In a letter of
1794, in which he tells Korner of "writing his treatise on
the Naive and, at the same time, thinking about the plan
for Wallenstein," Schiller confesses:
In the true sense of the word, I enter a path wholly unknown to me, a path certainly untried, for in poetic matters,
dating back three, four years, I have put on a completely new
man.4Z
Reaching for the truth of nature by combining Naive and
Sentimental poetry, Schiller integrates Homer's "imitation of nature" into his own "presentation of the ideal."
In his advice to Goethe who, at the time of Schiller's work
on Wallenstein, was engaged in his Achilleis, an epic poem
about the death of Achilles, Schiller suggests:
Since it is certainly right that no Iliad is possible after the Iliad,
even if there were again a Homer and again a Greece, I believe I can wish you nothing better than that you compare
your Achilleis, as it exists now in your imagination, only with
itself, and in Homer only seek the mood, without rea1ly comparing your task with his . ... For it is as impossible as thankless
for the poet, if he should leave his homeground altogether
and actually oppose himself to his time. It is your beautiful
vocation to be a contemporary and citizen of both poetic
worlds, and exactly because of this higher advantage you will
belong to neither exclusively_43
Like catalysts in the process of establishing an ideal mode
of poetic expression, the echoes of Homer's Iliad in Schiller's Wallenstein accentuate its modernity.
In a major change from the History of the Thirty Years
War, Schiller's Wallenstein, like Homer's Iliad, begins in
the middle of the war. But where Homer, in the first
seven lines of the Iliad, describes the wrath of Achilles,
and the fateful clash between Achilles and Agamemnon,
Schiller, in the Prologue to Wallenstein, discusses the role
of art, and art's relationship to history and nature. Befitting the ancient epic poem, Homer's description centers
on Zeus and the fulfillment of his will; befitting the modern dramatic poem, Schiller's discussion centers on the
phenomenon of the great historical personality.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Both Homer's Iliad and Schiller's Wallenstein, with the
Catalogue of Ships and the first play of the trilogy, exhibit
the army and its various elements in a set picture. But
where the Catalogue of Ships, preceded by an invocation
to the Muse, merely lists the leaders of the Trojan war,
Wallenstein's Camp (the model for Brecht's Mother Courage), depicts the dissolution of life in the state of war
which, as a state of nature in the midst of the state of society, perverts all human values.
Both Homer's Iliad, in the center of its first half, and
Schiller's Wallenstein, in the center of its central play, The
Piccolomini, show the most tender human relationship
exposed to the harsh reality of war. But where Homer, in
the parting of Hector from wife and child on the wall of
Troy, focuses on the conflict between family and society,
Schiller, in the love scenes between Max and Thekla,
focuses on the conflict between individuals and society. A
poetic expression of Kant's Moral Law, founded on nothing but their hearts, love creates an island of freedom in
the sea of historical necessity.
Both Homer and Schiller, with the Shield of Achilles
and the chalice of the banquet at Pilsen, use the detailed
description of an artifact to highlight the world view implicit in each poem. But where the scenes on the shield
depict human life within the timeless order of nature and,
therefore, are self-explanatory, the scenes on the chalice
require an explanation not only for their reference to a
specific moment in human history, but also for their use
of allegory in portraying that moment.
Where Homer, in the First Book of the Iliad, tells of
Achilles' meeting with Thetis, and of her visit to Zeus on
Olympus, Schiller, in the opening scene of Wallenstein's
Death, the last play of the trilogy, shows Wallenstein concentrating on the long expected moment of the conjunction between the planets Venus and Jupiter. The change
of perspective, from trusting in divine powers that are
moved by will and fate to relying on heavenly bodies that
move in accordance with universal laws, does not affect
the hopes and the despair that either of them occasion.
Both Homer and Schiller, with dramatic suspense, portray their heroes in thoughtful solitude. But where Homer
paints the rich scene of Achilles sitting before his tent, in
the company of Patroclos, and singing about the glory of
men to the sound of his lyre, Schiller presents Wallenstein
absorbed in a monologue, reflecting on the relationship of
freedom and necessity in human nature. Unlike Achilles'
song which, in the creative process, unites freedom and
necessity, Wallenstein's reflection, in the form of a
syllogism with invalid premises, denies such a union and is
left with the fragments of abstract thought. Achilles' restful repose conveys the harmony of his song as much as
Wallenstein's restless stopping and starting the disharmony of his reflection.
In striking change from the History of the Thirty Years
War Schiller models the friendship between Wallenstein
and Max, the only non-historical character in the play, on
27
�the friendship between Achilles and Patroclos in Homer's
Iliad. Both Homer and Schiller, in the poetic constellation
of their characters and plots, make friendship, a middle
ground between a natural and a conventional bond, the
turning point for tragedy. Like the death of Patroclos for
Achilles, the death of Max brings Wallenstein closer to
realizing the tragic connection between freedom and ne·
cessity, borne out in the problematic relationship of
nature and convention.
The modern complexity of Schiller's Wallenstein, over
and against the relative simplicity of Homer's Iliad, shows
itself in content as well as in form. Expressive of the frag·
mentation of human nature in the course of history, Schiller's abstract language lends itself to portraying characters
that are torn between action and reflection. Striving for a
new totality of human nature, some of Schiller's characters parallel more than one of Homer's characters: Max,
both Patroclos and Hector; Thekla, both Briseis and Andromache. This double role of the modern characters is
the more significant, as it obliterates the enmity between
Greeks and Trojans and thus points to an individuality
which, viable or not, transcends the political nature of
man. Complementary to the parallels of characters, parallels of plots create a maze of poetic affinities· between the
ancient epic and the modern tragic poem. Discontinuous
and staggered, the parallels of plots seem to point not only
to the fragmentation of human nature in modern times,
but also to a new totality made possible through history.
Intent on exploring the way in which time and timelessness complement each other in the work of art, Schiller
and Goethe, in their letters during the years of Schiller's
work on Wallenstein, discuss the relationship of tragic to
epic poetry. Perceiving them as complementary art forms,
the one under the category of causality, the other under
the category of substantiality, Schiller defines tragedy as the
capture of ~'singular extraordinary moments," and epic
poetry as the depiction of "the permanent, persistent
whole of mankind."44 In agreement with Aristotle's no·
tion of tragedy as the more comprehensive art form of the
two,45 Schiller changes his early plans for an epic poem
about the Thirty Years War, centering on Gustav Adolf,
to his final ones for a dramatic poem, centering on
Wallenstein. Immersed in his task of translating Euripides,
in Schiller's eyes a poet on the way from Naive to Sentimental poetry, Schiller, in 1789, had written to Korner:
Let me add further that in getting better acquainted with
Greek plays I, in the end, abstract from them what is true,
beautiful and effective and, by leaving out what is defective, I
therefrom shape a certairi ideal through which my present
way shall be corrected and wholly founded.46
In a letter to Goethe, in which he speaks of "sketching
out a detailed scenario for Wallenstein," Schiller remarks:
I find the more I think about my own task and about the
way the Greeks dealt with tragedy that everything hinges on
the art of inventing a poetic fable. 47
28
Schiller's Wallenstein and Euripides' Iphigeneia in Aulis,
which Schiller had translated in 1788, apparently follow
the same poetic fable. In both dramas, the leader of the
army orders members of his family to join him at his
camp. In both, the political reasons for this move are disguised as personal reasons. In both, the heroic action of a
youth close to the leader interferes with his plans and finally causes tragedy and death. In the comparison with
Homer's Iliad, the main parallels were drawn between the
Emperor and Agamemnon, Wallenstein and Achilles, and
Max and Patroclos. In the comparison with Euripides'
Iphigeneia in Aulis, however, the main parallels would
have to be drawn between Wallenstein and Agamemnon,
Max and Achilles, and Thekla and Iphigeneia. The fundamental theme of Schiller's Wallenstein, the necessary connection between nature and convention, emerges in the
"living shape"48 of Wallenstein, presenting, in one
modern historical figure, Achilles, the archetype of the
natural hero, and Agamemnon, the archetype of the conventional ruler.
In the 26th letter On the Aesthetic Education of Man,
Schiller comments on the sovereign power of the artist:
With unlimited freedom he can fit together what nature
separated, as long as he can somehow think it together, and
separate what nature connected, as long as he can only detach it in his mind. Here nothing ought to be sacred to him
but his own law, as long as he only watches the marking
which divides his province from the existence of things or
realm of nature.
True to the reality of history, Schiller presents Wallenstein in a modern historical drama, set in the world of the
Thirty Years War. Separating what nature connected,
Schiller omits those features of the historical Wallenstein
that would disqualify him for being a tragic hero. True to
the reality of poetry, where the historical characters, as
poetic figures, become symbolic beings, Schiller presents
Wallenstein in a dramatic poem, surrounded by a mythical horizon. Fitting together what nature separated,
Schiller strikes parallels, respectively, between one historical and more than one mythical character, and between
one historical and more than one mythical plot. The fact
that the poetic figure of Wallenstein reflects the archetypes from Homer and Euripides in a cross between naturally opposed, but artistically complementary, characters
demonstrates both the fragmentation and the striving for
a new totality of human nature in the course of history.
By reflecting the Iliad as well as the pregnant moment before the Iliad, Schiller's Wallenstein, a living example of
the unity of time and timelessness, opens up a perspective
from history to epic as well as tragic poetry. With his integration of Greek "imitation of nature" into his own
"presentation of the ideal," Schiller seems to point to the
fulfillment of an ideal in which art and nature would meet
again.
SUMMER 1982
�To a letter in which Korner had suggested a few changes
in the plot of Wallenstein, Schiller replies with unusual
sharpness:
A product of art, insofar as it has been designed with artistic
sense, is a living work, where everything hangs together with
everything, where nothing can be moved without moving
everything from its place.49
Correlation of everything with everything can be detected
in more than one element of Schiller's dramatic poem:
the polarity of characters sustains the symmetry of plots
which, in concentric circles of scenes and acts, form the
whole of the trilogy. Corresponding to the three parts of
the Prologue, the three plays of Wallenstein explore the
relationship between nature and art, portrayed in the life
of individuals, representative of the life of mankind. Schil·
ler's integration of characters and plots from Greek epic
and tragic poetry into his modern historical drama con·
tributes to the symbolic nature of his poetic figures and
poses the question of the relationship between Ancients
and Moderns, fully discussed in his philosophical writings.
The correspondence between dramatic characters and
aesthetic principles ties together life and art by interpret·
ing them in terms of history, understood in the light of
nature.
The evidence of such complex relationships between
the various elements of Schiller's Wallenstein certainly
proves it to be a Hproduct of art/' but does it prove it to be
a "living work?" In a long, painstaking letter about Wallenstein, Humboldt writes to his friend:
We often talked with each other about this poem, when it was
scarcely more than sketched out. Yau considered it the
touchstone with which to test your poetic capacity. With admiration, but also with apprehension, I saw how much you
bound up in this task .... Such masses no one ever has set in
motion; such a comprehensive subject matter no one ever has
chosen; an action, the motivating springs and consequences
of which, like the roots and branches of a tremendous treetrunk, lie so far spread out and dispersed in such diverse
forms, no one ever has presented in one tragedy. 50
In a letter to Korner, Schiller confesses:
None of my old plays has as much purpose and form as my
Wallenstein already has; but, by now, I know too well what I
want and what I have to do that I could make the task so easy
for myself. 51
In the light of his notion of the poets as "preservers" and
"avengers" of nature, Schiller, in the letters On ihe Aesthetic Education of Man, compares the artist to Agamemnon's son who returns to the house of his fathers in order
to avenge the past on the present. Understanding him as a
contemporary and citizen of more than one world, Schiller advises the artist to take the material for his work from
the present, but the form from "a nobler time, yes, from
beyond all time, borrowed from the absolute, unchangeTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
able unity of his being." In compliance with his own advice, Schiller takes the material for his Wallenstein from
modern history, but the form from a blend of Naive and
Sentimental poetry, explicated in the aesthetic theories of
his philosophical writings. Fully aware of the artificial
nature of such a process, Schiller, nevertheless, expects to
achieve an ideal of poetry in which history and philosophy
would contribute to the vindication of nature. The fact
that no one, for now almost two hundred years, has seen
that Schiller's Wallenstein, in appearance the most
modern of his dramas, in substance is also the one where
Naive and Sentimental poetry blend most completely,
should be enough of an indication that history and philosophy, though indispensable for Schiller's work, are only
means towards a higher goal: their fulfillment in poetry.
To end with Schiller's own words:
All paths of the human spirit end in poetry, and the worse for
it if it lacks the courage to lead them there. The highest philosophy ends in a poetic idea, so the highest morality, the
highest politics. It is the poetic spirit that, for all three of
them, delineates their ideal which to approximate is their
highest perfection.sz
l. The main sources for my account of Schiller's life are: F. Burschell,
F. Schiller, In Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Hamburg-1958; G.v
Wilpert, Schiller-Chronik, Sein Leben und Schaffen, Stuttgart 1958.
With a few exceptions, references to secondary literature have been
kept out of the account.
2. Translations of dramatic works, C.E. Passage, Wallenstein, 1958; Don
Carlos, 1959; Mary Stuart, The Maid of Orleans, 1961; The Bride of
Messina, William Tell, Demetrius, 1962; Intrigue and Love, 1971, New
York; F.J. Lamport, The Robbers and Wallenstein, London 1979.
Translations of philosophical works, On the Aesthetic Education of Man,
R. Snell, New York 1954; E.M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby, dual
language edition with extensive introduction and commentary, Oxford
1967; On Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, J.A. Elias,
New York 1966.
3. Wallenstein's Death, III, 13, 1813.
4. F. Burschell, F. Schiller, 7.
5. G.v. Wilpert, Schiller-Chronik, 41.
6. To Lempp (1), Jun. 19, 1783.
7. In A Schiller Symposium, ed. L. Willson, Austin, Texas 1960, 65-81.
8. See. T. Sowell, Ethnic America, A History, New York 1981,54: "The
British brought nearly 30,000 German mercenary soldiers to the col·
onies to try to put down the American rebellion. These were not individual volunteers but soldiers sold or rented to the British by the rulers
of various German principalities."
9. Th. Mann, Versuch ilber Schiller, Frankfurt a.M. 1955, 35 (Last
Essays: translation R. and C. Winston, New York 1966, 29, but without
this personal reference).
10. In A Schiller Symposium, Austin 1960, 31-48.
11. Dec. 4, 1788.
12. To Baggesen, Dec. 16, 1791.
13. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter 2.
14. The Artists, 443-445.
15. Wallenstein, Prol. 61-69 (translation C.E. Passage; "great objectives,"
my correction).
16. Aesthetic Education, Letter 2.
17. Aesthetic Education, Letter 3.
18. Aesthetic Education, Letter 6.
29
�19. Aesthetic Education, Letter 6.
20. Aesthetic EduCation, Letter 8.
21. Aesthetic Education, Letter 11.
22. Aesthetic Education, Letter 20.
23. Aesthetic Education, Letter 15.
24. Aesthetic Education, Letter 21.
25. Aesthetic Education, Letter 8.
26. Aesthetic Education, Letter 27.
27. Aesthetic Education, Letter 27.
28. Aesthetic Education, Letter 9.
29. Aesthetic Education, Letter 9.
30. Note that Schiller's judgment (1794/95) dates from long before even
the First Part of Goethe's Faust {1806).
31. To Korner, Sep. 12, 1794.
32. To E.v. Schimmelmann, Jul. 13, 1793.
33. To C.v. Schimmelmann, Nov. 4, 1795.
34. To Goethe, Aug. 31, 1794.
35. To Schiller, Nov. 6, 1795.
36. To Humboldt, Feb. 17, 1803.
37. Ober Schiller und den Gang seiner Geistesentwicklung, 1830, in
Werke, II, ed. A. Flitner/K. Giel, Darmstadt 1969, 361-362.
38. To Reinwald, Apr. 14, 1783, quoted in F. Burschell, F. Schiller,
47-48.
39. A. Lincoln, "The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions," Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, Jan. 27,
1838.
40. History of the Thirty Years War, End of IV.
30
41. Wallenstein, Pro!. 102-107 (translation C.E. Passage; "within",
"heart", my corrections).
42. To Komer, Sep. 4, 1794.
43. To Coethe, May 18, 1798; in his earlier work Hermann and
Dorothea Goethe closely imitates Homer. Under the names of the nine
Muses, starting with Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry, and ending with
Urania, the Muse of philosophical poetry, the nine Cantos of Hermann
and Dorothea present the whole realm of poetic expression. Set against
the historical background of the French Revolution, the story of Hermann and Dorothea, together with the different modes of poetry evolving from each other, seems to be a modern version of Homer's Shield of
Achilles. The Muse of epic poetry, however, not only governs the First
Canto, but her spirit prevades the poem as a whole: Homeric meter,
Homeric diction, Homeric epHhets and episodes, though softened from
heroic to idyllic tone, echo Iliad as well as Odyssey in every line of
Goethe's poem. As Goethe, in his elegy "Hermann and Dorothea,"
states it: "Doch Home ride zu sein, auch nur als letzter, ist schon" ("Yet,
to be a Homeride, even if only the last one, is beautiful").
44. To Goethe, Apr. 25, 1797; Aug. 24, 1798.
45. To Goethe, May 5, 1797.
46. Mar. 9, 1789.
47. Apr. 4, 1797.
48. Aesthetic Education, Letter 15.
49. Mar. 24, 1800.
50. To Schiller, Sep. 1800.
51. Nov. 28, 1796.
52. To. C.v. Schimmelmann, Nov. 4, 1795.
SUMMER 1982
�Some Chinese Poems
Translated by Julie Landau
Six Dynasties Period (317-588)
Anonymous
Tzu- YEH SoNGS
Three Selections
I
When first I knew him,
I thought two hearts could be as one
My thread hung on a broken loom,
How could it make good cloth?
II
Through the long night, I can not sleep,
How dazzling the moon!
I think I hear someone callingAnd sigh 'yes' to the emptiness
III
I am as the morning star,
Fixed for a thousand years.
Your fickle heart goes with the sun,
Rising in the east, while it sets in the west!
Julie Landau has studied Chinese at Columbia University and for a year
(1967-1968) in Hong Kong. Her translations of Chinese poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Renditions {Hong Kong), and in the anthology, Song without Music: Chinese Tzu Poetry, edited by Stephen C.
Soong, (University of Washington Press, 1980).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
31
�T'ao Ch'ien (365-427)
RETURNING TO 1HE FARM TO liVE
I
I never had a taste for men's affairs
Mountains and hills are what I love
Stupidly, I was drawn in
Once snared, thirty years went by
The fettered bird longs for the forest
The fish in the pool thinks of tbe lake
To clear some land in the wilderness
The foolishness I held to, and came back to farm.
Ten acres and a place to live
A thatched hut, a few rooms
Elm and willow shade the back
Peach and plum grace the front
A village in the distance
Sends up light smoke
Far down the lane, a dog barks
A cock crows atop the mulberryMy door is far from the world's muddle
I've room enough and time
Caged for so long
At last I am myself again
II
The wilderness is out of reach of men's intrigues
An alley leading nowhere attracts few wheels and reins
All day the bramble gate stays closed
In bare rooms, where are worldly thoughts to settle
From time to time, winding through rough country
Others too part the grass to come and go
We meet-no time for idle talkMulberry and hemp is all we think about
Mulberry and hemp are bigger day by day
And day by day I open up more land
We live in fear that frost and hail
Will kill the crop and scatter it like straw
These are from a series of five poems on the same theme.
32
SUMMER 1982
�IMITATION OF OLD POEM
A riot of orchids under the window
Dense, dense the willow by the hallWhen first we parted
You did not say it would be long
Once out the door, you went ten thousand miles
And on the way met others.
Hearts drunk before we spoke
What need then for wine?
But orchids fade, willows wither
Promises are broken.
Go, tell the young
To love and not be true
Rashly destroys a lifeFor parted, what is left?
T'ang Dynasty (618-907)
Tu Fu (712-770)
A LONGING LOOK IN SPRING
The country's in pieces, the river flows on
The capital, trees and grass, in full springAfflicted by the times, flowers cry
Birds grow restive in the air of partings
Warning beacons have burned three months
Letters from home are worth ten thousand in gold
White hair grows so thin
It can not bear a pin
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
33
�MOONLIGHT NIGHT REMEMBERING
MY YOUNGER BROTHER
The drums of battle interrupt my journey
The front in autumn, lonely as the wild goose cry
Dew from tonight: white
The moon, bright as at home
My brother and I, now parted
Without a home to send us word, who lives, who died
Our letters, forever on the way,
And war, and war, and war
THE GUEST ARRIVES
North of the cottage and south, spring floods,
Day in day out, my only guests are gulls.
The path has not been swept of petals
When I make wide the bramble gate for you.
Only a simple supper- the market is so far,
Even the wine is roughIf you'd care to drink with my old neighbor,
I'll call across the bamboo fence that we've a cup for him.
CLIMBING
Impatient wind, high sky, baboons shrilly lamenting,
Shoal in clear water, white sand, birds slowly circling
Space without bounds, the whisper of falling leaves,
River without end, rushing and tumbling.
Ten thousand miles I travelled in autumn,
Full of years, sick and alone, I climb.
Hardship, suffering, regret, frost my temples.
New misfortunes keep me even from my muddy wine
34
SUMMER 1982
�Li Po (701-762)
BRING WINE!
Don't you see the waters of the Yellow River come from the sky
Flow out to sea and never return?
Don't you see in bright mirrors of high rooms, white hair lamented
Black silk in the morning, by evening pure snow?
Of life and happiness, drain the cup,
Don't leave the gold bottle in the moonlight in vain,
Use the talent heaven bestowed,
Squander a thousand in gold, it can come back,
Roast a lamb, slaughter a cow, enjoy life,
In company you must drink three hundred cups!
Honored Ts'en,
Tan-ch'iu, good sir,
Bring wine!
Give the cup no rest
I'll sing you a song ...
Lend an ear ...
The bell, the drum and all life's luxuries are not enough
Stay drunk, and never come to
History is full of saints and sages, lonely and forgotten
Only the drinkers leave their mark
Prince Chen, in his day, feasted at Ping Le
Spent thousands on a measure of wine, the price of laughter
When buying, don't say you can't afford it
Just buy and drink and pour
The dappled horse,
The fine fur coat,
Let's trade them for a splendid wine
Dissolve ten thousand ancient sorrows
Ts'en and Tan-ch'iu are names. Ts'en is thought to be the poet, Ts'en Ts'an.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
35
�Kao Shih (702?-765)
SONG OF YEN
(written to music)
In the twenty-sixth year of K'ai Yuan, an officer
who returned from having served at the border
showed me "The Song of Yen." Affected by
thoughts of the campaign, I wrote this to the
same rhyme.
Lured northeast by the smoke of Han victories
Generals leave home to wipe out straggling opposition
A man by nature likes to use his power
And the emperor is pleased.
Brass and drums echo along Yii Pass,
Banners serpentine through rock
Battle orders fly over the desert
The fires of the khails light up Lang Shan
Mountain and river: bleak and chill
Wind and rain: allies to the Tartar horsemen.
Up front, half our troops are dead
In camp, girls still sing and dance.
Deep in the desert, autumn withers grass and trees
Few men are left to see the sunset at the lonely fort.
The privileged were intrepid
Strength spent, the pass still under siege,
Those in armor diligently endure, cut off.
Jade tears are shed at home
Young girls, south of the wall, despair
Soldiers, north of the front, look back in vain
They're out of reach
In that forsaken place what is there
But the stench of death, all day, rising in clouds?
Chill battle sounds fill the night
And everywhere white steel and blood,
Valor and death without reward.
Can't you see the misery of it all
That even now, it's only victory that counts?
The twenty-sixth year of K'ai YUan is A.D. 738. Yen is a state in north
China. "Song of Yen" belongs to a genre of ballad called ylieh-fu, folk ballads collected in the Han Dynasty and their later imitations. The imitations,
of which this is one, usually follow the original theme, and retain the tide,
but describe current ills or events. "White Snow Song" and "Bring Wine" are
also yiieh-fu.
36
SUMMER 1982
�Ts'en Ts'an (715-770)
WHITE SNOW SONG
Sending Field Clerk Mou Back to the Capital
A north wind snaps the frosted grass
Under the Tartar sky, snow in August
Everything suddenly transformed as by the first spring breeze
That in one night
Opens ten thousand pear blossoms
Snow sprinkles bead curtains, wets silk screens,
Fox furs aren't warm enough, silk quilts seem thin
The general can not arch his horn tipped bow,
Frontier guards' coats of mail, frozen, but still worn.
On tangled, jagged desert, a sea of ice,
Sad clouds, frozen, stiff, gloomy, extend ten thousand leagues
The garrison commander toasts the the departing guest,
Tartar instruments-lute, mandolin and reed pipe, play ...
Flake upon flake, the evening snow piles up against the gate;
Vainly, the wind rips the red banner, stiff with cold
Lun T' ai East Gate, I see you off
You go by the snow filled T'ien Shan pass
The road curves, you're out of sight,
You leave nothing here but the marks of your horse on the snow
Lun T'ai is a place on the northern border, outside the Great Wall.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
37
�Liu Tsung-yiian (773-819)
OLD MAN FISHING
An old fisherman passes the night beside the western cliff
At dawn, scoops clear water from the Hsiang, kindles bamboo
The mist clears, the sun comes out-not a soul in sight
The long oar whispers in the water; green hills, green water
Turn back and see the river flow from heaven
Above the cliff, clouds idly play tag.
The Hsiang is a river.
Afternote
These selections represent two disparate periods of Chinese
history: one of disunity, political instability, and confusion;
one of empire. After the Han Dynasty disintegrated in the
third century, attempts to reunify China faz/ed. The north
fell to barbarians and was ruled successively by a variety of
foreign dynasties; the south, by a succession of weak, regional, native dynasties. Among the intelligentsia- China's
traditional bureaucracy- many retreated from political life
rather than take the risks of aligning themselves with the
wrong usurping famzly. Confucianism, which had adapted itself to the exigencies of an orderly, unified empire, declined
in importance. The more mystical ideas of Buddhism and
Taoism were in the ascendant. Many poets sought nature,
wine, and seclusion. One of the greatest of the recluse poets
of the Six Dynasties period was T'ao Ch'ien.
Folk poetry, especially love poetry, constrained by the Confucian morality of the Han, re-emerged in this period of dis-
38
unity-free, suggestive, and amoral. Tzu-yeh (Midnight) is
thought to have been a singing girl of the fourth century.
Tzu-yeh songs, some of which she may have written 1 are un-
inhibited love songs whose simplicity and frankness are their
charm.
China, north and south, was reunited by the Sui Dynasty
(581-618). During the T'ang Dynasty (618-907} China was,
once more, strong and expansionist. Confucian values again
prevailed. Most poets chose to serve the state in China's vast
bureaucracy. Rarely in favor at court for long, many passed
much of their lives as minor offiCials in remote, often disease-
ridden, outposts of empire. Kao Shih and Ts'en Ts'an wrote
of life and war at the frontier in the far west and northwest.
Liu Tsung-yiian wrote from exz/e in the south. Tu Fu's war
poems descn'be the chaos around the capital at the time ofthe
An Lu-shan rebellion (755), an uprising which the dynasty
survived, but from which it never really recovered-J. L.
SUMMER 1982
�That Graver Fire Bell: A Reconsideration
of the Debate over Slavery from the
Standpoint of Lincoln
Robert Loewenberg
It was George Fitzhugh, the nation's most profound defender of slavery and the man who proposed to enslave
whites as well as blacks, who was the first to make the
point that the proslavery position and abolitionism do not
represent two opposite extremes but two sides of a single
extreme. Considering his own position in support of slavery a form of socialism, a view not disputed by Marxist or
radical historians now, Fitzhugh insisted that abolitionism
was akin to slavery in principle and in ultimate tendency.'
He contended that abolitionism was a malevolent brand
of socialism, however, while the slavery he defended was
benevolent.
But if the ideas at the root of both proslavery and abolition were alike, are we to suppose that the Civil War was a
gigantic hoax, each side fighting benightedly for the same
bad cause? Or is it more likely that the people of those
times had some reasonably clear understanding of what issues were at stake, while it is we who have been misled by
extremists? In fact, our present view of the period and all
that is connected to it is influenced by the assumption,
virtually universal and unquestioned, that the proslavery
and abolitionist extremes were opposed in theory because
they were opposed regarding the Southern slave. But contemporary Americans were not confronted with a choice
between abolitionism as pure freedom on one side, and
Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, Robert Loewen berg has previously contributed "The Trivialization of the Holocaust
as an Aspect of Modern Idolatry" (Winter 1982) to the St. John's Review.
He has published Equality on the Oregon Frontier (University of Washington Press, 1976) and articles on the history of the American Northwest and on values in writing history.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
some brand of slavery on the other. The real extremes were
these: slavery and freedom, not proslavery and abolition.
It would seem that no opposition could be clearer than
slavery and freedom. The difference is commonsensical;
any slave or free man could tell the difference. But we are
accustomed to uses of language which convey more confusion than common sense regarding freedom or regarding most political terms. For example, are men free when
they are equal before the law, an ancient ideal which Lincoln cherished; or does freedom require an equality that
rejects law as a disguise for power, a bourgeois convention, as the abolitionists and their defenders claimed?
The antebellum debate over slavery was a struggle for
control of the terms of public debate. The struggle regarding words has, in the main, been won by abolitionism. Today we see the Civil War, and much else, in abolitionist
terms. How ironic then that George Fitzhugh, slavery's
great advocate, should now provide us with the means to
develop a more correct and historically accurate understanding of freedom. Fitzhugh demythologized abolition.
But, inadvertently, he did more than this. In identifying
abolition with his own proslavery position, Fitzhugh did
not explain its opposite, or freedom.
Fitzhugh's demonstration-and it was devastatingthat the abolitionists were the ones, even more than he,
who called for an end to free society as the source of all
enslavements, including wage slavery, child abuse, intern~
perance, and female political disabilities, amounted to this:
freedom as such did not exist except in a negative sense as
an absence of slavery. In other words, Fitzhugh, agreeing
that abolition was pure freedom while also insisting that
abolitionism was reducible to slavery, seemed to imply
39
�there could be no such thjng as freedom at all. Unless
common sense and philosophy both fail us, however, there
must be an opposite to slavery. Freedom is the opposite
of slavery.
In his critique of abolition, Fitzhugh unwittingly showed
that Lincoln was the real champion of the principle of
freedom in those times. Lincoln was, if anything, even
more alive to the character of abolition than Fitzhugh.
Not in the middle between the opposites of abolition
and proslavery, Lincoln, in fact, spoke for freedom as the
opposite of slavery. Lincoln, not William Lloyd Garrison,
Elijah P. Lovejoy, Horace Greeley, or Thaddeus Stevens,
is properly contrasted with Fitzhugh, the South's most
complete defender of slavery. And, if this is a proper pair·
ing, we might anticipate a certain congruence between
the analyses of Lincoln and Fitzhugh. As a matter of fact,
they made the same discoveries from opposite sides of the
debate about slavery and freedom. Fitzhugh detected
sameness where a difference had been supposed to reside.
Lincoln discovered that two things that seemed the same,
freedom and abolition of slavery, were really different.
Fitzhugh exposed the kinship of slavery and abolitionist
doctrines; Lincoln showed that his own defense of free·
dom, based upon the principle of consent of the governed,
was different from, actually antithetical to, Stephen A.
Douglas's supposed defense of freedom, which was also
based upon the principle of consent of the governed.
Lincoln called Douglas's doctrine of popular sover·
eignty, according to which voters living in the territories
would decid.e the question of slavery prior to statehood, a
"covert . .. zeal for . .. slavery." 2 Douglas said that a major-
ity had the right to do whatever it wished, that is, to be
free, even to vote others into slavery and to deprive them
of the consent of the governed. Douglas opposed slavery,
but would not, he said, intolerantly impose his personal
view on others. He did not care whether slavery were
voted up or down so long as people voted and the majority
governed. The good and bad of slavery for Douglas was a
matter of votes and personal conviction, "conscience" as
it was sometimes called.
Lincoln argued that Douglas's version of consent of the
governed subverted freedom in the moment it professed
to uphold it. The themes of reversal and betrayal are cen·
tral ones in Lincoln's thought during the years 1838 to
1865. Popular sovereignty twisted the principles of Ameri·
can government and made the Declaration of Indepen·
dence the foundation for slavery, just as the Dred Scott
Decision of 1857 misinterpreted the Constitution, making
it an instrument for slavery and force instead of an instru·
men! of law and right.3 Lincoln saw at the root of Douglas's
idea the reversal of the principle of consent of the gov·
erned as found· in the Declaration and the betrayal of law
and the Constitution. Fitzhugh also contemplated a rever·
sal of law and right, but from the opposite perspective.
Slavery, he said, is the "inalienable right" of everyone' He
dismissed as irrelevant the then common defenses of slav·
40
ery based upon biblical and racial grounds and proclaimed
that slavery was suitable and just. Slavery was the higher
law.
The higher law doctrine was, of course, not Fitzhugh's
slogan but William Seward's. Seward proclaimed it in
1850 during the debates that preceded the famous Com·
promise of 1850 which men hoped would extinguish all
debate about the slavery question. This was more than
ten years before Seward became Lincoln's Secretary of
State. Actually, Fitzhugh loathed every kind of law and
politics~like the abolitionists. In fact, the debate over
slavery and freedom focussed on just the point the aboli·
tionists and Fitzhugh wished away: It was a debate about
law.
From the standpoint of the abolitionist identification of
abolition and freedom, the measure of Lincoln and the
nation turns upon the correct relation of law to the higher
law. From this point of view Lincoln is seen to have sacri·
ficed the Declaration to the Constitution, principle to
expedience. In particular, Lincoln failed to make emanci·
pation the aim of the Civil War rather than simply the res·
!oration of the Union. Those who take this view also think
that Lincoln preferred property rights and states' rights to
human rights. This group, which contains most writers,
includes those whom C. Vann Woodward has called "lib·
era] and radical historians who identify with abolition." 5
These historians are divided between those who despise
Lincoln as morally obtuse and others who credit him with
prudence. But the important point is granted by all, namely
that the abolitionist rhetoric, with its conflicts between
the Declaration and the Constitution, the Union and
emancipation, human rights and property rights, is true.
Lincoln denied this. The abolitionist context and the sev·
era] sets of opposites that are part of it is exactly what Lin·
coln did not grant as properly framing the issues or dividing
the people in the years before or during the Civil War.
Above all, Lincoln did not regard law or the Constitution
as inferior to any "higher law," whether in the consciences
of abolitionists and transcendentalists such as Henry
David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, or in Douglas's
law of the majority.
It is taken for granted that Lincoln, however great a
man, was a "moderate," in the sense of one who stands
against pure good in favor of expedience. Not Lincoln's
version of freedom but Emerson's or Thoreau's is the one
that post-Civil War Americans have been taught in schools,
in colleges, and from the pulpit, where Lincoln called for
freedom to be taught. Moreover, freedom emphasizing, in
Thoreau's words, that "it is not desirable to cultivate are·
spec! for the law, so much as for the right," is contrary to
Lincoln's teaching.' Lincoln denied the conflict of right
and law, as Thoreau posed it, because he denied the eleva·
lion of what Thoreau and the abolitionists called "con·
science" to a level transcending law and government.
Abolitionist ideals which were articulated best by Emer·
son and Thoreau, who were not active abolitionists, are
SUMMER 1982
�part of a tradition that is hostile to Lincoln as are those related versions of American history we know as liberal and
radical. The "radical vein which the conservative and reactionary of Christendom had for centuries endeavored to
keep submerged," and that Perry Miller finds in Jonathan
Edwards, is the vein that also nourished nineteenth century abolition.7 What Miller calls reactionary and conservative, however, Christendom called heretical-in particular, gnosticism. Abolitionism proper had its beginnings
in the sixteenth century among the followers of Thomas
Miinzter. Although historian David B. Davis calls the
MUnzterites the
11
first abolitionists" in order to praise
them, he is not wrong as to fact 8 But Miinzter's and Jonathan Edwards's vision of freedom is the one Lincoln instructed Americans to reject.
In the decade of the 1850s, when George Fitzhugh was
at the peak of his powers, producing in his two books the
most important defense of slavery ever made by an American up to that time, Lincoln was embarking on the early
stages of a second career in national politics. The corner·
stone of this effort, like the first, was his conviction that
slavery was wrong and freedom was right. As Lincoln said
in a speech at Peoria, Illinois, in October 1854, "I say this
is the leading principle-the sheet anchor of American
republicanism ... this [is] our ancient faith .... Now the
relation of masters and slaves is~ pro tanto, a total violation
of this principle."' As a practical matter, Lincoln's position committed him to opposing the extension of slavery
into territories acquired from Mexico in 1848. One could,
as Lincoln often said, compromise about the existence of
slavery as a fact only if one did not compromise with the
fact of slavery as evil. The great point of difference between Lincoln and some contemporaries (as well as later
critics) is that they compromised in the other direction.
They would not give ground on the existence of slavery,
but they compromised, unknowingly, with freedom itself.
This was Lincoln's quarrel with abolition as well as with
Douglas. Freedom and slavery for Lincoln were absolutely
opposed: the house divided.
By freedom Lincoln meant nothing outwardly complex
or unfamiliar to the men of his day. Those who heard his
speeches, beginning with his first major address in 1838,
the Lyceum Address, or who listened to his debates with
Douglas two decades later, understood that when Lincoln
said "freedom" he had something clearly in mind. By freedom Lincoln meant this: law. By law Lincoln did not
mean what is sometimes called positive or public law, or
any other historical or relativistic idea. Rather, Lincoln
understood by law transcendence, which is the opposite
of relativism. The law is lawful because it transcends times
and places as well as majorities and the higher law of individual consciences. Lincoln saw that law is the "sheet anchor" of American republicanism; in his words, "No man
is good enough to govern another man without that other's
consent." 10 To this proposition Lincoln opposed popular
sovereignty. The fight against Douglas occupied Lincoln
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
untill860. After that time he defended his position against
the Radicals in Congress who said with Thoreau that "my
only obligation ... is to do at any time what I think right
[or] ... conscience."]\ But both periods and both fights
show the same understanding of the law and freedom.
Law and freedom, as they are found in the Constitution
and the Declaration, are alike a unity or a whole in Lincoln's thought. These two documents were related, he
said in January 1861, as an apple of gold to a frame of silver: "The picture was made, not to conceal or destroy the
apple; but to adorn, and preserve it." 12
The physical Union that Lincoln wanted to save, embodying the union of the Declaration and the Constitution, included other unions. Among these is the union of
the politic and the ethical. Lincoln did not suppose this an
impossible union as later Max Weber, the founder of modern social science, would do. Lincoln was certainly an
idealist. By idealism Lincoln understood the ongoing struggle of men, of talented men especially, to meet the challenges to virtuous and civil dealings posed by an opposite
idealism which holds that men should compel reality to fit
their ideals of it. This second kind of idealism, the source
of modern fanaticism, has its roots in a view of politics
and of words that Lincoln instinctively deplored. At the
root of Lincoln's union was a relationship ofChristianity ·
and law, properly understood. He called this union "political religion."
Political religion was Lincoln's answer to the question
which he himself raised in 1838 in the Lyceum Address
about how best to secure that ~~government . .. conducing
more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty
than any of which the history of former times tells us,"
i.e., American republicanism. He says:
The answer is simple. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity swear by the blood of
the Revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws
of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.
As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration . .. so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let
every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred
honor. ... Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every
American mother to the lisping babe ... let it be taught in
schools, in seminaries, and in colleges ... let it be preached
from the pulpit . .. in short, let it become the political religion
of the nation. 13
This unity of Christianity and law, this political religion, is
what prompted Lincoln to call American republicanism
the second greatest institution in the world after Christianity. Let it be clear what political religion was not. Lincoln did not regard Christianity as a thing merely useful to
order. He also did not understand by political religion any
substitution of religion for politics. This substitution, especially in its insidious modern form, was the fanaticism
that threatened America. By political religion Lincoln understood a certain connection of the human to the divine,
41
�the connection that had long sustained Western political
thought about freedom.
Lincoln understood, as Aristotle before him, that all political life has as its condition the principle that "the mind
is moved by the mover." 14 In other words, man is free because he is related to the divine; he is, as Plato put it in a
pertinent observation on suicide, the possession of the
godsY It is not coincidental that the present expression of
the abolitionist position as elaborated by Alexandre Kojeve (whose doctrines influence such important studies of
American slavery as David B. Davis's) is opposite to this.
"Death and freedom," Kojeve has written, "are but two
... aspects of one and the same thing." Kojeve's understanding of freedom stands on suicide which, in its turn,
reflects and requires atheism. "If Man lived eternally and
could not die, he could not render himself immune to
god's omnipotence either. But if he can kill himself ... ,"
then he is free. That is to say, freedom rests upon "a complete atheistic philosophy." 16
Naturally, these two extremes regarding freedom partake of related extremes in politics. The practical aspect
of Lincolnian freedom is that human government is not a
meaningless and irrational undertaking, rather, government is essential to humans. If this is so, then questions of
good and evil regarding governments cannot be reduced
merely to the pleasurable. The good and the pleasurable
are not the same. Then freedom cannot be identified simply with desire, but must instead be identified with something outside a selfish will. Reason and not passion, the
good and not pleasure, constitute human freedom. All of
this together Lincoln signified by the word "law." It signifies transcendence. The substance of this view is the one
expressed by Aristotle that "men should not think it slavery to live according to the rule of the constitution; for it
is their salvation." 17 The implication of this doctrine is
that self-government demands self-control, not "popular
sovereignty" or "conscience." But we know that abolition-
ists looked at law and salvation, as well as constitutions, in
a different light.
Abolitionists considered constitutions and laws to be enslavements. Garrison's famous public burning of the Constitution in 1854 is the essential symbol of the abolitionist
movement. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 symbolizes Lincoln's answer to it. Against the Promethean
symbolism of Garrison, Lincoln emphasized Christian
symbols. Lincoln's use of religious symbols, as they apply
to law and freedom, is part of the rhetoric of his political
religion.
Lincoln's understanding of the American republic and
his assessment of its destiny turn upon his view that freedom provides for man's political "salvation." Constitutions, in other words, are not the means of enslavement
but of freedom. Lincoln's meaning is that law is man's salvation, his assurance of a humane, civilized life in this
world.
American republicanism was to man's political salva-
42
lion what Christianity was to the salvation of man's soul.
The two salvations for Lincoln were connected. As Jesus
made the family a sacramental union so as to provide a
metaphorical basis for knowledge of God (called Father
and bridegroom), so Lincoln, immersed in these same
meanings and their purposes, sought to make the Union
sacramental by posing the Declaration and the Constitution as a metaphorical basis for knowledge of the self
(called ruler and ruled). Moreover, because the divine or
transcendence is necessarily connected to or unified with
the human by means of reason or the soul, the relationship between the political and the religious realms is not
simply a metaphorical one. Christianity is marked by universality; it promises salvation to all men. The law of the
republic is both a replica of this universality as well as an
effect of all transcendence. Governments, that is, are natural to man, or, as the ancients put it, governments are
"divine." For good and evil to be possible, there must be
transcendence. Man is not just another kind of animal for
whom speech, as among bees, is solely a behavioral instrument. Hence time and place cannot be the determinants
of good and evil. But the truth about the political sphere,
though it hinges on the truth of the religious sphere, is always different and in some sense opposed. Lincoln did
not call for religious politics but for political religion. Accordingly, Lincoln contrasted Europe, or the old world as
Americans of that day called it, with the new, passion with
reason, and otherworldly with worldly aspirations. As
Christianity rests upon the crucifixion of a savior, the republic rests upon resistance to what Lincoln calls "suicide" in the Lyceum Address. Political salvation is not the
work of one man for all others, but the work of each man
through self-control. Political salvation is the Constitution
and the Union because the sovereignty of majorities(what
Douglas advocated) or the sovereignty of conscience (what
abolition advocated) are alike against the Union and unconstitutional in a moral and human sense as well as in a
legal one.
What do Lincoln's life and writings teach of political religion? The outward form of Lincoln's political life, like
his own outward form, is simple and inelegant. It was
bound at both ends, from 1838 to 1865, by the principles
already noted and by his consistent opposition in practice
to the extension of slavery. In 1847, during his sole term
in Congress, Lincoln voted for the Wilmot Proviso, stipulating that any territories acquired from Mexico must be
closed to slavery, "at least forty times" by his count. 18 Years
later in 1861 Lincoln made the principle of nonextension
of slavery the basis for his opposition to the Crittenden
Compromise, which would have extended the superseded
Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the Pacific. The event
that brought his life and thought into focus, and from
which comes our own understanding of political religion
as he practiced it, was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.
It was the passage of this bill for the settlement of Kansas and Nebraska on the principle of popular sovereignty
SUMMER 1982
�that brought Lincoln to the center of public controversy.
Douglas's bill repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
That famous piece of legislation stilled, at least for a time,
what Thomas Jefferson had called a fire bell in the night,
the slavery question.
Jefferson's anxieties in 1820 about slavery in the lands
of Kansas, lands he purchased from France in 1803 with
anxieties touching the constitutionality of his right to
make the purchase, took on a new urgency during Lincoln's day. This is because the politicians of the 1820s led
by Martin Van Buren had thought to use the conflict over
slavery, the fire bell in the night, as the means to build a
new party coalition that would keep the slavery issue out
of national politics. Lincoln's election in 1860, by shattering that coalition of Northern farmers and Southern yeomen, undid Van Buren's political work, forcing men once
more to consider Jefferson's warning. Van Buren's idea
had been to keep the country half slave and half free in
fact. The result of his effort turned out to be that the
country became half slave and half free in principle. It was
this dreadful consequence that Lincoln spelled out to
Alexander Stephens in December 1860, two days after
South Carolina seceded.
You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we
think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the
rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us. 19
Stephens, who was to become the vice president of the
Confederacy, had asked Lincoln, who was already president-elect of the Union, "to save our common country"
and to recognize that he and the Southerners were not
Lincoln's personal enemies.
But Lincoln had always recognized this. The distinction
between right and wrong, liberty and slavery, was superior
to all things because things perish. This was the rub. Liberty was above the "c.ommon country" and above Lincoln
and Stephens. The physical union, an object of emotion,
was destined to perish. But the union sustained by political religion would, as Lincoln said in 1838, "live through
all time."20 The wishes and desires of men, even men who
wished for emancipation, would have to yield to the law.
Lincoln made this point to Horace Greeley on August 22,
1862, in response to his Prayer of Twenty Millions, written to Lincoln three days before. Lincoln explained that
his policy would be to free slaves or not to free them "if
it would save the Union" quite regardless of his "oftexpressed personal wish that all men, everywhere, could
be free." 21
The prudence suggested in this observation by Lincoln
is not mainly expressive of expedience or trimming. Lincoln's prudence relates instead to self-control and to forbearance indicative of constitutional rigor in the personal
and legal realms. The Constitution did not permit Lincoln
to make emancipation the purpose of the war as Greeley
demanded. Lincoln's personal wish to emancipate the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
slaves did not overcome an inner law of reason and an
outer law, the Constitution, that salvation of all reason
and law, viz., no man has the right to rule another without
that other's consent. Lincoln understood he could not fulfill
the law by breaking the law as some messianic abolitionist
would do. To proceed in that way Lincoln considered tyrannical and un-Christian. A grant of freedom to the
slaves, at that point, however desirable or possible, would
have been an even graver fire bell in the night than the
one Jefferson warned about in 1820. It would have signaled that a new enslavement was about to begin.
What was this new enslavement, how and why was it
new? That Lincoln knew the answers to these questions
emerges from his struggle with the Radicals. With the secession of South Carolina in midwinter of 1860, the focus
but not the substance of Lincoln's quarrel with the ideals
of popular sovereignty shifted from Douglas to the Radicals. This new struggle began when Lincoln took office.
The main question was how to deal with the eight slave
states remaining in the Union after February 1861. Although both Garrison on the abolitionist Left and Greeley
on the abolitionist Right hailed the Southern departures,
they would soon be calling upon Lincoln to give no quarter to the South once the war started. Most people, however, looked for some way to save the situation. Congress
considered a host of plans and ideas for restoring the
Union. The end result was a cruel caricature of "compromise." The eight wavering states split their loyalty, four to
the North, four to the South. And, as if to mimic those
trying times, fifty-five counties in western Virginia seceded from the state of Virginia in May 1861. Adopting a
new constitution for itself, with slavery, West Virginia
joined the Union to the delight, not only of Lincoln, but
of Thaddeus Stevens, who was the Robespierre of Radicals. What this meant was obvious to Lincoln: the war to
come would not be about slavery as a practical matter,
however much slavery had been its cause. Even so, the
question of the war's aim became the subject of contention between Lincoln and the Radicals. For Lincoln the
seceded states were not a nation, and consequently constitutional provisions applicable to them remained intact.
The Radicals, for their part, were openly contemptuous of
the Constitution. They were also much less agitated than
Lincoln about the practical consequences to the Union
where the five Union slave states were concerned. For
Lincoln the triumph of the Union, that is, the defeat of
the eleven slave states, required the support of the five
Union slave states. And the triumph of the Union would
also be the resolution of the intolerable condition of the
house divided; it would be the triumph of freedom.
Lincoln's position was that the aim of the war should be
the perpetuation of the Union, so that the result of the
war would be the "ultimate extinction" of slavery. This result, as Lincoln had always insisted, at no time more importunately than during the secession crisis of 1860, could
be accomplished without war and without the violation of
43
�either the Constitution or the rights of the Southern
states. Essential to this result was obedience to the law
and the recognition of "our. ancient faith" that slavery was
the soul of lawlessness. The South well understood, rather
better than some Radicals, that an end to the fact and the
principle of slavery extension meant the ultimate extinc·
tion of slavery. This is why the South seceded. It is why
Lincoln refused to give his support to the Crittenden
Compromise in 1861.
The Republican leaders in Congress took a different
view of things. Falling under the skillful and often ruthless
leadership of men who called themselves Radicals, in par·
ticular Senators Zachariah Chandler, Benjamin Wade,
Charles Sumner, and in the House, Thaddeus Stevens,
James Ashley, George Julian, and H. Winter Davis, Con·
gress relished a power unknOwn to American institutions
to that time. The Radicals' outward objective, resisted by
Lincoln 1 was to make emancipation the aim of the war.
The struggle, as Lincoln saw it, however, was between po·
litical religion and its opposite, religious politics.
On its practical side this contest centered in the Radical
Committee on the Conduct of the War chaired by Ben
Wade. The Committee's main goal, whether in investigat·
ing generals or in cashiering them, was to make Lincoln
revise the purpose of the war. And the Radicals also pro·
mated the fortunes of their favorite generals, especially
General John C. Fremont. He had proclaimed martial law
in Missouri, declaring that all slaves were confiscated
property, thus free. Although Lincoln had countermanded
his order, other Radical generals imitated Fremont. Con·
gressional Radicals also tried to force the President's hand
by legislative means. They passed confiscation acts in the
summers of 1861 and 1862. The differences between Lin·
coln and the Radicals are clearest, however, in the contest
over the Emancipation Proclamation. This episode, one
of the most famous in American history, was also the
great "passion play" of political religion.
Much has been said about the Emancipation Proclama·
tion. There is now a strong tendency to think that only the
naive could credit the "stereotyped picture of the emanci·
pator suddenly striking the shackles from millions of slaves
by one stroke of the presidential pen."22 Moreover, the doc·
ument is considered deficient in grandeur. It resembles a
"bill oflading" in the view of historian Richard Hofstadter.23
It is also widely believed that the famous Proclamation
came about as a result of the President being forced onto
higher moral ground by the importuning Radicals. But
this view of events, like the wider abolitionist context it
sustains and reflects, does not square with the facts. That
Lincoln was forced to issue the Emancipation Proclama·
tion, in the sense that he was also forced to conciliate the
South before the war or to hang Union deserters during
the war, is likely true enough. But the complaints of the
Radicals, who called the Proclamation "futile" and "ridic·
ulous," as well as the comments of historians in later
44
times, would indicate that Lincoln did not do what he was
supposedly pressured into doing.
Lincoln was a master of the politician's art. What he did
in this case, as he so frequently did in others, was to make
the best of difficult circumstances. He served his own pur·
pose, which was to salvage the Union as a physical and
constitutional entity, and he tied even tighter the princi·
ples of emancipation and constitutionality. The Proclamation distinctly subordinated emancipation to the overriding
purpose of the war, reunion. Lincoln beat back the demand for emancipation on Radical terms, which demanded
the unconditional liberation of the slaves regardless of any
constitutional or military considerations. Regarding such
terms as the instruments of tyranny, Lincoln understood
what most of his contemporaries only glimpsed, as when
Henry Wilson, himself a Radical, discovered with shock
that radical emancipator Ben Wade, chairman of the
Committee on the Conduct of the War, had all the ear·
marks of the slaveholder. "] thought the old slave-masters
had come back again," said Wilson, speaking of Wade's
behavior in Congress in 1865.24
The Radicals lost the fight with Lincoln over the Eman·
cipation Proclamation and most of them knew it. Those
who were satisfied that the Proclamation had raised Lin·
coln to their level failed to see that Lincoln had raised
them to his. They conceded what Lincoln wanted from
the start, that only lawful emancipation was true emanci·
pation. They conceded, in other words, the necessity for a
constitutional amendment, the 13th. Later no one worked
harder for it than Lincoln. The Proclamation did not strike
off the slaves' chains because only a constitutional amend·
ment could do that. As a military measure that made the
continuation of rebellion the justification for freeing slaves,
the Proclamation only applied in the rebellious states, and
there, as the Radicals loudly complained, it could not free a
single slave because Union authority had been usurped by
the rebels.
The Proclamation was, as it says, a war measure. It was
written as a war measure and not as a grander measure
might have been. Yet in the subtlety of its ultimate pur·
poses, both its political purpose toward the Radicals and its
moral purpose toward the slaves and the aim of the war,
the Emancipation Proclamation must surely qualify as one
of the more remarkable bills of lading ever written.
Perhaps Hofstadter was more apt than he knew. Lin·
coln's political religion charged him with the delivery of the
Constitution to a recipient, the slaves. Lincoln at least con·
sidered his agency essential to the wholeness of the nation
and to the warrantability of the product, freedom. Com·
pare the Proclamation as a symbol of Lincoln the man and
the principle of self-government with Garrison's Prome·
thean gesture, his burning of the Constitution in 1854. The
contrast becomes sharper still as the elements of Lincoln's
political religion unfold. Lincoln's goal of self-government
for the republic was also his personal goal.
SUMMER 1982
�My paramount object [Lincoln said in 1862] .. . is to save the
Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery . ... [W]hat
I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe
it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear be·
cause I do not believe it would help to save the Union.ZS
Forbearance is in truth the soul of what Lincoln called
"political religion." In this connection, and in other star·
tling ways, the contrast between Lincoln and abolition
shows most clearly. At the level of personalities, the contrast
between Lincoln and William Lloyd Garrison is especially
obvious. Garrison was the nation's high priest of religious
politics. He was no doubt America's nineteenth century
Munzter. He regarded "politicians and philosophers [who]
... sometimes foolishly speculate ... about the best forms
of government" as idle men. 26 When men were "perfect,"
that is, beyond good and evil, they would have true government, which is to say no government. Thus Garrison
said, as did Lincoln, that America would be "immortal,"
but their meanings were perfectly opposite. Lincoln un·
derstood America's immortality in the sense supplied by
political religion. Garrison, on the other hand, meant that
America was to become a heaven on earth, a New Jeru·
salem.
Garrison, like Munzter and the first abolitionists before
him, understood human life and history to be in the grip
of immanent eschatological purposes: history had meaning
and America was history. Counting all men as potential
Christs, Garrison regarded religious salvation as measured
by one's willingness to sacrifice and martyr himself for the
heavenly realm of freedom in this world. Slavery was for
Garrison the sum of all villainies because the freedom he
craved was literally not of this world. This seemingly absurd vision is the apocalyptic one that Munzter also held
when he directed all European princes to submit to him
as the risen Christ. Looking upon this world as the field of
man's salvation, the reformer proposes to escape the con·
ditions of human reality by insisting that these conditions
are actually impediments to true humanity, hence the work
of some devil, for example, class, race, sex. Once the devil
is exorcised, man will be free in the radical sense once reserved to religion, i.e., man will be liberated from the con·
ditions of human being. Thus was America immortal in
Garrison's mind.
There are several other instances in which antebellum
reformers considered this release from the conditions of
being human to include actual immortality. The case of
John Humphrey Noyes, the famous founder of the Oneida
commune in 1840, where free love, eugenics, and birth
control methods were used to create what Noyes called
the We spirit that would liberate men from all possessions,
is the best Known. But Lincoln understood that abolition
offered in truth a kind of religion. Garrison's "idealism,"
which left "every man to decide, according to the dictates
of his conscience," promised as a matter of political doctrine that good and bad were only names." This vision of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
man, which is loosely called relativism and egalitarianism
today, was a promise of immortality and certainty in this
world for those who had rejected Christianity's promise of
immortality in the next world. Garrison's cry for men to
become free by being "crucified with Christ" comprised
the betrayal of Christianity, as well as the reversal of Lincoln's political religion." Men who seek to be crucified
with Christ in order to bring about political salvation in
reality commit suicide. They subvert political religion by
turning politics into religion and religion into lawlessness.
Lincoln said the conflict with the abolitionists was a
struggle to maintain freedom by means of political religion,
a struggle against any form of religious politics. The contest was made more dangerous since both sides used the
language of freedom and the language of religion. Although there was not a group in America that more often
sought to connect Christian and political symbols than
the abolitionists, there were others who did it better and
who knew better what they were doing. America's poet of
freedom delighted most in braiding political and religious
meanings. The contrast of Lincoln with Emerson, who
compared John Brown to Christ, best reveals differences
between political religion and the ideals of abolition."
Where Lincoln's free man is marked by restraint and forbearance, Emerson's free man or Man Thinking is the
model of unrestraint. Man Thinking is radically free.
In 1836, two years before Lincoln made the Lyceum
Address, Emerson marked himself out as one of America's
outstanding spokesmen for freedom. Like Lincoln, Emerson spoke of freedom as a sacred thing. It was, however,
the will of man and not the law that Emerson considered
sacred. "Nothing," wrote Emerson in 1841, "is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." If so, is the law
profane? Emerson supposed it was. "No law," he insisted,
"can be sacred to me but that of my nature."30 What then
of morality or transcendence as the foundation of law?
For Lincoln the sanctity of the Constitution was its transcendence of individual minds and natures, singly or as
majorities. This transcendence, relying upon reason in
individuals as the means to discern law, demonstrates that
good and evil are truths beyond time and place, beyond
the consciences of individuals. Supporting law is the
divine. As Lincoln suggested, Christianity is the greatest
institution. Emerson was a transcendentalist of quite an
opposite kind.
Precisely, it was law that free men were to transcend;
they were to transcend transcendence. Emerson said ''good
and ·bad are but names ... the only right is what is after
my constitution; the only wrong what is against it."31 Here
was a very different constitution than the one Lincoln had
in mind. If Emerson was right, then Garrison was justified
in burning the Constitution and in calling it "a covenant
with death and a league with hell." 32 Whereas Lincoln's
prescription of political religion evoked Aristotle's praise
of constitutions as the source of freedom and therein sal-
45
�vation, Emerson's doctrine encouraged men to burn constitutions as the means of salvation. Freedom is the
release from covenants. But covenants of one type or another are the web of a man's life. How would ordinary
people know to burn covenants? Emerson, aware of the
question, as was Lincoln, had the answer. The gift of freedom must be the work of great men. Great men, not covenants, shall be the liberators. And the means to greatness
is no other than the destruction of all covenants, or freedom. Thus will the great man "have no covenant but
proximities," no covenants that outlast whim, thus the renunciation of all covenants. Emerson anticipates here the
disclosure of his most shocking teaching that true liberation is the release from an egoistic self, to be replaced by a
godlike unity that is not an "I" but a "We." This was his
ideal "ever new and sublime, that here is One Man."33
Emerson really meant all covenants, even a man's relation
to himself. This is why he counted the human memory a
hindrance to freedom. Lincoln noticed this version of
freedom and emphasized antidotes to it. He especially
nurtured memory, because it would help to preserve
covenants. Lincoln urged men to consider the Declaration a covenant ('undecayed by the lapse of time," a
means to knit together all customary and personal covenants which depended on memory. 34
We need not look far for the opposition of Lincoln and
Emerson on the subject of the sacredness of freedom.
Emerson rests freedom in the sacred recesses of man's
passion, in "unhandselled savage nature." 35 It is sacred because it is screened, as Emerson put it, from natural law,
from society, and from books and the past. But Lincoln
believed that only reason could sustain law. Moreover,
reason must overcome passion if good and evil are to be
more than names. For the ancients, and for Lincoln, slavery was the spontaneous submission to the will without
the mediation of reason, but this is what Emerson called
freedom. The source of this difference lies in what each
side considered reason to be.
For Emerson, reason is an instrument, at once the product and the producer of nature. Lincoln understood reason as the ancients understood it. He considered it, along
with those whom Perry Miller called the conservative and
reactionary of Christendom, the sensorium of transcendence. The ultimate imperative of Emersonian freedom
says, "do not choose." 36 In other words, let your will subdue all choices and all anxiety regarding them. Simply do.
This understanding of freedom and the will is the one that
Miller found so affecting in Jonathan Edwards. Moreover,
where Edwards named this necessitous or enslaving will
God, Emerson identified it as "Man Thinking." Freedom
is oneness with "God," or nature; the creation of human
constitutions is mere whim. A man is liberated in this way
from every interference. He is a new Adam, a veritable
Christ. This is the "reason and faith" that Emerson sought
in the woods where ('all mean egotism vanishes." 37
But how perfectly does this Emersonian ideal of free-
46
dom recall the worldly freedom of slavemasters. Emerson's
freedom, which does not wittingly or outwardly envision
slaves and masters, was this: complete liberation requires
the liberation of passion from the internal conflict of desires within one's self. This is the basis of that affirmation
of uman' s freedom" celebrated now by writers on the subject of freedom such as David Brion Davis. Davis, perhaps
the most highly regarded student of American abolition,
counts the Munzterites and their like as the West's "first
abolitionists" as we have already seen. If sin "was not a
reality," says Davis, characterizing the first abolitionists,
"but only a name that could be made meaningless by an
act of will [Emerson's position], there could be no justification for inequalities of sex and property which violated
the law of spontaneous love." Above all, the law of spontaneous love would overcome that most unconscionable
property and possession, the self, or what Emerson called
"mean egotism." Freedom from the ego is the red heart of
abolitionism that Fitzhugh, too, discovered. It supplies as
well those veins of radical, actually heretical, Christianity
that historian Miller found beating as a "mighty engine of
revolution" in Jonathan Edwards. 38
Lincoln linked memory of the Revolution to the Bible.
His purpose was to show that truth or transcendence partakes of the sources of all transcendence, hence of its sanctity. Indeed, Lincoln goes far beyond Washington, whose
own linking of religion and the political is not without a
pragmatic aspect. The parallel that Lincoln proposes between American republicanism and Christianity is, for
him, the source of all salvation in this world. Lincoln invests religious and Christian principles and their symbols
with political ends. He counts the reverse, the investing of
politics with religious ends, as of the essence of reversal
and betrayal; the reversal of the two realms, religion and
politics, and the betrayal of the separate purposes of each.
Abolitionism is religious politics.
American republicanism, compared by Lincoln to "that
only greater institution," Christianity, is, like Christianity,
a "rock against which the gates of hell shall not prevail." 39
Lincoln did not invoke the words of the Christian savior
Jesus to his chief apostle Peter without purpose. Let us
explore this comparison of Christianity with republicanism. It contains within it the essential elements of Lincoln's teaching on abolition. What is it, we must ask of
Matthew 16:18, the Christian source Lincoln drew from
for use in the Lyceum Address, that does prevail against
Christianity? The answer is "suicide": the danger to republicanism, like the danger to Christianity according to
Scripture, comes from within.
The rock against which the gates of hell shall not prevail
is the Church, actually Peter himself. In Matthew the
gates of hell shall not prevail against Christianity or against
the salvation provided to men by Jesus. But the -danger to
Christianity is that Peter as a man and the Church as a
body will behave falsely, suicidally. As the Church must
keep the teaching of Jesus, so Peter must be loyal to Jesus.
SUMMER 1982
�If these loyalties are kept, Matthew teaches, spiritual salvation is assured. These relations found in Matthew regarding man's spiritual salvation and the only institution
greater than republicanism are duplicated in the Lyceum
Address in which republicanism itself and political salvation are at issue.
The relationships of Peter to Jesus and of the Church
to the teachings of jesus compel us to consider the parallel
that Lincoln makes between the first and second greatest
institutions. In the Lyceum Address abolitionism (the real
subject of the address) stands in relation to freedom as
Peter stands in relation to jesus. Abolition as a movement
favoring freedom for the slave is an "apostle" of the
savior, freedom. If abolitionism is a faithful apostle the republic will be saved. If it is false-as Peter was at one crucial point-then Has a nation of free men we must . .. die
by suicide." The relationship of the Constitution to the
Declaration also expresses the relationship of the church
to the teaching of jesus. Specifically, the survival of freedom calls for each American "to .. _support the Constitution and Laws [with] ... his life, his property and his
sacred honor," just as the "patriots of seventy-six [supported] ... the Declaration of Independence."40 But just
as the Southern slaveholders hoped to see the Constitution upheld at the expense of the Declaration, so the abolitionists and the advocates of popular sovereignty
thought they could bypass the Constitution, the one by
majority rule, the other by individual conscience, in favor
of the Declaration.
All three groups would deprive political life of content,
none more so than abolitionism. Abolitionists were explicit in regarding all political things with contempt To
the abolitionist, the occupation of political man, called
upon to rank goods and evils in light of the vast complexities of civil life, was an evil enterprise. Where freedom of
conscience is the highest good, either all men think alike,
in which case no government is necessary, or each man
thinks and acts differently, in which case no government
is possible and certainly none is legitimate. Politics, in this
view, is a game at best At worst it is the sign of man's degradation. This is how abolitionists most often saw government and political life. Accordingly, the abolitionist John
Humphrey Noyes said to Garrison in the year of Elijah P.
Lovejoy's murder, that he would "nominate jesus Christ
for the Presidency" as the best means to "overthrow ...
the nations."41 Thus abolitionist relativism disguised a
dogmatic absolutism.
In the history of American abolitionism there is no more
perfect example of the fanaticism bred of such dogmatism
-than the affair of john Brown. Brown, like Lovejoy, who
courted martyrdom, confused the emancipation of slaves
with the emancipation of souls. He confused his martyrdom with crucifixion and made his death nearly a suicide.
Although john Brown was too pathetic and absurd to become more than a terrorist-Lincoln compared him to the
frustrated assassin of Napoleon III-the acclaim Brown
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
won from Emerson and Thoreau, who compared him to
Christ, is more important as an indication of the caesarism that Lincoln sensed in abolition than Brown's acts.42
Brown's comments in 1859 demonstrate the nature of the
caesarism involved in the transformation of religion into
politics.
Brown's religious politics were the same as Noyes's,
who abjured all political life, and also like Garrison's, who
renounced (until about 1859) all violence. "Christ," said
Brown, is "the great Captain of liberty; as well as
salvation." This expression of religious politics was uttered by Brown after Harper's Ferry when he had begun
to compare himself to religious heroes of old, including
Peter. In a remarkably revealing comment, meant to justify religious politics, Brown misstates the role of Peter
and thereby renders a Lincolnian judgment against himself. Writing a month before he was hanged, Brown said,
"Christ once armed Peter. So also in my case I think he
put a sword into my hand."43
But jesus disarmed Peter. When jesus was arrested,
Peter was disarmed by his Master to show that the
Kingdom of God, Jesus' presidency, was not of this, but of
another world. It showed that jesus was not the captain of
liberty as well as salvation.
But while abolitionists condemned Lincoln as a moderate, and Douglas deplored what he called Lincoln's moral
absolutism, that is, Lincoln's insistence that slavery was
evil-in fact popular sovereignty and abolitionism were
alike "absolutistic" in the sense disapproved by these foes
of Lincoln who said they favored freedom. This is simply
demonstrated: absolute freedom, whether for majorities
or individual consciences, rests upon the self~canceling
proposition that all truth is relative. The political or practical consequences of popular sovereignty and abolitionism
as political remedies are more important. Lincoln under-
stood that governments founded on the principle of popular sovereignty would destroy freedom by vote since that
principle made it possible to enslave individuals if a majority decided that it was good to do so. Lincoln also realized
that abolitionism would, for its part, make government
and all social life impossible. Lincoln, supporting both majority rule and freedom, as well as the Constitution, which
Southern slaveholders raised in their defense, sought to
unify all three of these fundamental principles of American republicanism-majority rule, freedom, constitutionalism-as a means to prevent their destruction at the
hands of any one of them. The method Lincoln employed
for this purpose and called political religion may be called
moderation.
By moderation Lincoln did not mean the taking up of a
position halfway between two extremes. This is what Fitzhugh meant by moderation or what modern liberals mean
by it In this view the center is a creature of extremes. By
moderation Lincoln understood a position above the extremes which, though partaking of principles found in
each, majority rule in popular sovereignty and emancipa-
47
�tionism in abolition~ transforms and unites the extremities
by means of a higher principle. The higher principle Lin·
coin had in view was political religion in its mechanical
and its essential aspects.
Lincoln considered that political religion involved the
substitution of persuasion for force as the essence of polit·
ical religion. Moreover~ his political religion as a mechanical or procedural principle, by seeking common intellectual
ground among members of the political community, ap·
peals to the interests and passions of reasonable men, so
that passion or force shall yield to reason, or to constitu·
tions. The aim, then, of moderation is the replacement of
force and passion with reason in each member of the
political community. Political religion is the teaching of
self-control.
Lincoln's life shows three examples of this self-control.
Two of these concern Lincoln's efforts toward others in the
first years of his political life. The third example concerns
Lincoln near the end of his life. Whether such consistency
as Lincoln's was "foolish ... [,] the hobgoblin of [a] little
mind ... ", as Emerson would have been bound to regard it,
is a matter the reader must decide for himself.44
The first example of political religion is Lincoln's first
public statement as a politician on the subject of slavery,
his now famous protest in the lllinois legislature, made
March 3, 1837, when he was twenty-eight years old. In
principle and in method this early affair set a pattern from
which he did not deviate. Although this protest is famous
because of its opposition to slavery founded on "injustice
and bad pGlicy," it is difficult to see why Lincoln should
have received much credit for it.45 And, while Albert
Beveridge, many years ago, could find little difference be·
tween the majority resolutions and the protest of Lincoln
and his fellow representative from Sangamon County,
Dan Stone, except the "moral" difference between slavery
and freedom, even this difference is not obvious.46
The majority resolutions of the Illinois legislature do
not say that slavery is moral. Rather the resolutions are a
high-flown defense of slavery as constitutional. The rna·
jority contend that "the right of property in slaves, is
sacred to the slaveholding states by the Federal Constitu·
tion." 47 Stone and Lincoln do not deny this or even dispute another point of the majority, that the federal gov·
ernment could not abolish slavery in the District of
Columbia. What then is the difference between the rna·
jority resolutions and Lincoln's protest? Is there indeed
any basis for praise of Lincoln in the drafting of the pro·
test at all? Lincoln not only agreed with the majority that
the Constitution protected slavery, he also roundly con·
demned the "promulgation of abolition doctrines [as tend·
ing] ... rather to increase than to abate the evils of slavery."48
Finally, when one considers that Lincoln, eleven months
later in the Lyceum Address, called upon every American
never to violate the Constitution and laws in the "least
particular," the difficulty in seeing any special point in
the protest becomes even greater and more paradoxical.49
48
But of course it was Lincoln's agreement with the major·
ity that makes the protest significant. The Illinois legisla·
lure, responding to petitions from Southern legislatures
seeking support and assurance that Northerners respected
the constitutionality of slavery and deplored the anti·
constitutional implications of abolitionism, had no oppo·
nent in Lincoln. But just as Lincoln would not later, in the
Lyceum Address, praise the mob that killed the abolitionist
Lovejoy, so he could not join the majority in the Illinois
legislature in giving unconditional support to the constitu·
tional right to slavery without protesting that slavery was
wrong. It is not the genius of Lincoln's rhetoric, however,
but the intent of his politics that should be emphasized.
Lincoln's intention in the protest was to call attention
to his disagreement with the majority by means of his
agreement with it. The "moral" difference was the only
difference as it was later between Lincoln and Alexander
Stephens. Here, as later, that difference was the rub.
Freedom is what the Constitution supported, not slav·
ery. Just as the framers had won support of the Constitu·
tion by appealing to the monetary interests and passions
of slaveholders, so Lincoln in his protest hoped to secure
the support of men whose interests in the constitutional·
ity of slavery had less to do with the Constitution than with
such commercial interests as trading in Southern ports
downriver from St. Louis or Alton.
The second example of Lincoln's teaching of political
religion is found in the Lyceum Address considered as a
politician's instrument. Lincoln's strategy in Springfield,
speaking to an audience caught up in the excitement of
Lovejoy's recent murder, was the same as it had been in
the Illinois legislature. Once again Lincoln's purpose was
to teach self-control by demonstrating it.
As we have already seen, Lincoln's objective in the Lyceum Address was to use Christian symbols to distinguish
political religion from religious politics. In the Lyceum
Address Lincoln identified abolitionism as a species of an·
tinomianism. Abolitionism makes a political principle,
freedom~ into a religious principle, salvation. Moreover,
its open despising of politics is as dangerous to freedom as
it is to religion. Abolitionism is the enemy of political
religion because it is the enemy of freedom as well as law.
But Lincoln was careful not to make this point in the
manner of an abolitionist. He was moderate and did not
say all he meant.
In the Lyceum Address Lincoln set himself the task of
showing that abolitionism is mob law, hence wrong. But
Lincoln did not wish to appear to applaud Lovejoy's lynch·
ers. Lincoln also wished to demonstrate that freedom is
right without appearing to take Lovejoy's side against the
mob (and against his audience which had no more affec·
lion for Lovejoy than had the Illinois legislature).
Lincoln's moderation is visible in the rhetorical struc·
lure of the speech. He did not mention Lovejoy, the first
and recent martyr to abolitionism, and also carefully sepa·
rated his discussion of Lovejoy from his discussion of other
SUMMER 1982
�victims of mob rule such as gamblers and murderers. In
this way the reader or listener senses a difference between
wrong behavior wrongly punished and abolitionism, also
wrongly punished. The impression is that abolition is a
churchly doctrine carried to the point of destroying both
Church or Constitution, and doctrine or freedom. Free·
dom liberated from its home in the law is a betrayal of
freedom. Allied with mob law and with slavery in its con·
tempt for law, abolition itself brings about lynchings. In·
deed, Lincoln suggested that freedom and lynch lawslavery, in a word-may become one. This, incidentally,
was Fitzhugh's point about abolitionism.
Lincoln taught in the speech before the Illinois legisla·
ture and in the Lyceum Address that self-control is the chief
instrument and end of political religion. The "suicides" of
Lovejoy and Brown should be called reversals of selfcontrol and betrayals of freedom, as the Lyceum address
suggests. The identification of a man's will with the law is
what men have always called absolutism.
In fact it is the danger of absolutism in the name of
emancipation or liberation that is the great center and focus
of everything Lincoln taught and learned about freedom.
Lincoln, a man whom his best friends knew to be exces·
sively ambitious, possessed considerable personal knowl·
edge about the freedom for which Emerson had only
wished. It is perhaps as important to us that Lincoln had
an opportunity to act on his knowledge. Thus Lincoln rea·
lized as early as 18 38, and proclaimed publicly, that a
"towering genius" and a passionate man who was unwill-
ing simply to do his part, with lesser men, in preserving
the gains to freedom brought by the Revolution, "would
as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire [distinction] ... by
doing good as harm."50 In particular, the great man who
was not content to abide the constraints of law, who wished
to tear down the "sepulchres of the fathers" 51 with Emer·
son, rather than add "story to story upon the monument
of fame erected to the memory of others," would as will·
ingly serve his passion for distinction "at the expense of
emancipating slaves" as by enslaving free men. Lincoln
had this chance himself in the middle of the Civil War.52
Lincoln had an opportunity to emancipate slaves in a
way satisfying to both his ambition for freedom as a prin·
ciple and to his personal ambition. Shortly after the
Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Lincoln was bid·
den by Salmon P. Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, to
apply the Proclamation in areas specifically excepted by
it, for example, parts of Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia
that were under Union control. Such an application as
Chase asker! Lincoln to make would subvert the letter and
spirit of the Proclamation as a war measure. Lincoln
resisted. Perhaps this was a hard decision-he was a man
of genius after all. It was certainly a "religious" decision at
all events. His explanation of his course of action to Chase
is pertinent.
If I take the step [you recommend] must I not do so, without
the argument of military necessity, and so, without any arguTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ment, except the one that I think the measure politically expedient, and morally right? Would I not thus give up all footing upon constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the
boundless field of absolutism?53
Liberation was the graver fire bell. Unlike the bell that
frightened Jefferson, this bell rang at high noon when
men do not fear fire but are inclined instead to regard it as
a source of illumination and warmth. And Fitzhugh heard
this graver bell, too. Unlike Lincoln he was delighted by
its noise and especially by the abolitionists who rang it.
Did they not alert all men, ifmen would only see-and
Fitzhugh certainly thought the light was bright enoughthat the new freedom was none other than the old slavery? But here Fitzhugh may have been too sanguine.
There was, as Lincoln strongly hinted, something new
and far more dangerous in the new freedom.
It was the brightness that troubled Lincoln. He may
have guessed that someone would say, as Perry Miller did,
that "one has to look into the blinding sun" in order to be
free at all. 54 Yet who but a man with "a transparent eye·
ball" can look into the blinding sun? .Only such a man as
Emerson's Man Thinking or one who counts the tran·
scending of self, the extinguishment of the human I as
freedom; he says, in liberation: "I am nothing." 55 The
issue was the abolition of man, a consequence Fitzhugh
could not have imagined.
The author is pleased to acknowledge the assistance of the Earhart
Foundation in the preparation of this essay.
1. Fitzhugh was regarded as among the most important of slavery's defenders in his day, a judgement largely affirmed by later historians, including those who credit Fitzhugh with a Marxist-like critique of capital
[Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation, New York 1969}, and others who consider his defense of
slavery unusual or sui generis [C. Vann Woodward, "George Fitzhugh,
Sui Generis," in George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All/ or Slaves Without
Masters, Cambridge 1960, vii-xxxix; Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle:
The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South 1840-1860, Baltimore
1977.1
A recent collection of essays on Fitzhugh will be found in The Conservative Historians' Forum, 6, Spring 1982.
2. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed., Roy P. Basler, 10 vols.,
New Brunswick, New Jersey 1953, II, 255.
3. See Lincoln's "Fragment on the Dred Scott Case," Works, II,
387-388. Lincoln makes the argument here that the Supreme Court
must itself overthrow the Constitution, creating a kind of popular sovereignty among the three federal branches, if it can decide "all constitutional questions."
4. Fitzhugh, Cannibals All/ 69.
5. C. Vann Woodward, American Cotp;terpoint, Slavery and Racism in
the North-South Dialogue, Boston 1971, 38.
6. H. D. Thoreau, Walden, New York 1960, 223.
7. Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards, Westport, Connecticut 1949, 319.
8. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Ithaca, New York 1966, 297.
9. Lincoln, Works, II, 266.
10. Lincoln, Works, II, 266.
11. Thoreau, Walden, 223.
12. Lincoln, Works, IV, 169. (Cf. Proverbs 25:11)
13. Lincoln, Works, I, 112.
49
�14. Metaphysics, 1072a30.
15. Phaedo, 62b4.
16. Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Ithaca, New
Yock 1969, 247, 259, note 41.
17. Politics, l310a34-36.
18. Lincoln, Works, II, 252.
19. Lincoln, Works, IV, 160, 161.
20. Lincoln, Works, I, 109.
21. Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record, New York 1862-1868, Supplement, I, Part II, 483.
22. J. G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction,
rev. 2d ed., Lexington, Massachusetts 1973, 380. One of the better recent studies is La Wanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom; A Study in
Presidential Leadership, Columbia, S.C. 1981.
23. Richard Hofstadter, The American Poli~ical Tradition, New York
1955, 132.
24. Congressional Globe, 38 Congress, 2 sess, 497.
25. Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record, Supplement I, Part II, 482-483.
26. William Lloyd Garrison, Liberator, VII, June 23, 1837: 103.
27. Garrison, Liberator, VII, 103.
28. Garrison, Liberator, VII, 103.
29. See the present author's "Emerson's Platonism: and 'the terrific
Jewish idea'," Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of
Literature XV, 1982.
30. Robert Spiller and Alfred Ferguson, The Complete Works of Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Cambridge 1971, 1979, II, 30.
31. Spiller and Ferguson, Complete Works.
32. Garrison, Liberator, XXIV, July 7, 1854: 106.
50
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
ent
Emerson, Works, II, 42; I, 53.
Lincoln, Works, I, 108.
Emerson, Works, I, 61.
Emerson, Works, I, 82.
Emerson, Works, I, 10.
Davis, The Problem of Slavery, 299, 298; also on Davis see the presauthor's "The Idea of Freedom in American Historical Writing,"
The Center Joumal1, Fall, 1982; Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 319-20.
39. Lincoln, Works, I, ll5.
40. Lincoln, Works, I, ll2.
41. Noyes to Garrison in William Lloyd Garrison, the Story of his Life
Told by his Children, 4 vols., Boston 1894, II, 147.
42. Lincoln, Works, III, 541.
43. John Brown to E. B. in Louis Ruchames, A John Brown Reader, London !959, 135, !29.
44. Emerson, Works, II, 33.
45. Lincoln, Works, I, 75.
46. Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 4 vols., Boston 1928, I, 195.
47. Quoted in Lincoln, Works, I, 75.
48. Quoted in Lincoln, Works, I, 75.
49. Lincoln, Works, I, 112.
50. Lincoln, Works, I, ll4.
51. Emerson, Works, I, 7.
52. Lincoln, Works, I, ll4.
53. Lincoln, Works, VI, 429.
54. Miller, Jonathan Edwards, 195.
55. Emerson, Works, I, lO.
SUMMER 1982
�Sophocles' Ajax and the Ajax Myth
Philip Holt
The Greek tragic poet worked with myths, with stories
shaped by tradition and known (at least in outline) to his
audience. 1 He was not wholly in control of his material.
The poet interpreted the myth; he did not invent it. Myth
required that Troy fall to the Greeks, that Agamemnon be
murdered upon returning home, that Oedipus discover
the truth about his birth and marriage. Yet myths were
flexible within limits-sometimes, broad limits. The playwright could usually choose among different versions of
his myth, and he could even make innovations of his own
-not simply in drawing characters and writing speeches
to flesh out the myth, but in constructing the plot. Aristotle (Poetics ch. 9, 145lb) took notice of this freedom:
One must not aim at a rigid adherence to the traditional stories
on which tragedies are based. It would be absurd, in fact, to
do so, as even the known stories are only known to a few,
though they are a delight none the less to all.
In view of this flexibility within tradition, we can approach a Greek play by contrasting it with earlier treatments of the same story. What did its author emphasize
that his predecessors had played down, or add which they
had omitted, or delete which they had included? With
these questions answered, we can go on to interpret the
play itself: precisely what did the playwright create by presenting his version of the story rather than some other?
1. The Myth
The story of Ajax' death, as Sophocles tells it, is complicated. After Achilles died, Ajax and Odysseus laid claim to
his armor. The Greeks awarded it to Odysseus. Enraged at
this slight to his honor, Ajax set out by night to kill the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Greek leaders, but Athena clouded his mind so that he mistook the army's cattle for its men, and he killed and tortured the cattle instead. When he recovered his sanity and
saw what he had done, shame and fear of reprisals drove
him to fall on his sword. The Greek commanders sought
to punish him after death by leaving his body unburied,
but Odysseus persuaded them to allow his funeral.
Sophocles' authority and the excellence of his play made
this version prominent in later antiquity and standard for
modern times. But this was not the version Sophocles inherited, probably in the 440s B.C., when he wrote the
Ajax. The evidence on earlier treatments of the myth is
often spotty, but it gives us good reason to believe that
Sophocles' predecessors knew a simpler story with some
highly un-Sophoclean meanings-'
We first find the Ajax story in Odyssey 11.543-551,
where Odysseus tells of his journey to the underworld and
its ghosts:
Only the soul of Telamonian Aias stood off
at a distance from me, angry still over that decision
I won against him, when beside the ships we disputed
our cases for the arms of Achilleus. His queenly mother
set them as prize, and the sons of the Trojans, with
Pallas Athene,
judged; and I wish I had never won in a contest like this,
so high a head has gone under the ground for the sake
of that armor,
Aias, who for beauty and achievement surpassed
all the Danaans next to the stately son of Peleus.
Philip Holt wrote his doctoral dissertation on Sophocles' Trachiniae
(Stanford 1976). He has published several articles on Vergil and Sophocles.
51
�Figure 2. Etruscan bronze statuette, 460s B.c.; sui·
cide of Ajax; Kappeli collection, photo courtesy of
Antikenmuseum und Skulpturhalle, Basel.
Figure 1. Corinthian cup by the cavalcade painter, sixth century B.C.;
Greek leaders discover Ajax' suicide; private collection, photo courtesy
of Antikenmuseum und Skulpturhalle, Basel.
Odysseus goes on to tell how he tried to speak to Ajax, but
Ajax walked off without saying a word. Beyond the bare
facts that Ajax lost the judgment of arms and died, Homer
tells us only that "the sons of the Trojans" decided the
dispute. He probably means (as one scholiast tells us) that
the Greeks summoned a group of Trojan prisoners and
asked them "by which of the two heroes they had been
more greatly harmed." There is nothing about Ajax' madness or the slaughter of the cattle.
Pindar tells the story with considerable sympathy for the
fallen hero in three passages written from 479 to 459 B.C.:
The greater mass of men have blind hearts. If it were possible
for them to know the truth, then mighty Ajax would not have
become enraged over the arms and thrust a smooth sword
through his breast. [Nemean 7.23-27]
Envy devoured even the son ofTelamon, rolling him upon his
sword. Oblivion overcomes in grim strife the man who has no
tongue but is mighty in heart; the greatest honor goes to the
elaborate lie. For with secret votes the Danaans showed
Odysseus favor. Ajax, deprived of the golden arms, wrestled
with death. [Nemean 8.23-27]
The art of inferior men has seized and overthrown a stronger
man. Consider mighty Ajax, who slaughtered himself late at
night and won blame from aU the sons of the Greeks who
went to Troy. [Isthmian 4.36-40]
Where Homer committed the judgment of arms to "the
sons of the Trojans with Pallas Athene," Pindar has it
decided by the "secret votes" of the Greeks. He also regards the judgment of arms as unjust. Ajax deserved to
win, but he lost because "the greater mass of men" were
"blind" to his true worth, or because of the Greeks' envy
and desire to curry favor with Odysseus, or because the
hero "who has no tongue, but is mighty in heart" is vul-
52
nerable to "the art of inferior men." Pindar's view of Ajax
as a victim of injustice and corruption carried weight in
later decades. The Socrates of Plato's Apology (41 b) muses
that if he must die,
It would be marvelous to pass time in Hades and meet Palamedes and Ajax the son of Telamon and ariy other of the
men of old who died because of an unjust verdict, and to
compare my sufferings with -theirs.
This hero is not, however, the Ajax of the Odyssey, where
Odysseus mourns Ajax' death without admitting that
Ajax was cheated. Nor is it the Ajax of Sophocles.
Both Homer and Pindar move immediately from the
judgment of arms to Ajax' death. They put nothing in between-no plot to murder the Greeks, no delusion sent by
Athena, no slaughter of the cattle. They might have known
of these things and chosen to leave them out, for the picture of Ajax as a murderous, cattle-killing madman would
mar Homer's sorrow over the passing of a great warrior
and Pindar's indignation at heroic virtue misunderstood
and unrewarded. Or they might not have known them.
Their version of the story is quite intelligible, without any
gaps to be filled with madness or attempted murder from
Sophocles' plot. Homer and Pindar may present the original version of the myth, for time and retelling are more
likely to complicate a myth than to simplify it. The short
version kept its appeal in later times. Ovid gives us the
shortest version of all, with Ajax killing himself on the spot
the minute the verdict goes against him (Metamorphoses
13.1-398).
The Odyssey and Pin dar's Odes contain the only surviving accounts of Ajax' death in poetry before Sophocles.
More complicated versions (if any) must be sought among
the fragments (often meager) of lost epics and dramas, and
in works of art.
Our story appeared twice in the "cycle" of epics composed not long after Homer to round out the story of the
SUMMER 1982
�Figure 3. Etruscan carnelian scarab, early fourth century B.C.; suicide of
Ajax; photo courtesy of Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Trojan War and its aftermath. The Aethiopis closed with
it, with the essential events of the short version. Proclus,
the author of a plot summary from the fifth century A.D.,
tells us that the Aethiopis included the judgment of arms.
After Achilles' death, he says, "the Greeks made a grave·
mound and held a contest, and a dispute arose between
Odysseus and Ajax over Achilles' arms." The suicide is at·
tested by a scholiast on the Isthmian 4 passage quoted
earlier: "The author of the Aethiopis says that Ajax killed
himself towards dawn." The judgment of arms may well
have been settled by a jury of Trojan prisoners. A scholiast
on the Odyssey ll passage quoted earlier says the Trojan
jury is described in "the cyclic poets," and we shall see
that it does not come from our only other possibility, the
Little Iliad. There is no literary evidence that the
Aethiopis included Ajax' plot to murder the Greeks, his
madness, or the attack on the cattle.
The Aethiopis may have been content with the short
version of our story-Ajax killing himself "towards dawn"
after a night of brooding over his disgrace. This ending
would preserve the Aethiopis' focus on Achilles' exploits
after the death of Hector. The death of Ajax-best of the
Greeks after Achilles (Iliad 2.768 f., Odyssey 11.550 f.) and
Achilles' companion and (in one tradition) his cousinwould fit into the Aethiopis as a somber coda to the death
of Achilles himself. It would fit better in a short version
than in a long one.
This may not be the whole story. Scenes from the epic
cycle appear on a large relief sculpture from the early Roman .empire, the Tabula Iliaca Capitolina, and the section
devoted to the Aethiopis includes a brooding figure captioned "Ajax mad." The nature of his madness-delusion,
rage, melancholy-is not clear. In any event, the Tabula
Iliaca Capitolina is too late, and too far slanted towards
Roman versions of the myths, to tell us much about the
Aethiopis.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Figure 4. Athenian black-figure amphora by Exekias, 530s B.C.; Ajax prepares to commit suicide; photo by H. and B. Devos, courtesy of Musee
des Beaux-Arts et d'Archeologie, Boulogne-sur-Mer.
Another work in the epic cycle, the Little Iliad, opened
with the judgment of arms in a different version from the
Aethiopis. To settle the dispute between Odysseus and
Ajax, the Greeks sent spies up to the walls of Troy to learn
the Trojans' opinion of the two heroes. Conveniently
enough, the spies overheard two women debating that very
question. One praised Ajax for carrying Achilles' corpse out
of the thick of battle, but the other replied ("through the
providence of Athena") that Odysseus was braver because
of his work in fighting-presumably in fighting off the Trojans while Ajax made away with the body. This tradition of
a decision on narrow grounds in the judgment of arms (best
service in rescuing Achilles' corpse, not greatest overall
prowess) was disregarded by Pindar and Sophocles, but it
was fairly widespread in epic. It even left traces in the third
or fourth century A.D., in the Posthomerica of Quintus of
Smyrna (5.125, 158-160).
More important, our sources on the Little Iliad tell us
that after the judgment of arms, "Ajax went mad, slaughtered the cattle of the Achaeans, and killed himself," and
that because of this deed "he was not cremated in the usual
way, but was buried in a mound because of the anger of the
king." Scholars tend to assume this means Ajax set out to
kill the Greeks but was blinded by Athena and killed the
cattle instead. They use Sophocles' plot to fill out the gaps
in our evidence for the Little Iliad, and then they turn
around and conclude that the Little Iliad gave Sophocles
his plot. Sophocles certainly took the slaughter of the cattle
from the Little Iliad, and the "irregular" burial there probably inspired the debate over Ajax' burial in the last part
of his play. The madness in the Little Iliad, however, invites another explanation once we stop using Sophocles'
Ajax to piece out the story. If we read that "Ajax went
mad, slaughtered the cattle of the Achaeans, and killed
himself," the natural inference is that Ajax went berserk
53
�Figure 6. Athenian red-figure cup by Douris, c. 490 B.C.; quarrel of Ajax
and Odysseus over Achilles' armor; photo courtesy of Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna.
Figure 5. Athenian red-figure lekythos, 460s B.C.; Ajax prepares to commit suicide (sword planted in ground to right); private collection, photo
courtesy of Antikenmuseum und Skulpturhalle, Basel.
Figure 8. Detail of Figure 7. Odysseus;
Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Figure 7. Other side of the cup by Douris; vote on the judgment of
arms; Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Figure 9. Detail of
Figure 7. Ajax; Kunsthistorisches Museum.
54
SUMMER 1982
�and vented his wrath on the nearest available object, the
cattle. This madness is a frenzy, not a delusion. Agamemnon's anger can be explained by the attack on the cattle
(army property) without reference to a plot to murder the
Greeks.3
The epic cycle gives other evidence of an enraged (not a
deluded) Ajax. A fragment of the Sack of Ilium praises the
diagnostic skills of the physician Podalirius, "who first
recognized the flashing eyes and burdened mind of the
wrathful Ajax." These symptoms may have boded an attack on the cattle or a simple suicide; they hardly suggest
the onset of a hallucination.
The elaborate and melodramatic story found in the Little Iliad, with its spy mission, madness, and rampage among
the cattle, stands in contrast to the more somber and
straightforward version which seems to have appeared in
the Aethiopis. Intrigue and adventure are characteristic of
the Little Iliad. It is an episodic work, fond of complicated
and varied incidents. Aristotle complained that it was too
episodic: one could find eight or ten tragic plots in it,
where a properly focused epic like the Iliad offered only
one of two (Poetics ch. 23, 1459b). Amid all its romance
and adventure, and no doubt because of these things, the
Little Iliad maintains a special interest in Odysseus,
whose wiles and exploits occupy a large part of its action.
The Little Iliad glorifies its favorite hero by making his opponent's conduct as outrageous as possible. By contrast,
the Aethiopis seems to have been relatively sympathetic
to Ajax, who is much like its own favorite hero, Achilles.
Aeschylus wrote a play called The Judgment of Arms
and presented Ajax' suicide in The Thracian Women.
These plays included some interesting details not found
in other pre-Sophoclean versions of the myth. Aeschylus
seems to have used Nereids, not Greeks or Trojans, to
decide the judgment of arms (fr. 285). His Ajax was endowed with a magical invulnerability (fr. 292b):
According to the story, Ajax was invulnerable on the rest of
his body, but he could be wounded in the armpit, because
when Heracles wrapped him in his lion-skin he left that part
uncovered because of the quiver which he wore. Aeschylus
says of him that the sword bent "like a man stretching a bow"
when his skin did not give way to the blow, until (he says) a
goddess came and showed him in what part of the body he
needed to stab himself.
There is nothing in the fragments (admittedly scanty)
about madness or cattle. Aeschylus' two Ajax plays may
have presented the two essential events of the short version of our myth-the judgment of arms and the suicide
-with little in between.
In art, Ajax' death furnished material for vase-painters,
metal-workers, and gem-engravers throughout antiquity.'
Representations of the suicide reach back as far as the
seventh century B.C. They show Ajax bending over or lying face down as a great sword, planted hilt down in the
earth, pierces his body. On the manner of Ajax' suicide,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Sophocles was following an old and well-established tradition. Figure I shows an early example from Corinth, with
the Greek chieftains gathered around to look at the body.
Later artists, more adept at showing the human figure in
action, sometimes varied the poses. Etruscan artists of the
fifth and fourth centuries B.C. (with whom the scene was
rather popular) show Ajax in wild, contorted attitudes,
leaping on his sword almost like an acrobat (Figure 2 and
3).
Athenian representations of the suicide are fewer, but
more impressive, than those from Corinth and Etruria. A
well-known vase by the black-figure master Exekias from
the 530s B.C. shows a naked, intent Ajax planting his
sword in the ground (Figure 4). His armor sits opposite
him, a reminder of the warrior's life he is leaving and of
the warrior's honor that drives him to his death. In the
460s, an Athenian artist working in the later red-figure
technique .showed a similar scene (Figure 5).5 This Ajax,
less grim and more plaintive, kneels before his upturned
sword, arms raised in prayer, in a scene recalling his dying
speech in Sophocles. Both these scenes, though painted
well before Sophocles wrote, would make excellent illustrations for his play.
The other main event of our story, the judgment of
arms, is fairly popular with Athenian artists. The debate
between Odysseus and Ajax appears on vases before 500
B.C., and scenes of the Greeks voting on their claims enjoy
a vogue between 500 and 480. In one example (Figure 6),
the two heroes quarrel violently over Achilles' armor.
They rush at each other, one drawing his sword, the other
with his sword already drawn. Their friends try to hold
them back. Agamemnon, with the armor at his feet, stands
between them to keep them apart. The other side of the
cup (Figure 7) shows a more orderly scene: the Greeks
vote (with pebbles, like Athenian jurors) between the two
heroes. Athena presides-'-perhaps to bless democratic
procedure, perhaps to ensure Odysseus' victory. Since the
Greeks pile their pebbles up in the open rather than
follow the Athenian practice of putting them in urns, we
can see how the voting is going. The pile on the left is
clearly bigger, and at the far left of the scene Odysseus
shows his surprise and delight (Figure 8). At the far right,
Ajax turns away to lean on his staff and hide his head in
his mantle (Figure 9).
Another cup from about the same time gives us different versions of the same scenes. In the quarrel (Figure
I 0), we see the Greeks restraining the heroes again as a regal, but agitated, Agamemnon steps between them and
shouts for order. The other side of the cup shows the
scene immediately after the voting (Figure II). A close
look shows fifteen pebbles on the left and fourteen on the
right: the vote has been close, but Odysseus wins. To the
far right, Ajax claps his hand to his head in dismay. To the
left, the cup is badly broken, but we can make out the second figure from the left as Athena, for the tassels of her
aegis project from her back. The figure to her right is
55
�Figure 10. Athenian red·figure cup by the Brygos
painter, c. 490 B.C.; quarrel of Ajax and Achilles; collection of Walter Bareiss, photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; all rights reserved,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
probably Odysseus, for he is holding a shield, whose lower
rim can be seen below the broken edge of the cup. He has
just taken possession of Achilles' armor. ·
The painter of this cup carries the story a step further
(Figure 12). On the inside of the cup (for its strongstomached owner to see as he drained the last of his wine),
he shows Ajax pierced by his sword and lying dead as Tecmessa comes up to drape a robe over his body. Ajax lies on
a nubbly surface, probably a beach. The setting at the
seashore and Tecmessa covering the body appear here
forty years before Sophocles showed them on the stage.
In these details as in the manner of Ajax' suicide,
Sophocles was following an older tradition.
The artists, like the poets, appear interested primarily
in the two main events of our myth, the judgment of arms
and Ajax' suicide. They paid little attention to what happened in between. The slaughter of the cattle appears only
once in vase-painting before Sophocles (Figure 13). Only
fragments of the vase survive, but we can make out the
hindquarters of a bull, lying supine with legs upturned, on
one fragment and the hindquarters of a sheep in a similar
position on another. The human figures must be curious
or horrified Greeks on the morning after Ajax' rampage.
After this vase, the cattle drop from sight (except for one
appearance in Hellenistic timesf until the first century
B.C. and after in Rome.
The Romans more than made up for Greek neglect of
the slaughtered cattle, but only with repeated reproductions of one scene. Ajax sits on a rock~ resting his head on
one hand and holding a sword. Carcasses of slaughtered
animals are before him. We have over thirty copies of this
scene, mostly on engraved gems (Figure 14), based on a
56
Figure 11. Other side of the cup by the Brygos painter; vote oh the
judgment of arms; collection of Walter Bareiss; all rights reserved, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
work of art which somehow became popular in Rome in
the first century B.C. That work of art was more likely an
illustration of Sophocles' play than an inspiration for it.
Finding Ajax' madness in ancient art is almost as hard
as finding slaughtered cattle. The wild, contorted poses in
some scenes of Ajax' suicide suggest Ajax killing himself
in a frenzy, but the madness of Sophocles' play is different.
There are no scenes of Ajax' attempt on the Greeks in ancient art. Athena's intervention to cloud his wits might appear difficult to show in a painting, but it is not impossible;
Greek art is no stranger to mad scenes. No Greek artist~
however~ undertook this one.
2. The Play
Sophocles did not inherit a canonical version of the
Ajax myth. His predecessors in treating the story left him
a simple outline (judgment of arms, suicide of Ajax) and
ample room for choice in filling it out. Our study of the
myth shows what choices Sophocles made and how they
affected the meaning of the play. By examining the poet's
sources~ we discover something often undervalued in a
Greek writer: his originality.
Like other fifth-century writers, but unlike some of the
epic poets, Sophocles universalized the judgment of arms
by having it decided on the broadest possible groundsSUMMER 1982
�between the assertive and cooperative virtues. Ajax is
above all an individualistic hero, bold and self-assertive,
proud and independent. His prowess in battle makes him
a valued member of the community, needed by the Greek
army, needed even more by his own followers, Tecmessa
and the Chorus. His prowess also sets him apart-stationed at a post of honor at the extreme end of the Greek
camp (4), open to the envy and resentment of others (154157), repeatedly called ((alone," Single," "solitary" in the
language of the play. He does little to fit in with the community, to accommodate his rugged nature to its demands. His treatment of Tecmessa and the Chorus shows
how deaf he is to advice and entreaties from others; his attempt to murder the Greeks shows how little he cares for
the rights of others when his own are at stake.
Where his abilities and temper set him apart, he insists
on being set apart in honor too-in winning extraordinary
prizes to match his extraordinary merits. Like his cousin
Achilles, he meets the great crisis of his life when the loss
of a prize breaks down the correlation between his achievements and the community's recognition. From then on,
his individualism isolates him further. He becomes the
would-be murderer of his comrades in arms, an object of
universal hatred (457-459), a weak support for a Chorus
which cannot understand him and for a devoted woman
he does not care to understand, and finally a solitary suicide left to address his last words to the landscape. Only
his burial gives him a place in the human community
again 7 His character and fate show both the attractions
and the problems of the heroic imperative to excel, to
stand out from the rest of the community.
In contrast to Ajax, Odysseus is very much the man of
the community, endowed with the cooperative spirit, reasonableness, and readiness to try persuasion that Ajax lacks
-all qualities necessary for the smooth functioning of society. Odysseus shows these qualities most clearly at the end
of the play, when he breaks into a deadlocked debate between Teucer and the Atreidae to secure Ajax' right to
burial. This debate is almost surely Sophocles' invention,
although Ajax' "irregular" funeral in the Little Iliad probably inspired it. By including the debate, Sophocles displays Odysseus' conciliatory spirit to good adva_ntage
against the vituperation, intransigence, and petty pnde of
the others.
More impressive than Odysseus' persuasive skills in
breaking the deadlock are the humility and moderation
that bring his success. More than anyone else in the play,
he knows the limits set upon mortal life. He hated Ajax
"while. it was right to hate" (1347), but justice and respect
for Ajax' merits tell him not to pursue that enmity past
death (1344 f.):
11
Figure 12, Inside of the cup by the Brygos painter; suicide of Ajax; Tecmessa covers the body; collection of Walter Bareiss; all rights reserved,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
on who was the best of the Greeks generally, not on who
did the most to rescue Achilles' body. He further universalized the conflict by following a tradition that emerged
around 500 B.C.: the whole Greek community settled the
dispute by a democratic vote.
Classical authors universalized the conflict in different
ways. For Pindar, the conflict between Ajax and Odysseus
pits true worth against low cunning. Odysseus represe_nts
the art of inferior men," and he wins a popular electiOn
because "the greater mass of men have blind hearts." Something similar appears in Ajax' and Teucer's complaints that
the judgment of arms was rigged (445 f., 1135, 1137), but
this is mere propaganda, unsupported by the facts of the
play. Sophocles may be raising Pindar's idea of a corrupt
election only to reject it.
Other classical authors (mostly after Sophocles) see the
judgment of arms as the victory of intelligence and wit over
mere strength and courage. In the fourth century B.C., Antisthenes wrote two speeches for Ajax and Odysseus that
stress the conflict of intelligence and courage, and the conflict looms large in the later debate-scenes of Ovid and
Quintus of Smyrna. Ajax becomes the hero of brawn defeated by the hero of brain-though he is still far from the
"beef-witted lord" of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.
Again, Sophocles raises the idea, for we hear of Ajax' size
and strength as his main qualities (1077 f., 1250-1254; cf.
758). Again, he rejects it: the words come from Ajax' enemies, and the !).jax we see in the play is an intelligent man.
His speeches are forceful, well thought out, and eloquent.
On the battlefield, too, he is thoughtful. "Who was found
more prudent than this man, or better at doing what the
occasion demanded?" Athena asks rhetorically (119 f.).
Few other authors praise Ajax for prudence or sagacity.
For Sophocles, the judgment of arms shows the conflict
11
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
It is not just to harm a noble man once he is dead, not even if
you happen to hate him.
Since he knows human limits, he accepts human changes:
"Many who are now friends become enemies again" (1359).
57
�Figure 13. Fragments of an Athenian red-figure cup by Onesimus, 490s
{?); photo by M.
Chuzeville, courtesy of the Louvre, Paris.
B.C.; the Greeks discover the slaughter of the cattle
Ajax made the same observation earlier, but in a tone of
bitter, cynical disillusionment (678-683):
I now learn that we are to hate our enemy only so much, as
one who will be our friend again, and I shall want to help my
friend only so much, as one who will not always remain my
friend; for with most mortals the harbor of companionship is
untrustworthy.
In contrast, Odysseus accepts changes pragmatically and
finds in them a call for tolerance and magnanimity.
Odysseus thinks as he does because he knows we are all
weak and mortal. The fallen enemy is no different from
the rest of us; Ajax' fate can happen to anyone (1364 f.):
Agamemnon: So you bid me to let this corpse be buried?
Odysseus: I do, for I myself shall come to this.
Odysseus' words here recall his pity for Ajax in the prologue (121-126):
I pity the wretch, even if he is my enemy, because he is yoked
to an awful ruin, anO I think no more of his case than of my
own. For I see that we who live are nothing but phantoms or
a light shadow.
His enmity with Ajax matters less than their common humanity. This is the wisdom of Priam and Achilles in the
last book of the Iliad, but Odysseus uses this wisdom dif·
ferently. Priam and Achilles weep together, then part to
go to their separate dooms. Odysseus turns towards life,
formulates sound principles for guiding life in community, and applies those principles with telling force in the
final debate. In the words of Sophocles' famous praise of
human achievement, "he has taught himself the temperament that governs towns" (Antigone 354-356). Sophocles
sees Odysseus' famous versatility not as low trickery (as
Pindar did) or as cynical pragmatism (as Sophocles was to
58
Figure 14. Roman gem; Ajax amid the slaughtered
cattle; one carcass visible to the left; photo courtesy
of the British Museum, London.
do later in the Philoctetes), but as the humble flexibility
that we need to live with others.
Odysseus' victory over Ajax in a democratic election is
the result of his sociable wisdom. Sophocles could have
had him win through the favor of Athena or the caprice of
Trojan prisoners. Victory through the community's choice
shows the community's preference for humility and concern for the common good over boundless self-assertion
and love of distinction. Odysseus makes a better neighbor
(if not a better story-book hero) because he is good for the
community.
If Sophocles made Odysseus nobler than the tradition
did, he made Ajax more selfish, violent, and irrational.
Ajax is a fascinating and sympathetic figure in Sophocles'
hands, but one of the most significant conclusions that
emerges from comparing the play with the myth is that
our sympathy for him comes very hard indeed. Sophocles
included everything the myth offered-and possibly much
that it did not-that might discredit the hero. Unlike
Homer and Pindar, he makes Ajax slaughter the cattlean act both horrifying and absurd. Unlike the author of
the Little Iliad (probably), he makes the slaughter of the
cattle a diversion from something worse-the slaughter of
the Greeks. He adds other touches that might, if treated
differently, serve admirably to blacken Ajax' character: his
callous disregard for the loving Tecmessa and for the family ties that she invokes; his proud and foolish rejection of
divine aid, told to us by the Messenger in another apparent Sophoclean invention (762-775); his boast in the
prologue over the torture he thinks he is inflicting on
Odysseus. If Sophocles had set out to make a villain of
Ajax, or to debunk his brand of heroism after the manner
of Euripides, it is hard to see what more he could have
done to the story.
SUMMER 1982
�Yet the play does not debunk, and it is not the story of a
bad man's downfall-the sort of story Aristotle warned
tragedians to avoid (Poetics ch. 13, 1453a). For all his
faults, Ajax still merits Tecmessa' s love and the Chorus'
devotion. He is a greater, perhaps even a better, man than
most who survive him. Agamemnon and Menelaus are full
of petty spite, eager to abuse in death a man they could
never surpass in life. Teucer, though more sympathetic, is
a small-scale Ajax, a man of mere pugnacity, not of grand
wrath. Even the wise Odysseus is a small-scale figure, a
good and humble man rather than a great one. Display of
their smallness, and of Ajax' greatness by contrast, is one
reason for the debate over the hero's burial at the end of
the play. (It is also one reason why some critics find the
debate dull and undramatic.)
Ajax' greatness is not simply shown in his foils. It is
shown in the man himself. His courage and prowess are
beyond serious question, and Odysseus admits (agreeing
with the epic tradition) that Ajax was the best of the
Greeks after Achilles (13 39-1341 ). His faults are fascinating, not repugnant, because they are the faults of a great
man, not of a small one. His towering (and largely justified) self-confidence, his anger and self-assertiveness, his
refusal to accept the army's judgment or Tecmessa' s advice, all stem from the same nature that made him the
bulwark of the Achaeans. His heroic merits and heroic
vices are inextricably linked: we cannot have the merits
without the vices.
The same can be said of Sophocles' other heroes. The
qualities that make Philoctetes a worthy possessor of
Heracles' bow and an indispensable member of the Greek
army at Troy also give him a self-destructive grudge that
confines him more tightly than his exile and nearly keeps
him from going to the war. The same quick wit, keen
pride, and decisiveness that make Oedipus king of Thebes
and drive him to search for the truth also arouse his
groundless suspicions of Creon. Some years earlier, they
led him to kill his father at the crossroads. Sophocles' work
shows an enduring preoccupation with the problems and
appeal of a rugged, proud sort of human excellence, unquestionably great but not entirely good, needed by society but not amenable to society's desires or demands.
The paradoxes in Sophocles' heroes also show themselves in the hero-cults of Greek religion. A hidi5s, in
Greek terms, is a person who has died but who continues
to exercise unusual power over human life and who demands worship at his (or sometimes her) grave.8 Heroes
are not honored because they are good; they are appeased
and conciliated because they are powerful and dangerous.
Their power is often linked to a sinister force of character
that shows itself in pride, swiftness to anger, hunger for
honor. Heroes arouse in their worshipers a fascinated awe
or dread that is quite independent of moral judgment.
Sophocles was a devotee of hero-cults. He helped introduce the worship of Asclepius to Athens, and he founded
a shrine to Heracles. (These figures were not pure heroes,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
but their worship combined heroic and divine elements.)
He was the priest of another hero-cult and was honored as
a hero himself after his death. Every recorded example of
his famous piety is connected with a hero-cult.
His interest in hero-cults carried over from his life into
his art. Oedipus at Colonus tells, among other things, the
story behind a hero-cult in Sophocles' district of Athens.
The benefit that Oedipus can confer on the place of his
death, and over which Thebans and Athenians fight, is
the benefit that a city receives from the burial and worship of a hero in its territory.
Like the Oedipus at Colonus, the Ajax involves the
foundation-story of a local hero-cult. Ajax was a popular
hero in Athens, the patron of one of the ten tribes of
Athenian citizens. He and his family were invoked to defend their home island, Salamis, at the battle in 480 B.C.
(Herodotus 8.64, 121). The debate on his burial at the end
of the play is important partly because a proper funeral
and a recognizable tomb are generally prerequisites for a
hero-cult. Interest in Ajax' cult seems to have influenced
Sophocles' treatment of Ajax' character. He draws out the
tensions and sharpens the paradoxes latent in the worship
of heroes. He probes the fascination which heroes inspire.
In developing our own contemporary response to the
play, we should keep in mind that fascination with heroes
of this sort is not confined to ancient Greece. Something
like it lives on in popular culture. We find it in the romantic fascination with the temperamental artist or performer, who can treat family and friends abominably, be
moody, egotistical, and possibly mad, and still write great
poems or symphonies or deliver great performances on
the stage. On another level, there is something like it in a
type of athletic hero who has become popular (at least in
the United States) in the last fifteen years or so-the braggart, bully, or playboy who wins games.' It would be misleading to say that these people succeed in spite of their
irresponsibility, selfishness, and lack of restraint. In a
sense, they succeed because of them; the Hheroic" vices
stem from the same forces of character that produce gripping music, impassioned acting, and last-second touchdowns. Even in an age far more inclined than ancient
Greece to demand humility of its heroes, and far more
ready to spread moral standards into every department of
life, the archaic cult-hero has a place. Fans of Richard
Wagner and Maria Callas (not to mention joe Namath and
Muhammed Ali) know something of its power.
Sophocles' appreciation of Ajax' heroism is great, but
extraordinarily balanced and clear-eyed. He shows us a
hero worthy of admiration, but he does not ignore the
claims of the community or the dangers of the heroic temper. Sophocles knows the cost of having men like Ajax in
the world, and he produces a profound appreciation of
the moral ambiguities of the Greek heroic type. His appreciation of Ajax would not be so subtle and deep without Ajax' plot to murder the Greeks, or his slaughter of
the cattle, or his rejection of divine aid, or the other in-
59
�criminating details left out of most other treatments of
the myth.
Sophocles' most important departure from tradition concerns the nature of Ajax' madness. In earlier versions of the
story (certainly in the Sack of Ilium, possibly in the Little
Iliad), the madness is a rage or a frenzy-if it appears at
all. In Sophocles, it is the delusion that cattle were Greek
soldiers. 10 This is made quite clear in the prologue, where
Athena describes Ajax' adventures with the care and detail we would expect in an original (or at least, an unfamiliar) version of the story. By her account, Ajax was sane
when he set out to kill the Greeks. She did not intervene,
"casting hard-to-bear imaginings upon his mind" (51 f.),
until he was at the entrance of the Atreidae's tent. Ajax in
the prologue is mad .because he is still deluded. His recovery (described by Tecmessa) lies in regaining his wits and
recognizing what he has really done. Nobody in the play
blames madness for Ajax' attack on the Greeks, or for his
suicide, or for anything else except the delusion and the
accompanying slaughter of the cattle.
Identifying the limits of Ajax' madness does not reduce
its importance in the play. Rather, it helps us understand
its meaning and dramatic function better by focusing our
attention on the important theme of correct perception.
Perception gets little attention, as far as we can tell, in
earlier treatments of the Ajax story. Perception is, however, a theme dear to Sophocles' heart, especially in his
earlier plays. Discoveries and revelations are important in
the Antigone, the Trachiniae, and the Oedipus Tyrannus.
Both the Ajax and the Oedipus draw symbolic links between physical sight and deeper knowledge. In the
Oedipus, sight and knowledge are opposed: the blind
"seer" Teiresias has knowledge that the sighted Oedipus
lacks, and Oedipus blinds himself when he gains knowledge. In the Ajax, sight and knowledge are equated. Ajax'
delusion about cattle and men symbolizes ignorance about
more important matters.
In some ways, the ramifications of the hero's ignorance
are more complex and varied in the Ajax than in the
Oedipus. Ajax' delusion expresses (and aggravates) his
heroic isolation. He is so cut off from his fellows that he
cannot even see them plainly, and so full of contempt for
them that he sees no difference between them and beasts.
More important, the delusion reflects a basic confusion
that was already in his mind about telling his friends from
his enemies. 11
The Greeks, supposedly his friends, turned out to be
his enemies (as he sees it) by depriving him of Achilles'
arms. Tecmessa, once his enemy, has become a loving and
devoted friend (487-495). Odysseus, the friend turned enemy, does a friend's service by securing Ajax' right to
burial. Friends and enemies keep changing places. Ajax'
bitter reflections on that fact (678-683, quoted earlier) are
drawn directly from his experience. Odysseus, as we have
seen, accepts that mutability and acts with the appropriate moderation. Ajax is confused by it, and particularly
60
confused by the supposed treachery of the Greeks against
him. The confusion about cattle and men is a natural
result.
Even Ajax' confusion about friends and enemies is but
one aspect of something more general: confusion about
the nature of the world. The steadfast Ajax believes in a
world that runs according to fixed and definite rules. He
had every reason to think he would get Achilles' arms because of his lineage and deeds (434-440). There seemed to
be no way he could fail to kill the Atreidae (447-456). He
thought he could reject divine aid in battle because his
own strength would be equal to any challenge (762-775).
What these things have in common is Ajax' firm confidence that the qualities of things and men are fixed, not
to be altered by time and chance. His confidence is misplaced. The world of this play is full of unexpected and irrational change. "A day brings down and brings back up
again all things human," says Athena (131 f.). Ajax' experience is excellent proof of her words.
The Ajax is a story of discovery. The hero wrestles with
disillusionment, comes to see the way things really are,
and faces the problem of living in a world of change. This
intellectual enterprise has a symbolic model in Ajax' delusion about the cattle and his recovery from that delusion.
Sophocles first tells the story of the little delusion about
cattle, then goes on to develop the larger story of Ajax' discovery of the nature of the world.
We can now follow that larger story through the play.
Early in the play, especially in his first monologue (430480), Ajax confronts the shock that his loss of Achilles'
arms and his failure to kill the Greeks has dealt his preconceptions. He resents these failures not simply as personal
setbacks, but as violations of the proper order of things.
"If one of the gods interferes, even a weakling can escape
someone mightier," he says (455 f.). His rejection of divine
aid earlier in the war rested on a similar principle: "With
the gods, even a nobody can attain prowess, but I am confident that I shall win glory without them" (767-769). He
wants to succeed by his own merits, not by divine in~
tervention. The first monologue shows his bitter, disillusioned protests at his discovery that a man's fortunes do
not depend simply on his merits. In tone and in spirit, the
speech corresponds to Ajax' first cries of anguish upon
discovering that his attempt to kill the Greeks has failed.
Ajax faces his situation squarely, examines the different
courses of action open to him, and resolves to kill himself.
Tecmessa pleads with him to go on living-eloquently,
but to no avail. Ajax says his farewell to their son and goes
into his tent. The Chorus sings about his impending death,
and we have every reason to expect a messenger to enter
and announce the worst.
Instead, Ajax re-enters, still alive and holding a sword.
He delivers an eloquent and enigmatic speech on time
and change (646-692). Time, he says in words that recall
Athena's at 131 f., makes obscure things to grow and hides
away things that were manifest. Nothing is beyond expecSUMMER 1982
�tation. Even he has been softened by Tecmessa's words so
that he pities her. He goes on to say that he will go to the
shore to purify himself and to bury the sword which Hector once gave him. Then he will "be sensible" (sophronein)
and submit to the gods and the Atreidae. After all, harsh
things in nature yield: winter gives way to summer, day to
night, storm to calm weather, sleep to waking. He realizes
now (he says in words quoted earlier) that friends turn to
enemies and enemies to friends. With some final instructions to Tecmessa and the Chorus, he leaves the stage.
The Chorus sings a joyous ode to celebrate his supposed
change of mind. In fact, Ajax is going to his death.
Discussion of the speech tends to center on the question whether Ajax' apparent change of mind is sincere. I
shall avoid that issue to point out that on one important
matter, he is telling the truth. He is describing, with con·
siderable force and eloquence, the way the world (as presented in this play) really is. Athena enforces the law of
change and Odysseus shows us how to obey it, but it is
left to Ajax, the staunchest opponent of that law, to give it
its fullest and most poetic expression. He has now worked
past his early grief and disillusionment to see clearly and
soberly how the world really operates and where he was
wrong in his earlier conceptions and demands of life. In a
way, the Chorus is right when it sings that Ajax has
recovered from his sickness. The great delusion has passed,
much like the smaller one about men and cattle.
This discovery does not alter his decision to kill himself.
The old reasons for suicide-his shame over killing the
cattle, the army's hatred of him, his hatred of the armyhave not gone away. Rather, the speech on time shows
that Ajax has found new and more profound reasons for
dying. He cannot live in a world of change. When he
speaks of "doing reverence to the Atreidae" instead of
simply honoring them, and of "the untrustworthy harbor
of friendship," his language shows a bitterness and a vehe·
mence that mark him as the old Ajax still. He can see that
yielding is natural and necessary; he cannot imagine himself doing it, and he rejects the idea even while speaking
of it. Seeing the world clearly means seeing clearly the
reasons why he must leave it. 12
Yet paradoxically, Ajax' leaving the world is a form of
yielding to it. 13 The law of nature is that "fearful and
mighty things give way" (669 f.), and Ajax' examples of
change in nature (winter giving way to summer, storm
yielding to calm) all involve something grim and mighty
passing out of existence to make room for something mild
and gentle. Ajax will follow this law himself by passing out
of existence and leaving the world to the humanity and
tact' of Odysseus. Death takes him into a state where
things are most surely and permanently settled, but it is
also the ultimate change. There is more to Ajax' death
than defiance of the world. In an ironic way, and at great
cost to himself, he reaches a certain rapprochement with
it. Sophocles' most important contribution to the Ajax
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
myth was to see the story of a great man's spiritual
journey within the traditional tale of warrior pride.
l. An earlier version of this paper was read before the Fourth Comparative Drama Conference at the University of Florida on April 18, 1980.
My thanks to Frank Romer and the library staff of Johns Hopkins University for access to some excellent research materials and to Mark I.
Davies for advice on art and for reading a draft of the paper.
2. Sources for the myth (mostly literary) are collected and discussed in
the Ajax commentaries ofR. C. Jebb, Cambridge 1896, J. C. Kamerbeek,
Leiden 1953, and W. B. Stanford, London 1963. Jebb offers the fullest
collection of material, Kamerbeek the most incisive discussion, and
Stanford some good remarks about Ajax in Homer and at Athens. Also,
Carl Robert, Die griechische Heldensage 11.3.2., Berlin 1923, 1198-1207.
For the epic cycle, T. W. Allen (ed.), Homeri Opera 5, Oxford 1912, and
Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica,
Loeb Classical Library, London/New York 1964. For Aeschylus, Hans
Joachim Mette, Die Fragmente der TragOdien des Aischylos, Berlin
1959.
3. Apollodorus, Epitome 5.6-7, in the first century A.D., describes Ajax'
plot to murder the Greeks, his delusion, and the slaughter of the cattle
much as we find them in Sophocles, then adds the "irregular" burial as
it appeared in the Little Iliad. Did Apollodorus follow the Little Iliad
throughout-in which case Sophocles followed the Little Iliad closely
indeed? Or did he conflate Sophocles' version with that of the Little Iliad?
4. For the myth of Ajax in art, see Frank Brommer, Vasenlisten zur griechischen Heldensage, 3rd ed., Marburg 1973, 380 f., 418, and Denkmiiler·
listen zur griechischen Heldensage 3, Marburg 1976, 14-19; Mark I.
Davies, "The Suicide of Ajax: A Bronze Etruscan Statuette from the
Kappeli Collection," Antike Kunst 14, 1971, 148-157, and "Ajax and
Tekrnessa: A Cup by the Brygos Painter in the Bareiss Collection," An·
tike Kunst 16, 1973, 60-70; Mary B. Moore, "Exekias and Telamonian
Ajax," American Journal of Archeology 84, 1980, 417-434; B. B. Shefton,
"Agamemnon or Ajax?" Revue Archeologique 1973, 203-218; and Dyfri
Williams, "Ajax, Odysseus, and the Arms of Achilles," Antike Kunst 23,
1980, 137-145.
5. Discussed in Karl Schefold, "Sophokles' Aias auf einer Lekythos,"
Antike Kunst 19, 1976, 71-78.
6. Some fragments in relief from a molded bowl of the second century
B.C. appear to show Ajax among the cattle: see Fernand Camby, Les
vases grecs d reliefs, Paris 1922, 287 no. 10.
7. On Ajax' "heroic isolation," see Bernard M. W. Knox, "The Ajax of
Sophocles," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 65, 1961, 1-37, reprinted in Thomas Woodard (editor), Sophocles: A Collection of Critical
Essays, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1966, 29-61 (whose page numbers I cite
hereafter) and Knox, Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater,
Baltimore 1979, 125-160. Knox has examined the heroic isolation of
Sophoclean heroes generally in The Heroic Temper, Berkeley/Los
Angeles 1966. Also useful is the chapter on the Ajax in Charles Segal,
Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles, Cambridge,
Mass. 1981.
8. For a good outline of Greek hero-cults and their connection with the
heroes of Sophoclean drama, see Knox, The Heroic Temper, 53-58.
9. There is a good account of the type in George Plimpton, Paper Lion,
New York 1966, 72-75 on Bobby Layne.
10. This is widely, though not universally, accepted by critics of the play
and stated with particular force by Knox, "Ajax," 34. I have argued it
and presented my interpretation of the play's madness theme in greater
detail in "Ajax' Ailment," Ramus 9, 1980, 22-33. Also useful are
Penelope Biggs, "The Disease Theme in Sophocles' Ajax, Philoctetes,
and Trachiniae," Classical Philology 61, 1966, 223-235; and Michael
Simpson, "Sophocles' Ajax: His Madness and Transformation,"
Arethusa 2, 1969, 88-103.
11. For discussions of this aspect of the play, see especially Knox,
"Ajax"; Simpson; and David Bolotin, "On Sophocles' Ajax," The St.
John's Review 32.1, 1980,49-57.
12. See Knox, "Ajax," 45-48.
13. For this important aspect of the play, see Simpson.
61
�Toward Reading Thomas Aquinas
Thomas ] . Slakey
that Thomas' particular endeavor
was to reconcile Aristotle with the Bible. While this is
true, it is only part of a much larger truth .. In late antiquity the process of weaving together Platonic, Aristotelian,
and Stoic materials was already well under way among
those in the Eastern Mediterranean who spoke Greek. In
addition, Cicero and others undertook the task of transmitting Greek wisdom to the Latin West. The early Christians
merely expanded this process, and in fact the first instance
is recorded in the New Testament itself, in the Acts of the
Apostles, where St. Paul is speaking in Athens. Paul uses
pagan worship of an unknown god and quotations from
pagan poets as starting points toward the Christian gospel
(Acts 17: 22-34; see also Romans I: 19-20; II, 14-15). Many
of the early Christians were educated in pagan schools
and some even saw Greek philosophy, especially in Plato,
as the means by which God, in His divine providence, had
prepared the Gentile world for Christian revelation. Augustine emphasizes the importance of Platonic specula·
tion to his own conversion, though it should be noted that
he knew Plato chiefly through Cicero and Plotinus. Augustine in turn was one of the chief vehicles of Platonic,
or rather neo'Platonic, thought to the medieval world. 1
Thus Thomas did not begin the process of combining and
adapting pagan and Christian materials. Rather he was
heir to a very long and wide-spread tradition.
Nevertheless, by his time the process had taken on a
particular character through the rise of the medieval university, which began about 1200, shortly before Thomas
was born. There were two chief methods of instruction in
the medieval university, the lectio and the disputatio. The
I
T IS SOMETIMES SAID
A tutor at St. John's College, Thomas J. Slakey gave this lecture at St.
John's College, Annapolis, on February 19, 1982.
62
lectio seems to have meant literally the reading aloud of a
text,in class, together with commentary. The commentary
could range from a brief exposition of words and phrases
to a detailed explanation and discussion of the positions
taken in the text. Thomas himself taught in this manner
throughout his career and we can get close to his Classroom because many of the commentaries survive, some
based on lecture notes taken by students or secretaries
and some refined and reworked for publication. There are
twelve commentaries on separate books of the Bible and
five on other theological works. In addition there are
twelve on separate works by Aristotle, but these seem to
have been written by Thomas directly for the use of students rather than for his own classroom teaching, since
Thomas himself was in the Faculty of Theology rather
than the F acuity of Arts, where Aristotle was studied-'
Nevertheless, the commentaries on Aristotle grew out of
the tradition of the lectio and they illustrate Thomas' way
of reading a book. He rarely permits himself the moves so
dear to modern scholars when they meet difficulties and
apparent contradictions: maybe the author changed his
mind, maybe the text is corrupt; maybe this passage was
inserted by some later editor; maybe this whole way of
talking merely reflects a distant and primitive past. Rather
Thomas tries to understand the author as saying something intelligible or maybe even true, a tactic sometimes
called benigna interpretatio, benign or kindly interpretation.
Benigna interpretatio does have a real danger: we can
rest too comfortably in our own opinions and assume too
easily that our own paltry ideas deserve the majestic clothing bequeathed by some great author. If we are, however,
able to face our real differences of opinion with the author
when they do finally emerge, this way of reading seems to
me the best way to learn from books, especially old books,
In fact, in its respect for texts, the lectio resembles our
SUMMER 1982
�seminars, although we substitute a joint reading by twenty
or so people for a lecture by a single teacher.
T
HE SECOND METHOD of instruction in the medieval
university was the disputatio (Weisheipl, 124-26).
This was an interruption in the daily routine of lectiones for an extended public discussion or debate of a
particular issue, called a quaestio disputata. The question
for the day would be set by one of the masters. Numerous
proposed solutions would be offered by the bachelors, or
junior teachers in the university, usually based on quotations from the authors in the curriculum, the auctores, a
word which can also be translated "authorities." There
would also be replies and counter arguments. Some time
after the public disputation was concluded, the master
who had proposed the discussion would publish his understanding of the question in writing. He would gather
the proposed solutions into some kind of order, offer his
own detailed resolution or "reply" to the question asked,
and then briefly comment on each of the alternative proposed solutions.
Several volumes of Thomas' quaestiones also survive,
and they extend throughout the whole period of his teaching life. Moreover, it is clearly the method of the quaestio
which is used in the Summa Theologiae, Thomas' longest
and most ambitious work, begun at about age forty and
left unfinished at his death at about age fifty. It attempts
to speak to all the major questions of theology in a way suitable to beginners (See Prologue to Part I). The topics are
organized into questions and subdivided into "articles," or
"joints," each phrased as a question. (On the word "article" see Ila Ilae, Q.l, a.6.) Each begins with a series of brief
arguments, usually based on quotations from received au-
thors, or "authorities." These arguments should not be
understood as "objections," as they are sometimes described in English translations, because this word suggests
that a position has already been arrived at. They are rather
proposals toward a solution, and they generally set the
terms in which the discussion will proceed. There follows
a sed contra, or "on the contrary/' again usually based on a
quotation, and usually counter to the general sense of the
first set of arguments. There then follows the "reply" in
which Thomas sets out his own position, followed by brief
comments on each of the initial arguments and sometimes
on the sed contra as well. Throughout, Thomas' strategy is
to save and use what he can from each of the arguments
put forward, to show that the truth as he sees it is suggested by, or at least not opposed by, the quoted authority.
His typical move is the distinction: taken in one sense an
argument is misleading, but in another sense it is true.
Dante brings this out nicely when he presents Thomas as
a speaker in the Paradiso. In Canto X, Thomas says of
Solomon, quoting Scripture, that he was "given wisdom
so deep that, if the truth be true, there never arose a second of such vision" (X, 112-114, Sinclair translation). But
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
then what about Christ Himself, and also Adam? Three
cantos later the qualification comes: Dante has Thomas
explain that Solomon was wisest in the wisdom proper to
kings. Thomas concludes: " ... let this always be lead on
thy feet to make thee slow, like a weary man, in moving
either to the yea or the nay where thou dost not see clearly;
for he ranks very low among the fools, in the one case as in
the other, who affirms or denies without distinguishing,
since it often happens that a hasty opinion inclines to the
wrong side and then the feelings bind the intellect" (XIII,
94-120).
The overwhelming characteristic of Thomas' writing is
its impersonality. It's as if the commentaries, the quaestiones, and the Summas could have been written by any·
one who brought various authors together and carefully
sifted and worked back and forth in a constant search for
the truth. In notable contrast to present day philosophical
and theological writing, Thomas almost never says anyone
is simply mistaken and he never, never claims originality
for his own positions.' Even his Christian belief is not
thrust to the fore. Though he sometimes singles out questions where only divine revelation can be a guide, and
where Scripture must be taken as decisive, Thomas more
commonly weaves together in a single article suggestions
from the Bible, from Aristotle, from Cicero, from Augustine, or from whoever else he finds speaking some part of
the truth. Finally, and again in marked contrast to present
day scholarly writing, Thomas almost never mentions his
contemporaries by name. The most burning issues of the
day appear in the Summa only in their assigned places.
The impersonality has its weak side. Thomas is not
good at arousing our interest, at leading us into a topic, at
making us care about the outcome. Feelings shouldn't
bind the intellect, but some kind of feeling helps to get
the intellect started. Also, the inexorable march of arguments can give the impression that Thomas always thinks
definitive solutions have been reached. The Summa appeals to some who want simple knockdown answers to
complex questions. The strength of Thomas' writing, however, is that if one is involved in a topic through a study of
the authors he quotes, the Bible, Augustine, Aristotle, and
others, then one can appreciate both the subtlety of his
distinctions and the testing, tentative character of his
work. I have used metaphors of sifting and weaving to describe it. I think he took for granted, without laboring the
point, that the sifting and the weaving would be continued
by others.
H
OW DOES THOMAS conceive of man's relation to
God? Let us begin with his discussion of religion
-not Christianity, but simply religion, what
would now be called "comparative religion." Thomas,
however, considers religion not as an aspect of human
psychology or sociology but, following Cicero's lead,
under the heading of justice. 4 Man owes a kind of debt to
63
�God. It cannot be a debt in the strict sense, for man in the
strict sense can bring nothing to the God who made him
and the whole universe out of nothing, and man can
therefore make no return to God. The reverence and
honor we show to God are not for His sake, but for ours.
To the extent that we revere and honor God, our minds
are subjected to Him, and in this the perfection of our
minds consists. For each thing reaches its just perfection
by being placed under its superior, just as body is
perfected when it is made alive by soul and air when it is
lighted by the sun (Ila Ilae, Q.81, a.7c). As Plato argues
that justice is reached only when each part of a man's soul
is in right relation to the whole man, and only when each
man is in right relation to the whole city, so Thomas
argues that justice is reached only when man is in right
relation to God. Religion is not an adjunct or department
of human life. It is central to human life properly lived.
Moreover, in joining ourselves to God, we need to ex·
press ourselves in physical ways (Ila, Ilae, Q.81, a.7c), by
voice, by gestures such as bowing and kneeling, even by
sacred buildings (Q.83, a.l2; 84, a.3). Acts of reverence are
not peculiar to religion. Many are shown to other men,. to
parents, to kings and presidents, to country. The word
pietas or piety, as used in Latin and still to some extent in
English, ranges from reverence towards gods to reverence
towards family and fatherland. But one act of reverence
Thomas considers proper to God alone, namely the act of
offering sacrifice. Sacrifice is a sacred act in which something is offered to God and generally destroyed in the pro·
cess, as in the-killing of animals or in burnt offerings (Q.85,
a.3, ad 3). Thomas sees sacrifice as common to peoples
throughout the world (Q.85, a. I, on the contrary). He says
that "natural reason tells man that he is placed under something higher, because of the lack which he feels in himself
so that he needs help and direction from something higher.
And whatever that is, it is what among all men is called
God" (85, a.lc). The external act of sacrifice expresses "an
internal spiritual sacrifice, in which the soul offers itself to
God ... as the source of its creation and the completion of
its happiness." Only God is our creator and only God is
the completion of our happiness. Therefore to God alone
should we offer ourselves and to God alone should we
make those external offerings in sacrifice which express
the offering of ourselves (85, a.2c).
to consider Thomas' study of humility.
He classifies humility under the heading of temperence, or moderation. The Latin word humilitas derives from the notion of "low" or "close to the ground"
and tends to have a pejorative sense in classical Latin
writers. Greek has a word with a similar meaning and precisely the same etymology, tapeinotes. Humility is a rather
striking omission from Aristotle's list of virtues in the
Ethics, especially when one considers the emphasis Soph·
N
64
EXT, I WISH
odes and other Greek writers give to the dangers of exces·
sive pride. Thomas' own comment on Aristotle's omission
is that in his study of the virtues Aristotle was concerned
only with man's civil life, whereas humility especially concerns man's relation to God (IIa Ilae, Q.l61, a. I, ad 5). According to Thomas we should see ourselves as assigned by
God to a certain level (secundum gradum quem est a Deo
sortitus, a.2, ad 3), and we should recognize that whatever
is good in ourselves comes from God. Even the exercise of
our abilities comes from God, who acts in us and through
us (a.4c).
This profoundly difficult doctrine gives rise to questions about how God can act in us without destroying otir
free wills, and also questions as to why God did not make
the world better than He has, with less sin and suffering,
the questions which so tormented Job. It is a doctrine,
however, which has its roots deep in the Bible, for example, in the claim that God uses whole nations and armies
as his instruments for the punishment and restoration of
Israel: first the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, and finally
the Persians under Cyrus (see, for instance, Amos 3:11,
Isaiah 7:18-20. Also Psalm 139). Isaiah says of Cyrus, who
delivered Israel from captivity in Babylon, "Who stirred
up one from the east whom victory meets at every step?
He gives up nations before him, so that he tramples kings
under foot ... Who has performed and done this, calling
the generations from the beginning? I, the Lord, the tirst
and with the last; I am He" (Isaiah 41:2-4). It is Cyrus who
acts, but it is also God who acts through Cyrus.
The doctrine also has its roots in the concept of crea·
tion out of nothing. If we are made by God out of noth·
ing, all we are and all we do comes from God. And yet
God has not made us like rocks, and stones, and trees, or
even like the beasts of the field. He has given us the capacity to think and choose, and when He acts in us it is as beings which think and choose. (See Ia, Q.22, a.4).
Finally, this doctrine of God's action in us has its roots
in the life of prayer. We pray to God for help. Do we think
that God who is Lord of heaven and earth can only affect
such things as weather and disease and not affect ourselves? Rather we pray, "Create in us a clean heart, 0
God, and put a new and right spirit within us ... Take not
thy Holy Spirit from us" (Psalm 51:10-11 ).
To acknowledge the fact that God acts in us and through
us, to pray by it and live by it, is to see ourselves as we really
are, creatures wholy dependent on God for everything we
are and do and this is what is meant by humility. We become, in the phrase from Matthew's gospel, "poor in
spirit" (5:3), and we feel that "fear of the Lord" which the
Bible so often calls "the beginning of wisdom" (e.g. Psalm
111:10, Proverbs 9:10; see Thomas Ila Ilae, Q.l61, a.2, ad 3).
Thomas sees no conflict between humility so under·
stood and the virtues which the pagan philosophers saw
as leading to achievement in public life, in particular with
the virtue which Aristotle calls megalopsychia, magnanimity
or greatness of soul. 5 Megalopsychia strengthens our resolve to attempt great things when we really are capable
SUMMER 1982
�of them. It requires an accurate judgment of our abilities
and a courageous use of them (Q.l61, a.lc; also Q.129, a.3,
ad 4). The vice Thomas opposes to humility is superbia, or
Hpride." The word is derived from super, meaning "over"
or "above," and it has a double sense in classical Latin
writers: it can mean loftiness of spirit but also arrogance
or haughtiness. Thomas takes it in the latter sense as a
vice.
Pride is not, properly speaking, the desire for honor and
recognition. Thomas calls the desire for honor and recognition vain glory (inanis gloria, IIa IIae, Q.l62, a.S, ad 2),
empty glory. The name suggests a trifling or even silly
vice. Pride in contrast is a vice of strength. It seeks not the
recognition of excellence but excellence itself. The proud
man seeks not so much to be recognized as first as to be
first.
Pride becomes a vice when it seeks excellence beyond
our capacity (Q.l62, a.lc). Thomas does not claim that
pride is the source of all sins. He recognizes that we sin
sometimes from ignorance and sometimes from weakness
(a.2c). But when sin involves a conscious and deliberate
turning away from God, a refusal to seek God as the final
goal of our lives, it is at least an expression of pride if not a
result of pride, a desire to put ourselves in the place of God
and to govern our own lives (a.7; see also Ia I!ae, Q.84, a.2,
and Q.88, a. I, on "mortal" sin.) In this sense pride is the
first sin. It was the sin of Adam and Eve in the garden.
The temptation of the serpent was that they might "be
like God, knowing good and evil." They determined for
themselves what was good and what was evil instead of accepting that determination from God (IIa Ilae, Q.163, a. I,
a.2.).
Pride is also the source of many other sins, such as what
Thomas calls a "distaste" for the truth (excellentiam veritatis fastidiunt). The proud delight in their own excellence to such an extent that they cannot experience "the
sweetness" of certain facts. They might know how the
facts are, but not "how they taste."6
bodily but not composed of matter and form at all. It follows, he argues, that each angel is a distinct form (a.2), and
therefore, as it were, like a distinct species of animal. One
angel is as different from the next as, say, a horse is from a
camel.
Thomas holds that the angels' powers of understanding,
varied as they are among themselves, exceed our own not
only in degree but in kind. (See Ia, QQ's 54-58, especially
Q.58, a's 2-3). All our knowledge begins from our five separate bodily senses. Through colors, sounds, textures, and
so on, we slowly and painstakingly put together concepts
of things. We then make sentences about them, sentences
which are combinations of subjects and predicates, sentences like "lead is heavy." What we call "speech" or
"thinking" is expressed, in both the Greek logos and the
Latin ratio, by the same word as a mathematical "ratio,"
that is, a relation between a pair of magnitudes. And this
is what is meant by saying that we are rational animals: we
connect things. Moreover, we make further connections
called inferences. We "reason," and thus we reach conclusions.
The angels, on the other hand, are intellectual creatures, which means that they apprehend by a kind of immediate insight or "reading into" things (intus Iegere).
Thomas describes their insight only in general terms, but
we can get some clue as to what it might be like by considering mathematical examples. After having gone through
a proof we can often see in the figure that a conclusion
must follow without having to recall all the intermediate
steps. For example, having learned why the angles of a
triangle equal two right angles we can see this immediately
in the nature of a triangle, in the fact that it is composed
of three sides. Even better would be to see this immediately without ever having gone through the proof-presumably the way Euclid first saw it. Such would be the
insight of a rather low ranking angel. An angel of more
powerful mind might see the whole of Apollonius in the
first sketch of the conic sections. And a still more powerful angel would have an intuitive grasp of vast amounts of
information which we cannot even conceive except in our
T
ROMAS" STUDY OF ANGELS (Ia, Q.50 ff.) also helps
clarify man's relation to God. It is frequently said
that ancient and medieval cosmology, with the earth
at the center of the physical universe and the sun, planets,
and stars rotating around it, gave man an extremely exalted
position. The Copernican revolution, placing the sun at
the center, is said to lower man. This seems to me almost a
total misunderstanding. In the medieval universe, man
does have a definite place but it is not the highest place.
The highest place is filled by God, and in fact so high is it
above our comprehension that we cannot speak of it as
place. Moreover, there also exist above us vast multitudes
of angels, greater in number than human beings and animals, in Thomas' opinion (Q.50, a.3). Angels are nonbodily, and, according to Thomas' Aristotelian analysis of
the Biblical and neo-Platonic materials, not only nonTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
piecemeal and haphazard fashion.
Although we do have some share in intellect, we are the
lowest of intellectual creatures. We have bodies and our
knowledge begins from our bodily senses. Our position at
the center of the physical universe is of little importance
compared to our position at the very edge of the intellectual and moral universes.
Moreover, as Dante shows most powerfully, the center
of the physical universe can be conceived of as the locus
of all that is heavy, slow, and evil. We begin to emerge
from sin only as we come out of the earth and ascend the
Mount of Purgatory. We still have to move beyond the
shadow which the earth casts on to the first three planets
(Paradiso, IX, 118), before we approach regions of greater
speed and perfect light, which can more nearly image divine perfection. It is the outer boundaries of the solar system and the heavens which are their true center. Man, far
65
�from being at the center, is at the edge. We are, as C. S.
Lewis puts it, 44 Creatures of the Margin."7
A
LTHOUGH ALL OUR KNOWLEDGE begins from the
senses, and although we are therefore on the very
edge of the intellectual world, we are on that edge.
We do have the capacity to know not merely sensible particulars, a cat, a horse, but to grasp universals, cat, horse.
As is clearest of all in geometry, we can understand certain properties as following not merely by physical observation and measurement of particular triangles, but from
the definition of triangle. To repeat the earlier example, it
is because a triangle is bounded by three straight lines that
its angles equal two right angles.
Moreover, in the case of certain properties like
"justice," we know that no physical manifestation in a just
individual matches our conception of what justice is.
Socrates may occasionally fail and fall short, and even if
he does not, our conception of what justice is does not depend on Socrates' being perfectly just. It points beyond
Socrates to something which Socrates can only aim at. To
use Platonic language, Socrates has only a "share" or a
!(participation" in justice. He does not reach justice itself.
Similarly with our conception of being. Socrates will
die, and any of the things we experience through our senses
will also degenerate and pass away. All physical things
have only a shared existence. They are not being itself.
But even the angels, though they will not die, have only a
shared existence. It is not part of their nature to exist.
Rather their existence is derived, like ours, from a creator
who made them out of nothing. We can strive to move beyond such beings to the conception of a being who simply
is, not by sharing or participation but by His own nature.
He is the source of all the lesser things we know and of all
that is good and just and wise in them. He Himself is
goodness and justice and wisdom. As Thomas puts it,
even though we develop words like "good" from our experience of physical things, such words point beyond themselves and ultimately to God. Their full meaning is realized
only in God. (See Ia, Q.l3, a.6.)
WO IMPORTANT ARGUMENTS follow from this conception of man as knowing universals. The first is
that man's life is not limited to the world of particular physical things. Even though man obviously dies, it is
his body which dies, not his mind or soul. The mind which
can grasp non-bodily things like goodness, justice, and being, must itself be non-bodily. This argument is of course
found in the Phaedo (64-69, 74-75, 78-79) and Thomas
also finds it, I think rightly, in Aristotle's De Anima, whatever Aristotle's final opinion on this question may be. (See
Ia, Q.75, a.6; De Anima III, 4,429a 18-b 22.)
The other argument is that man's happiness can be
found only in union with God. This argument is found at
T
66
the beginning of Part Two of the Summa Theologiae and
is reflected in the structure of the work as a whole. Part
One of the Summa starts from God as creator, and goes
on to treat of the angels and men and all the physical universe as coming forth from God. Part Two reverses the
motion. It begins from man and sees everything in human
life as leading man back to God. For instance, the discussion of law, which comes from the second part of the
Summa, deals with law as an instrument of man's service
to God and return to God. (See Ia Ilae, QQ's 90-108.)
We seek many things in life: wealth, sensual pleasure,
power, and knowledge. Each of these has, or at least can
have, some share in goodness and can therefore give us
some share in happiness. But only goodness itself can fully
satisfy our desire, our constant movement from one
par~
tial and temporary satisfaction to another. And goodness
itself is God Himself (Ia Ilae, Q.2, a.8). Whether we realize
it or not, all our confused and haphazard search in life is
really for God. The search Augustine describes in the
Confessions is the true search of every man. As Augustine
puts it, "Thou hast made us for Thyself, 0 Lord, and our
hearts are ever restless until they rest in Thee" (Confessions, I, l ).
There is a fundamental paradox in human existence. In
one sense man is firmly in place in an elaborate hierarchy,
a sacred order. He is a creature of God, he owes reverence
to God. He must humble his pride and bow his head before God. He is located in a range of creatures, neither
lowest nor highest, between animals and angels. In a different sense, his position is most unstable. He is a creature
of the margin. He shares something of the nature of animals and something of the nature of angels. His desire for
happiness leads him beyond anything he can find in the
world about him. His reason leads him beyond what he
can fully understand.
I
'VE EXPLORED THREE EXAMPLES, from the Summa
Theologiae, Thomas' study of religion, his study of
pride, and his study of the angels. Nothing I've said so
far is specifically Christian-' For Thomas, if I understand
him rightly, the world I've described so far is knowable, at
least in principle, by natural reason. I do not mean to say
that in developing his conception of the universe that
comes from God and returns to God, Thomas makes no
use of the Bible. He constantly draws on the Bible and on
other Christian writers. But following a passage from St.
Paul that he is fond of quoting (for instance, Ia, Q.2 a.2,
on lhe contrary), Thomas holds that "the invisible nature"
of God, "His eternal power and deity" can be "seen by the
mind in things made" (Romans, I, 20; see also, Romans II,
14-15).
Thomas' understanding of religious faith is very different from that most commonly expressed today when we
speak of "faith in God." For Thomas the existence of God
is not a matter of faith. Rather faith presupposes the exisSUMMER 1982
�tence of God. Speaking strictly, to have faith means to
believe that something is true because we believe that it
has been revealed by God (Ila Ilae, Q.l, a.lc).
In the Bible itself there is never any question of God's
existence. Faith is demanded only when God enters our
world and speaks in something like a human voice: when
He speaks to Abraham and promises him a son in his old
age, or to Moses from the burning bush and promises that
He will lead the children of Israel out of Egypt, or through
the prophets, or finally through His Word made flesh in
the man jesus Christ. Then those who have ears to hear
must believe that it is God who speaks and they must
trust in His word. This is where faith enters.
The good news of the gospels is that God has not abandoned us to our sins and to our own feeble efforts at finding him. God has revealed Himself as Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit, and especially in the Son made flesh in jesus
Christ. Christ has died on the cross for our sins and risen
from the dead. Through him we can begin to rise from
our sins in this life and later we can rise from death to live
with God. In that life we will find what we have been
seeking all along. It is our true home, our fatherland, our
patria. On this earth we are only viatores, travelers, pilgrims. (For the use of these terms, see for example Ila Ilae,
Q.18, a.2, a.3.)
HEN THOMAS APPROACHES the mysteries of revelation in study and prayer, his faith is serene. He
expresses neither the anxiety nor the bluster of
so many modern Christians. His world is open to the voice
of God. Like Samuel he can say, "Speak, Lord, your servant is listening" (I Samuel 3:10).
To what extent is our own world open to the voice of
God? I do not know the answer to this question, but I do
think there is something about the typical modern process
of inquiry, especially as it begins in Descartes, which
makes it difficult for us to hear God's voice when He does
speak. Descartes imagines true knowledge as a city of perfectly straight streets built by one skillful engineer in an
empty plain (Discourse on Method, Part II). Nothing could
be further from Thomas' manner of inquiry, which is truly
like the medieval city Descartes despises, making use of
all the twisting alleys and old houses, always building on
foundations laid by others, adjusting, modifying, combining.
Secondly, Descartes wishes that he could have been
born with the full use of his reason and that he had never
had to rely on any teacher or parent for anything he thought.
This suggests that he wished to think without even the
hindrance of any human language, in a new language of
perfect clarity and precision. Again, nothing could be farther from Thomas' manner of inquiry. Like Plato and Aristotle, Thomas began from what was said by others. He
ransacked old books, pagan, Moslem, jewish, and Christian, for whatever help he could find.
Finally, Descartes establishes as a criterion of truth
whatever is completely clear and certain to himself. The
W
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
first question of modern philosophy becomes, what can I
know for certain? The principal endeavor of modern philosophy from Descartes through Kant and to a large extent
to our own day, is to set limits to knowledge, to exclude
from inquiry those matters which do not sufficiently meet
the standards of certainty which are somehow prescribed
at the beginning, and the standards of certainty generally
come from mathematics and physical science. Even the
most evident truths of morality become suspect, since
they do not possess the kind of clarity that mathematics
and the physical sciences seem to have. Obviously any
purported truths of religion are even more suspect.
Again, Thomas turns this criterion of certainty upside
down. He invokes a metaphor of Aristotle's in which the
most certain and evident truths are precisely those hardest for us to grasp. The obscurity does not lie in those
truths but in our feeble knowing powers. Aristotle says,
" ... as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the
reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most
evident of all" (Metaphysics II, 1, 993b 10, quoted Ia, Q.l,
a.5, ad 1 and frequently elsewhere). It is not the truth of
God's existence and nature, or even the truths of revelation, which are obscure. God Himself is truth and the
source of all truth. The obscurity and the weakness lie
with us.
We ridicule medieval man for placing himself at the
center of the physical universe. Perhaps we have made a
more important mistake: placing ourselves at the center of
the universe of knowledge and truth.
l. Let me mention in passing that Plato's own writings were largely
unknown in the Latin West until the fifteenth century. No Platonic text
was ever the direct subject of instruction in any medieval school. See
Rashdall's Medieval Universities, ed. Powicke and Emden, Oxford 1936,
1, 38.
2. See James A. Weisheipl, O.P., Friar Thomas D'Aquino, New York,
1974, 281-82.
3. A notable exception is Ia, Q.3, a.S, where he mentions three "errors"
and describes one David de Dinando as having spoken "really stupidly"
(stultissime) when he identified God with prime matter.
4. See Cicero, De Invent Rhetor., Book II, chapter 53. See Sum. Theol.,
Ila llae, Q.80, A.un., obj. 1. I'm using the Marietti edition, Rome 1948.
All translations are my own.
5. David Ross's widely used translation of the Ethics unfortunately renders megalopsychia as "pride.''
6. Ila Ilae, Q.l62, a3, ad l. The metaphor of tasting the truth comes
from St Gregory's Moralia.
7. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, Cambridge 1964, 58.
8. See Lewis, The Discarded Image, 18-19.
67
�REVIEW EsSAY
Updike and Roth: Are They Writers?
John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich
and Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound
lEV NAVROZOV
When manuals entitled "How to Become a Writer" began to
appear in Russia in the 20s, they used the term zavyazka, which
is the opposite of denouement. The latter means the "untying,"
"release," "resolution" of the novel, while zavyazka means its
"tying-up"-its "conceptual beginning." After reading the first
eighty-eight pages of Mr. Updike's novel, we finally reach its
"tying-up." Nelson, son of the car dealer Rabbit, residing in
Brewer, Pennsylvania, leaves his college at Kent State, Ohio, and
visits his :Parents with a girl named Melanie.
First of all, Rabbit discovers that he is "not turned on" by
Melanie. In that pansexual phoneyland that Mr. Updike and his
colleagues describe as America, everyone at any age is or must be
"turned on" by everyone else. Indeed, Rabbit "feels even sexier
toward fat old Bessie," his seventy- or eighty-year-old mother-inlaw, than to the college girl his son came with. To make this
cultist pansexualism plausible, Mr. Updike goes into the lavatory
experiences of fat old Bessie, as witnessed by Rabbit. Besides the
incredible fact that his son's girl, Melanie, does not turn Rabbit
on, said Rabbit concludes that she does not turn on his son either.
Since everyone has to be sexually attracted to everyone else,
Rabbit's old sick subordinate named Charlie feels he must have
Rabbit Is Rich, by John Updike. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1981. 467
pages. $13.95.
Zuckerman Unbound, by Philip Roth. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New
York 1981. 225 pages. $10.95.
Lev Navrozov has contributed "One Day in the Life of the New York
Times and Pravda in the World: Which is More Informative?" (Autumn
1981) and "A Pead Man's Knowledge" (Winter 1982) to the St. John's
Review. Author of The Education of Lev Navrozov (Harper & Row 1975)
and of the forthcoming What the New York Times Knows About the
World, he has written many articles for Commentary, Midstream, The
Yale Literary Magazine, and other magazines.
68
an affair with Melanie. Why should a pretty college girl of 20 or
so have an affair with an old, sick, boring, vulgar, and uneducated man who works as a car salesman's subordinate in a small
Pennsylvania town? Because Mr. Updike's phoneyland has even
less to do with America or any real society than the Soviet novels
of the Stalin era had to do with Russia. Sex in thi!'l phoneyland is
not a reality observed in any real society, but a figment of cultist
imagination.
Like many other Westerners mistaken today for novelists, Mr.
Updike is sure that realism in literature is the utmost absence of
all good manners, utmost obscenity, utmost vulgarity. Describe
all the lavatory experiences you can, and your amateur puppet
show will come wonderfully to life, and your cardboard figures
will begin to live. The sex Mr. Updike describes is no less detailed
than in a medical reference book or locker room conversation.
But as soon as Mr. Updike departs from medicine or locker room
lore into human relations, this sex becomes as false, fantastic,
and far-fetched as everything he writes about.
Apart from this, the-more-vulgar-the-more-realistic approach,
Mr. Updike uses two no less naive amateur techniques to give
realism to his puppet show. First, he believes that the more detailed
his description of everything is, the more lifelike his cardboard
will be. Rabbit jogs, and Mr. Updike proceeds to describe (I) the
color of his running shoes, (2) where they were bought, (3) what
sort of shoes they are, (4) what soles they have at toe and heel,
and (5) how the soles behave, owing to "resilient circlets like flattened cleats." Also, all puppets must be fashionable: "Melanie
was mystical, she ate no meat and felt no fear, the tangled weedy
gods of Asia spelled a harmony to her."
After this fantastic puppet show "nouement," we learn that
the fashionably mystical Melanie is not the girl of Rabbit's son,
Nelson. Quite the contrary. His girl's name is Prudence: this is
how she has been nicknamed for her insufficient promiscuity in
SUMMER 1982
�1\!Ir. Updike's sex utopia. For some reasons as implausible as
everything else in the novel, Prudence is so far into her pregnancy that Nelson must marry her. So Nelson has left the unwed
expectant mother Prudence at college and come to his father to
get a job at his car sales shop, with Prudence's friend Melanie to
chaperone him on this mission. "You (arc) such a goddam watchdog," Nelson complains to Melanie, "I can't even go into town
for a beer."
The idea that a college girl will go from Kent to Pennsylvania
to chaperone her friend's fiance in his father's home and will live
there as if she were the fiance's aunt or mother is again good only
for an amateur puppet theater. But Ivlr. Updike adds more hastily invented nonsense to this silly invention of his. We find that
in the middle of a grand Hollywood-movie affair with Rabbit's
old, sick, poor, uneducated, and vulgar assistant named Charlie,
the beautiful chaperone Melanie sleeps also with her charge,
Nelson.
Like those philistines who are, in any company, interested in
nothing except obscene jokes and are dead, bored, and monosyllabic until someone begins to tell them, Mr. Updike comes to the
same kind of phosphorescent animation only when he is at his
locker room jokes. Mr. Updike invented IYielanie and dragged
her all the way from college to chaperone her friend's fiance in
order to have a pretext for more locker room entertainment.
What is the attitude of Prudence toward the chaperon's cohabitation with her fiance? Explains Janice, the wife of Rabbit:
"They don't have this jealousy thing the way we do, if you can
believe them."
No, they don't have jealousy. Nor any other feelings. They are
Mr. Updike's sexual-gastric puppets which IYir. Updike puts
through various sexual-gastric acts of his imagination so narrow
that the impression finally is that the sexual-gastric automaton is
Mr. Updike himself.
After a series of locker room jokes strung out over the 467
pages, comes the denouement: Nelson marries Prudence and
even goes back to college. This is what Rabbit wanted: to get rid
of Nelson. Father and son hate each other. Mr. Updike, an exemplary Freudian cultist, thought it necessary to invent this as well.
I\llr. Updike seems to have a lower ability to observe human relations than an average person-a layman who has never dreamed
of becoming a writer. About sixty pages before the end of Rabbit
Is Rich, Mr. Updike decided again to compose Couples, a novel
about wife-swapping written about a decade earlier, and "plug"
it in somewhere at the end of whatever he had written under the
title Rabbit Is Rich. Why not? As it was, Rabbit Is Rich was a
string of desultory anecdotes. Why not plug in at the end some
wife-swapping anecdote as well? No sooner said than done. Instead of getting someone's wife named Cindy, as he wanted,
Rabbit got, according to the first night's arrangement, sorneone's
wife named Thelma. Nevertheless, there follows the novel's biggest in-bed scene. Since the time of Couples, Mr. Updike has
learned a perversion about which any boy of any country may
read in any standard textbook of general psychiatry. Mr. Updike
displays his discovery over a dozen or so pages.
The wife-swapping vacation is interrupted by the news of the
disappearance of Nelson. On their way back, Rabbit's wife, JanTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ice, begins to sob aboard the plane. Rabbit assumes that the disappearance of their son Nelson causes the tears. Finally Janice
explains to Rabbit:
"I felt so sorry for you, having Thelma when you wanted
Cindy so much." With that there is no stopping her crying.
The mother of a son who has disappeared cries over her husband's getting the wrong wife during a wife-swapping session.
Chekhov says about a character of his that he could multiply
big figures in his mind but he could not understand why people
cry or laugh. Can Ivlr. Updike multiply big figures in his mind?
He certainly cannot understand why people cry or laugh.
The New York Times celebrated the appearance of this
467-page volume of emetic pulp: the upper half of the front page
of the New York Times Book Review showed Mr. Updike against
a panorama of books, presumably his own. From an article below, "Updike on Updike," we learn from Mr. Updike that his
"20-odd books" have been translated into "20-odd languages, including Finnish, Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew and Korean." 1
I recall how we read that the worst novels of the Stalin era had
been translated into many languages. The psychology of selfevaluation is the same: "Look how many books I have written,
how many pages each of them contains, how many copies of
each of them sold, and how many prizes they have won."
Mr. Updike, speaking of "what the aim of my [Mr. Updike's]
fiction is," says: "let literature concern itself, as the Gospels do,
with the inner life of hidden men." A writer is a "secreter of images," l\!Ir. Updike explains, "some of which he prays will have
the immortal resonance of Don Quixote's windmills, of Proust's
madeleine, of Huck Finn's raft._" Mr. Updike's ambition does not
stop at the immortal resonance of Cervantes, Proust, and Twain.
"I want to write books ... " 1\!lr. Updike declares to l\!Ir. Updike.
Yes, what books? "Something like E=mc2 , only in words, one
after the other."
No Soviet literary charlatan under Stalin had Ivlr. Updike's insolence: it is truly cosmic.
Now listen to l\!Ir. John Leonard's riddles or pomposities in his
Books of the Times review. They are vague, confusing or obscure
enough to pass for wisdom intended for the select few:
He [Rabbit] wastes himself while the dead aren't looking [are
they looking elsewhere?] and God is short of meanings [or of
literary critics?].
Or:
After the death of God-after the chilling discovery that
every time we make a move toward "the invisible," somebody
gets killed-we require a myth of community, sm;nething as
Felix put it in "Coup," that fits the facts, as it were, backwards."
A hard lesson and, after three "Rabbit" books, a splendid
achievement. Let Felix also have the last word: "I perceived
that a man, in America, is a failed boy" [period, end of reviewJ.Z
69
�What does all this highfalutin rigmarole mean?
The "death of God" is Nietzsche's phrase which had been
worn threadbare (in Russia, for example) before Nietzsche died
in 1900. Mr. Leonard must think it terrifically new, for he repeats it several times. But what does it have to do with someone
getting killed? Who gets killed?
What is a "hard lesson?" That God is dead? That someone
gets killed? That we require a myth of community, as Felix of
Mr. Updike's Coup discovered?
What has all this to do with a man in America being allegedly a
failed boy, or a boy being a failed man?
The less comprehensible the better. An understandable text
will expose Mr. Leonard: everyone will see that he has no more
to say as a critic than l\llr. Updike as a writer.
But what was Mr. Leonard's evaluation of Rabbit Is Rich?
It consists of nine words. The book is the "usual Updike xylophone" (three words), and "I like his mus_ic very much" (six
words). Whereupon Mr. Leonard pounces on the critics who fail
to like Mr. Updike's xylophone (not saxophone?) music:
Let the critics, like Nelson, "suck the foam out of one more
can," their "surly puzzled" faces "drinking and eating up the
world, and out of spite at that."
How can Nelson and the critics suck the foam out of one more
can if they drink and eat up the world? Is the world the foam? Or
they do not drink and eat up the world, but only their faces do?
Anyway, these outpourings are to show that the critics, their
faces surly and puzzled, are against Mr. Updike, and only Mr.
Leonard is heroically out to appreciate and defend singlehandedly
the "usual Updike xylophone." It is amazing how conformist salaried officials of a corporation, like Mr. Leonard, praising John
Updike only because "everybody does it," are fond of imagining
themselves to be lone fierce intellectual heroes, fighting against
the overwhelming establishment.
The review in the New York Times Book Review presents a different style: the courtier describing the Emperor's nonexistent
clothes. This particular courtier is Professor Roger Sale of the University of Washington. Dr. Sale ends his review quite resolutely:
For me "Rabbit is Rich" is the first book in which Updike has
fulfilled the fabulous promise he offered with "Rabbit Run"
20 years ago. 3
How did Dr. Sale arrive at this (fabulous) conclusion? Thereview is either vague or vaguely pompous in this respect:
Harry Angstrom [Rabbit] can never be described as largeminded, but that does not prevent Updike from imagining him
largely [or large-mindedly?].
But at one point Dr. Sale decided to be specific. Rabbit's and
Janice's "lovemaking while talking about moving out of his motherin-law's house and worrying about their son Nelson is the best
moment in the book, maybe in all Updike." Prepare yourself for
the best moment:
70
"Could we afford it," Janice asks,"with the mortgage rates
up around thirteen percent now?"
He shifts his hand down the silvery slick undulations of her
belly .... [the dots are in the magazine].
"It seems hard on Mother," Janice says in that weak voice
she gets, lovemaking. "She'll be leaving us this place some day
and I know she expects we'd stay in it with her till then."
The quotation goes on in the same spirit for another twenty-four
lines but I grudge the space.
Mr. Updike describes common Americans who turn out, under
his pen, to be fantastic, obnoxious, stupid, and asocial animals,
driven by fantastic sexual-gastric urges of Mr. Updike's invention. Mr. Roth describes Americans like himself who turn out,
under his pen, to be like the phoney dukes and duchesses of old
pulp novels.
The first twentieth century Western pulp novel I read had
been published in England in the 1920s and was entitled The
Undesirable Governess. There was a difference between The Undesirable Governess and nineteenth century European dime fiction. The latter usually displayed dukes and duchesses, and all
the "appurtenances of luxury." "Tears streaming down her pale
face, the duchess was running to the pond." The pond was a
ducal "appurtenance of luxury." The Undesirable Governess displayed "people of culture" as the modern equivalent of dukes
and duchesses. Instead of running to the ducal pond, the heroine read the Upanishads, the most cultured pastime for the
English middle class of the 20s. The Upanishads had replaced
the ducal pond. Just as the 19th-century dime novel readers were
to gasp at the luxury of dukes and duchesses, the new pulp novel
readers were to marvel at the culture of "people of culture."
In Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman is a writer
whose book makes a million dollars. "But what writer?" any more
or less intelligent American is bound to ask. "A hack like Gay
Talese, who has made millions of dollars, or a Chekhov, who
would be unable to live off his genius in New York today?"
Philip Roth is not that complicated. His Zuckerman is a great
writer-like Tolstoy, John Updike, Cervantes, Proust, Mark Twain,
Philip Roth. Naturally, his book makes a million, not millions. Millions of dollars would make readers suspicious: What if this great
writer were just another Harold Robbins?
A million dollars is enough for Mr. Roth to show "how the rich
live" -the subject of his pulp novel-and at the same time remove
any suspicion as to the greatness of his Zuckerman.
There is a writer's love affair, of course. With a Hollywood star,
of course. How do writers have affairs, in contrast to Mr. Updike's
car dealers or college students?
We have to recall again nineteenth century pulp literature in
which the readers who never had seen a real duke or duchess at
close quarters were shown how phoney dukes and duchesses lived.
In Zuckerman Unbound, the phoney Duke and Duchess have been
replaced by the phoney Writer and the phoney Movie Actress.
When Writer Zuckerman came to Movie Actress Caesara
O'Shea's hotel suite, what did he do-go to bed with her as Mr.
SUMMER 1982
�Updike's Rabbit, a car dealer? Little do you know about the life
of Writers.
Writer Zuckerman read S(,iren Kierkegaard aloud to her.
Do not expect that Writer Zuckerman or Movie Actress Caesara
or Philip Roth himself would say anything original about "Syiren
Kierkegaard" (or about anyone and anything else on earth). "Sy{ren
Kierkegaard" plays here the same role as the Duke's carriage
played in the nineteenth century pulp.
Now, the Movie Actress begins to fidget. After all, she is a Movie
Actress, not a Theatre Actress or Authoress. A Movie Actress corresponds to the illegitimate daughter of a duke and a kitchen maid
in old dime novels.
Is Writer Zuckerman going to read all of Sy{ren Kierkegaard at
a go?
Zuckerman laughed. "And what will you do?"
"What I always do when I invite a man to my room and he sits
down and starts reading. I'll throw myself from the window."
Writer Zuckerman has to descend to this half-duchess-halfkitchen-maid and explain to her that he is a Duke of literature,
not a Harold Robbins:
"Your problem is this taste of yours, Caesara. If you just had
Harold Robbins around, like the other actresses, it would be
easier to pay attention to you."
Writer Zuckerman is not like Harold Robbins who would go to
bed with the Movie Actre_ss instead of reading S0'ren Kierkegaard
to her. Just as in old dime novels there would be the villain who
was born and bred low, but who impersonated a duke, so, too,
Harold Robbins, in contrast to Writer Zuckerman (or Writer Philip
Roth), has no more refinement than Mr. Updike's car dealer.
Having proven, by dropping the name of S¢ren Kierkegaard,
that Zuckerman is a Writer, not a Harold Robbins, Mr. Roth shows
him and his life in a way no different from the way People magazine portrays Harold Robbins and his high-society life. Indeed,
we are treated to a clipp-ing frorri such a magazine:
I know, I know, actually you only want to know who's doing
what to whom. Well, NATHAN ZUCKERMAN and CAESARA
O'SHEA are still Manhattan's most delectable twosome. They
were very together at the little dinner that agent ANDRE
SCHEVITZ and wife MARY gave where KAY GRA.HAM talked to
WILLIAM STYRON and TONY RANDALL talked to LEONARD
BERNSTEIN and LAUREN BACALL talked to GORE VIDAL and
Nathan and Caesara talked to one another.
The actual descriptions of this kind in People and other such
magazines at least refer to real people like real Harold Robbins.
What Mr. Roth describes is phoneyness about phoneyness, society chitchat twice removed from life, a fictitious People magazine
column about a fictitious Zuckerman.
If Philip Roth were to describe an "unsuccessful" writer as,
say, Chekhov would be in New York today, all readers, including
those who read People magazine and other such, would find his
book unreadable, for Mr. Roth would have nothing to say on the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
subject. As it is, Mr. Roth sets up Zuckerman as a Kierkegaardreading Writer high above People magazine, and then proceeds
to write People magazine stuff "about how the rich live," to be
entertaining at least to some People magazine readers, or to
those who do not read People magazine out of college-educated
snobbery and read Mr. Roth for the same kind of "high-society"
pulp.
About two pages are devoted to Writer Zuckerman's ordering
of twelve suits at the most fashionable tailor. I am sure that Mr.
Roth is factual1y accurate describing the particular fashions of
1981 in New York since he has been a millionaire Writer himself.
But as soon as Mr. Roth departs from his consumer's report of
fashionable goods and services, phoneyness sets in:
One night a pretty rock singer whom he'd never seen before
told johnny Carson about her one and "Thank God" only
date with Nathan Zuckerman. She brought the house down
describing the "gear" Zuckerman advised her to wear to dinner if she wanted to "turn him on."
Silly and cheap as Johnny Carson and his show are, it is improbable that a rock singer on his show would brag of a date with a
writer (like Philip Roth) she had never seen, and would "bring
the house down" by inventing the "gear" he allegedly advised
her to wear. Mr. Roth sounds like a foreigner describing the
Johnny Carson show to a foreign pulp magazine.
Mr. Roth must have felt that the story about how a Writer
made a million dollars and proceeded to live like a Harold Robbins, except for reading Kierkegaard to Movie Actresses, as a
Writer should, is too little for a novel.
The new fashion seems to be to avoid in-bed scenes, and in
this respect Mr. Roth has become more fashionable than Mr.
Updike. Without such scenes, however, he has not much to say.
So Mr. Roth invented a substory, combining again amateur triteness and amateur implausibility to the same amazing degree Mr.
Updike does.
A former television quiz winner named Alvin Pepler from
Newark, Zuckerman's home town, comes to New York and
meets, on page 11 of the book, the celebrated Zuckerman. This
trite meeting of the trite admirer with the trite celebrity, worn
threadbare in humorous sketches and vaudevilles a century ago,
lasts to page 41, about one-fifth of the slender book.
Alvin Pepler turns out to be somewhat insane and threatens,
in the farfetched ways of Mr. Roth's invention, to kill the celebrated Zuckerman.
Finally, Alvin Pepler reappears on page 13 3-he is writing areview of Zuckerman's celebrated book for the New York Times
and wants his opinion of the review, because Alvin Pepler does
not 'want Sulzberger to read it if it stinks."
Everything in the "novel" is so farfetched, contrived, and amateurish that it is not clear whether this is a humorless spoof or if
Mr. Roth really believes that the New York Times accepts reviews from former Newark television quiz winners-and Arthur
Ochs Sulzberger reads them personally. Why has not this highbrow best-seller been reviewed before if it has already made a
million dollars? Is this Mr. Roth's idea of being funny? Or
Pepler's? Who is silliest-l\!Ir. Roth or Pepler or Zuckerman?
71
�This review-for-the-New-York-Times filler goes on for twentythree pages, about one-tenth of the book. Finally, Zuckerman
opines that Pepler's thoughts in the review are not original (are
Zuckerman's or Mr. Roth's?), but "Sulzberger could be crazy
about it." Pepler flairs up, like the professor from Ionesco's wellknown old play The Lesson, which Mr. Roth evidently decided to
imitate to fill in some pages, and besides, possibly to show how
well-read he is.
Still, Mr. Roth felt himself duly bound to fill in another dozen
or so pages. So Zuckerman's father dies, and the ensuing description, as trite and implausible as the rest of the book, does
the trick of bringing the "novel" to a decent minimum size.
Anatole Broyard entitled his Books of the Times review of
Zuckerman Unbound "The Voyeur Vu," for only the French can
-convey the subtlety of Mr. Broyard's perception of Mr. Roth's
novel. "Voyeur" is in French "peeper," "Peeping Tom," meaning a writer in this particular case, and when the latter becomes a
celebrity he becomes a "peeper peeped at."
Now, when he walks down the street, everyone he meets is
a literary critic. He is the voyeur vu. 4
How could one express this in plain English, instead of the language of Proust?
And what an achievement of Philip Roth, too! A celebrity is
peeped or peeked at. Voyeur vu. Perhaps Mr. Roth should write
his books straight in French?
As is usual, about two-thirds of Mr. Broyard's review is devoted to the "retelling of the plot." Then Mr: Broyard notes that
"Mr. Roth's voice is convincing and emotionally charged." He
refers to Mr. Rpth's "wit and grace." Not that the book is impeccably free from weaknesses: "Pepler is too monolithic, too quickly
comprehended." Mr. Roth's voice "seems to be pitched just a little too high up in the sinuses, too ready with ironic incredulity."
Mr. Roth suffers from too much irony (and also from too much
wit, grace, talent, intelligence, and beauty?).
The new book is reasonably funny, reasonably sad, reasonably interesting, and occasionally just plain reasonable.
The review in the New York Times Book Review is a bravura. It
reproaches Philip Roth only for his new avoidance of pornography, in contrast with his former pornographic self. The reviewer
(George Stade) is one of those middle-class males who imagine
themselves big-hearted, open-minded, and oceanically gifted hemen because they are noisy, pushy, and ill-mannered. Often
they also eat and drink a lot, do not pass a single woman without
a lewd observation-and this seems to prove their oceanic talent.
Listen to Mr. Stade's bojsterous masculine harangue:
Mr. Stade assumes that Fenny Cooper, Nate Hawthorne, Hermie Melville, and Sammy Clemens (as well as Em Dickinson and
Tommy Eliot, no doubt) larded their works with American middle-class locker room anecdotes, told in the most masculine locker
room manner of the most masculine he-man, as Philip Roth did
in his earlier works. This is why these writers are still read in
many countries. American middle-class locker room anecdotes
have been cherished all over the world. No country has ever had
such obscene language, or such noisy, pushy, ill~mannered males.
And look what Philip Roth has done-he has stopped pouring
out obscenities because of the retrograde and feminizing custodians of our high literary culture.
I had thought that our "high literary culture" and its "custodians" were steeped in pornography. Pulp culture thrives on pornography. How can "high literary culture" abstain, if it is mostly
just an amateur version of pulp culture? What else would Mr.
Roth or Mr. Updike sell?
But no. The custodians of our high literary culture are as they
were over a hundred years ago. Mr. Stade, the lone heroic heman, possibly the last male on earth, is fighting single~handedly,
just like Mr. Leonard, against the feminizing establishment, led
by the New York Times (and Playboy?), for the preservation of
that almost destroyed national treasure of treasures: middle-class
vulgarity. And IIOW Philip Roth has left the-cause. Alone, all alone,
Mr. Stade is, pitted against hordes of feminizing retrogrades.
Yes, only the feminized retrograde absence of modern robust
male pornography mars Philip Roth's book, which is
masterful, sure of every touch, clear and economical ofline as
a crystal vase, but there is something diminished about it as
about its immediate predecessors. The usual heartbreak and
hilarity are there, but they no longer amplify each other; now
both are muted.
If only there were a generous splash of pornography on every
page, as in the good old days-the 60s and 70s, when the fashion
was full on. How Mr. Roth's crystal vase of a book would sparkle,
and how the heartbreak and hilarity amplify each other, no longer
muted. Good old days. When Normie Mailer was mistaken for
Billy Shakespeare. Remember? Will they ever come back?
l.
2.
3.
4.
5.
New York Times Book Review, September 27, 1981, 1.
Books of the Times, September 22, 1981.
New York Times Book Review, September 27, 1981, I.
New York Times, May 9, 1981, 13.
New York Times Book Review, May 24, 1981, l.
The custodians of our high literary culture are as retrograde and feminizing as they were over a hundred years ago.
The ghosts of Mr. Roth's Landsmanner, Fenny Cooper, Nate
Hawthorne, Hermie Melville, and Sammy Clemens are nodding approval. Who cares what the Momma's boys think?5
72
SUMMER 1982
�FROM OUR READERS (continued from page 2)
probably say so. In that case, his reactions
to arguments against feminism would be
more consistent than they now appear.
TINA BELL
Nyack, N.Y.
Mr. Doskow replies:
Ms. Bell misses the point of my quarrel
with Mr. Levin. The issue is not one of
women being forced to stay home by their
husbands (though this has been known to
happen), nor is it a question of the importance of raising children, certainly a most
important task {I would only add that Fatherhood deserves equal billing with Motherhood). Rather the issue is whether women
should be judged on their individual abilities or considered congenitally incapable of
doing certain kinds of work, and whether
when they do the same work as men they
should be paid equally, something which
has not been and is not now the case. There
may well be significant distinctions between
men and women. But, as I thought I made
overabundantly clear, what seemed to be
natural differences not very long ago
(women's innate incapacity to be attor-
neys, e.g.) turn out to be merely prejudices.
To cite just one more example (from Stephen Gould, The Mismeasure of Man,
p. 118): G. Stanley Hall, "America's premier psychologist," attributed the higher
suicide rate of women to "A profound psychic difference between the sexes. Wornen's body and soul is phyletically older and
more primitive, while man is more modern,
variable, and less conservative .... Women
prefer passive methods; to give themselves
up to the power of elemental forces, as
gravity, when they throw themselves from
heights ... "
Incidentally, if Pride and Prejudice is to
be Ms. Bell's text, it is a pity that she misses
the profound irony of the first sentence
which remarks, among other things, that it
is not all men but only those "in possession
of a good fortune" who must be "in want
of a wife." Arc the others not to "establish
themselves in civilized society"? I might
also remark that in a more enlightened age
Charlotte Lucas might find something
more interesting and useful to do with her
life than to marry Mr. Collins and spend it
as a toady to Lady Catherine.
GEORGE DOSKOW
�The St. John's Review
St. John's College
Annapolis, Maryland 21404
Non-profit Org .
. U.S. Postage
PAID
Permit No. 66
Lutherville, Md.
�
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<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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1982-07
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Radista, Leo
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Carnes, David
Durholz, Janet
Bolotin, David
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Brann, Eva T. H.
Smith, J. Winfree
Berns, Gisela
Landau, Julie
Loewenberg, Robert
Holt, Philip
Slakey, Thomas J.
Navrozov, Lev
Description
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Volume XXXIII, Number 3 of The St. John's Review, formerly The College. Published in Summer 1982.
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The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_33_No_3_1982
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Annapolis, MD
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St. John's Review
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THESTJOHNSREVIEWAUTU:
NWINTER198283THESTJOHl
SREVIEWAUTUMNWINTERl
8283THESTJOHNSREVIEWAl
TUMNWINTER 198283 THEST
OHNSREVIEWAUTUMNWI!'
TER198283THESTJOHNSREV
•
�Editor:
FROM OUR READERS
Leo Raditsa
THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES
Managing Editor:
Thomas Parran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
David Carnes
Consulting Editors:
David Bolotin
Eva Brann
Curtis A. Wilson
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Why, I wonder, would you or your editor deliberately choose to
send me an issue of your magazine calling my attention to a review (of Updike) [Lev Navrozov, "Updike and Roth: Are They
Writers?", St. John's Review, Summer 1982] that is so gratuitously,
exaggeratedly, insulting? Is this meant to be provocative behavior?
Cute behavior? Am I supposed to have a passionate intellectual
curiosity about what the St. John's Review thinks of our books?
I don't bother to reply out of anger or resentment; only to express my astonishment at what people with some pretension to
professionalism think is appropriate; I won't bother opening another issue.
ROBERT GOTTLIEB
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned comments are also
welcome.
THESTJOHNSREVIEW (formerly The College) is published by
the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland
21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, SamuelS. Kutler, Dean. Pub·
lished thrice yearly, in the autumn~winter, winter-spring, and
summer. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions: $12.00
yearly, $24.00 for two years, or $36.00 for three years, payable in
advance. Address all correspondence to The St. John's Review,
St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland 21404.
Volume XXXIV
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
Number I
©1983, St. John's College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Cover: Arch of Titus. The triumphal parade in Rome of the spoils from
the Temple of Jerusalem. Built in 80-85 A.D., almost half a generation
after the end of the Jewish War (70 A.D.), the Arch of Titus rises on the
Via Sacra in the Roman Forum-part of the triumphal route.
William James, by Alice Boughton, 1907.
Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz, by Andreas Scheits, 1704, Florence, Uffizi.
Composition: Britton Composition Co.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
The writer is president and editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf, publisher of
John Updike.
Lev Navrozov replies:
I have received over 500 responses like Mr. Robert Gottlieb's
letter to my reviews of "great works of literature" and of their reviews in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books.
So I can establish a certain general pattern. A respondee wants
to show that he despises my review so deeply that no response is
appropriate except icy silence, so that his response should not
really be regarded as any response at all. This approach saves the
respondee from any dangerous attempt to discuss my review, to
argue, or to present his view.
The respondee also says or ifDp]ies that his response is provoked not by insecurity, or any Other such ignoble feelings, but
by the loftx emotions of a gentleman and an artist, duty bound to
express his civic or artistic scorn. Whereupon a respondee lets it
be known that any other response is beneath his dignity and
makes what seems to him an epistolary door-banging exit.
Let me now note that a Russian emigre monthly, Literary
Courier, has translated the review in question into the Russian
and published it in the magazine's latest issue. According to its
editor in his letter to me, it "has caused great interest, much
praise, and this we owe to you."
So evidently the issue is not between just Mr. Gottlieb and me.
The issue is rather between his milieu and mine. What Mr. Gottlieb's milieu regards as "great novels," or "outstanding poetry,"
my milieu does not view as literature.
I come from a family of a writer and lived since childhood in
the literary milieu of the poet Pasternak and the novelist Platonov
(I give these two names as known in the West). I also grew up on
Western, and in particular American, literature.
Even if I had read Mr. Updike's novel at the age of 16, I (and
my milieu) would have said that this is not literature.
(continued on page 2)
�HESTJOHNSREVIEWAUTUMNWINTER198283
3
William James, Moralist jacques Barzun
13
Treasure Hunt (narrative) Meyer Liben
22
Don Alfonso (poem) Elliott Zuckerman
23
The Unity of Leibniz's Thought on Contingency, Possibility, and Freedom
Arthur Collins
46
Letter from a Polish Prison Adam Michnik
51
Not Just Another Communist Party: The Polish Communist Party
Branko Lazitch
54
A Nighttime Story (narrative) Linda Collins
57
Marx's Sadism Robert]. Loewenberg
68
Meetings, Recognitions (narrative) Meyer Liben
72
Two Poems
73
The Lost Continent, the Conundrum of Christian Origins joel Carmichael
84
New Year's Eve (narrative) Meyer Liben
85
Ernst and Falk: Conversations for Freemasons Gotthold Lessing
translation and notes by Chaninah Maschler
97
The Rainfall in the Pine Grove, after Gabriele D'Annunzio,
"La pioggia nel pineto," and two poems Sidney Alexander
Laurence Josephs
REVIEW ESSAY
100
Defeat in Vietnam, Norman Podhoretz's Why We Were in Vietnam
review essay by joseph A. Bosco
AT HOME AND ABROAD
103
Letter from the Homefront: On Marrying Kari]enson
105
The Holocaust Mission, July 29 to August 12, 1979 Raul Hilberg
Inside front cover:
FROM OUR READERS:
The Emperor's New Clothes Robert Gottlieb
Editorial Policy Nancy de Grummond, Charles Kluth, Kurt Schuler
�I realize that to say that the naked Emperor wears no clothes may seem "gratuitously, exaggeratedly, insulting" to those
tailors who spun the fictitious clothes and
the courtiers who support their pretense.
But what am I supposed to do? To pretend
that Mr. Updike wears luxurious literary
vestments?
Ironically, the parents or grandparents of
many of those who belong to Mr. Gottlieb's milieu came from Russia too. Yet by
the time we came they had created a selfcontained cultural monopoly which keeps
out all critics, whether riative Americans or
late-comers like myself.
Only in a culturally self-contained mutual admiration society which has insulated
itself against all outside literary criticism,
amateur monstrosities like Rabbit is Rich
may be proudly published and showered
with rave reviews and prizes.
Members of this monopoly can well ignore its critics who can only publish in offmonopoly periodicals which can be easily
passed over in silence. Yet for all their
power they cannot afford any dialogue or
debate with their critics.
EDITORIAL POLICY
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Please enter my subscription to the St.
John's Review in accordance with your policy about new subscribers. I have had occasion to see the magazine from time to time
over the past two years when it was passed
on to me by a friend and was first of all attracted by articles in my own field of art
history and archaeology written by eminent scholars like Philipp Fehl and Homer
Thompson. It was refreshing to find their
ideas and opinions presented in a much
broader context than is possible in the standard specialist journals. The magazine is to
be praised especially for not suppressing
feeling in its contributors, who are allowed
to bring up issues relating to strong, basic
emotions about fear and love and living
and dying. Lev Navrozov is permitted to
say true things he could not have said in
the Soviet Union, and Michael Levin may
publish his own very personal, highly debatable views on the sexes. In the case of
the latter, even the outrageous title of his
2
article, "'Sexism' is Meaningless," (St.
John's Review Autumn 1981) allowed for
expression and reaction. The resulting section of Letters to the Editor was lively and
splendid. Congratulations to the Editor,
whom I respect immensely for publishing
writings that help to create dialogue and
bring into focus significant thought and
feeling.
males; it is no more worthy as ·an end in itself than is machismo.
CHARLES KLUTH
'52
Baltimore, MD
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
An Open Letter To The
Instruction Committee
NANCY T. de GRUMMOND
Associate Professor
Department of Classics
Florida State University
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
As an alumnus of St. John's, I think you
are to be commended for printing the article "'Sexism' is Meaningless" (St. John's
Review Autumn 1981), especially because
you must have known that to do so was to
invite a great deal of criticism. But I was
distressed to find that some graduates of
St. John's appear to have adopted the jesuitical doctrine that "error has no rights" and
complain not merely of the opinions expressed in the article but even of your having printed it and Your motives in so doing;
it would appear that there is free speech
only for those who hold "correct" opinions.
It is my opinion that the most recent
work in anthropology and the physiology of
the brain, as well the practical experience
of the Army and the Marine Corps, indicate strongly that the traditional understanding of men and women as equal but
complementary remains true. The obvious
difficulty with this formulation has been
that it has too often been used to exclude
women from fields of endeavor to which
they were perfectly well suited, not to mention other abuses; hence the knee-jerk reaction of the feminist to any comparison
which goes beyond the "gross biological
features" (to quote one of your correspondents). But the application of so gross a
standard has led us to such obvious absurdities as quotas for 1OOlb. beat patrolmen.
It will not be easy, as it never is, to be
both fair and reasonable but, if there is to
be a restoration of common sense, we had
better start trying. In the meantime, we
needn't, and shouldn't, equate feminism
with anything beyond the concerns of fe-
I am disturbed by the statement of editorial policy you recently adopted for the St.
John's Review . ..
The statement emphasizes that contributors to the Review should be familiar with
the St. John's program (first paragraph), will
probably be tutors, alumni, or visiting lecturers, and will write mainly about books
and issues within the program (fourth paragraph). I presume that you find such a
statement necessary because you are dissastisfied with the editorial practices the
Review has been following for the last several issues, and I infer from the paragraphs
I cited that you don't think the Review has
been sufficiently concerned with the program. Apparently, you want to narrow drastically the range of topics the Review covers.
That is a bad mistake.
The Review is the only tangible intellectual contact that many alumni and many
outsiders have with the college. Consequently, I think that the Review should
make a strong effort to appeal to them, by
including articles about subjects that are of
immediate interest to them. One must remember that the world of learning is wider
than the St. John's program; one must also
remember that most of the general public
(and, after a few years away from St.
John's, most alumni) have intellectual interests different from those of students and
tutors at St. John's. If the Review wishes to
address that public, it cannot stick its head
in the sand and pretend it does not see that
more people want to read about the informativeness of the New York Times versus
that of Pravda than about spirituality in the
philosophy of Plotinus, for example.
Let me relate to you my own experience
with the Review. The articles in it that I
always read first are those not explicitly
connected with the program. My friends,
whether alumni of St. John's or of other
(continued on page 112)
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�William James, Moralist
Jacques Barzun
James's long discussions in youth with Wendell Holmes
and the great essay-review of Spencer's Psychology in 1878
were his first attempts to vindicate the character of the
moral life. It had to be done because the phrase "in an age
of science" was already taking on the implication that
everything in human life had changed and must be reexamined before its license to exist could be renewed.
For James as a naturalist, the double question was: how
to establish the reality of moral choice as part of nature;
and how to show that this choice was a free individual act,
not a resultant of extraneous "forces." The evidence
James begins with is the root phenomenon of the reflex
arc: a sensory stimulus affects the brain, and its result is
some form of action. All action is reaction upon the outer
world. 'The current of life which runs in at our eyes and
ears is meant to run out at our hands, feet, or lips. The only
use of the thoughts which it occasions while inside is to
determine its direction to whichever of these shall, under
the circumstances actually present, act in the way most
propitious to our welfare.'
What James saw and said a hundred years ago is that reflex action is not like stepping on one end of a see-saw and
getting hit in the face by the other. Between stimulus and
action comes response and which response it is to be is by
no means always automatic. Whatever may be the link between brain and mind, we experience the stimulus. Except
in the simple cases of touching a hot stove or a sharp
blade, response varies widely. The mind interposes at the
midpoint of the arc its peculiar and complex individual
characteristics.
This interlude of response may seem a slender support
A leading man of letters, Jacques Barzun has recently published Critical
Questions, Selected Essays 1940-1980 (University of Chicago Press,
1982). The above essay comes from A Stroll with William James, a book
meant to mark a life-long debt, to be published early in 1983 {Harper and
. Row).
Quotations from James are in single quotes.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
for the moral world, but it is the same support that holds
up and indeed constitutes the whole of our conscious life,
with which moral judgment and choice are intertwined.
The important point is to recognize preference as a given
element and one that is inescapably individual. It is that ·
"taking" (or unique perception and perspective) which is
central to the Jamesian conception of reality.
In one of his most charming essays, "On a Certain
Blindness in Human Beings," James relates a picturesque
incident of his driving with a North Carolina farmer
through a remote valley recently opened to cultivation.
James was appalled at the devastation-beautiful trees
felled, then charred stumps bearing witness to the struggle for level ground; great gashes in the greenery and
patches of corn and other plantings irregularly scattered,
like the pigs and chickens, among the miserable log cabins, across what mus't have been an enchanted vale. 'The
forest had been destroyed; and what had "improved" it
out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature's beauty.' James put a tactful question to his driver,
whose reply changed the whole scene: "Why, we ain't
happy here, unless we're getting one of these coves under
cultivation." 'I instantly felt,' James goes on, 'that I had
been losing the whole inward significance of the situation.
Because.to me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought they could tell no other story. But when
they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of
was personal victory, of honest sweat, persistent toil, and
final reward. The cabin was a warrant of safety for self and
wife and babes. The clearing was a symbol redolent with
moral memories of duty, struggle, and success.'
Preferences, then, the ends that we pursue, 'do not exist
at all in the world of impressions we receive by way of our
senses, but are set by our emotional and practical subjectivity altogether. Destroy the volitional nature, the definite
subjective purposes, preferences, fondnesses for certain
effects, forms, orders, and not the slightest motive would
3
�remain for the brute order of our experience to be remodelled at all.'
It is our desires, our "fondnesses" as James calls them,
that underlie the state of mind in which we say "this is
good, this is bad; that is better and this worse." Or we imply these judgments by a taking or a rejecting, instinctive
or deliberate. Desires are of course not limited to bodily
need. Man has developed a want for the superfluous,
which is infinite and includes those satisfactions termed
moral satisfactions. The moral order, in other words, turns
out to be the meaning attached to experience by every being who thinks while he feels.
But this conclusion is only the threshold of the higher
moral questions. Thoughtful people wonder about the
status of ethical ideas strictly so called, the meaning of the
terms right and wrong, duty and conscience, and the
standards that they comply with. In ordinary speech,
<~ethics" means not cheating or stealing, "morals" means
sexual propriety; and the "decline of moral standards" so
frequently discussed turns on how much there is of the
one and how little of the other. "Wider moral issues" occupy writers and preachers and even politicians: what is a
just society? Is equality of opportunity enough to ensure
it? Is the .criminal reared in poverty responsible for his
acts? Does the right to life begin in the embryo? And in
comparing groups or individuals, the question is asked,
What "values" has she, he, they got? Tell us your "priorities." "Lifestyles" themselves, voguish and vaguish as the
term is, embody the kind of judgment called moral, and
the same estimating of worth comes into play in every
realm of thought and action: art, science, philosophy, and
religion are equally exposed to moral judgment; they form
part of the moral life of man.
Its difficulty is that because it relies on estimates, because it arises from our different perspectives, certainty
and agreement are not to be had, even with the aid of a
particular religious revelation. And supposing that revelation brought about unity, the multiplicity of creeds at variance on moral questions would still leave the philosopher
having to choose among revelations. He wants a prescrip~
tion to. fit all mankind if he can discover it. What can he
turn to?
In answering the challenge, James gives in passing some
credit to the Utilitarians, who ascribe good and bad to associations with pleasure and pain. Association does train
us morally, but only up to a point. As James's Psychology
makes clear, there are tendencies of the human mind that
are "born in the house" and not developed by utility.
'Take the love of drunkenness; take bashfulness, the terror of high places, the susceptibility to musical sounds;
take the emotion of the comical, the passion for poetry,
for mathematics, or for metaphysics-no one of these
things can be wholly explained by either association or
utility. A vast number of our moral perceptions deal with
directly felt fitnesses between things and fly in the teeth
of all the prepossessions of habit and presumptions of uti!-
4
ity. The moment you get beyond the coarser moral maxims, the Decalogues and Poor Richard's Almanacs, you
fall into schemes and positions which to the eye of common sense seem fantastic and overstrained. The sense for
abstract justice, which some persons have, is as eccentric
a variation as is the passion for music. The feeling of the
inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity
of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic fussiness are
quite inexplicable except by an innate preference of the
moral ideal attitude.'
Since these attitudes are individual facts and unevenly
distributed among mankind, it follows that 'there is no
such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically
made up in advance. We all help to determine the content
of ethical philosophy so far as we contribute to the race's
moral life. In other words, there can be no final truth in
ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had
his experience and said his say.' This is what we should
expect in a universe that is inherently pluralistic and
unfinished.
Are there then no such things as moral principles? Is it
meaningless to speak of principled action, of a man, a
woman of principle? For if all these are empty words, how
can moral behavior be taught and misbehavior reproved?
The demand for a common standard is as strong a feeling
as that of wanting justice in our special case. We ask incessantly, What is the law? the entrance requirements? the
speed limit? We need yardsticks to set our minds at rest
and bring others to book-the phrase is literal: the book is
the record of accepted measures for ordinary thought and
action. Bence the similar call for principles in the cloudier
sphere of moral judgment.
But the word principle, with its aura of personal merit
and firmness in a shaky world, is ambiguous. To the absolutist a principle is a teaching fixed for all time and good
on all occasions, a dogma. One should not be afraid of the
word, "dogma/' for it conveys the advantage that princi~
pies have when proclaimed with authority as "indelible
moral truths, not mere opinion." In that guise principle
seems to possess an inherent compelling force-no need
of the police behind it. At the same time, dogma has acquired its unwelcome ~ound because it claims universal
sway, while modern liberal constitutions require the peaceful coexistence of several conflicting dogmas. So the very
general demand for principles and men of principle comes
down to asking that everyone have "some principle or
other.'' And diversity is back to plague us as before.
A further difficulty with principles is that they clash
among themselves, even within the same system of morality. Albert Schweitzer, for instance, preached "Reverence for Life" and got the reputation of a saint. But what
pragmatic contents does the formula cover? If it means no
vivisection, more hun1ane slaughter~houses, forbidding
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�blood-sports-even if it means vegetarianism, Schweitzer's
injunction can at least be debated. But as a universal rule
it is mere concept-worship. Schweitzer must have daily
flouted his own law. If his hospital at Lambarene was even
moderately aseptic, many living crawling creatures had to
be denied reverence. The tape worm and tse-tse fly could
bear witness to his unprincipled behavior, and he was
ruthless to cancer cells, which are also a form of life. "Oh,
but that's not what he meant!" What then did he mean?
An absolute rule is literal or it is nothing. Here the nothing is a pompous echo of a general tendency already wellrooted in our mores.
Schweitzer was too intelligent a man not to see the objection and he made some verbal gestures to gloss it over:
good sense should govern the application of principle.
That saving clause, expressed or not, seems to go with
every ideal when one begins to analyze it It enables the
absolutist to pass for a moral champion and sensible as
well: proclaim the principle inviolable, denounce as unprincipled-as pragmatists-those who question the heroics of absolutes, then reserve the right to do quietly what
the "unprincipled" say has to be done.*
In the last half-century the game has been played with
this same "sanctity oflife" to bring about the widespread
abolition of capital punishment; it now goes on about legalized abortion. "The state should not commit-or abetmurder." The noble rhetoric blankets the varieties of
experience and flouts the proper use of words: a judicial
execution or a legal operation is not murder. And other
considerations than the life of the criminal or the fetus
have relevance. To name but two, the sanctity of life is
hardly honored by incarceration for years in the prisons
we have. Nor is it reasonable to prohibit abortion and permit all persons and powers in society, whether through
high literature or low advertising, to solicit the eye and the
imagination with ubiquitous incitements to sexual activity.
In a word, principles are at best short-hand summaries
of what civilized life requires in general, in ordinary relations, in open-and-shut situations: do not lie, steal, or kill.
But the pure imperative gives no guidance whatever in
difficult cases. Universal lying would be dreadful, but you
do not tell the truth to the madman armed with a knife
who asks which way his intended victim went And even
routinely, you lie to spare the feelings of the hostess who
apologizes for her spoiled dinner or dull company. The
police shoot in hot pursuit and sometimes kill the innocent bystander, just as they would, and do, to quell a riot
The very right of self-defense works for and against the
sanctity of life. And whether or not the unborn have a
"right to life" from the moment of conception, it would
be morally monstrous to force the victim of incest or rape
*The love of abstraction and hatred of usefulness go so far in certain
moralists as to make them affirm that it would be better for morality if
honesty were not the best policy. In other words, the right is what people ought to do with no reason given, except that they ought to because
it is right. Imperatives satisfy, even vicariously, the imperial emotions.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
(especially if accompanied by venereal disease) to bear her
child. The child itself might come to wish it had never
been born and curse the blinkered moralist
Every human situation being a tangle of facts and meanings and possible consequences, moral judgment consists
in deciding how much evil may be averted and the good
sustained or extracted. Sometimes the complication is
tragic, as in the case that E.M. Forster discussed at the
outbreak of the Second World War: "Should I betray my
country or my friend?" The dilemma may have seemed improbable at the time; it no longer looks it after the revelations of high-minded spying and treason. And the moralist
is no nearer a solution than Antigone was two thousand
years ago when she had to choose whether to obey the law
of the gods commanding her to bury her brother or the
law of the state forbidding her to do it because he was a
rebel.
If these various degrees of uncertainty and horror do
characterize the life of man precisely because he is a
moral being, what help can thinking about it abstractly
provide? James has but two generalities to offer, but they
are comprehensive. The first is that 'there is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek
incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to act as to bring
about the very largest total universe of good that we can
see. Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help less in
proportion as our intuitions are more piercing and our vo-
cation the stronger for the moral life. For every dilemma is
in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact com-
bination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which
each decision creates is always a universe without precedent and for which no adequate previous rule exists. The
philosopher, then, qua philosopher, is no better able to determine the best universe in the concrete emergency than
other men. He sees, indeed, somewhat better than most
men what the question always is-not a question of this
good or that good simply taken, but of the two universes
with which these goods respectively belong.'
"Not this good, or that good" -it is the whole tangle
that must be resolved, just as it is from the new emergencies that moral habits grow more delicate. If we no longer
make fun of the insane, abuse the crippled, or beat the
abc's into little children, it is because individuals with
"piercing intuitions" have persuaded society that their
sensibility to others' pain implied a moral duty to stop inflicting it But short of such great reforms, what moral
contribution can the morally alive person make? Start, as
James always tells us to do, with the idea of a tangible result 'If one ideal judgment be objectively better than another, that betterness must be made flesh by being lodged
concretely in someone' s actual perception. It cannot float
in the atmosphere, for it is not a sort of meteorological
phenomenon like the aurora borealis.' ·
The second general principle as to the question what
ought to be done, what one's duty is in the circumstances,
what the ground of our obligation is, brings us to the pas-
5
�sibly surprising conclusion 'thatwithout a claim actually
made by some concrete person there can be no obligation,
and that there is some obligation wherever there is a
claim. Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to an overarching system of moral relations true "in
themselves" is therefore either an out-and-out supersti·
tion, or else it must be treated as a merely provisional ab·
straction from that real Thinker in whose actual demand
obligation must be ultimately based.' James, being a natu·
ralist, does not posit such a Thinker; he is only showing
those who do that their traditional religious morality im·
plies a claimant. It follows that in a world which acknowledges no God-or not everywhere the same one-the
claim must come from the beings whose existence we do
acknowledge.
James knows the strangeness of thinking that every claim
imposes a duty. With our habit of always wanting a backing
to reality, we look for some sign of "validity" behind the
claim to turn it into an obligation, something beyond,
which 'rains down upon the claim from some sublime di·
mension of being which the moral law inhabits. But how
can such an inorganic abstract character of imperative~
ness, additional to the imperativeness which is the con·
crete claim itself, exist? Take any demand, however slight,
which any creature, however weak, may make. Ought it
not, for its own sole sake, to be satisfied? If not, prove why
not. The only possible kind of proof would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a demand that
ran the other way.'
So here we are, each of us, at the center of the conflict·
ing claims that assail us. They may come from animals or
infants or strangers: the range of claims we are subjected
to depends on the degree of our awareness; the extent of
our moral effect on the world depends on our ability to
sort and fulfill them.
I confess that when I first read James on "The Moral
Philosopher and the Moral Life," I was struck by a sense
of helplessness about carrying out his injunction. But af·
ter reflection, when I had grasped his extraordinary idea, I
felt the sudden release from interminable shilly-shallying:
X has asked me to do this for him. Perhaps I should. But I
don't really like X, so why should I? But it's absurd to
decide on mere dislike. Why not do what he asks if I can
without too much trouble? Yes, but he probably won't
return the favor. Surely, that's no reason for not doing
it-and so on. The amount of inner wear and tear saved
by the Jamesian redefinition of duty can be very great.
Our modern cant phrases-to sort out one's priorities, to
stick to one's values-hardly help in comparison with
James's simple idea that the burden of proof in our moral
relations is always on the negative: given a claim con·
cretely presented, why should I not satisfy it? The search
for a "why should I" is futile see-sawing or a grudging sur·
render to the "superstitious abstraction."
The result of honoring as many claims as possible is to
raise the amount of satisfaction in the world, increase the
6
sum of good, and thereby umoralize" the universe more
than it is already. For if reducing cruelty to animals makes
for a universe better than it Was before, so does giving our
claimants more of what they assert to be their good. Su·
perficially, the judgment may look like the Utilitarian's
"greatest good of the greatest number"; actually, it differs
in having nothing to do with legislating the good of society at large or with the wishes of a majority. It is a con·
crete relation between persons.
That relation may even be what is meant by the uto·
pian commandment that we should love one another. At
the same time, the requirement of an existing, live claim
prevents intrusive do-goodism under the cloak of love.
But what if the claimants misjudge and call good what is
bad-ask for drugs or the means of harming others? In
such cases there is obviously a counterclaim which nullifies theirs, the claim of their kindred or of the rest of society. Besides, claims of this sort fall within the circle of
mores and laws about which the moral person has long
since settled his doubts. One is not bound to be perplexed
and imagine a dilemma every time a choice has to be
made. A great deal of the present century's feelings of
guilt are the result not so much of moral conscience as of
the self-conscious ego. Its feelings are not insincere, but
they are more about the status of the self in its own eyes
than about the object of its concern. Thus Mrs. J
ellyby in
Dickens, who neglected her children in her zeal for the
natives of Borrioboola-Gha.
To respond to all possible claims, one must begin look·
ing for them in one's own immediate sphere of knowledge. One must recognize the limits of one's power, but
with a resolve to act. Indignation about this bad world is
cheaply come by and morally worthless. As Robert Frost
once recounted, he gave up reading Lincoln Steffens on
the plight of cities, because as a poet he knew he could
not go and help. Self-acceptance strengthens the moral
judgment in an essential way, for in deciding which claims
to fulfill there are times when the claims of the self must
be counted. The traditional self-sacrifice of a grown child
to an aged parent, for example, must be weighed against
its possibly immoral results-domestic tyranny and emo·
tiona! blackmail, on one side, gradually creating embit·
tered hostility toward the whole world, on the other.
As always, it is easier to dispose of such questions from
the distance of the writer's desk or the philosopher's lectern. The great merit of James's view of obligation is that
its concreteness and perception of the unique warn us
against the errors of casuistry. The word has acquired the
sense of deviousness only because in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries the religious casuists tried to foresee
and rule on all conceivable predicaments in advance, in a
"case book." On paper their solutions sounded contempt·
ible. Moral dilemmas, like experience itself, exceed all imag·
inings, as is shown by our innumerable books of casuistry
-our novels. They lead us to admire or despise the same
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�acts, doubtless because these only look the same, or because disparate moral truths are invoked.*
Imbued with the tragic view of life, James was certain
that moral action often demands the sacrifice of self; duty
is hard; it entails pain and sometimes death. For evil is real
and must be fought, repeatedly, endlessly, at great risk.
Not only is there no guaranty that one's moral decision is
right; there is not even any assurance that the fulfilled
claim will not turn from a good to an evil. James's knowledge of history brought enough instances to his mind to
leave no doubt.**
To speak of moral decisions implies that human beings
faced with a moral choice are free to do one thing or another. This privilege is denied by thinkers who believe in
determinism. They may belong to either camp of James's
opponents; they may be idealists or materialists. Both
accept the fact of volition: you can raise your arm if so
minded or refuse to if you choose. But that choice is not
really yours nor is it decided on at the moment; everything
in the past has been interlinked in a chain of causes and
effects, of which your present act is but the latest link to
the next. We see here the block universe of the Absolute
or of blind matter, either of which locks all things in a
tight network for all eternity.
The battle over free will is ancient and neither side can
win, because satisfactory evidence on the subject can
never be found. The definition of "free" is itself a source
of disagreement. Those who say that man acts for a reason
and not from a cause are told that reasons too are foregone. The thorny notion of cause and effect divides even
scientists, though most prefer determinism as more con~
venient to work with. This state of affairs leaves belief in
free will as itself something to choose or reject. James was
brought to see this option by the French philosopher
Renouvier and like him he chose free will, on moral
grounds. He pointed out at the same time that the determinists also choose-the opposite. Let them have their
way, says James, it then follows that 'you and I have been
foredoomed to the error of continuing to believe in liberty. It is fortunate for the winding up of controversy that
in every discussion with determinism this argumentum ad
hominem can be its adversary's last word.'
But this debonair taunt and argument are not enough.
In "The Dilemma of Determinism" James shows what follows his choosing and what he means by its moral
grounds. Take any deplorable event (his example is a bru*For a vivid contrast, take our modern scorn for the medieval trial by
combat or by ordeal to determine guilt. In an age of belief in a divine
providence that governs every event, it was a most moral and logical procedure, and our method of trusting in the doubtful word of mortal witnesses would have seemed reckless and absurd.
**A striking one has emerged since his death: the benevolent, liberal,
highly moral treaty that Great Britain made after the Boer War saddled
South Africa with a regime based on the continuance of race oppression.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tal murder, then recent) and see the difficulties that arise
if a determinist regrets its occurrence. 'Are we to say,
though it couldn't be, yet it would have been a better universe with something different from this Brockton
murder in it? Calling a thing bad means that the thing
ought not to be, that something else ought to be in its
place. Determinism [thus] virtually defines the universe as
a place in which what ought to be is impossible.' And
'what about the judgments of regret themselves? If they
are wrong, other judgments, of approval presumably,
ought to be in their place. But as they are necessitated,
nothing else can be in their place; and the universe is what
it was before-a place where what ought to be appears impossible. We have got one foot out of the pessimistic bog,
but the other sinks all the deeper. We have rescued our actions from the bonds of evil, but our judgments are now
held fast. When murders and treacheries cease to be sins,
regrets are theoretic absurdities and errors.'
In other words, under determinism there can be no
clear and consistent meaning in the terms moral life,
moral judgment, moral action.
Freedom thus regained does not mean "deuces wild"everybody free every instant to will what he or she pleases.
There are networks of compulsion-instinct, habit, bodily
makeup-and it is as clear to indeterminists as to others
that one can predict fairly well what someone else will do
when one knows the doer's character and the constraints
he works under. Determinists seem to fear that the cosmos will fall apart if free will is permitted to exist. 'It is as
likely (according to McTaggart) that a majority of Londoners will burn themselves tomorrow as that they will partake of food; as likely that I shall be hanged for brushing
my hair as for committing murder, and so forth.' Clearly,
the dispute itself is very free; it suffers no constraints from
common sense. But in James's universe things are not totally loose and disjointed. All kinds of unities and relations
among things and among ideas coerce. The one permanent
avenue of freedom, however narrow, is that 'in an activity
situation, what happens is not pure repetition; novelty is
perpetually entering the world.'*
One might have expected that James's large definition
of duty and his solid reasoning in favor of free will would
satisfy the moralist "in an age of science." But they do not,
because James's maxim requires that an action for good
shall be related to the entire present situation, which he
says is new and cannot be judged by previous rule. But
morality is the right and James's precept looks like the expedient, the changeful. A moralist may admit the changing
character of truth, because he has accomodated himself
to "progress" in science, but this concession probably
*The full technical argument is given in Chapter VI of Essays in Radical
Empiricism, "The Experience of Activity;" and again at greater length
in the last five chapters of Some Problems of Philosophy.
7
�makes him all the more unbending about the "right." He
is sure that the pragmatic imagination playing upon context and consequence can only make for uncertainty in
human relations, set people adrift and helpless amid temptations, in short replace Right absolute by Relativism.
This argument is so familiar that it is often accepted by
those against whom it is directed, as if they lived indeed
by a lower grade of ethics but could do no better. Nor is it
noticed that the attack brings together two different sets
of facts. One is the diversity of existing moralities, each of
them absolute to some tribe or nation; the other, the diversity of individuals within tribe or nation.
When Europe discovered the new world in early modern times it was seen that peoples lived by different rules.
Montaigne pointed out that cannibals were not immoral
at home though they were abominable murderers in Europe. By the next century Pascal notes that even in Europe
moral truth is one thing on this side of the Pyrenees and
another on the other side.
This being the state of affairs from time immemorial, it
seems rather egotistical to proclaim any one set of commandments the sole morality, and somewhat fanciful to
speak of "indelible moral truths implanted in the human
heart." Is it moral or immoral for the Mohammedan to
have four wives? Or the African chief to have forty, each
worth so many head of cattle? A worldly Pope recently declared that to look with lust upon one's wife was tantamount to adultery. If this is morality for Catholic believers,
is it incumbent upon their neighbors on the same street?
In many parts of the world, a gift of value for doing business, giving justice, or performing a helpful official act is
only courtesy; in the West it is bribery, immoral and criminal. Murder in early medieval England was paid for by a
fine-that is the original meaning of the word murder;
later it was paid for by one's life; now, in this country, the
penalty is a life sentence, and the meaning of that is seven
years in jail. (If life is sacred, by the way, the Eskimos' law
is the most moral: the murderer is told to go away and join
another tribe.)
Like it or not, humanity is radically diverse. It is only by
successive abstractions that we come to conceive of a single "human nature." If you take away one by one heredity,
education, the social forces of the time and the place, you
can arrive at the essential human being, the forked radish
with four limbs, needing food and shelter, and who will
surely die. But having defined him-or it, rather-no specimen of the kind can be found; like an average prescription
for eyeglasses, the definition doesn't fit anybody.
It is at this point that the second and different target of
the foe of Relativism comes into view. Actual life is lived
by a collection of somebodies and they are no more alike
among themselves than are the groups to which they belong. Ascetics and Lotharios, extroverts and introverts,
the pensive and the gregarious, the poet and the athlete,
and many other varieties and subvarieties breathe and
move under the same customs and costume. If the moral-
8
ist perforce tolerates different national and tribal ethics,
why the indignation at internal diversity?-unless it is
such as to disturb the peace, which is a political, not a
moral reason. In advanced civilizations the idea occurs to
very moral persons that different types of character are
entitled to different treatment.* Since 1914, for example,
we recognize the conscientious objector. As Shaw pointed
out even earlier, to do unto others as we would have them
do unto us may be unjust: they are not us and their tastes
may differ. It is precisely the social behaviorist's mistake
to suppose that the same lure and the same whip will work
on all alike. It is also the error of the speculative reformer;
Utopias are invariably made for one type.
The anti-relativist of today, with his high ideal of inflexibility, needs to see that without the acceptance of different ethical norms we should never have got away from
those of the cave man. The refinement of feeling and conduct that moralists pride themselves on comes from
change, not fixity. The law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for
a tooth gets outgrown, but at first it necessarily appears as a
violation of principle. The fear that if one rule is altered,
then "anything goes" is the fallacy of all or none. "Things"
could hardly "go" farther than we see them doing at present, yet our age is extremely moralistic, if not moral; it
lacks "morals" in the vulgar sense but it is full of moral
scruples and it labors under innumerable codes aimed at
giving equal treatment and protecting the helpless. We
have come so far as to cherish even "endangered species"
-small, unknown, speechless claimants such as the snail
darter, which now arouse widespread moral passions.**
Indeed, our moralism is one cause of the perpetual anger
at society: why isn't it perfect?
Since )ames's moral philosophy follows the pragmatic
pattern of considering outcome as well as antecedents, it
is clear that his relativism, far from being footloose, is held
fast by as many demands and duties as the moral agent
can think of. His relativism relates, and widely. It would be
better named Relationism. In thus relating one's decision
or conduct to several needs and ideals, one gives the observer as many chances to criticize, whereas the absolutist
relates his act to only one thing: the fine abstraction that
*Contrary to common opinion, it is in governing and administering that
rules should be rigid. If well drawn, they save time and preclude indecision. In the life of institutions good fixed rules are the prime producers
of efficiency and fairness. To be sure, such grooves for sensible action
must be redrawn as often as necessary. The complicated work of civilization today is chaotic because of antiquated procedures. Everybody
"makes policy" and leaves action to chance or precedent. But this failure due to scarcity of administrative genius is aggravated by false notions
of "flexibility," "compassion,'' and other forms of muddling inequity. In
the struggle with the bureaucracies of business and government and
education, what makes the public hate "the system" is that it is not a
system.
**UNESCO has adopted a Declaration of the Universal Rights of Animals, but it has not helped the goats of San Clemente Island, which
were liquidated for endangering several species of plants and the habitats of other, less common creatures. Ah, principle! (New York Times, August 19, 1979).
AU1UMNIW1NTER 1982-83
�his God or his grandfather once uttered emphatically. In
other words, James insists as usual that theory be given
concrete, namable contents. Those are the "objective val·
ues" that moralists preach, though what they rant about is
but a formula, a form of words.*
The Jamesian obligation to connect the moral judgment
not to 'this good or that good simply taken but to the uni·
verse with which they belong' also clears up the common
confusion about morals in politics and foreign affairs. Lin·
coin's struggle with his followers' narrow absolutes may
serve to illustrate. In 1863, when summoned to change
leaders in troubled Missouri, he gave a reply that should
be read as a textbook case in political morality: "We are in
Civil War. In such cases, there is always the main ques·
tion; but in this case that question is a perplexing com·
pound-Union and Slavery. It thus becomes a question
not of two sides merely, but of at least four sides even
among those who are for the Union .... Thus, those who
are for the Union with, but not without slavery-those for
it with or without, but prefer it with-and those for it with
or without, but prefer it without. Among these again, is a
subdivision of those who are for immediate, but not grad·
ual extinction of slavery." To each party, each of the six
choices was the only moral goal, as Lincoln knew: "all
11
these shades of opinion and even more" are entertained
by honest and truthful men .... Yet all being for the
Union, by reason of these differences each will prefer a
different way of sustaining the Union. At once sincerity is
questioned·, and motives are assailed. Actual war coming,
blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced
from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and
thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns.
Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be
first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow. And all
this, as before said, may be among honest men only." It is
as Dorothy Sayers told us: the first thing a principle does
is to kill somebody.
The statesman thus appears as something greater and
wiser and more tragic than the image of "the man of principle," who follows the rule by rote and lets the heavens
fall. He is actually one who says: "Gentlemen, I beg you to
rise above principle" and who persuades the everwarring
factions of his party and his nation to give up their abso·
lutes and be guided by his superior pragmatism. In the
murderous battle of principles, he keeps in view the aim
and end of moral action. The end is the test, justifying
him when the story is over.
But even before, along the way, the end is the standard
for judging which principle is to be followed and which
must be waived. Hear Lincoln before his presidency, dur·
ing the debates with Douglas: "Much as I hate slavery, I
would consent to the extension of it rather than see the
Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any great evil,
to avoid a greater one. But when I go to Union saving, I
must believe, at least, that the means I employ has some
adaptation to the end. To my mind Nebraska has no such
adaptation."
Here with the word means Lincoln introduces the last
component of moral conduct: besides the variety of claims
and ends to be weighed and combined, there is the mode
of action to be chosen. No man was more dedicated to
freedom than Lincoln, but as Chief Executive he restricted
freedom of speech, suspended habeas corpus, and used
the army to enforce the draft against rioters-with regret,
no doubt, but without compunction.
Does this not mean that the end justifies the means?
Yes. Horrors! No formula arouses greater indignation in
moralists; it is the mark of the Evil One; it is the reason
given for regarding avowed pragmatists as suspect. Any·
body who subscribes to the wicked notion in so many
words has to explain himself, offer some excuse. Well, for
a start, everyone without exception acts on it in ordinary
life. For instance: a man takes a sharp knife and slashes a
child. He is a brute, a monster. But just a minute! The
man is Dr. X, about to remove the inflamed appendix. Immediately the cut in the abdomen becomes desirable,
praiseworthy, highly paid. The end-and nothing elsehas changed the moral standing of the violent act. The
end justifies the means.
Again, we take that same child, we take all children,
and, at an age when they are bundles of energy bent only
on running and playing and shouting we coop them up for
four hours, six hours a day, and compel them without due
process of law to struggle over tasks they do not care for
and see no point in. It is called Education. We piously
plead: the end justifies the means. Similarly, the ends jus·
tify monogamous marriage, imprisonment by law, monastic retreat from the world, and its seeming opposite: society
itself. For as Rousseau and Freud pointed out, to live in
society is a harsh, unnatural discipline justifiable only by
the ends of relative safety for continuous toil.
The modern state particularly is built on the ends-andmeans formula so hastily condemned. From compulsory
vaccination and seizing land for public use to the control
of a thousand normal acts-eating and drinking, teaching
and learning, traveling and importing-our laws and administrative rules interfere hourly with harmless human
purposes.
We tell ourselves that the end-the common welfarejustifies. The same maxim is also blessed by one ancient
church that guides the conduct of millions. It teaches, on
the basis of scriptures even older than itself, that procrea·
tion in wedlock is the sole justification of sexual intercourse.
The end apparently justifies the otherwise reprehensible
means. On occasions less intimate and recurrent anybody
would behave in the same spirit: we would not hesitate to
knock down man, woman, or child to save any of them, on
*Looking at the sum of moral ends achieved permits moralities and cultures-whatever anthropologists may say-to be adjudged better or worse.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the instant, from being run over or burned to death by
clothing on fire.
9
�The bugbear phrase is evidently a misnomer for something else; and cleansing it of odium is not a merely verbal
matter, for its present use is to distort the actual relation
of ends to means and discredit pragmatic moral judgments.
What needs to be embodied in a formula is a distinct
situation, that in which the means corrupt the end-or destroy it, as would happen, for example, if one should drug a
child to stop it from crying. Weak minds are often tempted
to use such means, which in effect covertly substitute one
end for another; the true one is a child at peace and not
crying; the false is a child merely silenced by a dose of
pmson.
Besides, this reductivism works both ways. 'If William's
religious melancholy is due to bad digestion, scientific
theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are.' James called such interpretation
"medical materialism" and saw in it sheer intellectual arrogance. He resented the trick that transformed useful
discoveries (his own included) about the dependence of
mental upon bodily states into a gratuitous identification
of the two. It is a permanent temptation, as the poet and
scholar Joy Gresham, who became Mrs. C. S. Lewis, confessed about her youthful views: "Men," I said, "are only
apes. Love, art, altruism are only sex. The universe is only
matter. Matter is only energy. I forget what I said energy
was only."
To speak of moral intuition and believe in free will on
moral grounds, as we have seen James doing, argues the
valuing of belief itself as a human activity. To accept
equality or any other "moral truth" for its good consequences is an act of faith and therefore a risk. But as early
as the 1870s and '80s, when James was discussing these
questions, faith had become a privative concept which
meant: unscientific, illusory, antiquated nonsense, prob-
ably of religious origin.
Those who took this attitude generally called themselves
Positivists, after the name given by Auguste Comte to his
philosophy of knowledge. In effect it admitted as knowledge only what science had certified-positive(ly) knowledge. Toward everything else these minds were skeptical;
toward religion specifically, or anything called spiritual,
they declared themselves "agnostic"-Huxley's bad coinage for one who says: HI don't know."
The purpose embodied in this then-new word is important; it was to teach the lesson of withholding belief. The
agnostic does not deny divinity like the atheist; he waits
for evidence one way or the other. Such a position sounds
worthy beyond cavil, but its balancing act between Yea
and Nay rarely proves stable. Most positivists were assertive materialists, and James found himself obliged to rr\eet
their hidden metaphysics head on. 'Science, these positivists say, has proved that personality, so far from being an
elementary force in nature, is but a passive resultant of
the really elementary forces, physical, chemical, physiological, and psycho-physical, which are all impersonal and
general in character. Nothing individual accomplishes
anything in the universe save insofar as it obeys and exemplifies some universal law.' Thus-and this was the analogy that Taine made famous in the preface to his History
of English Literature (1864)-"Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar." James shows that the argument rests on the genetic fallacy. Treating moral facts like
so many chemicals is 'as if the same breath which should
succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously
explain away their significance.' And he adds that he feels
'impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the
program, in view of what the authors are actually able to
perform.'
10
By the time one does get to energy, amid the elementary particles of physics, which exist for us only as traces
on film and which are identical within their kinds, it is evident that something must be added to them before they
can become even the ape that we say we are. Yet when one
makes this simple reflection one is suspected of "smuggling in" something illicit into the universe. The word
''mysticism" is murmured and one is accused of being
"against Science," or just too stupid to see how, for the
enlightened, science has become "a Way of life."
Science can be no such thing, since it begins by excluding what it cannot measure or classify. No scientist has
ever chosen a wife or bought a house by scientific methods,
nor does he laugh, or applaud a musical work, on scientific
grounds. Two-thirds of his life is totally remote from science. Therefore to speak of belief, free will, or faith of any
kind as "smuggled in" would mean that natural science offered a complete account of experience. What it offerstoo readily-is the claim to do so in the future, coupled
with the command to sit and wait. Huxley, again, gave the
fGrmula: "To rest in comfortable illusion when scientific
truth is conceivably within reach is to desecrate oneself
and the universe."
Some writers of our time, though eager to vindicate the
moral life, have accepted the premise that science legitimately occupies all the land, but hope that it might be induced to lease some untilled portion for non-scientific use.
When James met the claim of total ownership he took a
different and intellectually sounder line. The opportunity
was given him by a statement in which the English mathematician W. K. Clifford, who was also Jame's friend and fellow psychologist, summed up the new orthodoxy: believe
nothing without sUfficient evidence-it is a sin: '"Whoso
would deserve well of his fellows in this matter will guard
the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous
care .... If a belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence (even though the belief be true, as Clifford on the
same page explains) the pleasure is a stolen one. It is sinful
because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind .... It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." '
On this text James wrote a closely reasoned essay which
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�he called "The Will to Believe." The title has passed into
common usage with (as usual) the erroneous meaning of
"believe what you please." Seeing this, James regretted
the phrase and thought he should have said "the right to
believe." In fact, the demonstration is about the right and
the will to believe, each restricted to precisely stated conditions.
Clifford's preachment 'with somewhat too much ro·
bustious pathos in the voice' is self-refuting on the face of
it. Clifford, like everybody else, believed thousands of
things on no evidence at all-for example, whatever he
knew, or thought he knew about his family and friends;
and he acted on faith whenever he said with no quiver of
doubt: "I'll see you next Monday."
It is such facts of belief and their source in experience
that James begins by examining. 'We find ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why. We all of us believe
in molecules and the conservation of energy, in democ~
racy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity
and the duty of fighting for "the doctrine of the immortal
Monroe" -all for no reasons worthy of the name. We see
into these matters with no more inner clearness, and prob~
ably with much less, than any disbeliever in them might
possess. His unconventionality would probably have some
grounds to show for its conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the prestige of the opinions, is what makes the
spark shoot from them that lights up our sleeping magazines of faith. Our faith is faith in someone else's faith,
and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself is that· there is a truth and that our
minds and it are made for each other.'
Our thoughts are energized by feelings of all kinds, and
it is the varied origins, character, and intensity of feeling
that pose the problem of which ideas to trust. 'Our next
duty, having recognized this mixed-up state of affairs, is to
ask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathological,
or whether, on the contrary, we must treat it as a normal
element in making up our minds.'
To help settle the question James defines a few terms.
Call hypothesis anything proposed to our belief and see if
it seems to us live or dead. A live hypothesis is one that the
individual finds believable, credible. To an atheist, the reincarnation of souls is not a live hypothesis, but "medical
materialism" might be. He could in the end reject it, but it
was not "unthinkable" like the other. If one thinks one
might take action there is some degree of "liveness" in the
hypothesis: 'there is some believing tendency wherever
there is willingness to act at all.' ("Act" here would include
re~arranging
one's other opinions and altering one's
vocabulary).
The choice between hypotheses James calls an option
and he classifies options as living or dead, forced or avoidable, momentous or trivial. What he goes on to state applies
only to an option that is forced, living, and momentous. It
is only within these narrow limits and only when no empirical evidence is to be had, that James finds the right
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
and the will to believe legitimate. Belief under these conditions is no frolic when teacher's back is turned; it has a
reason to exist, which is: that not deciding is a form of decision. Thus for most people free will is a tenable idea-it
is live, which makes the option living, and it is certainly
not trivial; it is forced, because there is no third possibility.
So in the absence of evidence one has the right to believe
in free will, for not deciding would be to decide against it.
These safeguards against credulity have been so regularly overlooked in discussions of James's essay that they
bear restating in his own words: *'Our passional nature
not only may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its
nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say under such circumstances, "Do not decide but leave the
question open," is itself a passional decision and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.' ,
So much for the right to believe. The will to do so is a related subject, but its limiting conditions are different.
First, willing is not mere wishing or "velleity," as it is ca11ed.
"I wish I were a millionaire" and "Everybody falls in love
with me" are not forms of the will to believe; they are
commonplace fantasies. Not the superficial wish but the
deep-seated will is a strenuous expression of the self.
When Walter Scott, caught as partner in the bankruptcy
of his publishing firm, decided for his honor to pay all its
debts by writing novels, essays, biographies indefatigably,
he noted in his journal: "] must not doubt. To doubt is to
lose." That resolve was his will to believe-in his own
powers, in his eventual success.
But belief is a far from simple thing. One often hears
the strong beliefs of others explained away: "He thinks so
because he wants to so much." But try, yourself, to believe that you are younger, or a better dancer, than you actually are; the probability is that you cannot, no matter
how much you want to. Peter the apostle wanted to walk
on the waters of the stormy lake; his life depended on it,
but he could not will it. The test of willing, as usual, is action. Every great artist starts out unknown, uncalled for,
but possessed of a belief in himself and of the will to make
it true. His periods of discouragement show that it is will
which is at work in periods of production.
These facts define the situation in which the will to
believe is legitimate and, what is more, "creative": 'There
are cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact
can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic
which would say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is "the lowest kind of immorality." Yet such is the
logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regu*One exception must be noted: Edwin L. Clarke, in a modest textbook
entitled The Art of Straight Thinking (New York 1929), devotes half a
page to explaining that James carefully limits the domain in which belief
without evidence has its rights. Professor Clarke-may have been annoyed
by the ubiquitous will to misunderstand on the part of other scholars.
11
�late our lives!' James then gives a physical example to make
vivid a type of predicament that orie meets more often in
social or emotional life: 'Suppose that you are climbing a
mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from
which the only escape is a terrible leap. Have faith that
you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to
its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all
the sweet things you have heard scientists say of maybes,
and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and
trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair,
you roll into the abyss.'
Life being full of "maybes," it forces every conscious
being to act a thousand times on the strength of the will to
believe. The will functions without our knowing it as
such, or appreciating the philosophic and psychological
reasons for its reality, as against the unlifelike view of the
Cliffords and the Huxleys. But any initial doubt or faith
has the interesting aspect that everyone can prove himself
right: 'Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for
you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you
shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or
the other of two possible universes true by your trust or
mistrust-both universes having been only maybes in this
particular, before you contributed your act.'*
One very ordinary situation in which belief contributes
to making itself true is that in which trust, candor, courtesy,
or love produces the same pleasant attitudes in return.
And so with their opposites; the grouchy and suspicious
generally find their worst expectations come true. In bodily
matters, the placebo effect, long used by physicians, is of
the same kind: give a sugar pill to a patient with the will to
cure himself and he may do as well as the truly drugged one.
This peculiarity of the body and the mind, though not
uniform in its action, is so noticeable that it has inspired
more than one cult of self-help: to double your energy and
succeed in all things, repeat three cheerful slogans before
breakfast. That is a caricature of the will to believe, but
caricature implies a real original.
'Our willing nature,' as James calls it, is normally re·
strained; it needs favoring conditions before it can act to
our benefit. The common belief of those around us is one
enabling cause. A vivid imagination is another, but it must
summon emotional force behind its image and keep it at
the forefront of consciousness. The will to believe is the
will to attend; that is why we say of genius that it is ob·
sessed. As Hemingway puts it somewhere: "It was not just
something he believed. It was his belief."
The distinction points to a generally neglected factthe gradations of belief, the various shades of our several
beliefs. Think of them in this light and the shadings ap·
pear indeed infinite. We believe the broadcast report of a
catastrophe; we believe more strongly when the details
*Thanks to the currency of the phrase "self-fulfilling prophecy," the
the
public is now familiar with
workings of the negative will: predict that
your wedding will not take place and make it so by not showing up for it.
12
are told in the next day's paper; we believe to the full
when not merely a witness but a friend saw it happen.
There is even a step beyond, which is faith, or belief un·
conscious of itself. One senses the difference between
believing that something exists and believing in the thing
itself. People are chock-full of beliefs, but life is lived on
faith-a buried assumption on which one acts; for exam·
pie, that the shopkeeper will give you change for your ten·
dollar bill and not say it was a five, as he could safely do if
he were in bad faith. When any deep trust has to be put
into words we discover that belief-its statement-is the
interruption of faith. One used to have unthinking faith
in the safety of the streets; now one at best believes that
the stranger coming along will not assault one. Common
speech records the shifting emphasis when it uses "I be·
lieve so" to mean "I am not sure."
If in order to leap the mountain chasm it was necessary
to overcome "The fear that kills," it is.no less important to
remember the poet's next line: "And hope unwilling to be
fed." For despite the derivation of the word, it is a mistake
to suppose that everybody wants to believe what is agree·
able.** Many prefer the worst; to them news or ideas feel
true because they are gloomy. When Freud said that
science was the conquest of will over the pleasure princi·
pie, he evidently felt that the truths of science robbed him
of pleasure, and he rejoiced. But it is just as reasonable to
say that scientific work is the expression of man's free will
invading the realm of necessity, in which case science is
one form of the pursuit of happiness.
These opposed views are doubtless never to be reconciled, but they illustrate a main contradiction of our century. The age cries out for all the freedoms-the free will of
individual self-determination, the free choice of social and
cultural pluralism, the right to free beliefs and utterance,
the free access to good things that equality affords. But it
also believes in the material, medical, subpsychical determinism of all acts and thoughts, and it turns its back upon
risk, which is the necessary companion of free will as well as
of the right and will to believe. So while half our energy
goes to freeing, the other half is spent on trying to make
safe, to control, to predetermine by means akin to the behaviorist's conditioning or the poll-taker's way of freezing
the future. Our worship of science springs from the same
passion for certainty (plus the hold it gives on other's opinions) rather than from intellectual pleasure and admiration. Similarly, because they are risky and disturbing,
heroism and ambition are thought wrong and ridiculous;
tests, statistics, diets, charts tell everybody "This is what
you ought to be-indeed, whether you know it or not, this
is what you are.'' And with that denial of freedom and risk,
anxious guilt replaces the sense of accomplishment.
**"Belief' seems to have a two-pronged etymology: be-lief means be-glad,
as in "I'd just as lief," lief being related to love; belief is also connected
with leave in the sense of allow. Our belief is thus what we should be
glad to think when it is allowable to do so: exactly James's position.
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�Treasure Hunt
Meyer Liben
It was one of those lovely New England days late in
August which our great authors of the early and middle
nineteenth century have described for us so easily, so extensively. When a region has achieved a given importance
-political, cultural, whatsoever-the climate and terrain
take on an added significance. How much more so if the
beauty is there to begin with!
I am poor at natural description, I find it difficult to portray what is, whatever exists, in distinction, I mean, to
what is happening (I add that as a kind of self-pleading, to
hide a deficiency). I am plainly insensitive to natural beauty
(a great deal is happening there) having a poor sense for
color, space, and relationship.
Lake, mountain, and cloud blended. The predominant
colors were green, blue, and brown, the dusty brown of
road. A few clouds wandered aimlessly in a sky otherwise
absolutely clear. I mention the aimlessness of the clouds
because that contrasts so strongly with the decisive, the
volitional nature of the event now ready to begin, I mean
the Treasure Hunt in the annual Blue and Gold color
competition in the summer camp set in a terrain which
has been so closely and charmingly, so easily and extensively described by our great authors of the early and middle nineteenth century.
A word in passing about this Color War, a phenomenon
requiring explanation for those unfamiliar with the customs of the summer camps of the late 1920s and the early
1930s. The competitive element was strong, mirroring
that of the Great Society. There was no particular effort
made to disguise or soften the competitive instincts.
Everyone in camp, counsellor and camper alike-with exceptions to be mentioned-was on the Blue or the Gold
team engaging in every variety of sport, in dramatics, and
in any other kind of activity which lent itself to competition. Our Blue and Gold lasted for only five days. There
were some camps at the time which were divided on the
very first day, even on the bus or train carrying them all
out of the city, and the struggle for points, for victory,
went on all during the summer! That was obviously exaggerating, rather than mirroring, the world round about,
and then there were camps coming into existence which
discouraged, even forbade this type of competition, trying
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
to create an atmosphere different from that of the society.
The competition in these camps was of a low-pressure
sort; in some cases the element of cooperation was definitely encouraged.
But our camp stood in the middle between those which
were competition-crazy and those which were competitionshy-we had our five days of Blue and Gold rivalry (deeper
thinkers amongst us referred to it as an attenuated hangover of the War Between the States) and we were now on
our fourth day of that rivalry, with the issue in doubt, and
an important 25 points to be awarded to the team (this
was a Senior Division event) winning the Treasure Hunt.
There were three on a team. On the Blue team were
Larry Altman, Dick Gordon, and Dave Crown. On the
Gold team were Marv Woolman, Jackie Lesser, and Ben
Semmel. This game-finding a written clue on the basis
of a written clue, and so to the final treasure, usually a
prize, in this case the 25 points-requires intelligence and
speed. There is hardly a game that doesn't. Now Larry
and Marv were very intelligent (both, as it happened, from
Townsend Harris Hall), while Dick and Jackie were very
fast, ran neck and neck in the sprints, and both murder at
laying down a bunt and beating it to first. That left Dave
and Ben to represent sagacity, the guiding hand, even
what we in our camp called "character,n a quality for
which medals were awarded at the reunion held in midwinter. "Character" meant a certain stability; often times
the awards were made to those who seemed most reserved
and didn't particularly shine in one sport or another. The
stability didn't seem to jibe altogether with the sagacity,
but that was part of the confusion of this particular area
of choice.
The contestants were gathered around the flagpole, situated on the parade grounds which overlooked the lake.
The Grand Isle seemed very close, the brilliant clarity of
that August day acting as a kind of telescope. Down at the
waterfront the sophomores were starting their swimming
meet, and the points to be won here, tho not crucial, were
bound to be important.
Above the cries and splashes of the sophs one of the
judges, head of the Senior Division, laid down the rules. A
word about these judges. The Head Counsellor and the
13
�camp Doctor were kind of ex-officio judges-they might
be used if a shortage or an emerge'ncy developed. The active judges were usually counsellors chosen for their noncombative natures. They came most from the intellectuals,
those (often, of course mistakenly) thought to be the least
interested in victory and therefore, by a curious twist in
logic, the most judicious. If a counsellor went to an Ivy
League school, or planned to do medical research, he was
pretty sure to be chosen for a judge. So do the men of the
world underrate the fierce rivalry of mind and spirit.
"The boundaries," said the head of the Senior Division,
"are the backstop of the baseball field (not into the woods),
the beginning of the girls' camp (not into the girls' camp),
the parents' Social Hall, and the lake (not into the lake).
And remember, no conversation with anyone not on your
team."
This last warning was given because (as this judge had
heard) there had been a scandal a number of years back,
years after the Black Sox scandal, in which spies were used
to report the discoveries of the opposing team. These spies
would follow the enemy, see where the clue was replaced,
and report accordingly. That episode almost disrupted the
Color War, but then it came back stronger than ever.
I'd like to sketch in a little of the background of this
Head Senior Counsellor, while he is laying down the law in
his rather pedantic manner, tho shot through with flashes
of wit which were swiftly reabsorbed into the pedantry,
only to reappear again, for he was bright and nimble, really
assumed a pedantic style to cover an extreme restlessness,
a power of imagination.
His name is jules Kurtin, he has just finished his senior
year (on scholarship) at Yale, and will enter Law School in
the falL He is a kind of solitary, friendly with both the eggheads and the athletes, tho belonging to neither group, and
naturally incurring the suspicion of both. Since he had no
girl friend, there were rumors that he was a homosexual,
but that was wrong, it was just that he had no girl friend.
Rumors of sexual deviations and difficulties were not uncommon-it was an easy way of getting back at someone
who seemed superior or odd. He had no camp experience
before this year, and had no particular interest in going to
the camp. His sister, however, had a boy and a girl of camp
age, and she insisted that her brother be included in the
kind of package deal which was usual then, and probably
still is, in the summer camps. So, since he had nothing
better to do for the summer, he found himself at camp.
Then he was made head of the Senior Division because
the man who had been hired for that job gave it up at the
last minute for a better-paying job in the Poconos. Thereluctance of the other Senior counsellors (who had been to
the camp before and wished to continue for themselves
the benefits of its traditio!"! as a "Counsellor's Paradise")
propelled Jules into this position, in which, after an unshaky start, he managed quite adequately. In view of his
college, his temperament, and consequent reputation in
the camp community, it was only natural that he should
have been chosen as one of the judges. No one could
14
imagine jules taking sides in this war. No one thought that
he would fight over a close decision at home or threaten
to leave the camp unless the broad jumper on the other
team was disqualified for a foot fault. It was the felt absence of this combative edge which disqualified jules from
being chosen for the Blue and Gold.
So jules, in spite of his comparative unfamiliarity with
the ins and outs of the camp (for many of the counsellors
had been there, beginning as campers, for as long as ten
years) had been given the task of working out the route and
writing the clues for the Treasure Hunt. He at first approached this as a rather pedestrian task, but as he began
to work on it, one night at a writing table in the parents'
lodge, his interest was aroused. The game took on the profound meaning which all games, sufficiently examined,
will bring to light, every game being a deposit, so to say, of
man's history and ·forgotten behavior. jules began to see
this game as a kind of allegory of life's pursuits, of all the
goods (and evils) which we are forever seeking. He saw the
Treasure not only as money-he thought of the Holy Grail,
the Golden Fleece, of the brawling and curiously honest
madness of California in 1848.
Then he jotted down, as they came to mind, some of
man's pursuits: Fame, Love, Money, P.ower, God, Happi·
ness, Truth, justice, Security, Failure, Status, Understanding the Origins of the Universe.
These were some of the pursuits from which he decided
to make his choice for the game. And because he realized
that so many people do not know what it is they are pursuing, indeed are seeking something to pursue, he added
Ideals to his list.
And what about the randomness and mystification in
life? He grinned at the thought of his favorite line from
Ring Lardner. Lost, at the wheel of a car, close to home,
our author asks a policeman for instructions. Advised to
take the Boston Post, Ring replies: "I have already subscribed to one out-of-town paper".
So, out of the joy of play and amateur mystification, he
included this last sentence as one of the clues. Does this
sound as tho it would be too esoteric an allusion for the
hunters? Not at alL For, as it happened, there was a counsellor from Boston, who received, every day, precisely the
Boston newspaper in question, which he spread out,
weather permitting, on the parade grounds, during free
time, rest hour, or whatever other time he could snatch
from duties not very arduous to begin with.
But now the clues are finished, and the hunt has started.
Each side is given the first clue. They study it anxiously,
eagerly, wanting to get the head start. It was the famous
quotation from Socrates about the worthlessness of
the unexamined life.
Now in these summer camps, in these close social con-
glomerations, there is a high level of interpersonal knowledge, there is endless joking and jibing about oddities of
behavior, an intricate and ever-changing web of friend and
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�enemy, there is a great deal of sadistic gossip (as well as
friendly gossip, boasts of the merits and achievements of
those on your side), there is a great deal of the hostile interest of the young, part of the pattern of what we today
call "putting one down".
The point of these clues in the Treasure Hunt is that a
given word, or phrase, will, through free·associational
routes, rational analysis, or luck, yield up the material leading the hunters to a given person, or a given place. So
these paragraphs, these lines, sentences, and clauses are
studied with the care and intensity that the New Critics
give to a line of verse.
Obviously the key word in this first clue was the word
"unexamined". Now there was a youth in the camp, whose
name was Jordan Kustler, who refused to be examined by
the camp nurse. On the occasions when these examina-
tions were necessary (the nurse sometimes doubling for the
doctor, or assisting him in these mass prophylaphtic orgies)
Jordan would disappear-into the woods surrounding the
camp, down to the lake and under a war canoe, anywheres
where he thought he'd be safe from the examination
(mostly throat) of our attractive nurse.
This clue, therefore, was not the most difficult of clues.
Larry and Marv (the smart ones, you recall) hit on the answer at about the same time, and the teams, with Dick and
Jackie in the lead (the fast ones, you recall) sped towards
the bunk and the bed ofJordan Kustler, twelve years old, a
Junior. The two speedsters arrived in a dead heat (the distance from pole to bunk being very short) but Jackie found
the slip, which was under Jordan's pillow, and, according
to the rules, his team, assembled, had one minute to read
and analyze the clue before handing it over to the foe, or,
in the absence of the foe, to replace it exactly where found.
To enforce these rules, the judges were spread out at the
different discovery spots, moving ahead with the progress
of the game. This, of course, was to prevent the discoverer
of the slip from hiding it in a place absolutely unrelated to
the sense of the previous clue. It is an example of the imperfectibility of man. So the Gold team examined the new
clue, and then, at the word of the judge, handed it to the
Blue team, and tore off in the direction of home plate.
Look homeward, angel,
Milton's line, Wolfe's title, was the second clue.
When writing down this clue, Jules was thinking of
man's role in the world, that he must seek to prove himself in the great outside, and then return to the ease and
safety of home (the way Shakespeare did), tho, as with
Ulysses, the trials on the way home were not the least hazardous. To the Blues and the Golds the line meant only
one thing: Home Plate on the baseball field. The Blues
reached the plate just as the Golds were streaking off.
On the ball field, the Juniors were in the midst of a game
worth 50 points, and these could prove to be important,
if not absolutely crucial in the final tally.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
"What's the idea?" asked the catcher on the Gold team
as Dick went for the home plate. "How are you supposed to
play a ball game with an army tearing around home plate?"
But he had not objected when the Gold team had looked
for and found the clue buried und<;r the plate.
"Don't hold him back," said the judge, "let him look."
And then Dick triumphantly came up with the slip of paper, and discussed it with Larry and Dave, who had by now
appeared on the scene.
That third clue was not an easy one, it certainly puzzled
the Blues, who stood discussing and analyzing it, at the
edge of the field, not far off from the Gold team, which
was similarly stymied.
This clue read:
Luck is a fool's name for fate,
and it was an expression of the sort that sometimes gains
currency in this kind of social organization, makes the
rounds, is on everyone's tongue and then is swiftly forgotten. Both teams now tried to remember who it was that
had coined the phrase, or introduced the phrase, or made
the phrase popular, thereby associating himself indissolubly
with that phrase. Marv Woolman was sure that the expression had originated with Boris Melkin, a somewhat bizarre Junior Counsellor (that is, a younger fellow, a J.C. not
a counsellor in the Junior Division) who put on Hamletish
manners, roaming the camp grounds, quoting tag-ends of
verse and wisdom. 'Tm pretty sure" said Marv, "that he
started that saying" and off went the Gold team towards
the bunk and bed of Boris Melnick. But Larry Altman had
another thought, it was a kind of free-wheeling inspirational thought, one of those flashes into the outer darkness that lights up precisely the object lost or hidden.
"Let's go" he said, "to the horseshoe that's hanging on the
Social Hall door." So, without question-one can run as
fast puzzled as clear-headed-off sped the Blues, with
Dick in the lead, and reaching that spot, he sure enough
found the fourth clue tied onto that horseshoe. They read
it swiftly and dashed away from the Social Hall, trying, unsuccessfully, not to be seen by the Gold team. Frustrated
in their search in Boris Melkin's bed and bunk (to say
nothing of his trunk and personal belongings) that bunk,
as it happened, being at the end of the line and so having
a view of the Social Hall, the Gold team (it was actually
Ben Semmel, to give credit where credit is due) noted the
surreptitious departure of the Blues-they left like scouts
at dusk-and began a swift examination of the Social Hall.
Finally, they hit on the horseshoe, without any association
coming to mind, but by that time the Blues had a lead of
about five minutes, by no means commanding at this stage
of the game, but fairly significant, and were far away from
the Social Hall, while the Golds stood around and puzzled
over the fourth clue.
That fourth clue was the line from Shelley:
Fa me is love disguised,
15
�and this one, too, proved somewhat of a puzzler for the
contending teams. These clues (the analysis of whose
structure is long overdue, quite perfect for a doctoral the·
sis straddling sociology and literature) often depend on as·
sociations of an eccentric sort or on puns of a sometimes
ghastly sort. In this fourth clue, for example, both teams
spent time on the word 'is', for it seemed at first glance to
offer the most likely possibilities, considered that one of
the counsellors was called Iz, and so both teams went into a
swift breakdown of his life, loves, and habits, but couldn't
somehow come up with enough to go on, enough to make
them move in a given direction, so they looked further into
the mystery hidden in this short line. What follows is surely
too gross a generalization, but it sometimes happens when
those of roughly similar backgrounds are engaged in the
same problem, that they will sometimes see the answer at
about the same time. This of course is running down the
importance of individual difference. Nevertheless, the two
sides suddenly remembered the play (written by the dra·
matics counsellor) in which the actor, wearing a mask of
wordly power, suddenly throws off that mask, reveals a
face desperately alone, and pronounces the name buried
in his heart. It was a memorable moment, both teams remembered it, and the Golds rushed back into the Social
Hall, followed soon after by the Blues, who had not gone
too far off for their deliberations. The six of them milled
around on the stage, seeking the· clue which had to be
there. It was there, worked into the folds of the curtain,
and fell when the curtain was shaken in a moment of random despair. Dick and Ben touched the paper at the same
time (so said the judges, after a disputation) and both
teams looked together at the fifth clue, the one already
mentioned:
I have all ready subscribed to one out of town paper,
and that turned out to be a pretty easy clue. The contenders lit out for the Bostonian's bunk, but there was no clue
there, no object left untouched, no possible hiding place
passed over, and then they all went, as the Irish say, after
himself. He was officiating as one of the judges at the
Sophomore swimming meet. In no time at all he was surrounded by the six youths, and paid them as little mind as
he could, considering the circumstances, the sixth clue
folded and protruding from the coin pocket of his swimming trunks. Dave Crown of the Blues spotted the piece
of paper and grabbed it. That gave his team the minute's
edge to analyze that clue and reflect on it.
The sixth clue was the statement from Laotse, which
had impressed Jules, as an amateur cosmogonist (who is
not an amateur cosmogonist?):
All of a sudden, nothing came into being.
Larry, Dick, and Dave looked incredulously at this sentence, and then incredulously at one another. So did the
16
Gold team (at sentence and one another) when the paper
came into their hands.
"This is a reallulu.
"What is this supposed to mean?''
"That Jules is off his rocker, bats in his belfry."
"What does nothing come from?"
''What does it mean?''
These were some of the comments made and some of
the questions raised by members of both teams. They
were on the shore, a little ways off from the dock, and
were pretty close to one another. It looked almost as tho
the difficulty of the clue had brought them together. But
then they moved apart and began a closer examination of
the text.
There was a freshman in the camp by the name of Lee
Soden.
"SuddenLee, suddenly, Lee Soden" said Marv excitedly,
and off went the Golds on a wild goose-chase. It was a genuine wrong number.
The Blues recalled that one of the counsellors, Bob
Kamin, was very fond of the expression: "Nothing to it".
He used it on every conceivable occasion, preferably when
it sounded quite senseless. Apparently he liked the sound
of it, or preferred to stop conversations. Or it might just
have been a kind of habit, the way some couldn't help
spitting, or winking an eye. So off dashed the Blues on as
wild a goose chase as the enemy.
Both possibilities, of course, were genuine, they deserved exploration. They were only wrong, and after the
teams had proved to themselves, by the most exhaustive
search, that this was the case, they continued to study the
sentence written by the Chinese philosopher, desperately
seeking the word, the sound, that would send them off in
the right direction.
After a while someohe (Ben Semmel, as it happened)
saw the word being (which should have been existence,
but Jules remembered it as being) as beeing, and that led
the Gold team to the place where the bee-hive had recently been discovered and soon destroyed-after a series
of swift, high-level discussions, the final one on the spot.
Here, sure enough, the Golds found the seventh clue, and
so went back into their early lead. And this turned out to
be a fairly substantial lead, for it was a good ten minutes
before the Blues, after excluding one possibility and another, picked up the right word play.
Now it somewhat threw Jules that these sentiments,
which he had chosen with a certain amount of care, with
some thought, should have to be read as semantic puzzles,
interpreted on the basis of these puns, these sophomoric
plays on words. But that was the tradition in which the
game had come to be played, and to change the tradition
in the middle of the game, he thought, is a way of spoiling
the game. So was the content overlooked, the allegory
grounded. But the sentiments had to be read nevertheless, and the kids might feel some sense of the over-all ...
Jules's thoughts were checked, as he approached the
scene of the seventh clue, by the sight of Georgie Lessing,
11
AUTIJMN /WINTER 1982-83
�a senior. Jules grinned at the sight of the boy sitting on the
steps of his bunk. He was the only kio in the camp who
had stayed out of the Blue and Gold competition. He did
it as a matter of principle. "If you want me to compete,"
he said, "I'll go home." And that, of course, would have
opened up the problem of a return on the camp fee, if indeed that fee had been paid in full, to say nothing of his
two cousins in the girls' camp. All manners of pressure
were brought on the boy, but he was adamant. "It's all
madness," he said, "creating a phony rivalry, fighting
where there are no real issues." So he sulked in his cabin,
or, as now, sat on the steps of his bunk, reading "War and
Peace" or one of the "Baseball Joe" series, for that was the
style of his eclecticism.
"Where are they looking now?" asked Georgie. "At the
bottom of the lake?"
"If you only knew," said Jules.
He hesitated and then decided it wouldn't be cricket to
tell Georgie about this next clue, which was a really corny
one. The thought of it always made him a bit hysterical,
being so obviously ridiculous, so outlandish, so idiotic. In
order to make use of this clue, he had had to get the permission of a counsellor called Wilfred Thar.
The clue, of course, was:
There's gold in them thar hills.
Thar had a mouthful of gold fillings. Between two of the
teeth so filled there was a slit, formed, no doubt, by the
slow drift of the lower teeth, and after a fairly lengthy discussion (Thar being a rather finicky chap) Jules convinced
him that this slit formed by the drifting of the teeth would
be the perfect place to hide a clue, which had to be written, of course, in very small script on a very small piece of
paper.
"Now don't swallow it," Jules had said, and they both
laughed, Jules giddily, Wilfred in a rather pained manner.
Well, it didn't need Intelligence, Character, or Speed to
figure out where that clue was. Thar made no effort to
hide-he sat on the steps of his bunk, watching the runners as they streaked by in the early stages of the game,
waiting for the moment he did not exactly relish, tho having made his promise, he was determined to stay with it.
Now and then he felt with his tongue to feel whether the
slip of paper was in its proper place.
Well, the reader can well imagine the jollification, the
addlement which then surrounded the person and place
of Wilfred Thar. The Gold team, with its ten minute edge,
was down at the bunk in a flash and were rather thrown
by Thar' s manner, which seemed a little more hostile than
the occasion warranted. They even felt for a moment that
they were on the wrong track. There was a confused huddle, during which the three team mates reassured one another, and then they started on the search. They did a
thorough dismantling job on the bunk, on the suspect's
bed, and when it became clear that there was no clue inside, they approached the counsellor. He sat in a species
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
of horrified resignation; the fact is that he was very sanitation-minded, suffered on occasion from fears of contagious diseases, and looked forward with some apprehension
at the prospect of six youths poking around in his mouth
in search of a small piece of paper. In the summer his fear
of contagion was related to tropical diseases, such as
typhoid and yellow fever, diseases quite unknown in New
England at the time. He had an opportunity, while waiting, to think of the medical backgrounds of the six boys,
and was disturbed at the remembered knowledge that
Dick Gordon's brother had been in a New York hospital
for a reason which Wilfred had never thought to ask
about. Thar was wearing a T shirt, a pair of bathing trunks,
and sandals.
"Wauld you mind taking off your T shirt and sandals?"
asked Ben Semmel.
The Golds had decided that it would be best if Ben, as a
Character winner, should approach Wilfred along these
lines.
Without a word, the counsellor removed his shirt and
sandals. Both were carefully examined and returned.
"Do you mind," asked Ben, "if we looked in the pockets·
of your trunks?"
"Not at all," said Thar, ~~help yourself."
So they searched and again found nothing.
"This sounds stupid" said Ben. "but we'd like to take a
quick look into your mouth."
Wilfred opened his mouth without much interest and
smiled without much joy when Ben pulled the paper out.
The Golds quickly jotted down the eighth clue and Ben
started to replace the piece of paper.
"Never mind," said Wilfred, "I'll handle that," and he
carefully replaced the clue just as the Blue team hove into
sight.
Now the Blues did not bother with bed and bunk. One
of them had heard from a kid in Thar's bunk about the
unusual amount of gold in his counsellor's mouth, and
with hardly a word of apology they went straight for that
area. The counsellor winced when Dick pulled out the
paper.
The Blues had picked up five minutes on the Golds,
with five clues to go.
The eighth clue, before being approved by the camp
authorities, required a certain amount of discussion, some
dispute. A quotation relating to Noah, and reinforced by
mention of a youth nicknamed Arky, clearly led to the Ark
in which, of course, was enclosed the Torah, used in the
Social Hall on the rainy Sabbaths, for when the sky was
clear, the Services were held outdoors, on the parade
grounds over the lake.
In this high-level discussion about the use of the Ark,
there was, at first, a general demurrer at the notion of using it in any way in this game. The word "sacrilegious"
was used. But Jules explained the way in which he had
planned the Treasure Hunt and his arguments, with their
educational cast, softened the opposition.
"This relates to the search for God," explained Jules.
17
�"How can we possibly exclude this search from the game?
Is it less important than the search' for money and power,
than the search for love and justice?"
Presented this way, the argument was irresistible. But
jules's desire to put the clue inside the Ark was turned
down decisively, nor would the judges accept the idea of
pinning the clue on the curtain covering the Ark. They finally decided to put the clue on a bench in front of the
Ark, and that was fairly easy for both sides, so the Gold
team maintained its five minute lead.
In composing the ninth clue, Jules used the expression
the Pursuit of Failure.
That in fact was the clue. He had heard it used by one
friend about another friend. jules remembered the phrase
tho he himself was very little preoccupied with failure, being young, healthy, ambitious, and hopeful. But he was
aware of the Freudian implications of the statement. Some
seek their own destruction, feel they deserve their own
destruction because the early murderous impulses had
never been properly abreacted (a word he sometimes
thought of, but never used), because the impulses were
stronger than the usual, or the provocations greater, or
the character structure weaker. No doubt there are other
possibilities-it is even conceivable that one has done
something for which he feels he deserves punishment.
And a kind of punishment is apparently the pursuit of failure-the fact that this behavior can be pleasurable only
adds to the punishment when the pursuer comes to un·
derstand that the pleasure is a trick, a device to keep him
on this pursuit of failure, for what is the point of pursuing
failure if there is nothing in it at all?
This clue, too, was based on an outrageous pun. There
was a counsellor (one of the counsellors for the freshmen,
kids about six or seven years old) who, early in the summer, had fallen desperately in love with a girl counsellor
called-yes, yes, this is her name, unbelievable as it
sounds-Phalia. Her name was Phalia. She was most attractive, flashing eyes and all, and it was not surprising
that Fred Angst (the freshman counsellor) should have
fallen in love with her. She was apparently a living example of his type, and who, all things being equal, will not fall
in love with a living example of his type? The fact that she
did not respond in kind was part of the over-all situation in
which Fred found himself. He was a serious chap who liked
to win as much as the next one, and found that he was not
sleeping as well as one would expect in this cold, bracing,
New England night air. He was almost always up an hour
or two before reveille, t.hinking of what he had said, or
should have said, of what she had said, of what he wished
she would say, thinking of how she looked, imagining moments of a deeper intimacy than they had so far enjoyed.
The fact is that Phalia did not respond in kind, she being
entranced in another direction. It was happening all over
18
the place, but Fred was more insistent in his pursuit than
most of the others, he did not drift easily to other faces,
other bodies. His difficulties became known the way difficulties become known when people are looking to see the
triumphs and difficulties of others. Furthermore, in the
words of George Herbert, "Love and a cough cannot be
hid." Fred's situation, known to the counsellors, became
known to the campers (who is not interested in abiding,
unrequited love?) and Fred Angst was known as the one
who carried the brightest of all torches.
But it was a rough clue, the pun was beyond limits, and
both teams puzzled over the four words, saying them over
and over again, saying them backwards, forwards, and
sideways, turning the phrase round and round. Really it
shouldn't have been that hard because the New York way
of pronouncing "failure" is precisely Phalia and finally,
Larry Altman hit on the connection.
"Down to the freshman bunk" he cried, and as they
ran, he quickly explained his thought. Dick Gordon sped
ahead, easily outdistancing his team mates, for the frosh
bunk was at the other side of the camp, and Dick had the
tenth clue by the time Larry and Dave arrived. It was
pasted on Fred Angst's trunk, more or less disguised as a
Railway Express ticket. About five minutes later (for love
and a cough cannot be hid), the Gold team arrived, and
decided to check first the person of Fred. (Spur of the moment luck had taken Dick into the bunk). Fred allowed
the search, tho it was disconcerting, for the freshman
were involved in their own aspect of the color war-they
were in the midst of a potato race, which Fred was umpiring, or overseeing, or whatever it is one does with seven
year old kids involved in a game which they have just
learned, involving a set of rules and swift movement. The
competitive excitement of the Blue and Gold had pene'trated the somewhat isolated life of these youngsters (for
they were off from the main camp, going to bed earlier)
and the ten points picked up by the winner of the Potato
race might easily prove of crucial importance. There was
indeed a case, known to the old rememberers, of a color
competition decided by the five points given for greater
silence at the dinner table.
Finding nothing on Fred's person, the Golds went into
the bunk, and of course they found the clue, but by that
time they were about ten minutes behind, and streaked
off with the tenth clue in mind. That clue was probably
the easiest of all the clues, being the statement from
Isaiah (2.8) that
Everyone worshippeth the work of his own hands,
and that could lead only to one place, which must be the
Arts & Crafts hut.
We leave our contestants for the moment to record a
conversation between one of the judges, stationed near
this hut (to be in front of it might be a give-away) and the
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�camp chef. The kitchen staff was not involved in the Blue
and Gold. The waiters were not invdlved, but being old
campers or would-be counsellors, they generally took sides,
while the kitchen workers, older, and often without camp
experience (coming from the city employment agencies)
found it difficult to understand what was going on. They
were amazed, for example, by the silence at table. The
chef was baffled by the fierceness of this rivalry, did not
understand that he was witnessing a pure, or abstract,
struggle for victory, on the basis of an artificial division,
and that the winner wins precisely nothing but the victory, and the right to assume a superior stance as against
the losers.
"Why," said the judge, to the incredulous chef, "there
was a case, a few years ago, not in this camp, where the
color war started at the bus terminal, the teams traveling
on separate buses-to learn songs and cheers, plan strategy, etc. Well, the bus drivers were carried away by the
spirit of the event, by the excitement of the songs and
cheers, and decided to make a race of reaching the camp,
tho there were no points awarded (so they say, but who
knows?). Well, one of the buses got into an accident, luckily no one was hurt, just a few kids shaken up, and that's
how that camp season started."
"What is it again they win?" asked the chef.
"Only the satisfaction of winning," said the judge, who,
with more knowledge, was less astounded than disturbed
by this abstract lust for victory.
But then the conversation was interrupted by the appearance of Dick Gordon, headed for the Arts and Crafts
hut, on a hint from Isaiah.
Now Jules would have the boys understand the prophet's
meaning, that it was wrong to worship the work of one's
hands, that this leads to idolatry, the worship of made objects, and can lead even to self-idolatry. "See this wondrous object I have made. Therefore am I superior, more
noble, etc." The painter says to himself: "What a wondrous thing I have created," but such a work merely goes
into the world and takes its place amongst the other
created objects.
Nor is it to be implied (Jules would like the boys to think
of this too) that the work of other hands ought to be worshipped, but only the living invisible God, who inspires
creation, this foray into the thinly-domesticated mystery,
this salvage out of chaos.
But mostly
the work of his own hands
and that work will be worshipped by the maker only if it is
not in use. Man worships what he makes and hides, the
way a miser worships gold (late at night, when there are no
distractions) but once he sends that object into the world,
why it is no longer his. He will not worship what is being
used day by day, even being used up (for no such created
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
object lasts forever). There is no secrecy, no idolatry or
shame, it is only what man has made with his own hands
(sometimes amazing, but never to be worshipped) to take
its rightful place in the circulation of created things, rivalling the objects that came into the world, nor must these
objects be worshipped, being merely signs of the inexplicable Creation, the mystery of the making of worlds.
Ideally speaking, Jules would have liked the boys to
think of these matters, as they schemed for their points in
the Blue and Gold. But he knew how fierce competition
will sometimes destroy thought, knew the chasm that lay
between victory and ideality.
"But something will rub off" he thought, as he watched
the other Blues enter the Arts & Crafts hut.
In that hut were objects in various stages of completion.
There were more objects of utility than objects of art, in
line with the predilection of the counsellor in charge and
a certain sense-mostlY unconscious-of the injunction
against the making of graven images. There were wooden
boxes, of various shapes, meant f6r various uses, and in
one of these boxes was the eleventh clue. That made the
discovery pretty routine, for what boys, seeking a hidden
slip of paper in a room full of empty boxes, would not
open those boxes, first off? So the Blues found this clue,
and, ten minutes later, the Golds found the clue, and off
they were, on the next to the last lap.
This eleventh clue was more difficult than others:
I have always known
That at last I would
Take this road, but yesterday
I did not know that it would be today.
Narihira (translated by Kenneth Rexroth)
When the Golds found this clue, the Blues were still
puzzling over it. They did not know in which direction to
move, trying desperately to decipher the lines before the
Golds picked up the clue, for they feared the keen mind
of Marv Woolman, remembering (all of a sudden) that he
had won a high school poetry prize. So the Blues studied
the document, the way one studies the missing word in
the crossword puzzle-time and the unconscious sometimes succeed, activated by the reason, and activating in
turn that reason, and in the interplay the missing word appears, the puzzle is solved. And then the Golds were in
the same boat. Both teams studied the text. What road
was meant? What kind of yesterday, what kind of today?
And yet the answer was not so terribly difficult-one
only had to hit on the fitting event, and then all fell into
place.
What event was this? Now there had been a boy in
Jules's bunk, a boy of twelve, called Sandy, a very engaging and ingenious child, very spirited, very poignant, a
child who could easily win one's heart, the way he won
Jules's heart. Towards the end of July, Jules received a rush
19
�summons from the camp director. It was in the late after·
noon, in the pleasant interlude between the end of the
afternoon swim and dinner time. All moved at their ease (I
say all, but there are always some so dispirited that even
this pleasant interlude had no effect), discussed the high
spots of the day, hungry after much activity and sure that
food would be forthcoming. The head counsellor and the
doctor were seated with the director, who handed Jules a
telegram. This telegram announced the death of Sandy's
father. Jules looked at the message blankly. The dead
stranger slowly disappeared, and the problem remained of
breaking the news to the child. We may worship the dead,
but we must take care of the living.
"We thought," said the director, "that it would be best
if you told the boy, you're pretty close to him."
Jules nodded. He thought of a book by Mrs. Ward (was
that her name? what was her first name again?) in which a
character is faced with the problem of breaking such news.
It is a universal situation, but each event has its unique
approach.
"You'll understand how to break it to him," said the di·
rector, "gradually."
~~Yes/' said Jules.
He was rather proud that he had been chosen for so delicate and difficult a task. Why not the director, the head
counsellor, the head of the Junior Division? He wondered
why the doctor was at this meeting? Why a doctor at the
news of the death of a distant stranger? A kind of rever·
sian, he thought, to the ancient medicine man, the witch
doctor, the man of magic summoned at the moment of awe
and loss. Then, of course, before one dies, he most gener·
ally is sick, and so the doctor is summoned when he dies.
There was so little left for any of them to say at this conference, it all seemed quite unreal, except for the reality
of telling the child. If the child didn't have to be told (but
those were not the instructions) why then the matter would
slowly have disappeared amongst all this social happiness,
the way a wisp of cloud will disappear in a joyful sky of
blue. There would have been no high-level conference.
But the man was dead, and the child had to be told, he
had to be sent home, to be at his dead father's side, and
walking down to the camp (the meeting was in the parents'
lodge) during the interlude, the free play, Jules thought of
what it was he had to do.
He had to be serious with the child, until the child realized that his counsellor was serious, and then the child
would begin to expect an explanation of this seriousness,
for this seriousness had to be maintained beyond the usual range. That was all that had to be done-a certain seriousness had to create a certain expectancy, and that
expectancy had to create a given anxiety, and then the
anxiety had to be met.
So Jules was serious in the bunk, serious to all the kids
in the bunk, but particularly to Sandy. And the child grew
serious, expectant, and anxious, for this was an unex~
pected style of behavior on the counsellor's part. But Jules
20
decided that he would not break the news till the next
morning. Should I trouble his sleep even more? thought
Jules, and he decided that the best time to break bad news
is in the morning, when one is least tired, but would the
anxiety interfere with the child's sleep?
That night, after dinner, the Juniors had camp fire, they
sat around, sang, listened to stories, roasted marshmallows, put out the fire in the immemorial way of boys. The
songs floated in the air, the stories flooded the stillness,
the voids of expectancy, the fire died in the solemn hiss.
\Then, when the kids turned in for the night, Jules sat on
Sandy's bed, spoke to him about the city, about his life at
home, enquired about his mother, about his father, about
his sister, and then again about his father, created an air of
seriousness, of anxiety. And the child was confused,
troubled, fell asleep after an active day in which he had
played his part. Hadn't he doubled in the ninth, and then
come home with the winning run?
The next day, after breakfast, Jules took the child for a
walk, down to the lake. That was an unusual act.
"But what about inspection?" asked Sandy, for after
breakfast the bunks were inspected, for poorly-made beds,
spider-webs on the ceiling, dirt in the corners, and each
week a banner was awarded to the cleanest bunk in the
division.
"We'll be back in time" said Jules, and they walked
slowly along the shore. The lake was absolutely calm, the
sky clear, the visibility perfect. Jules asked about the boy's
school life, about his street life, about his grandfather,
about his father, about his teachers, about his friends,
about his father. The child was uneasy, worried, wondered about this walk, about this conversation, began to
expect what he did not want to hear, and then heard it,
slowly and conclusively. The lad was silent, he threw a
rock into the lake, and both watched the widening ripples.
Jules put his arm around the boy's shoulder. They walked
together along the lake-shore.
"Your mother wants you to go home today," said Jules.
"It didn't have to happen," asked Sandy, "did it?"
He looked up trustingly at his counsellor.
"It happened," said Jules, "that's how it is. Now you
must go back, out of respect to your father, to remember
him, and to help your mother."
He felt a bit foolish mouthing these platitudes, but was
not sorry that he said them. What else is there to say? he
thought. Is silence better?
Sandy seemed, on the surface, to be wondering more
than suffering, wondering why this had happened, won·
dering why it happened to him. There was an indication
of anger, that this had happened to him, an indication of
resentment, that this had happened to him, and not to the
others, rather than to the others. He listened to the camp
cries, to the early-morning hum. Then his jaw hardened,
he stoically accepted the inevitable, the mystery and the
disappearance. He acted the man who silently sorrows,
buriesgrief and suffering, and continues his day's work,
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�his life's work. Then the boy's lips trembled, and he burst
into tears, with the awful sense of absolute loss.
So it was only a matter of time before one player or another, one team or another, would stumble on the meaning of the lines of the Japanese poet, would come to think
of one who amongst all having to leave, left earlier than
expected, on the road he would have had to take.
The Gold team picked up the clue first. Far from Marv
Woolman, it was Jackie Lesser, the speedster, who hit on
it. His nimbleness was apparently displaced upwards, and
a certain sympathy, a feelingful note, triumphed over
cleverness and character.
"It's Sandy," cried Jackie. "He left before the season
ended, he took the road home before he was supposed to
take the road home."
Marv and Ben looked at him with an amazement compounded with surprise, even anger, for how come that
Jackie, picked for speed, should have come up with an answer that made immediate sense? But their feelings quickly
disappeared into the competitive crucible, and the three
minds worked as one in trying to figure out just where they
were supposed to look. Would it be in Sandy's old bunk?
But there was clearly a road involved. What road? The road
home, of course. That road started at the top of the hill, it
was the beginning of the country road which led to the
town road, which led to the main road, which led to the
railroad station. So up they-sped to the beginning of that
country road, where stood a great oak tree and thru the
branches of that oak peeped a sheet of paper. It was the
clue, tied around a twig. They read and copied the clue,
looking around all the time to see whether the Blues had
picked up the trail. There was no one in sight. Then one
of the judges appeared from his hiding place, and tied the
paper back on the same twig. Off went the Gold team, not
down the path they had come up on, where they might be
observed by their rivals, but singly the back way, behind the
bunks, to meet near the Nature hut where they read, again,
the lines of Keats which made up the final clue:
Young men and maidens at each other gazed
With hands held back, and motionless, amazed
To see the brightness in each other's eyes
As they were examining these lines, leading to a place,
the Blue team was desperately reading over and over
again the lines of the Japanese poet until they too, by a
process of elimination and association~ came to remember
Sandy and his sudden departure home, and that led them
to the oak tree and the final clue. That clue, those lines
from Keats, were swiftly fathomed by Larry Altman, and
he and his teammates rushed down to the parade grounds
for this was where the boys and girls came together for the
Sabbath services and on all other ceremonial occasions.
(It was quite amazing that the Gold team had so much
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
trouble with these lines, they were so accurate a description of the meetings between brother and sister camps.
The three teammates, standing in front of the Nature
hut-a random meetingplace, away from the oak-were
in full view of the parade grounds, but looked past those
grounds in a kind of panic which sometimes occurs when
the victory is in sight. How else is it possible to explain
their overlooking these meetings, climax of the week, the
girls dressed in their whites [to welcome the Queen of the
Sabbath], the boys scrubbed and combed, in their sailor
ducks and sport shirts, waiting~ in the dusk-for this or
that familiar face, for the figure actively sought out, or flirtatiously avoided, for the figure warm or indifferent?)
A little down the way from the flagpole, Jules waited
with the other judges. He looked out at the lake, on whose
quiet surface, way out in the distance, the boats of strangers were faintly seen. He felt, for a moment,. a curious
sense of power, as one who created movement in others,
even choosing the direction in which they moved. But he
did not like that feeling, and it faded. He wondered whether
he had left out any important pursuits. Of course he hadthere was the search for identity, later to become a rather
fashionable problem, namely, Who am I? or Who am I
really? But he had excluded that pursuit on purpose-he
believed that one found himself (is everybody lost?) not by
looking for one's self, but by struggle in the outside world,
the world of struggle, the world of ideas (a kind of struggle),
of love (a kind of struggle) and so on.
Then the Blues appeared at the parade grounds (with
Dick Gordon, or course, in the lead) and quickly sized up
the situation. There was only the flagpole, and Dave
Crown was the first to look up (character pays) and there,
three-quarters of the way up the pole, the tell-tale piece of
paper was taped.
"There it is" shouted Dave, and then Dick-who was
nimble as well as fast-started to shinny up the pole. This
brought the Gold team out, wondering what connection
the lines of the poet had with the flag, which was swaying
in the slight breeze. Then Ben Semmel understood the
sense of the lines, saw the parade grounds filled with boys
and girls
.. . amazed
to see the brightness in each other's eyes,
saw the paper on the flag pole, but by that time Dick was
up there, pulled off the tape, and swiftly brought to the
ground the paper which read:
TREASURE HUNT WINNER!
and that was certified by the judges who appeared from
their vantage point and made official the victory of the
Blues.
21
�Don Alfonso
In this harmonious villa
Where oboes serenade
And lovesick tenors croon
Of constancy among the sycamores
I think of two old men who closed their eyes
And recollected what they owed.
The one considered wise
As ice crept up his thighs
Settled a rooster on the demigod
Who cured him of becoming.
The other fellow, fat but not a fool
Also perplexed his school
With chatter of a debt to Justice ShallowSuddenly chilled
When to be king his Prince banished the world.
This morning in the coffee house I heard
The fresh Ferrando trill of Phoenixes.
His friend, a baritone but still a boy
Joined him in sixths to idolize
Some lily of allegiance.
I hate a warm duet.
Too arrogant for owing, I'll enjoy
A bet. Adept at recollecting, I'll
Collect, moved not by eros but
Experience. No instant chill
Nor gradual welcome gelidness
But icy from the ages, I'm compelled
By one goad only: to instruct
Exasperating innocence.
Leaving the losers to their wry quartet
I'll shape my cadence to the sages' tune,
A philanthropic glee
Contrived for three:
Midwife to wind·eggs and the source of wit
And I, who knew Giovanni.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
Elliott Zuckerman is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
22
AUTUMN/WINI'ER 1982-83
�The Unity of Leibniz's Thought on
Contingency, Possibility, and Freedom
Arthur Collins
1 The Defects of Cartesian Physics
That it fails to accommodate force is Leibniz's fundamental criticism of Descartes' physics. Descartes tried to
reduce physics to geometry. A conceptual scheme restricted to geometrical concepts lacks resources adequate
for the representation of physical forces. In the context
that is best known and most often discussed by Leibniz,
he attacks Descartes' conception of the conservation of
the "quantity of motion," and he substitutes the idea of
the conservation of vis viva, or active power, which is what
we would call the conservation of energy_I
When we try to state the issues here in up-to-date terms,
at least in the terms of modern classical physics, it can appear that Leibniz is insisting on the conservation of the
product of mass and velocity-squared, while Descartes
calls for the conservation of the product of mass and
velocity. Since mv2 (kinetic energy) and mv (momentum)
are both conserved, some commentators say that Descartes and Leibniz are both right and that debate is out of
place.'
This conciliation is not satisfactory. Nothing like the
modern concept of mass is actually employed by Descartes. Were we to try to introduce umassn where he speaks
of "quantity of matter," we would have to make amendments in his thinking along the very lines which Leibniz
requires. Mass eludes any merely geometrical description
and the shortfall is only made up by appeal, in one way or
another, to something like force. Furthermore, Descartes
actually thinks in terms of what we might call "speed",
that is, motion along any path, straight or curved, while
Professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, Arthur Collins has published articles in many philosophical journals. He last contributed "Objectivity and Philosophical Conversation, Richard Rorty's
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" to the St. John's Review (Winter
1982).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the conservation laws only hold for rectilinear speed. This
distinction becomes significant in Descartes' metaphysics
when he tries to reconcile mind-body interaction with the
thoroughgoing mechanical determinism that he supposes
to rule the material world. Descartes' idea of conservation
and his laws of impact express this determinism. The
problematic mind-body interaction takes place, Descartes
hopes, when purely mental influences manage to "deflect"
the subtlest material particles of the animal spirits in the
pineal gland. Such deflection is supposed to change the
direction but not the quantity of motion of particles affected.' In the parlance of classical physics, this solution
fails because it violates the principle of the conservation
of energy. The deflection of a particle would constitute a
change of velocity (though not necessarily of speed) and,
therefore, a change of energy. This addition or subtraction
of energy would not be charged to any account in the material world. Leibniz makes this point.4
These faults in Descartes' ideas are not just details on
which he remains at an unsatisfactory and preliminary
level, relative to later science. On the contrary, the difficulties spring from views which are among Descartes' most
important and best insights. The claim, "My physics is
nothing but geometry," 5 is widely recognized as the expression of his deepest inspiration in science, but this
view is also, as Leibniz thought, responsible for the most
obvious defects in Descartes' physics. Why are we supposed to agree that physics is just geometry? In part, this
is supposed to follow from the fact that nothing sensuous
is allowed to characterize (touter," spatial, material reality
by Descartes' epistemological analysis. All sensuous characteristics like color, sound, and heat, that is, all the socalled secondary qualities,6 are not really out there. They
exist only in the play of mental states and perceptions in
our minds. Contact with outer things is causally responsible for the generation of ideas with sensuous features, but
material things do not have such features themselves.' On
23
�reflection, it appears that nothing is left with which we
can rightly describe the nonmental 'space-filling world except nonsensuous concepts like figure, magnitude, and
motion.
When sensuous distinctions are no longer thought to distinguish different regions of space, we are reduced to a defoliated universe of moving particles having geometrical
features only. To Descartes this seems a great intellectual
advantage and a trustworthy sign of the correctness of his
epistemology. In fact, it would be better to say that his epistemology is motivated in major part by his scientific objectives. He intends to filter away the sensuous so that a
mathematically suitable subject matter will be left for scientific theory. His epistemology provides just the interpretation of reality needed by Descartes and others who
were convinced that scientific understanding becomes possible only when we manage to delete the unmanageable,
subjective, sensuous aspect of things and to characterize
the subject matter of science exclusively in the vocabulary
of abstract mathematics. In the argument of Descartes'
Meditations and in the Principles of Philosophy, the proof
for the existence of an external world of material things is
simply a proof that the abstract mathematical and geometrical truths, which we are able to appreciate in pure
thought, do have a subject matter outside of our thought
which they fit and describe. This subject matter is res extensa, that is, space, as an existing manifold or entity.
Descartes does not confine his purification of our conception of the material world to the purge of sensuous
characteristics. The prevailing scholastic-Aristotelian tradition was dominated by biological and psychological paradigms for the explanation of change. Within this tradition,
as Descartes read it, the understanding of physical phenomena involved projecting into the physical realm various soul-like agencies and, in particular, the substantial
forms of the scholastics. Descartes' reduction of physics
to geometry means the elimination of this psychologism
and teleological thinking from the scientific explanation
of the motions of bodies. The material universe which survives the elimination of both the sensuous surface and the
inner determinants of motion is Descartes' plenum of indefinitely subdivisible particles, all of whose motions are
determined by collisions that conserve an initial sum of
motion given to the system at the beginning of things by
God.8 Matter itself contains no principle of action nor disposition to move or not to move. All concepts of determinants of motions residing in material things are e1iminated
in Descartes' rejection of the animism of the scholasticAristotelian tradition.'
At a level near common sense we can represent the shortcomings of the Cartesian identification of space and matter
and the resulting purely geometrical physics as follows. A
theory in physical science has to provide concepts with the
help of which we are able to see what happens as the instantiation of clear regularities. Motions observed in ordinary experience are usually too complicated for analysis,
24
but, at least for the scientific explanation of motion, rules
should be formulable that cover very simple artificial or
imaginary ideal cases. Descartes himself thinks of the obligation of scientific theory in this way and he formulates
seven laws of which ideal cases of impacts of particles are
supposed to be the instances. 10 If such laws are satisfactory
they will enable us to predict what will happen when situations fitting the conditions specified (here the specification
of simple collisions) are realized. This elementary reflection
is usually summed up by saying that a scientific theory generates predictions when initial conditions are satisfied.
Now Leibniz's critique of Descartes' physics can be stated
as the thought that no such predictive validity is accessible
to a physics framed with Descartes' attentuated concepts.
Using a priori arguments, Leibniz is able to show that the
specific laws Descartes presents are incoherent and could
not possibly be empirically adequate.n But the larger point
is that no laws based on Descartes' concepts can succeed.
Leibniz sees this permanent inadequacy in the fact that
Descartes has no conceptual means for distinguishing between instantaneous motion and instantaneous rest. 12
Suppose we are going to predict the future position of
bodies in the solar system. In order to do this we need rules
expressing the patterns of mofion which they instantiate
and we need initial conditions in the form of specifications of the positions, velocities, and accelerations of the
various heavenly bodies at some particular time. But geometrical concepts only yield determinations of position at
a particular time, that is, at an instant. Descartes' purification of the concept of matter has left him nothing with
which to express the difference between a moving body
and a stationary body at one moment and he has no reason for thinking that there is any intrinsic difference. The
obstacle to predictive success within Descartes' conceptual scheme can now be put very simply. Initial conditions
that characterize material things at one moment of time
accessible to Cartesian physics will give the positions of
particles only. But the future development of a system of
bodies depends upon velocity and acceleration, and not
merely on position. So the Cartesian scientist will inevitably find different developments arising out of what he
sees as identical conditions. If the conditions are identical,
however, the very idea of scientific regularity requires
identical predictions. So predictive success cannot be
forthcoming. Ad hoc efforts to generate predictions conformable to experience must result in laws which are arbitrary and incoherent, as Leibniz finds that the Cartesian
laws of impact are in fact.
The characterizations that successfully distinguish motion and rest at an instant are just those that are accessible
to the infinite mathematical methods of the calculus
which Leibniz himself developed. Leibniz thinks of Descartes' "matter" as incomplete. It is a mistake to think that
merely space-filling stuff could constitute a substance.B In
this there is the influence of Aristotelian conceptions of
matter and form which Leibniz does not repudiate. NeiAUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�ther matter nor form, by itself, can constitute an existing
thing. But Leibniz' s view is also determined by his under·
standing of the irreducible status of force in physics. In his
thinking, momentary material existence is an abstraction
from the reality of temporally extended things. Substances
are not constituted of densely laminated temporal slices
which are their constituent realities as the cards are the
constituents of the deck. Substances, rather, correspond
to functions with values extended in time. Thus, the monad contains all its temporal states as the values of a function are contained in the law which is the function itself.
The fundamental metaphysical description of the world
must be in terms of such functions. Such a description
can never be reached by aggregating consecutive momentary distributions of merely space-filling stuff. In contrast,
time does not enter into Descartes' characterization of res
extensa at alJ.l 4 So, in Cartesian physics, moving bodies
have to be constructed out of momentary stationary bodies.
Descartes did attempt to present a theory of motion in
his laws of impact. Furthermore, his scientific writings
present an enormous number of explanations of various
phenomena most of which are now merely picturesque
relics. Some of his explanations are reasonable and correct. On the whole, however, it seems to me that Descartes
was never entirely clear about the appropriate expecta·
tions for scientific explanation, once the field had been
cleared by his elimination of both sensuous qualities and
occult inner determinants of change.
No one emphasized the role of mathematics in science
more than Descartes. Yet he seems to have had very little
confidence in the possibility of really detailed mathematical explanations of real events, and he did not foresee anything like the kind of success mathematical physics was to
attain, so soon after his lifetime, in the work of Newton.
Sometimes Descartes writes as though the chief intellectual job of science is completed when substantial forms
and teleological explanations have been dropped so that
the material world can be understood to be a matter of
moving and colliding particles.
The explanations that Descartes actually gives of particular phenomena are usually very much like ad hoc scholastic explanations in their ambitions and their explanatory
horizons, however unlike scholastic explanations they are
in content. Like the scholastics, Descartes offers imaginative stories that are plainly without predictive force or intent. They are broad ways of seeing the phenomenon in
question within the framework of a geometrical particle
universe.
In a remarkable passage, Descartes says that, since he
came to appreciate the real character of physical reality,
that is, that it is a spatial manifold of particles, and since he
came to appreciate the nature of physical events, that is,
that they are collisions of particles, he has found that he
can solve any problem of science that is proposed or that
occurs to him in a very short time. 15 This is not so much an
outrageous boast as it is an illuminating indication of what
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Descartes expects from explanation in physics. The solutions to problems which he can produce so promptly are
obviously merely broad hypotheses providing, with the
help of humble empirical analogies, a way of seeing this or
that event as a particular form of particle motion. So the
phenomenon of planetary motion is explained when we
see that an ocean of particles might carry suns and planets
in vortices, as a whirling eddy of water carries a leaf in a
closed path. Magnetic phenomena are explained by the
imaginative hypothesis, again based on the observable
world of everyday objects, that there are screw-shaped
pores in bodies, which impede but do not prevent the passage of screwshaped particles, just as the threaded nut impedes but does not prevent the passage of the threaded
bolt. Combustion is explained to the same limited degree
as the progressive destabilization of the structure of a
burning object by a storm of fast moving particles. And
the refraction of light is supposed to be intelligible on the
model of tennis balls deflected from their path when they
encounter the light resistance of a thin veil. In sum, explanation does not go beyond the provision of a hypothesis
that makes it reasonable that the phenomenon in question is observed even though the world is just a plenum of
moving particles. Particular explanations rely on a rough
empirical analogy to show how such particle collisions
could constitute the phenomenon in question. It is only
such hypotheses, dependent upon empirical analogy, that
Descartes was able to think of in a short time, and that is
what he means by "solving" the problems that come to his
attention. Given this conception of explanation it is quite
understandable that Cartesian physics should tolerate divergent developments from initial conditions that are identical when described in the terms that Cartesian science
permits.
Near the end of the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes
quite explicitly expresses his conception of the irreducibly
conjectural character of theoretical explanations. He recognizes that accounts in terms of particle motions involve
positing events (the particular particle motions and collisions) which are not accessible to the senses. Then, in
Principle CCIV of Part IV, Descartes tells us
That touching the things which our senses do not perceive, it
is sufficient to explain what the possibilities are about the nature of their existence, though perhaps they are not what we
describe them to be and this is all that Aristotle has tried to do. 16
In the following passages, Descartes says that we would not
find his individual explanations compelling if we considered them independently of one another. The real support
for his system is that so many explanations are generated
from so few ideas (namely, those that go into the scheme
of a plenum of particles), yielding a simple coherent picture of the worldY
If we look at Leibniz's critique in the context of Descartes' repudiation of teleology and his reduction of nature
to a wholly mechanical system of particles in motion, we
25
�find that Leibniz urges the rehabilitation of teleology and
is prepared to reinstate the Aristotelian biological paradigm for all substances complete with the entelechies and
substantial forms that were so deliberately expunged from
the physical world in Descartes' ·thought. This must appear to us as a considerable step backward. A number of
Leibniz's prominent excesses such as his panpsychism, his
denial of the reality of death, his theoretical assimilation
of all causes of change to a more-or-less mental "appetition", and his ubiquitous teleology are all of them regressions in comparison with the conceptual restraint achieved
by Descartes. Leibniz only manages to preserve any plausible and recognizably scientific perspective at all by segregating teleological and mechanical explanations and
holding that everything that happens in the physical world
can be explained mechanically, without invoking the
agency of any entelechy or deploying any teleological pattern of explanation.18 Teleological thinking is conveniently
allocated to a higher metaphysical level. Teleological understanding, in the form, for example, of least action principles, guides our discovery of mechanical laws without
introducing a teleological aspect into those laws themselves. Leibniz says, for example, that the thought that
light always takes the shortest path operates essentially in
the understanding that led to the discovery of Snell's law .I'
I do not want to give the impression that Leibniz's defense of teleology is entirely inappropriate. Leibniz did not
simply slump back into already discredited styles of
thought. On the contrary, his insistence that reason-giving
explanation must be reconciled with a mechanical universe and his idea that the two patterns of explanation operate at different levels embody important truths.
2 Nature Itself
Attempting to delete spurious psychologism and teleology, Descartes eliminates all activity from the material
world and paves the way for an Occasionalist philosophy in
which God is directly responsible for each thing th.at happens. The ultimate passivity of material substance is expressed in Descartes' thought that matter does not even
contain any principle sufficient for its own continued existence into the next instant of time. All temporal continuity of existence depends on God's continual recreation
of things. 20 How could a particle, unable to struggle though
a second of continued existence without help from God,
have any continued and independent effect on things
other than itself? Furthermore, the Cartesian exclusion of
every means for distinguishing one region of space (which
is matter) from another undercuts the very idea of occurrences in the material world. At each moment, every region
of space or matter exactly resembles every other region. It
follows that at every moment the structure of the whole of
space or matter is exactly what it is at every other moment.
The universe is at every moment a plenum of indefinitely
26
divisible particles. Then anything that happens will leave
things exactly as they were: a plenum of indefinitely divisible particles,'~ If, somehow, we could attach meaning to
motion in this universe, we would still be unable to make
sense of Descartes' idea that God has caused an initial motion of particles and ordained the subsequent conservation of that motion. For Descartes' conceptual parsimony
leaves us no way to grasp how it is that motion might continue without the continued action of God.
At first impression, we are apt to think that Descartes
can reasonably propose that God has created an essentially
inert, wholly passive, and motionless universe, which he
then sets in motion at the beginning of time. We will have
in mind analogies like the initial winding of a motionless
clock which creates a motion that endures in the clock
without our continual intervention. Leibniz sees that this
understanding of motion in nature cannot survive close
inspection, if we are thinking in terms of Descartes' physical concepts. Clocks can be wound so that they will run
continuously precisely because of the nongeometrical features of bodily existence on which Leibniz insists. The
compression of the mainspring of the clock represents a
force, an inner determinant of future motion. This intrinsic potential cannot be represented as a particular arrangement of particles. Within Descartes' framework of
ideas, the compression of the spting would bode nothing
for future motion. A mere arrangement of space-filling
particles will not induce any further changes. A further rearrangement will need an external cause. Ultimately, God
will have to move the hands of the clock himself. This is
the prospect for "the new philosophy which maintains
the inertness and deadness of things." 22
Leibniz mounts such criticisms in his 1698 essay, "On
Nature Itself."23 If we are to imagine that God has arranged things to conserve the initial motion that he has
caused in matter, we must suppose that he has imparted
to material a foundation for continued motion that is intrinsic to that reality.
For since this command [calling for conservation of motion
after the initial motion was imparted] . .. no longer exists at
present, it can accomplish nothing unless it has left some subsistent effect behind which has lasted and operated until now,
and whoever thinks otherwise renounces any distinct explanation of things, if I am any judge, for if that which is remote
in time and space can operate here and now without any intermediary, anything can be said to follow from anything else
with equal right.24
and
... if things have been so formed by the command that they
are made capable of fulfilling the will of him who commanded
them, then it must be granted that there is certain efficacy residing in things, a form or force such as we usually designate
by the name of nature, from which the series of phenomena
follows according to the prescription of the first command.25
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�In other words, no matter what role we assign to God, we
must impute active powers to nature if we are to formulate
intelligible explanations.
"On Nature Itself' is Leibniz's contribution to a German debate occasioned by Robert Boyle's contention that
appeals to "Nature" should be deleted from science. 26 For
Boyle, the repudiation of Nature meant the rejection of
scholasticism and scholastic forms. In this, Boyle is following Descartes. For the specious concept (<Nature", Boyle
wants to substitute "mechanism" as the foundation of all
explanations in the material world. The German Cartesian
point of view supported Boyle's claim and reasserted the
essential passivity of material substance. 27
Leibniz does not argue against Boyle's mechanism, nor
does he claim here that mechanical explanations ought to
be supplemented by teleological explanations, though this
is certainly his view. In this context, it is the Cartesian
concept of mechanical explanation that Leibniz finds defective as a consequence of the limitations of Descartes'
concept of material substance." Descartes tries to exclude
ad hoc psychologism and teleology." But the resulting
conceptual platform is so feeble that no explanations at all
can be mounted on it. Then God's ad hoc intervention is
required at every point. If that is so, then it turns out that
the only explanatory pattern that finds any application in
Descartes' material world will be the teleological pattern
of intended purposeful behavior. God causes each and every thing that happens for his good reasons. Then all explanations are psychologistic, the very thing Descartes
sought to eliminate completely. Although Leibniz is rightly
known as the defender of teleology, his insistence here
that activity be ascribed to nature itself is founded on the
claim that, failing an active nature, each and every mechanical event in the universe would have to be understood
as an intended action on the part of God.
Perhaps the most interesting idea of "On Nature Itself'
is Leibniz's thought that we should bring under a single
philosophical perspective both the mechanical events
studied and explained by physicists and the free actions of
men. Leibniz sees that the independence of the human will
and the independence of mechanical forces from God's
actions are parallel requirements if we are to understand
human responsibility and the motions of bodies respectively. The passivity of created substance finds expression
in the Cartesian doctrine "that things do not act but that
God acts in the presence of things and according to the fitness of things." Natural application of this to the mental
realm of thinking and willing would mean reassignment of
the cause of the sequence of our thoughts and desires and
resolutions from us to God. The Occasionalists such as
Malebranche who seem to espouse such a view have not
really established it and do not appreciate its destructive
implications. We must believe in our own spontaneity.
To doubt this would be to deny human freedom and to thrust
the cause of evil back into God, but also to contradict the tes-
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
timony of our internal experience and consciousness by which
we feel that what these opponents have transferred to God
without even the appearance of reason belongs to ourselves.30
Furthermore, the very idea of an independent substance is
wrapped up with action so that, were actions all assigned
to God,
God would be the_ nature and substance of all things-a doctrine of most evil repute, which a writer who was subtle indeed but irreligious, in recent years imposed upon the world,
or at least revived. 31
Equally appropriate to mechanical causality and free
action, these ideas show us what is best in Leibniz's
thought about teleology without the encumbering metaphysics and theology with which his insights are ordinarily
accompanied.
What is at stake in the dispute over active powers as far
as mechanical explanation is concerned? Consider a simple
example. The wind blows dead leaves from the branches
of trees in the autumn. Leibniz's intuition is that our science must offer a mechanical understanding that really
succeeds in attributing the detachment of the leaves to
the force of the wind. Of course, Leibniz thinks that God
has arranged the laws of nature and that these laws are as
contingent as the particular events that obey them. 32 But
to say that is not to say that God really removes each leaf,
that God twirls it in the air for a while, and that God then
deposits it on the ground. On the contrary, things are so
ordered that the wind removes the leaves and no action of
God's is present or required. To assume that God knows
just how each leaf will move is to assert the infinity of his
understanding but not the ubiquity of his will. To think
otherwise is to destroy the idea of "laws of nature" and to
replace them with mere generalizations the truth of which
is only a consequence of the consistency of God's actions.
Therefore, our mechanical conceptions must be rich
enough to capture causal action in relationships that obtain between natural events. Descartes has produced a
physics that is too weak for this job.
Turning to voluntary human behavior, Leibniz finds the
same pattern in a setting of very different philosophical issues. When we raise the question which preoccupied Leibniz throughout his career, that is, the question of God's
responsibility for the failings and evils of human conduct,
we are asking whether or not human beings are truly active
in the world. Of course, Leibniz thinks that men are created by God and that, in his creation, God fully appreciates the powers, limitations, and liabilities of his creatures.
Moreover, being omniscient, he knows exactly what circumstances they will face and how they will act. This
much is parallel to the fact that God makes the things of
the material world and the laws of nature and he knows in
advance just what will happen. But to say that men have
any powers at all implies that, when those powers are exercised, it is men who act and not God. When I vote it is
27
�not God who casts a ballot, any more than it is God that
tears the leaf from the wind-whipped branch. No doubt we
would not hold a man responsible for his actions if he
were a mechanism like a clock or if his "acts 11 were caused
by the wind. So there is more to responsibility and free
agency than independence of God. In "On Nature Itself",
however, Leibniz sees the common ground of mechanism
and volition. In understanding we have to make fundamental explanatory appeal to the human agent. In understanding mechanical events we must make fundamental
appeal to physical determinants of change. The creativity
of God no more constrains physical forces than it does human actions.
This line of thought also clarifies Leibniz's oftenexpressed view that there is a mechanical explanation for
everything that happens in the world while, at the same
time, teleological explanations have their own validity
within the same world of events.33 The physical world is
not a continuous sequence of miracles, as it would be if
active powers were excluded from nature. The physical
world is ordered by the intentions and creativity of God.
But to say that is to say that he has created a mechanically
functioning system wherein what happens is explained by
physical causes for motions and not by the will of God.
The wisdom of this conception is partially concealed
from us by the theological trappings of Leibniz' s customary discussions. It becomes correspondingly clearer when
we translate the conceptual relationships envisioned by
Leibniz back to the level of human purposeful action in a
mechical world. What is required for the simplest selfconsciously purposive action by a human agent? Suppose,
for example, a man drives a nail into a wall in order to
hang a picture. The format that Leibniz proposes urges us
not to confuse the aptness of the teleological explanation,
"He put the nail into the wall in order to hang the
picture," with a mechanical explanation of the motion of
the nail: "The force imparted by collisions with the hammerhead caused the relatively rigid nail to penetrate the
relatively fixed waiL" We should not think that the mechanical explanation competes with or rules out accounts
that cite purposes and reasons. Thus, Leibniz says that
there is a mechanical explanation for all motions. The mechanical explanation is not merely compatible with a
reason-giving explanation. Leibniz is asserting that a mechanical explanation is required if the reason-giving explanation is to be intelligible. We could not act as we do,
when we want pictures hung, were it not for the fact that
nails are mechanically caused to move by collisions with
hammerheads. Leibniz appeals to a notion of levels of explanation saying that there are mechanical explanations
for everything which are not teleological, and that there
are also teleological explanations applicable to the same
reality which are correct explanations.
Leibniz thus stands against all reductive programs that
would try to convert teleological explanations into mechanical explanations. Such a reduction is the common aspira-
28
tion of Hobbes's conception of the material embodiment
of deliberation and wilL of Descartes' theory of deflections of particles in the pineal gland, and of contemporary
mind-brain materialism applied to action and motivation.34
In Leibniz' s view mechanical causes are organized as they
are as a consequence of God's intentions. But it is physical
forces that explain what happens mechanically, and God's
intentions are not physical forces. The same pattern of relationships holds for human purpose-fulfilling actions. Human intentions have a secure explanatory role. But this
never removes the need for a mechanical explanation for
the motions of things. Human intentions are not mechanical causes any more than divine intentions are mechani~
cal causes.
In his theological presentations we can all understand
with Leibniz, although perhaps few of us will agree with
him, the thought that the laws -of nature are instituted by
God in the course of bringing into existence the kind of
world he wants. But in understanding just this much,
Leibniz shows that we must be envisioning two kinds of
explanation which are correlative and not in conflict with
one another. We are supposing that God sets up the world
and its laws with a purpose and to fulfill his plans and intentions. This is a reason-giving explanation belonging to
the general teleological pattern. But this idea would not
be intelligible at all, and explanations would collapse into
the assertion of sequences of miracles, if we did not also
suppose that the arrangements God makes give scope to
another very different kind of explanation, namely, the
mechanical explanations of the motions of things that appeal to physical powers and forces in nature rather than
God. In the absence of an explanatory role for natural
forces, appeals to God's ordinances reduce to the Occasionalist's attribution of each and every event to the direct
intervention of God's will. Following the same pattern,
while deleting the theological context, we can understand
a purpose-oriented explanation of human behavior, but
we would not be able to understand it, for it would mean
nothing if it were supposed to rule out or to compete with
mechanical explanation of what happens. If it were supposed to rule out a mechanical account, a reason-giving
explanation would have to assert that the will moves objects directly. But we neither understand nor have any use
for this efficacy of the will. We do understand that someone has arranged matters to realize his objective just insofar as we also understand that there are mechanical causal
relations which he has foreseen and wittingly exploited in
his action. If we thought that teleology eliminates mechanism, we would convert every purposeful act into a manmade miracle.
The idea of purposive action in a mechanical world has
seemed to many philosophers to require a gap in the mechanical order of things through which the will can find
expression in what happens. Leibniz' s insight here shows
us that the envisioned gap could serve no useful purpose.
A motion that is not mechanically explicable would not be
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�graspable as a purposeful act but, instead, this uncaused
motion would belong to the realm of the miraculous, as
though our every action involved a kind of levitation.
We tend to credit the question, "How can my reasons
have anything to do with what happens if there are mechanical causes for all motions?" This natural-sounding
complaint implies that my reasons could be relevant if
only some events were not determined by any mechanical
cause. Then those things at least might be determined by
"my reasons." But this line of thought is hopeless. If my
reasons could produce some motion in things, this will be
either an unintelligible miracle and, thus, no explanation,
or, "my reasons" will just be an expression for some fur·
ther mechanical cause, as both seventeenth century and
twentieth century reductions will have it. But if appeal to
reasons is actually only appeal to mechanical causes, then
purposes, objectives, that is, true reasons, drop out alto·
gether and explanation operates merely by appeal to sufficient prior determinants of motion.
Without the cloud of dust that philosophical reflection
about causality and freedom inevitably raises, I do not
think we would find an apparent inconsistency or any
other problem in the fact that the force of hammer blows
moves a nail, and that I, at the same time, claim to have a
reason for its being in the wall. Only a philosopher would
ever think that the correctness of the reason-giving ac·
count implies that I must have moved something "with
my will" so that either my will is also a physical cause, or
the mind can mysteriously intervene in the physical order
and violate conservation laws in the process. In Leibniz's
thinking the choice between these unpromising options is
not forced upon us. Teleology is not mechanism and it
does not presuppose a gap in the mechanical order. Quite
the reverse is the case. Leibniz shows that if the relevant
motions are not explicable mechanically, the teleological
explanations will not get any explaining done. This is the
most profound message of the understanding of activity
and explanation presented in "On Nature Itself."
Our thinking about action is often beset by another
speculative temptation. We are willing to allow that the
mechanical force of hammer blows surely accounts for the
motion of the nail head. But then we simply want to look
further back in the physical and physiological chain of
events for the point at which appeal to reasons and purposes finds its real footing. Of course, I did not simply will
the hammer to move any more than Jj.;imply willed the nail
into the wall. I picked up the haii}I'fler and that means, inter alia, that forces applied to the hammer by my hand explain its motion. Could it be that the will only produces its
own nonmechanical effects when applied to parts of my
own body? This would enable me to orchestrate the mechanical relationships of things in the world beyond my
body so as to achieve desired objectives. This attractive
thought comes to a dead end with the appreciation that
the motions of bodily parts are not in any relevant way different from the motions of external objects. Conservation
TI!E ST. JOHNS REVIEW
laws alone mean that there must be mechanical explanations for motions of protoplasm as well as for motions of
rocks. There are known physiological-mechanical (speaking loosely) explanations for the motions of my hand, of
my muscles, and, no doubt, there are as yet undiscovered
explanations for all the subtle electro-chemical goings-on
within the muscles, the nerves, and the brain. Should we
not suppose that my control of my body, to the extent that
I have such control, presupposes and exploits just these
mechanical relationships? To think otherwise will be
merely to project the miracle of willed motions into some
physiological recess where our scientific understanding is
presently incomplete and does not as yet, therefore, make
such willing as unintelligible as the idea of willing a hammer to move. Willing things to change and move is really a
concept with no more application within the body than
without. And voluntarily moving things that we can move
does not imply that no mechanical account of their motion
is correct.35 Leibniz's view that purpose explanations do
not replace or conflict with mechanical explanations appears to be the only defensible understanding.
This conclusion does not mean that Leibniz provides
any philosophical analysis that removes the feeling of incompatibility that surrounds the issue of freedom and causality. The understanding of teleological explanation and
its relation to efficient causality or mechanism remains to
be achieved.36 Leibniz's view of the distinctness and the
interdependence of these explanatory patterns is both
subtler and more promising than many approaches that
are still defended. This Leibnizean view, as I have1ried to
show, is independent of theological commitments and of
Leibniz' s too-bold opinion that there is a teleological explanation for everything that happens.
3 Analyticity
All the events and actions that are explained either mechanically or teleologically are contingent according to
Leibniz. True propositions asserting such occurrences are
contingent truths. By a contingent truth Leibniz means a
truth of which the denial expresses something possible and
is not inconceivable or contradictory. I want to emphasize
Leibniz's assertion of the contingency of all of these
subject matters because there is an intefpretation of his
thought, and it is the dominant interpretation now, according to which he does not really think that any of these
matters are contingent. On this, the dominant understanding of Leibniz, he takes all truths to be analytic
truths, and, as everyone agrees, no analytic truth can be
contingent. It is an obvious and essential feature of analytic
truths that their denials are contradictory. So in saying
that Leibniz thinks that all truths are analytic, supporters
of this interpretation assert that he cannot really distinguish between the class of truths whose denials are contradictions and any other class of truths whatsoever. So
29
�his real opinion is supposed to be th~t there are no contingent truths at all and that everything true is necessarily
true.
In considering this contention we have, first, to note
that there is a sense in which all these contingent truths
are also necessary. They are "hypothetically necessary" in
Leibniz's customary terminology. 37 By this he means that
there is a coercive reason why this event or action occurs
rather than some alternative to it. Thus, given the laws of
nature and the relevant circumstances preceding a mechanically caused event, that event must follow. This is
entailed by the presumed universality of natural laws.
Leibniz recognizes that the conditional statement that expresses hypothetical necessity is itself logically necessary
or, as he expresses it, metaphysically necessary and absolutely necessary. It is a feature of any absolutely or logically
necessary truth that its denial is a contradictory statement.
Therefore, in saying that an event is hypothetically necessary, Leibniz is associating that event with a conditional
statement that is absolutely necessary.
This is not an extreme view of Leibniz's, nor one that
we should think of as expressing a characteristically rationalist perspective. An ideally simple schema can bring out
the points in a way that makes them noncontroversial, or
nearly so. Suppose that the only law relevant to the occurrence of the event E is the simply conditional: "If circumstance C obtains then event E follows." E is shown to be
hypothetically necessary by adverting to this law together
with the fact that the circumstance C did obtain in the actual context of the occurrence of E. This can be summed
up in the logically necessary conditional:
If it is the case that the law: if circumstance C then event E,
holds; and if circumstance C does obtain, then event E follows.
All those philosophers of science who envision a deductive
relationship between scientific laws, initial conditions and
statements asserting the occurrence of explained events
are committed to this Leibnizean viewpoint. Most empiricists adopt this view. That the relationship of the explanans
to the explanandum is deductive is just another way of
saying that propositions with the above form, and those
with much more complicated laws and instantiating conditions, are logically true. Leibniz once asserted, "As for
eternal truths, we must observe that at bottom they are all
conditional, and say, in fact, such a thing posited, such another thing is."38
The necessity of conditional statements connecting laws
and conditions with explained events is all that Leibniz
means by "hypothetical necessity" in the sphere of mechanical explanation. Such hypothetical necessity leaves
open the possibility that some other event might have occurred, rather than the actual event, had the laws and initial conditions been different. For factual circumstances,
and the laws of nature, are themselves contingent according to Leibniz. 39 Thus~ the denial of the occurrence of a
hypothetically necessary event is not contradictory.
30
Parallel points are to be made in understanding Leibniz's
conception of the contingency of free actions. Leibniz
consistently rejects what he calls "the freedom of indifference." By this he means to exclude choices which are entirely arbitrary and motivated by nothing but the disposition
to choose. Freedom, for Leibniz, never eliminates the
need for a reason for what is done which distinguishes it
in some intelligible way from all alternative actions and
makes clear why it was chosen over alternatives. To suppose that a man could actually make a random or arbitrary
choice between alternatives would be to allow an element
of unintelligibility into our idea of reality. A single inexplicable node in the causal network of things would infect
the whole scheme of an explicable world.
The vulnerability of this conception is revealed in exchanges with Samuel Clarke, who points out, among other
things, that Leibniz must rule against the very possibility
that God, or a man, could ever be faced with equally desirable means to some desired end.40 In the manner of the
problem of Buridan's ass, the value-equivalence of the
means would prevent selecting either of them, on Leibniz' s principles, no matter how urgently desired the end.
In spite of such penetrating criticisms, we should bear
in mind that the idea that everything that happens is explicable is not merely a rationalist dogma. It seems to be a
presumption of all investigations of things and one that is
extremely difficult to set aside.
For better or worse, Leibniz's view is that an agent must
always have a definite reason for choosing the action he
does perform from the alternative courses available to him.
The reason is coercive in the sense that, once an agent determines what course he prefers, which Leibniz expresses
as "what course appears best to him," he will inevitably
adopt that course. He likes to compare deliberation with
weighing things in a balance. The very idea that a man
could act in the absence of a determining reason is, for
Leibniz, like the idea that a balance might incline to one
side although there is no greater weight in that side than
in the other.41
The principle: men always choose the course that appears best to them, is the analog of a scientific law, and the
particular assessment preceding an action will be the ana·
log of prior circumstances. Again, conditionals of the following type can be formed:
If a man is choosing for the best, and if A appears better than
any other option that he recognizes, then he will do A.
This pattern fits the actions of God as well as of finite
agents with the difference that God's infinite power enforces his choice and to God's infinite wisdom what appears best is best.42 In both the divine and the human case,
the absolute necessity of conditional statements of this
form never means that other actions could not possibly
have been performed. On the contrary, it is an ineliminable
part of the idea of action that all of the alternative actions
AUTIJMN/WINTER 1982-83
�could be performed by the agent. This is the minimum
meaning of calling them alternative courses of action. The
question of choice only arises on the. irreducible assump·
tion that an agent could do more than one thing. Only
then does the question of preference, the best, the appar·
ent best, and assessment become relevant. Therefore, ac·
tions themselves, although hypothetically necessary, are
never absolutely necessary. Other preferences and princi·
pies of action might have issued in other actions. The denial
that a particular action was done is never a contradiction.
The contingency of mechanically explicable motions
and the contingency of motivated actions is essentialto
Leibniz's thinking about these matters. If it were abso·
lutely impossible for a particular motion not to occur, if its
nonoccurrence were inconceivable and contradictory, and
the assertion of its occurrence, thus, metaphysically nee·
essary, then talk about mechanical causes would be as in·
appropriate in physics as it is in geometry. If a man's
behavior were absolutely necessary, the desirability of an
action would be as irrelevant as the desirability ofa theo·
rem in pure mathematics. Then, as Leibniz says, it would
be as easy to be a prophet as to be a geometer.43 Like geo·
metrical proofs, scientific explanations and explanations
of actions can be expressed in deductive arguments. The
crucial difference is that the premises of mathematical de·
ductions are themselves necessary truths while the prem·
ises from which actions and events can be deduced are
contingent.
Apart from God, the existence of all material things and
all human agents is contingent. Thus all statements that
describe finite existences and say what happens to them
and what they do are contingent truths, if they are true
statements.44 Plainly all statements about mechanically
caused events involving bodies and all statements about
the free actions of human agents will fall into the class of
contingent statements.
The popular idea that Leibniz makes all truths analytic45
is certainly wrong. It flies in the face of his frequent and
careful statements on these issues. It makes nonsense of
his most important views and of his philosophy as a whole.
It imputes logical inconsistencies to a great logician that
are so obvious that no beginning student could miss them.
There is just no question of testing this proposed under·
standing of Leibniz against his writings in order to see
whether it may be an adequate or an unavoidable expres·
sion of his real opinion. The only interesting question is
how it can have happened that this reading has managed
to gain, not merely currency, but ascendancy in the views
of so many who study Leibniz's philosophy.
First, we need a rough review of the concept of analytic
truth that is used in this bad interpretation of Leibniz.
The roughness of our treatment here intentionally avoids
twentieth century controversies over analyticity46 and
avoids all of the niceties concerning logical form that
would require attention in a scrupulous discussion of ana·
lyticity per se. In particular, we shall largely ignore the fact
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that all propositions are not of subject-predicate form, as
Leibniz himself largely ignores it. None of these matters
have any relevance to the claim that Leibniz thought that
truths are all of them analytic. An exposition of analyticity
that fits in with Leibniz' s expressed views about truth and
that makes sense in the context of examples of truths like
Leibniz's examples will suffice' for our purposes.
Propositions are analytic whose truth depends upon and
only upon the meaning of the terms they contain. Gener·
ally the meanings of terms are complex. In order to make
meanings fully explicit reformulation of sentences is gen·
erally required. Such reformulations substitute something
like definitions for terms that have complex meanings. In
the case of analytic propositions, this analysis via articulation of meanings ultimately makes the truth evident, dis·
playing it, for example, as resting on an identity the denial
of which would be patently contradictory.
In an illustration that has become standard in modern
discussions, the articulated meaning or definition: "things
that are both men and unmarried" replaces the complex
term "bachelors" in analyzing the proposition,
(I) All bachelors are unmarried,
yielding,
(2) All things that are both men and unmarried are un·
married,
which rests on the identity,
(3) What is unmarried is unmarried,
in the sense that to say that (2) is false is to assert that
something is both unmarried and not unmarried, which
denies (3) and is, therefore, contradictory."
Leibniz never uses the word ''analytic 11 in this sense. As
everyone knows, the word ''analytic" was first given the
sense just sketched by Kant. At the same time, Leibniz
certainly does say that there are truths which reduce to or
rest on identities. He also often points out that this foun·
dation of such truths is not always evident and that it re·
quires analysis of the terms of a proposition to display the
underlying identity.48 Perhaps his thinking in such pas·
sages is so close to our concept of analyticity that we can
properly say that he is talking about the analyticity of
propositions in our sense, although he does not use the
word as we do. But just this much, far from showing that
Leibniz takes all truths to be analytic, seems to establish
the opposite. For Leibniz always very clearly distinguishes
between truths that rely on the law of contradiction from
other truths which need a further foundation and whose
denials are possible and not at all contradictory. The con·
sistency of Leibniz's distinction on this point is one of the
reasons for which it is odd that many readers are satisfied
to say that he makes all truths analytic.49 The following is
a particularly clear statement of Leibniz' s. It is one of a
number of statements with similar force:
31
�Omnes Existentiae excepta solius Dei Existentia sunt con tingentes. Causa au tern cur res aliqua corltingens [prae alia] existat,
non petitur ex [sola] eius definitiOne ..... Cum enim infinita
sint possibilia, quae tamen non existunt, ideo cur haec potius
quam ilia existant, ratio peti debet non ex definitione alioqui
non existere implicaret contradictionem, et alia non essent
possibilia ....
All existences excepting only the existence of God are contingent. The reason why something contingent exists [rather
than another thing] is not to be sought in its definition
[alone] . ... Since there are infinite possibilities which, nonetheless, do not exist, the reason why this rather than that does
exist ought not to be sought from definitions, otherwise not
existing would impl~ a contradiction, and other things would
not be possible. . . . 0
It is worth noting that, in Kant's initiating discussions
and in all philosophical usage since Kant, "analytic" is essentially a contrastive concept and the point of calling a
proposition analytic is not fully intelligible without the
correlative concept of "synthetic" propositions. Neither
Kant nor any post-Kantian philosopher who uses the concepts, analytic and synthetic, has said that all truths are
analytic. The contrast is always the basis for a dichotomous
classification of truths. There are philosophical controversies concerning the viability of the analytic-synthetic distinction altogether, though philosophers do, for the most
part, accept the distinction." There are none who accept
the distinction and then find that all true propositions fall
into just one of the two available classes.
It is this extravagant opinion, that no philosopher would
dream of holding himself, that is so commonly assigned to
Leibniz. This reading of Leibniz requires, then, that we
retrospectively apply to his thought an essentially contrastive concept that was introduced long after his death by
Kant and, at the same time, it requires us to suppose that
Leibniz uses this contrastive concept noncontrastively
and that he puts all truths on one side, though no other
philosopher would do that. Once this interpretation is introduced, it turns out to be incompatible with almost
everything that Leibniz said. This circumstance, instead
of leading to the prompt rejection of the interpretation, or
even to suspicions about it, has spawned various ingenious
efforts to deal with the Leibniz' s inconsistencies, namely
those that the interpretation itself creates. The most outrageous plan for resolving these created difficulties is
surely Russell's. Russell supposes that though Leibniz says
that there are contingent truths he does not believe that
there are any, since Leibniz really thinks that all truths are
analytic and therefore, necessary. Russell finds that Leibniz
was a fellow of poor character, lacking "moral elevation" 52
so he basely concealed his true views after discovering
that they did not please Antoine Arnauld in 1686.53 If Russell were right, we should have to think that Leibniz went
on, after 1686, to write huge books and endless letters and
articles, and thousands of fragments that no one saw but
himself, in all of which he insincerely asserted that there
32
are contingent truths only because he thought that this
opinion would more appealing to his royal patrons and religious authorities than his real belief that everything is
necessary.
Other critics have not followed Russell in these accusations, but neither have they rejected the idea that, for
Leibniz, all truths are analytic. Why not? One obvious reason hinges on the word "contains." Leibniz states in many
places that if any proposition is true then the predicate is
contained in the subject of that proposition, or the subject
contains the predicate. Furthermore, it is quite possible
that Kant had in mind just this Leibnizean use of "contains" when he introduced the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths by saying that the predicate is
contained in the subject of analytic truths, while it is not
contained in the subject of synthetic truths which add
something, as Kant puts it, that is not already thought in
the subject concept. So we have two suggestive facts:
First, Leibniz said that in all truths the predicate is contained in the subject, and, second, Kant said that, if the
predicate is contained in the subject, you have an analytic
truth. Combining these we can get: Leibniz finds that all
truths are analytic.
But this requires the additional premise that Leibniz
and Kant mean the same thing when they speak of the
predicate being contained in the subject of a proposition.
How can that possibly be when Leibniz makes it clear,
again and again, that his "containment of the predicate in
the subject" is compatible with the contingent status of a
proposition? In the essay "On Necessary and Contingent
Truths," Leibniz says
Verum est affirmatum, cuius praedicatum inest subjecto,
itaque in omni Propositione vera affirmativa, necessaria vel
contingente, universa1i vel singulari, notio praedicati aliquo
modo continetur in notione subjecti; . ...
Assertions are true of which the predicate is in the subject, so
that in all true affirmative propositions, whether necessary
or contingent, universal or singular, the notion of the predicate is contained in some way in the notion of the subject; . ... 54
Again, this citation is selected from a number of discussions which have the same force. I have added the emphasis, "aliquo modo continetur," that is, ''contained in some
way." What are the different ways in which the predicate
might be contained? Leibniz clearly envisions two possibilities. In the case of necessary truths, containment of
the predicate in the subject is a matter of meaning, that is,
containment is shown "ex definitione" of "per analysin
terminorum." Only in these cases is the reason for the
containment a "necessitating reason." 55 In the case of
contingent propositions Leibniz says that there is no necessitating reason but only an "inclining reason" for the
presence of the predicate in the notion of the subject.56
Again, Leibniz distinguishes between predicates that are
part of the essence of the subject and predicates that
AUTIJMN/WINTER 1982-83
�are in the subject but not part of the essence of the subject. Only propositions that ascribe essential predicates
are necessary.
It seems to me beyond dispute that, were Leibniz informed of Kant's conception of analytic and synthetic
propositions, he would not say that he finds all truths analytic. His stated distinctions prepare for a much more
plausible response. Analytic truths are those for which
there is a necessitating reason for the inclusion of the
predicate in the subject. These are propositions true by
definition. They ascribe essential predicates. The denials
of these are contradictory. There are other propositions
which are synthetic. They are contingent propositions
where the reason for the subject's containment of the
predicate is not a necessitating reason. They are not
shown true by appeal to the meanings of terms. They do
not involve essential predicates of their subjects. And
their denials are not contradictory.
That Kant's analytic statements are all necessary is a
logical point at the most elementary level. Leibniz, who
was, after all, a great logician, could not fail to notice that
where the subject contains the predicate in Kant's sense,
a proposition will be necessary and its denial a contradiction. But in all the passages wherein he asserts his containment thesis, Leibniz also asserts that there are contingent
as well as necessary propositions, and these differ "toto
genere."57 In one passage Leibniz actually seems to antici·
pate and reject the idea that his conception of contingent
truths might, somehow, make them necessary along with
ordinary necessities:
Si omnes propositiones etiam contingentes resolvuntur in
propositiones identicas, an non omnes necessariae sunt?
Respondeo, non sane.
If all propositions, even contingencies, are to be resolved into
identical propositions, can we not conclude that they are all
necessary? I answer, Not soundly.
Leibniz then explains that propositions of fact are all about
existing things. What exists, a consequence of God's creation, is always an alternative to other possible existences.
So there is a reason for what exists, but that something exists is not necessary. And he concludes:
... dicendumque est in contingentibus non quidem demonstrari praedicatum ex notione subjecti; sed tantum eius rationem reddi, quae non necessitet sed inclinet.
It must be said that in contingencies the predicate is by no
means to be demonstrated from the notion of the subject; but
rather a reason for it is given which does not necessitate but
inclines. 58
Furthermore, in many presentations of the contain~
ment thesis about all truths it is plain that Leibniz does
not think he is asserting something controversial or even
original in the least way. He intends this claim, rather, as
an expression of a conception of truth shared by most
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
philosophers." He thinks it is Aristotle's conception of
truth, as well as that of ail the leading scholastics he can
think of. But Leibniz does not propose that Aristotle and
most scholastics held that ail truths are necessary and that
they can all be established from the analysis of meanings.
Leibniz would recognize that as an extreme and unfamiliar
view, while his containment thesis is presumably familiar
and innocuous. In one passage, Leibniz says, "[In a true
proposition, the predicate is contained in the subject] or I
do not know what truth is."60 This is just hyperbolic rhet·
oric for expressing the noncontroversial status of the containment thesis as Leibniz understands it.
It is not hard to state just what the containment thesis
does mean as Leibniz intends it. It asserts only what might
be expressed as follows: If'S is P' is true, then, of course, P
must actually qualify the subject S. That is, P must be a
feature of that subject, for that is just what the sentence
states. In other words, a list of all of the features of the
subject S would contain the predicate P, for if P were not
on that list, it could hardly be true to say'S is P.'
Leibniz's thinking is also influenced by a conception
which is now known as the "timelessness of truth." If an
individual has some feature at some time, then the statement, 'S is P' which expresses that fact, is timelessly true.
The statement does not become true when the individual
comes to have the feature. This is not a mysterious doc·
trine if we think of the temporal qualification as tacitly included in the predicate. Then we get propositions such as
"Reagan is elected in 1980" which is always true, and not
just in 1980. But consider "Reagan is re-elected in 1984."
If this is true, it is now and at all times true, although we
do not now know that it is true. If it is true, then Leibniz
will say that Reagan (now and always) has the feature of
being elected in 1984 although we are not smart enough
to know that in advance. Further, reelection in '84, like
election in '80, is not an essential feature of Reagan, if it is
a feature. That means that, if he is going to be reelected,
that is not a necessary truth, though it is, now, a truth.
Understood in this way, the containment thesis is as uncontroversial as Leibniz expects it to be. The containment
thesis actually provides no support whatever for the idea
that Leibniz takes all truths to be analytic truths.
In addition to his views about containment of predicates in subjects, there are four Leibnizean doctrines that
seem to press readers to the interpretation we are considering. These are (I) that for every truth an a priori proof is
available in principle; (2) That God is able, because his
mental powers are infinite, to reduce contingent propositions to identities and thus appreciate their truth, while,
for mentally weaker men, a posteriori experience is the only
source of knowledge of contingencies; (3) There is a complete concept for every individual so that one who knows
the concept would know everything that was, is, or will be
true of that individual; and (4) An individual is a species infima, that is, a minimal species.
(1) In many passages and in various contexts Leibniz
33
�says that there is an a priori proof for all true propositions,
although we are often unable to produce that a priori
proof. Now, most philosophers of the twentieth century
think that the feasibility of a priori proof is equivalent to,
or is certainly a reliable mark of, necessary status. To prove
some proposition a priori means, for us, to prove it without any appeal to the facts of the world, which are only
discoverable a posteriori, or by experience. Again, we are
now inclined to think that if a proof does not need any appeal to the facts it must rely wholly on analysis of concepts
and meanings. That means, for us, that a proposition provable a priori will be an analytic truth and, therefore,
necessary.
In considering Leibniz's ideas, however, this line of
thought must be wholly set aside. It is simply an error to
project into Leibniz's thought any restriction of a priori
status to propositions that are necessary or defensible by
appeal to meanings alone. God's policy of action: selection of the best, and man's policy: selection of the apparent best, are premises that Leibniz plainly admits in a priori
proofs, but he regards these as contingent premises and
their contingency will be inherited by whatever is proved
with their help. In fact, the contingency of all created existence alone guarantees the contingency of all matters of
fact even though a sufficient intelligence would be able to
predict them, using God's selection of the best as a premise. Leibniz says,
Principium primum circa existentia est propositio haec: Deus
vult eligere perfectissimum. Haec propositio demonstrari non
potest; est omnium propositionum facti prima, seu origo omnis existentiae contingentiae.
The first principle concerning existence is this proposition:
God wants to choose the best. This proposition cannot be
demonstrated; it is first of all propositions of fact; or the
source of all contingent existence.61
The confinement of a priori to analytic truth is plainly
wrong even for thinking about Kant, as his fundamental
concept, synthetic a priori truth, testifies.
(2) Obviously we do not and cannot produce apy of the
a priori proofs for contingent facts that Leibniz says are
possibile in principle. The reason he gives for our failure is
that the world is infinitely complicated and each thing in
it is related to everything else. An a priori proof of anything will have, as a consequence, to be an a priori proof of
everything. It will have to take an infinity of factors into
consideration. Our minds are clearly not up to such proofs.
But an infinite mind, the mind of God, and only such a
mind, could actually frame and grasp such proofs. This
strand of speculation occurs frequently in Leibniz's writings and it has contributed to the idea that Leibniz thinks
that all truths are analytic although we finite minds cannot appreciate the analyticity of what we discover through
experience. Therefore we call these "contingent truths".
Only God can understand these truths as analytic truths,
but such they surely are.62
34
Leibniz frequently alludes to infinite analysis in mathematics. He likes to say that he appreciated the true character of contingencies when he placed them in the context
of infinite mathematic~] analysis. Infinite analysis is the
"radix contingentiae": the root of contingency. Again, he
says that it takes a little flair for mathematics to grasp the
nature of contingent truths which are only resolvable, in
some sense, at infinity, as curves meet their asymptotes at
infinity, and an infinite-sided polygon becomes a circle.
Contingent truths are often said to be like incommensurable ratios whose exact value is the sum of an infinite series of factors. And Leibniz actually seems insecure in this
analogy because we finite minds are capable of summing
such infinite series.63
Many of those who say that Leibniz makes all truth analytic are most encouraged by this appeal to infinite analysis. My guess is that such readers think that Leibniz means
that we treat propositions as contingent because we cannot understand their necessity. These readers rightly note
something that Leibniz surely does mean, namely, that
what is only a posteriori to a finite mind may be a priori to
an infinite one. They go on to the plausible but faulty extension: What is contingent to a finite mind may be necessary to an infinite one, and what is synthetic for us may be
analytic for God. These extensions would only be legitimate if we could say that the infinite understanding that
God is capable of is an understanding of meanings and
definitions. Why should we think that? Of course, Leibniz
does mean that an infinite analysis would be required to
find all the predicates contained in a given substancesubject. But we have seen that the reasons for containment
do not all give rise to necessary truths or analytic propositions. There is nothing in the idea of an infinity of predicates that tends to make them all essential predicates.
Leibniz sometimes says explicitly that infinite analysis
of which only God is capable is needed to reduce contingent truths to identities. Can't we say that all identities
are necessary? Identities come into the picture only via
the notion of containment. If P is contained in S then the
identity underlying'S is P' is expressible as'S (which hasP
in it) is P', the identical part of which is 'What is Pis P.'
Let us agree that this is a necessary truth if anything is.
What follows? If P is a contingent feature of S, then the
identity is also statable as 'What is contingently P is contingently P.' But to point out that this identity, like all
identities, is necessary does not in any way undercut the
contingency of 'S is P'.
At times, Leibniz did worry lest his view that all truths
rest on identities make them all necessary. In a passage already quoted he asks, "If true propositions all reduce to
identities are they not all necessary?" He then tries to dispel the appearance of necessity in a manner much like
that I have just proposed. To say that there is an underlying identity only means that the predicate is contained in
the subject. But the truth in question is necessary only if
the containment is essential"ex notione subjecti" and not
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�if there is a merely inclining reason for the containment, a
reason "quae non necessitet."64 The Same understandable
worry sometimes leads Leibniz to d~ny that contingent
propositions really reduce to identities at all:
... ita in contingentibus datur connexio [relatioque] termi~
norum sive veritas, etsi ea ad principium contradictionis sive
necessitatis per analysin in identicas reduci nequeat.
-. .. accordingly, in the case of contingencies, a connection
[and relation] of terms is given, though it cannot be reduced
to the principle of contradiction or necessity through analysis
into identitiesP
But in this very passage Leibniz reasserts his idea that
God's infinite analysis gives him a view of contingencies
that we cannot share. It is, then, only a priori knowledge
and not necessity or analyticity that infinite analysis yields.
It is likely that the same reflections underly Leibniz's
misgivings about necessity in this passage:
... non intelligentem quomodo praedicatum subjecto inesse
posset, nee tamen fieret necessaria.
... I did not understand in what way the predicate can be
contained in the subject1 and yet not make the proposition
necessary.66
Leibniz did not forget his distinction between necessitat·
ing and inclining reasons here. It is just because the containment thesis will always generate an identity that it so
strongly suggests the necessity of the analyzed proposi·
tion to Leibniz and his readers. But, as we have seen,
Leibniz would rather abandon the claim that an identity
underlies every contingent truth than regard such truths
as necessary.
The best support for the idea that Leibniz makes even
contingent truths analytic may come from passages like
this one:
Verum est vel necessarium vel contingens. Verum necessarium sciri potest per finitam seriem substitutionum seu per
coincidentia commensurabilia1 verum contingens per infinitam1 seu per coincidentia incommensurabilia. Verum necessaria est cujus veritas est explicabilis; contingens cujus veritas
est inexplicabilis. Probatio a priori seu [demonstratio] Apodixis
est explicatio veritas.
Truth is either necessary or contingent. Necessary truth can
be known through a finite series of substitutions or through a
commensurable coincidence [resolution to identity] 1 contingent truth by infinite analysis 1 or through incommensurable
coincidence. Necessary truth is that of which the truth is explicable; contingent1 that of which the truth is inexplicable. A
priori or apodictic demonstration is explication of truth.67
Leibniz never makes it entirely clear in just what way appeal to infinity is supposed to help us to understand contingency. In spite of the large number of passages in which
he makes use of the analogy of incommensurability, he
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
never makes it clear just how this analogy is to be under·
stood either. Furthermore, his appeal to "substitutions"
in passages like the one just cited sounds menacingly necessitarian. Be this as it may, we can be sure that Leibniz
did not think that these analogies go to show that contin·
gent propositions are really analytic. He surely does mean
that we cannot complete son;te kind of analysis which God
can complete, and this because the analysis in question is
infinite. But to make a proposition analytic, Leibniz would
have to say not only that its full analysis requires an infi·
nite mind, but also that that analysis is wholly conceptual
and that the substitutions employed in the analysis are all
of them definitional substitutions. Mere assertion that
analyses are infinite does not imply that they are confined
to conceptual matters. On the contrary, what God discovers through his infinite analysis is what we have to learn
through experience. This prominently includes knowledge
of causes of events and of free decisions, that is, of contingencies. In countless passages, including those we discussed in the first two parts of this essay, Leibniz makes it
clear that God's foreknowledge is foreknowledge of contingent facts, of mechanically caused events, and of freely
chosen actions. The a prioricity of God's foreknowledge is
always distinguished from the necessity of what he knows.
God cannot reduce actions and causes to definitions because they are not matters of definition.
Leibniz usually, perhaps invariably, combines his idea
that God can make infinite analyses with the thought that
God can know contingent truths a priori. The above passage ends saying that contingent truths are inexplicable
by men and that by explicability is meant demonstrability
a priori. This is the mystery about contingent truths that
infinite analysis is to make intelligible. God's powers enable him to prove contingent propositions a priori, but
that does not convert contingent truths into necessary or
analytic propositions.
Here is what Leibniz really has in mind in his discussion
of infinite analysis that makes possible a priori knowledge
of facts. We men have enough understanding of the world
to predict a few things like eclipses and next month's tides.
The more knowledgeable and brilliant we are the more we.
can predict. Some of our predictions depend on our knowledge of our own future actions. We can predict that we
will not run out of gas on a long trip because we know that
we will stop and refuel when we run low. In these ways,
God is like us but infinitely wiser and more powerful. He
has been able to predict everything from the beginning.
"Everything" includes an infinite complexity of mechanically caused events and freely undertaken actions and
these are all contingent.68 God knows all the contingent
effects of mechanical causes and all the free decisions that
agents will ever take. Everything is connected with every·
thing else, so that the infinite truth of the world appears,
from a particular point of view, in the complete truth
about any individual. But this enormous truth contains a
great deal that is irreducibly contingent.
35
�God's knowledge is wholly a priori ,since he knows everything before he creates the world of which he has knowledge. He knows that this is the way things will turn out, if
he creates just such individuals subject to just such natural
laws, and also creates such free men acting on such principles. That all this is knowledge of the actual world is a consequence of God's decision to create this "series of things."
Here again we have a contingency. He creates as he does
in light of a mental comparison with other possibilities
each of which is also infinitely complex. ·God might have
created another world, or none. That would not be contradictory. But his creative action is contingent and a great
many of the things that happen in the world he created
happen contingently. Perhaps we can say that for Leibniz
anything that could be said to "happen" is contingent.
For he describes necessary and essential truths about the
world as conditional."
(3) Leibniz regularly says that every individual has a
"complete concept" and that all the truths, past, present
and future, about an individual could be read off from the
complete concept. This gives rise to the thought that
truths about individuals are conceptual truths, for does he
not say expressly that they can be got out of concepts? Beyond this, Leibniz is a metaphysical individualist. The
universe consists wholly of a multiplicity of entities that
Leibniz calls substances. These are basic individuals whose
existence manifests a true unity and independence. All
truths about the created universe are truths about these
substances. Again, this is an expression of Leibniz's nomi·
nalism. At his most theoretical, Leibniz says that all substances are what he calls monads. His theory of monads is
notoriously difficult to relate to discourse at the less abstract levels of physical science, psychology, and ethics. I
think it is certain that Leibniz himself never connected
his Monadology with other universes of discourse in any
definite way.70 Nonetheless, Leibniz also allows discourse
in which far less theoretical individuals such as persons
and physical bodies are the subjects about which truths
may be asserted. At both the most theoretical and the
more practical levels of discourse .he defends the idea that
every individual has a complete concept and he freely uses
persons and blocks of marble as illustrations of individual
things with complete concepts.71 When Leibniz wrote to
Arnauld saying that the entire history of the individual is
contained in its complete concept, down to the minutest
detail and once and for all, Arnauld found in this doctrine
"a necessity more than fatal." 72 Thus, Arnauld may be the
first of those who found in this opinion of Leibniz a philosophy that excludes all contingency. Readers who now
say that Leibniz makes all truths analytic in connection
with the complete-concept thesis are reasserting Arnauld's
initial reaction.
The analyticity interpretation gets support here because
we so naturally suppose that to speak about what is in a
concept is to speak about meanings. If all truths about in-
36
dividual substances can be generated by knowledge of concepts, then they all come from meanings and are, therefore,
analytic. This understanding is inadequate for reasons
much like those we have already stated in the context of a
priori proof and infinite analysis. Leibniz is using the term
"concept" of a substance so that all features of a substance, and not merely essential, definitional, or necessary
features, will appear in the concept. He uses the word
"concept" to contrast with talk about the substance itself
as an existant thing. The concept is the representation of
the thing. The features of the concept follow the features
of the thing and include contingent elements, if the thing
has contingent features.
Of course, the concept of the individual is accessible to
God before creation, so God is not merely forming a representation of an existant. This a priori accessibility of the
concept is, again, an important part of the doctrine that
encourages the analyticity thesis about Leibniz. Since the
concept pre-exists the thing of which it is the concept,
truths derived just from the concept must be conceptual
truths. But, again, this is wrong. We finite minds can have
concepts of things before they exist, and whether or not
they later exist. We may have a complete concept (relatively speaking, of course) of a certain engine, and then we
may build the engine that just fits that concept, or we may
build another, or none, if other ideas suit us better. This is
the way we should think of Leibniz' s God, allowing the
appropriate superiority of his power and wisdom. When
we think in advance that the bearings we have designed
for our engine will not last for more than one year of constant use, we envision a contingent feature of our engine.
If we build the engine and are entirely right about the
bearings, the fact that they wear out in less than a year
does not become a kind of necessary truth. It is a contingent truth that we were able to foresee, so that it was part
of our concept of this engine before the engine existed.
To call it "a truth about an engine" presupposes that the
engine is built. If we do not go on to build the engine,
then all we have is a conditional truth. "If we build such
an engine, and if the laws of nature are as we assert them
to be, then the bearings of that engine will wear out in less
than a year." This is a necessary truth, but, as Leibniz
himself says, its content is only of the form, "Such a thing
posited, such another thing is."73
We conclude, that for God and for man, the existence
of concepts of things prior to the existence of the things
of which they are concepts does not in any way imply that
truths about the things, legible from the concepts, are
necessary or analytic. In the absence of the existence of
the thing, such truths are not truths about individuals at
all. With the existence, even the subsequent existence,
nothing prevents them from being contingent truths.
(4) Leibniz sometimes says that an individual is a species
infima.74 That is, each substance is a least species, a species having only one member, namely, that individual substance itself. Now truths about the relation of species and
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�subspecies are ordinarily truths based wholly on meanings
within some scheme of classification. Let us assume in
any case, that such is the status of assertions like, "Cats
are mammals." Let us assume that this and other truths
like it are necessary and analytic truths. In the example,
we can see that being a member of the smaller class, cats,
has as an essential requirement being in the larger class,
mammals. If sentences about individuals could be assimi·
lated to this pattern they too would be necessary and analytic. It is as though the more defining qualifications one
introduces in speaking of a species, the fewer will be the
individuals that instantiate that species-concept. Then
Leibniz may seem to be saying that the most articulate
species-concept, the ultimate definition of a subspecies, is
always a concept so full that there is but one individual
that can satisfy that species concept. Such a concept will
specify everything about the single individual that is, under this understanding, the member of a species infima.
This idea is plainly close to the complete-concept theory
that we have just considered. The remarks we made about
that theory apply equally to the notion of a species infima.
Leibniz got the idea of a species infima containing one individual out of scholastic thought. The scholastics arrived
at the concept in connection with the problem of individuation. What is it that really makes one thing, one man,
for example, a different individual from another? According to a powerful and plausible Aristotelian view, the body
is the ultimate and decisive foundation for the individuality of things. But for scholastics some things, such as
angels, differ from men in that angels do not have bodies.
The idea that each angel is a species infima is a scholastic
solution to this problem. It tries to accept the Aristotelian
concept of individuation by ruling that there can be only
one bodiless entity of each conceptually distinct sort.75
Leibniz extends the idea of species infima to all individuals whether or not they have bodies. He has in mind
that no two individuals, such as two men, will have just
the same bodily features, nor just the same physical histories, etc. Therefore, classifications based on subtle
enough differences will yield classes containing only one
individual. But, as we saw, this will include classification
with respect to empirical and contingent features, and not
merely with respect to essential features. In fact, Leibniz' s
special objective here is not complete concepts or a priori
proofs but rather a vehicle for expression of his well-known
view that no two individuals are exactly alike, or that individuals never differ in number only.76
I have devoted a lot of detail to this point, that is, the
idea that all truths are analytic according to Leibniz, because it is an error that is widespread and an error that,
once made, leaves Leibniz' s overall thought in hopeless
confusion and inconsistency. I think it can be said that
this misinterpretation is just based on inappropriate modernizations of Leibniz's use of word.s such as "a priori",
"concept", "containment" and 11 teduction to an identity."
Confining ourselves to Leibniz's senses of such expres-
Tiffi ST. JOHNS REVIEW
sions, none of his doctrines lend any support to the popular misinterpretation.
4 Possibility and Possible Worlds
Leibniz often expresses his commitment to contingent
truth by saying that not everything that is possible actu·
ally exists.77 Spinoza and Hobbes are generally bracketed
in his discussions as thinkers who erroneously eliminate
contingency and equate what is possible and what is real.78
If there were no unactualized possibilities, Leibniz says, it
would be inappropriate to praise God for his creation,79
and men could not be free and responsible for their actions.80 To speak of human freedom presupposes that
more than one possibility must be open to a man. To praise
God presupposes that other worlds might have been created. This is the setting of the famous concept of possible
worlds.
The thought of other possible worlds emphasizes a side
of our reflections on contingency that easily generates
puzzles and paradoxes. The recent great revival of discussions of possible worlds has not neglected to revive these
paradoxes and puzzles.81 The paradoxes turn on the idea
of the existence of possible worlds. Suppose we agree that
Leibniz is right about Spinoza. Then Leibniz asserts and
Spinoza denies that there are possibilities beyond those
that are actualities. But what can this mean? Both men
know that what exists, exists, and what does not, does not.
Leibniz says that there are further possibilities, and Spinoza that it is not the case that there are further possibilities. These perhaps inevitable expressions suggest that
the difference is in some way a difference about what
there is. To say that there are unrealized possibilities
seems to be the same as to say that unrealized possibilities
exist somehow. Of course, they do not exist in the way in
which realized possibilities exist. But if Leibniz were to
admit that these possibilities do not exist at all, that they
do not exist in any sense, then what would be the difference between his view and Spinoza's? Generally, this kind
of thinking has led many, and sometimes Leibniz among
them, to think of a possible world as a kind of existent
thing. Because it gives unrealized possible worlds some
kind of ontological weight, I call this the ontological inter·
pretation of possible worlds.
The temptations and advantages of the ontological interpretation can be illustrated in connection with Leibniz's
discussions of the "problem of evil." Among the creatures
of God are some, some men, for example, whose acts are
vicious, whose characters are corrupt, and whose very
constitution is deficient. How can an all-powerful and allgood God have produced such creatures? One view of
Leibniz's solution to this problem is that, in Leibniz's system, God's creation does not include the fashioning of
such deficient individuals at all because all individuals, as
possibilities, exist eternally and, therefore, pre-exist all creative acts of God. A recent exposition states:
37
�siderable ontological standing. God is not responsible for
these individuals because they exist as possibilities quite
independently of him.
The ontological interpretation of possible worlds is
especially clear in a passage at the end of the Theodicee
where Leibniz adds a sequel to the dialogue of Lorenzo
Valla that he has retold. The high priest Theodore is sent
by Jupiter to be instructed by Pallas Athena so that he will
understand how misery and corruption of some men is
compatible with the greatness and goodness of God. The
goddess meets Theodore on the steps of an immehse palace of inconceivable brilliance. After first making him capable of receiving divine enlightenment, Athena tells him:
system wherein competing organisms fully exploit every
possibility and exist in every ecological niche. Both Russell and Arthur Lovejoy point out that, if Leibniz's theory
of competing possibilities is taken literally, there appears
to be no role at all for God in determining what exists.85
This is precisely because the theory gives possibilities not
only a kind of existence but also a certain activity that is
independent of and precedes actuality.
Leibniz seems to have thought of the "urge to exist" of
possibilities as at best a convenient metaphor. He usually
speaks of unrealized possibilities as existing only as thoughts
in the mind of God. In the Theodicee he says that the idea
of a struggle for actual existence must really be understood
as a conflict of "reasons in the perfect understanding of
God," and at least once he expressly asserted that possible
things, since they do not exist, can have no power to bring
themselves into existence.86 These views of possibility are
deflationary in comparison with the ontological interpretation that makes possibilities into things that are. When
Leibniz follows this ontologically restrained line of thought
and speaks of possibilities that God considers before crea·
tion as "ideas", he means that something that is just an
idea contrasts with things that exist in any sense at all.
The fact that God recognizes that many different actualities might arise, depending upc,m what he freely decides to
create, does not mean that anything already exists, as
though ready for his "examination" in its fully formed
state, merely leaving God to determine whether or not to
license the full-blooded actuality of an already subsisting
entity."
Leibniz's writings and life-long interest in the theory of
combinations shed light on his thinking about possibility.
In the Ars Combinatoria Leibniz relates his abstract development of a theory of combinations to truth by way of the
reflection that a proposition is composed of a subject and
a predicate and is, therefore, an instance of binary combi-
You see here the palace of destinies, of which I am the keeper.
There are representations here, not only of everything that
happens, but also of all that is possible; and Jupiter; having reviewed these representations before the beginning of the existing world, examined the possibilities for worlds, and made
It is, then, the business of inventive [combinatory] logic (as far
as it concerns propositions) to solve this problem: (i) given a
subject to find its predicates. (ii) given a predicate to find its
subjects.88
Each substance has "always" subsistfd, or, strictly speaking,
has had a conceptual mode of being that lies outside of time
altogether~sub ratio possibilitatis. Its total nature was determined, for its adequate and complete notion (including all its
predicates save existence) was fiXed. For this God is in no way
responsible; it is an object of his understanding and no creature of his will.82
According to this line of thought, possibilities are completed essences which God knows about but does not
make. Creation consists in admitting into actuality certain
of these individuals who, actuality apart, are completely
formed. In his policy for conferring actual existence on
these individuals God sees to it that the best possible world
becomes the actual world. This best possible world has
some defective individuals in it but it is, on balance, better
than any possible alternative. God did not construct these
deficient individuals, nor their betters. He merely allowed
them, so to speak, through the portals of actuality. I am
not particularly concerned here with the success of this
well-known formula for the absolution of God. I do want
to stress that, insofar as it does absolve him from the responsibility for having created deficient individuals, it
gives those individuals, as mere possibilities, a certain con-
the choice of the best of all. ... Thereupon, the goddess led
Theodore into one of the apartments: when he was there, it
was no longer an apartment, it was a world.83
In this forceful, entertaining and figurative exploitation of
the concept of possible worlds, unrealized possibilities are
construed on the pattern of other worlds that one might
visit or observe.84
The high-water mark of this realistic interpretation of
possibility in Leibniz is probably his theory of exigentia.
According to this view, all possibilities contain a certain
urge to exist. The actual world is the net effect of the strivings of individuals many of which are incompatible with
one another. The result is a world of maximal existence
which we might think of on analogy with an ecological
38
nation.
From the point of view of combinations, Leibniz is think·
ing of possible truths and not actual truths. That is, combinatory analysis will never enable us to see that the ascription
of one predicate to a subject makes a true proposition and
the ascription of another makes a false proposition. But
if our language were adequate and complete enough, a
merely combinatory procedure would generate all the
statements about every subject that could possibly be
true.
The idea of an adequate and complete language is itself
problematic. Leibniz always supposes that adequacy will
be enhanced by analysis and definitions that reduce complex predicates to their simpler, .and ultimately, to their
primitive constituents. The completeness of a language
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�would require that the miscellany of subject terms of ordinary speech be replaced by terms representing the simple
constituents of reality. This kind of project faces a large
number of philosophical and technical difficulties. It is
certainly a familiar project in twentieth-century philosophy. Ideas very much like those of Leibniz on the subject
of possibility, ideal language, and combinatory analysis lie
behind the modern development of truth-functional analysis, Russell's Hlogical atomism", the metaphysics and
"picture-theory" of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Rudolph
Carnap's many versions of the theory of "state-descriptions", and the extensional semantics of quantification
theory. Like Leibniz's schemes, a few of these recent projects for ideal languages have got beyond the programmatic
stage. The scheme itself, however, enables us to grasp and
evaluate Leibniz's thinking about possible worlds.
A drastically simplified model for the world will be helpful. Suppose that the universe could only have two constituent substances in it, apart from God. Suppose these
substances are two dice and that names for each of them
are the simple subject terms of our language. Suppose,
further, that the only truth to be told about a die is what
number of dots it shows. Then the simple predicates of
the language will all be expressions like "shows a three"
and "shows a six." Let us imagine that the whole history
of the universe is just the outcome of one roll of the dice.
The roll itself is not even a part of reality. Then all the
truth there is about the universe would consist in saying
what number of dots between one and six each of the dice
shows. We can write this as a pair of numbers: for example, let the truth be that (5, 6), which is to be read, "The
first die shows a five and the second a six." In this representation the subject terms are indicated just by position
in the pair. Leibniz' s problem of the Ars Combinatoria
would be this: Find all the predicates of the first die. And
the solution would be the set of all simple predicates
{shows a one, shows a two, ... , shows a six}.
All subjects of a given predicate, for instance, the predicate "shows a two," would be the set of all the subjects or
{the first die, the second die}.
Though creation will be a trifling matter with this attenuated universe, God still has the job of determining which
possible world shall come into existence. That means that
God will determine which of the several outcomes for a roll
of two dice shall be the actual universe. Being wise, God
understands that the possible worlds are exhausted in the
array of combinations:
(I ,I)
(2,1)
(3,1)
(4,1)
(5,1)
(6,1)
(1,2)
(2,2)
(3,2)
(4,2)
(5,2)
(6,2)
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
(1,3)
(2,3)
(3,3)
(4,3)
(5,3)
(6,3)
(1,4)
(2,4)
(3,4)
(4,4)
(5,4)
(6,4)
(1,5)
(2,5)
(3,5)
(4,5)
(5,5)
(6,5)
(1,6)
(2,6)
(3,6)
(4,6)
(5,6)
(6,6).
Now we need something to distinguish the different possible worlds represented in this array in terms of value so
as to make it thinkable in the framework of the analogy that
God might judge one possible world better than another.
Leibniz says that God combines things so as to produce a
maximum of ordered variety. Let us say that the numerical total of dots on both dice measures the quantity of existence and that variety is represented only by evenness
and oddness of the number of dots on each die. Under this
stipulation, the possible world (6,6) maximizes quantity but
not variety, while (4,5) maximizes variety but not quantity.
(5,6) offers a maximum of quantity with variety, so this
may be our model for the best possible world.89
Were the universe as simple as this dice-world, a mentality no more powerful than ours could survey possible
worlds in advance as well as any divinity. We could know,
as God would, that there are eleven possible totals of dots,
ranging from two to twelve. There are fifteen worlds with
sums less than seven and fifteen with sums more than seven.
On the array, these sets of fifteen possible worlds are displayed above and below, respectively, the diagonal going
from the lower left to the upper right. The diagonal itself
contains the six ways of getting a total of seven, which is
more ways than there are for getting any other total. We
could extend this set of analytical truths about the set of
possible outcomes indefinitely. These truths about possible outcomes are all accessible to us prior to rolling the dice.
Leibniz thinks of such intelligible considerations about
possible worlds as themselves necessary truths, as indeed
these are when considered as statements of possible arithmetical combinations. Should we point out to Leibniz that,
when these mathematical reflections are transferred to actual physical objects, they cease to be necessary truths?
Real dice might be so constructed (for instance, they might
be loaded) so that certain combinations will never come up.
We might then say, for example, that it is not possible to
roll a seven with a certain pair of dice. Still this would be a
matter of hypothetical necessity according to Leibniz, depending on physical laws and conditions. The outcome
(3,4) would not be contradictory, even for loaded dice. After
all, God will decide the physical laws too, so He can make
uninhibited use of combinatorially analyzed possibilities
in connection with possible physical objects.
Thinking in terms of this simple model of the world and
alternative possibilities, and in terms of our own real abilities to understand possibilities in advance, reduces our impulse to construe possible worlds as having any kind of existence at all apart from the one possible world which is
the world. Our own thought and survey of possible outcomes of a roll of dice does not depend on thinking that
those possibilities somehow exist with fully articulated status in advance of any rolling. No outcomes of railings preexist the actual rolling in any sense whatever, and speech
about possible outcomes only refers to what may happen
after rolling. When Leibniz says that God considers a
world or worlds in which Adam does not sin as well as worlds
39
�in which he does, he need mean by this nothing more than
a vastly more complicated case logically quite like our reflection that, in some rolls, the first die comes up a one,
and in others it does not. That these outcomes are open to
intelligent survey does not mean that they must already
exist in any sense at all.
In contemporary discussions of modal concepts in logic,
the ontologically weighty interpretation of possible worlds
is currently defended by David Lewis. In his theory, the
ontological standing of all possible worlds is so consider·
able that "real" or "actual" cease to be ways of making
fundamental distinctions between one possible world and
all the others.90 Lewis thinks that "actual" and "real" are
indexical expressions like <~here" and "now."91 Any place
at all is "here" for a person speaking from that place. One
time is not fundamentally distinguished from others by
being now. In a similar way, there is an internal and an external use of "actual" in characterizing worlds. Of course,
speaking within this possible world, we say that all the
others are merely possible while this one is actual. But the
inhabitants of other possible worlds will inevitably make
the same claim for the actuality of their world, and with
the same justice. To say that other possible worlds are not
actual does not diminish them in point of ontological
standing anymore than it diminishes the existence of places
to say that they are not liere. This ingenious, perhaps intuitively unconvincing proposal is egalitarian about the
existence of all possible worlds. Metaphysically speaking,
they are all equally constituents of reality.
Possible worlds are all of them representations like the
items in the array that represents thirty-six possible outcomes of one roll of a pair of dice. The real world is not a
representation. It is the world. So, too, by our hypothesis,
there is but one roll of the dice. The real world cannot be
identified with one of the items on the array, not even with
the item that represents the world as it actually is. Lewis's
theory about possible worlds succumbs, first, to the tempting thought that there are thirty-five items of one kind
and one item of a different kind, thirty-five shadowy worlds
and one full-blooded reality. On this basis, Lewis is able to
propose that full-bloodness or actuality is perspectival. We
have to judge, so Lewis thinks, from within one of these
thirty-six worlds. Naturally, the one we judge from will be
called "actual" and the others "merely possible." But we do
not judge from within one of these worlds, for none of
them is the world. We have, in the dice-world, thirty-six descriptions and one world. Nobody lives in descriptions and
must judge from such vantage points. The thirty-six possibilities all deserve the old scholastic label: "entia rationis."
Leibniz makes use of this thought when he points out
that we have to think even of the actual world as a possible world and as contemplated by God. 92 We will be safe
from ontological largesse as long as we make all possible
worlds alike, and do not think of them as all shadowy except one.
40
The most decisive argument against any ontological interpretation of possible worlds in the context of Leibniz's
thinking is that it undercuts the view of possibility that he
defends. Leibniz himself presents this argument. If possibilities were any kind of subsisting things, intelligible,
because they are somehow, there like Athena's palace of
destinies, to be inspected by God or man, then they would
have to be objects of a kind of experience, rather than products of reason and understanding. Inspection of possible
worlds, were they to exist in any way, would amount to a
further source of a posteriori knowledge. Theodore actually observes other worlds and explicitly gains knowledge
of them and of the comparision with his own world by experience. And that is just what Jupiter has done in contemplating the possibilities prior to creation. But this figure
gives us no reason to think that Leibniz actually inclines
to the ontological interpretation of possibilities in the
Theodicee. Athena, herself, calls the contents of the palace "representations" and though Theodore experiences
other possible events, this is not described as another reality but Comme dans une representation de theatre."93 In
other words, the items from which we learn about possibility are not other worlds with a less robust kind of being,
nor are they other worlds with the same being as ours, when
viewed from within, as David Lewis proposes. They are
not worlds at all but only representations. When thinking
about possibilities we are comparing representations of
worlds with each other.
The fact that we make an actual object like the array of
thirty-six possible dice worlds, or the palace of destinies of
Athena, is an accidental feature of representation. Our
representations could be all of them in imagination only.
But, whether the representations are real objects or only
thoughts, the important point is that we do not have alternative worlds to compare, but only alternative representations, one of which, by hypothesis, represents the world as
it is.
Leibniz makes the point that, if possibilities were to exist as inspectible things, then knowledge of them would
be a_posteriori, in discussing the idea of a "scientia media."
Such a middle science was proposed by Luis Molina,
among others, as a device for resolving the tensions between the concepts of human freedom and predestination. The middle knowledge was supposed to be a kind of
visionary appreciation of things accessible to God and
constituting a third option between the absolute necessity
of definitional and mathematical truth and the mere con·
tingency of matters of fact which we learn in experience.
Leibniz points out that, if the notion of vision actually car·
ries any weight in the concept of "scientia media", the
knowledge deemed accessible to God will be a posteriori
knowledge:
11
Non ergo in quadam Visione consistit DEI scientia, quae imperfecta est et a posteriori; sed in cognitione causae et, a
priori.
AUfUMN/WINfER 1982-83
�Thus the knowledge of God is not made up of a kind of vision1 which is imperfect and a posteriori; but in understanding
of causes, and a priori. 94
This theme becomes immediately relevant to the thought
of existing and inspectible possible worlds when Leibniz
rejects the Molinist claim that God might see the future
infallibly reflected in a great mirror.
Secundum au tares scientiae mediae non possetDEUS rationem
reddere sui pronuntiati, nee mihi explicare. Hoc unum dicere
poterit quaerenti cur ita futurum esse pronuntiet, quod ita
videat actum hunc representari in magna illo specula, intra se
posito, in quo omnia praesentia, futura, absoluta vel condi-
tionata exhibentur. Quae scientia pure empirica est, nee
DEO ipsi satisfaceret, quia rationum cur hoc potius quam illud in specula repraesentetur, non intelligeret.
According to the advocates of the scientia media, God could
not give a reason for his assertions, nor explain them to me.
To someone who asks why he says that things will be thus, he
would be able to say just that it is because he sees this event
represented thus in that great mirror, posited among them, in
which everything present, future, absolute or conditioned is
exhibited. Such knowledge is wholly empirical, and it would
not satisfy God himself because he would not know the reason
for which this rather than that is represented in the mirror.95
A vision in a glass, no matter how accurate and trustworthy,
is only another experience which cannot replace rational
understanding. In the spirit of this conclusion we have to
suppose that God's representations of other possible
worlds have the features that they do because God understands how things would be related in those worlds. The
same holds for the simpler human mind contemplating
the simpler dice-world. The array of thirty-six outcomes
has the constituents that it does because we understand
just what would be possible and we make the representations accordingly. Possible worlds are dependent upon our
understanding, and not the other way around. And if other
possible worlds did exist, somehow, and God could examine them, that would not give him reasoned knowledge
but only a kind of empirical knowledge that is not available to us.
5 Freedom
Leibniz's understanding of freedom is dependent in
many ways on his doctrines concerning contingency and
possibility. Mechanism perennially challenges the claims
of freedom. In the second part of this study, we have seen
Leibniz's proposals for the reconciliation of freedom and
a ubiquitous mechanical causality covering all motions.
The view that all truths are analytic which we have criticized in the third part would also contradict the view that
men are free, and the rejection of that interpretation elim-
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
inates a general threat to Leibniz's doctrines. The theme
of possible worlds, just considered in the fourth part, can
also be interpreted in a way that creates a fundamental
obstacle to freedom.
The thought that a man could have done something other
than what he did do plainly requires that some other action
was possible. Insofar as possible worlds are to offer a way
of expressing our thoughts about possibility, we can say
that, where there is freedom, one action is done in the actual world and other actions in other possible worlds. But
can we say that one and the same man exists in more than
one possible world? Or is an individual confined to just
one world so that other possible worlds could at best contain similar individuals faced with similar choices? If one
and the same man cannot exist in more than one world, the
prospect for freedom is dark. We shall apparently be forced
to construe the idea of the freedom of one individual as
equivalent to the idea of the behavior of more than one
individual.
This is the problem of transworld identity of individuals. It arises in a clear form in Leibniz's exchanges with
Arnauld and it is much discussed in recent literature on
identity and modal concepts.96 Leibniz sometimes seems
to imply that a true individual can exist in one possible
world only. The thesis that there can be no transworld identity is defended at present, again by David Lewis, among
others. It is closely connected with the ontological interpretation of possible worlds just examined. If possible
worlds exist in any sense at all, they seem to be, to that extent, like other places that one might visit, or at least
places of which one might obtain news. Under any such conception, each world will have its own population. At best,
one possible world may have an individual in it who more
or less perfectly resembles, in history and features, an individual in another possible world. Even if such a similarity
were perfect, an individual in one possible world cannot
be the very individual that is in another world any more
than a man born in New York can be the very same individual as an exactly similar man born in New Jersey.
We have repudiated the ontological interpretation of
possible worlds and we have argued that, in his best
thought, Leibniz repudiates it too. If the prohibition on
identity across possible worlds comes entirely from the ontological interpretation we can expect that it will be removed when that interpretation is set aside. If alternative
possible worlds are only representations of different systems and not existing systems of different entities, then it
seems that possible worlds will contain different representations of one and the same individual. Freedom would,
then, not be threatened.
When he received a sketch of the Discourse of Metaphysics from Leibniz in 1686, Arnauld found that the complete
concept of the individual enunciated in Article Thirteen
destroys the foundations of freedom and responsibiity.97
The ensuing exchange on this point brought the problem
41
�of transworld identity to the surface. In that correspondence, Leibniz uses the concept of possible worlds in arguments intended to overcome Arnauld's initially negative
judgment. God knows all the things that Adam and all his
descendants have freely done and all that they ever will
do. He also knows all the things they might have done had
they chosen to act differently, or were they going to
choose differently in the future. This is part of God's knowledge of other possible worlds which he could have created.
In other worlds Adam does different things. How does
Leibniz think it possible to fit freedom for Adam and his
progeny into this picture of God's knowledge and creation? There are two thoughts pertinent to this question
and the second of them hinges on transworld identity.
In the first place, God can know in advance what a man
will freely choose, so free agents do not present an obstacle to God's complete knowledge of the "series of things."
It is this thought that is responsible for the rapid shift in
point of view in the Discourse from the issue of determinism to the issue of foreknowledge." God contemplates all
possible worlds. Some of them have free agents in them
and some do not. Worlds with free creatures in them are
better than worlds without freedom, so God will surely
create one of them. This one is best of all, a judgment that
requires knowledge of the actual series of things and of all
possible series. But God does not produce the events of the
actual world himself. They are produced by the causes that
we rightly mention in explaining those events. Actions are
really done for the reasons the agent has.
Here we find again the point of "On Nature Itself." Explanations have their footing in the world and not merely
in its creator. By analogy, the pistons drive the crankshaft
of an engine and we cannot skip over or drop explanatory
reference to the pistons and explain the motions of the
crankshaft by appealing to the intentions or actions of the
builder of the engine. So in the inanimate world it is forces
that causes motions and not God. When a man acts freely,
he, and not God, determines what he will do. This is the
platform for Leibniz's defense of freedom and reconciliation of freedom with the complete concept of the individual and with God's knowledge. Though everything that I
do belongs to my complete concept, many things belong
contingently, and some because of what I freely choose to
do.
no more impairs my freedom than does another man's
knowledge of how I will vote impair my freedom to vote as
I see fit.
Leibniz's second line of thought about the freedom of
the individual in the correspondence with Arnauld is a
good deal less secure than the first line of thought. In the
passage concerning a possible journey that we have just
quoted, Leibniz touches on the question of the identity of
individuals across possible worlds. In introducing the possible journey as an illustration, Arnauld had sought to distinguish those facts about an individual without which he
could not be the individual that he is from another range
of facts which can vary without affecting identity. Arnauld
thinks that this distinction must be pressed in opposition
to Liebniz's claim that all the facts about an individual are
equally contained in the complete concept of that individ·
ual which God is able to consult before creation. Thus,
Arnauld says, with echos of the Cartesian cogito:
I am certain that, since I think, I, myself, exist. For I cannot
think that I am not, nor that I am not myself. But I can think
that I will make a certain voyage or not, while remaining en-
tirely sure that neither the one nor the other will require that
I am not myself. 100
If we put this in the terminology of possible worlds, Arnauld is asserting that the very same individual can exist
in more than one possible world. In one possible world Arnauld makes a journey and in another world the identical
Arnauld does not make the journey. As we have seen, this
claim rules out the ontological interpretation of possible
worlds.
In responding to this contention Leibniz comes very
close to denying the possibility that the same man may be
a constituent of more than one possible world. In his earlier letters Leibniz had fallen into use of the expression
"possible Adams" and in response to the statement of Arnauld that we have just cited, he says that the notion of
multiple Adams has to be taken figuratively. When we
think about Adam from the point of view of a few salient
characteristics: "that he was the first man, put into the
garden of enjoyment, and that from his side God took a
And there is nothing in me of all that can be conceived sub ratione generalitatis . .. from which it can be deduced that I will
make it necessarily _9 9
woman," 101 we speak as though these few characteristics
determine the individual so thaf he will remain one and
the same substance whether he has or lacks other features. Different completions will be the various possible
Adams, yet, we speak as though they will all be the same
individual, differently completed. This is what Leibniz
says must be understood as a loose and metaphorical way
of speaking. Rigorously speaking, a few salient characteris·
tics do not determine an individual,
God's knowledge of what I will do is not the explanation
for my free action. God knows my motives and he knows
how I will assess my Circumstances and this is the basis of
his knowledge of what I will freely do. God's knowledge
... for there may be an infinity of Adams, that is to say, of
possible persons [sharing these salient characteristicsJ who
would nonetheless differ among themselves . ... the nature of
an individual should be complete a,nd determined. 102
The connection of events, although it is certain, is not necessary, and . .. I am at liberty either to make the journey or not
make the journey, for, although it is involved in my concept
that I will make it, it is also involved that I will make it freely.
42
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�If a man were to differ in any way at all from the actual
Adam, in his features, in his history·, or in his relations to
the rest of the universe, then that man could not be Adam
but, at most, another possible man similar to Adam.
It seems to me that, if he were to rely on this second
line of thought, Leibniz's reconciliation of freedom and
the complete concept of an individual would surely fail. It
is as though Leibniz is here reducing the idea of two alter·
native courses of action available to a free agent to the
quite different idea of two very similar possible individuals, one of whom necessarily pursues one course, while
the other necessarily pursues the other course. If this re-
sult is allowed to stand it must be a severe disappointment
to those who hoped to analyze contingency in terms of
possible worlds. We start by thinking that I could take the
journey, or I could not. It is up to me. Possible world analysis then restates this as the fact that one possible world
has me taking the journey and another has me not taking
it. But now the ontological interpretation exerts its undesirable influence. It cannot be true of one and the same individual that he takes a trip and does not take that trip. So
if these possible worlds are like existing things, even with
a shadowy existence, it will turn out that it cannot be me
that does not take the trip in another possible world but,
instead, a man much like me. This is disappointing because the idea of freedom surely requires that one and the
same individual may either perform or not perform a certain act. Freedom is rejected if we substitute a conception
of two different individuals one of whom performs the act
while the other does not. What another does can never be
part of the essence of my freedom.
Leibniz does not seem to appreciate fully the dangers
implicit in the denial of transworld identity. Yet even in
these passages he does not foreclose an understanding
that will save both the complete concept notion and freedom. Thus, in the same context, Leibniz considers the life
of an individual up to a certain point in time, and the life
of the same individual after that point. The crucial time is
labelled B. B is the time at which the individual does in
fact perform some free action such as setting out on a
journey103 The line ABC then represents the life history
of the individual and the issue of identity and possibility
focusses on the conditions for saying that the individual in
the interval AB is the same as the individual in the interval BC. Since there is a reason for everything, and no free
action is a manifestation of arbitrariness or indifference,
there was a reason prior to B which explains why the journey is taken at B. Since the event at B is a free action, the
existence of a reason means that there is something about
the agent's constitution, thought, perceptions, and assessment of his circumstances prior to B which would make it
possible to predict with complete certainty that he would
make the journey. It is in this sense that everything that
he does is contained in the complete concept of the individual. But as we have stressed in Part Ill, the coercive
reason for a free decision does not necessitate behavior.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The very idea of a course of action entails that other courses
were possible. The individual whose choice could be predicted by a sufficiently well-informed observer is, nonetheless, really choosing. This too must be counted part of
the complete concept of the individual.
The complete concept gives the impression of conflict
with the concept of free deci>ion. But Leibniz means to
include the fact that he makes free decisions in the complete concept of an individual. That he will make the free
decision to take a journey is as much part of the concept
of a man as is the fact that he will take the journey. We
feel a conflict here that is reinforced by Leibniz' s assertion that an individual who does not make the trip cannot
be the same individual. By the same token an individual
who decides not to make the trip cannot be the same individual. Then how can the decision be free? If we set aside
the ontological interpretation of possible worlds, there is a
way of putting together all of these ideas that reconciles
them all. This requires as the focal element the thought
that a man deciding what to do is, in the jargon of possible
worlds, deciding which of two possible worlds to bring
about. Strictly speaking, there are an infinite number of
possible worlds in which I make the journey and an infinite nu.mber of worlds in which I do not. The set of all
possible worlds is the union of these two sets. In a free action, I determine that the actual world will fall into one
or the other of these two exhaustive sets of possibilities.
In this respect Leibniz' s conception of human freedom is
modelled in the creativity of God. God's work consists in
determining which possible world will be real. He chooses
a world which contains free agents. But that means that
he does not fully determine which world will be real, for
that is partly a consequence of all of the free decisions of
all free agents. Every free act makes a difference as to
what possible world is actual. We have seen that God
knows just which world will be real, but that knowledge
depends upon knowing how men will freely choose. This
means no less than the thought that God's knowledge of
the complete actual world depends upon his knowledge of
our world-choosing actions as well as his own.
At the point of choice an individual can really do either
of two things. If he does one, he makes himself and the
world different from what it would have been had he done
the other. In this sense, insofar as he is free, it is up to a
man to determine which possible individual he is. The result of this decision, like all other features of an individual,
contingent as well as necessary features, belongs to the
complete concept of that individual. So we can say that,
though a man has a real choice, he will not be the same individual he would have been had he chosen differently.
This does not at all require that there is, in some kind of
existence or subsistence, another individual who does
choose differently. The existence of such another would
not help us to understand freedom. I determine what individual I will become not in the sense that there is a collection of individuals and I can become identical to just one
43
�of them. Rather, I can represent my future in different
ways and my action will determine which of these repre·
sentations is a representation of the real world. Insofar as
he means that, when a man acts freely, he forecloses pas·
sibilities that would have made him a different man had
they been realized, Leibniz is certainly right.
. This ultimate reconciliation depends upon accepting
the thought that Leibniz understands every free action as
eliminating worlds from the roster of all possibilities. This
interpretation would have men sharing in just the kind of
creativity that Leibniz assigns to God. Men's power and
knowledge remain insignificant in comparison with divine
power and knowledge, but the essence of human action is
otherwise quite a lot like divine action. In many passages
in his writings this seems to be just the conception of human action that Leibniz does adopt. Thus:
[The rational spirit] is an image of divinity. The spirit not only
has a perception of the works of God but is even capable of
producing something which resembles them ... our soul is ar·
chitectonic in its voluntary actions .... In its realm and in the
small world in which it is allowed to act, the soul imitates
what God performs in the great world. 104
The following abbreviations are used in these notes:
G: I-VII: Gerhardt, C. J., Die Philosophische Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, seven volumes, Berlin, 1885.
Grua I-II: Grua, Gaston, G. W. Leibniz: Textes Inedits, two volumes,
Paris, 1948.
OF: Couturat, Louis, G. W. Leibniz: Opuscules et Fragments Inedits,
Paris, 1903.
L: Loemker, Leroy, Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters, Second
edition, Dordrecht, 1969.
M: Mason, H. T., The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence, Manchester,
1967.
F: Frankfurt, H. G., Editor, Leibniz: Critical Essays, Garden City,
1972.
I have translated the Latin citations from Couturat and Grua, of which
there are no English translations, and the French from Theodicee, G VI.
Other quotations in English translation only are from the works cited in
the relevant notes.
L See "A Brief Demonstration of a Notable Error of Descartes," L:
297-302; also "Critical Thoughts on the General Part of the Principles
of Descartes," especially Leibniz's comments on Part 11, art. 4 and 36, L:
392, and 393-5. Leibniz restates, summarizes, and refers to this issue in
many of his articles and letters.
2. See Mach, E., The Science of Mechanics, McCormack, T. J., tr., La
Salle, 1960, 360-5, and Papineau, D., "The Vis Viva Controversy,"
Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, val. 8, 1977, 111-42.
3. The Passions of the Soul, Haldane and Ross, editors, Descartes: Philosophical Works, Cambridge, 1931, art. xxxv-vi, val. I, 347-8.
4. See "On Nature Itself," L, 503.
5. Principles of Philosophy, art. 1xiv, in Haldane and Ross, val. I, 269.
6. The distinction between primary qualities (as those susceptible of
mathematical characterization and thus objective) and secondary qualities (taken to include all sensuous qualities and to be subjective only) was
first drawn by Galileo. The terminology, "primary" and "secondary," was
first used by Robert Boyle. The distinction plays a fundamental part in
the philosophies of Descartes and Locke and has been retained by many
thinkers up to the preSent. See, for example, Jackson, F., Perception,
London, 1977,ch. 7.
44
7. See Meditations, "Replies to Objections," Haldane and Ross, val. II,
253-4; and Meditations, VI, val. I, 191.
8. Principles of Philosophy, Part II, art. xxxvi.
9. E. g., Letter to Mersenne, Adam and Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes,
Paris, val. III, 648-9.
10. Principles of Philosophy, Part II, Art. xliv-lii, Adam and Tannery,
vol. VIII-I, 68-70.
11. "Critical Thoughts," L:398-402; and the note to Leibniz's comment
on Part II, Art. 53, G: IV, 382-4.
12. "On Nature," L: 505.
13. "On Nature," L: 505; and Letter to DeVolder, L: 516; see also,
Naert, E., Memoire et conscience de soi selon Leibniz, Paris, 1961, 15-20.
14. Cassirer, E., Leibniz's System in Seinen Wissenschaftlichen
Grundlagen, Mar burg, 1902, Einleitung, art. 7, 90-102.
15. Discourse on Method, Anscombe and Geach, editors, Descartes'
Philosophical Writings, London, 1954, 47.
16. Principles of Philosophy, Part IV, art. cciv, Haldane and Ross, vol. I,
300.
17. "But they who observe how many things regarding the magnet, fire,
and the fabric of the whole world, are here deduced from a very small
number of principles, although they consider that I had taken up these
principles at random and without good· grounds, they will yet acknowledge that it could hardly happen that so much could be coherent if they
were false," Principles of Philosophy, 301. Here Descartes approximates
the so-called hypothetico-deductive conception of theory formation
and confirmation. The degree to which this kind of thinking appears in
Descartes' ideas about scientific knowledge has been generally overlooked.
18. Discourse on Metaphysics, art. 10, L: 308-9.
19. Discourse, art, 22, L: 317-8.
20. Meditations, reply to objections, Haldane and Ross, 219.
21. "On Nature," L: 505.
22. "On Nature," 501.
23. L: 498-508.
24. "On Nature," 500.
25. "On Nature," 501.
26. Boyle, R., "Free Inquiry etc.," 1692; See Loemker's account, L: 498.
27. "On Nature," L: 502.
28. "On Nature," 504-5.
29. See my "The Scientific Background of Descartes' Dualism," this
journal, Winter 1981.
30. "On Nature," L: 502.
31. "On Nature," 503. The writer is Spinoza.
32. " ... [I]f this world were only possible, the individual concept of a
body in this world, containing certain movements as possibilities, would
also contain our laws of motion (which are free decrees of God) but also
as mere possibilities," from Leibniz's remarks on a letter of Arnauld,
M:43.
33. Discourse on Metaphysics, art 10, L: 308-9.
34. See Hobbes' Leviathan, Part I, ch. l-3, and De corpore, Part IV,
ch. 25. For contemporary materialist conceptions of the mind see
Rosenthal, D., editor, Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem, En·
glewood Cliffs, 1971.
35. See O'Shaugnessy, "Observation and the Will," J. Phil., vol. LX,
1963.
36. See my "Teleological Reasoning," J. Phil., LXXV, 1978.
37. For example, Grua, 270-l. The distinction is also discussed in
several letters of the Correspondence with Arnauld.
38. Nouveaux Essais, G: V, 429.
39. M: 43. See note (32), above.
40. See Clarke's fifth letter, addressed to art. 1-20 of Leibniz's previous
letter, Alexander, H. G., editor, The Liebniz-Clarke Correspondence,
Manchester, 1956, especially 98.
41. Leibniz's second letter to Clarke, art 1, Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, 16.
42. Discourse on Metaphysics, art. 5, L: 305.
43. Montgomery, G., Leibniz: Basic Writings, LaSalle, 1902, 127.
44. See Russel4 B., The Philosophy of Leibniz, London, 1902, ch. II~
25-30.
AU1UMN/WINTER 1982-83
�45. Louis Couturat played an especially important role in promoting
this interpretation. See La Logique de Leibniz, Paris, 1901, ch. VI, sect.
5-18, 184-213. Summing up his detailed inVestigation, Couturat says,
"En resume, toutes verite est formellement ou virtuellement identique
ou comme dira Kant, analytique, et par consequent doit pouvoir se
demontrer a priori au moyen des definitions et du principe d'identite,"
210. Couturat's book influenced Russell to change his interpretation
from his 1902 exposition, according to which Leibniz makes existential
propositions contingent, to the 1903 view that Leibniz did not really
believe in contingency at all since he held that all truths are analytic.
The prestige of Russell and Couturat has been an enduring support for
this interpretation. Among more recent writers, the analyticity of all
truth is ascribed to Leibniz by Fried, D., "Necessity and Contingency in
Leibniz," Phil. R., val. 87, 1978, 576; Wilson, M., "On Leibniz's Explication of Necessary Truth," in F: 402; Lovejoy, A, "Plenitude and Sufficient Reason," The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge, Mass., 1936, as
reprinted in F; 295, 316, and 321; Hacking, I, "Individual Substance," F:
138; Rescher, N., Leibniz: An Introduction to his Philosophy, Totowa,
N. ]., 1979, 23; and Nason, J. W., "Leibniz and the Logical Argument for
Individual Substances," Mind, vol. LI, 1942, 201-2. Prominent dissidents are Broad, C. D., Leibniz, Cambridge, 1975, who recognizes the
compatibility of the containment thesis and the complete concept with
contingency; and I Ishiguro, H., Leibniz's Philosophy of Logic and Language, Ithaca, N.Y., 1972, 15 and 120.
46. Quine, W. V., "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical
Point of View, Cambridge, Mass., 1953, 20---46.
47. The limitation of this example to the subject-predicate propositional structure has no theoretical implications. Equally compelling illustrations could be constructed to fit any propositional form.
48. Grua, 387.
49. OF: 16-7 and 405; Grua, 273.
50. Grua, 288.
51. See Strawson, P., and Grice, H., "In Defense of a Dogma," Phil. R.
52. "Recent Work in the Philosophy of Leibniz," Mind, 1902, as reprinted in F: 365.
53. "Recent Work."
54. OF: 16.
55. Grua, 303; OF: 405.
56. Discourse on Metaphysics, art. 13, L: 310.
57. OF: 18.
58. OF: 405.
59. "First Truths," L: 267.
60. Letter to Arnauld, M: 63.
61. "Reflections sur Bellarmin," Grua, 301.
62. See especially, Rescher, N., The Philosophy of Leibniz, Englewood,
1967, ch. II and III; and the same author's Leibniz: An Introduction,
Totowa, N.j., 1979, ch. III and IV.
63. Parkinson, G. H. R., Leibniz: Logical Papers, Oxford, 1966, 77-8;
OF: 388 and 18.
64. OF: 405.
65. Grua, 304; see also, OF: 388, ffl34.
66. OF: 18.
67. OF: 408.
68. Letter to Arnauld, M: 58.
69. Nouveaux Essais, G: V, 428.
70. See, for example, the Correspondence with Des Bosses, L: 596-616.
Here Leibniz shows great flexibility, or ambiguity, on the connection
between monads and the status of animals as unified beings. The muchdiscussed vinculum substantiale marks his insecurity concerning the adequacy of the theory that all true substances are monads.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
71. M: 42.
72. M: 9.
73. Nouveaux Essais, G: V, 428.
74. Discourse on Metaphysics, art. 9, L: 308.
75. Discourse, art. 9, L: 308.
76. This claim appears throughout Leibniz's writings. It makes up one
of his arguments against atomism; it is a foundation for his relational
theory of space and time; and it is a prominent dictum of the Discourse
on Metaphysics and of the Monadology.
77. Grua, 263.
78. Leibniz thinks that Spinoza and Hobbes held this erroneous view and
that Descartes risks falling into it. See L; 273 and Theodicee, G: VI, 139.
79. Theodicee, G: VI, 145.
80. Grua, 270; and Theodicee, G: VI, 122.
81. This revival has been stimulated in major part by the work of Saul
Kripke who made use of the concept of possible worlds in constructing a
semantics for modal logic. For the revival of the paradoxes see the discussion of David Lewis's theory of possible worlds below.
82. Rescher, N., Leibniz: An Introduction, Totowa, N. ]., 1979, 72.
83. Go VI, 363.
84. Compare, "I argued against those misuses of the. concept that regard possible worlds as something like distant planets, like our own surroundings but somehow existing in a different dimension, or that lead to
spurious problems of 'transworld identification' "; Kripke, S., Naming
and Necessity, Cambridge, Mass., 1980, 15.
85. For Lovejoy's view see F: 327; for Russell's, F: 378.
86. Grua, 286; and Theodicee, G VI: 236.
87. This deflationary, non-ontological conception of possible worlds
also seems to rule out the solution of the problem of evil that is imputed
to Leibniz by Rescher and others. Nothing evil exists prior to the creation of the world. God's understanding that something evil might exist
cannot be made to yield the idea that something evil does exist whether
He does any creating or not.
88. Parkinson, G. H. R., Leibniz: Logical Papers, Oxford, 1966, 1-12;
and Couturat, L., La Logique de Leibniz, Paris, 1901, ch. II, "La Combinatoire."
89. It is a defect of the simple dice-world as a model for Leibniz's thinking
that the best world can be achieved in either of two ways: (5, 6) or (6, 5).
Strictly speaking Leibniz is absolutely committed to the view that there
must be just one uniquely best possible world if God is to create anything.
90. Lewis, D., Counterfactuals, Cambridge, Mass., 1973, 84-91; and
"Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic," J. Phil., vol. LXV,
1968, 113-26.
91. Counterfactuals, 85-6.
92. Grua, 270.
93. G: VI, 363.
94. OF: 26.
95. OF: 26.
96. See the works of Kripke and Lewis cited above and Chisholm, R.,
"Identity through Possible Worlds: Some Questions," and other essays
in Loux, M., The Actual and the Possible, Ithaca, 1979.
97. Letter of Arnauld to Leibniz, M: 9.
98. Articles 13-17, L: 310-5.
99. M: 58.
100. G. II:
101. M: 45:
102. M: 45, and see also 60-1.
103. M: 46.
104. Principles of Nature and Grace, art. 14, L: 640.
45
�Letter from a Polish Prison
Adam Michnik
Bialoleka Prison
Aprill982
Dear Friend,
General )aruzelski has announced that political prisoners who promise to give up all "illegal" activity will be
freed. Liberty is within reach. All you have to do is pick up
a pen and sign a loyalty oath ...
You don't have to do much to get rid of the barbed
wires and bars between you and "freedom." The steel
doors of Bialoleka Prison will open. No more prison walks:
you will see the city streets. You will see streets endlessly
patrolled by armored cars and sentries. You will see pedestrians and automobiles stopped for identity checks,. You
will see the informer surveying the crowd for people suspected of having broken "emergency security restrictions." You will hear words you know only from having
read them in history books: police round-ups, volksliste,
words suddenly stripped of the patina of time and revived
in all their horror by the present moment. You will hear
the latest news: summary sentences, the fate of friends arrested, hunted, hidden.
On Loyalty Oaths
But if you make a simple little calculation, the simplest
possible-supposing you are able-you will know at once
why signing a loyalty oath is of no interest to you: quite
simply, because it is not worth the trouble. Here, in
prison, no one is going to arrest you ''until the situation is
clarified." Here, you don't have anything to be afraid of.
One of the most courageous and dear-headed of the young Polish political thinkers and leaders, Ada'm Michnik wrote an important essay on tolerance that has been translated into French, L'€glise et la gauche (Paris,
Seuil 1979).
This article first appeared in Commentaire, Summer 1982.
46
It's paradoxical, I know. Here, w,hen there's a knock on
the door at daybreak, it's not strangers in uniform. It's
your flunky bringing you coffee: under his sharp eye you
know you are safe from spies. Bialoleka Prison is a moral
luxury and an oasis of freedom. It is also testimony to your
resistance and your importance. !f the government has
put you in prison it shows that they have been forced to
take you seriously.
Sometimes they try to frighten you. A friend of mine, a
factory worker from Warsaw, was threatened with fifteen
years in prison; another prisoner they tried to intimidate
by threatening to implicate him in a case of espionage.
One man has had to put up with being interrogated in
Russian, another was dragged from his cell to be trans·
ferred to the farthest reaches of Russia. He came to a little
while later at the dentist. But these blows are bearable. I
think it is easier to resist here than out there on the other
side of the barbed wire, where the situation is more com·
plicated, morally as well as politically. ("It may be easier to
be in prison than to be free," a friend writes to me. "The
waters have all burst and in their whirlpools the slime has
risen to the surface.")
The Primate of Poland has called it an outrage that loy·
alty oaths are exacted under duress. The Pope has called
this violation of conscience criminal. It is hard to think
otherwise. We condemn with all our heart those who are
guilty of extorting these loyalty oaths and brutally destroying another man's dignity. A young woman, the wife of a
Solidarity activist, was arrested and her sick child taken
away from her. They told her the child would be put in an
orphanage. She signed. One of my \riends was arrested,
and had to leave his mother who was riddled with cancer.
"There won't be a lame dog who will dare give her some·
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�thing to drink," they said to him. He signed. Useless to
give more examples: the brutality df some, the weakness
of others, sordid blackmailings, tragic slander, we know all
that well, and we also know well that subjected to such
pressures people don't all act the same way. The Primate
has left it open to each one to make his own choice.
Teachers particularly have to choose between two equally
important imperatives: to retain their self-respect and to
maintain their contact with the young. The decision rests
upon the· individual; it makes appeal to his intelligence
and to his conscience. No one can judge anyone else. To
resort to ostracism would only correspond to the desires of
the government: isn't it their idea to set us against one an·
other and thereby break down our resistance and our solidarity? But such a tolerant attitude, born of understanding,
ought not to lead us to conclude that to sign a loyalty oath
is a morally neutral act. No. To sign a loyalty oath is wrong,
whatever the circumstances are; it is only that circumstances can make it more or less wrong. A man who signs a
loyalty oath always deserves pity, sometimes understanding; praise, never. There are many reasons for this, first
among them the imperative of self-respect.
On Self-Respect
To be powerless before armed violence is to be deeply
humiliated. Set upon by six thugs, you are powerless. But
just because of this powerlessness, if you have the least
shred of self-respect, you will not find this the moment to
sign agreements and make promises. They force the door,
they bash the furniture, they take you to headquarters
with handcuffs on your wrists, they knock you down, they
squirt teargas in your eyes, and then they request you to
sign an oath. Your basic instinct for self-preservation and
simple human dignity force you to say "No."
For even if these people were fighting fbr an altogether
honorable cause, they would defile it by such behavior.
At that moment your mind is no longer clear. It's only
after traveling several hours, when you find yourself at
Bialoleka Prison, shaking with cold (later they'll talk about
"humane conditions"), and you can listen to the radio,
that you learn that war has been declared against your
people. This war has been declared against them by the
very men to whom they gave their mandate to govern, to
formulate policy, and sign international treaties. These
men offer us a helping hand in public and talk about rec·
onciliation at the same time that they order the secret police to arrest us in the middle of the night ...
It is immediately clear to you that you are not going to
give these people the gift of your loyalty oath; loyalty is
something they are not capable of.
You don't as yet know what this war will bring. You
don't know as yet how the factories and steelworks will be
stormed, or the shipyards or the mines. You know nothing
as yet about "Black Wednesday" in the Wujek mine. But
you do know that if you sign a loyalty oath you will be
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
haunted by the sense that you have denied yourself and
the meaning of your life, by the sense that you have be·
trayed people who placed their trust in you. It would
mean betraying friends who are in prison and friends in
hiding, betraying those who are trying to defend you by
printing pamphlets in Gdansk'Or in Krakow, by organizing
meetings in Paris or New York. You see before your eyes
the face of Zbigniew, in hiding, of Edward, convicted, of
Seweryn, waiting in Paris. Nothing is decided, many paths
are open, choices are not yet sealed, but you already
know, you feel it, that your self-respect is not the currency
with which to buy your liberty. At this point, another argument not to sign a loyalty oath emerges: good sense.
It is irrational to sign a contract with people for whom
even the term Hcontract" has no fixed meaning, who
blandly renege on their commitments and for whom lying
is an everyday matter. Have you ever met a security agent
who hasn't lied to you? These people, whose eyes are
blank but never at rest, whose minds are dull but keen at
the art of torture, debased and greedy for advancement,
see you only as an object to be worked over. These people
have a particular view of human nature. For them every
man can be "convinced": by that they mean corrupted or
terrified. The only question is the price to be paid or the
blows to be delivered. They go methodically about their
business-but your least slip, your least weakness, gives
meaning to their lives. To them your capitulation means
more than simple professional success: it proves their
raison d'etre.
The Meaning of the Confrontation
You are engaged in a philosophic confrontation with
them. At stake in this confrontation is the meaning of
your life and of every human being's life-and the loss of
meaning in theirs. It is the confrontation of Giordano
Bruno with the inquisitor, of the Decembrist with the police, of Lukasinski with the Tsar's destroying angel, of
Ossetsky with the blond fellow in the Gestapo uniform, of
Mandelstam with the Bolshevik in the uniform of the
NKVD. It is a confrontation which has never ended and
whose stake, as Elzenberg said, isn't measured by your
chance of emerging victorious, but by the intrinsic worth
of the idea. In other words, it is not in overcoming the
forces against you that you carry off the victory, but by remaining true to yourself.
Reason also tells you that in signing a loyalty oath you
give the officials the weapon they'll make use of to make
you sign the next declaration: that of collaboration. In
signing .the loyalty oath, know that you sign a pact with
the devil. Be wary of giving these uniformed inquisitors so
much as your little finger: they'll soon grab your whole
hand. How many men do you know who have destroyed
their lives in a moment of weakness? Today they are pursued by phone calls at home and at work, subjected to
blackmail every time they go abroad. They pay for a min·
47
�ute of thoughtlessness with years of.humiliation and fear. ,
If you don't want to be afraid, if you want to respect yourself, an inner voice tells you, don't .make compromises
with the government police. The police official inspires in
you less hatred than pity. You know he suffers psychologi·
cal complaints, he is often ashamed in front of his children;
you know he will disappear, buried in collective forgetful·
ness. (Who remembers the informers and executioners of
the past?) And this brings us to the third reason for not
signing: memory.
Memory
You think about your country's history; to sign a loyalty
oath in prison has always been a disgrace; to remain faithful to yourself and your country has always been a virtue.
You think of people who have been tortured and who
spent many years in prison but who never signed. And
you know that you will not sign either because you will
not renounce their memory. Especially will you not sign
when you remember what happened to those who did
give up in prison. You remember Andrzej M., the distinguished literary critic, your friend, who, in prison, wrote a
clever pamphlet cooperating with the authorities, evidence of his spiritual death; Henryk Sz., an intelligent and
ambitious young man, who rose to the rank of chief Informer on his comrades; you remember Zygmunt D., that
charming and witty companion who, once he gave in, con~
tinued to inform on his friends for years afterwards. You
remember with horror this human flotsam, these creatures destroyed by the police; and you wonder what will
become of you. Of course, the choice is yours alone, but
memory reminds you that you, too, could find yourself in
their ranks: no one is born a spy. You and you alone daily
forge your lot, sometimes at the risk of your life. You
haven't heard as yet the loyalty oaths on the radio, the disgusting interviews, you don't know that Marian K., that
intelligent and courageous activist from Nowa Huta, who
in his loyalty oath wanted to render unto God that which
belongs to God and to Caesar what is Caesar's, ended by
rendering everything to the police for want of understanding that in certain situations ambiguity loses its shades of
meaning and the half truth becomes a total lie. You
haven't heard the interview with Stanislas Z. a workeractivist also from Nowa Huta, cunning, resourceful,
whose voice was never clear until it joined the government propagandists; you haven't yet read the statement
of Marek B., spokesman for the National Committee, protege of Leszek, the doctor of Gdansk, who dragged the
name of Solidarity in the mud; neither have you read the
statement of Zygmunt L., from Szczecin, Marian j.'s adviser; it was he who, at that time, whispered him absurdities about the "jews in government," and "gallows for
profiteers"; today he denounces the "extremists." In
short, you don't yet know that this time, as always, there
will be people who will allow themselves to be manipula-
48
ted into telling lies Oike Zdzislaw R. from Poznan with
whom you spoke at the time of the dedication of the monument), influenced by threats. This time, as always, the
rats will leave the sinking ship first. But you know that
this situation is not new and that you are not going to
agree to talk to the official no matter how much he waves
your release papers before your eyes. You are not going to
explain to him that he is the slave here, and that no order
is going to come to free you. You are not going to explain
to him that these activist workers, these teachers, writers,
students, and artists, these friends and strangers who
crowd the smokey corridors of police headquarters, embody the freedom of the country-and that just for that
reason war has been declared upon them. You are not going to explain to this official, after he has slugged you with
the force of the sadism pent up these last fifteen months,
the meaning of Rosanov' s essay i.n which he asks the fundamental question for European culture that arises when
the man who holds the whip is face to face with the man
who is whipped. You are not going to explain to him that
meeting him in this place is nothing but a new version of
that old confrontation. No, you will explain nothing; you
won't even speak to him. You will give him an ironic
smile, you will refuse to sign whatever there is to sign (including the internment order), you will say how sorry you
are and ... you will leave the room.
On Jailers as Slaves
You will be transfered to the Bialoleka Prison in the
company of men who are a credit to the best of Polish society; a famous philosopher, a brilliant historian, a stage
director, a professor of economics, members of Solidarity
from Ursus and from the University, students and workers. You won't be beaten in prison. On the contrary. They
need you as a proof of their liberalism and their humanism. Won't you be shown to the Red Cross delegation? to
the deputies of the Diet? even to the Primate of Poland
himself? They will be fairly polite, fairly obliging, fairly
pleasant. Only occasionally will they make you run the
gauntlet of helmets, truncheons, and imported japanese
shields. But the only effect of this masquerade will be to
make it even more evident that the regime is like a bad
dog who would very much like to bite but cannot because
his rotten teeth make him powerless. The day of Pawka
Kortchaguine is past. Today it is enough to raise your
voice to kindle a gleam of fear in the eyes of the official.
Fear and uncertainty are betrayed despite the helmet, the
uniform, and the shield. And you will understand at once
that this fear on the part of the official is a source of hope
for you. Hope is essential. It is perhaps the most important thing there is ...
Hope is precisely what's at stake in the present struggle.
The officials want to force us to to renounce our hope.
They understand that the man who declares his loyalty to
a regime of violence and lies abandons all hope of seeing
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�Poland free from lies and violence. The loyalty oath aims
to transform us into servile beasts who will no longer raise
our heads to defend liberty and dignity. In refusing all en·
ticement to talk with the official, in refusing him your CO·
operation, in rejecting the role of informer and spy, in
choosing the human condition of political prisoner, you
preserve your hope. A hope not only in yourself and for
yourself, but one which is also in others, for others. Your
declaration of hope is like a bottle you cast from your
prison to be carried by the sea across the world to go
among men. If you succeed in reaching even one single
person, you have won.
I know what you will say: he is spouting commonplaces,
he is playing the hero, his head is in the clouds. That's not
exactly true.
True, I do assert commonplaces. Ordinary truths, how·
ever, have to be repeated frequently in order to endure,
particularly today when it takes courage to assert ordinary
truths. In contrast, relativism, otherwise so useful in intel·
lectual activity, may confound moral criteria and call into
question moral principles. . . Is this attitude synonymous
with the cult of heroism? I don't think so. You know you
are not a hero and you never wanted to be one. You didn't
want to die for your people, nor for freedom, or for any·
thing else ... You did not envy Ordon or Winkelride their
fate ... You wanted to live a normal life, to be able to con·
tinue to respect yourself and your friends. You loved the
moral ease that allowed you to feel free inside yourself, to
love beautiful women, to enjoy good drink. This war
caught you with a beautiful woman, not on the point of
attacking the offices of the Central Committee.
But since this war has been declared on you, along with
more than thirty thousand of your fellow citizens, normal
life is out of the question. A normal life, in which self·
respect is joined to material security, cannot be found in
the midst of police raids, summary sentences, outrageous
radio broadcasts, and underground Solidarity publications.
You must choose between moral and material luxury. You
know that your "ordinary" life today would have the bitter
taste of defeat. It is precisely because you want to enjoy
life that you won't give in to the seductive propositions of
the government bureaucrat. He promises you freedom, he
gives you glimpses of ordinary human happiness, but he
brings you only slavery, suffering, and damnation.
No, this is not heroism. It is a rational choice. Brecht
said; "Woe to the people who need heroes." He was right.
Heroism implies an exceptional situation, while the Poles
mili~
tary and police power.
I do not want to be misunderstood. I do not propose ro·
mantic intransigeance, but social resistance. It is not,
therefore, appropriate to bring up in this context, as
Daniel P. did in his article in Polityka, the two opposed
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Romantic Revolt and Organic Struggle
While he acknowledges the validity of both these posi·
tions, the writer defends those who espouse "organic
struggle" on the staff of Polityka, the journalists who con·
tinued to ply their trade. At the risk of finding themselves
questioned by their own children, "What did you do when
guns took the place of reason?", they decided to assume
the responsibility of staying at their posts instead of quietly
withdrawing. "There's no point in pursuing lost virtue,"
The Value of Morality
today need a "normal" and "general" resistance to
positions which have become classic in our history: the
one of romantic revolution and the other of "organic,
struggle. Let us see why.
writes Daniel P. "There's no point in mouthing grand
principles and forgetting the practical. There are no spurs
on bedroom slippers." (This apropos of the rebellious
journalists of Polityka.)
It is his view that "it is not in the interest of society that
the press disappear in Poland or that it should see 'its di·
versity even more restricted. We must work to send the
soldiers back to their barracks. Who will do it if we take on
easy jobs as spokesmen for exile organizations abroad, as
editors for nonpolitical newspapers?" Daniel P. uses here
arguments you know well beginning with the controversy
about the Essay on Grubs by Piotr Wierzbicki. He doesn't
beat around the bush, he doesn't ramble, he uses serious
arguments and states clearly the dilemmas that weigh
upon every Pole today.
To argue these points one must apply two standards,
one for particular issues and another one for general ques·
tions.
It may be true, as Daniel P. says, that the people who
believe in defiance are as essential as the people who be·
lieve in organic struggle, but I should like to add, however,
that it is important to be "organic" in form and "defiant"
in content. We need men who don't befoul themselves in
the lies of public life, who enjoy the good opinion of soci·
ety, who refuse to compromise with the sort of system
imposed on our country, but who do not endorse irrespon·
sible actions such as terrorism or guerilla attacks. In other
words, the dilemma isn't expressed simply in the terms
"organic struggle" versus "defiance" but in the terms
ganic struggle" versus ''collaboration."
"or~
Compromise is an indispensable element of a healthy
public life, on the condition, however, that society per·
ceives it as compromise. As soon as public opinion perceives it as a device or a betrayal, compromise loses its
validity. It becomes a mistake or a lie. To come out on the
side of WRONA* today amounts, as we both know well,
to coming out against the country. The loyalty oath the
officials demand of you, like the one, couched in slightly
different terms, demanded of the journalists of Polityka,
*WRON: The Military Council for National Defense; wrona means
"crow."
49
�has nothing to do with compromise: it is a certificate of
collaboration and so conceived. In signing it, those who
wanted to save the "renewal" (I don't like this official ex·
pression, I prefer "democratic form") put the seal on their
final condemnation. [An illegible phrase.] Daniel P. pre·
tends to believe that Polityka can once more become an
oasis of half-truths and of halfway honesty. I cannot agree
with him; the day is gone for this way of thinking. It was
gone well before December 13, 1981, even before the first
of September 1980. Which brings us back almost to the
middle of the time of Gierek when Polityka gave up its
role as liberal and moderate critic of the government to
become its glib apologist. Beginning in June 1976, with the
uprisings of U rsus and Radom, Polityka lost its credibility.
It wasn't even interesting any more; it was an anachronism.
The political rise of the editor-in-chief coincided with the
political death of the newspaper. Today Polityka exists
only as a caricature of its former self. Its history is the history of many Polish intellectuals who cherished the illusion that the system could be reformed from above, by
finding one's way into the corridors of power, by knocking
at the door of the Central Committee, by joining forces
with the minister in power. This idea has had its day.
Nothing can bring it back. The battlefield of social conflict, and therefore of the social compromise to come, is
today the factory and the university, no longer the halls of
the Central Committee or of the Diet. Despite the past
complexity and the distortion of the relations between
Communist power and Polish society, the Party only lost
its mandate with its declaration of this last "war." It's easy
to replace the policeman's helmet with the traditional
chapka of the Polish army. But that alone won't change
anything.
Resistance to the Government
If we, as an organized society, want to exert the least influence upon the future of Poland, we have to forge that
influence by a constant pressure on the machinery of
power. To count upon the good will of the military leadership is to rely on miracles. To count on their weakness, on
the other hand, has nothing irrational about it. It is not
irrational to think that the machinery of power could be
obliged to compromise. The obvious ideological and practical vacuum of the Party are proof. The government
50
defends its power and its privilege, not ideas or values.
The fact that it has had to resort to the definitive argument of force proves it. To paraphrase Hegel: "Minerva's
crow flies at night."
There you are, overwhelmed by the piercing sense of
your loneliness and weakness in the face of a military
machine which went into motion that December night.
You don't know what developed after that. You don't
know that people will gradually recover from the shock,
that underground newspapers are going to appear, that
Zbignew B. is going to direct the struggle from his hiding
place, that Wladyslaw E. from Wroclaw is going to escape
from the police, that events at Gdansk, Swidnik, and Poznan are going to make Poland tremble again, and that the
structure of the outlawed union will reappear. You don't
yet know that the generals direct a machine that jams and
sputters, and that the wave of repression and slander has
no effect.
Alone, facing police officers who wave their guns at
you, handcuffed, with teargas in your eyes, you can see
clearly despite the starless night, and you repeat the words
of your favorite poet: "A stone can change the course of
the avalanche in its path." And you want to be that stone
that changes the course of events, even if it is to be flung
at the ramparts.
Translated from a French translation of the Polish
by Linda Collins
Afternote:
The military regime in Poland has recently accused Michnik along with
other leaders of KOR (the Committee for Social Self-Defense)-Jacek
Kuron, Jan Litynski, Jan Jozef Lipski, Henryk Wujec-of treason and conspiracy, which carry the maximum penalty of death. The official press
treat them as guilty before "trial." In the judgement of the Hungarian
writer, George Konrad, in a letter of November 1 (see The New York Review of Books, December l, 1982), they may be shot before the West, or
anybody else outside of Poland, notices their danger. L.R.
AUTUMN/WJNTER 1982-83
�Not Just Another Communist Party:
The Polish Communist Party
Branko Lazitch
Communists parties the world over are much the same
in their doctrine: Marxism-Leninism; in their structure:
democratic centralism; in their history with its identical
periods: Lenin, Bolshevization, Stalinization, destalinization~ etc. As anyone can see at the present time, however,
the Polish Communist Party is a special case-a party unlike the other "brother parties." No other Communist party
in the world has entrusted its fate to the army; taken a career officer for its First Secretary; declared a state of war
against its own citizens. This is not the first time the Party
has been at war with the people of Poland. They have
been at war for more than sixty years.
Summer 1920
The story starts in the summer of 1920: the Soviet Polish War, the first revolutionary war of the Bolsheviks after their victory in Russia. A war in Lenin's conception on
two essential fronts. First: the collapse of the home front
through revolutionary propaganda (Agit-Prop). The call to
the people, and especially the soldiers, to rise up. A pamphlet in circulation in June 1920 reads:
Soldiers of the Polish Army! Work for the Victory of the
Revolution in Poland. No longer obey your leaders, who are
betraying you. Instead of fighting against your brothers, the
workers and the peasants of Russia and the Ukraine, turn
your arms on your officers, on the bourgeois and the landlords. Whoever fights against Soviet Russia fights against the
working class in the whole world and joins the enemies of the
people.
Second front of the revolutionary war: under the protection
of the tanks and cannons of the Red Army, the organization
of a provisional "national" power meant to bring Socialist
Poland into immediate existence. In Bialystok a revolutionBranko Lazitch writes for L'express. His most recent books are Le Rapport
Kroutchev et son histoire (Paris, Seuil1976) and L'€chec permanent, l' alliance communiste-socialiste (Paris, Laffont 1978).
This article first appeared in Commentaire, Spring 1982.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ary committee (a provisional government) was organized
under the presidency of the most well-known Polish revolutionary, Julian Marchlevski (Karski), with several other
Polish Communists who already held high positions in Soviet Russia and in the Communist International. From
the start Lenin counted on the success of this revolutionary war.
At his reception of the French Delegation to the Second Congress of the Co min tern on July 28 in the Kremlin,
Lenin overflowed in optimism: "The world revolution will
have taken a decisive step if Poland gives herself to Communism. Yes, the Soviets in Warsaw means Germany
shortly afterwards, the reconquest of Hungary, the revolt
of the Balkans against capitalism, Italy shaken-bourgeois
Europe cracking on all sides in a fearful hurricane."
The two Polish Communists in his immediate circle did
not share Lenin's euphoria. Of the first of these, Julian
Marchlevski himself, Trotsky was later to say: "There was
an unknown: what attitude would the Polish workers and
peasants have? Some of our Polish comrades, for instance
Julian Marchlevski, friend and companion of Rosa Luxemburg, entertained considerable scepticism." Later Lenin
revealed the doubts of the second ranking Polish Communist, Karel Radek, secretary of the International: "Radek
foresaw how it would turn out. He warned us. I was furious. I accused him of 'defeatism.' But he was essentially
right."
A military set-back outside of Warsaw followed this political setback throughout Poland. On August 18 the Red
Army began its retreat. It would not return for twenty
years, and then in the wake, not of revolutionary war, but
of the Hitler-Stalin pact in September 1939.
Pro-Trotsky
After this first conflict with the Polish people, the Polish Communist Party was compelled to set itself against
Moscow within the International. In the months that immediately preceded Lenin's death (January 21, 1924), the
struggle for the succession already raged. The Bolshevik
51
�old guard had banded together to remove the candidate
with the greatest prestige-who, however, had not always
been a Bolshevik-Leon Trotsky. The top of the International, the controlling troika of G. Zinoviev, the President,
and Kamenev and Stalin, were involved in this manuever.
Only two voices rose at the highest level of the Comintern
to denounce the plot against Trotsky in almost the same
words: the leadership of the Polish Communist Party and
Boris Souvarine, the representative of the French Communist Party at the Comintern. Made up of the three
W's: Walecki, Warski, and Wera Kostrzewa, the Polish
leadership declared: "For our Party, for the whole Comintern, and for the world revolutionary proletariat the name
of Comrade Trotsky is irrevocably linked to the victorious
October Revolution, to the Red Army and Communism."
Six months after Lenin's death, in the summer of 1924, at
the fifth Congress of the Comintem, this attitude of the Polish Communist Party came under examination. A Polish
Commission was formed, presided over by a Bolshevik who
had never spoken during the congresses of the Comintem,
and who, unlike the other Bolsheviks involved in the business of the organization, did not know a single foreign language: Stalin. At the time his name meant absolutely nothing
to almost all the foreign delegates at the Congress. But the
Poles knew him well-and he them.
Unlike the other Committees that, since the birth of
the Comintern in 1919, had used German, the Polish
Committee under Stalin carried on its work in Russian.
The discussion moved immediately from the realm of
ideas to the realities of power. Stalin circulated in the cor-·
ridors of the Congress to assert that the "bones of the obstinate must be broken." "Not those whose bones can be
broken for the same reasons as ours but those who have
no bones at all are dangerous to you," Wera Kostrzewa replied, not in the corridors, but on the floor of the Congress. Her words pointed to the increasing political, moral,
and material corruption within the Comintern. At another time she also objected to the excessive dependence
of the foreign branches on the Russian Communist Party,
the dominant force in the Comintern: "The most important branches of the Co mintern ought to enjoy greater independence in the making of policy within their party and
greater responsibility in all international questions." But
in the following years in the Comintern things turned out
exactly the opposite.
The Russians had already mastered the technique of
manipulating meetings both in committees and in plenary
sessions at this fifth Congress, the Congress of Bolshevization. The immediate consequence was the removal of
the leadership of the Polish Communist Party with a resolution that: "The Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party, under the political direction of the group
Warski, Kostrzewa, and Walecki, despite its revolutionary
words, has shown itself incapable of applying the line of
the Communist InternationaL"
This was only a prelude. It took ten years for Stalin to
52
show the Poles his true stuff: to make blood flow. He
made blood flow not only in the Russian Communist Party
but throughout the Comintern. In the Comintern he
began, fittingly, with the Polish Communist Party.
1933: Second Purge
The time came in 1933, the victim was Jerzy Sochacki:
member of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party since 1921; Communist deputy to the Sejm;
member of the Politbureau; permanent representative of
the Polish Communist Party to the headquarters of the
Comintern since 1930; member of the two supreme bodies of the Comintern, the Praesidium and the Secretariat.
On the fifteenth of August 1933, the Soviet police arrested Sochacki, and accused him of spying from the time
he joined the Communist Party in 1921. A complete dossier was drawn up to cover his twelve years {(work" as a
spy. A secret trial was staged. "I die proud and happy for
my leader Pilsudski," were quoted as Sochacki's "last
words" before execution. Stalin's justice had moved swiftly
between Sochacki's arrest on the fifteenth of August and
his execution on September 4, 1933, Sochacki's postumous rehabilitation, in contrast, had to wait for the destalinization that followed the Twentieth Congress of the
Soviet Communist Party in February 1956, and Gomulka's
return to power in Warsaw.
A Pole thus became the first foreign Communist to lose
his life in Moscow. Shortly afterward, in 1936 and 1938,
the Polish Communist party knew slaughter. The Polish
Party suffered more victims than any other foreign
branch of the Comintern. The Hungarian, German, and
Jugoslav Communists suffered Stalin's extermination but
in fewer numbers than the Poles. The nature of factscommon revolutionary past, linguistic facility, and geographical proximity-made for more Polish Communist
political exiles in Russia than from any other country in
Europe. The men and women from the rest of Europe depended on the protection-relative-of their respective
Communist Parties, members in good standing of the
Comintern. The only branch of the Comintern that Stalin
had dissolved, the Polish Communist Party, had no such
resort.
193 8: Dissolution by Stalin
In January 1938 the official organ of the Comintern,
The International Communist, published an article called
"Provocateurs at Work" that held that agents of Pilsudski
had long ago infiltrated the Polish Communist Party up
to, and including, its top leadership. After this article,
Communist publications ceased to mention the Polish
Communist Party. There was no public notice of the decision in Moscow in April1938 to dissolve it. The party simply no longer existed physically or politically. Alone, Stalin
could only undo the Polish CP. The next year, 1939, Hit-
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�ler's alliance made it possible for Stalin to abolish the Polish State as well.
1942: Resurrection
After his pact with Hitler, Stalin had no need of either
the Polish Communist Party or the Polish state. Hitler's
attack on Russia on June 22, 1941, however, overturned
the situation. Stalin recognized Poland in 1941. In 1942
he authorized the resurrection of the Polish Communist
Party. The beginning of 1942 was a critical moment for
the Soviet Union: Hitler's military superiority was beyond
doubt; the alliance with the democracies was only at its
first steps. Two reasons for Stalin to muffle the emphasis
on Communism on its doctrine, practice, and even on
the word itself. Stalinist vocabulary saw the disappearance
of the adjective "communist." The new Communist parties organized during the war avoided it: in Switzerland,
the Labour Party; in Iran, The Party of the Masses (Tudeh);
in Cyprus, The Progressive Party of the Working People; in
Poland, The Worker's Party.
This new label did not make the Polish CP anymore
successful. By the summer of 1944, on the eve of Soviet
troops' entry into Poland, the Party numbered about
20,000, a ridiculous total. The Communists who had survived Hitler's occupation or Stalin's Gulags could count
on only one power, the Red Army. In the summer of 1944,
at Lublin, a Committee was formed, a carbon copy of the
1920 Committee of Bialystok-except for the inferior
quality of its members. The Lublin Committee became
the nucleus of the future regime, because the Red Army
occupied the country.
1
1944-1945: Satellization
Between 1944 and 1945 Poland, like all the other countries under the Soviet jackboot, underwent satellization.
The usalami tactic" was the same as in Hungary and else-
where: first, the gradual elimination of adversaries; then
of allies; the compulsory fusion of Communist and Socialist Parties. Soviet colonization offered Poland the prize of
a Marshal of the Red Army, Rokossovsky, to head the
Polish "National" Ministry of Defense. There was more:
the persecution of the Catholic Church: the arrest of Cardinal Wysznski; purges of Party leadership: the pushing
aside and the arrest of Gomulka who, however, was neither hailed before a People's Tribunal nor shot.
1956: Rehabilitation
Starting in 1956, the year of the Twentieth Congress of
the Soviet Communist Party and of destalinization in Soviet Russia and elsewhere, the story of the Polish Communist Party again takes its distance from the "brother parties."
The Polish Party took the lead. The Twentieth Congress
opened on the fourteenth of September without at first
1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
arousing excitement in Moscow. Warsaw, in contrast, felt
its effects immediately. Large-scale photographs of the
three founders of the Polish Communist Party, Warski,
Walecki, and Wera Kostrzewa-all three victims of Stalinappeared on the front page of the Communist daily Tribuna Ludu on the nineteenth of February. The same
front page also carried a declaration of the five "brother
parties" that for the first time revealed what had happened
eighteen years before: "In 1938 the Executive Committee
of the Communist International adopted a resolution to
dissolve the Polish CP on the grounds of an accusation of
widespread penetration of the ranks of the Party by enemy
agents. It has now been established that this accusation
was based on documents forged by a gang of saboteurs
and provacateurs whose true role was not brought to light
until the unmasking of Beria". No mention of Stalin. It
was as if he had played no role in the history of the Polish
CP.
In the aftermath of the Twentieth Congress another
exploit distinguished the Polish CP. Khrushchev's Secret
Report in circulation among the "brother parties" in the
East found its way westward through Warsaw. The most
explosive document ever to come from leading Communist circles came in this way to have its world-wide effect.
The Gomulka Experiment
In June 1956 Poland also saw another historical event,
the first of its kind after the initiation of uncertainty: the
revolt of the people in Poznan. The same year in October
there was another unprecedented event: Khruschev came
to Warsaw at the head of a Soviet delegation determined
to impose its will on Warsaw and the Polish CP. The attempt ended abruptly. Gomulka came back to power.
This Polish "October Spring" began a new experiment-a
reexamination of Communism and a reform from within.
The result was negative. Instead of democratizing the
Communist system, the Polish CP only weakened itself.
Movements of the workers and people brought about
three changes in the top leadership of the CP. In 1956,
1970, and in 1980 three first secretaries fell under pressure from the masses, facts unprecedented in the history
of "real" socialism. Once again the Polish CP knew a lot
different from the other "brother parties". Its acceptance
of powers parallel to its own made its lot unique in addition: the spiritual power of the Church starting in the
mid-fifties; the power of the Solidarity Union after 1980.
The military coup on December 13, 1981, brought this exceptional situation to an end at the price of a no less exceptional situation: it reversed the roles of Army and Party.
The Party now transmits the orders of the Army. Such a
situation cannot last. There will be new sudden changes
and reversals in the chequered history of this Party-and
in the tragic story of Poland.
Translated by Brother Robert Smith and Leo Raditsa
53
�A Nighttime Story
Linda Collins
On the day the president of Egypt was assassinated,
Charles Pettit's little boy had stayed home from school
with a temperature. In the middle of the morning, his
mother found him sitting on the floor of the living room
looking at television.
"Let me tie your bathrobe," she said. "It's too chilly to
be sitting there with your bathrobe open."
He didn't look around. When she glanced at the screen
to see what he was watching, she knew by the chaotic way
the camera was moving that again something bad had
happened.
A while later Charles telephoned from his office in
Greenfield. He had heard the news on the car radio, but
he hadn't called her right away, he said, because he hoped
it wasn't true.
"It's true," she said.
"I know if s true," said Charles.
She said she thought Robert might not have understood what he had seen. He could have thought he was
looking at a movie, she said.
"Perhaps," said Charles.
In the evening, the children made brownies with their
mother while Charles watched the news, turning from
channel to channel. Then he went outside and breathed
the cold night air.
The next day Robert was well, and the following day he
went back to school.
On Friday, Charles drove the five miles home from
work as the sun set and the sky flamed. Yellow stacks of
freshly split wood sat beside each house, and in the openings of sheds and outbuildings he could see the same raw
color. An occasional meadow was still bright green, and
here and there a dark horse raised its head as he drove by.
Remembering they were to use the car later, he left it half
way out of the shed, where his own firewood was stacked.
Linda Collins has previously contributed "Going to See the Leaves"
(Autumn 1981) to the St. Johh's Review. Her stories have appeared in
Mademoiselle, the Hudson Review, and other magazines.
54
His wife was in the kitchen straightening up after the
children's supp.er. He kissed her on the cheek. She put
down the sponge and turned to him for another kiss.
"Make your drink," she said. ''I have a few more things
to do."
The children were waiting for him in the living room.
Robert was in his dinosaur pajamas, and the younger
child, Lizzie, wore a thick one-piece suit with padded feet.
An outsized zipper ran up to her chin.
Charles put his drink down on the coffee table and took
off his glasses to receive their embraces.
When they were all sitting on the rug near the fire he
put his glasses back on. Lizzie moved into his lap.
"Daddy," she said and pressed his cheek with her hand.
She stroked his sleeve, touched the buttons of his jacket,
patted his face. She was rosy from her bath and her fingers smelled of soap. He took her wandering hand and
held it still.
"Daddy!" she said.
Releasing her hand, he ran his finger over her fine pale
hair. She looked up at him with a fierce expression.
"Tell us a story," she said. "Tell."
Robert, who was six, sat with his legs straight out in
front of him. He rotated his feet in their new bedroom
slippers and watched the elastic stretch and retract. His
eyes were brown and his hair was smooth and brown.
Where his sister was fat and flushed, he was thin. He was
sitting slightly apart from his father and sister, and
although he kept his eyes on his slippers, having noticed
that the firelight lent them a shine which could be made
to slide from the toe to the heel by twisting his foot, every
now and then he directed a quick look at his father. He
busied himself with slippers, dinosaurs, and whatever diversions the fire could offer: sparks, gleams, the collapse
of a burnt-out log, but when he looked up his glance measured the distance between his father and his sister. He
waited.
"All right, kitty cats," said Charles. "What shall it be?"
"Ticky tats," said the little girl.
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�"Kitty cats," said Robert. "Kitty cats." He was mocking
his father who would not have said "kitty cats" had he
been directing his attention only at him. His father could
make him laugh when he didn't want to, and often did, by
saying things like "kitty cats," and worse.
Suddenly he felt tired of keeping this stiff watch and
unbending guard. He sighed, acknowledging a kind of de·
feat, and he moved in closer to Daddy and Lizzie.
"All right/' said Charles. "Ready?"
"Ready," said the children.
Lizzie put her thumb in her mouth and then took it out
and looked at it. It was wet. "Ready," she said.
Charles began the story: "Once there was a little girl
and her name was Frimble. She was a very good little girl.
She always did whatever her mother asked her to do, and
she always did what her father asked her to do. In nursery
school she was good, and she was good in the supermarket. She stayed on her side in the car and she never forgot
to brush her hair. She smiled at the good and frowned at
the bad-"
"And sometimes she was very sad," said Robert, rapidly
and in a slightly confused tone as though surprised to find
himself saying anything at all.
"No," said his father. "She wasn't actually ever sad. She
was quite happy. Reasonably happy."
Both children looked at him. The little boy moved
closer and the father reached toward him and grasped
with two fingers of one hand the slender column of the
back of his neck. The child put his head to one side to relish the feeling and to bear the happiness that had begun
to mount inside him. He let his eyes close.
The little girl shifted her weight on Charles's thigh, and
he, feeling a sudden strain in his back, said, "Why are we
sitting on the floor? Let's go sit on the couch."
They stood up.
The move meant they had to pick up and start again.
From the couch the fire looked far away and formal.
"Daddy!" said the little girl imperiously.
He put an arm around each of them and started again:
"But one fine day-"
"Charles, not too long." His wife had stopped in the
doorway to look at them. Her arms were full of bathtowels. Later, when the children were in bed, they would
have a quick supper, and then, as they sometimes did on
Friday evening, as soon as the neighbor's daughter came,
they would drive down to Greenfield and go to the
movies.
"And then?" said Robert.
Lizzie was standing up on Charles's leg. He could feel
her toes inside her rubberized pajama soles as she tried to
balance on his thigh. Gently, by pressing his hand against
the small of her back, he persuaded her to sit down. "But
one day, one fine and cloudless day, when Frimble had
gone with her nursery school class to buy fish food for the
class goldfish, she got separated from the other children
and the teacher, and she found herself all alone in the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
middle of the shopping center. She looked down the ar·
cade on her right and saw no one. Then she looked to the
left and saw no one there. She was all alone." The story
went on, almost by itself. He knew he wasn't doing his
best. Sometimes his stories amazed him. Some stories
poured through him as though they came from some·
where else; they bemused even the teller, and he could
imagine that years from now, when the children were
grown up, they would remember the best ones, like The
Boy Who Had X-ray Vision, or the one about the children
who lived in the woods on the far side of the dump.
He went on, speaking in a soft voice, and told them how
Frimble was at last rescued from the locked and echoing
supermarket by a certain first-grade boy whose intelligence in deducing her location was equalled only by his
agility in squeezing into narrow places. "And so the boy,
having found his way into the warehouse, edged past
boxes and cartons and crates. How dark it was! He knew,
however, that he must not let himself be frightened. If he
panicked, he would not be able to tell which cartons held
paper towels and paper diapers and toilet paper-the
large light ones that rocked if you gave them a little
push-and which, heavier and pungent, held soap powder
and soap flakes. For then he'd never find Frimble whose
voice he had heard over the intercom before the power
failed, telling him she was between the dogfood and the
place where the candy was. 'Courage,' he said to himself,
and so, listening and feeling and sniffing, he made his
way."
Charles glanced from his son to his daughter and saw by
their grave, wide-opened eyes and their parted lips that
their hearts lay with the lost girl and the brave frightened
boy. His own heart went out to them and he decided,
while he was speaking, to edit one or two effects he had
had in mind and hasten the denouement.
The fire made a popping noise.
The children were sitting close to their father. Robert
was holding one of his father's hands in his hands.
As he finished the story, Charles could hear the children breathing.
"And then she went home?'' asked his daughter.
"And then she went home," he said.
The movie took place in California. The camera slid
around a house in such a way as to induce apprehension
in the viewer. In the house lived one of the main characters, a fifty-year-old woman, played by an actress who was
making a movie for the first time in many years. Charles
was reminded of his youth by the sight of her face. He had
liked her in college and even in high school. There was a
lot of driving in the movie, particularly by women, who got
in and out of their cars in a way characteristic of women
in movies and on television. The way they slammed car
doors and drove away said: This is California, this is modern life, this is dangerous and exciting. The woman lived
55
�alone in the house, and in the evening, after her housekeeper and gardener went home, it \VaS clear she was in
danger. She had lovers. Someone was going to kill her.
One of her lovers was going to kill her. Her death was prolonged. Charles knew at some point his wife would turn
her head away. When she did, he smiled and gave her a little pat.
«Tell me when it's over," she said.
"It's only ketchup," he said.
"I don't think so," she whispered back.
During the time the several police officers were weighing the probable involvement of the known suspects, the
minor characters were portrayed in places familiar to nonCalifornians from other movies: at a Pacific beach house,
at an orange ranch, and at a dusty gas station and general
store at a crossroads in the desert. The killer did turn out
to be one of her lovers, but not the obvious one. The
shoot-out took place at the tiny motel where the housekeeper's aged mother lived.
"How did you like it?" asked Charles in the lobby, feeling for the car keys.
44
Horrible," said his wife. "They said he was an Ameri-
can Lelouch. I'm sorry I brought you."
44
You didn't make me come," he said. "Anyway, I liked
it."
They drove home through the quiet countryside. From
time to time their headlights picked out of the darkness a
tree whose leaves had turned yellow or flashed on the
black window panes of a farmhouse where everyone had
gone to bed. "I think we could use some heat," said
Charles, and turned the knob for the heater ·and the one
for the fan. After a minute they felt the warm air. It was
soothing to drive through the pale autumn fields. Neither
spoke. Just before the road started its rise toward their
village it passed through a marshy place where mist was
thick on either side and they were plunged into milky
obscurity. Charles reached with his right hand under his
wife's skirt and felt for the elasticized edge of her undergarment.
At home, she paid the baby sitter and watched at the
window while the girl ran across the road to her own
house where the outside light was on. When the light
went off, she let the curtain drop and went upstairs. She
pushed the children's door open over the stiff new carpet
56
and Charles stood in the doorway while she touched both
children and adjusted the window and the shade. Then
they went together into their own room.
Much later in the night, Charles woke up. The television was still on. Dread had seized him in his sleep. He
had dreamed they were all in a train, his wife and both
children, and the outside of the train was being pounded
by bullets. There was a terrible racket of metal against
metal and it was not at all clear he was going to be able to
continue to protect them. Awake, he was as afraid as he
had been asleep. He lay still and waited for his arms and
legs to stop trembling.
After a while he felt calmer. He turned on his side, toward the television. It was a movie, in black and white, set
in Prague during World War II, about three Czech exiles
who parachut~d into Czechoslovakia on a mission to kill
the Reichskommissar; one of the three, it seemed, had betrayed the others. Intrigued now, and wide awake, he
reached for his wife's extra pillow, which was lying between them, and stuck it under his head. His heart was
still beating heavily. The room was silvery. He stretched
his legs and began to relax. The wife, or the girlfriend, of
one of the exiles came and went, bringing messages.
There was a lot of running. It must have been the sound
of gunfire from the television he had heard in his dream.
In the dream he had tried to lie on top of the children to
protect them from bullets. He had tried to lie on top of
them without hurting them.
In the crypt of St. Vitus, the two loyal Czechs met their
heroic end while gunfire sounded from the street.
When the movie was over, he turned to the news channel and watched a summary of the events of the week.
The film had been edited. He was never able to find what
his wife said Robert had seen: the arm, the clothing, the
expression on the injured man's face.
He saw the sky above Cairo and the plumes of colored
smoke expanding as the formation of Mirages flew by the
reviewing stand. Within the reviewing stand the chairs
were all turned over. It looked as though no one was there,
but then, like anemones on the sea floor, the chairs
started to move and wave about, and one by one the men
appeared from beneath the chairs, their hands first, as
they reached from below for leverage to help them rise.
AU1UMN/WINTER 1982-83
�Marx's Sadism
Robert J. Loewen berg
"The death of mankind is ... the goal of socialism." Igor Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon
It is a notorious fact, or for some an ironic and scandal·
ous one, that Karl Marx's hatred of the bourgeois intellec·
tuals, of liberals, has not prevented them from becoming
the heirs and custodians of his ideals. Except for the liberal
intellectuals who today dominate the universities and al·
lied institutions, principally the media, there is no respect·
able Marxism. That is, unless one counts as respectable
the wrinkled pedagogues of dialectical materialism and
their dozing charges in Russia or the freakish ideological
concoctions of Oriental tyrants. Moreover, insofar as the
bourgeois intellectuals have inherited the mantle of Marx
in a culture that cheerfully submits its offspring to instruc·
tion in today's liberal ideals, ideals that in part descend
from the abolitionists, the very civilization of America can
be called Marxist. In fact it has been called this by the world's
most outstanding Marxist scholar, Alexander Kojeve in
delight, over twenty years ago.'
'
That Kojeve's observation was not entirely wishful
thinking by a frustrated communist is suggested by the
comments of another more recent Russian emigre, not a
Communist, who only months ago confirmed Kojeve's
judgment. Lev Navrozov was shocked to find that America
is "a Left-biased" culture, that is, one in which all political
opinions agree upon a vocabulary that is largely Marxist.
Navrozov called this discovery, in sadness, "the most eye·
opening experience I have had since my arrival. .. from
Associate professor of history at Arizona State University, Robert Loewenberg has previously contributed "The Trivialization of the Holocaust
as an Aspect of Modern Idolatry" (Winter 1982) and "That Graver Fire
Bell: A Reconsideration of the Debate over Slavery from the Standpoint
of Lincoln" (Summer 1982) to the St. fohn's Review. He is at work on
studies of Emerson and of the abolitionists.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Russia in 1972."2 Important here is not the sadness or the
delight of Russian observers but their agreement about
what is, after all, a commonplace: America is a Left-biased
culture. History, it almost appears, has turned the master
dialectician, Marx, on his head. Having reduced Marx to his
antithesis, bourgeois communism, history now evidently
prepares to sweep even him into its ample dustbin. Ko·
jeve, a Marxist who transcended Marx, believed he had a
more properly Marxist explanation.
"The United States," Kojeve said, "has already attained
the final stage of Marxist 'communism,' seeing that, prac·
tically, all the members of a 'classless society' can from now
on appropriate ... everything that seems good to them ... "
The classless society, Kojeve continues, is "the end of His·
tory [that is, it is the eternal present when] men ... con·
struct their edifices and works of art as birds build their
nests and spiders spin their webs, ... perform musical con·
certs after the fashion of frogs and cicadas ... and ... in·
dulge in love like adult beasts .... But there is more ... the
definitive disappearance of human Discourse ... [that is,
human] 'language' ... would be like what is supposed to
be the 'language' of bees." 3
What Kojeve tells us then is that the liberal intellectuals,
the same liberals that he as well as Marx despised, are not
so much Marxists as the products of Marxism. They are
witnesses to Marx's truth. America is the realm of free·
dom. How else, Kojeve suggests, shall we understand the
conceptual egalitarianism of our culture or relativism? Has
it not transformed words into gestures and made a kind of
language of bees the law of the land? And do we not ap·
proach the free love ideal of Kojeve, to say nothing of the
character of our edifices and our popular concerts? But im·
pressions can be misleading, at least as justifications for
sweeping generalizations such as Kojeve's. There is no
doubt something wrong or even self-serving about his idea,
because his experience of America did not lead Kojeve
to question his Marxism.
57
�If we are to accept that America has already achieved
the final stage of Marxist communism, the realm of freedom, certain serious problems and questions arise. In the
first place such an achievement can hardly be supposed to
satisfy Marxists. For them the violent revolutionary over·
throw, at least, of bourgeois capitalism is an article of faith.
There has been no such event in America as there has been
no abolition of property. Nor can today's liberal intellec·
tuals be remotely likened to a revolutionary cadre. As·
suredly they are not the descendants of one. But there is
another set of questions that arises in connection with Ko·
jeve's observation. If it is at all correct to say that America
has attained the final stage of Marxist communism, what
are we to identify as the sources, both historical and philo·
sophie, of American culture and of the notorious fact that
our liberal intellectuals are heir to Marx's ideals? How has
American culture arrived at the final stage of Marxist
communism without Marx and without a vindication of
Marxist historical processes?
Perhaps the obvious answer is the right one: Marx was
not radical enough. American culture is not Marxist com·
munism but some other "ism" that looks like Marxism. We
may reasonably suppose that our present-day American
ideal and practice of freedom has its sources in indigenous
traditions and institutions. In fact the historical beginning
of what Kojeve describes as the attainment in the United
States of the final stage of Marxist communism is found
in the abolitionist movement, in particular in the thinking
of its radical figures. In addition to William Lloyd Garrison
and other famous abolitionists, these include two of the
more daring, and as they were called, ultraist reformers of
that day, Stephen Pearl Andrews and John Humphrey
Noyes. And, although Emerson and Thoreau were not ac·
tive abolitionists, their contributions to the movement in
the form of conceptual elaboration of the ideal of freedom
were great. Finally, we are guided by the abolitionists' vi·
sion, actually by the movement's most acid and brilliant
contemporary critic, George Fitzhugh, who was a socialist
and the nation's top defender of slavery, to the philosophic
source, that is, to the source of the institutions that have
grown up from abolitionist seed to become the "final stage
of Marxist 'communism'."
Fitzhugh's judgment (and it is important to know that
he was a proto-Marxist of the kind to attract favorable in·
teres! from communist historians in our day) was this: the
abolitionist ideal of freedom did not really differ from his
own ideal of slavery.4 The difference between slavery and
abolitionism was, he said, that abolitionists would cure the
problems of free society, above all the problems stemming
from inequalities created by profit, by giving men yet more
freedom rather than less. Fitzhugh, however, said the abolitionists' ideal of freedom would lead them to free love and
this, he concluded, would lead them to despotism.
The discovery of Fitzhugh that abolition must lead
either to Southern slavery or to free love, which would lead
to despotism, was an insight of genius. He made this dis·
58
covery after reading the abolitionist and communist writer
Stephen Pearl Andrews who later beca!Tie the Pontiff of
Free Lovism in America, and the first American to print
the Manifesto. What Fitzhugh did not see was that free
love was a radicalization of the socialist labor theory of
value, or the principle of Marx that man is "nothing but the
creation of ... labour.''' This discovery, in particular the
uncovering of an infallible linkage between the timeless
and universal fact of human sexuality and the founding
doctrine of modern political theory, the state of nature, according to which man has no telos, was made by another
man more radical than Marx. Historians should now begin
to recognize that the lines of liberationist reasoning reaching into our time from the abolitionist and reform movements of the nineteenth century have their philosophic
source much less in Marx or even in Hegel than in a certain
Frenchman. Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade (17401814), a self-described "libertine" (his American editors remind us that this word is drawn "from the Latin liber:
'free' -an exceptional man of exceptional penchants, passions and ideas") is an author whose real thought, as these
same editors rightly say, ''remains . .. unknown.'' 6
Unlike Friedrich Engels, the Marquis de Sade did not
find it "curious ... that in every large revolutionary movement the question of 'free love' comes to the foreground.'''
Sade understood that free love is the revolution. Neither
have the liberal epigones of Engels as yet uncovered their
intimate connection with the man who is defined by the
"Latin liber: 'free'." This is striking considering that these
same thinkers have not' been slow to count men such as
Engels among the great leaders of the international antislavery movement.' Even more important, today's liberals
regard themselves as the descendants of the abolitionists
who, like them, "dream of extending the intimate love of
the private family to a wider circle of social relationships
.. '[and] debate ... the justifications for monogamous mar·
riage, the proper role of woman, and the best methods
of child-rearing."' In sum, the oversight regarding Sade's
proper and central place in the history of modern freedom
is a grave one. Except for a few daring poets, for the Surre·
alists, and more recently a handful of avant garde literary
critics all of whom consider him a heroic figure, Sa de is in
truth "unknown."lO
First and foremost a political writer and theorist, Dona·
tien de Sade is, however, known only as a pornographer.
Certainly he was a pornographer. But it seems unlikely to·
day that anyone except the most hopelessly prurient or
naive student could doubt that pornography is intrinsically
political even if it is more subtly, and more effectively, PO·
litical than utopian or science fiction. Pornography stands
in automatic rebellion against civility and against the so·
cia! as such. Indeed, as we shall see, it stands in opposition
to the human condition. Unlike theft or prostitution which
cannot easily thrive without honesty and chastity respectively, pornography, especially in Sade's expert hands (and
especially in its written form) is the enemy, rather like mur·
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�der, a crime Sade prized, of everything civil. Sade sought
to found a critique that would justify the destruction, as
Marx put it, of "everything existing." 11 His aspirations, also
like Marx, were cosmic. To men living in the last third of
the twentieth century when pornography of the sort Sade
wrote secretly in jail can be bought in supermarkets, and
when the ideals he promoted are legal or social commonplaces or soon to become so (for example, homosexuality,
incest, abortion, murder, cannibalism), it seems fair to say
that Sade had a better understanding of the role of "the
abolition ... of the family" than his more famous revolutionary successor who regarded it as a mere "practical measure."" Sade had a profound understanding of why "the
attack on the family ... could not be shirked," as a student
of the socialist idea and of Robert Owen, its most famous
popularizer prior to Marx, has said. This attack is in truth
"central to the whole communitarian position." 13
The failure of our historians to grasp Sa de's great importance in the history of the communitarian movement cannot be explained by any secret writing in Sade or by any
lack of historical interest in an approach such as Sade' s
that emphasizes material factors. We cannot read very far
in Sade, in Marx, or in the history of American radical reform movements before we come upon an intersection that
relates property and freedom. Property, they all concur,
has its roots in the self, in amour propre or vanity. This of
course is Rousseau's idea, the foundation of his critique of
civilization. Moreover, it was Marx's solution to the problem of civilization considered as exchange deriving from
the division of labor, his solution, that is, of the problem of
the labor theory of value, that made him famous. A critique
of human enslavement based upon unequal exchange,
Marx's idea was that man's freedom lay in the principle
that all labor is equal. Men shall be freed by work. Sade (and
the American abolitionists as well) agreed that the inequality arising from the division of labor was man's slavery.
But Sade's solution to this problem was more radical than
Marx's. As for the solutions of Fitzhugh or the abolitionists, they were more Sadean than we have guessed until
now. Sade's idea was that men shall be freed not by work
but by pleasure.
Marx, we know, shared the assumption of his time that
labor is the basis of all value. It was, however, Marx's revision of this idea, his "trenchant distinction," as a recent
Marxist writer and admirer of Fitzhugh has put it, that the
ground of exchange was not use-value (for example hats
and corn are not commensurable in use.)l' Rather the
basis of exchange is labor as such or labor measured by duration. Where the means of producing hats and corn are
privately owned, and where labor itself is therefore an item
in exchange (labor power), and also privately owned in its
right (by the laborer), it follows, said Marx, that profit, hence
also alienation and unfreedom, is precisely a consequence
of exchange. Exchange serves capital, not needs. Marx
then radicalized the labor theory of value by applying it to
labor itself. He counted profit as the sale or exchange of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
labor-value. According to this view, labor as work is credited
or paid its value at the same time that the product of the
labor is paid its value. The "surplus value," or profit, is
then a legitimate theft from labor.
The abolition of the division of labor and exchange,
thereby of civil society and all that goes with it, is tantamount to the appearance of man as absolutely free. Freedom, in other words, is no other than the abolition of
amour propre, of vanity. Vanity in the sense of selfish is
understood by Rousseau, as by Marx, to be the product of
meum et teum; all relationships are founded in property
and are property. This commutative proposition makes relationship as such, or dependence, property. But the substance of this freedom in Marx and in Rousseau as well is
problematical. What is this nonselfish, or as we say in common speech, unselfish being? What is freedom?
Marx did not explain the realm of freedom perhaps for
the same reason that he was at pains to insist, at the other
or starting end of his thought, that the inevitable question
regarding the origins of man and nature is impermissiblean "abstraction," as he says. 15 Instead, Marx explains the
source of freedom. Sade, however, admits of no such restraints. He merely drew out to its fullest extent the idea
that all labor is equal, that what Fitzhugh called skill and
wit and what Andrews called natural wealth is nature's
gift.I6 Like water from a spring this natural wealth is free
to all men.
If one's natural wealth, actually one's possession of those
endowments of nature which make for inequality, is as
free to everyone as air and water, then it follows that all
exclusive relationships, especially marriage, are radically
unfree. It was Andrews who had said, in explaining natural
wealth, that "when man deals with Nature, he is dealing
with an abject servant or slave ... man is a Sovereign and
Nature his minister. He extorts from her rightfully, whatever she can be made to yield. The legitimate business of
man is the conquest and subjugation of Nature." 17 This was
Sade' s opinion, too. Man's overcoming of the involuntary
or natural distinction between the sexes, the distinction at
the root of all division oflabor (thus the source of all property and pain), is the final, actually the first freedom; it is
the highest pleasure. Pleasure, not labor, sex, nor reproduction explains man's origin and his purposes. Where
Marx had said that "the whole of what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labour,
and the emergence of nature for man ... has the evident
and irrefutable proof of his self-creation, of his own origins," Sa de proclaimed that man's origin is in pleasure.IB
In fact he does not distinguish pleasure or creation from
masturbation or pornography. Human freedom places the
endowments given by Nature to oneself and to others, like
air and water, at the disposal of all.
Sade' s idea of freedom looks forward to the replacement
of selfhood and the unmooring of all selves for use by others.
This is free love. And Sade realized, as would Kojeve, that
this objective involved the "definitive annihilation of Man
59
�properly so-called" along with the destruction of language
and philosophy." Sade realized the need for an attack as a
kind of self-rape on all creative powers, human and divine,
by the liberating and death-defying pornographer. This is
a political and philosophic undertaking, and because it flies
with greatest daring in the face of all human history and
fact, it begins with seizure of the world.
It will be obvious to the reader that Sa de's ideals, whatever else may be said of them, do not entail revolution. He
regarded the abolition of private property, following the
politicization of all human affairs that attends the liberation of the sexes~ as a mere "practical measure". Any vestiges of "this barbarous inequality" might legitimately be
cured by so traditional a means as theft: "Is theft, whose
effect is to distribute wealth more evenly, to be branded
as a wrong in our day, under our government which aims at
equality?" The state must indeed stimulate this useful if
simple equalizer in view of the admirable way that it "furthers equality and ... renders more difficult the conservation of property."20 Sade had no need of dialectical materialism. A pragmatist in economic matters as in others, he
would have dismissed Marx's contemptuous labeling of his
ideas as bourgeois radicalism while attacking Marx as an
absolutist. If man is made by pleasure and not by labor he
requires only pornography and a certain education in the
"sublimities of Nature."21 Sade's elaboration of these ideas
is found in an ingenious essay entitled "Yet another Effort,
Frenchmen, if you Would become Republicans."
The positioning of this essay is part of its meaning. Sade
embeds it in the middle of his pornographic novel-play entitled Philosophy in the Bedroom in which sexual acrobatics
is the main theme. In addition to the amorous relationship between a brother and sister with which the story begins, the plot turns upon the efforts of the protagonist, a
homosexual named Dolmance, a paramour of the brother,
to instruct a fifteen-year-old virgin, Eugenie, paramour of
the sister and the daughter of "one of the wealthiest commercial figures in the capital" (thus the story's predictable
anticapitalist element), in libertinism and debauchery."
Dolmance' s success, of which there was never any doubt,
is illustrated at the book's theoretical center, the womb of
the book, when Eugenie delightedly leads the revelers in
the near murdering of the story's sole antagonist, her
mother. The crime of this woman, easily guessed for all of
its implausible oddity, is that of being a mother. She confused the act of sex with its consequence, or children. The
woman is also guilty of failing to recognize that she has no
rights as a mother except that of instructing a child in sexual matters. Fittingly, then, the daughter administers just
punishment for her mother's crime. Eugenie's sewing together of her mother's womb "so that you'll give me no
more little brothers and sisters" is the occasion for a carnival flow of blood and semen. Like the mingled screams
of pain and pleasure, they flow as one. Dolmance, overwhelmed by the scene's perfection, is immediately aroused."
Eugenie has been educated. She has seen with her own
eyes that life is being unto death by means of sex. This is
60
freedom. Eugenie has witnessed, actually participated in,
the fact of man's equality with all other men, indeed with
all other beings. Sade has demonstrated that in making love
like an adult beast man severs the connection between sex
and reproduction. But this is death.
Freedom is death. In Kojeve's words for which Marx is
his source, "Death and Freedom are but two ... aspects of
one and the same thing .... j'To say 'mortal' is to say 'free'.24
And what of future generations, of reproduction simply?
Where freedom is death and reproduction is separated from
sex, the danger and the hope of the future is transferred
from God to man. The future is no longer a providential
matter. Sade intended, as did Noyes, as we shall see in a
moment, that the control of reproduction by means of
abortion, infanticide, and promiscuity would take the
power of childmaking and childrearing from the private
sphere and from God and place these powers in the hands
of mankind, that is, of the state.
It is Dolmance who reads the essay, "Yet another Effort, Frenchmen," to his partners. As the group's leader
and an advertised "cynic," his action on the occasion of
Eugenie' s triumph over her mother is the essay's meaning. Dolmance is the apparent author of the essay just as
Sade is the apparent model for Dolmance. But Dolmance,
although he admits that his thinking "does correspond
with some part of these reflections," is not the real
author. 25 Here, brilliantly, Sade insinuates the theme of
his work into his characterization: the theme is creation
by each self of new selves. Each self, generated by sex not
by reproduction, is interchangeable with other selves. Of
course a homosexual imitator of Sa de shall be Sa de's hero
and persona.
The essay that Dolmance reads but has not written is
said to have been picked up at a Paris newsstand. That Dolmance does not take credit for "Yet another Effort,
Frenchmen," or that he is not named Sade, is a joke at the
expense of philosophy and truth: philosophy is an undertaking appropriate only in the bedroom; more exactly philosophy is action, sexual action particularly, of which the
ideal is "philosophy" raped or pornography. The ideal of
philosophy so conceived is ''realized" in a scene such as
the one just described.
Philosophy is action which expresses the self in context
of the most liberated sexuality. This activity puts all false
philosophy, and all reality which is less than pornographic
sexual activity, out-of-bounds. Philosophy in the bedroom
is the highest action. This is idealism or theory conceived
as the goal for action to achieve. It is the restriction oflanguage to sense objects, but sense objects created by a pornographer. Reality, here susceptible of definition, is also
achievable or nearly so. The action of the mind in creating
the standard for action is the highest activity because it
defines action and precedes it. Sa de's creativity places
reality at the service of mind. Sade imagines libertinism,
therefore he exists.
Consider the extent of Sade's onanism. For him the
wasting of seed is creation. He is performing an act of ereAUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�ation by his own standards more obscene and blasphemous than anything even he can describe. Yet because it
is not a sexual act but a properly philosophic one he cannot explain it without seeming to undermine his point that
philosophy in the bedroom is the sole philosophy. Sade is
simulating an act of would-be creation, in particular the
creation of non-reproducing or death-seeking beings who,
like him, seek new reality, that is philosophic pleasure, by
means of a theoretical or hypothetical auto-eroticism modeled upon real auto-eroticism, masturbation, as an ideal.
Sade's aspiration here causes us to reconsider the judgment, made by one of the rare philosophic intelligences of
our time, that Marx's Theses on Feuerbach is "the best
world fetish ever constructed by a man [Marx] who wanted
to be God."26
It is appropriate to note here that it was not Marx's ideas
or his influence that affected the thinking of the American
communist John Humphrey Noyes, the results of whose
ideals Kojeve and Navrozov have described as Marxist
communism. Noyes, often considered the most revolutionary of modern times, was the founder in Oneida (New York)
of a free love commune in the 1840s. But Noyes goes beyond Marx: his ideas are Sadean; for instance, his remarkable system for human reproduction. Only couples chosen
by Noyes could mate for the purpose of conception. In
this way Noyes intended to efface the real mother and father and make himself, almost literally, the creator of the
offspring of others. Insisting, like Sade, upon the sinfulness
of egos, of what he called "selfish love", Noyes assured the
absolute equality of the sexes by implementing a thoroughgoing promiscuity without the possibility of offspring."
(Celibacy would achieve the same result and has been
adopted at times, for example by the Shakers in America,
to serve the same egalitarian goals Sade or Noyes had in
mind.) Noyes's object, the object of sexual equality, was
the disconnection of sex and reproduction. The resulting
offspring, products of Noyes's command, were touched in
only the slightest degree by human intervention.
Sa de's pornography or Noyes's system with its denial of
reality on principle raises the question how other, lesser
men will be induced to follow and to waive common sense.
Self-evidently Sade's answer, like that of America's "Leftbiased" culture, is that common sense can be seduced; it
can be sexually bewitched by pornography. Not the envious desire for equal porridge as Marx supposed but a lust
for nirvana, for "mind-blowing", is what Sa de supposed as
the basis for politics. But because real men differ from
creatures such as Sade's Minski, the fantastic and bestial
hero of The Story ofluliette, who is no more than a fleshed
phallic symbol housed in a metaphorical body, something
more is n~eded. Education is needed.
In pinning his hopes for Frenchmen upon education,
Sade showed himself a typical bourgeois radical of the type
so much hated by Marxists. Sade seeks to educate his fellows in the doctrine of political hedonism, to substitute the
pleasurable for the good. A cosmic thinker, Sade promises
immortality to his followers. It can be won, he explains, if
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
man will cast off his foolish and cowardly reliance upon the
gods. Sade's atheism, like that of Marx, is fundamental to
his project. It is in fact the project's purpose.
Sade establishes the foundation of education exactly as
Marx does. Sade prohibits questions about man's origin
and his end. He prohibits the subject of cosmology. "Let a
simple philosopher introduce ... [youth] to the inscrutable
but wonderful sublimities of Nature," Sade says. As for
anyone who might ask about man's origins, about God,
free will, and good and evil, let such a simpleton be told
"that things always having been what now they are, never
had a beginning, are never going to have an end." Such
questions, Sade indicates, are pointless. They are faintly
immoral as well. "It. .. becomes as useless as impossible
for man to be able to trace things back to an imaginary
origin which would explain nothing and not do· a jot of
good."28 Only egotistical people or those with too much
time on their hands seek answers to such questions. Compare Marx's treatment of a questioner of this type: "Are
you such an egotist/' Marx asks, "that you conceive every-
thing as non-existent and yet want to exist yourself?""
So as not to lose the sharpness of Sa de's thought it is
important to realize that he possessed the firmest possible
grip upon the problem posed by the rejection of classical
philosophy and Christianity. He understood what is meant
by Kojeve's principle that where "there is eternal life and
hence God, there is no place for human freedom." 30 Sade
boldly rejected "the grubby Nazarene fraud [and] ... His
foul, nay repellent mother, the shameless Mary," replacing
them with "atheism ... the one doctrine of all those prone
to reason .... Religion," he said, "is incompatible with the
libertarian system." 31 Sade hated the divine with a consuming hate of one who wishes himself to be creator. He
was quite clear about the necessity for atheism, actually of
nirvana or Nothing which is something more than atheism,
to the purposes of creation. Sade is a radical and does not
condescend to argue. Instead, he delights to sneer, challenging his reader to doubt, once all the veils are drawn, if
cannibalism, rape, murder, sodomy, and incest are other
than the most natural impulses to which objections are at
best hypocrisy. Indulging these so-called crimes, Sade insists, is noble and also revolutionary, since the performance
of, say murder, is liberation and freedom. Such indul·
gences, Sade believes, and his admirers agree, reflect only
the "singularity of. .. tastes." 32
Like a bourgeois radical, Sade demands absolute toleration and openness as his due. He knows that his tolerant
liberal reader, who dares not go so far as he, will grant him
the right to indulge his tastes. He knows, in other words,
that he will subdue his liberal reader. Yet Sade has only
contempt for toleration and for liberal readers. He cruelly
invokes toleration as an argument on his behalf. Finally,
he does not permit the tolerant reader to evade the consequences of his tolerance.
It is self-evident that Sade is not a liberal or one who discourses on the need for revolution while fully clothed and
within reach of a policeman. Sade is radical and insists
61
�upon raping, indeed sodomizing, one's mother and murdering her if necessary for the orgasm of everyone. In this
way Sade creates followers whose position, like that of today's liberals in face of their communist colleagues, is to
oppose his goal as inappropriate even as they insist that
this goal or absolute freedom is the essence of all morality."
Sade's appeal to the argument of radical toleration-"We
wonder that savagery could ever reach the point where
you condemn to death an unhappy person [sodomist, murderer, rapist] all of whose crime amounts to not sharing
your tastes" -serves the double purpose of embarrassing
liberals while condemning the principle of toleration as
evidence of liberal fears and egotism." In other words, Sade
demonstrates that the dreadful outcome of liberal egotism
and toleration is intolerance (his position), and the destruction of egos (also his position). Toleration permits what liberals call "victimless crimes" which, however, destroy egos
(e.g., sadism) and are therefore intolerant. Sade had a perfect understanding that the meaning of radical toleration,
the essence of which is a hatred of the philosophic or an
embrace of the proposition that all truth claims are equal,
is freedom: it is the destruction oflanguage or its mutation
into the language of bees. "Debate" on the subjects of"extending the love of the private family" and the rest, Sade
knew to be cowardice, for the principle that admits debate
concedes the legitimacy of the possibility. The purpose of
freedom (of speech and of actions) in the modern context,
he well knew, was to liberate men from reality so that good
and evil would possess whatever meanings he assigned
to them.
Certainly if man is to be free he must be free above all
from a standard of good and bad beyond himself. This was
especially clear to those American abolitionists and femi- •
nists who considered the conscience the primary site of
freedom. That many abolitionists could, however, say as
much without acting on what they said reflected a failure
on their part to realize Sa de's point: that sexuality and the
overcoming of any distance between men and women was
the true test of all liberation.
In this respect it will be necessary to revise the historians' estimate of the abolitionists in light of a more comprehensive and more historical context. They were rather
less radical or liberated than previously supposed. As one
recent student has put it in a study aptly entitled The
Slavery of Sex, many of the radical female abolitionists
were "limited by their elitism ... [for example] women who
were socially and sexually deviant were not accepted ....
These women were prudish in sexual matters, and many
were willing ... to impose their moral standards on others."35
Like Andrews, these ~omen were not quite ready, with
Sade, to embrace deviation-what is today routinely called
"deviationn-as virtuous, an expression of individuality,
or freedom, let alone to tolerate it. Their "elitism, ... the
denial of radical equality to all, brought them up short of
the goal of abolishing slavery to sex as a social and a political principle.H36
It is sufficient to mention only Garrison, widely consid-
62
ered to have been the most radical of abolitionists active in
the cause and undoubtedly a feminist. His speech or rather
the conceptions he propounded were radical enough. He
looked for the dissolution of the Union, of government as
such, and considered there was at once nothing more contemptible "than the exclusive spirit toward women," or
nothing higher than the "right of every soul to decide ...
what is true ... [so that] no man can be an infidel, except he
be false to his own standard." 37 But he could not bring himself to endorse, much less to engage in, free love. Even the
petty anarchism of his sometime pupil, Nathaniel Rogers,
caused him to act the tyrant. In identifying Garrison as the
head of the "extreme wing of the Socialist, Infidel, Women's-Right" party, Fitzhugh was only partly correct. 38
What the abolitionists broached and what their historians today praise as true freedom Sade had conceived in
1795, the year of "Yet another Effort, Frenchman." Sade
contemplated ·a revision of personhood or what is today
recommended to us as the "twilight of subjectivity.'' 39 It is
doubtful if even now men fully understand what Sade understood so well, namely that this ideal must encourage,
not prevent, victimization. Only the most advanced twentieth century thinkers in the abolitionist tradition seem to
have grasped this point. For example, joel Feinberg argues
for the necessity to "withhold noncontingent rights from
infants ... [basing] the case for prohibiting infanticide on
reasons other than ... rights." 40
Sade attempted to resolve the conflict between liberty
and equality as posed by the premises of modern political
theory. He sought to resolve the claims of individuality
versus the community, of liberty versus equality, by transforming rights into needs and needs into pleasure. The
problem of liberty versus equality has proven insoluble in
all modern systems except the Marxist theory of value and
its promise of the realm of freedom, a faith rooted in historical processes. But Marx's solution, as we have said, has
no respectable believers but liberals. It is in fact Sade's solution, for which Marxists such as Koji:ve have taken credit
without making clear that it goes beyond Marx, that leads
observers to confuse America with the final stage of Marxist communism. Sa de simply radicalized freedom: freedom
must be free. The enslavement of others that must follow
this doctrine Sade greeted amiably as the means of yet
greater liberation, that is, the liberation from vanity or
natural wealth. Here in fact is the key to his thought. He
begins with the primacy of sex or, rather, he substitutes
sexuality for reproduction as the basis of human existence.
The core of life is the moment of lust.
"There is no moment in the life of man," Sa de writes,
"when liberty in its whole amplitude is so important to
him." But while "no passion has a greater need of the
widest horizon of liberty than this one, none, doubtless, is
as despotic.''41 Sade's resolution of this apparent dilemma,
a form of the essential dilemma of the political conceived
as a contest between the individual and the community,
i.e., as a form of the theory of unequal exchanges or the labor theory of value, is ingenious. ''Never," says Sade, ''may
AlYTIJMN/WINTER 1982-83
�an act of possession be exercised upon a free being."42 Such
an exercise is the acme of tyranny. He supports this asser·
tion with a predictable and telling comparison. The "ex·
elusive possession of a woman," he says, "is ~o less unjust
than the possession of slaves."43 No one will doubt that
Sade was an abolitionist. He was more of one than Engels
and a better one than Andrews. Sade's doctrine here, com·
mon to abolitionists in America, implies a revision of the
idea that labor forms selfhood. Sade, who was impatient
with what he considered, rightly in this case, derivative
matters, was not interested in the labor question but rather
in its source. Unlike Charles Fourier, for whom work could
be transformed into play, or Marx, for whom work or pro·
duction is constitutive of man in the realm of freedom-or
like other modern thinkers and leaders who also conceived
work as an instrument ofliberation-Sade had his own novel
and seductive formulation.
If exclusive possession is prohibited for men, must it
not work a correlative freedom for women? Sade insisted
upon it: "All men are born free, all have equal rights." Ac·
cording to this principle, one of which we should "never
... lose sight," it is also true that "never may there be
granted to one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing
hands upon the other, and never may one of these sexes,
or classes, arbitrarily possess the other."44 But then what
of liberty's need for the widest possible horizon? Has Sa de,
too, run aground in the narrow passage between Commu-
nism or equality and Individualism or freedom?
Sa de's response to this challenge shows his position.
"No man," he says, "may be excluded from the having of
a woman ... [because] she ... belongs to all men. The act
of possession can only be exercised upon a chattel or an
animal, never upon an individual who resembles us."45
Consider, Sade says, that in permitting all men access to
all women, females are freed from possession by a single
male. Does the principle of freedom, Sade asks, not give
the appearance of the enslavement of women? This is an
appearance only. Of course, freedom must include rape,
murder, and cannibalism, but Sade does not suppose for a
moment that a woman's freedom is affected adversely by
this fact. Actually a woman is freed marvelously precisely
in the act of rape. The freedom expressed in rape is "a
question of enjoyment [i.e., of pleasure] only, not of property."46 And to this distinction between ownership and
pleasure, which is no less trenchant than Marx's regarding
the theory of labor, S'l\le adds an example especially instructive because it occurred later to Andrews.
"I have no right of possession upon that fountain I find
by the road," Sade explains, "but I have certain rights to
its use."" Andrews's example also demonstrates the principle of ownership and pleasure with a reference to the use
of water. "So soon as I have dipped up a pitcher of water
from the spring or stream," Andrews expounds, '~it is no
longer ... natural wealth; it is a product of my labor."48
But his example, in contrast to Sade's, tells us why American abolitionists moved, as Andrews himself complained,
festina lente in sexual matters. If natural wealth becomes
1BE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
property through the intervention of labor, all hope of resolving the dilemma of freedom and equality, of Individualism and Communism, vanishes. Again Sade had the
better answer.
The radicalization of the labor theory of value is Sa de's
solution to freedom's conflict with possession or ownership. The taking of natural wealth, water from a stream,
on the principle of pleasure-not labor-insures that the
object taken does not become a possession. As Marx turned
the labor theory of value back upon itself to show how
capital was a theft from labor, Sade radicalized the labor
theory of value by making all possession, the product of
labor, an encroachment upon pleasure and upon natural
wealth.
The effect of Sa de's reasoning in practical, or at least in
"philosophical," life (i.e., in pornography) is surprisingly,
we may say dialectically, a boon to women. Women are
liberated by submitting to men. But because pleasure, not
possession, is the basis of ownership and at the same time
destroys ownership, pleasure liberates men from self-possession or egotism in the act of possessing women. That
every man has of right equal access to all women is simply
justified: women are no different from other natural objects such as water and air. Moreover, women do not choose
to be beautiful to men or indeed they do not choose to be
women. Rape is then liberation in a fundamental sense of
overcoming womanhood or the outward self, the unfree
or involuntary eleinent of a "woman's" being.
Of course no woman can be said to possess womanhood
or to choose it. What women do not possess and what
costs them nothing is free, like water, to all who wish it for
the sake of pleasure. Regardless of any egotistical or possessive and selfish objection women may have, men have
the right "to compel their submission."49 Sade proclaims
in the name of freedom that "I have the right to force from
her this enjoyment, if she refuses me it for whatever the
cause."so But because pleasure, the purpose of rape, is not
labor, the raped woman is not a possession of the rapist. It
follows finally that men can have no rights to pleasure itself as a possession as this would be a contradiction in
terms.
The apparent enslavement of women, or rape, which
liberates women from the slavery of womanhood, hence
from unfreedom, thus pain, is also the means for women
to liberate men. If it is allowed to all men that women, and
"all sexes ... [and] creatures," shall yield to lust, it cannot
be doubted that men must equally yield to women. 11 Is
not the basis of right found in pleasure the most complete
freedom? But what is pleasurable is by definition not a
possession. What is pleasurable is free. Natural wealth is
free to everyone on the same principle that women are free
to everyone. The pleasure of men, guaranteed by their
freedom of access to all women, is itself a natural product
like air and water.
Certainly it would be unnatural and irrational for an individual male to deny himself pleasure, i.e., to deny himself freedom. Such a denial, moreover, would constitute
63
�exclusivity and egotism, a hoarding, of natural wealth, his
own or others. This would be precisely that elitism deplored
by antebellum abolitionists and by neoabolitionists. It
would be to suppose that one's own special pleasure, like
one's own special skill or wit, was his when in fact it is
everyone's. In other words, individuals may not discriminate or distinguish egos or persons where pleasure is concerned without contradicting the principle of pleasure
itself, thereby committing an act of self-enslavement. Certainly pleasures may be various-in fact, must be so. But
pleasure as such, whatever its variations, is common to all.
It must be free to all if it is to be free to any.
Pleasure or freedom, the opposite of labor or slavery,
having no costs, works the same effacement of ego and
selfhood in men that male access to women works upon
women. This is why love, ego, and self-interest are evils
for Sade as they were for John Humphrey Noyes. Again
Sade, however, is far ahead of most contemporary neoabolitionists. It is only in recent times that the possibilities
of "sex without love" have begun to expose themselves to
radical scholarship.52 Sade realized that "love ... is no more
a title [to a man or a woman], ... and cannot serve the happiness of others, and it is for the sake of ... happiness ...
that women have been given to us."53
Sade was not affected by elitism. He was its constant
enemy. Moreover, as pleasure is the instrument to cure
men of egotism, it is especially effective in the hands of
women who are, in Sade's view, capable of greater pleasure, hence of greater freedom and selflessness than men.
"Women [have] been endowed with considerably more
violent penchants for carnal pleasure then we," Sade contends.54 For this reason he considers it necessary to say, al
want laws [sic?] permitting them to give themselves to as
many men as they see fit. .. [U]nder the special clause
prescribing their surrender to all who desire them, there
must be subjoined another guaranteeing them a similar
freedom to enjoy all they deem worthy to satisfy them."55
Laws, it appears, are instruments of permission. But why
laws at all in the reign of freedom and pleasure? Sade has
a special conception of laws in mind.
Sade yokes the seeming extremes of absolute liberty
and abject tyranny in a perfect mutuality. Of course this is
possible only in the realm of the pleasure-made man who
has donated his selfish ego for a better human future.
The drift of Sade' s thinking leads one to suspect that he is
about to counsel the effacement of man as such and the
merging of the human with the natural in a kind of species
cannibalism. Perhaps the refusal to go beyond a hint of
this possibility is the only concession Sade makes to his
reader in Philosophy in the Bedroom.
Describing the sexual, and the transsexual, meshing
and entwining of bodies and beings, of "all parts of the
body" among "all sexes, all ages, all creatures possible,"
Sade calls finally for an annihilation of every possible distinction among hurrians. 56 Here is equality. It is a doctrine
of salvation. Sade calls for an engorging of the human by
64
the rest of nature. Celebrating the immortalizing effects
of a kind of enmaggoting of the human, Sade makes no
distinction between humanity and plants and animals.
Sade announces his ontological contribution in a formula
characteristic of the modern liberator as suffering servant.
"The philosopher," he says, "does not flatter small human
vanities ... [but in the] ever ... burning pursuit of truth,"
he utters huge veriti~s regardless of the consequences and
the squeals of conformists. 57 Because the truth is philosophic, that is, because it is an action idealized, or philosophy in the bedroom, a disquisition can do no better
than ask, and with a rhetorical sneer, how anyone dares to
suppose that man is different from a rat or a manure pile.
"What is man?" Sade inquires, jjand what difference is
there between him ... and all other animals of the world?""
In fact man is reducible to his physical being. But this is
no bad thing. Far from it. Man's natural condition is the
source of the greatest liberation of all.
Because man is part of nature and does nature's bidding,
he is freed from the greatest enslavement. What is more
repugnant and more completely contrary to all desire and
freedom than death? And what, if not the fear of death,
enslaves men to religion, that is, to superstition? Sade proclaimed immortality or liberation from death because he
could also proclaim man is liberated from the divine.
Above all, immortality is the fitting reward of those who
bravely reject the "absurd dogmas, the appalling mysteries,
the impossible morality of. .. [Christianity], this disgusting
religion." 59 Christianity promises immortality in order to
control and limit nature. But just as pleasure is liberation
because it is sensual, atheism is knowledge of the highest
things because it too is sensual. Atheism is a true judgment because, like "every [true] judgment [it is] the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by
the . .. senses."60
It is also perfectly obvious that, as man has no beginning
except in sex, there· can be "no ... annihilation; what we
call the end of the living animal is no longer a true finis,
but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter
. ... According to these irrefutable principles, death is
hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible
passage from one existence into another ... what Pythagoras called metempyschosis."61 Sex and all allied pleasure
insure everlasting life, but it is the orgasmic, not the reproductive aspects of sexuality, which do so.
Self-sovereignty, absolute liberty and pleasure having
made necessary the elimination of egos, requires as well
the abolition of man. But the cost is only pleasure and the
reward, or immortality, is the highest pleasure of all. Sade's
inversion of Christianity includes necessarily a vision of
the good regime since his kingdom is emphatically of this
world. The philosopher in the bedroom speaks not only to
Frenchmen, whom he urges to make "yet another effort if
they would be republicans"; he speaks as well to the "legislator" whom he also openly addresses in the course of
his essay as you. 62 He speaks to us.
AtnlJNUN/~UNlllR
1982-83
�.i
The republican regime of liberty is unquestionably a
regime of laws. It is already clear that the freedom of
women is to be assured by laws. But radical individualism
and self-sovereignty are manifestly incompatible with laws
in the accepted sense. How could one possibly "devise as
many laws as there are men," asks Sade. He answers by
promising that laws shall "be lenient, and so few in num·
her, that all men, of whatever character, can easily observe
them."63
Laws must suit the variations of people, their tastes es·
pecially. Laws must be particular, not general; they must
be value-free. But of course there is a universality in this
version of law, namely every case is special. The man above
the law or the philosopher is here everyman. And unlike
the classic philosopher, the lawgiver, everyman, conceived
by Sa de denies nothing to himself in the way of pleasures.
Indeed, law is solely for the sake of pleasure. The purpose
of law so conceived is to incite passions and indulgences,
not to control them. This is all there is of virtue and law in
Sade. He explains why the law, in the accepted view, is
unfair, that is, unjust to human nature·. His rationale proceeds in light of a dialectic of sorts to the effect that man
has a nature, but in a special sense. Man has no fixed nature. "It has been pointed out that there are certain virtues
whose practice is impossible for certain men ... ," Sa de
begins. Since this is so, he continues, "would it not be to
carry your injustice beyond all limits were you to send the
law to strike the man incapable of bowing to the law?"64
What kind oflaws should the republican regime devise?
What meaning might law have at all? Sa de's answer is a
model of the bourgeois radical's vision of the liberation of
individuals. "The legislator ... must never be concerned
with the effect of that crime which strikes only the individual."65 In other words the republican regime, which
sets about to liberate the individual and to fashion laws for
him particularly, is now to be unconcerned about individuals
and care only for itself, the state. Sade describes here what
Kojeve commends as the universal and homogeneous
state, the state that has the appearance of having attained
Marxist communism. 66 This is the realm in which we are
to witness what Rousseau called a "change ... [of] human
nature ... transforming each individual, who by himself is
a perfect and solitary whole, into a part of a much greater
whole."67 The objective of law in such a state is the enlargement of the public sphere and the destruction of the
private sphere in the name of and for the sake of the individual's liberty. But this object is no other than the widest
horizon of pleasure or liberty, namely the elimination of
all distinctions and exclusivities. The object of law is
equality. This object, Sade realized (much before Tocque·
ville and with less evidence for his inferences), demands
the destruction of what sociologists call mediate institutions. This destruction is to be done by the omnicompetent state in the name of liberty, a procedure that must
enhance the power of the state and its reputation as the
source of benevolence. "Equality," said Tocqueville at the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
conclusion of his famous study of 1835, "prompts men to
think of one sole uniform and strong government. ... In
the dawning centuries of democracy, individual indepen·
dence and local liberties will always be the products of art.
Centralized government will be the natural thing."68 Historians, who have of course paid great attention to Tocqueville, have wondered if Tocqueville considered this
tendency benign or malevolent. Sa de is not ambiguous on
this point. He considered this tendency Sadean.
It remains only to address the vestiges of exclusivity and
inequality, of elitism, in the residual superstructure oflife.
Sade turns to this subject with relish.
Because ego and selfishness are melted in the furnace
of pleasure and all sexual or natural distinctions turn to
ashes, the state must do its part to extinguish all derived
distinctions. Sade encourages with vigor the work of man's
compulsory education. Surely life is the absolute possession of the state, first of all. A human being who does not
possess a self cannot be said to possess life either. Rather
he "possesses," as aspects of his (more properly "its") immortality as matter, those feelings and functions which he
shares with all other humans and indeed with all nature.
The urge of self-preservation, for example, does not convey a right to self-preservation in the individual. This right
is the state's. In fact Sa de's position that "the freest of
people are they who are most friendly to murder" further
underlines his ideal of liberation of the self from egotism.69
The instinct for self preservation is in Sa de's view outmoded. Moreover, it is man's finitude or death that
justifies Sa de's reasoning on all forms of murder. Murder,
infanticide, and abortion result from the principle that
severs the relation of sex and reproduction. All of these
murderings sever man from the divine or eternity. Sade
writes: "If all individuals were possessed of eternal life,
would it not become impossible for Nature to create any
new ones? If Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows
that their destruction is one of her laws." 70 The logic of
these sentences, in addition to licensing all murder that
will cut the connections of sex and reproduction, is that
the state may murder at will just as it may create at will.
"Every individual born lacking the qualities to become
useful. .. has no right to live, and the best thing ... is to
deprive him of life the moment he receives it." Likewise
the state may "prevent the arrival. .. of a being."71
Undoubtedly the independence, the freedom and equality of each being, warrants such measures. These measures
will appear harsh only in the eyes of those individuals who
persist in selfish and egotistical ways. The source of selfpossession is vanity, after all. Rousseau was not the only
one to see that the absence of freedom, that is, dependence, means vanity and egotism. Sade simply decreed
dependence a crime against freedom, its contradiction.
The extinction of what the American communist John
Humphrey Noyes called the "I spirit" can mean only that
the I who acts and speaks must be We. Elimination of egos
or creation of the we spirit is critical to the interdepen·
65
�dence of the community and to the freedom of all to do
what they desire to do. A weeding' out of those who are
dependent because they cannot participate in their own
liberation and that of others, while superficially an act of
cruelty, is in the larger view an act of magnanimity.
Sade does not flatter small vanities. The truth is that
the elimination of useless individuals is a function of free·
dam. "It is not unjust," Sade proclaims, that "the human
species ... be purged from the cradle; what you foresee as
useless to society is what must be stricken out of it."72 Of
course uselessness is defined only by whatever suits the
ruler's pleasure. First of all men and women must be made
to give way to others without qualifications of any sort,
and as all must yield their egos to pleasure, so government
must enforce these activities and promote them. In addition to providing free and certainly compulsory state education (Sade understood the necessity of compulsory and
free education in a regime founded in equality and freedom), the legislator must encourage every effort in the
direction of freedom and equality .73
The government must promote the most complete independence of every individual, the freedom of each person. As we have already seen, the state shall encourage
theft as an instrument of equalization. Much more important, the state must prohibit those activities with a tendency to establish vanity. Offenses tending to inhibit
sexual indulgences must be rooted out and punished with
utmost severity. The government for its part will establish
"various stations, cheerful [and] sanitary" for the satisfaction of every possible lust. "The laws ... will oblige
[women] ... to prostitute themselves ... [This] is ... the
most equitable of laws ... all egotistical sentiments quite
aside."74 What other law could be more useful to freedom?
But the fundamental purpose of the state's provisions
for individual freedom is "absolutely destroying all marital
bonds."75 Because sexual activity is not for the sake of reproduction but serves the opposite purpose, suicide, murder,
annihilation, and nothingness are as much to be encouraged as other pleasures. Incest, for example, is a new virtue:
"It loosens family ties .... [It] ought to be every government's law."76 Sade means it must not simply be permitted.
It must be forced. Whereas certain ancient gnostics, seeking to free men from the body, urged activities designed
to extinguish human life, Sade put sex in the service of
these goals. Offspring are not only an annoyance rightfully to be disposed of, they are an affront to pleasureseeking liberators. Only the state is the creator of beings.
Sade turned the business of reproduction over to the state,
to "you", the legislator, much as Noyes took this task
upon himself at Oneida. In other words, the creation of
human beings is taken from men and women in the name
of their liberation. This reverses the way of civilization as
well as the first commandment gi'(en to men in the book
of Genesis to multiply and replenish the earth. Opposite
principles are set in their place. These are the substitution
of man's power for God's power, finitude and mortality
for infinitude and immortality; above all death for life.
66
Sade invites a new view of children, thus of being.
HThere are no longer born, as fruits of the woman's plea-
sure, anything but children to whom knowledge of their
father is absolutely forbidden." Children, instead of "belonging to only one family ... must be ... purely les enfants
de Ia patrie."77 The formation of a family of man, deriving
from the "annihilation" of the traditional family, is the
special duty of republics.
Every individual must have no other dam than the nation . ..
from her alone all must be expected. Do not suppose you are
fashioning good republicans so long as children, who ought to
belong solely to the republic, remain immured in their families. By extending to the family, to a restricted number of persons, the portion of affection they ought to distribute amongst
their brothers, they inevitably adopt those persons' sometimes very harmful prejudices; such children's opinions, their
thoughts, are particularized, malformed, and the virtues of a
Man of the State become completely inaccessible to them . ..
[Those who], love ... their children less but their country
more [are most free ].78
Sade's reference here to "particularism" summarizes
his thinking. As a quintessential bourgeois radical for
whom particularism means tribalism, egotism, and selfishness, Sade proposes instead the family of m,an. But we
have just seen in Sa de's essay that the core of the family
of man lies with the reduction of philosophy to action, in
particular to sexual action. Sade's purpose reverses the
meaning of philosophy in two ways. Philosophy distinguishes act and contemplation; Sade combines them by
reducing thought to act. He is pragmatic. Philosophy regards thought as universal and action as particular; Sade
insists upon the opposite. But acts cannot be universal.
They are particular. Sade's inversion of philosophy, his reduction of it to action is profitably compared to the betterknown efforts of Marx and Hegel, the materialist and the
idealist, who also attempted to transpose the realm of philosophy to action, to history.
Marx and Hegel, as we know, invested history with
meaning, that is, with philosophy or universality. Kojeve
has described this as making the concept equal to time.79
Sade also made this equation but with a difference. This
difference is the institutional substance of that reality
Kojeve thought he found in America as the attainment of
Marxist communism. Sade equates the concept (philosophy) with time as pleasure. In other words he equates the
concept with temporality, with every moment of time.
The meaning of such an equation in practice would be
the eternal present or the realm of freedom. Philosophy in
the bedroom is then a universal language or the language
of bees.
The author is pleased to acknowledge the assistance of the Earhart
Foundation in the preparation of this essay.
l. Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Lectures on
the Phenomenology of the Spirit, Ithaca 1969, 159-61. Note to the Sec·
ond Edition.
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�2. Lev Navrozov, Letter to the Editor, Commentary 73 June 1982, 16.
3. Kojeve, Introduction, 161. Note to the Second Edition, 159-60.
4. Fitzhugh's chief work is Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters, ed.,
and with an introduction by C. Vann Woodward, Boston, 1960 (1856).
For a brief survey of his ideas see the present writer's "The Proslavery
Roots of Socialist Thought," The Conservative Historians' Forum 6 1982,
14-21.
5. Karl Marx, "Private Property and Communism," in T. B. Bottomore,
Karl Marx Early Writings, New York 1964, 166.
6. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, eds., The Marquis de Sade,
The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings,
New York 1965, viii, v.
7. Friedrich Engels. "The Book of Revelations," in Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, Works [in Russian] Moscow-Leningrad 1928-48, xvi,
pt. 1, 160. I am indebted to Joseph Dwyer, deputy curator, Hoover Institution, for this citation.
8. For example, David Brion Davis, who is the leading as well as quintessential abolitionist historian. See his The Problem of Slavery in the
Age of Revolution 1770-1823, Ithaca 1975,468.
9. David Brion Davis, "Ante-Bellum Reform," in Frank Otto Gatell and
Allen Weinstein, American Themes, &says in Historiography, New York
1968, 153.
10. A recent work in literary criticism is Jane Gallop, Intersections. A
Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski, Lincoln, Neb
1981.
11. Karl Marx to R. Kreuznach in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The MarxEngels Reader, New York 1972, 8.
12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party,
in Tucker ed., The Marx·Engels Reader 360.
13. J. F. C. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World, New York 1969,
59.
14. Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made, Two Essays
in Interpretation, New York, 1969, 176.
15. Marx, "Private Prop~rty and Communism," 166.
16. Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!, 21 and following. Stephen Pearl Andrews,
The Science of Society, New York 1851,76.
17. Andrews, The Science of Society, 81.
18. Karl Marx, "Private Property and Communism," 166.
19. Kojeve, Introduction, 159, note 6.
20. Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, 313-14.
21. Sade, Bedroom, 304.
22. Bedroom, 192.
23. Bedroom, 363, 365.
24. Kojeve, Introduction, 247.
25. Sade, Bedroom, 339.
26. Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, Durham, N.C.
1975, 299.
27. Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States,
New York 1875, 292.
28. Sade, Bedroom, 304.
29. Marx, "Private Property and Communism," 166.
30. Kojeve, Introduction, 258.
31. Sade, Bedroom, 299, 300, 301.
32. Seaver and Wainhouse, The Marquis de Sade, viii.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
33. Based on Irving Kristol, "Taxes, Poverty, and Equality," Public In·
terest 37, 1974, 25.
34. Sade, Bedroom, 325.
35. Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex, Urbana 1978, 225.
36. Hersh, Slavery, 225.
37. Walter M. Merill, ed., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison 6 vo1s.,
Boston 1971-1981, III 148, lV 387.
38. Fitzhugh, Cannibals Alll, 95.
39. Fred Dallmayr, Twilight of Subjectivity: Contributions to a PostIndividualist Theory of Politics, Amherst,-Mass. 1981.
40. Joel Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty: Essays on
Social Philosophy, Princeton 1980, xii.
41. Sade, Bedroom, 317.
42. Bedroom, 318.
43. Bedroom, 318.
44. Bedroom, 318
45. Bedroom, 319.
46. Bedroom, 319, note 15.
47. Bedroom, 319, note 15
48. Andrews, The Science-of Society, 77.
49. Sade, Bedroom, 319.
50. Bedroom, 319, note 15.
51. Bedroom, 316.
52. Russell Vannoy, Sex Without Love: A Philosophical Exploration,
New York 1980.
53. Sade, Bedroom, 319.
54. Bedroom, 321.
55. Bedroom, 321.
56. Bedroom, 321, 316.
57. Bedroom, 329.
58. Bedroom, 329.
59. Bedroom, 298.
60. Bedroom, 304.
61. Bedroom, 330-l.
62. Bedroom, 316, 317, 325.
63. Bedroom, 310.
64. Bedroom, 310.
65. Bedroom, 312.
66. Kojeve, Introduction, 139 and elsewhere.
67. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, ed., Charles Frankel,
New York 1947, 36.
68. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in American, ed., J.P. Mayer and
Max Lerner, New York 1966, 649.
69. Sade, Bedroom, 333.
70. Bedroom, 3 30.
71. Bedroom, 335 note 20, 336.
72. Bedroom, 336.
73. Bedroom, 321-2.
74. Bedroom, 316, 319-20.
75. Bedroom, 322.
76. Bedroom, 324.
77. Bedroom, 322.
78. Bedroom, 335, 321-2.
79. Kojeve, Introduction, 100-149.
67
�Meetings, Recognitions
Meyer Liben
1 - - - How do you know him?
- - - Oh, we met about a month ago at a party, at a
friend's house, he didn't know anybody there, he had just
moved into the city-he's from out West somewheres-and
came with a girl who was a friend of the hostess, really of
the host's wife, that was more the effect, met the girl
through a fellow he used to go to college with, I think they
roomed together for a year and then he (I mean the one
you're asking about) switched to another school, didn't
like the place or maybe it was his marks, anyway he's in
some phase of T.V., or maybe he just watches it a lot, I
don't know him very well, we just met him at this party,
and hardly spoke to him at all.
2 - - - I didn't know that you knew him.
- - - Oh yes, we met about seven years ago, one of
those relationships where, if you pass in the street, you
nod without talking, never quite sure whether she remem·
bers who you are or not (or sometimes imagining that she
thinks about you quite often, covering the interest with a
nod) and then when someone mentions her name you say:
Oh I know her slightly, or, after a while: I've met her but
don't really know her, I think we actually met at the
beach, she was with mutual friends, people I'm still friends
with, tho I've never seen her with them again, you know
how it is at the beach, everything stands in the way of real
contact, the ocean's vastness, solar somnolence, we're all
half·naked and insignificant, the meetings are unreal, so
you nod, faintly, when you pass in the street, or say:
We've met, but I don't really know her.
3 - - - I didn't know you knew them.
- - - Are you kidding? We've known them for years,
we don't see them as much as we used to, they used to live
across the street from us on 84th Street, that was before
Meyer Liben's (1911-1975) collection of short stories, Street Games and
Other Stories will appear in 1983 (Schocken Books). Justice Hunger and
Nine Stories appeared in 1967 (Dial Press). His stories have often appeared in the St. John's Review Ouly 1980, Summer 1981, Winter 1981).
68
the West Side was making its comeback, the kids used to
play together, and we used to visit back and forth, naturally
see each other in the park. Then they moved, and we
moved. For a while (especially when we were still on the
old block) we'd see each other, but now I don't know,
maybe they moved into another bracket or something,
not that they're highhat or anything, anyway we kind of
drifted apart once we were in neighborhoods to which the
other was strange, we know them at least sixteen years,
lived on the same block for let's see, nine years, our kids
practically grew up together.
4 - - - How did you meet?
- - - It was a foggy day, I was standing on the beach,
looking out into the mist, and she suddenly appeared from
the water, pretty weird, because I'd been there for about
an hour, and hadn't seen anyone, but we didn't talk, and I
actually met her a week later at a friend's house, we recog·
nized one another right off, but we never have said any·
thing about that first meeting, I'm pretty sure it was the
same girl, I mean how can you forget, under the circum·
stances?
5 I don't really remember how we met, I mean I don't
remember the exact occasion, it's funny how the exact
moment of meeting tends to be forgotten, we can place it
by years, or season, or place, but things seem to conspire
against the exact moment, maybe it's because we rarely
meet a person for the first time, but have seen him, at a
distance, on a number of occasions, or have heard about
him, so the first meeting is blurred by those views from a
distance, or by the previous mention, and it becomes
quite impossible to pin down.
6 I can tell you the exact moment that I met her, I came
down to the dock with a friend, and she was sitting there
with a group of youngsters, reading, that was absolutely
the first time that I laid eyes on her, never saw her in a back·
ground of other figures, had never heard her name men·
AU1UMN/WINTER 1982-83
�boned, that was absolutely the first contact, when I came
down to the dock, a meeting of str~ngers, loveliest and
purest of all meetings.
7 The first time we met we didn't seem to have very
much interest in one another, but then we met for the
second time and fell very much in love, and as the years
went by, remembered that as the first meeting, but it
wasn't it was really the second meeting, and we've put the
first meeting out of mind, as tho we're ashamed not to
have fallen ih love then, but that was really the important
meeting, for had we not met then, the second meeting
would have meant nothing at all, we're both sure of that,
and yet we keep forgetting that first meeting and think
only of the second meeting, when we fell in love, but not
as strangers.
8 He claims that he knows me, tells me exactly where
we met, at whose house, the company present, what was
said, even the actual date, but I don't remember him at all,
know that I never saw him in my life, and the more pre·
cise he is in his details, the surer I am that I never saw
him, tho I have been at the house where he claims we met,
been at parties there, and if indeed he was there on an occasion when I was there, then all I can say is that our meet·
ing created absolutely no impression, so that it's as tho I
never met him, but is it really possible to meet a person
and have absolutely not the slightest remembrance, is it
possible that his recollection is accurate (but I know that
I've never seen him) that things happen to people, and
then it's as tho they never happened?
9 We've met, we know one another, we used to see one
another as parts of a group (I don't mean as individuals
who also happened to be part of a group), and we occa·
sionally meet now, for we work in the same area, but it
doesn't mean a thing, in the sense that we have no inter·
est in one another, no concern; if one of us died, the other
would shrug condolingly, part of the news of the day;
there's an edge of hostility, but not enough to create real
interest, and all in all it would have been much better had
we never met at all, for our connection is a kind of waste
of human energy, we have nothing to say to one another,
and have learned nothing from one another (such things
happen) except the knowledge that we ought never to
have met, call it, if you will, one of Fate's discards.
10 I had actually met him in the park, we were intro·
duced by a random acquaintance, but then we met a few
weeks later in the company of my husband and his wife (I
mean to say that I was with my husband and he was with
his wife), we were introduced and acted as tho this was
the first time we had ever met, but I don't quite understand why we acted that way, because our first meeting
had been casual, and, how shall we say: innocent?
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
11 You know how it is when you meet a person you
haven't seen for maybe 40 years, since you were in the
same elementary school class, you recognize him immediately, but make no sign because you are not sure that he has
recognized you, tho it is entirely possible that he has recognized you and passes you by because he thinks you
have not recognized him, at any rate you pass one another
by, maybe both of you knowing that you have recognized
one another and both chary of picking up the ancient strand.
12 - - - I thought that you were old friends.
- - - Oh, we used to be old friends.
13 How we met? A blind date-you know, one of those
dates where I'm wearing a grey suit, red tie, and you're
wearing a yellow dress and what color necklace would go
with yellow, and then we stand in the lobby and look around
wonderingly or anxiously, and then we recognize the color
combines, but that is not the true recognition, the way it
is after a long, grim, separation, or the way it is when eyes
meet for the first time, and bring old dreams to life.
14 We met just once and I've never seen her since, and
you can carry an impression like that for a long time, for it
will not be sullied by experience, but buried warm and secretive, lives its own life.
15 We met just once, and I can tell you exactly where
and when. It was four years ago, on New Year's Eve, at
the home of a person, who, it turned out, neither one of
us knew. We got into a bitter argument, over immortality,
he held that it is morally indefensible even to discuss the
question, being an escape from reality and from the demands of terrestrial life. That was the only time I ever saw
him, I'm sorry to hear of his death. I usually remember
people by what we talk about, but in this case it was not
only the topic of conversation, it was also the time, the occasion, I don't think I've ever forgotten any person I've
ever met on New Year's Eve.
16 We neither one of us recognized the other, but as we
spoke, it turned out that we came from the same neighborhood, and then we discovered that we had gone to the
same school, and then it turned out that we were in the
same class for a year, there was no question about it, we
double-checked graduation dates, etc., we recalled (he admiringly, I with reverse emotion) our teacher, a number
of the kids in the class-there was no one not remembered by both of us-various episodes in which we had both
apparently participated, but we did not remember one
another at all, looked at each other blankly as we recalled
the childhood scenes we had lived through together.
17 It's kind of a joke between us, we argue about it, she
claims that we met, briefly, at a friend's house about two
weeks before my recollection of the time we met, at a
69
�cocktail party which she too recalls very well, but I don't
remember the first occasion at all: and every now and
then (jokingly) she reminds me of that earlier occasion,
saying that she apparently didn't make much of a first impression on me, but I frankly don't remember seeing her, I
stayed at the party for only a few moments, she was probably in a corner, out of sight, we joke about it, I say she was
probably absorbed in an interesting conversation with
some handsome gent, cornered off, but she says she definitely saw me, even remembers the suit I wore (blue serge),
we joke about it, she brings it up at argumentative moments, and as the years go by, fills in more and more details of that party, that party seems to be more important
to her than any social event of her life, she is constantly
adding figures to it, coming up with new scraps of conver-
stantial than you might think, more than air, but we could
be in the same room and not recognize one another (much
harder if we were in different rooms), in fact, after all
these years-we've done an awful lot of business together-I'm kind of scared to meet him, the voice has become disembodied, spectral almost, I really don't want to
meet him, I hope the occasion never arises, I don't want
to bring that familiar voice and that strange body together, I just hope that our relationship remains telephonic,
friendly, faintly personal.
become celebrities, I was there for just a couple of minutes, being late for a dinner date, but I know I didn't see
her there, sometimes I wonder if I actually was at the party,
if only I could prove that I wasn't.
22 What bothers him, you see, is that I met his wife before he did, I met her almost a year before he did, I don't
know why that should annoy him as much as it does, but
it doe~ annoy him, it upsets him in fact, it isn't as tho I
went out with her seriously (but even if I had, why should
that upset him?), we were friendly, and apparently he keeps
throwing it up to her, he seems to blame her for my knowing her before he did, I can't understand his attitude, of
course I met her first, it was at least a year before he met
her, it might have been more than a year, but what of it,
18 You have to be of a certain age before you meet people, otherwise you see them or are exposed to them, the
way it is with children and parents, no formal introduc-
lance, absolutely no other kind of priority is involved, why
does he make such a big deal of the fact that I knew his wife
before he did, met her perhaps two years before he did?
sation, new interpersonal connections, nuances of the be·
havior of strangers, comments on people who have since
it's just a matter of chronology, it's of no intrinsic impor·
tions necessary.
19 I'm very pleased to meet you, it was very nice to have
met you, haven't we met before, don't I know you from
somewhere, it was very interesting to have made your acquaintance, I trust we'll see each other again soon, I didn't
quite catch your name, I hope this will have proved to be
the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship, I've looked
forward to this for years, it's a great thrill to shake the
hand of the man who, h'ya, how do you do, sir, I trust this
will have proved to be, an unexpected pleasure, I didn't
quite catch the name.
20 He says that he doesn't know her, in the sense that
he doesn't know her name, or anything at all about her, but
that their eyes met across the room, and he feels in that
sense (not the Biblical) he knows her, in fact he says that
when he meets anyone (particularly an attractive girl) he
prefers not to know anything about her, in that way, he
contends, he is not distracted from the essential, the real
presence, and he knows this girl, he says, by the mixing of
the glances.
21 One of those telephonic connections-we've had
occasion to speak to one another for some twenty years
now, business-wise, his voice is as familiar to me as that of
my closest friends, hut I've never seen him, we're very
friendly on the phone, not quite personal, of course I've
built up some notion of what he looks like, building a body
from a voice, of course the sound of a voice is more sub-
70
23 How do I know her? In the ancient meaning of the
word. As a youth, in a great midwestern university (name
disclosed on request), we went off, on a Saturday night,
for a little fun in town, .rounded the bars, and then wound
up in a house of prostitution, poorly reputed, the address
of which one of us had unbelievably remembered from a
conversation he had overheard between two seniors two
weeks back, and that woman was my bed-mate, I imagine
that's her husband next to her, she's put on weight, but I
recognized her immediately, I doubt if she remembers
me, do you think she would, after all these years, I don't
think we even spoke at the time.
24 He has a very odd habit when he meets ehildren of
bowing in a very grave and courtly manner, shaking the
hand of the boy, kissing the hand of the girl; the children
tend to be very impressed, they feel the importance of a
first meeting, they like something to be made of it, for
these are strange figures, coming from a distance.
25 Having met for the first time, and now taking our departure, we say: nice to have met you, or: very pleased to
make your acquaintance, or: it was a pleasure meeting you,
or: very nice meeting you.
26 When he meets you, it is not like one meeting you
for the first time, and either glad or sorry for the opportunity, but rather he is sizing you up for some reason which
you cannot comprehend-as a prospective buyer (or a proAUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�spective friend), as a subsidiary character in a novel he is
working on (or the main character in an unwritten novel),
as a most·wanted criminal, as a sexual rival, he looks care·
fully at the cut of your clothes, tries to figure out your income, the state of your health, your weaknesses and strong
points, not at all interested in making your acquaintance.
27 I'm sorry, you're making a mistake, I don't know you
at all, you're mistaking me for someone else, absolutely a
case of mistaken identity, no, I've never seen you in my
life before, you're confusing me with another person, it's
possible that the resemblance is there, no I don't have a
twin sister, I've never been in Detroit, I never went to
George Washington High School, I never spent a summer
in a camp near Berlin, New Hampshire, I never worked in
Kresges, I never went to summer school at the University
of Washington, never been on a cruise to Haiti, I've hardly
been anywheres, and you definitely don't know me, this is
positively the first time that you've ever seen me.
28--- It was very embarrassing, she said, I went up
to him, thinking that he was my old teacher, my old favorite teacher, then as soon as I said hello and introduced myself, I saw that I had made a mistake, that at close range he
didn't resemble my teacher at all, tho he seemed to from a
distance, I guess I must have been thinking about him,
anyway this fellow was pretty fresh, I guess he thought I
was introducing myself because I was attracted to him, or
something, anyway he was very nasty and suggestive, and I
walked off fast, there couldn't be any two people more unlike than this man and my old teacher.
29 Have you ever noticed how two children act when
they meet for the first time? But of course you have, what
man yields to what other man when it comes to closeness
of observation, we all of us note the most delicate nuances,
the slightest tremors of change or novelty, seismographers
all, so you've certainly noticed how two children, small
ones, act when they meet for the first time, and I am talking here of the relief they experience in meeting a person
of the same height, they look straight ahead, they do not
have to look up (that looking up is the primary cause of all
future neck troubles, orthopedists' bonanza) the strain is
taken out of their world view, and then too there is that
joyful recognition of the contemporary (for only contemporary peers understand one another), no talking down,
no struggling to make yourself understood (seeking neither
the disciple nor the sage) and that accounts for the way
they move apart from the first movement (the way it is
when things are too good to be true) and then they joyfully
turn to one another and begin-joyfully-to wreck Paradise.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
30 Their hands clasped, one was dry, one was clammy,
their eyes met, one pair frank, open, the other conniving,
sly, they spoke, one straightforwardly, to the point, the
other circuitously, avoiding the issue, but do not think that
(in this introductory meeting) the dry hand, the frank eyes
and the straightforward speaking style belonged to one of
the men, because there was a division (obviously unequal).
31 Last night, for the first time, I met Death, in the naturalist, the Lucretian manner. Exhausted, I fell asleep after dinner, but as is my habit, I heard and was aware of all
the significant events in my household-the phone ringing, the sibling quarrel, the peal of laughter-! heard the
bell ring and knew that my daughter's escort had arrived, I
heard another child leave for her party, I heard the familiar
introduction to the T.V. program, telling me the time, but
asleep nevertheless, and then I fell deeper asleep, and in
that sleep heard nothing, not the voice of my wife reading
our youngest to sleep, not the 11 o'clock voice of Ron
Cochran, I did not hear the one child return and did not
hear the other return, did not hear the front door open
and close, or the Frigidaire open and close (formerly
known as raiding the pantry), did not hear the silence of
the house asleep, the milkman's approach and departure,
awoke to greet (without ceremonial) the dawn of a glorious
summer day, realizing, the way it is when you meet Death
in the Lucretian manner, that life goes on, and you not
aware (maybe not even aware that you were not aware).
32 It was pretty funny-we passed each other in the
middle of the block, looked at one another, with that air of
vague familiarity just short of recognition, went on, both
looked back, the recognition on the tip of the unconscious,
and when we reached our respective corners, we turned
around and rushed back, meeting again in the middle of
the block, crying out each other's names, in an orgy of delayed recognition.
33 I've seen the oddest things in the way of introductions-a man forgetting the name of his oldest friend, his
mind an absolute blank, until his friend (luckily remembering his own name) announces it; a woman introducing
24 people-half of whom she had met for the first time,
skipping 14 people mutually known-in drumfire order to
the most recent arrival at a party; a man introducing himself by a wrong name, or introducing an arrival by the introducer's name; a woman introducing her husband by
her lover's name, a man introducing his third wife to her
first husband; a man who introduces people by names and
occupation; and other oddities at the moment of bringing
strangers together.
71
�Achilles
In Memoriam:
John Downes
His heel, just a palm-full when
She held him there, now is gone
As far as body can; arch-ended,
Is walked under stone.
Annapolis (1909-1926)
Myth will recall what bone
Forgets: so heroes burn
In their own flame desired beyond all,
0 beyond beauty, beyond love.
All changed now, all he looked
At, even what he never truly saw:
Monuments, ribs of old ships
Stuck through sand; ribs of cattle.
And culled across an open mouthed sky
Birds chirp at breakfast. Their acid
Droppings scald the outraged marble, toppled
Capitals of such and such a style,
Rubbed to ether, to cinders of
A pureness so intense the hands melt
Touching them. Silence like a blade's
Unfelt acuity parts flesh from blood.
Never under the sun did a friend
Warrant more violence for daring
To die first, or lover less faithful
Require more deaths for slaking
Than such a thirst loosened by dusty
War into the shape of sobbing:
That lovely throat now dust
Itself in no known place, and nowhere known.
Above the bay he lies, bone-dead to dreams
Protected from desires by flowers and grass,
Young Jack asleep whose parents on their way
To bed admired an instant by the light of lamps.
Deep deep in loam, his grief is uncompared
By birds that rise to argent dawn and cloud;
This sleeping sailor, narrowed to his name,
No legends make him prince, no crown his doom.
For in his youth the merry dancers stopped
Behind his eyes prepared to scan the sea.
The dolphins bright as love removed his life
From wave to wave to final silent beach
Where enemies and friends alike are good.
Not lost at sea but on the land betrayed,
To sickness logging down his youth he fell,
Landlocked by tides before he shot the sun.
His lovers, now already less than strangers,
Like stars, like drifting wood, like tides,
Curve through the night-course of his memory
Remembering him who cannot say their names.
0 may his death be brief, appear no more
Than banks of cloud between whose clearing poles
The hill he lies in, with its flags and stones,
Moves slowly out upon the unsafest wave.
LAURENCE JOSEPHS
Laurence Josephs teaches English at Skidmore College. His poems have
appeared in the St. John's Review (Autumn '81, Winter '82).
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�The Lost Continent
The Conundrum of Christian Origins
Joel Carmichael
The countless thousands of books devoted to Christian
origins, including hundreds and thousands of lives of
Jesus and Paul, while deploying a vast amount of scholarship in a variety of fields, are all obliged to concentrate,
finally, on a very small number of documents: the New
Testament (essentially the Four Gospels and Paul's Letters) and the works of F1avius Josephus, especially The
Jewish War. Aside from these, the number of references to
Jesus and to early Christianity fill no more than a handful
of lines.
The .critical analysis of Christian origins began only two
centuries ago: until very recently it was hampered in its
criticism by preconceptions that even conscientious schol·
ars were unaware of. In the case of Jesus and Paul it has
been difficult to escape from the bondage of tradition,
which is itself the product of the documentation under
examination.
It took many generations of scholarship before it was
possible to discuss seriously what was really obvious at
first glance: if Jesus had been executed by the Romans for
sedition, might he not, in fact, have been a rebel against
Rome?
The reluctance to ask this simple question is all the
more surprising since Hermann Reimarus, the first critical
student of the historic Jesus, flatly laid it down in the eighteenth century th"t the Kingdom of God agitation carried
Among his many books, Joel Carmichael has written important studies
of Trotsky and Stalin, Trotsky (New York, St. Martin's Press 1975) and
Stalin's Masterpiece (New York, St. Martin's Press 1976). He translated
the memoirs of N. N. Sukhanov (The Russian Revolution 1917, Oxford
1952), the only full-length eyewitness account of the February and October events in Russia in 1917. First published in 1963, his Death of Jesus
appeared in a new edition in 1982 (New York, Horizon Press). In 1980
his study of Paul, Steh auf und rufe Seinen Namen, Paulus, Erwecker der
Christen und Prophet der Heiden, appeared in German (Munich,
C. Bertelsmann). Since 1975 he has been editor of Midstream.
The above essay summarizes the conclusions of a new study, The Unrid-
dling of Christian Origins.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
on by Jesus had a political aim. After Reimarus, however,
the question was not to be raised again until our own day,
and then only in a few scholarly and semi-scholarly books
that have not affected most people.
Our sources, taken together, do not create a unified picture: the facts they include must be disentangled from
tendency, apologetics, and obscurities, both intentional
and unintentional, to allow a real-life picture to emerge.
In the case of the Four Gospels, especially, the warp is
embedded deep in their very conception and purpose-in
the very reason they came into being.
There are two factors in the genesis of the First Three
Gospels (the historical and chronological basis for our
knowledge of Jesus):
On the one hand there was a global transformation of
perspective between the events of Jesus' own lifetime and
the germination of a new belief founded shortly after the
crucifixion on Simon the Rock's Vision of Jesus resurrected.
On the other hand this shift in perspective was paralleled by a socio-political upheaval-the destruction of the
Temple in Jerusalem in 70, the consequent emancipation
of the new belief from its institutional restraints, and the
concomitant fact that for generations after the destruction of the Temple the new sect of believers in Jesus was
opposed by the Jewish elite-the rabbis who had inherited the Pharisee tradition.
Thus the writers and editors of the Gospels after the destruction of the Temple, whose belief in the Vision of the
Risen Jesus necessarily distorted their view of events beforehand, found it natural to transpose their own contemporary disputes with the rabbis to the lifetime of Jesus,
especially since by then the Jews were no longer regarded
as targets for conversion and the leaders of the new sect
were directing their propaganda at all mankind.
Paul's Letters are, of course, by far the oldest source for
the history of the earliest phase in the formation of the
new sect. But Paul, though a slightly younger contempo-
73
�rary of Jesus, tells us almost nothing of the flesh-and-blood
Jesus: he was preoccupied with working out his own ideas
concerning the significance of the resurrection of Jesus.
The historical material that can be extracted from his Letters is, however, invaluable.
The Gospels, too, contain nuggets of historical information, though they were written under the pressure of a
specific situation and are biased in a characteristic way.
They have, in addition, an ait of timelessness, of motion-
lessness, in which Jesus expresses various ideas without
the reader being able to see their meaning against an historical background: it is hard to see, from the text alone,
just what there was about the Kingdom of God, or about
his ideas in general, that could have led to his crucifixion.
When we consider, further, that his whole career as outlined in the first three Gospels could scarcely have lasted
more than a few weeks, and that the Kingdom of God he
proclaims at the outset of all three accounts seems peculiarly abstract and anodyne, we are bound to be baffled.
It might be thought that the works of Flavius Josephus,
which cover a lengthy period before the Roman-Jewish
War, would fill in all this background. And for anyone
studying the first century of the Roman Empire they are,
indeed, indispensable.
Josephus was an aristocratic priest, and a commander in
the war against Rome. After defecting to the Romans during the war he became an outstanding propagandist of the
Flavian dynasty that came out of it victorious. The
Church Fathers took over the texts of Josephus's works
very early on-he died at the end of the first century-because it was the only account covering this densely packed
epoch and because it served as a vehicle for a very early
forgery designed to make Josephus a "witness" to the
supernatural status of Jesus, a forgery whose blatancy,
while obvious in any dispassionate examination, was not
exposed until the sixteenth century.
Josephus has become a special subject: specialists concentrate on fine points called for by each one's specialty.
By segregating Josephus's chronicles within a special area
of biased, though recondite, scholarship, and by projecting its own version of events as exclusively authoritative,
Church tradition insulated the whole era against empirical enquiries.
Josephus's account is packed with action and personalities: it conveys unmistakably the throb of life in Palestine
for the generations preceding the outbreak of the RomanJewish War. It is steeped in blood: murders, revolts, cruelty,
rapacity, cataclysms of all kinds are intertwined. Grinding
oppression on the part of the Romans, desperate uprisings
on the part of the Jewish Kingdom of God activists,
against a background of well-nigh total corruption, ferocity, and deceit, are routine. His descriptions provide a
blanket contrast with the eerie calm of the Gospels.
The Gospels and the Church tradition founded on
them indicate no friction at all between Romans and Jews
in Palestine. Everything that happens to Jesus takes place
in a Jewish milieu; even his trial before the Roman procu-
74
rator is explained as a Jewish plot. The stateliness of the
seemingly simple anecdotes, shot through with camouflaged theological motifs, casts an atmosphere of motionless pageantry over what we know was a most turbulent
era. And in our own day the countless books describing
the life of Jesus from a traditional point of view make life
in Palestine at the time sound well-nigh idyllic.
The Gospels suppress any criticism of the Romans. The
word itself, indeed, occurs only once (J n ll :48), and the
Romans are assigned a role only twice-Pilate himself and
the Roman centurion who on seeing Jesus on the cross
calls him "Son of God" (Mk 15:39).
The Romans, who crucified countless thousands of
Jews, so that the cross became the conventional symbol of
Jewish resistance to Roman power, go completely unnoticed by the writers and editors of the Gospels. Contrariwise, the Pharisees who were equated with the rabbis, the
chief opponents of the nascent sect by the time the Gospels were composed, after the destruction of the Temple,
are more or less constantly reviled (though here too
numerous indications of the opposite peep through the
web of apologetics).
It was the global transformation of outlook inherent in
the germination of a new belief inspired by Simon the
Rock's Vision of the Risen Jesus, reinforced by the reaction of the new sect to the Jewish debacle of 70, that distorted the Gospels systematically: all the basic ideas that
had a living context in the life of Jewry beforehandKingdom of God, the Messiah, Son of David, salvationwere wrenched out. of their true context: national insurrection.
In Jesus' lifetime not a single day could have passed
without some inflammatory incident; the mere presence
of the Romans constituted a constant provocation. All of
this is glossed over in the Gospels.
Nevertheless, the mere fact that Jesus was announcing
the Kingdom of God-i.e., a total transformation of the
universe in which the pagan powers, pre-eminently
Rome, were to be destroyed-together with his execution
by the Romans for sedition, irresistibly brings to mind the
Kingdom of God agitation that had dominated life in Palestine from the installation of direct Roman administration in 6 A.D. until it brought about the Roman Jewish
War in 66, and even later flared up in the abortive Bar
Kochba revolt in 132-35.
It is evident, in short, that any discussion of Jesus'
career, even if it is limited to the Gospels alone, will bring
us face to face to face with the Zealots, Kingdom of God
activists par excellence. If these diehards were capable of
swinging the bulk of the Jewish population of Palestine
into the. desperate rebellion against Rome, their mood must
have been incubating for a long tiine~losephus' account,
dense with real-life detail and vivid characterizations that
articulate a long-drawn-out process of alienation leading
to a last-ditch insurrection, fills in the background of the
Zealot agitation.
He has, to be sure, a bias of his own: he comprehen-
s
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�sively vilifies the Zealot movement in all its variations,
partly in the conviction, no doubt sincere, that the Kingdom of God activists were destroying Jewry and that God
himself had favored the Romans by giving them victory,
and partly, of course, because he was making propaganda
on behalf of his Roman patrons.
Nevertheless, the texture of his chronicles is so closeknit that the broad outlines of the Zealot movement, beginning with Judah the Galilean's agitation in 6 A.D., are
unmistakable. It is easy to allow, so to speak, for Josephus's
bias: when he describes people he calls "thieves" and
"brigands" as being tortured to death for refusing to call
Caesar "Lord," we are bound to conclude that they could
not, after all, have been mere thieves and brigands.
Josephus, however, says nothing whatever about Jesus
(aside from the forged paragraph mentioned above); he
does mention John the Baptist, innocuously, and also Upright Jacob, in a brief and equally innocuous passage. But
for the fleshing out of the realities of life in Palestine
around this time he is our only source. He is also priceless
for the study of the earliest phase of the new belief in
Jesus. His chronicle creates an infinitely broader, deeper,
and more ramified framework for judging the historical
material in Paul's Letters, the Gospels, and the Acts of the
Apostles.
If we compare Josephus's treatment of the Zealot movement with the treatment given by the Gospels, especially
Mark, to the complex of ideas, personalities, and events involved in the Kingdom of God movement, we see a striking
parallel. Both, for substantially the same reasons, ignore
the true content of the whole movement: Josephus describes the Kingdom of God activists in such a way as to
downgrade their ideological, idealistic concerns; the Gospels wholly disregard their political aims, too.
Most illustrative of this negative attitude of the Gospels
is Jesus' complete silence about the Zealots. The Gospelwriters, intent on whitewashing the Romans and dissociating the nascent sect from any connection with the Kingdom
of God activists who, after harassing the Romans for so
many decades, had brought about the ferocious war of
66-70, would surely have found it very convenient to set
down Jesus' denunciation of the architects of the catastrophe, if he had ever made any. In Rome, especially (where
Mark was written during or shortly after the war), some
negative remarks attributed to Jesus would have eased the
embarrassment of his followers. But since the author, or
authors, of Mark could not actually forge anything, they
were obliged to disregard the subject altogether; this disregard is all the more striking since they did find, in the reminiscences they had at hand, echoes of Jesus' opinions
about real people (Pharisees, HHerodians", even occa~
sionally, Sadduccees).
Taken together, however, both Josephus and the Gospels enable us to divine the presence of a remarkably energetic, grandiose movement capacious enough to bring the
Jewry of Palestine to destruction during the Roman-Jewish War in 66-70. Both accounts, accordingly, radically
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
contrasting with each other in all respects, confirm,
through this same negative attitude, the existence of a
vanished movement that in the desert of our documentation can be pieced together only through analysis.
Paul's Letters, taken together with the Gospels and
Acts of the Apostles, disclose a 4affling enigma~the dense
obscurity overhanging the two decades, roughly 60-80
A.D., between the Letters written by Paul, a real individual, and the anonymous compilations in the Gospels that
came into being one by one after the destruction of the
Jewish State and Temple in 70.
Consciousness of this obscurity allows one to sense a
profound, inexplicable, and of course camouflaged contrast between the official version of Christian origins in
the Gospels and the realistic glimpses tantalizingly suggested both by Paul's urgent, passionate, real-life struggle,
and by the random nuggets of historic actuality embedded in the Gospels themselves.
From this point of view the indifference of both church
historians and academic scholarship to the fate of the Jesist
coterie in Jerusalem, headed by Jesus' brother, is bewildering. If the "Mother Church," in distinction to the Jesist
coterie, actually existed before the destruction of the
Temple, the total silence of scholarship is incomprehensible: if its leaders had ever had anything self-aware to say it
would have been easy and natural for whatever it was to
circulate throughout the far-flung Jewish Diaspora. It is
obvious that the very concept, "Mother Church," as well
as the phrase itself, is a retrojective fiction.
Around the middle of the Fifties, that is, the time of the
riot occasioned by Paul on the Temple premises, it is possible to infer a crisis in the history of the Jewish state and
hence within the coterie of the Jerusalem Jesists. From
then on all remains blank; we are thrown back on the evolution of the Zealot crisis that erupted in the Roman War
of 66-70, and then, as the earliest documents of the new
sect began to be assembled afterwards, beginning with
Mark, we can once again see the beginning of a continuity,
in which, however, the first phase in the evolution of the
new faith~ the lives of Jesus, John the Baptist, Upright
Jacob, and Paul himself~is twisted about to conform with
the later tradition embodied in Mark, Matthew, Luke, Acts,
and John.
I have mentioned the omission, suppression, and distortion in the Gospels, and also referred to the nuggets of information embedded in them: there was no question of
forging, but of selecting and stressing and, conversely,
neglecting.
If the Gospels had been fabricated, after all, there would
be no way of knowing anything whatever about the career
of Jesus the man. If we recall the sweeping powers assumed by the Church when Christianity became a state
institution under Constantine the Great in the first quarter of the fourth century, and the severity of the censorship he authorized, which from the fifth century on was
applied with energy, the survival of the few scraps of information we have is remarkable. We owe such scraps es-
75
�sentially to an indifference to mundane history and to the
reverence for traditional texts that piety forbade tampering with.
Some principle for distinguishing between grades of evidence is indispensable; it seems sensible to me to take as
a starting-point the global transformation of perspective,
i.e., the germination and spread of the belief in the special
status of Jesus entailed by his Resurrection and Glorification, which intervened between the events of Jesus' life
and their chroniclers.
In my Death o{Jesus I established a "cardinal criterion":
Anything that conflicts with that global transformation of
perspective is likely to be true.
If a document records something countering the prevailing tendency in the Gospels to exalt Jesus, to preach
his universality, and to emphasize his originality, it should
be regarded, other things being equal, as being ipso facto
likely.
Very soon after the execution of Jesus and until the
Roman-Jewish War the predominant attitude among the
believers in the Vision was that of the jerusalem coterie.
At the same time, a contrary tendency-against the Torah
and toward the escalation of Jesus as Lord.of the Universehad already made itself felt even in Jerusalem, when the socalled "Hellenists" epitomized by the name of Stephen
were expelled and took their characteristic views to Antioch and no doubt to many other centers in the Jewish
Diaspora.
Paul himself, after attacking the new sect, as he himself
says, was then converted and began to express a point of
view he shared with some unknown predecessors. Indeed,
Paul's own initial hostility toward the Jesists was doubtless
a reaction against the anti-Torah views of such "Hellenists," since before his conversion Paul had applied his passion, as it seems, to the defence of the Torah, and only
afterwards went to the opposite extreme.
At the same time it is evident that Paul's views were not
predominant among the Jesists in general. When they
were made known in Jerusalem they put him in a predicament that undid him.
It is evident, moreover, not only that he ran afoul of the
Jesists in Jerusalem led by Jesus' brother Upright Jacob,
but that throughout his own lifetime he had no serious
influence. A moment's reflection on the background of
conflict-totally divergent from the sugary, harmonious
version of Paul's relations with the Jesists in Jerusalem as
recorded in Acts-shows Paul's unimportance during his
lifetime: While the Temple was at the peak of its majesty-the most celebrated edifice of antiquity, a citadel
and magnet for all Jewry-Paul was necessarily overshadowed.
It is plain from Paul's Letters themselves that he must
have written far more than have come down to us. He was
intensely active, apparently, for some two decades-from
about 35 to about 55.lt is hard to believe that all he wrote
is summed up by the small number of letters that now
form the backbone of the New Testament.
76
The condition of the Letters themselves indicates as
much: they are plainly random selections, often fragmentary to boot. One of the major ones-2 Corinthians-is
practically incomprehensible; it is best understood as a mosaic of scraps of other, left-over letters gathered together
after the phenomenon of"Paulinism"made its appearance.
Moreover, it is evident from the content of the Letters
we have that a dominant theme in all his major Lettersthe theme that often makes them sound hysterically demanding-is his rivalry with others; he is plainly describing
a situation in which he is promoting his own ideas against
rivals. And the rivals are, equally plainly, precisely the
leaders of the community of Jesists in Jerusalem.
It is obvious, in short, that during Paul's lifetime his
Letters were disregarded. It was only later, with the destruction of the Jewish State and Temple in 70 and the
consequent· disappearance of any institutional brake on
the spread of the new faith among the Jews, that Paul's
ideas, originally conceived as an explanation of what was
for Paul a current historical crisis, became, through a systematic misunderstanding of the key phrase, the Kingdom of God, the foundation of something he could never
have dreamed of-a timeless theology.
The Jewishness of the first Jesist coteries, under the
leadership of Jerusalem, can scarcely be exaggerated. This
also applies to the coteries Paul himself was connected
with, for despite the development of his own views it is
plain that in developing those very views Paul takes for
granted the overwhelming authority of the Scriptures as,
quite simply, unchallengeable: not only does he use Scriptural texts in a rabbinical manner (which might of course
have been a mere personal mannerism taken from his
training), but he expects his readers to realize that the
Messiah had come, died, and been raised again "according
to the Scriptures" (Rom 1:2, I Cor 15:3); he takes it for
granted that they will get the point of the examples he
gives of Abraham and Isaac _(Rom 4:2,3; Gal 4:28), Sarah
and Hagar (Gal4:21-31), and, even more striking, Moses'
Tablets of Stone (2 Cor 3:2, 3), the Covenant (2 Cor 3:6),
Adam's Sin (Rom 5:14), and the Stumbling-Block (Rom 9:
32,33). He makes flat statements assuming the unquestionable acceptance among his readers of the Hebrew
Scriptures: "Through the comfort of the Scriptures we
might have hope" (Rom 15:4).
Whatever might have been the background of the pagans whose lives had become linked to the Synagogue,
once they had become involved either as God-fearers or
something similar their locus of authority automatically
had become the Hebrew Scriptures. This in and of itself
entailed the giving of respect to the Jewish authorities in
Jerusalem, in this case, of course, the Jesists.
The original centrality of the Jerusalem Jesists is, in
short, evident from all the earliest documents on: even
Acts, which takes pains to harmonize the disputes that
separated its hero Paul from the Jerusalem Jesists, concurs
with Paul in accepting the centrality of the Jesists in Jerusalem.
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�In their own way the Gospels disclose a profoundly Jewish substratum: it peeps unmistakably' out of texts that include additions or changes designed to camouflage that
substratum or focus it differently. The Gospels were written and compiled to serve an apologetic purpose, but the
many elements they contain, if detached from the tendency of the editors, can point to some historical realities.
The idea of the Chosen People was taken for granted
by Jesus' immediate followers with unquestioning matterof-factness: it is graphically illustrated in the story of Jesus
and the pagan woman: it surely goes back to the first community: here Jesus rejects the pagan woman's appeal for
help by saying: "Let the children first be fed, for it is not
right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs."
Whether this was said by Jesus himself may not be certain, but its preservation must surely imply its being embedded in documents too revered to be disregarded: it
means, plainly and simply, that the Jews come first: i.e.,
that the pagans-"dogs" -are outside the Torah. Jesus relents in the story, but only after the woman modestly asks
no more for herself and her daughter than a few crumbs of
the "children's food" (Mk 7:24-30).
This theme of the Chosen People is repeated a number
of times in the Gospels-as where Jesus is seen sending
out his twelve "apostles" to go through Palestine, but to
"go nowhere among the pagans and enter no town of the
Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the House
of Israel" (Mt 10: 5-6).
There are countless other remarks-recalled, no doubt,
from Jesus' actual life-that indicate the same Jewish substratum.
Jesus is asked a fundamental question: "Which commandment is first of all?" He answers:
The first is, Hear Oh Israel, the Lord our God is one: and you
shall love the Lord thy God with all your heart, with all your
soul, and with all your mind, and with all your might. The sec-
ond is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. [Mt 22:
36-39]
The first statement is the key affirmation of Judaism;
the second sums up its ethics.
Think not that I have come to abolish the Torah and the
Prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.
[Mt 5:17]
And day by day, attending the Temple together ... they partook of food ... praising God and having favor with all the
people. [Acts 2:46]
Now many wonders were done by the . .. apostles . .. all to-
gether in Solomon's portico. [Acts 5:12]
God exalted (jesus) ... to give repentance to Israel [Acts 5:31]
[The pilgrims en route to Emmaus] We had hoped that (Jesus)
was the one to redeem Israel. [Lk 24:21]
For that matter it seems likely, in accordance with our
Cardinal Criterion, that Jesus, despite his constant arguments with the Pharisees, was in fact a Pharisee himself:
he says only Pharisees can interpret the Torah (Mt 23:1-3).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
These nuggets of history, however, have been tucked
into a framework contrived to accommodate a much later
situation. Essentially, Mark plucks Jesus out of his place in
time and space and transcendentalizes him beyond his
own politics. And the historical rationale for this is obvious: On the face of it it must have been a source of acute
embarrassment for believers living in Rome during the
years just preceding the Zealot war against Rome that
their own leader, Jesus of Nazareth, had himself been executed only a few decades earlier for just the same reasonsedition. It was vital for them to dissociate themselves
somehow from the opprobrium naturally clinging to followers of an enemy of Rome at a time when Rome was
engaged in a ferocious struggle against Kingdom of God
activists. It was just this crisis in the Roman Jesist community, indeed, that led to the composition of our first Gospel, Mark.
Since there was, however, no way of twisting the basic
facts out of shape-i.e., the indictment and execution of
Jesus as "King of the Jews" by a Roman procurator-it was
necessary to create a narrative structure that, while accommodating the irrefragable facts of Jesus's execution,
plausibly explained them away.
This was by no means due to hypocrisy: In the Jewish
Diaspora Jesus the Messiah had been escalated into Lord
of the Universe, Son of God, and Savior of Mankind. Psychologically, indeed, the same impulse that divorced the
real-life Jesus from his historical background after the
destruction of the Temple, was a parallel to the original
impulse in the psyches of Diaspora Jews like Paul that
made them, too, transcendentalize all traditional Jewish
national ideas while remaining convinced, like Paul, that
that itself represented a realization of a Jewish concept.
In any case, the problem confronting the author of the
ground-plan of Mark was simple: he had to obliterate the
possibility that Jesus would be linked to the Zealots the
Romans were fighting. He had to exculpate him from the
charge of being an activist in general, and an enemy of
Rome in particular. To do this he had to denature the
Kingdom of God-to depoliticize it by twisting its undeniable association with Jesus out of its socio-political background and by giving it an elusive other-worldly meaning.
The corollary of this was to slide past the attack on the
Temple and the resulting trial of Jesus for sedition.
The convergence of two concerns led to the apologetic
distortion of the historical account in Mark (and subsequently in Matthew, Luke, and Acts, which all accepted
the ground-plan of Mark).
One concern was to stress the transcendentalization of
Jesus that had been going on in the Jewish Diaspora sideby-side with the Jewish tradition of Jesus the Messiah and
his Glorious Return as Bringer of the Kingdom of God;
the other concern, desperately urgent because of the bitterness surrounding a war, was to free the Jesist congregations in the Roman Empire from the stigma of the Zealots.
Whoever wrote Mark solved the problem more than adequately: he created a model, in fact, that still enthralls
77
�the hundreds of millions of people indoctrinated by the
Gospels and by the vast cultural heritage they underlie.
Though by and large details are missing in all Gospel ac·
counts of Jesus' attack on the Temple, it is impossible to
escape the implications of the enterprise, whatever its
specific shape. It is indissolubly linked to the primary fact
of the tradition-the most solid, unchallengeable fact of
all: that Jesus was executed by the Romans as King of the
Jews.
If we start from this fact, and consider the skimpy de·
tails embedded in the Gospels, to the effect that Jesus
events preceding his arrest there was a real-life, stark event
-an abortive insurrection.
If we recall that the Temple had been standing in
Mark's own lifetime, that the insurrection he was camouflaging had taken place only the generation before, and
that the reminiscences he himself was making pious use
of must have referred to some of the events, we can see
that Mark had to contrive an overarching aesthetic
framework to achieve plausibility. Some oversights, perhaps inevitable, were to survive.
The echo of the Zealots, for instance, is arresting:
Simon the Rock (Peter) is called "Baryon," as though it
meant Bar Yonah," or son of Yonah, but "Baryon"
<I
meant a "rebel, outlaw," a political or social outcast living
"on the outside," i.e., away from the settled areas controlled
by the state. Judas "Iscariot" must surely refer to sicarius,
or Daggerman, an extremist Zealot group; the two sons of
Zavdai (John and Jacob) are called "sons of rage," echoing
the violence associated with the Kingdom of God activists.
Also, two Kingdom of God activists, called "bandits"
and Hthieves," were crucified alongside Jesus: these were
simply pejorative expressions for such rebels used by Flavius Josephus as well as by the Romans, for tendentious
reasons: Barabbas, too, "arrested in the insurrection" (Mk
On this and opposite page: 67 A.D. Silver Shekel, Obverse (above), legend: "Shekel of IsraeL" Chalice. These coins were issued for five years,
from 66 to 70 A.D. (Roughly twice actual size.)
"preached" in the Temple for three days, "overturned the
tables of the money-changers" and "drove them out with
a whip of cords," we see that the whole incident, presented in the Gospels as though it were symbolical, or in
any case non-violent, becomes portentous: Jesus held the
Temple.
Now, how could he seize the Temple, and hold it for
any length of time? The Temple was a vast edifice,
guarded by a Roman cohort of 5-600 as well as by a Tern-.
pie police force of 20,000. How could Jesus have scattered
the money-changers and overturned their tables in the
face of the armed police units? (To say nothing of the
money-changers themselves,)
The group led by Jesus must have been armed themselves. This simple fact makes understandable the many
references to arms lurking in the present text:
One (of the party) drew his sword, and struck at the High
Priests' servant, cutting off his ear. [Mk 14:47]
Look, Lord, we have two swords here. [Mt 22:49]
(and parallels)
Lord, shall we use our swords? [Mt 22:38]
Jesus could seize the Temple only by armed force; his
execution by the Romans as "King of the Jews" was directly linked to his seizure of the Temple. Behind the
skimpy, distorted, and obscure Gospel references to the
78
15:7), was likewise a Kingdom of God activist.
Simon the "Kananean" (in the list of the Twelve appointed by Jesus [Mk 3:18]), is revealing: "Kananean," a
word incomprehensible in the Greek text, is evidently a
transliteration of a Hebrew-Aramaic work (Qanna'i) for
"Zealot". Now, it was Mark's habit to explain such words:
just before this, the epithet "Boanerges" ("sons of rage")
for the sons of Zavdai, has been explained by the narrator.
Mark's avoidance of an explanation in this instance makes
it obvious that a real translation of the meaningless
uKananean" would have been embarrassing in the atmosphere of Rome at the time. Later, to be sure, it lost its
odium: A half-generation or more after the destruction of
the Jewish State it was possible for Luke to translate it, for
a different readership, quite straightforwardly as "Zealot"
by using the Greek word "Zealot" instead of a transliteration of the Hebrew-Aramaic (Mt 10:4).
In the Palestine of Jesus' day the statement "Pay Ceasar what is due to Caesar, and God what is due to God"
(Mk 12:13-17), would be taken by any Kingdom of God
agitator in a real-life situation as self-evidently insurrectionist. To such an agitator it went without saying that
the Holy Land was God's alone and no pagans could profit
from it, and in particular that the taxation imposed in 6
A.D. was an outrage. But Mark places it in a context in
which it sounds unmistakably as though Jesus were endorsing the tribute to Rome: he uses the phrase as Jesus'
response to a trap set for him by the "Pharisees and the
Herodians." It was natural for the Romans to expect a
subject people to pay tribute, just as it was natural for a
Kingdom of God agitator to refuse to pay tribute; by
transposing the context of the question, accordingly, the
AUTIJMN /WINTER 1982-83
�architect of the Markan theme extract.ed its political taint,
as it were, and soothed his readers among the Jesists in
Rome as the Zealot war erupted.
In general, Mark depicts the Jewish authorities as hostile
to Jesus from the outset: "Pharisees" plot with "Herodians"
(the pro-Roman Jews headed by sons of Herod the Great
and ruling Galilee at the time) against Jesus (even though
it is the High Priests who finally engineer the crucifixion
[Mk 15: 10-11]).
By the time of the spread of the Gospels the High
Priests had vanished with the Temple cult, while the
Pharisee tradition was sustained by the rabbis, now the
chief opposition to the new sect: for the Gospel-writers,
the word "Pharisees" stood for the Jewish authorities in a
comprehensive, absolute sense.
Jesus in turn vilifies all Jewish authorities as cultically,
legally, and spiritually sterile, even evil. The hostility to the
Jewish authorities is extended to the Jewish people as a
whole, who fail to perceive that even someone they are familiar with since childhood is meritorious: hence Jesus'
comment that "a prophet is without honor in his own
country, and among his own people, and in his own house"
(6:1-6); the Jewish people as such is condemned for ritualism (7: 6-8); to cap the process the Jewish mob actually
calls for his death and derides him (15: 1lff., 29-30).
Moreover, Jesus is described as cutting himself off from
his kinship not only with his people, but with his own
family:
And his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside
they sent to him. Jesus replies: "Who are my mother and my
brothers?" and goes on: "Whoever does the will of God is my
brother, and my sister, and my mother." [3:31-5]
Mark tells us, in short, that mere biology is meaningless:
the Roman Jesists can be as close to Jesus as his own family. If we recall the importance of the dynastic factor in the
emergence of Upright Jacob in the Jerusalem coterie before the Roman-Jewish War, we discern a polemical thrust
at Jesus's family that must have entered the story at the
time the Gospel was set down after the destruction of the
Temple.
When the pre-eminence of Jesus's family in the Jerusalem coterie was made obsolete by its extinction together
with the Temple, it was possible to defy the vanished authority and virtuously separate the Roman Jesists from it.
Thus, the family of Jesus is presented as having thought
him out of his mind, to begin with, and as explicitly repudiated by Jesus.
This is complemented by the contemptuous description
of Jesus' Jewish companions, called the "Apostles," who
of course also constituted, together with Upright Jacob,
the core of the Jesist coterie in Jerusalem. They are constantly described as bickering over precedence and rewards
(9:34, 10:34-45) and as devoid of Jesus' own remarkable
powers (9:6, 10, 18) One betrays him (14:10, 11, 20, 21,
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
43-5); on his arrest they all abandon him and flee (14:50).
For that matter the leading apostle, Simon the Rock,
though acknowledged as the first to see in Jesus theMessiah, is said to '1 rebuke" Jesus for speaking of his resurrec-
tion and because of that, indeed, is called by Jesus "Satan".
On top of that there is an account of Simon the Rock's
unappetizing denial of any acquaintance with Jesus: not
only is it excessively long in such a short document, but it
is negative through and through.
That Simon the Rock recognized Jesus as Messiah but
denied the salvational function of the resurrection shows
Reverse, legend: "Jerusalem the Holy." Stem with three pomegranates.
that the Jerusalem group headed by Upright Jacob did not
believe in Jesus except as the Jewish Messiah-that his
role as Lord of the Universe, of Divine Savior of Mankind,
meant nothing to them. In short, the viewpoint of Paul is
put forth in Mark in such a way as to take advantage of the
Jewish defeat in war.
The ground-plan of Mark goes far beyond details: it has
a profound apologetic aim.
While bound to accept the historic fact that the Roman
indictment was followed by a Roman execution, Mark tells
us that Pilate was forced by the Jews to do what they
wanted. In the narration this has already been built up"planted," in literary parlance-by clear-cut suggestions of
a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Jesus.
The assignment of an executive role to the Jewish authorities in explaining away the Roman indictment and
execution of Jesus in and for itself expresses the anti-Jewish
tendency of Mark's ground-plan.
It is more than likely, of course, that the Kingdom of
God agitation engaged in by Jesus would have set him
against the Jewish aristocracy as well as the Romans, but
there was no need at all for them to be involved in an actual trial: in view of the public nature of the agitation, indeed, it is hard to see why the Romans had any need for a
trial either: a perfunctory hearing would seem to have
been sufficient.
In any case, any number of Kingdom of God agitators,
79
�would-be Messiahs and pretenders of all kinds were routinely exterminated by the Romahs. There was no need
for the Jewish authorities to intervene at all.
Moreover, since the tendency in:Mark is in any case to
highlight the evil intentions of the Jews, had there been,
in fact, any Jewish intervention to undo Jesus it would
have been both natural and easy to build up that theme
and omit the Roman role altogether.
The fact that the original writer of the ground-plan for
Mark was obliged, despite his reluctance, to record an important role for the Romans, confirms the matter-of-fact
historicity of the Roman charge on the cross itself-"King
of the Jews" -and demonstrates the tendentious artificiality of Mark's emphasis on the role of the Jews.
The theme was vital for Mark: to amplify it he enlarges
on how Jesus, though of course a Jew, was not appreciated
by Jews and how he expressly denied the importance of
any kinship.
Since the Jews in the Roman Empire were suspect at
the time because of the Kingdom of God agitation, which
had even penetrated the Diaspora, and because of their
success in proselytization (cf. Tacitus's sneer at Christianity for its Jewish roots), Mark has set himself the task of
splitting Jesus away from his original background.
From the very outset, the reader is informed that Jesus
did not follow the tradition represented by the "scribes":
he, in contrast, "has authority" (Mk I :22). Jesus, by absolving the sins of a paralytic he has just healed, forces the
scribes to charge him with blasphemy (2:6-7); then he attacks the "scribes of the Pharisees" for their objections to
his eating with "tax-collectors and sinners"; and in explaining that his disciples do not fast like "John [the Baptist's] disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees," uses a
metaphor-the futility of using new cloth to repair an old
garment or of putting new wine into old wine-skins-evidently intended to drive home the point of Judaism's
obsolescence.
This metaphor would have had compelling force precisely in the wake of the destruction of the Temple, and
not before: it gives lapidary expression to what has now become an historic fact-that the Roman Jesists, with a
large admixture of converts and semi-converts, have
found the solution to a problem that, as we know from the
evolution of Paul's ideas, must have begun to weigh on
them beforehand-i.e., the reinterpretation of the Torah
and of Jewish traditions in general in the light of Simon
the Rock's Vision.
The theme of Mark can be tersely summed up: the
Jews, both leaders and masses, are responsible for Jesus'
death; his immediate family thought him crazy; his
"Apostles", having misunderstood him, also abandon him.
Jesus himself provides the counterpoint to this series of
negatives: he rejects those who reject him, emphasizes
the importance of worshipping God through him in contrast to loyalty to blood-relationships, and denounces the
chauvinistic limitations of Simon the Rock, his pre-eminent follower.
7
80
In short, Mark, while depicting Jesus in a Jewish environment, has extracted him from it and placed him beyond it.
This point is driven home explicitly in what is, thematically, the climax of the Gospel: after demonstrating how
the Jews had failed to apprehend the divine nature of
Jesus, the narrator puts a key phrase-"verily, this man
was the Son of God" -into the mouth of the Roman centurion directing the Crucifixion.
Perceived beforehand in Mark only by demons (responsible in antiquity for the supernatural knowledge ascribed
to madmen), this basic idea is expressed by a normal
human being, that is, a pagan, like, perhaps, the bulk of
the Jesists in Rome. (The fact that Mark uses a Latin
word, when Matthew and Luke use a Greek, reinforces the
impression that Mark was indeed composed in Rome.)
The preliminary stage for the deification of Jesus has
reached its climax: Jesus has been crucified, the Gentiles
have seen the Light, Judaism has been definitively superseded.
The original author of Mark has solved the problem set
for him by the historical circumstances of Jesus' arrest, indictment, and execution by the Roman authorities. He
has demonstrated that it was a machination of the Jews,
who had either misunderstood or opposed him, that Jesus
had not been executed as a freedom-fighter in a nationalist movement against the Romans at all, but was, in fact, a
divine figure whose fate was part of a cosmic plan.
By elevating the drama to this supra-terrestrial terrain
Mark has wrenched Jesus out of his historical framework.
He gives the remark about paying tribute to Caesar,
which in a historical context would have been understood
as an insurrectionist slogan, a seemingly natural background in which its meaning is reversed, and Jesus, in his
only comment on politics, seems to be endorsing tribute
to Caesar, and blandly slides past the Zealots in Jesus's entourage by misrepresenting Simon the Zealot through an
unintelligible transliteration.
Mark's extracting of Jesus from his folk heritage bridges
the main chasm between Judaism and the world outside
by making it entirely unnecessary for pagans to become
Jews for any reason whatever, and facilitates their conversion by showing that belief has nothing whatever to do
with communal or biological bonds. Although Mark did
not specifically strip the traditional Messiah of a martial
function, by transcendentalizing Jesus out of his political
background he promoted a conception of Christ that also
transcended the provincial background of politics in Palestine and thus laid the underpinnings for a cosmic role to
be played by an eternal, divine Christ.
There is no reason to assume that Paul's writings,
which were not paid much attention to in his lifetime,
necessarily served as matrix for this idea. An anti-Torah,
transcendent view of Jesus was adumbrated, if not elaborated, only a few years after the crucifixion; there is no reason it shouldn't have been represented in Rome as well as
in Antioch, or indeed in any Jesist coterie anywhere at all.
AUTUMN I WINTER 1982-83
�It surfaced very naturally, just as Paul's ideas in general
were recovered, after the destruction bf the Temple, and
came to embody the official view of an evolving religious
·
fellowship.
Once a sharp contrast was drawn between Jesus the
Jewish Messiah and Jesus Lord of the Universe, the contrast itself became the pivot on which all subsequent speculation turned, and once the contrast was grasped by the
believer, and internalized, it became in and for itself a natural matrix for still further speculation.
Mark solved the primary problem involved in the transformation of a cluster of Jewish beliefs into a universal,
transcendent religion expanded far beyond the horizons
of Judaism: his solution, by explaining away the real cause
of Jesus' execution and shifting it to a theological plane involving a radical and unbridgeable difference with Jewry,
served simultaneously as the model for the dehistorizing
and theologization of the new religion.
Just as Paul's ideas were to create a universe of ideas for
the new sect, so the ground-plan of Mark created an original historic basis for it. By camouflaging a simple fact
-that Jesus was executed not as a reformer of Judaism
but as a rebel against Rome-Mark provided an historical
foundation from which Paul's ideas could soar aloft.
But before that something else had to happen: the idea
that the World's End was imminent had to be given up.
The Gospels recorded a number of postponements of
the advent of the Kingdom of God-from the "at hand"
of the very first fervor, to the few weeks implied by the
disciples going through the towns of Israel, to the end of
the lives of the listeners to one of Jesus' speeches. It may
well be that even by the time the first draft of Mark was
written the writer was no longer so sure of the imminence
of the World's End; by the time John was composed,
around the turn of the second century, the notion of the
World's End has been totally dislocated from the author's
cosmology: for him there is to be no Glorious Return at
all-the Lord has already come. On the other hand, some
scraps in the New Testament-such as I and II Peter and
Revelations, as well as small fragments of the Gospel John
itself-seem to return to the perspective of an imminent
Final Judgement (Jn 5:27-29; 6:39ff).
Though it took varying lengths of time before the
World's End idea was wholly extinct, it is plain that by the
time Luke was written, some decades after the destruction of the Temple, the idea had become at least quiescent. It was no longer held seriously.
Thus the general feeling had moved definitively away
from Paul's state of mind: he wrote because he felt the
World's End was imminent despite delay. By the time this
had evolved into the conviction that the delay was no
longer a delay but a condition of nature, it was possible,
indeed indispensable, for something to be put down on
paper. Thus, some decades after Mark, Luke and Acts
were drafted (parts of both of which were, as it seems, the
work of the same hand).
Acts is, indeed, our sole source for the earliest period of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the new sect after the destruction of the Temple: it carries the process of socio-political accommodation begun
by Mark still further.
The sources embodied in Acts are so fragmentary that
no coherent account is possible; still less does it say anything about any individual except Paul himself. There is
almost literally no information about anyone mentioned.
The individuals are given names, to be sure, and an occa~
sional sentence or two purports to flesh out an inchoate
narrative, but there is no way of apprehending motive,
character, or activity.
The writings set down in this very early period had the
function of defining, that is, establishing the leadership of
the new sect: they were a major attempt at organization.
And to do so, decades after the destruction of the Temple
and two generations after the death of Jesus, it was vital
for the leaders to claim a living link between Jesus and
themselves.
Accordingly, the newly evolving Church was "defined"
by the Twelve Apostles, or rather, more accurately, by
apostles in the plural. This claim, wedded to the claim, implicit and explicit, that the founding Apostles' authority
was binding, became the theological principle underpinning the Church.
This principle of the binding authority of the Apostles
in and for itself was never to be challenged by the great divisions of the later Church (Catholics, both Roman and
Greek Orthodox, and Protestants); the only dispute was to
be the manner in which the authority attributed to the
Apostles was, in fact, binding (the Protestants, of course,
accepted the Scriptures alone as binding; the Catholics
considered the "Church tradition" equally binding.)
But in fact the "Apostles" were simply part of a theory.
In the very beginning there was no such institution as
"The Twelve": the figure itself, reflecting the World's
End expectations of the Kingdom of God activists, merely
stood for the Twelve Tribes of Israel. "The Twelve" never
played a role of any kind, even in the sources that mention them: after their first mention (in late sources) they
are never, except for Simon the Rock, mentioned again as
"Apostles." A major associate of Jesus, Jacob ben-Zavdai,
lived for a decade after Jesus' crucifixion and must have
been both eminent and active, since he was executed
in 43 by Agrippa I. But after the first mention he is not
called an "Apostle."
Most striking of all, in discussing his trips to Jerusalem
Paul makes no mention of "The Twelve" whatever-he
talks only of the three "pillars," the only ones he confers
with: they are obviously the leaders of the Jerusalem coterie. That is, even if there was such a group as "The
Twelve/' it was no longer in existence in the middle or
perhaps end of the Forties (44 or 48). Later on only
Upright Jacob, Jesus' brother, is mentioned as leader of
the Jerusalem coterie (Acts 32: 15ff).
It is obvious that the statement that there were apostles
is part of the early Church tradition itself: it is the way the
tradition substantiates itself.
81
�Though the church "theory" is very old, it goes back,
accordingly, only to the time when there was already a
huge break with the real-life background of the historic
jesus, and an awareness of that break-that is, to about
100, when the jewish Temple had been extinct for a
whole generation and when the jesists themselves were
swiftly being transformed into the first stage of what
could now be called "Christians," or perhaps only "protoChristians." Although Paul was now accepted and the
foundations of the religion accordingly laid, the organization of the Church itself was still rudimentary and uncertain, and a dogma that was to be indispensable-the Trinity-had not yet been thought of, let alone worked out.
But the generation of 100, aware that they were different as it were in essence from the historic jesus, Simon
the Rock, Upright Jacob, and Jacob and John ben-Zavdai,
and aware of the gap between them, conceived of themselves as being not the second link in the chain of generations-the break made that impossible-but the third;
i.e., they had to create a link between themselves and the
first generation. The concept of the Apostles fixed and
·amplified this link: it became the "Apostolic tradition," as
though it were a tradition about an historical situation.
The traditional definition of the "Apostolic age" as ending with the deaths of Simon the Rock (Peter), Paul, and
probably Upright jacob rests on the claim that until a few
years before 66 reminiscences directly derived from jesus
were still alive. This "living tradition" about jesus itself
consists, however, of assertions made about it by the tradition.
Hence the Gospels and Acts, while containing nuggets
of historical fact or probability, as I have indicated, no
longer reflect the circumstances of jesus's real life, but the
pseudo-tradition about them embodied in revered documents. The handful of what might have been historic
reminiscences committed to writing as the real-life first
generation began to die off, survive merely as fragments
embedded in theologically tinctured and slanted texts
that began to be assembled as a "canon" around the middle of the second century.
It is plain that the earliest current of belief in jesus had
already been expressed in two different styles. One had to
do with the homely tradition of jesus the Jewish Messiah
who had lived in Palestine, been executed by the Romans,
and been seen resurrected at the Right Hand of God; the
second was the visionary jesus stripped completely of all
earthly attributes and embodying a simple principle, to
wit, that he had died and been raised again. But basically
the two traditions were to become one, since the tradition
about the earthly jesus, though it underlies. what seem to
be the facts in the Gospels-sayings, miracles, snippets of
statements etc.-in fact has been twisted around as a
form of adaption to the disembodied, spiritual, abstract,
principled framework of the confessional formula inherited by Paul from his own predecessors very early on. The
significance of the seemingly historical framework of the
82
Gospels is in fact found only within the capsule of the confessional formula of the Death and Resurrection of jesus
Christ. The seemingly factual framework of the Gospels
was itself an adaptation of historical or semi-historical
fragments about jesus's life on earth only from the point
of view of fleshing out the formula of the confession.
This fusion of two beliefs about Jesus had little to do
with a lapse of time-it was a transformation of view that
took place very rapidly: it was already given a sort of
schematic representation by Paul: whereas before his
resurrection Jesus was the son of David-i.e., the jewish
Messiah-afterwards he was the Son of God, Lord of the
Universe (Rom 1:3-4). Thus the process of transforming
historical into theological materials that took place after
the destruction of the Temple was the same, writ large, as
the transformation already seen at work in Paul's Letters,
written before 55.
For Paul, too, a communal repast had already become
sacramental. It can be summed up in a single sentence:
When we bless "the cup of blessing", is it not a means of shar~
ing in the blood of Christ? When we break the bread, is it not
a means of sharing in the body of Christ? [I Cor 10:16].
The transition from the tim~ in which the early )esists
interpreted the Lord's Supper as a Passover meal-a
seder-to the time, much later, when Christ was himself
called a Passover lamb, is evident.
Though the factual information in Paul's Letters is peripheral as well as scanty-he was arguing a case, exhorting his audience; justifying his position-it is, to be sure,
illuminating: it gives us an insight, for instance, into the
authoritative position of Upright Jacob and his possible
role in Temple politics just before the Roman-jewish War;
negatively, too, his Letters tell us something: before the
Destruction of the Temple Paul was overshadowed by the
jerusalem jesists. We can also estimate the speed of expansion in the very earliest tradition: when Paul mentions
the appearance of the Risen jesus to more than "500
brethern" (I Cor 15:6) he is already employing a formulaic
expression typical of an already fixed tradition to events
that occurred fairly soon after Simon the Rock's Vision.
The jerusalem coterie did not interfere with the new
speculations that under Hellenistic influence began in the
jewish Diaspora after the Vision: no doubt they were
shapeless and unsystematic. Perhaps such speculations
came to the surface in only a few centers-such as Antioch-that were to become important after the extinction of the jerusalem coterie in the debacle of 70. And it
was just this fact of their later importance that was concealed after the debacle by the instinctive creation of a
legendary, mythological fabric to manifest the continuity
claimed by all institutions.
The conventional view of theologians today would have
it that the anti-Torah, transcendental conception of Jesus
held by Paul and Stephen had already struck deep roots
AUTIJMN /WINTER 1982-83
�throughout the "Christian" community long before the
destruction of the Temple in 70. From that point of view,
accordingly, the elimination of the "Mother Church"
-the Jesist Coterie-and all the more so of the Temple
and the Jewish State meant nothing-a mere clearing
away of the debris long since left behind by the evolving
faith.
This conventional view, is also, of course, the grand
theme of Acts-indeed, its purpose. Yet it can hardly be
correct: Paul's Letters, written many decades before the
destruction of the Temple and long before the evolution
of any theological "views" at all, show his second-class
status. They show his irritation with the contending
"Gospels" he kept colliding with, the hostile attitude of
the Jerusalem "pillars," the atmosphere of contention and
self. justification. The impression left by these striking motifs in Paul's Letters is reinforced negatively by their random and fragmentary survival.
From an historical point of view it is plain that Paul was
dead long before the triumph of his ideas: the destruction
of the Temple cleared the way for the tendentious slant·
ing of the Gospels, beginning with Mark, away from the
real-life career of Jesus, executed by the Romans for sedition, into the Pacific Christ, Lord of the Universe, and
Savior of Mankind, whose salvational powers were to be
mediated to believers via the magical apparatus of the
Church.
In one respect proto-Christianity carried on the tradition of Judaism: it was grounded in mundane history as
well as in reflections on its meaning. Yet the contrast with
Judaism, in which the Creator of the Universe stands
apart from his own handiwork, was fundamental: Incarnation, propped up on two great events, the Crucifixion
(and its meaning) and the Vision of the Risen Jesus (and
its meaning) was the very core of the new faith. For
Judaism, the Incarnation was inconceivable.
The surviving Letters of Paul provided a theological
framework for the pseudo-historical Gospels and Acts of
the Apostles. The combination of these writings into a
canon made necessary the obfuscation of the facts they
contain.
It seems fair to say that until very recently the sum total
of all scholarship dealing with Christian origins has been
confined to tendentious documents. Since it reaches conclusions implied in its premises, it constitutes no more
than a vast circular argument-a begging of the question.
The apologetics, both theological and practical, that generated the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles cannot, without incisive analysis, solve historical puzzles.
The warping of perspective inherent in our sources can
scarcely be exaggerated. Because of the very fact that
Christian tradition was itself fabricated by writings, the
conventional view today accepts without question a tranTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
scendental interpretation of those origins, an interpretation
that, overshadowed at first by the historical expectations
of the first Jesist coterie, later, after the Jewish debacle in
70, swept the field and was amplified, magnified, ramified, and consolidated precisely as the institutional expression of the triumphant tendency.
If the rationale of the Church is summed up in the
phrase ascribed to the Risen Jesus-"I am with you always, until the World's End" -and if its institutional continuity is guaranteed by the passage aimed at Doubting
Thomas-"Blessed are those who have not seen (the
Risen Jesus's) wounds and yet believe" (Jn 20:29)-we see
how essential it was for Christian theology from the very
beginning to wrench both Jesus and the Kingdom of God
out of their historical matrix.
It was thus the course of history itself that created
Christian theology-conditioned, to be sure, by the long·
ings of multitudes.
Yet historicized theology is imaginary history: the web
of myth has suffocated the history of real people.
What is, perhaps, astonishing is the durability of that
imaginary history. Christianity is the only major religion
whose essence is substantiated by supernatural claims
made on behalf of an historic individual-claims, moreover, expressed in actual documents. One might have
thought, once the documents were closely scrutinized,
that the real-life background of the supernatural claims
would eventually edge aside or at least modify the claims
themselves. Yet to this day the tradition has survived all
the assaults of commonsense; it has withstood the counterweight of probability, of rank impossibility, of pervasive discrepancies, of manifest contradictions, of outright
nonsensicality.
The hundreds of millions of Protestants-recently joined
by Catholics, now also allowed to read the Bible freely
-who even in childhood read and study the New Testa·
ment, which despite its ethereal cast constantly hints at
factual situations, look-and see nothing. Huge motion
pictures have been made depicting, in a naturalistic setting, the supposed events of Jesus' life in Roman Palestine. These motion pictures, conscientiously made with
the guidance of sincere experts, are so foolish when held
up against their real-life background in the vividness called
for by naturalism that one might well think the insulating
walls of traditional perception would surely be pierced.
They seem to elicit no reflection. Audiences are so con·
ditioned by the theological interpretation of the historic
setting that the setting itself is apprehended dimly or not
at all; the mythology is potent enough to plaster over all
the fissures between itself and real-life plausibility.
Accounts of Christian origins that diverge from the tradition are often called "hypothetical," even by skeptics, as
though the tradition itself were true to life.
This attitude on the part of believers and non-believers
alike seems to me due to a sort of shyness, a reluctance to
accept conclusions arising out of the logic of analysis.
83
�Some find it difficult to accept the contradictions in the
sources, as when, for instance, the ~.~pacific" passages attrib-
uted to Jesus contradict the martial passages, the references to arms and so on. Others, accepting one part of a
Gospel but not another, will doubt the likelihood of the
Romans' having allowed Jesus to survive as long as he did,
instead of arresting him, say, on the spot. At bottom many
are put off by the notion that the historic Jesus could possibly have been so utterly different from the Jesus conceived of by Paul; they require a palpable demonstration,
however tenuous, of a link between the two irreconcilable
portraits.
The "Higher Critics", after almost two centuries of
analysis, have not been helpful in filling the empirical void
left by the destruction of the tradition. No doubt this, too,
is due to a reluctance to venture into conjecture and surmise, away from the buttressing of documentation. For
instance, even though the connections between Judah
the Galilean, John the Baptist, Jesus, and the Zealot leaders of the war against Rome are unmistakable, they are
not, after all, fleshed out in sufficiently copious detail to
make a dense chronicle possible.
Still, three facts remain: Jesus preached the "Kingdom
of God;" he was executed as "King of the Jews"; everything expressly attributed to him was taken from one aspect or another of Judaism.
These three facts, which after all are also embedded in
our sources, entail two conclusions: The first is that for
the evolution of the later religion we are thrown back, in
sum, not to Jesus, but to what was said about him-to the
theology that after Jesus' death was layered around the
concept of Lord of the Universe and Savior of Mankind.
The second is that we can, very reasonably, extrapolate
from the nuggets of history I have mentioned a true
though, to be sure, scanty account.
These three facts, then, when propped up on the fac-
84
tual matter scattered about even in the Gospels and Acts
and downright abundant in Josephus's writings, constitute a tripod sturdy enough to warrant a "new" account
of Christian origins. It is possible to extract from the
sources a coherent chronicle of the Kingdom of God agitation against Rome during the first century of the Empire that will locate Jesus in time and space and explain
how normal history was later transformed-again, in time
and space-into the theology of a great Church.
Inevitably, that chronicle will be skimpy; while the factual structure, so to speak, is there, the details are bound
to be absent precisely because of the process we have
been discussing. The Kingdom of God agitation against
Rome-in other words, the Jewish independence movement-is a sort of Lost Continent: the historiography that
covered the two centuries between the successful Maccabee insurrection and the abortive Bar Kochba insurrection is, except for Josephus, simply missing. And even
Josephus, whose histories stop in any case with 70, is
warped, despite his copious detail, by his hostility to the
independence movement and in particular by his omission of the background to Christianity (it is, of course,
conceivable that self-serving parties might have eliminated references to Jesus in Josephus's early manuscripts).
What remains of the Lost Continent are skeletal vestiges and some glimpses-a few peaks, a spur or two, a
panoramic vista. Still, bare bones are better than nothing.
The philosophical implications of such a reconstruction
surely demand a re-assessment of our own history. For if
this reconstruction of Christian origins is accepted, it will
be evident that it was not the career or Jesus, after all, that
was the seminal event of the modern age, but the Jewish
debacle of 70.
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�New Year's Eve
Meyer Liben
It was twenty minutes to twelve, but there was nothing
to indicate that it was twenty minutes before the New
Year. I was sitting next to a man who had introduced himself as Hudson, and I immediately commented that Thomas
Hudson was the name of the hero in Ernest Hemingway's
posthumously published novel, Islands In The Stream,
which I had recently read.
"What's it about?" asked Hudson.
"It's about difficult work, desperate love, and death."
"How come you didn't put an adjective before 'death'?"
asked Hudson.
"That word can get along without an adjective," I replied.
We were looking north through a window at the familiar
nightscape of the city. I do not know what Hudson felt,
but I felt the comfort of shelter on a bitter cold night, and
that New Year's Eve sense of desolation and futurity.
There were a couple of dozen people in the room, broken
up into small groups in accord with inclination, accident,
and the arrangement of the furniture.
"You know," said Hudson, "it feels like the end of an
Old Year more than the beginning of a New Year."
"Past experience bears more on some than does the
ex~
pectancy of the unknown," I replied in the sententious
manner which many find annoying, including myself.
A nearby couple were having a serious low-keyed discussion about a family matter, and across the room an ex·
uberant drunk was telling a small group a long anecdote
which was being listened to with varying degrees of interest.
"When Hemingway died," said Hudson, ''a number of
critics commented that his stories would outlast his novels."
"Some race," I said.
The sound of a police siren faintly entered the steamheated room.
"How come he knocked himself off?" asked Hudson.
"What's your feeling about it?"
"Well," I said, "if you figure Hudson to be pretty much
autobiographical, and that's how it sounds, then he tells
you in the novel. He says that work keeps him alive, that if
he couldn't get that daily work done, he'd be lost, his day
would lose all its meaning. By work he means his painting,
which we translate into Hemingway's writing. Indeed, in
an earlier book, he wrote: ' ... I felt the death loneliness
that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your
life.' In this last book he talks about the matter in a strong,
single-minded way. Without work accomplishment, the
actuality or strong potentiality of it, he felt he was nothing.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The work was a talisman, a defense, a protection against
the inroads of mortality. There must have come a time
when he felt that the work, actual or potential, was not
under his control (Carlos Baker, in his biography, indicates
that). That bulwark gone, he did away with himself."
"There's plenty of other kinds of work in the world besides writing," said Hudson. "He could have worked as a
fisherman ... "
"Come on, Hudson/' I said, "at this stage it was not a
question of livelihood with him. He was a very competitive
man, kept comparing himself to the greatest writers, and I
suppose that when he was continually creating, he felt that
he was struggling with God, with the original Creation.
When that ceased to be the case, he left the world. All his
pride, duty, defiance, sense of being, and meaning in the
world, was tied up with that creative making."
"How about his children?" asked Hudson, "their need
for him?"
"The way he saw it, children need a courageous father.
Baker quotes him to the effect that the worst luck for a kid
is to have a coward for a father. And he maybe equated
lack of creative juices with cowardice.''
"Well/' said Hudson, <~courage is a most urgent quality,
but there may be other qualities just as important. Charity,
for example. He could have spent time, in his own way,
helping others, or working with them to transform lives
and institutions. The sense of justice."
"I guess for him there was no substitute for the courage
of creation."
Just then I heard the first ring of the telephone in a room
down the hall. As the second ring began, I was at the
phone, having excused myself abruptly to Hudson and
skilfully weaved through the scattered groups. My son had
promised to call me at midnight, and that young, hopeful
voice was indeed there.
"Hi dad. Happy New Year."
"Happy New Year to you. How's the party?"
"Great, really great. All the kids are here, music and
everything."
"Marvelous. Stay with it. I'm always with you."
"I know it, dad. I know it all the time."
And then I moved back into the party room, knowing
that the sense of the New Year was beginning to stirin the
hearts of all those here, and everywhere, all the ones loved
and unloved, neglected, forgotten, in the hearts of all the
undefeated.
85
�Gotthold Lessing
Ernst and Falk:
Conversations for Freemasons
Translation and notes by Chaninah Maschler
At Ephesus towards his life's end, when his disciples could
barely carry him to church and his voice could not put together sev~
eral words, St.John the Evangelist used to say nothing at each meeting except this: "My sons, love one another." Bored at always hearing
the same words, his disciples and the brothers who were present
asked: "Teacher, why do you always repeat the same thing?" John's
answer was worthy of him: "Because it is the Lord's command.
And if it only be done, it shall suffice."
Beatus Ioannes Evangelista, cum Ephesi moraretur usque ad
ultimam senectutem, et vix inter discipulorum manus ad Essiesiam deferretur, nee posset in plura vocem verba contexere, nihil
aliud per singulas solebat proferre collectas, nisi hoc: Filioli diligite
alterutrum. Tandem discipuli et fratres qui aderant, taedio affecti,
quod eadem semper audirent, dixerunt: Magister, quare semper hoc
loqueris? Qui respondit dignam Ionne sententiam: Quia praeceptum Domini est, et si solitm fiat, sufficit.
(Lessing concludes his short dialogue, the Testament of John
[1777], with this passage from St. jerome's Commentary on the
Epistle to the Galatians [6]).
Prefatory Note
Lessing died in 1781, the year in which Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason was published. Eleven years earlier he had
accepted a call from the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbi.ittel
to settle in Wolfenbi.ittel, there to superintend the Ducal
Library. His original reasons for accepting the Duke's invitation were financial, but he soon came to use his somewhat protected position as librarian to advance the cause
of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke~ the great cause of religious toleration. 1
Only a few days after settling in at Wolfenbi.ittel he had
discovered a manuscript on the sacrament of the eucha·
rist by Berengarius of Tours (died 1088), which gave sup·
A tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, Md., Chaninah Maschler has
recently published an essay on Eva Brann's Paradoxes of Education in a
Republic in Interpretation (10,1, January 1982).
86
port to a Lutheran interpretation of the Lord's Supper.
He published it under the rubric Contributions to History
and Literature: From the Treasures of the Ducal Library at
Wolfenbuttel. At intervals he would, under the same head·
ing, publish carefully annotated editions of other manuscripts found in the Woffenbi.ittel Library.
Thus, in 1774, he announces in print, under the by now
established heading, that he has unearthed "fragments"
of a mysteriously untitled and anonymous work that was
hidden among the more recently acquired Ducal manuscripts. How the pages got into the library and whether
they originally constituted·one whole he has been unable
to establish, though he notes that all the fragments have
one and the same objective~to examine revealed religion
and test the trustworthiness of Biblical history. The first
fragment is sent into the world under the title On Tolerating Deists.
It doesn't cause a stir. Three years later he publishes
five more "anonymous fragments": On Decrying Reason
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�from the Pulpit, Impossibility of a Revelation which All
Men can Believe on Rational Grounds, The Israelites'
Crossing of the Red Sea, That the Books of the Old Testament were not Written to Reveal a Religion, On the Resurrection Narrative.
To protect the laity and needle the professional theologians he appends some "counter propositions by the Editor," the tenor of which can be gathered from the following
passage:
... Much might be said in reply . .. But even supposing there
could be no rebuttal, what follows? The learned theologian
would, perhaps, in the end, be embarrassed, but need the
Christian be? Surely not! At most, the theologian would be
perplexed to see the supports with which he wanted to uphold religion thus shaken, to find the buttresses cast down by
which he, God willing, had kept it safe and sound. But what
does the Christian care about that man's hypotheses and explanations and demonstrations? For him it is a fact, something that exists, this Christianity which he feels to be true
and in which he feels blessed. When the paralytic experiences
the beneficial shocks of the electric spark, does he care
whether Nollet or Franklin or neither of the two is right?
This time Lessing succeeds in provoking a reaction:
The orthodox, led by the Chief Pastor of Hamburg, J
ohann Melchior Goeze (1717-1786), proceed to the defense
of their territory, though they call it a fight for truth and
in behalf of the hearts and minds of the faithfuL
Given the manifest mystery-mongering of Lessing's original account of his finding of the Wolfenbiittel Fragments, most readers, unless otherwise instructed by a
scholarly note, will think of them as composed by Lessing
himself. They will be all the more disposed to take them
as expressing Lessing's own beliefs when they read the
very long final "fragment," On the Aims of Jesus and his
Disciples.
Yet the facts are otherwise: Before settling in Wolfenbiittel in 1770 Lessing had been given the manuscript for
a book entitled Apology or Defense of Rational Worshippers of God. Its author, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Professor of Oriental languages at the Gymnasium in Hamburg,
had allowed it to circulate privately but expressly advised
against publication "until more enlightened days." After
Reimarus's death his daughter showed the manuscript to
Lessing and, either at her initiative or at Lessing's, the two
of them plotted to have the book published, thereby to
hasten the coming of enlightenment. Berlin publishers refused to take on the job, for fear of the censor. But as Librarian to the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbiittel, paid to
glorify the Ducal House by exhibiting its scholarly treasures to the world, Lessing was protected against the censors! Hence the scheme to publish Reimarus' s detailed
critique of Revealed Religion in "fragments" ostensibly
found in the Ducal Library. Reimarus's argument would
complete Spinoza's (in the Theologico-Political Treatise)
that faith and philosophy are fundamentally distinct, that
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the certainty of faith is not mathematical but moral, and
that freedom of conscience not only can be granted without imperiling public peace but must be granted in the interest of public peace.
But the power of the orthodox is too great for Lessing:
In 1778 he is deprived of his freed"m from censorship and
must turn in the manuscript of Reimarus's Apology. That
same year he publishes, anonymously, the Dialogues for
Freemasons translated below, the year thereafter Nathan
the Wise, and finally, in 1780 (again anonymously), the essay in which he shows more explicitly in what respects he
differs from Reimarus and Spinoza, On the Education of
Mankind. The difference lies in Lessing's different attitude toward human history: The hope for, the faith in the
gradual though always partial and Perspectival enlightenment of all mankind and some uncertainty about the location and permanence of the boundaries separating "the
few" from Hthe many" is what sets him apart from
Spinoza and Reimarus.
At their first appearance, the Conversations for Freemasons were dedicated to Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick- Wolfenbiittel, not the reigning Duke, Charles, but his brother.
The dedication is appropriate because the House of Brunswick-Wolfenbiittel seems to have had a tradition of supporting enlightment: For example, Duke Anton Ulrich,
two generations or so earlier, had invited Leibniz, who
then (about 1706) occupied the same position as librarian
later held by Lessing under Duke Charles, to design plans
for a building that would house the already magnificent
Ducal Library, and the plan offered by Leibniz, and executed, was for a kind of "library temple." Again, the
persecuted author of the first translation into German of
Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation as
well as of Spinoza' s Ethics, J- Lorenz Schmidt (1702-49),
spent his last years under an assumed name in Wolfenbiittel: The Duke of Brunswick had given him asylum.
Moreover, Duke Ferdinand and Duke Charles both were
Masons, but according to Heinrich Schneider ("Lessing
und die Freimaurer," 169, Zwolf Biographische Studien),
Duke Ferdinand carried more weight in local Masonic affairs.
Given the fact that not only the immediate addressee of
the Conversations for Freemasons, Duke Ferdinand, but
Lessing himself as well, were Freemasons, sworn to secrecy, the elusiveness of certain passages in the Conversations should not be surprising. Given the further fact that
many, to this day, seem to be attracted to the Brotherhood because they love to believe that there are secrets
which, if they live long enough, they may gradually learn,
while others, uninitiated, have no hope of learning them,
the occasionally irritating evasive allusions in the dialogues can, I believe, sometimes be taken ironically, as a
joke on insiders. The presence of odd-sounding words and
phrases such as HBrother Speaker" or "accept" is due to
Lessing's desire to give the dialogues Masonic coloring.
How, otherwise, could he convert his brethren?
87
�Translation
'
Ernst: Admittedly. But give me a straight answer, are you
a Freemason?
Dedication: To His Serene Highness, Duke Ferdinand:
I too stood by the well of truth and drew from it. How
deeply, only he can judge from whom I await permission
to draw more deeply still. The people have long been Ian·
guishing. They are dying of thirst.
Falk: I believe myself to be one.
Ernst: That's the answer of one who doesn't feel quite
sure of himself.
Falk: But I am.
Ernst: Then you must know whether, when, where, and
His Highness' most obedient servant.
Falk: I know those things. But they don't mean all that
much.
Ernst: How is that?
Falk: Who doesn't "accept." And who isn't "accepted"!
Ernst: What do you mean?
Falk: I believe that I am a Freemason, not because older
Masons have accepted me into an official lodge, but be·
cause I understand and appreciate what and why Freema·
sonry is, when and where it has existed, what fosters or
hinders it.
Ernst: And nevertheless you speak in such tones of doubt
-"I believe myself to be one"?
Falk: I've grown accustomed to that tone, not because of
lack of conviction, but because I would not stand in any·
through whom you were ((accepted."
Introduction by a Third Party:
If the following pages do not contain the true ontology
of Freemasonry, I desire to be told which of the innumer·
able writings occasioned by Freemasonry gives a more exact
idea of its true nature (Lessing's italics). But if all Freema·
sons, no matter of what stamp, willingly allow that the point
of view indicated here is the only one from which sound
eyes can see something genuine (rather than a phantom
rearing up before the nearly blind), why has it been so
long till someone spokeplainly?
Many and diverse things might be said in reply. But it
would be hard to come up with a question more nearly like
the one just uttered than this: Why were systematically
laid-out handbooks of Christianity produced so late? Why
have there been so many good Christians for so long who
neither could nor would give a rational account of their
faith? Indeed, such handbooks of Christianity as we now
have might still be said to have been produced prematurely
(since faith itself probably gained little from them), were it
not that [certain] Christians had conceived the notion of
explaining the faith in a totally nonsensical way.
The application of these remarks can be left to the
reader.
First Conversation:
Ernst: What are you thinking about, friend?
Falk: Nothing.
Ernst: But you're so quiet.
Falk: Precisely! Who thinks when he is enjoying himself?
And I'm enjoying the lovely morning.
Ernst: You are quite right. So, why not ask me what I'm
thinking about?
Falk: If I were thinking about something I'd be talking: No
pleasure compares with that of thinking out loud with a
friend.
Ernst: I agree.
Falk: Perhaps you've had your fill of quietly taking in the
fine morning. Why don't you talk if something occurs to
you.
Ernst: I've been meaning to ask you something for a long
time.
Falk: Ask away!
Ernst: Is it true, friend, that you are a Freemason?
Falk: That's the question of one who is not a Mason.
88
one's way.
Ernst: You answer me as though I were a stranger.
Falk: Stranger or friend!
Ernst: You were accepted, you know everything .... ?
Falk: Others, too, have been accepted and believe they
know.
Ernst: But could you have been accepted without know·
ing what you know?
Falk: Yes, unfortunately.
Ernst: How?
Falk: Because many who "accept" others do not them·
selves know it2 while the few who do cannot say it (Lessing's italics).
Ernst: But could you know what you know without having
been accepted?
Falk: Why not? Freemasonry isn't an arbitrary thing, a luxury, but a necessity, grounded in the nature of man and of
civil society. So to come upon it as a result of one's own
reflection rather than under the guidance of others must
be possible.
Ernst: Freemasonry isn't anything arbitrary? Doesn't it involve words and signs and customs every one of which
might have been different, and so must be arbitrary?
Falk: Sure. But these words, these signs, these customs
do not constitute Freemasonry.
Ernst: Freemasonry a necessity? How did people manage
before Freemasonry?
Falk: Freemasonry has always existed.
Ernst: Come off it! What is this necessary, this indispensable Freemasonry?
Falk: As I indicated earlier, something of which even
those who know it cannot speak.
Ernst: A nonentity, then?
Falk: Don't be hasty.
Ernst: What I understand I can put into words.
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�Falk: Not always, and often not in such a way that the
words convey to others the idea I have exactly.
Ernst: Approximately, if not exactly. '
Falk: Approximately the same idea would be useless or
even dangerous here: Useless, if it conveys less than the
idea; dangerous if it holds the least little bit more.
Ernst: Odd! If even the Freemasons who know the secret
of their order cannot impart it verbally, how, then, do
they spread their order?
Falk: Through deeds. They allow good men and youths
whom they deem worthy of more intimate association to
surmise, guess at, see their deeds (as much of them as is
visible). Their new intimates find such deeds to their liking and do the same.
Ernst: Deeds? Deeds done by Freemasons? I only know
their speeches and songs-more often prettily printed
than thought or recited.
Falk: (interrupting his friend)-as are lots of other songs
and speeches.
Ernst: Or am I supposed to take the things they boast of in
these songs as their deeds?
Falk: Do you think they are just boasting?
Ernst: And what are they boasting about, anyway? Noth·
ing except what is expected of every good human being
and decent citizen-that they're so friendly, so charitable,
so obedient, so patriotic.
F alk: Are those virtues nothing?
Ernst: Nothing that would set the Freemasons apart from
the rest of mankind. Who isn't supposed to be friendly,
charitable, and the rest?
Falk: Supposed to be!
Ernst: Aren't there plenty of incentives and opportunities
for these virtues apart from Freemasonry?
Falk: Yes, but the Masonic fellowship gives men an additional incentive.
Ernst: What's the good of multiplying incentives to vir·
tue? Better to strengthen one motive to the utmost. A
multitude of motives is like a multitude of gears in a
machine: the more gears, the more slips.
Falk: I can't deny it.
Ernst: Besides, what sort of "additional incentive is this
that belittles all others, casts doubt on them, gives itself
out as strongest and best?
Falk: Friend, be fair! Don't judge by the exaggerations or
petty vindictiveness of idle songs and speeches. They're
the work of apprentices, callow disciples.
Ernst: You mean, Brother Speaker was talking nonsense?
Falk: I mean, the things that Brother Speaker was praising
the Freemasons for are obviously not their deeds, since
(whatever else you may say of him) he doesn't talk out of
school,' and deeds speak for themselves.
Ernst: I'm beginning to see what you are driving at. Why
didn't they occur to me before, those deeds, those telling,
I'd almost call them shouting, deeds: Freemasons don't
just support one another, and powerfully so, like members
of any association. They work for the public good of any
state of which they are members.
11
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Falk: For instance? I want to be sure you're on the right
track.
Ernst: For instance, the Freemasons of Stockholm, didn't
they establish a foundling hospital?
Falk: I hope that the Freemasons of Stockholm showed
their mettle at other occasions.
Ernst: What other occasions?"
Falk: Just others.
Ernst: And the Freemasons of Dresden, who employ poor
young girls as lace makers and embroiderers, to reduce the·
size of the foundling hospital!
Falk: Erl)st, need I remind you of your name? Be serious!
Ernst: Well, seriously, consider the Freemasons of Brunswick, who give talented poor boys drawing lessons.
Falk: What's wrong with that?
Ernst: Or the Freemasons of Berlin, who support Basedow's Philanthropin.4
Falk: The Masons support Basedow's institute. Who told
you that fable?
Ernst: It was all over the newspaper.
Falk: You read it in the newspaper? I won't believe lt till I
see Basedow's handwritten receipt. And I'd want to be
sure that it was made out to the Freemasons, not just to
some Freemasons in Berlin.
Ernst: Why? Don't you approve of Basedow's institute.
Falk:: Me? I approve wholeheartedly.
Ernst: Then you won't begrudge him such financial assistance?
Falk: Begrudge? Quite the contrary. Who is a stronger
well-wisher of Basedow than I?
Ernst: Well, then .... You're becoming incomprehensible.
Falk: I suppose so. Anyway, I was unfair: Even Freemasons may undertake something not as Freemasons.
Ernst: Does that hold for all their other good deeds as
well?
Falk: Perhaps. Perhaps the several good deeds you enumerated just now are, to use scholastic jargon for brevity's
sake, their dee~ad extra.
Ernst: How do y u mean that?
Falk: Perhaps the e are the eye-catching things they do
only to draw the multitude's attention, and which they do
only on that account.
Ernst: To win respect and toleration from the multitude?
Falk: Could be.
Ernst: What about their real deeds then? You keep silent?
F alk: Perhaps I have already answered you? Their real
deeds are their secret.
Ernst: Ha Hal Yet another one of those things that cannot
be put into words?
Falk: Not very well. But I can and am permitted to tell you
this much: The Freemasons' real deeds are so great and so
far from realization that centuries may pass before someone can say, "This is what they achieved." Yet they have
done everything good in the world, note well, in the world.
And they continue to work for all the good that is to be in
the world, note well, in the world.
Ernst: Come now, you are pulling my leg.
89
�Falk: Indeed not. But look-there goes a butterfly that I
must have. It's a woepmilchraupe~a milkweed caterpillar.
I want to be off. The true deeds of the Freemasons aim at
making most of the deeds commonly called good super·
fluous.
Ernst: But are these themselves good deeds?
Falk: None better. Think about that for a bit. I'll be right
back.
Ernst: Good deeds whose object is to make good deeds superfluous? That's a riddle. 5 I refuse to guess at riddles. I'd
rather stretch out beneath this tree and watch the ants.
Second Conversation
Ernst: What's been keeping you? You didn't catch your
butterfly after all?
Falk: It lured me from bush to bush, down to the brook.
Suddenly, it was on the other side.
Ernst: There are such seducers!
Falk: Have you thought it over?
Ernst: What? Your riddle? I won't catch my butterfly
either. But I am not going to worry about mine from now
on. I tried once to talk to you about Freemasonry. That's
enough. You are just like the rest of them-obviously.
Falk: The rest of them? But they don't say the things I say.
Ernst: They don't? So there are heretics among the Ma·
sons, too? And you are one of them? But heretics always
have something in common with the orthodox. And that's
what I meant.
Falk: What did you mean?
Ernst: Orthodox or heretical-Freemasons all play with
words, provoke questions and then answer without really
answering.
Falk: Is that so? Well, then, let's talk about something else,
since you tore me away from my pleasant condition of
mute contemplation.
Ernst: Nothing is easier than getting you back into that
condition. just lie down beside me and look.
Falk: At what?
Ernst: At the life and activity in and around and on top of
this ant heap. Such busyness-and such order! Every one
of them fetches and carries and pushes, and yet none is in
the other's way. Look, they even help each other!
Falk: Ants live in society just like bees.
Ernst: And theirs is a society more wonderful than the
bees', because there is none in their midst to bind them
together or to rule over them.
Falk: Order can exist even without government?
Ernst: If every individual knows how to rule himself, why
not?6
·
Falk: I wonder whether human beings will ever reach that
stage.
Ernst: Hardly.
Falk: What a shame.
Ernst: Indeed.
Falk: Get up. Let's go: They're going to crawl all over you,
90
I mean the ants. I want to ask you something. I don't know
your opinion on this at all.
Ernst: On what? ·
Falk: Civil society, for human beings in general. How do
you size it up?
Ernst: As a great good thing.
Falk: No doubt. But do you consider it a means or an end?
Ernst: I don't follow.
Falk: Do you think that men were made for the state or
rather states for men?
Ernst: Some, it seems, want to maintain the former, but
the latter is probably truer.
Falk: I think so too. States unite human beings in order
that-through and in these associations-every individual
human being may better and more securely enjoy his
share of happiness. The totality of the shares of happiness
of the members is the happiness of the state. Apart from
this there is no happiness. Every other so-called happiness
of the state, for the sake of which some of the members,
no matter how few, are said to have to suffer, is only a
cover-up for tyranny.
Ernst: I would rather not say that so loud.
Falk: Why?
Ernst: A truth which each construes according to his own
situation is easily abused.
Falk: Do you realize, friend, that you're already a demiFreemason?
Ernst: Who? Me?
Falk: Yes, since you admit there are truths better not
spoken.
Ernst: Yes, but they could be spoken.
Falk: The sage is unable to say things better left unsaid.
Ernst: As you wish. Let's not get back to the Freemasons.
I don't want to know about them anyway.
Falk: I beg your pardon. But at least you see that I'm willing to tell you more about them.
Ernst: You are making fun of me. All right, civil society and
Political organization of whatever sort are mere means
to human happiness. What follows?
Falk: Means only! And means of human devising, though
I won't deny that nature has arranged things in such a way
that men would have had to invent political organization
sooner or later.?
Ernst: Which is why some have held that civil society is a
natural end: Because everything-our passions and our
needs-leads there, they believed that civil society and
the state are ultimate ends of nature. As though natural
teleology didn't bear on the production of means! As
though nature were more interested in the happiness of
abstractions like STATE, FATHERLAND, than in the
happiness of flesh and blood individuals!
Falk: Fine! You're meeting me half-way. The next thing I
want to ask you is this: Admitting that political constitutions are means, and means of human invention, would
you say that they alone are exempt from the vicissitudes
of human means?
AUTIJMN/WINTER 1982-83
�Ernst: What do you mean by "the vicissitudes of human
means"?
Falk: What makes them different from divine, infallible
means.
Ernst: What?
Falk: That they are not infallible: Worse than being unreliable, they often produce results contrary to their design.
Ernst: Give me an example, if you can think of one.
Falk: Ships and navigation are means toward distant lands
but they are also to blame for many a man's never arriving
there.
Ernst: Those who suffer shipwreck and drown? I see what
you are driving at. But the reasons for a constitution's failure, why it cheats so many individuals of their happiness,
can be learned. There are many types of constitution, one
better than the next; some very inadequate, blatantly at
odds with their purpose; the best may yet be undiscovered.
F alk: Forget about that. Suppose the very best constitution imaginable were invented. Suppose everybody the
world over accepted it. Don't you think that even then,
under this best constitution, things that are extremely disadvantageous to human happiness would necessarily occur, things of which men in the state of nature would have
been utterly ignorant?
Ernst: If such things occur under the supposedly best constitution, I infer it isn't the best after all.
F alk: Assuming that a better one is possible? Well, take
that better one as best and repeat the question.
Ernst: You seem to me to be disguising with spurious subtlety that you assume all along that every instrument of
human invention 1 including political constitutions, must
be flawed.
Falk: I'm not just assuming it.
Ernst: Show me.
Falk: You want examples of the harm that comes necessarily of even the best constitution? I could mention ten
at least!
Ernst: One will do for a start.
Falk: We are supposing that the best constitution has
been invented and that all mankind lives under it. Does
that imply that all human beings in the world make up
one single state?
Ernst: Hardly. Such an immense state would be ungovernable. So it would have to be divided into many smaller
states, all governed with the same laws.
Falk: People would still be Germans and Frenchmen,
Dutchmen and Spaniards, Russians and Swedes, or whatever they happen to be called?
Ernst: Certainly.
Falk: Wouldn't each of these states have its own interests,
and the members of each state have the interests of whatever state happens to be theirs?
Ernst: Obviously.
Falk: These state-interests would often clash, wouldn't
they, just as they do now? So wouldn't the citizens of two
different states be just as unable to encounter one another
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
without the burden of prejudice and suspicion if they lived
under the best imaginable constitution as a German and a
Frenchman, or a Frenchman and an Englishman today?
Ernst: Very probably.
Falk: When a German meets a Frenchman or a Frenchman
an Englishman, he does not meet him simply as a human
being, as a fellow man to whom' he is drawn because of
their shared nature. They meet as German and French,
French and English; aware of their nations' competing interests, they are from the start cold, distant, suspicious
toward one another.
Ernst: You're right, unfortunately.
Falk: Doesn't that prove that the means for uniting human beings, for assuring their happiness through association, also divide them?
Ernst: I suppose so.
Falk: One step further; these several states, many of
them, will have climates that are very different;_ consequently they will have quite different needs and satisfactions; consequently they will have different moral codes;
consequently different religions. Don't you think?
Ernst: That's an enormous step!
Falk: Wouldn't people still be Jews and Christians and
Moslems and such?
Ernst: I don't dare deny it.
Falk: In that case, Christians, Jews, and Moslems alike will
continue to deal with each other as before, not as one human being with another, but as a Christian with a Jew, a
Jew with a Moslem: Each will claim that men of his type
are spiritually superior to men of other type, and they will
thus lay the foundation for rights that natural man could
not possibly claim to be possessed o£.8
Ernst: It's very sad. But what you say is probably quite true.
Falk: Only "probably true"?
Ernst: I would think that, just as you supposed that all the
world's states would have the same political constitution,
so one ought to suppose that they would be of one religion.
I can't imagine how they could be the same politically without religious uniformity.
Falk: Me neither! Anyway, I proposed the hypothesis of
the one best political constitution only to prevent your
evading the issue [of the possibility or impossibility of a
perfect constitution.]' Political and religious uniformity
the world over are equally impossible. [The steps of our
argument were:] One state, several states. Several states,
several political constitutions. Several political constitutions, several religions.
Ernst: Yes, that's how things look.
Falk: That's how they are! Consider next the second misfortune which civil society, quite at odds with its end,
gives rise to. Civil society cannot unite men without dividing them, nor divide them without erecting walls or digging ditches to keep them apart.
Ernst: Those chasms are so· dreadful, those walls often so
impossible to climb!
Falk: I must add a third: Civil society doesn't just divide
91
�human beings along national an(! religious lines. Without
divisions and separations, that form subordinate wholes,
there would be no whole whatever. But civil society di·
vides on and on within each such partial whole. 10
Ernst: Explain.
Falk: Do you believe a state without differentiation of social
classes is conceivable? Let it be a good or a bad state, closer
or further from perfection, it is impossible for all its citizens to share the same conditions. Even if they all participate in legislative activity, they cannot all have an equal
share in it; at least, not an equal direct share. So there are
going to be upper and lower classes. And supposing that
originally each citizen got an equal share in the state's
wealth, this distribution cannot be expected to last beyond a mere two generations: One man will know better
than another how to increase his property; or the poorly
administered estate must, nevertheless, be shared among
more heirs than the well-administered one. Soon there are
bound to be rich and poor.
Ernst: Evidently.
Falk: Consider now, are there many evils that are not due
to such social differentiation?
Ernst: As though I could contradict you! But why would I
want to, anyway? To unite human beings one must divide
them, and keep them divided. Granted. That's how it is. It
can't be otherwise.
Falk: Precisely!
Ernst: But what's the point of dwelling on this conclusion? Are you trying to make civil society hateful to me?
Do you want me to regret that people ever conceived the
idea of uniting into states?
Falk: Do you know me so little? If the only good gained
from civil society were that human reason can be cultivated
there, and there alone, I would bless it even if the evils it
produced were greater by far than the ones mentioned.
Ernst: If you want to enjoy the fire you must expect to put
up with the smoke-as the saying goes.
Falk: Quite. But granting that fire makes smoke unavoidable, should one therefore prohibit the invention of chimneys? Is the fellow who invented them to be called an
enemy of fire? You see, that's what I was after.
Ernst: What? I don't follow you.
Falk: And yet the image was most suitable.ll If human beings cannot be united into states apart from such divisions
as we spoke of, does that make the divisions good?
Ernst: Why, no.
Falk: Does it make them sacred?
Ernst: How do you mean that usacred"?
Falk: I mean, so that touching them ought to be prohibited.
Ernst: Touching with what end in view?
Falk: This, of not letting them gain more ground than is
absolutely necessary, of canceling their ill effects as much
as possible.
Ernst: Why should that be prohibited?
Falk: But it can't very well be enjoined either, at least not
by the civil law, since the civil law holds only within the
boundaries of the state, and what is wanted is precisely
7
92
something that crosses these. So it can only be an opus
supererogatum ["a work of supererogation"; see note 5]:
That the wisest and best of every state freely undertake
this task beyond the call of duty can onlv be wished for.
Ernst: However ardent, it must remain merely a wish.
Falk: I believe so. May there be men in every state who
are beyond popular prejudices and who know when patriotism ceases to be virtuous.
Ernst: I join you in your wish.
Falk: May every state contain men who are not the creatures of the prejudices of the religion they were raised in,
who do not believe that everything which they regard as
good and true must be good and true.
Ernst: May it be so.
Falk: May every state contain men who are not dazzled by
high position and not put off by low, men in whose company the nobleman gladly stoops and the lowly confidently
nses.
Ernst: May it be so.
Falk: What if this wish of ours were fulfilled?
Ernst: Fulfilled? To be sure, here and there a man like that
might turn up.
Falk: I don't mean just here and there and now and then.
Ernst: In certain epochs and certain regions there might
even be several such men.
Falk: What would you say if I told you that men like this
exist everywhere today; that from now on there are always
going to be such men?
Ernst: Please God!
Falk: What if I told you, further, that they do not live ineffectually dispersed, like the Church Invisible?
Ernst: Happy dream!
Falk: I'll get right to the point-these men that we are
speaking of are the Freemasons.
Ernst: What's that you're saying?
Falk: What if the Freemasons were the ones who count it
one of their jobs to bridge those gaps and cross those
boundaries that estrange men from one another?
Ernst: The Freemasons?
Falk: Yes, I'm saying they count it as part of their business.
Ernst: The Masons?
Falk: I beg your pardon. I forgot that you don't want to
hear about them. Look-we're being called to breakfast.
Let's go.
Ernst: Wait a minute, you say the Freemasons ... ?
Falk: Our conversation brought me back to them against
my will. I do apologize. We're bound to find more deserving matter for conversation once we join the breakfast
crowd. Come!
Third Conversation:
Ernst: All day long you have been avoiding me in the
crowd. But I've tracked you down to your bedroom.
Falk: Do you have something important to say to me? I'm
too tired for a mere chat.
AUfUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�Ernst: You're ridiculing my curiosity.
Falk: Curiosity?
,
Ernst: Yes, which you so artfully piqued this morning.
Falk: What were we talking about this morning?
Ernst: The Freemasons.
Falk: Well, what about them? I hope I didn't give the
secret away when I was high on the rhinewine.
Ernst: The secret which, you say, no one can give away?
Falk: All right. That restores my peace of mind.
Ernst: You said something about the Freemasons that
came unexpected, struck me, made me think.
Falk: What was that?
Ernst: Come on, stop teasing me. I'm sure you remember.
Falk: Now that you mention it, it does come back to me.
That's why you were so absentminded with your men and
women friends all day?
Ernst: Right. I won't be able to get to sleep until you've
answered at least one question of mine.
Falk: The question.?
Ernst: How can you prove, or at least support, your claim
that the Freemasons have these great and worthy aims?
Falk: Did I speak to you of their aims? I was not aware of
it. You were quite at a loss when I asked what might be
the Masons' true deeds. I wanted to draw your attention
to something that deserves to be worked at, something
that doesn't figure in the dreams of our clever political
theorists (staatskluge Leute). Perhaps the Masons are
working on it. Perhaps they're working in that area. I
merely wanted to cure you of the prejudice that every
spot fit for building has been identified and occupied and
that all construction work has duly been meted out.!'
Ernst: Wiggle as you please: From your speeches I con·
elude that the Freemasons are people who have freely
chosen the responsibility to work against the unavoidable
evils of the state.
Falk: Such a conception of their undertaking will at least
not dishonor them. Hold on to it. But understand it right.
Don't include things that don't belong. We're talking
about the unavoidable evils of the state, of any state, not
about the evils that go with this or that particular state of
a given constitution. The healing and alleviating of evils
native to a particular state the Freemason leaves to its citizens, who must venture and risk themselves according to
their citizen insight and courage. Evils of a quite different, higher kind are the object of the Mason's efforts.
Though inasmuch as he is also a citizen, he may take part
in making civic ills milder.
Ernst: I understand. Without the evils that concern the
Mason there could be no happy citizens. They are not the
evils that cause citizens unhappiness.
Falk: Right, the Freemasons mean to-how did you put
it?-work against the unavoidable evils.
Ernst: Yes.
Falk: "Work against" may be too strong a word, if it is
taken to mean "undo them." These evils cannot be undone. It would destroy the state. They should not even be
made apparent now to those who do not yet perceive
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
them as evils. At most they can be mitigated, by distantly
stirring up this perception in people, by allowing it to germinate and send out shoots, by clearing away weeds and
thinning out the new plants. Now do you understand why
I said that, whether or not Freemasons have always been
at work, centuries may pass before one could say "This is
what they wrought"?
Ernst: Yes, and I now also understand the second part of
the riddle-"good deeds that are to make good deeds
superfluous." 13
Falk: Fine! Go, then, and study these evils. Get to know
them all. Weigh their mutual influences. This study will
reveal things to you which, in days of dejection, will seem
irrefutable arguments against providence and virtue. But
this discovery, this illumination, will give you peace and
make you happy without being called a Freemason.
Ernst: You say the word "being called" with so much emphasis.
Falk: Because one may be something without being called
it.
.
Ernst: All right. I understand. But to return to my question,
which I need only rephrase: Since I now know the evils
Freemasonry combats ...
Falk: You know them?
Ernst: Didn't you yourself enumerate them for me?
Falk: I merely named a few of them, by way of test, just
those which are obvious even to the most nearsighted,
just a few of the most uncontested and most comprehensive. But there are many less obvious and more debatable,
but just as sure and inevitable.
Ernst: I limit my question to the evils you have yourself
named. Prove to me the Freemasons have these in mind.
You are silent. Are you thinking?
Falk: Not about how to answer your question. But why do
you want to know?
Ernst: Will you answer my question if I answer yours?
Falk: Yes. I promise.
Ernst: I asked for evidence that the Freemasons think as
you say they do because I know and fear your ingenuity.
Falk: My ingenuity?
Ernst: Yes. I am afraid you're selling me your own speculations for fact.
Falk: Thanks a lot!
Ernst: Did I insult you?
Falk: I suppose I ought to be grateful that you call "ingenuity" what might have been given quite a different
name.
Ernst: No, no. Only, I know how easily a clever person deceives himself, how readily he attributes plans and intentions which they never thought of to others.
Falk: But how do we infer that people have certain plans
and intentions? Don't we reason from their several deeds?
Ernst: How else? Which brings me back to my question-from what individual, uncontested deeds done by
Freemasons can it be inferred that in and by their
fellowship they mean to overcome the divisions among
men of which you spoke? The unavoidable divisions
93
�within the state and among states. Show me that this is
even one of their objectives.
,
Falk: And that they mean to do this without threatening
the individual state or the continued existence of a plurality of states.
Ernst: I'm glad to hear it. Look, I am not necessarily asking
you to tell me of deeds. Oddities, idiosyncracies that spring
from or lead to union among men would serve. You must
have based your speculations about Freemasonry on some
such signs as I am asking for if your "system" is a hypothesis.
Falk: You continue suspicious of me? But perhaps you
will doubt me less if I cite a constitutional principle of
Freemasonry for you. 14
Ernst: Which?
Falk: A principle they have never made a secret and in accord with which they have always conducted themselves
before the world's eyes.
Ernst: To wit?
Falk: To accept into their ranks any worthy man of fit
character, without distinction of fatherland, religion, or
civil condition.
Ernst: Really?
Falk: Admittedly, such a constitutional principle seems to
presuppose men who already make light of national,
religious, and social distinctions. The constitutional principle itself does not raise up such men. But mustn't there
be Nitrogen in the air for saltpeter [KN0 3 or NaN0 3] to
accumulate upon the walls?
Ernst: Yes.
Falk: And may the Freemasons not have been resorting to
a perfectly familiar ruse, that of openly practicing some of
their secret objectives, so as to mislead such men as are
always on the look-out for something different from what
stares them in the face because they are driven by suspicion?
Ernst: Perhaps.
Falk: Why shouldn't the artisan who can make silver deal
in silver scrap, so as to allay the suspicion that he knows
how to make it?
Ernst: Why not?
Falk: Ernst, are you listening? You sound as though you
are half asleep.
Ernst: No, friend. But I have had enough, enough for
tonight. Tomorrow very early I'm going back to town.
Falk: Already? Why so soon?
Ernst: You know me and ask? How long will it be before
you conclude your [mineral water] cure?
Falk: I only started it day before yesterday.
Ernst: Then I shall be seeing you before you have finished
yours. Good night. Farewell.
Notice to the Reader:
The spark took. Ernst went and became a Freemason.
What he thus learned, at first, is the matter of a fourth and a
fifth conversation, in which there is a parting of ways.
94
Of the three conversations here translated, Lessing
wrote Duke Ferdinand on 19 October, 1778:
Since I make so bold as to deem the first three of the conversations in question the weightiest, most laudable, and truest
things that may ever have been written about Freemasonry, I
could no longer resist the temptation to have them printed.
(Da ich mire schmeicheln darf, class von den bewussten Gesprachen die drey erstern, das Ernsthafteste, Riihmlichste,
Wahrste sind, was vielleicht jemals tiber die Freimaurerei
geschrieben worden: so habe ich der Versuchung, sie driicken
zu lassen nicht Ianger widerstehen kOnnen.) [Schneider, Stri-
dien, Bern, 1951, 14]
Two years later a fourth and a fifth conversation between Ernst and Falk were published (some say contrary
to Lessing's wishes). Their dramatic date is long after the
conclusion of Falk's "cure." Ernst is disgusted with his
friend for having sweet-talked him into joining a society of
fools and charlatans. None of the hopes and expectations
that Falk had stirred up in him were met by the flesh and
blood Masons he encountered:
That equality which you gave out as a constitutional principle
of the order, that equality which filled my soul with such surprising hope . .. does it still exist? Did it ever? Let an educated
Jew ask for admission. "A Jew? Well, the candidate must be a
Christian, though we don't ca;e what manner of Christian."
"Without distinction of religion" means "without discriminating among the three officially tolerated religions in the
Holy Roman Empire." Is that your interpretation too, Falk? ...
Let a cobbler come ... even if he be a Jacob Boehme or a Hans
Sachs, they'll
s~y:
"A cobbler? Why, obviously, a cobbler ... "
The fifth conversation takes place after a dinner party
also attended by a Mason of whom both friends disapprove, a man who means to defend the American cause in
Europe and who believes, mistakenly in the friends' opinion, that the American Congress is a Masonic Lodge and
that the Masons are, in America, establishing their realm
by force of arms.~' In this conversation Falk explains what
he conceives to be the true history of Freemasonry:
Anderson's history, according to which "speculative"
Masons joined already existing lodges of "operative" Freemasons, is rejected. The word "masonry" is linked to
"masons" only by an erroneous folk etymology according
to Falk. Its true etymology is "Masonei," says he, meaning,
roughly, eating club. One of these eating clubs was, in Sir
Christopher Wren's day, close by St. Paul's, in London.
During the thirty years of St. Paul's reconstruction, Sir
Christopher Wren would frequent this eating club, of
which he was a member. All London wanted to get progress reports on the construction of the great church. Hearing that the architect frequented a masony, Londoners
mistook the word for a masonry, a fellowship of builders.
Sir Christopher, according to F alk, simply used the popular confusion for ends of his own:
He had helped conceive the plan-for a society that would make
speculative truths more directly efficacious in establishing the
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�public good and in making civic life mor:e e0mmodious. Then
it occmrred to him that a society that Fo-~e- £Fom the activities
of daily life to spectllation would be· a- fitting counterpart to it.
"There," he thought, "men would investigate what in the
realm of truth is useful; here what that iS useful is true."
be far better known in America tl\an they now are. His
every piece of writing is refreshing and instructive. Even
brief association with him, merely through his books,
makes it easy to credit Moses Mendelssohn's words of
condolence to Lessing's younger brother
Thus far Lessing's Falk.
His etymology sounds so wildly unlikely to me, and the
history attached to the supposedly Germanic origin of the
word-root so much like pseudo-history, that it is hard for
me to read them as anything but a spoof-of the eighteenth
century literary industry of fabricating Masonic pseudohistories, and perhaps of other kinds of make-believe history as well.
Readers of the foregoing translation may wonder why I
thought Lessing's dialogues worth translating and why it
seemed right that they be made known to members of the
St. John's College community. My reasons aren't all in
yet, but among them are these: Charlotte Fletcher has
argued in detail in the Maryland Historical Magazine (val.
74, no. 2, June 1979; pp 133-151), that St. John's College
was not named after the Cambridge University College of
the same name; rather~
. .. I thank Providence for i"ts benevolence in allowing me, so
early in life, in the flower of youth, to know a man who
shaped my very soul, a man whom I would conjure up as
friend and judge whenever I was deliberating about something to be done or written, a man of whom I shall at all times
continue to think as my friend and judge whenever I have to
take a step of some importance.
... the Maryland legislators named the Western Shore college
for the day when [Washington's Potomac bill] was enacted,
the Feast Day of the Evangelist. ... Not only was it a day
which they had enjoyed in the company of their former Commander-in-Chief, it was a day which would have had special
significance· for Washington, the Freemason [December 27,
the Feast Day of the Evangelist, is singled out by many British
and American Masonic handbooks as a day for important
transactions and special celebration] .... Records show ... that
a remarkable legislative performance ... [took] place on the
Feast Day of St. John the Evangelist, December 27, 1784,
when on behalf of their good friend, George Washington.
Maryland legislators enacted the first piece of cooperative legislation among the various states in the Confederation following
the definitive "Treaty of Peace" (my italics).
Moreover, she showed that it is worthwhile to ask whether
there is a more intimate, even curricular, connection between the college and the fellowship which, as has plausibly
been argued in a number of Masonic histories, preserved
ancient astronomical, geometric, and architectural lore (in
effect, the quadrivium) after the disintegration of Rome
in the West. 16
Second, it is hard for me to believe that there is no "real"
connection between the founding of these United States
of America and Masonic doctrines such as the one in the
"first charge" of Anderson's Constitution (see footnote
14). The Masonic insignia on our dollar bills, which got
there from the verso of the Great Seal of the United States
(designed in the eighteenth century), should not, I think,
be written off as boys-will-be-boys-even-when-grown
mumbo jumbo. They were put there to say something, to
Americans and to the world at large, and to those who
decided to put them there1 17
Finally, Lessing's name and Lessing's work deserve to
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
( ... Ich danke der VOrsehung fiir die Wohltat, class sie mich
so frUh, in der Bluthe meiner Jugend, hat einen Mann kennen lassen, der meine Sehle gebildet hat, den ich bey jeder
Handlung, die ich vorhatte, bey joder Zeile die ich hinschreiben sollte, mir als Freund und Richter vorstellte, und den ich
mir zu allen Zeiten noch als Freund und Richter vor-stellen
werde, so oft ich einen Schritt von Wichtigkeit zu thun babe.)
Quoted in Karl Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Leben,
Berlin 1795, 450.
l. Locke's first (anonymously) published work is the Epistola de
Raymond Klibansky writes: "It cannot be doubted that Locke
systematically collected all_ books on toleration which he could
find. , .. Even in one of his earliest notebooks, that of 1674, Locke, having
read Spinoza's treatise on Descartes' Principia Philosophiae, expressed his intention of finding out what other works there were by this author. When
in 1674-6 he was Lord Shaftesbury's confidential agent, he certainly
had the opportunity of perusing some of Spinoza's works, for
Shaftesbury reimbursed him for a sum spent on acquiring these books
for him. Later, Locke mentioned in his 'Catalogue de livres differends et
qu'on trouve avec peine' the Tractatus Theologico politicus ... . In a
catalogue of his [Locke's] books drawn up ... in 1693 the Tractatus [is
mentioned]. Perusal of the letter has convinced me that there is also internal evidence for Locke's having read and profited from Spinoza's
Theological-Political Treatise. For Leibniz on the subject of toleration,
see New Essays 416f. I accept the thesis of H. R. Trevor Roper that this
tradition of devoting one's life to the cause of toleration. goes back to
Erasmus (see The European Witchcraze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries and Other Essays, Harper Torchbook 1968). But its true begettor may well have been the Dean of St. Paul's, Erasmus's friend and
mentor, John Colet.'' (Oxford ed. by Raymond Klibansky and J. W.
Gough of the Letter of Toleration, xxxi, ii.)
2. The enigmatic "it" wants to be impenetrable and cannot be
eliminated from the translation. As Lessing wrote Duke Ferdinand on
Tolera~ia.
Octobe, 26, 1778,
I did not desecrate any secret knOwledge. I only tried to convince the
world that truly great secrets continue to lie hidden there, where the
world had at last become tired of looking for them.
(Ich babe keine geheime Kenntnisse enheiliget: ich habe bloss die
Welt zu ilberzeugen gesucht, class da noch wirklich grosse geheime
Kenntnisse verborgen liegen, wo sie derleichen zu suchen endlich
mOde ward.) Quoted in Heinrich Schneider, ZwOlf Biographische
Studies, Bern 1951, 15.
3. Lessing'·s word here is "plaudern," familiar from Mozart's Magic
Flute: "Ich plauderte, und das war schlechr,;• says Papageno toward the
end of Act ii.
4. Johann Bernhard Basedow (1723;_11790); was a German educational
reformer who established a teacher training institute in Dessau, where
his educational principles, much affected· by Rosseau's Emile, were
taught. This teacher training· institute· he called the Philanthropin. A
95
�student of theology earlier in his life, he,had come under the influence
of Reimarus.
1
5. I haven't cracked the riddle but suspect that in speaking of "Cute
Taten, welche darauf zielen, gute Taten entbehrlich zu machen," Lessing's Falk refers covertly and ambiguouslY to human charitable works,
Church sacraments, and the supreme, Divine work of charity, the
sacrifice of Christ. My guess depends on hearing the word opus-which
figures so prominently in Luther's doctrine of "salvation by faith, not
works," in the Catholic Church's rationale of the Sacraments, and in
the Bacon passage froiD the New Organon which Kant quotes as fronti·
piece to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason-underneath
the German Tat. Lessing himself introduces the Latin word in the second conversation, which is why I retained his expression opus
supererogatum. It is, unmistakeably, a technical locution-"works of
supererogation," beyond the call of duty, figure in Catholic teaching as
works by which the faithful gain extra merit.
6. Compare Adeimantus in Republic ii, 367 " . , . we would not now be
guard~ng ag~~nst one another's injustice, but each would be his own best
guardtan ...
7. Compare Aristotle's Politics i, 1253a30: phusei men oun he horme en
pasin epi ten toiauten koinOnian. ho de prOtos sustases megistOn
agathon aitios.
8. "Nimmermehr" in "Rechte ... die dem nati'lrlichen Menschen nimmermehr einfallen kOnnten," is ambiguous: it is not clear whether the
"natural man" of whom Falk speaks belongs to the past, the future, or
neither. This sounds very like Rousseau to me.
9. Compare Leibniz on oUrs being the best of all possible worlds: He did
not mean that it is perfect, as Voltaire foolishly thought. He meant that
the Very conceptiori of a perfect world is self-contradictory, so that ours is
the best of worlds that are possible. Lessing was a great admiror of Leibniz.
10. Lessing is borrowing Aristotle's word "whole." Compare note 7.
Students of Leo Strauss will recognize the degree to which the argu·
ments, the attitude, the very vocabulary of Ernst and Falk, are saved by
Strauss. Strauss refers to the work in a footnote on p. 28 of Persecution
and the Art of Writing, Glencoe, Illinois 1952.
11. Compare Republic vii. Much like Leibniz also in this respect, Lessing carried his very great erudition lightly. ThorOughly "modern," he
was intimate with the works of the AnCients, die Alten, as in "Wie die
Alten den Tad gebildet."
12. The use of architectural images is, unsurprisingly, prominent in
Masonic writings. I do not think that the extraordinary proliferation of
talk about "foundations", "architects", "clearing away the underbrush",
"corner stones", "city planning" in the books of Machiavelli, Bacon,
Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz in some measure, and certainly Kant
has been sufficiently noted.
13. See note 5, whence perhaps also "good works that are to make good
works superfluous."
14. Lessing is referring to the Constitution of the Grand Lodge of London, drawn up by James Anderson at the instance of the then Master of
the Lodge, John, Duke of Montague. A copy of Anderson's The Consti·
tution of the Freemasons (though in a later edition than the one pub·
lished in London in 1723) was in the Ducal Library in WolfenbUttel. The
"First Charge" of Anderson's Constitution runs as follows:
Concerning GOD and RELIGION. A Mason is obliged by his Ten·
ure, to obey the moral Law: and if he rightly understands the Art, he
will never be a stupid Atheist, nor an irreligious Libertine. But
though in ancient Times Masons were charg'd in every Country to
be of the Religion of that country or Nation, whatever it was, yet it's
now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that religion in
which all Men agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves.
That is, to be good Men and true, or Men of Honour and Honesty,
by whatever Denominations or Persuasions they may be distinguished; whereby Masonry becomes the Center of Unition, and the
96
Means of conciliating true Friendship among Persons that must
have remain'd at a perpetual Distance.
I was unable to obtain a copy of Anderson's book and rely on Jacob
Katz's citation in his Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1723-1939, 13
Cambridge, 1970.
Katz's book is a remarkable piece of sociological history. There is
hardly a page in it that doesn't throw light on issues far greater than the
seemingly recondite one of the title. About the quoted First Charge he
writes:
... There is no reason to assume that the authors of the English constitution intended, in their universal tolerance, to provide for Jewish
candidates in the flesh. Yet, when such candidates did apply for admission, the principle was followed in practice [in England, but not
in Germany] .... At least some of these Jews sought to retain their
own religious principles within the frame work of the lodges. In 1756
an anthology of Masonic prayers appeared in print, among them one
to be recited "at the opening of the lodge meeting and the like, for the
use of Jewish Freemasons." While the other prayers were addressed
to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the Jewish prayers contained nothing at variance with the Jewish tradition. [pp. l5ff]
Katz does not comment on the fact that the drawing up of a written constitution, which itself records what the proper procedures for amending
it are, was a Masonic practice, and one which may well have influenced
the American Founding Fathers, since a written constitution for a state
or nation was, in those days, ~ rarity.
15. There are a number of books on the theme of possible connections
between the American Revolution and Freemasonry. The author of one
of these, Bernard Fay, a Frenchman, maintains that the French Revolution too was "made" by Masons. It is extraordinarily difficult to sort out
whether-to speak in the voice of their critics-Masonic Lodges were
hotbeds of sedition or rather the reverse, whether illdeed Freemasonry
stood for anything in particular in the political realm. My interim
hypothesis is that it is probably pointless to speak of Masonic politics
without specifying the period and the countr'Y and perhaps even the particular Lodge. I do not believe that this means that the expression
"Masonic teachings" is simply empty: One of my contentions is that what
we usually identify as the distinctively modern linking of knowledge and
power, or knowing what and knowing how, or artes liberales and artes serviles is Masonic doctrine.
16. See for example George F. Fort, The Early History and Antiquities of
Freemasonry as connected with Ancient Norse Guilds and the Oriental
and Medieval Building Fraternities, Philadelphia 1875, and Tons Brunes,
The Secrets of Ancient Geometry and its Use, Copenhagen 1967.
17. Our coins too bear a motto-"In God we Trust-that can be linked
to the Masons: It was the motto of the London "operative" Masons in
the fifteenth and seventeenth century, except that their motto added
the little word "alone" between "God" and "we" (Georg Kloss, Geschichte der Freimaurerei in England, Irland und Schotland, 1848, 325. But
according to a little pamphlet of the United States Mint, the motto appeared on our coins only in the nineteenth century: Toward the end of
1861 the Secretary of the TreasUry received a letter from a certain Mr. Watkinson, Minister of the Gospel, who urged that the lack of some reference
to God on our coins might lead "the antiquaries of succeeding centuries"
to believe that we were "a heathen nation." In response to this letter, the
Secretary of the Treasury wrote the Director of the Mint: "You will cause a
device to be prepared without unnecessary delay with a motto expressing in
the fewest and tersest words possible this national recognition [of the trust
of our people in God]." But it turned out that, because of an earlier Act of
Congress, the Director of the Mint could not "cause" the preparation of
such a device. Legislative action was needed. Is there another modem nation where such an exchange of letters might have occurred?
AUTIJMN /WINTER 1982-83
�The Rainfall in the Pine Grove
Mter Gabriele D' Annunzio, "La pioggia nel pineto."
Be still.
On the leaf-strewn sill
of the forest I hear
no human words spoken,
but newer words sung
by the drops' tinkling tongue
and the broken
murmuration of distant leaves.
Listen! It is raining
from tattered clouds driven,
raining down from heaven
on the tamarisks burnt,
on the brackish tamarisks.
Raining on the tangled hairy kirtles
of the pine,
on the myrtles
divine;
on the thick -clustered broom,
on the juniper's loom;
Upon our sylvan
faces,
upon our naked
hands,
our vestments and our poses,
on each fresh -quickened thought
that the soul newly discloses;
on the fable richly-wrought
that yesterday
deluded thee, and today deludes me,
0 Hermione!
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Do you hear?
The rain is slanting
on the lawn's lonely green
with a tinkling silver sheen,
with a rustling and a canting
that varies in the air
as the foliage is there
more rare, less rare;
Listen! the cricket's chatter
replies to all this weeping:
What does it matter?
This flood of austral tears
provokes not his fears,
nor does heaven's windy whine.
And the pine
has one sound
and the myrtle yet another,
and the juniper another:
a pure liquescent round
of instruments
diverse:
played and plucked upon
by the rain's fluent fingers
and choir of the leaves,
0 green-mouthed singers!
So verse follows verse
until we are immersed
in the spirit of the wood,
of this life
arboreal
and your face immemorial
is washed in the rain
soft as a leaf;
and your hair
97
�falls fair
as the juniper's caresses;
as the rain's glistening grief
is the streaming of your tresses.
0 terrestrial creature
by name and by featureHermione.
Hear! 0 hear!
the harmonious hammer
of the cricket's shrill trill
fades still and more still,
muffled by the rain's
crescendoing roar.
Yet low
below
from depths unquenched,
from humid shadow
a melody mingles,
is drowned, expunged ...
only one note
trembles yet,
plucked from the fret;
resurgent, remote,surges ... shivers ... spills awaySeems, but is not, the voice of the sea.
And now you hear on every frond
the shattering sound
of the argent rain:
the downrushing Whence
that varies as the verdure
grows dense, or less dense.
Listen. The daughter
of the aria is mute,
but the unseen daughter
of the green-veiled water,
child of the distant bog,the frog,chants in denser shadow:
Who knows where? Who knows where?
And it is raining on your eyes,
And it is raining on your hair,
0 Hermione!
98
It is raining on your eyes ...
And as the downpour dashes
upon your black lashes,
tiny diamonds hang
and you seem to be weepingBut for joy! but for joy!
No longer wan
you emerge from the bark:
Vigorous, reborn
and freshly we turn
each to each,
And the heart in the breast is an intact
peach,
And the eyes in their lids
are springs in the grass,
And like almonds peeled
is the honeycomb of teeth.
So, slowly we pass
from hedge to hedge,
now together, now apart
(As rude-fingered weeds
ensnare our ankles,
entwine our knees)
Who knows where? Who knows where?
For the curtain of the air
Is a rustle of laces
As it rains as it rains
Upon our sylvan
faces,
Upon our naked hands,
Our vestments and our poses,
on each fresh-quickened thought
that the soul newly discloses,
on the fable richly-wrought
that yesterday
eluded me, and today eludes thee,
0 Hermione!
AUTIJMN /WINTER 1982-83
�The Donkey Rides
the Man . ..
The donkey rides the man
Swallows shoot the hunter
Sun rises in the West
Daisies bloom in winter
Constellations sunder
All singleness is lost
Adam's rod has wilted
Breasts are hard as frost
Contrarities now rule
Two perpendiculars
Fall to a single line
Peace plus peace make wars
0 Alice underground
Rise and take command
Scepter us with laughter
Orb with tickling hand
This topsy-turvy world
Spin it with your wand
All boys must be girled
All girls must be manned
Come Alice come from under
Nibble us high and low
Pacify with thunder
the apocalyptic show
The Mannequins
Flowing down Fifth Avegue
The shoppers in a churning stream
Flash dazzling semaphors of dew
Between the banks of deed and dream.
Where mermaids-sleeker for their sinsMay view in underseas of glass
Themselves beside the mannequins:
Shipwrecked, headless now. Alas!
Alas for the perfect thigh and breast!
Alas for the perfect lacquered smile!
Alas for the perfect all-the-rest
That lies beside her in a pile!
For he's entered there on sheepsoft feet:
That Devil-0 that panderer!
Stripped her on a public street,
With shameless hands he sullied her.
Yes, in the electric glare of noon
(Narcissus, transfixed, saw him do it)
Divested her of dress and shoon
And her lovely head, he did unscrew it.
Take heed, then, Beauties. Blemished be.
For perfect She is lifeless She.
Where reins of Yes and No
Ride us to no conclusion
In a dazzling merry-go-round
Of rectified confusion
SIDNEY ALEXANDER
Sidney Alexander has translated Francesco Guicciardini's The History of
Italy (New York 1969). The last volume, Nicodenz.us, t~e_Roman Ye~rs of
Michalangelo, 1534-1564, of his three-volume retmagmm? of ~e hfe of
Michelangelo is planned for publication in 1983 (Ohio Umvers1ty Press).
For the last twenty-seven years he has lived in Florence.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
99
�REviEw EssAY·.,
Defeat in Vietnam
Norman Podhoretz's Why We Were in Vietnam*
JOSEPH A.
For anyone over the age of twenty, Why We Were in Vietnam
is an unwanted attempt to face a painful past. Norman Podhoretz wants to reopen the Vietnam debate because he thinks
we have learned the wrong "lessons" from the disaster. The failure of American policy in Vietnam not only brought defeat without peace. It cancelled out the single most important lesson that
the Second World War, the "unnecessary war" in Churchill's
phrase, taught those who managed to live through it, the lesson
of Munich, that yielding in the face of aggression encourages
more aggression. For the lessons of Munich Vietnam's failure
substituted "new lessons": that the limitations on American
power no longer allowed the arrogance of policing the world; that
an ''ideologically-based anti-Communist foreign policy" must inevitably fail; and worst of all, that America's actions in Vietnam
made her equal to Hitler's Germany in "criminality" and showed
that now "the U.S., not the Soviet Union and certainly not Communism, represented the greatest threat to the security and wellbeing of the peoples of the world."
With evidence available during the war, Podhoretz faces the
charges of "genocide" and "atrocity" against American "policies" -the "McCarthyism of the left." The Geneva Convention
sanctions the U.S. "war crime" of clearing an area of civilians to
spare them before bombing enemy forces. In Vietnam civilians
numbered forty percent of the dead, the same percentage as in
the Second World War, in contrast to the seventy percent of the
War in Korea. He compares the war's suffering to Indochina under Communism: forced mass expulsions with millions dead; total suppression of political, religious, and press freedoms (South
Vietnam at war had twenty-seven daily newspapers, three televi-
*
New York, Simon and Schuster 1982. 240 pages. $13.50.
A lawyer in Washington, D.C., Joseph A. Bosco practices corporate and
administrative law arid represents European companies in the United
States.
100
Bosco
sian stations, more than twenty radio stations). "'Among the
boat people who survived, including those who were raped by pirates and those who suffered in the refugee camps, nobody regrets
his escape from the present regime.'"
Almost alone of contemporary writers, Podhoretz concludes
Americans need feel no shame. "That the U.S. involvement in
Vietnam should be described as a moral disgrace is itself a moral
disgrace." Reagan's description of the war as a "noble cause"
that made headlines during the 1980 campaign, again won a place
in the Washington Post's recent front-page story on the President's "gaffes".
Podhoretz calls to account the hypocrisy of those who proclaimed their desire for "peace" in Vietnam but who actually
supported the Communist victory; the malice of the "Amerika"
haters who likened the United States to Nazi Germany. (The in·
vective against America was palpable at teach-ins I attended in
Boston and Cambridge as early as 1964 .) These ''inveterate apologists for the Vietnamese Communists" still do not acknowledge
the suffering in Indochina today nor their complicity in it.
He criticizes the "anti-anti-Communists," the teachers and
media people who considered anti-Communism unsatisfying,
who said they opposed Communism but were against every antiCommunist government from Diem to Thieu, who fancied a
neutralist compromise or" coalition or "progressive ... 'third
force'". "[They] should now be ashamed of their naivete and the
contributions they made to the victory of forces they had a moral
duty to oppose .... In practice, and in its political effect, aritianti-Communism was often hard to tell apart from pro-Communism.'' Podhoretz concludes that the defenders of American
policy were right about its morality, but that the critics correctly
saw its futility.
But this moral calling to account is incomplete. Podhoretz ignores those Americans (many of my friends) who knew which
side was right and who certainly preferred our side, but who
nevertheless joined the anti-war movement, especially after the
Tet offensive in 1968, because, like Podhoretz, they thought vic-
AUfUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�tory impossible. To succeed, the anti-war movement, as Hanoi
realized, had to reach out beyond the MarxiS~-Leninists, the radical students, the anti-anti-Communists, to the ordinary, patriotic,
mainstream American citizens. Despite the: finest of motives,
these citizens strengthened the Communists. Why and how this
happened has to be understood. The prolongation of the war
and the absence of a strategy for victory that grew evident with
its prolongation had a lot to do with the disillusionment of many
ordinary Americans. With the concern for human life and public
opinion that distinguishes democracies from their totalitarian adversaries, how could Washington's "war of attrition," that took
the place of a strategy for victory, not have failed eventually? Recent Communist statements show that Hanoi, with the experience of the French in Indochina and the Americans in Korea
before its eyes, knew the importance of prolonging the war for
the spread of the anti-war moverrient in the United States and
throughout the world. From the beginning Hanoi planned to
out-last us, whether or not it out-fought us.
Podhoretz argues that the unwillingness (or inability) of the
elite in government to make the "moral, political, and strategic"
case for the war left a "moral vacuum" for the anti-war extremists. I find that charge curious and unfair. "Why, then, were we
in Vietnam?" asks Podhoretz. "To say it once again: because we
were trying to save the Southern half of that country from the
evils of Communism." The answer is hardly novel; Presidents
Kennedy and johnson gave it from 1961 through 1968. Most
Americans, "passive and unenthusiastic," in Podhoretz's description, understood that explanation: they remembered the
world wars, Eastern Europe, Korea, and they recognized the
evils of totalitarianism.
But the anti-war elites rejected those justifications. In April
1965, Secretary of State Dean Rusk raised a professorial firestorm when he remarked on "the gullibility of the academic
community and their shibborn disregard of the plain facts." A
teaching fellow at law school, I attended an "emergency" meeting of the Greater Boston Faculty Committee on Vietnam,
which included several prestigious academic names, convened
to draft an angry full-page advertisement for the New York Times
to answer Rusk. No one of the hundreds present defended U.S.
policy. The chairman, a professor of divinity, told me I could express my disagreement by "keeping my seat and remaining silent." (Later, the protests of a few won me a minute or two.)
Even Henry Kissinger, at Harvard in 1965, objected to the government's defense of the war on "moral grounds," because "in a
civil war it is not clear who the aggressor is; it is not like one sovereign nation attacking another." Later Kissinger modified his
view which confused a civil war with protracted war of aggression and which refused to see that a protracted, masked aggression did not differ in kind from open war as in Korea. By that
time, however, the "civil war'' argument had become favorite
anti-war mythology.
Podhoretz states that even though the anti-war positions clearly
represented a small, minority viewpoint, our government made
"the mistake" of believing "this meant that the American people
supported the war." He argues that until 1973 the public simply
"went along," more or less willing, to give their leaders the "benefit
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
of the doubt." At the same time that he criticizes the elites who
had gotten us into the war and· conceived and carried out our
failed policies, Podhoretz does not shrink from blaming the
American people themselves for the 1975 congressional action
that stopped further military aid to South Vietnam despite the
continuing danger from Hanoi. "At least a measure of responsibility" for this abandonment of an ally "belongs to the people ...
whose wishes their representatives believed themselves to be carrying out." The original intervention by the elites, he argues, had
been "an attempt born of noble ideals and impulses," but uthe
same cannot be said of what the American people did in 1975."
The American public demonstrated its own ultimate lack of
umoral capacity" to save South Vietnam-by contrast, they earlier
had been "willing to shoulder the burden of Korea."
Podhoretz is wrong to call the American people morally inadequate at the same time that he refuses to recognize their earlier
steadfastness. "Going along" and giving the· government "the
benefit of the doubt" meant seeing sons and brothers die in another faraway place for other men's freedom-without succumbing to hysteria or a new wave of McCarthyism despite provocations from the "wild men of the Left" with their Vietcong
flags and anti-American obscenities. In contrast, after only two
years of the Korean War the "stalemate" contributed to the rise
of McCarthyism and made Eisenhower pledge in the campaign
of 1952 to "go to Korea" with the implicit promise to end the
fighting one way or the other.
Nor were Americans really ever as "passive and acquiescent"
as Podhoretz describes them, until the very end. In election after
election they voted for candidates who supported U.S. policy in
Vietnam, they supported the deployment of forces and the military budgets to pay for it, and they expressed their belief in the
justness of the cause in numerous patriotic and "pro-war" demonstrations over the years-though never in as well-organized or
violent a manner as the anti-war activists.
In his mischaracterization of the people in both the Korean
and the Vietnam war, Podhoretz seems almost oblivious to the
working of the Communist strategy of protracted war and pro·
traded negotiations. Three years passed between the first commitment of American forces in Korea (never to number more
than roughly half the American forces, and the dead, in Vietnam) and the signing of the truce agreement at Panmunjom-an
agreement still enforced by our troops. In Vietnam it took twelve
years to get from Kennedy's first introduction of troops to the
signing of the hollow, non-enforceable agreement between
Henry Kissinger and Le Due Tho. Despite this, Podhoretz writes:
" ... Looking back on Korea from a perspective shaped by the experience of Vietnam, what seems most remarkable is the absence of any serious opposition to what Truman decided to do."
What seems more remarkable, looking at Vietnam in the light of
Korea, is that Americans held on for as long as they did! American patience and mahirity through this long national ordeal seem
nothing less than magnificent. Where is the "nobility" of the Vietnam cause Podhoretz celebrates, if not here?
The turning point in public support for the war was the 1968
Tet offensive, an overwhelming Communist defeat: the Communists suffered heavy losses and could not hold the scores of
101
�populated areas and military facilities they attacked; instead of
joining the liberating invaders, the 1 South Vietnamese fled in
every instance to areas with mor:e fighting but fewer Communists. But the media devastated suppbrt for the war in America
by portraying Tet as a Communist triumph. Why? In his important study, Big Story (new edition, Yale University Press 1982),
Peter Braestrup argues that not media "ideology" but "the limited ability of the press corps to cover so complicated and strange
a war" caused the "distortions ;md misrepresentations." To
Podhoretz instead, "Tet provided the occasion for a growing disenchantment with the war to express itself." Both may be right.
But Tet shocked me because it should never have happened at
all: it showed greater enemy strength and determination (suicidal
determination), and weaker allied intelligence, preparedness,
and security than should have existed at that point in the war.
Tel showed the futility of the "war of attrition" with its gradual
and "rational" bombing and troop escalation-with its official
guarantees of North Vietnam's territorial integrity and its assurances for the survival of the regime in Hanoi. In response, Hanoi
simply threw still more men south to be chewed up by superior
American military might-but not without taking their toll of
American lives and will. Most Americans were disturbed not by
the reasons for our involvement in Vietnam, but, especially after
Tet, by doubts about whether our policy was working.
Beneath this disappointment in the American people, nagging
at Podhoretz (and at many other Americans) is guilt, not for having defended Vietnam at all that the anti-war critics would have
us bear, but guilt at deserting an ally, furtively in 1973, openly in
1975. That this, our longest war, was the first in which the Yanks
came back before it was "over, over there," cannot help but
bother us.
Most troubling about Podhoretz' s moral analysis is his failure
to reconcile it with his own pragmatic judgement that we should
never have gone into Vietnam in the first place: "The only way
the U.S. could have avoided defeat in Vietnam was by staying
out altogether ... saving Vietnam from Communism was beyond
its reasonable military, political. . . intellectual. .. and moral
capabilities."
The moral and practical questions are intertwined. For if failure was unavoidable, the people of South Vietnam were cursed
with the worst of all worlds-the war and Communism. Wasn't it
deeply wrong-unconscionable-to impose such an unnecessary price on them and us? Bad enough to "destroy the country
in order to save it", but to put it through a war with no realistic
prospect of saving it? This seems less morally defensible than the
"arrogance" Podhoretz finds in the Kennedy and Johnson people who at least believed their policies would succeed, or than the
"naivete" of the moderate anti-war movement which could conceive of no worse fate for Vietnam than the war itself.
If it is true that American victory was not inevitable, as many
hawks wrongly believed, does it necessarily follow, as Podhoretz
maintains, that American failure was? Given the stakes, his fatalism is intuitively and historically unsatisfying. What was tried did
not work, but would an)lthing else have? Podhoretz criticizes
successive administrations for conducting the war militarily, politically, and strategically "on the cheap." Wouldn't avoiding or
102
correcting their "failures of leadership" have brought a different
result? Was America defeated militarily in Vietnam or politically
and strategically at home?
The United States in Vietnam forgot the lessons of conventional war in Korea and of counterinsurgency in Malaya, Greece,
and the Phi1lipines. In Korea, a conventional war of open and
unambiguous aggression, the first limited war of modern times,
the UN/US forces did not bring North Korea to negotiation until
they drove them from the South, invaded the North-and threatened its existence with a non-Communist reunification of Korea.
Until this invasion, numerous troop losses had not moved the
North Koreans to abandon their aggression. (Korea also, incidentally, showed that the Soviet Union and China would not intervene directly to defend the homeland of their ally-but only to
defend their own homeland, in that instance, China.) In Greece,
Malaya, and the Phillipines, the West prevailed by providing
material support without large troop commitments, because the
local Communis.t guerrillas were cut off from supplies and reinforcements from abroad. A hybrid of conventional and counterinsurgency warfare, our Vietnam strategy ignored the crucial
lessons of each: it did not invade the enemy's homeland and it
did not cut off the local guerrillas from supplies and reinforcements from abroad.
In contrast to the United States, the Communist world applied
the lessons of Korea in Vietnam. With Southeast Asia's largest
army, second in Asia only to China's, Hanoi openly proclaimed
its goal of Communist reunification; but it did not attack the
South directly and in force in 1955, because it feared the response
North Korea's open and unambiguous attack had provoked in 1950.
Instead it supplied the local guerrillas and infiltrated its own troops,
masquerading as guerrillas, into the South. All-out attack by regular mechanized divisions came twenty years later, after protracted disguised aggression had led the United States to abandon Saigon in fact in 1973 and by law in 1975. Vietnam ended
the way Korea had started, with brutal open conquest, but at a
time and under circumstances that prevented the response the
lesson of Munich required.
On leaving office, Eisenhower, who had refused to commit U.S.
soldiers to stop North Vietnamese advances in Laos and Vietnam, had no qualms about recommending to the new president
that he might have to intervene there, especially in the increasingly desperate situation in Laos. In early 1961-an incident
Podhoretz curiously ignores-Kennedy did in fact dramatically
and publicly commit the U.S. to the defense of Laotian "inde·
pendence." When a few months later, however, it became clear
that the defense of Laos required American troops, Kennedyin contrast to Eisenhower, who had supported a coalition that
favored the West-settled for a coalition government with Communists that conceded the Communist guerrillas two-thirds of
Laos with its access routes to Vietnam. (In 1965 Kissinger characterized Kennedy's decision as "backing down" and "abandoning an ally," a pattern he saw repeated in the Kennedy administration's, at least passive, involvement in the overthrow of Diem
in 1963.)
After his failure in Laos (and the Bay of Pigs and Khruschev's
"traumatizing" summit bullying) Kennedy decided to take a stand
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�in Vietnam. Because of fear of a big~power confrontation, however, his intervention was "timid and hesitant. .. half-hearted
and gradual." He decided on counterinsurgency without, however, sealing-off Vietnam's borders. By dealing with a protracted
and disguised invasion as if it were a guerri11a'war-and not tak~
ing the measures necessary for victory in such a war-Kennedy
allowed the myth of a "civil war and local insurgency" to take
hold of the world.
We cannot know whether, had Kennedy lived, his Irish would
have prevailed over his Harvard and he might have decided on a
more Truman-like response, or whether (as JFK apologists have
argued) he would have followed the cut-and-run model of Laos.
Either policy would have had better consequences. But even if,
as Podhoretz contends, he would have done more or less what
johnson did, the results probably would have been different.
Why? Because Kennedy doing it would have made all the differ~
ence: unlike LBJ, he had the "style" and "charisma" to mobilize
public opinion, and a network of media and academic allies.
Kennedy's closet doves would have remained there rather than
reacting to fate's cruel blow in Dallas by attacking the besieged
sitting president, hinting at a Robert Kennedy "dump Johnson"
challenge in 1964, and actually launching one in 1968. (Would
we have heard chants of"Hey, hey, JFK, how many kids did you
kill today"?) And without its trump card-a combined anti-war
and "get Johnson" movement gradually draining America's
will-Hanoi would have had the incentive to make peace not
war.
But that was not to be. Kennedy's death three weeks after
Diem's sealed the fate of Vietnam-and of America in Vietnam. Just as Diem's murder unhinged events in South Vietnam,
the assassination of Kennedy permanently altered the course at.
home. Vietnam almost instantly became "Johnson's war'' and
then "Nixon's war." But the rules of the game had largely been
set, by Kennedy and even by Eisenhower before him: aggression
would be resisted, but on the enemy's terms, and not on his home
ground. Neither Johnson or Nixon would fundamentally change
these terms-Johnson because of the domestic turmoil, and Nixon
and Kissinger for the same fear but also because they nurtured
bigger "geopolitical" ambitions on the international stage: detente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China.
At Home and Abroad
LETTER FROM THE HoMEFRONT: ON MARRYING
This is an Apology. The deed for which I
must atone, or provide justification, is mar·
riage. My particular faults-youth and gender (I am 23 and a woman in the 1980's)
-are incidental. But they have helped to
magnify-by making my own situation
more extreme-the central issue of mar~
riage. So much for the overall "efficient
cause" of this essay.
The more immediate catalyst was my
observation of various long-term "relationships" (my use of the term excludes marriage) and their eventual dissolution. What
struck me in each case was the couples' surprise at the fading of love and the resigna·
tion with which they accepted their parting.
I saw a remarkable mixture of innocence
and cynicism. The surprise that accompa·
nied the couples' loss of passion showed
shallow understanding of the way men and
women work together. The easy resigna·
tion suggested weary sophistication. But
perhaps the combination, innocence and
cynicism, ought not surprise. In our time
the kind of experience likely to promote
such cynicism is readily available, but seri·
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ous and thorough thought about the malefemale relationship is rare. We are jaded by
our past, and as pure of any real insight as
if we'd led the cloistered lives of our ances·
tors. Experience rather than understanding
has become the god to whom we appeal
The old rules that governed such matters
have been overthrown, but the subsequent
void is yet unfilled. No new constitution
was born of this revolution but only pur~
poseless freedom. Experience is now avail~
able in plenty, to what end no one knows. If
wisdom is not the aim, and since we've es·
tablished no rights and wrongs it cannot be,
experience itself must be the end. We are
left with a society that uses up mates as it
does cars, with equanimity. We have learned
to cloak the absence of thought with the
jargon of "relationships."
For most of my generation, marriage has
been, at best, an irrelevancy. We have slept
together-if not carelessly, then certainly
without mutual promise or obligation. When
we grew somewhat more attached we have
moved in together rather than marry. We
were "not ready" for marriage although
what we were waiting for was never quite
clear. We wanted to "test" each other first
to ensure that our marriage would never
end in divorce. We did not see the point of
"a piece of paper," because if we loved
each other that was enough, and if love
ceased it was only reasonable that the
union should also dissolve. Lest we bind
ourselves to anything that might become
difficult, we chose the temporary over the
permanent, the safe and casual over the
risky and demanding.
Now, months or years later, we find that
"something has happened," that we do not
in fact feel about each other as we once did.
What a good thing we didn't marry! The
situation is unpleasant, and it seems a pity
to part after so much shared past, but at
least no divorce is necessary. Yet if we are
not quite satisfied with the knowledge that
our caution was justified, if we are perhaps
uneasy about relationships with "planned
obsolescence," then we may well Wonder
what "happened," what went wrong.
It is not a very difficult puzzle. The arrangement was from the beginning inten·
103
�tionally temporary. Is it surprising that the
love also should be temporary? No, promises were made, no future anticipated. Is it
surprising that there should in fact be no
future? When two people have shared (another word, like urelationships" which has
been grossly overused but seems hard to
avoid) everything that can presently be
shared but have made no promises about
future sharing, it is not surprising that they
should eventually weary of each other.
Indeed, that very refusal to promise future love must immediately lessen present
love. When lover says to beloved, "I love
you now, but can't guarantee the future,"
he has already damaged their present. Pea·
ple who love may, of course, themselves be
sensible and cautious, but only insofar as
they are and do something other than love.
For love, itself, is by nature immoderate and
demanding. It is content with nothing less
than total commitment: love is itself the
food of love. Promise of love-guaranteed
future love-enables present love. When
we deny our mutual future, we remove the
endless supply of love and so begin to starve
our present love.
It seems a simple truth, that love which
is not fed will die; but it is one which is extraordinarily difficult both to remember and
to act upon. Love must grow or decline. Unless the couple is willing to promise a shared
future, their love cannot grow,,indeed, must
fade. The couple have avoided the promise, and as they watch their love weaken,
they agree, not surprisingly, to part.
The self-defeating effects of intentioned
temporariness seem evident; but we have yet
to address explicitly the initially mentioned
objection to marriage. The second, that
the couple must "test" one another, must
live together for awhile to see if things
work out, seems obviously mistaken. ''Testing" assumes a possible end of love, when
it is precisely the opposite which must be assumed if the love is to be fed and so prosper.
More interesting is the first objection,
the notion of "being ready." At the root of
this phrase and of many difficulties with
marriage-whether of the initial decision
to marry or the later and sadder one of divorce-lies one particular problem: that of
identity (we seem hounded by these once
worthy, now sadly jargonized words for
which we can find no alternative). It is the
problem which Tolstoy addresses so mar·
velously in Anna Karenina where he treats
104
marriage as an identity-giver, and which has
become especially important with the rise
of "Women's Liberation."
The refusal to commit oneself to another
in the name of finding or perhaps preserving one's identity has today become commonplace. We wonder at those men and
women who are not interested in a career,
in contributing to the GNP-and who prefer to stay at home with a family. We assume they are less complete, more reliant
upon others for their identity, less selfpossessed. An unattached woman with a
promising career is respected because she
is "free," dependent on no one and able to
"be herself." A married woman with a child
(although we are taught to pay lip service
to the "homemaker") is considered a mere
adjunct of her family who is unable to "realize her full potential." If talk of "finding
oneself" is passe now, it is only because
such ideas have found almost universal ac·
ceptance. We act as if this "self" were out
there somewhere, ready made and awaiting
discovery; or if we have already "found" our·
selves," we suppose we must guard our findings assiduously to preserve our own sacred
"individuality.''
The obvious mistake in all this is the un·
ders~anding of the self as something apart
from what defines it. We are always defined
by others. We do not and cannot define ourselves. An internal search for identity is
doomed to failure, because our sense of reality is so entirely bound up with others
that we cannot be sure of anything on our
own. Alone, we are capable of endless selfdoubt. The inner dialogue arrives at no
conclusion and will trap us in circles if unaided by an external presence. We are in
fact known and know ourselves by the
company we keep.
The fear of losing oneself in marriage, of
denying one's identity by joining it with an·
other's, is groundless. If we are inescapably
defined by others, the question is not
whether we wish rather to identify ourselves by our mate than to maintain independence and individuality, but whether
we choose one alliance over another. The
choice against spouse is not a victory for
self, but only the decision to be defined by
other and inevitably larger groups: proponents of the ERA, Moral Majority mem·
bers, Soho loft-dwellers, Visa-Card carriers.
We are all constantly defining and redefining ourselves by membership in various or·
ganizations. But insofar as our definition of
self is acquired solely from such groups, we
have forfeited any claim to some special
unique identity.
Commitment to a single other gives one
a specificity, an individuality not achiev·
able by participation in a variety of groups.
The statement, "She is the one who married A_ B_" is manifestly more specific
than "She is 3 lawyer." There are, to be
sure, thousands of lawyers. There is only
one wife of A._ B_. Equally, the single
most specific statement A_ B_ could
make about himself is "I am the one who
married C_ D_." Neither of them there·
by become mere adjuncts of the other.
Rather, they have defined themselves with
utter specificity and so possess their selves
most securely. The fear of commitment in
the name of self is mere self-deception be·
cause we are bound to "find ourselves" in
others in any case, and because if we are
really concerned about individuality and
differentiation from others, we will always
be most individual when we ally ourselves
with one other.
Let us return to the phrase, "being ready."
One must grant its occasional legitimacy.
Until we begin to make sense of the many
larger identifying groups and claim membership in some rather than in others, it
might well be folly to attempt the conclusively defining decision: the choice of a
spouse. But to procrastinate indefinitely is,
quite literally, self-defeating. It is frighten·
ing to marry, consciously to choose and de·
clare one's ultimate definition. And it is
easy to understand why so many have happily taken advantage of society's relaxed at·
titude toward living together. If we can
avoid decisions, by all means let us do so,
but let us admit that we do so out of laziness and fear, not out of a lofty sense of
self-fulfillment.
It is a radical step to risk defining oneself
by a single other, but it offers wilder possibilities than any other alliance. To marry is
not to surrender one's own individuality
but to join it with another's to create some·
thing radically new and unpredictable.
Much has been made of the security of marriage. I have never desired that sort of se·
curity; it is precisely the larger insecurity,
the increase of possibilities and the risk of
creation, that entices me.
Finally, we must address the third of
those initial objections. Why bother with
AUTIJMN/WINTER 1982-83
�the "piece of paper" which is the evidence
of a public promise? If we have promised
faithfulness to each other, what does it
matter that society know? After all, is it not
a private affair?
In fact, the promise of marriage is anything but private. As marriage is the most
profound commitment between two persons, so its public declaration is the most
profound action we can perform in the
world of men. The public promise to love is
the remarkable merging of the private with
the public, of the individual with the universal, of the world of thought with the
world of action. For in the public sphere,
action rules, in the private, thought. To assume that One can promise love in private is
seriously to misunderstand the nature of
promise. Promise is action and therefore an
essentially public undertaking. It is through
promise that a lasting love-a love "till
death us do part"-is made possible, piecisely because we are thereby transferred
from the private, unsure, and always vulnerable world of thought to the public,
strong, and definite world of action. Public
promise frees us. from dependence on our
"feelings," which are dark and easily swayed.
We are set free in the clarity of action.
Faithfulness to one person and its public
avowal are essentially one and the same. If it
is through promise that faithful love is made
possible and promise is a public event, then
to promise faithfulness is to declare it publicly. Moreover, the problem we have with
the "piece of paper" is precisely the same
problem we have with commitment. Both
stem from a fundamental misunderstanding
of identity. I have already discussed the fear
of losing oneself in marriage. Unwillingness
to make public avowal is the same fear taken
one step further. It is again the attempted
separation of self (although this time "self"
includes the loved one) from the external
world. It is to forget that we are always defined by others and so are inescapably public. When I marry, my definition is radically
altered and must necessarily affect my relationship to my other "definers" -the Public. Denial of "the piece of paper" can only
be futile evasion.
Prevailing contemporary opinion maintains that the private is somehow more
"real" than the public. Again, this implies a
misunderstanding of "public." The publicprivate dichotomy is that of action and
thought, and it is, after all, action which
1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
shapes thought, which gives it final definition. We are all of us a strange mixture of
public and private, but to assume that the
one is more profound, more "real" than the
other, is to misunderstand the distinction.
Serious participation in public affairs is
increasingly rare. Indeed, we assume those
who do pursue public life to be either crazy
or crooked. More_ and more we desire only
to be left alone, free to pursue private happiness. It seems no coincidence that this is
the same time in which the fear of, or perhaps studied disinterest in, marriage is also
so prevalent. Confusion about identity is at
the root of both. Only when we fully understand that the self is not a separate entity,
that we can never be wholly private, will we
risk commitment to the other-whether an
individual or a group.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about
the public-private division is our ability to
transcend it. We do so daily but nowhere
more completely than in marriage. In marriage, the profoundly private-love-becomes public. The indefinable is defined
and so ensured. We receive our ultimate
identity by the choice of spouse even as
our love is identified through unconditional promise. For in marriage conditions
are surrendered. We promise a love "'till
death us do part," a promise made possible
precisely in the making, because it is the
knowledge that love must last which allows
it freedom and the chance to grow, and because promise as action allows love to
transcend the problems inherent in its own
realm of the private. That we are at once so
entirely divided and yet able to transcend
such division is most miraculous. The possibility of promise is, after all, something
we share with no other creature. Let us not
surrender the distinction.
KARl JENSON
An actress, Kari Jenson lives and works in New
York.
THE HOLOCAUST MISSION:
July 29 to August 12, 1979
At the end of 1978 President Carter establishe_d a Commission on the Holocaust.
It was charged with the task of proposing an
appropriate memorial to the Jewish victims
of the Nazi regime. There was an element
of retroactivity in the presidenes decision,
a reaching out for the five million dead
whose very identity as Jews was not readily
recognized by the United States at a time
when they were being subjected to a sys·
tematic process of destruction. Now they
were to have a monument under official
U.S. auspices to recall the days when they
died alone.
The drafting of such a recommendation
is quite an undertaking and the work was
to be carried out by (I) a small staff consisting of a part-time director, full-time deputy
director and full-time assistant, (2) the "President's Commission" itself-a large body of
twenty~four members chosen from the public, plus five from the Senate and five from
the House of Representatives, and (3) an
advisory board almost as big as the commission. To finance the half year or so of deliberations and planning, a . modest budget
was allocated to the commission by the Department of the Interior. Commissioners
and advisory board members accepted no
fees and their official travel outside the
United States was to be billed to them personally.
Most members of the commission as
well as the board were Jews, a number of
them survivors. The most conspicuous profession in the group was the clergy (Jewish,
Protestant, and Catholic), albeit one that
was drawn mainly from academic life.
There was an obvious tilt to the northeast,
although several members had come from
Georgia. A number of commissioners
could be described as prominent in public
or cultural life. Few, very few, were young.
I had little inkling or knowledge of the
consultations which led to the creation of
the commission and the selection of its
me~bership. No doubt I was approached
because I had devoted about three decades
of research and writing to the Holocaust,
but I have long been accustomed to working
in solitude. No wonder that in one of the
105
�first telephone calls informing me of the
commission's existence I was admonished
not to turn down an appointment ifl should
be requested to serve. I would be needed
because the memorial was to be more than
mute stone; it was to contain records, books,
films, and it was to be a depository of such
materials in order that one might progress
beyond remembering the imperfectly known
to know what was imperfectly remembered.
This was the offer I could not refuse. To
my surprise, virtually all of the commissioners espoused the idea of a "living" memorial, a building in which one could meet,
learn, and think. More than that, there was
to be an endowment to aid researchers
with fellowships and grants. Of course,
most of the funds for this program would
have to be private. We would not only have
to recOmmend a broad framework, but we
would also have to think about the means.
During an early meeting, mention was
made by the director of a journey abroad,
to visit some of the principal sites in Poland
and the USSR where the jews had been
killed and to survey hitherto unavailable
documentary holdings in the archives of
these countries. This mission preoccupied
me from that very moment; it filled my mind
long after it was over.
I had never been in Poland or the USSR;
I had never visited Auschwitz, Treblinka,
or Babi Yar. Something-not only lack of
money-had kept me from traveling to
these places. I had "seen" them, of course,
in German documents. It is in those files,
thousands and tens of thousands of them,
that I had wandered and it is there that I
had encountered "planet Auschwitz" and
the "concentration camp universe." Eventually I had become familiar with these
phenomena, their terrain, logistics, and operational characteristics. Yet in essence
they remained mysterious to me and inexplicable.
"No one who has not been there can
imagine what it was like." How often had I
heard this phrase from survivors. Its implications could hardly be overlooked: those
who had not lived through the experience
would not be able to recreate it, even if
they studied the original records or examined the old barbed wires. There is no way
one can be in Auschwitz anymore; it is not
a concentration camp today, but a museum. Nor can one be in Treblinka, it is a
106
sculpture. One cannot be in Babi Yar either, it is a monument in a park. What then
could one recapture in those surroundings?
What could we do there now?
The survivors on the commission were
to be our guides. The Holocaust mission
was in the first instance their journey. At
the opening meeting of the commission in
Washington, a procedural point had been
raised by a Christian member. He said that
survivors should always speak first. He was
gently overruled by the survivors themselves who preferred to follow a proper
American alphabetical order, but here, on
the grounds where they had been the outcasts of mankind, orphaned or widowed in
a single night, they were to be at the head
of the procession.
· The undisputed spiritual leader was Elie
Wiesel, once an inmate of Auschwitz, now
the chairman of the commission, ''prophetlike," mesmerizing, saying at every occasion not merely that which must be said to
a host, but also those things that for most
of us would have been unutterable, and
saying them in the morning, the afternoon,
or the night. Fluent in French, English,
Hebrew, Yiddish (not to mention Hungarian), this gaunt figure moved among us,
sleeping little and eating almost nothing.
We almost did not go. The Soviet Union
issued visas to us on the Saturday prior to
our scheduled Sunday departure, and it denied entry to the part-time director of the
commission as well as to a member of the
advisory board. (Both had visited the USSR
before and had apparently been in contact
with dissidents.) The detailed itinerary was
a series of last-minute arrangements that
must have been put together with the assistance of extraordinarily diligent officials of
the Department of State and embassies
abroad. The group was large. Though it included fewer than half of the commissioners and advisory board members (none at
all from the legislative branch), there were
wives, reporters, and invited guests, some
of them financial supporters of remembrance projects. At the many ceremonies
at graves and monuments, the cameras
would sweep across this crowd which numbered between fifty and sixty.
Only after we had left the United States
did I understand the multiple purposes of
the mission. We would not only have to absorb much that we would encounter dur-
ing our hurried visits and meetings; we
would also have to impart information to
others. Our foreign hosts in Eastern Europe would ask us what we meant when we
said the word "Holocaust" and we would
devote more time than we had anticipated
to answering that one question above all.
Poland
Today Poland is a homogeneous society.
Unlike the Polish state of 1939, the present
republic has no substantial minorities. The
territories inhabited by Ukrainians and
Lithuanians were yielded to the USSR,
and from the western provinces, acquired
after the war, the Germans were expelled.
The Jewish community, once 3,300,000
dispersed in the large cities and smaller
towns, now numbers 6,000. Ninety percent
of the prewar Jewish population were kiHed
in the Holocaust; most of the remainder
survived as soldiers, 'refugees, or forced laborers outside or inside the destructive
arena, and these people have since moved
to other countries, mainly to Israel and the
United States.
The three million Polish Jews who succumbed to German destruction represent
nearly three-fifths of all the jewish dead.
Moreover, Poland (as defined by the
boundaries of 1939) is the graveyard not
only of those three million, but also of a
million more transported there in special
trains from several countries of Germandominated Europe.
Before their final destruction, the Jews
of Poland were incarcerated in hundreds of
ghettos, large and small. Near some of
these ghettos the death camps appeared.
From these ghettos the Jews were moved
out to the gas chambers where they were
killed along with the other jewish deportees from the northern, western, and
southern portions of the continent.
Few are the traces of Jewry in the physical panorama of contemporary Warsaw. As
we stood in front of the monument-cast
in heroic proportions-of the Warsaw
ghetto fighters, I glanced at the ordinary
apartment buildings erected by the Polish
government on the former ghetto site. They
were already showing signs of wear. I knew
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�that the old quarter was no more. For sev- every unmarked grave, every prison bar." I
eral years I had been one of the editors of took down these words and almost memothe diary kept by the man who was Chair- ' rized them; they rang in my ears longer
man of the Jewish Council of the Warsaw than any others expressed in these official
Ghetto, Adam Czerniakow. Again and meetings.
again, I had consulted a map of the TYet I knew that during our century, Jews
shaped walled ghetto, some ten full blocks had endured misery in Polish society. It is
at its widest and twenty blocks long, which hardly an unknown story and in the Amerihoused well over 400,000 people in three can Jewish community it has shaped sentior four story buildings. After the deporta- ments much less mellow than my own. I
tions, and the battle ignited by the armed could imagine a reaction in America to
resistance of the last ghetto inhabitants, what we were hearing in Warsaw that day.
the SS razed the jewish quarter lest War- It would be said in our country that Poland
saw regain its prewar population size. Now is embracing its Jews, now that they are
that there are Polish houses where the gone, as much as it was rejecting them
ghetto stood, it is difficult to visualize its when they were still alive. In the extreme
former boundary even at the Umschlag- form of this view, Poland has been the antiplatz through which the official ghetto ex- semitic nation par excellence, discriminatports and imports passed and from which ing against the Jewish population before
more than 300,000 Jews were taken to Tre- the war, welcoming German actions against
blinka.
jewry during the_conflict, and all but exOn the first day we visited also a Polish pelling the remnant thereafter. I myself
monument commemorating the Polish have always attempted to assess evidence
struggle against the Germans. At that cere- of Polish hostility toward the jews in the
mony picked Polish troops stood by and broadest possible context. Long before the
the American ambassador was present as Holocaust, there was little tranquility for
we placed flowers at the foot of the memo- Jewry in several countries of Europe. After
rial. The Polish People's Republic does not the German invasion of Poland, the ghetdeny the Holocaust, it does not obscure toization process instituted by the occupathe fact that jews died as jews, but it will tion authorities resulted in a reallocation of
remind the world of the Poles who died as Jewish housing and Jewish trading to the
Poles, and it will present the two fates in a Polish sector. The Poles profited, if that is
formula suggesting parity. Repeatedly we the word, from a Jewish misfortune. The
heard a statistic indicating that three mil- Germans set up also their death camps on
lion Polish Jews and three million non- Polish soil, not, however, to take advantage
Jewish Poles had died as a consequence of of any Polish hospitality, but to reduce
the German occupation. The Polish toll- costs, particularly of transportation. There
casualties in battle, deaths in camps, and was no central Polish authority under Gerfatalities in epidemics-was calculated a man rule and it is not Poland that destroyed
long time ago and may well be reexamined the Jews-this deed was performed by Nazi
by experts, but when Polish Justice Minis- Germany.
ter Jerzy Bafia referred to this "Golgotha"
Still, I could not ignore the circumstance
as a trauma that after thirty-five years was that for the remaining handful of Jews, life
still being felt in every walk oflife, I believed in Poland had become difficult and even
oppressive. Only a few days after our stay
him without need for any substantiation.
For Czeslaw Pilichowski, Director of the in Eastern Europe, I was to meet a middleMain Commission for Investigation of Nazi aged Jew in Denmark who had emigrated
Crimes in Poland, the double disaster in- from Poland nearly a decade ago. I asked
flicted on Jews and Poles by the same im- him what his profession had been before
placable foe was more than a matter of his emigration. He was a major in the Poljuxtaposition. He cited a poem, "To the ish army. Had he retired? No, he had been
Polish Jews," by Wladislaw Broniewski, dismissed abruptly in 1967, one week after
which contains the verse "Our common the outbreak of the Six-Day War between
home has been wrecked and the blood shed Israel and the Arab states. No doubt, the
makes us brothers, we have been united by reasons for the action against him were
execution walls, by Dachau, Auschwitz, by linked to foreign policy issues, but I could
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
not help being troubled by his experience
and the similar dilemma faced by other
Jews in the Soviet Union. The problem is
the age-old lesson so ingrained in the mind
of the Eastern Enropean Jew that eventually he will suffer, not for a religion he does
not practice or a Zionist cause he does not
espouse, but for the fact that in the eyes of
all those around him he remains unalterably a jew.
Our hosts placed stress on the Polish
agony during the war, and they implied
that since those trying days Jews and Poles
have had much in common. They also reminded us of the help that ordinary Poles
had given to endangered Jews in the course
of the German occupation. This chapter in
the history of Polish-Jewish relations was
emphasized in speeches, books, and exhibits. I had occasion to look at some of the
evidence-it was documentary. In German
parlance, Poles who had extended shelter
or sustenance to Jews were guilty of Judenbeherbergung, a crime for which the penalty
was a swift death. The Germans had the
habit of posting the names of Polish men
and women who lost their lives for such
activities.
We had a great many meetings. Addresses were given, points made, themes
stressed. At the end of a long day, I would
walk alone in Warsaw. Once, before midnight, I saw a Polish family placing flowers
on a plaque at the entrance of a park.
We have moved from cemetery to cemetery, said Elie Wiesel later in Jerusalem,
and everywhere we went we found a strange
beauty. This observation about localities
in which masses of people were killed expressed in quintessence a thought I had
during our visit to-Treblinka.
We had traveled to the site of the death
camp in the stifling heat of a Hungarian
bus. On the way, a survivor pointed out to
us the small Jewish towns that had once existed nearby. We passed old wooden houses,
rode over a narrow bridge, and saw old
freight cars at a railway siding-a deportation train preserved there by the Polish
government. I wish we could have approached the camp by rail, as the deportees
of 1942 had come, but we were arriving on
a very' warm day at the end of July, at a
time of year when the first of the Warsaw
107
�ghetto transports were being hauled into
this killing center. Though the distance is
not long, the Jewish victims had been moved
much more slowly than we, and they must
have jumped out of the cars with forebod·
ings and parUy in shock, but also with some
sense of physical relief. Did they notice the
sky and the trees? It took but two hours for
the deportees to be deprived of all their
personal belongings and to be walked the
incredibly short distance to the chambers
where they were gassed.
A small German guard force, augmented
by Ukrainian auxiliaries, killed three quarters of a million Jews in Treblinka on a vir·
tual assembly line. Several hundred Jewish
inmates employed in maintenance and facing certain death rebelled in August 1943.
Few were the survivors of the break, but
those Jews who did not escape from T reblinka did not outlive the camp. In the end,
the bodies in the mass graves were exhumed. All the installations were razed,
and a Ukrainian farm was established on
the site to restore its pastoral appearance.
Only a cobblestone path, built by prison·
ers, was left where Treblinka had existed.
After the war, the Polish government laid
down concrete ties, arranged as a symbolic
railway track, and set up hundreds of jagged
stones, each representing a Jewish community, around the stone meffiorial. For this
construction, the entire terrain was used
on a scale of 1: l, in the place where it had
all happened. A guide pointed out that af·
ter every heavy rain, tiny bone fragments
are disgorged by the earth and mix with
pebbles on the ground. Involuntarily, one
or two visitors bent down to pick up what
might have been such relics, only to drop
them quickly. I was still gazing at the
woods and I thought I heard the whine of
heavy trucks in the distance. Where is the
highway, I asked? Where are the trucks go·
ing? There is no highway and there are no
trucks, I was told. I was hearing the famous
Treblinka wind moving through the trees.
Much farther from Warsaw, to the south·
west, was Auschwitz, the most lethal place
in Nazi Europe. One million Jews died
there, as well as several hundred thousand
Poles, Russians, Frenchmen-all the nationalities in the orbit of the German army
and the German Security Police. Auschwitz
was a complex of three camps: the main
one, or Auschwitz I, which housed the ad-
108
ministration as well as a large number of
inmates; the killing center of Birkenau,
designated Auschwitz II; and the industrial
camp, Monowitz, or Auschwitz Ill. The
entire cluster was photographed repeatedly
by allied reconnaissance aircraft in 1944.
Auschwitz I is still intact. Its barracks
stand where they were, a reconstructed gas
chamber may be viewed, and the crematory
is in working order. The death camp ofBirk·
enau is almost bare; the tall smoke stacks of
the crematories are gone, but near the rail·
way track one may climb over the ruins of
the largest gas chambers ever built.
Adjacent to Auschwitz I is the city of
Auschwitz with its large railway yard.
Houses now filled with children are ranged
along the edge of the former camp. Every
day the inhabitants of these buildings may
look out of their windows and see the roofs
of barracks.
We stepped in, wearing our tags with the
emblem of the United States and the leg·
end "President's Commission on the Holocaust.'' The main entrance crowned with
iron grill work still proclaims the slogan
Arbeit macht frei (work makes free) and a
smaller sign at the side says HALT Ausweise
vorzeigen (Halt-show identification). The
walkways and buildings were those of a
permanent military fort, but that appearance was deceptive. On iron bars still flank·
ing the street on which we were walking,
men had been hanged. Individual buildings,
which the Germans called blocks, were put
to unique concentration camp uses: in one,
surgical experiments were performed, in
another prisoners were pushed into a cage
and starved to death. Between two of the
barracks there was an alley used for shoot·
ings. The windows of the building to the
left had been filled so that prisoners housed
there could not see the executions. To the
right, however, no such precautions had
been taken, since the only inmates kept
there were the condemned, waiting their
turn.
Each of the buildings is part of the Ausch·
witz museum. I went to see the exhibits of
old shoes, eyeglasses, prosthetic devices,
utensils, and luggage left behind by the
Germans because of their unsuitability for
shipment to the Reich. I saw a hallway filled
with photographs of Polish prisoners, young
men and women, who were brought here
in 1942 and 1943. Each of them looked
healthy, for their pictures were taken on
the day of arrival. For each the SS had
noted also the date of birth, and the date of
death. Most had lived only a few months in
Auschwitz. I peered at these photographs,
one or the other adorned with fresh flowers
left by Polish friends or family. I wanted to
find some young man who had been as old
as I was at that time. The search did not
take long. My contemporary, born a few
days before me, was dead as a teenager in
Auschwitz even before my schooling in
New York was interrupted by the war.
In Birkenau, standing on earth, sand, and
what may have been ashes, I attached myself to a Polish young lady of noble beauty
and refined features who explained the history of the camp. She was obviously a professional historian and I admired her grasp
of complex information. She was preparing
an album of German SS photographs of
Auschwitz and I promised her aerial photographs from our own archives.
Our group was about to be divided, some
to visit an old synagogue in nearby Krakow,
the others to stay in Auschwitz. just at that
moment I began to feel an unmistakable
pain, a cramp brought on by a kidney stone
which I must have formed. I am prone to
this malady when there is too much heat
and not enough water to drink. The pain
always worsens and then I need morphine
for relief. Obviously, I should have left im·
mediately to see a physician in Krakow, but
instead I raised my hand to join those who
chose to remain in the camp. I returned to
the barracks, the old shoes, to the photo·
graphs of the dead Poles, to the alley, to
the cells. I wanted to stand where the present pontiff had knelt in prayer. My pain
subsided, my muscles relaxed, and at the
end of the day, I knew that I would have no
need of drugs.
There was to be one more visit to a cemetery in Poland, a real one in Warsaw. By
now, I had run out of time-time to look at
documents in the Jewish historical insti·
tute, and time to survey the land behind
the tombstones where 80,000 jews, dead of
emaciation and disease, had been buried
during the ghetto days. I wanted to see only
one grave, a regular large slab half hidden
in the growing thicket of weeds. It is the
resting place of Adam Czerniakow, the
chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council,
who took his life upon the outbreak of de-
AUTUMN/WINTER 1982-83
�portations after he had failed to save his
people.
The Soviet Union
I was startled when Elie Wiesel, the chairman of our commission, called a meeting
of the group in the open environment of a
dining room of our Warsaw hotel to discuss
the advisability of proceeding to the Soviet
Union in the light of the refusal of visas to
the director of the commission and to a
member of the advisory board. So far as I
was concerned, that issue had been settled
before we left our homes in the United
States-we would go. Much to Wiesel's
dismay, several of us spoke up to reiterate
the earlier decision. Exhausted by a full
day, we reassured him in a sluggish manner
that at some appropriate time in the future
we would express our outrage to protest
the Soviet action. Only one member of our
group, Bayard Rustin, understood immediately that Wiesel was attempting to elicit
our outrage on the spot in order that he
might use it for yet another attempt to obtain the visas. I was too concerned with the
possibility that he migh't actually abandon
our original plans to be of help to him. For
me, the visit to the Soviet Union was essential, if only because we had been admitted
as members of an official Holocaust commission. Already my head was filled with
burning curiosity. How would we be received? What would be said to us?
The director of the commission, Irving
Greenberg, was not in Europe. Perhaps he
had expected an immediate statement of
solidarity from the membership. The advisory board member whose visa was also denied, had come with us as far as Warsaw.
He had in fact been instrumental in arranging the entire journey. It was his miserable
travel bureau we all had to use. Now he
conceded defeat: he wanted us to continue
without him. He only asked that we would
say one prayer for him at Babi Yar and
another in the Moscow synagogue. His
voice breaking, he sat down, but then rose
again to apologize for having displayed his
feelings so openly. Now he wanted to give
us a reason for leaving him behind. He had
been a member of a partisan unit in Eastern Europe during the war. There was an
iron rule in the unit that a wounded man
would be shot by his comrades lest their
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
mission be jeopardized. I liked Miles Lerman. This former partisan and current oil
distributor personifies the character traits I
, have come to associate with survivors.
They are men and women with fast reactions, high intelligence, great endurance,
and an extraordinary capacity for regenerating their lives from the impact of shattering experiences. When I saw Lerman again
in Copenhagen, barely a week after our
meeting in the Warsaw hotel, he was talking to all of us, full of inquiries and plans.
I was not prepared for the Soviet Union.
As a political scientist, I should not have
been surprised by anything, not the standard of living as exemplified by the merchandise in a department store, nor the
restrictions so evident in the mere absence
of foreign non-communist newspapers in
the lobbies of our hotels. I knew of the So·
viet belief that distant goals require constant sacrifices: for capital formation and
industrialization, many consumers goods
are not produced; for the stability of theregime, intellectual and physical mobility is
curtailed; and for the sake of unity in the
Soviet Union, the separate memories of
constituent nationalities, including the Holocaust that befell the Soviet Jews, must be
submerged. What I had not quite expected
was backwardness in so much art, architecture, and historiography, that stale conforming manner in which Soviet designers
and writers are casting the aesthetic qualities of life. Hence I was taken aback also by
the counterpart of this stylistic retardation
in the formula ridden answers of bureaucrats to central questions about the Second
World War and the Holocaust which had
transpired in its course. The approach of
Soviet officialdom to the meaning of history is fixed and rigid; the encounter of
these men with us could be no different.
In Poland, we had not only been warmly
received; we were given assurances that
the Polish archives would be open to American researchers interested in the German
occupation. Poland holds a large quantity
of German documents, particularly records
portraying the destructive scene at a local
leveL Much that occurred in the final hours
of Polish Jewry and of other Jews deported
to Poland is reflected in these files. The
USSR also possesses documents of Ger-
man occupation authorities, not to speak
of contemporaneous Soviet correspondence dealing directly with the German
onslaught and its effects on the civilian
populatidn. I was interested in these materials, though I realized that access to them
would be a major problem. Not only would
a segmentation of occupation history into
Jewish and other subject matter be unwelcome in principle, but such sorting requires
an examination of all the German records
in detail. We know enough about these documents to expect any report, whether by
German SS offices, civilian overseers, military government, railroad directorates, or
economic agencies, to contain information
about a variety of events-the production
of wooden carts and the shooting of Jews
might be described on a single page. Moreover, the researcher might be particularly
interested in comparisons and contexts; he
might wish to investigate the German "racial ladder" and the placement of various
groups in this scheme, or the role of native
auxiliaries in German service, or the psychological repercussions of shootings on
White Russian or Ukrainian communities.
It would be inherently impossible for So·
viet authorities to permit foreigners the
pursuit of information about any aspect of
the Jewish catastrophe without allowing
them some insight into the entire fabric of
Soviet society at a time when it was undergoing its greatest stress.
Tactically, there was yet another problem, one which affects all attempts to effect
exchanges of knowledge with the Soviet
Union. The United States is an open society, our libraries and archives are accessible
to all visitors without any stipulation of reciprocity. What Soviet or East German researchers want to know is given to them
without restrictions; for what we attempt
to find out, we have no more to give. In
Kiev, on our first night, walking with Bayard Rustin, I voiced the thought that one
argument-the only argument-might be
the point that it would be in the interest of
the USSR to open its shelves to us, that in
the United States there was little appreciation of the Soviet agony or the Soviet contribution in the Second World War, that
findings made by American researchers in
the Soviet Union would carry more weight
in our country than the selection and presentation of topics by Soviet historians and
109
�journalists. Rustin was without question
the most astute and experienced member
of our mission, and what he said to me that
evening in Kiev was somewhat as follows:
"I hope you do not mind, my friend, my
telling you that you are naive."
a
Kiev has the appearance of new city.
Before the war, its population was 900,000;
now the number is 2,150,000. From Sep·
!ember 19, 1941, to November 6, 1943,
Kiev was in German hands. As soon as the
city had been captured, a unit of the SS
and Police, Einsatzkommando 4a, ordered
the Jewish inhabitants by means of wall
posters to assemble for "resettlement."
They were taken to a ravine at the city
boundary wh.ere the Kommando, a small
company-size unit augmented by detach·
ments of German Order Police, massacred
them in a three-day shooting operation.
The count was 33,771 jewish dead. When,
in the spring of 194 2, the commander of
Kommando 4a, Paul Blobel, received a visi·
tor from Berlin (Albert Hartl), he pointed
to the mass grave, explaining that the Jews
were buried there. Now, more than three
and a half decades later, the Chairman of
the Executive Committee of the Kiev City
Soviet of Peoples' Deputies welcomed the
Holocaust commission to the city, and Soviet guides showed the recently built memorial to the American visitors.
I do not know what route the bus was
following from our hotel, but the ride
seemed very short and when we arrived at
the ravine called Babi Yar I immediately
asked how far we were from the center of
the city. Barely two miles was the answer. I
could not help wondering then how many
people, including the victims themselves,
must have heard the rifle shots and rna·
chine-gun fire. Babi Yar is a moon shaped
depression in the earth, covered with grass
and surrounded by trees. Raised on a ridge
that is jutting into the center of the dish is
a Janus-like monument. Facing the street
are heroic figures, while on the far side one
may see the tormented faces and contorted
bodies of Soviet citizens, including women
and children. I talked to the designer of the
memorial who explained, that the Germans
had shot captured partisans here and help·
less civilians there; the sculptor had kept
that geography in mind when he shaped
110
the monument. I knew that, unlike Blobel,
the Soviet planners of the memorial made
no mention of Jews. Our commission had
brought a wreath of flowers with streamers
commemorating Babi Yar as a Jewish tragedy and laid it down at the foot of the ped·
estal on which stood the partisans of stone.
The cantor sang, and I disengaged myself
from the coil of people around him, stepped
back twenty feet and looked up at the crown
of the monument. Two Soviet photographers rushed towards me and took pictures
of me at close range.
We were leaving Kiev for Moscow on a
Friday afternoon and I did not think that
we would have meetings until Monday. No
sooner, however, had we arrived when
several of us were asked to go to the headquarters of the Moscow Writers Union, a
building which in furnishings and atmo·
sphere reminded me of a typical student
center at an American university. It was
old and nondescript; on several of its floors
people were sitting, reading, eating. Our
delegation was headed by Wiesel and in·
eluded the theologian Robert McAfee
Brown, as well as Time magazine book
review editor Stefan Kanfer, not in his capacity as a correspondent covering our mission, but as a novelist pressed into service
at the spur of the moment to match the
formidable array of literary talent assembled on the Soviet side. To our surprise, the Soviet chairman introduced the
members of his group by citing their military records. Two had evidently received
high decorations and' another had risen
from private to major. "When you introduce us," I whispered to Wiesel, "you may
say that I was a soldier." "An officer perhaps?" Wiesel asked quickly. "No, just a
soldier." Kanfer did not stir. He is a veteran
of the Korean conflict. Wrong war.
The Soviet delegation consisted of eight
people; half of them were Jews. Were so
many Jews assembled as a courtesy to us?
The idea was unsettling. As if to read my
mind, one of the Soviet writers referred to
himself as a member of a minority~he was
a Russian. Later, the Soviet chairman
showed us two large tablets listing the names
of Moscow writers killed in action. Half
were Jewish names, he explained.
We were eating a full meal, the best I
was to be served in the Soviet Union, and
we were assured that we could have every
course without concern-the food was
completely kosher. While we were dining,
each of us spoke, not as one would in an official meeting with formal agenda, but to
say something personal. One of the Soviet
writers (the one who had risen from private
to major) was Anatoli Rybakov. This is
what he told us.
He had grown up, of Jewish parents,
wholly assimilated into Russian culture. He
did not attend religious services and he
knew no Yiddish or Hebrew. His eighteen
novels had no Jewish content. One day,
however, he wanted to write a short story
in which the two protagonists, a man and a
woman, were Jews. He wanted his story to
be about love, not merely the romantic
love of young people who had just met, but
also the mature love of a husband and wife
after they had lived with each other for
many years. He decided that his young
man should have migrated to Russia from
Switzerland in 1910, that he should have
met a young woman, married her, and
stayed on through the First World War and
the Revolution. To show them growing
older, he had to continue the story to 1941
and the German assault. He had spent three
years in research to construct a locality in
which his couple might have lived. By then
his story was becoming a novel. He had to
place them into a ghetto and inevitably he
had to_ construct the ultimate scene of a
German shooting operation. It troubled
him greatly that the Jews went to their
deaths with apparent docility, but he was
convinced that they had nO recourse and
that they died with dignity. After the publication of his novel he had received hun·
dreds of letters assuring him that he had
been right in his portrayal.
Wiesel spoke of his concern about Babi
Yar. Having been there only that morning,
still agitated by the experience, he had to
point out that it was painful to see the
monument without an inscription identifying the victims as Jews.
There are monuments and there are
monuments, the Russian chairman replied.
When,. for example, his -friend, Yevgenij
Yevtushenko, wrote a poem "Babi Yar" explicitly dwelling on the jewish fate, that
verse was a monument. Who could tell
which of the two monuments, the one of
rock or the other-on paper, would last the
longer?
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�The Saturday morning was devoted to Soviet archival administration. I had familan appearance by the commission and its iarized myself as well as I could with the
guests at the Moscow synagogue. I declined organization and holdings of the Soviet arto join the group. Religious observances chives by reading the standard work on that
make me uncomfortable and the political . subject by the American Sovietologist Paovertones of that particular visit disturbed tricia Grimsted. In her substantial volume,
me. We had come to the Soviet Union as a there is no mention of captured German
commission of the president and our man- documents. I would have to inquire about
date was the Holocaust. For me there was their location and availability in the course
no other purpose, but I realized that many of our discussions in Moscow.
of my colleagues did not share my singleThe chief of the Soviet team of archivists
mindedness. Our very presence in Moscow was the deputy director of the Main Archion a weekend was no accident; the Satur- val Administration, Vaganov. I pressed the
day in the synagogue had been planned to attack for the American group, supported at
show support for Soviet Jewry. Later I was every turn by my friends who were eager to
to learn that Elie Wiesel had asked for a widen any opening and exploit any breach.
private moment after a meeting with Proc- The Main Archival Administration, said
urator General Roman Rudenko to present Vaganov, had no German documents. It
a list of four incarcerated dissidents to the had no documents at all dated after 1940.
Soviet official. Wiesel is a deeply sensitive Furthermore, there was no "fond" or colman and he could not bring himself to re- lection identified as German documents as
member the dead by forgetting the living. I such. Where were they then? I asked. Did
myself was thinking about unknown, Rus- the Defense Ministry retain possession of
sified, and atheistic people whose lives in them? Documents dated after 1940, said
the. Soviet Union are increasingly filled Vaganov, were being kept by whatever
with questions and quandaries.
ministry was the appropriate custodian in
On Red Square, of all places, I was to accordance with their subject matter. In
have an unexpected encounter with one that case, I asked, when would documents
nameless individual. It was evening and dated 1941 or 1942 be transferred by minisfour of us, still wearing our tags, were stand- tries currently keeping them to the Main
ing there. He came up to us and in halting Archival Administration? There was a key,
but intelligible English said that he knew said Vaganov, according to which transfers
about our arrival from broadcasts on the were being made; the schedules varied on
Voice of America. His age was about twenty- the basis of different criteria. The Main Arnine and he was born in a small town far chival Administration did not know whe~
from Moscow of a Jewish father, long dead, documents would be handed over by the
and a Russian mother, still living. Some time Ministry of Defense. Was he saying, I asked,
ago he had moved to the Soviet capital that he had no German documents? The
with his Russian wife. By profession he was Soviet Archival Administration, said Vagaan engineer and he was working in his field, nov, may have documents needed for inbut lately he was contemplating emigra- vestigation of war crimes. One or another
tion. "Why?" I1 asked. "Because I want free- document may be found in the files of an
dom." Did he have access to military secrets Archive in Byelorussia or the Ukraine. We
in his job? Yes, he said, and that is why he should consUlt the volumes of the Soviet hiswas seeking employment in a position not tory of the Second World War for sources.
requiring knowledge of such information. We should avail ourselves of the existing
Once he had made the change he would system of cooperation between the Acadstay for a period of three years. Two of my emy of Sciences of the USSR and US acacompanions immediately handed him their demic bodies if we wished to utilize a Soviet
cards, but he would not give us his name. Archive.
Who was he? Why did he approach us?
Even before our queries to the archivists
Was I becoming paranoid for asking what were over, a larger group of our commishis purpose may have been?
sion had begun a meeting with Soviet hisBefore the commission had left the torians. We joined our colleagues to talk
United States, I had insisted on an oppor- with members of the World War II Section
tunity to meet with a representative of the of the Institute of the History of the USSR
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The
Soviet chairman was V. A. Kumanyov, but
the most active discussant at the Russian
end of the table was the military historian
of World War II Alexander Samsonov. It is
Samsonov who challenged our mission and
everything we stood for. In pursuing a study
of the Jewish disaster, he said, with World
War II as a background, we were reversing
reality and standing history on its head. As
a Marxist he had to conclude that the Fascist assault on the USSR was an attempt to
conquer the world. In the wake of this aggression, Jews were killed, Russians were
killed, Ukrainians were killed. The Fascist
plan was to wipe out entire peoples, including all of the Slavic nations. He himself was
a Bylorussian and more than thirty years
ago he had seen with his own eyes the devastation visited upon the area that was his
home.
Several of us replied to this argument.
We said that the jews had been the victims
of German actions from 1933 to 1945. The
ghettos were established on Polish soil in
1940 and when German armies suddenly
struck at the Soviet Union on june 22, 1941,
the Jews were facing mass death. We were
not unmindful of the fact that in German
plans the Slavic populations of Eastern Europe were destined for rapid enslavement
and ultimate extinction. Yet as Soviet forces
turned the tide of war in the titanic battle
of Stalingrad, the invader's vision of the
obliteration of the Slavs was dissipated in
the retreat. The Jews, however, were being
killed until the end; their annihil<ition became reality, and European Jewry, as we
once knew it, is no more.
Kumanyov now joined the debate. There
were differences of opinion, he said, particularly about Nazi policy vis-a-vis the Jews
in the total constellation of German planning. To Kumanyov the destruction of the
Jews was just an experiment which was to
lead to the annihilation of others. Thus he
agreed in part with Samsonov, in part with
us, but he had to add that if we were to look
at the Holocaust in an isolated manner, we
would weaken our common struggle against
Fascism.
We left the Soviet Union that afternoon.
The first of our two last stops was in Copenhagen, where we paid tribute to the
Danish people for their singular rescue effort of October 1943 which resulted in the
111
�clandestine transport in small boats of almost the entire Jewish population of Denmark to safety in Sweden. Our j~urney
ended with a depleted group in jerusalem
where our Israeli friends were worried that
the Holocaust Commission would not succeed in isolating itself from the urgings of
nationalities with martyrological claims of
their own. At Yad Vashem, Israel's Remembrance Authority, a display had been
prepared of original documents. One was
the last notebook of Adam Czerniakow
(the chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council) opened to the last entry. My colleague,
S. ). Staron, and I had worked with type·
written transcriptions and a facsimile edition of the diary; only now did I notice that
at the moment of Czerniakow's suicide,
hours after his final entry, the notebook
was just about full.
On September 27, 1979, the commission
assembled in the Rose Garden of the White
House for a presentation of its report to the
president. Elie Wiesel spoke in front of the
microphone, as President Carter stood at
his side, erect and motionless, looking off
into the distance. Was he listening to the
words7'Was he thinking about one of the
many crises with which he had to deal?
Wiesel, still thinking of Babi Yar, remarked that this massacre had occurred
just thirty-eight years before. The world
had looked on then and in the following
years, as the Holocaust swept across the
European Jewish communities.
The president responded, commending
us for our work and the journey that in itself was an act of memorialization. Then
he recalled the omissions of the time when
the world had looked the other way.
It was in the middle of the afternoon,
and for the president, not yet the middle of
his working day. He is like a prisoner, I
thought, always under guard, pressured by
every summons. That day he had given us
an hour. Could it be that he had already
devoted more time and thought to the Holocaust than his predecessor during the
war, Franklin Roosevelt, had managed
while the Jews were dying?
It is natural, I said to myself as I was walking in the streets of Washington that night,
for me to feel slightly depressed. Not because of those who would deny the Holocaust, or those who would dilute it, or the
others who would forget it-1 understand
them all. If I did not feel all that well, I was
merely experiencing the reaction I always
had after some concluding ceremony.
What I had to do now was to plan my research. There were documents I had to
read, particularly the records in the Polish
archives, and I would have to travel again
soon. Next year, in Auschwitz.
RAUL HILBERG
Professor of political science at the University of
Vermont, Raul Hilberg wrote The Destruction
of the European Jews, (Chicago 1961), which will
appear in a revised expanded edition in 1983
(Holmes and Meier). With Stanislaw Staron and
Josef Kermisz he edited The Warsaw Diary of
Adam Czerniakow, (Stein and Day 1979). "The
President's Commission on the Holocaust," after
its final report, was replaced by "The United
States Memorial Council."
FROM OUR READERS (Continued.from page 2)
colleges, do likewise. Several of them who
had never heard, of St. John's asked me
abOut it after reading the Review, and you
can bet that they read the article about the
New York Times versus Pravda, not the one
about Plotinus.
I am not berating the article about Plotinus or any other such article; I enjoy reading
them, too. But I think that the new editorial_y-clicy you have in mind will upset the
admirable balance (between the two types
of articles I gave examples of) that the Review has maintained over the last several issues. The general public, and most alumni,
will have no incentive to read it because
nothing will grab their attention. Offer
them something that they suspect will interest them, though, and they might read
the rest of the issue as well.
There is a case of such a publication as
you seem to want the Review to become; in
fact, it is none other than the Review itself
in the days when it wa,s called The College.
As I recall, I seldom read it, and none of my
non-St. John's friends I showed it to ever
112
did. It had the same tone as the professional
journals that tutors and alumni who have
gone on to become college professors write
in: a cut above the competition, but nonetheless plodding and addressed to a much
too narrow audience. Of course, articles
that lack pizzazz, like great books that lack
pizzazz, often have important things to
say. However, a whole magazine full of
them makes for a whole magazine unread.
You tutors, who develop great patience for
texts as a part of your job, tend to forget
this.
"The disciplined reflection which is nurtured by the St. John's Program" (I quote
the statement of editorial policy) is also
nurtured elsewhere besides St. John's, and
on other matters besides those investigated
in the program. Let the St. John's Review
continue to reflect the best efforts of the
whole republic of letters, not just those of
the small citadel that is our college; that is
the best way to communicate the intellectual liveliness of St. John's to those outside
its campuses. If you do not, the Review will
become another one of those magazines
read only by those who write for it.
KURT SCHULER '81
The following is the Instruction Committee's
statement of editorial policy which the
writer cites:
Editorial Policy For The St.John's Review
The St. John's Review exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection which is nurtured by the St. John's
Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors-their familiarity with that Program
and their respect for it-and through the
style and content of their contributions.
Contributors are, for the most part,
members of the greater college community-tutors, alumni, and visiting lecturers
(continued inside back cover)
AUTUMN /WINTER 1982-83
�-and others who are friends and critics of
the Program. Appropriate submissions by
those less familiar with the Program are
welcome.
For the most part, contributions do not
observe the usual limits of research scholarship, nor do they use its apparatus. On
the other hand, however, they do not display the easy generalization and simplification of popular journalism. Rather, under
the discipline of the liberal arts, they aim at
the immediacy and directness characteristic of intelligent fundamental inquiry.
Contributions aim to provide their readers with a representation in print of the
continuing study and free discussion which
is fostered by the Program and by which
the tutors, alumni, and students of the College live and work: the interpretation of
texts of worth and power and the consideration of deep and troubling issues. Although
the perennial character of the concerns
nourished by .tf,Ie Program often lends contributions a ce~tain distance from current
practical affairs, a thoughtful investigation
of a present political problem is not inappropriate. From time to time, original works
of the imagination are presented.
As it represents the St. John's Program,
the St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and
its readers may accordingly expect to find
diversity of thought represented in its
pages.
Error:
This picture in Philip Holt's article (page 58,
Summer 1982) appeared upside down;
�The St. John's Review
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�Editor:
Leo Raditsa
FROM OUR READERS
ON MARRYING
Managing Editor:
To the Editor the St. John's Review:
Thomas Parran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
Susan Lord
Consulting Editors:
David Bolotin
Eva Brann
Curtis A. Wilson
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned comments are also
welcome.
THESTjOHNSREVIEW (formerly The College) is published by
the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland
21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Samuel S. Kutler, Dean.
Published thrice yearly, in the autumn-winter, winter-spring,
and summer. For those not on the distribution list, subscriptions:
$12.00 yearly, $24.00 for two years, or $36.00 for three years,
payable in advance. Address all correspondence to The St. John's
Review, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland 21404.
Volume XXXIV
WINTER/SPRING 1983
Number 2
© 1983, St. John's College; "Adam Smith: Political Economy as
Moral Philosophy," © 1983, Gertrude Himmelfarb; "The Media-Shield of the Utopians," © 1983, Rae! jean Isaac and Erich
Isaac; "Benjamin Constant on Ancient and Modern Liberty,"
© 1983 Stephen Holmes. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Cover: Left: Americans advancing for attack on Hindenburg Line, 1918,
superimposed on American flag girl, Cambridge, Mass., 1977,
by Dimitri Fotos (with homage to Delacroix). Right, upper: Joseph
Dzhugashvili, police photographs, 1908; Right, lower: Benjamin Con·
stant, silhouette, 1792.
Composition: Action Camp Co., Inc.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
I find two things fuildamenta11y wrong with Ms. Jenson's essay
"On Marrying" (Autumn/Winter 1982-83).
One is what she has chosen to ignore. While she deplores the
ease and rapidity with which unmarried relationships dissolve,
she has ignored completely the very high divorce rate. Currently,
for every lOO people who marry, 50 are divorced. To acknowl·
edge this fact is to take away the basis for her argument that marriage makes love permanent.
In fact, few things last very long in this age. As a society, we
take for granted the ability to move around at great speeds; we
expect to change careers at least once in our lives; we hold jobs,
on the average, for just two years; and we fully expect the various
cars, computers, telephones, and other machines we use every
day to be outmoded in less than a decade. It shouldn't be surprising to note that our love relationships~ whether married or unmarried-partake of the same speed and impermanence that in·
forms everything else we do.
So there is something very much beside the point about Ms.
Jenson's focus on marriage as the salvation of love and permanence in human relations. I might argue for people to plan never
to marry if they would like to stay together, but it would seem a
little irrelevant. When there are structural problems in the
house, it's foolish to argue over what wallpaper to buy.
The second point is somewhat smaller, but still disturbing. Ms.
Jenson does not acknowledge the desire for long-term relation·
ships between homosexuals. Many gay men and women would
like to be married to their partners, but few religious authorities
will perform such a ceremony, and no legal authorities recognize
it. Does this mean all gay love relationships are doomed to impermanence? I don't believe Ms. Jenson cares less about this significant minority than she does about heterosexuals, but she fails to
mention them or the unique problem they face as people who
might wish to marry, but cannot. If she really believes that marriage is what makes love last, it is strange that she doesn't advocate the availability of marriage for gay men and women.
Successful long-term love relationships I'm familiar with are
the result of the individuals' emotional maturity and strength,
and having nothing to do with whether or not the parties involved have cleared their union with the authorities.
jOAN KOCSIS '78
Jamaica Plain, MA
Kari Jenson replies:
I wrote, precisely, to address Ms. Koscis's "structural prob·
lems." I cannot share the seeming equanimity with which she
lumps "love relationships" together with cars and computers. It
is one thing to expect my telephone to be outdated in five years,
quite another to expect the same of my lover. When we use peo-
�'HESTJOHNSREVIEWWINTERSPRING 1983
3
Adam Smith: Political Economy as Moral Philosophy
Gertrude Himme!farb
15
Ambiguities in Kant's Treatment of Space Arthur Collins
34
Black and White (poem) Elliott Zuckerman
35
The Media-Shield of the Utopians
Rae/ jean Isaac and Erich Isaac
50
Arrival (poem)
51
Benjamin Constant on Ancient and Modern Liberty
Stephen Holmes
64
65
Sixteen Eighteen (poem) Elliott Zuckerman
Elliott Zuckerman
The Holdup at Tiflis on June 26, 1907: the "Exes"
Mark Aldanov
77
Poems
81
Letters on Legitimacy
87
Guglielmo Ferrero and Legitimacy
93
My Memoir of Our Revolution
Rachel Hadas
Guglielmo Ferrero-Gaetano Mosca
Carlo Mongardini
Daniel Ardrey
110
With Orjan at the GreatJapan Exhibition (poem)
Elliott Zuckerman
111
The Division of the West-and Perception Leo F. Raditsa
REVIEW ESSAY
140
On Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth
review essay by Gregory S. jones
Inside front cover:
FROM OUR READERS
On Marrying joan Kocsis
�ple in the same way that we use machines, when we regard others as means towards our gratificatio,il, rather than as ends in
themselves, we are indeed in trouble. I intended to sort out a few
of the problems we have with commitment to another human
being, and to learn both what prevents us from forming such a
commitment and, in part, what breaks the tie once formed.
Our high divorce rate is part of the general problem. For the
same reasons that we are so reluctant to marry in the first place,
marriage itself is no longer seen as irrevocable. (Now when we
marry we make financial plans in case of divorce. Even more
laughably, many of us conveniently change the marriage vows to
specify faithfulness "until love ends," rather than "until death
parts us.") When marriage is not understood as a binding institution, as a promise which means something, it must lose much of
its effect.
Only a fool would claim that marriage automatically makes love
permanent. But marriage provides those conditions essential to
love's growth, and without which love will almost surely die. That
the couple who has decided to make their love permanent must
work constantly, and like crazy, goes without saying. Even if I
divorced my husband tomorrow, it would say little about the truth
of my argument, only that I had failed in practice.
I suspect homosexual relationships are in fact more difficult to
sustain for many reasons-among them, the absence oflegal recognition. Homosexual and heterosexual relationships, however,
strike me as essentially different.
2
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Adam Smith: Political Economy as
Moral Philosophy
Gertrude Himmelfarb
If there was a "chasm" in the history of social thought,
as R. H. Tawney held-a chasm between a moral society
and an immoral one, between one organized on the principle of the common good and another one on the principle
of self-interest-it must surely, one would think, be attributed to Adam Smith. John Ruskin called Smith that "halfbred and half-witted Scotchman," who deliberately perpetrated the blasphemy, "Thou shalt hate the Lord thy God,
damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour's goods." 1 It cannot have been an accident that the publication of Smith's
heretical work coincided with two major revolutions: the
American Revolution which professed to speak in the
name of a new Hscience of politics," and the ulndustrial
Revolution" which created the material conditions for both
the new political science and the new political economy.
This theory invites the obvious demurral, that the
Wealth of Nations was not all that revolutionary, either in
its ideas or in its effects. Even the distinctive terms associated with it antedated it by many years. "Political economy" made its appearance as early as 1615 in Antoyne de
Montchretien's Traictii de l'oeconomie politique. The term
was introduced into England by William Petty later that
century, and received wide currency with the publication,
almost a decade before the Wealth of Nations, of James
Steuart's Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy.
Another French import was ulaissez faire," which goes
back at least to the time of Louis XIV, when a merchant is
reported to have pleaded with the king's minister, Colbert,
Distinguished Professor at the Graduate School of the City University of
New York, Gertrude Himmelfarb has written On Liberty and Liberalism:
The Case oflohn Stuart Mill (1974), Victorian Minds (1968), Darwin and
the Darwinian Revolution (1959) and Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience
and Politics (1952).
The above essay comes from a forthcoming book, The Idea of Poverty:
England in the Early-Industrial Age (Knopf, falll983).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
"Laissez nous faire." The phrase was later popularized by
the French Physiocrats in their struggle against the highly
regulated economy of the old regime. Petty preferred the
Latin version, Vadere sicut vult. 2 Smith himself used nei-·
ther the French nor the Latin phrase in the Wealth of Nations. Nor, more surprisingly, did Malthus or Ricardo, although the phrase had come into general usage by their
time. It is ironic that this doctrine, which is thought of as
distinctively English, should have retained its French form
and that to this day there should be no satisfactory English
equivalent. (Neither free trade" nor jjindividualism" expresses quite the same idea.)
The "division of labor," which Smith did use frequently-which was, in fact, the keystone of his workwas adopted, complete with the famous pin-factory illustration (and with the same eighteen operations), from the
Encyclopiidie, the latter probably inspired by the account
of the same manufacturing process (this time in twentyfive operations) in Chambers' Cyclopaedia, published almost three decades before the Encyclopiidie and almost
five before the Wealth of Nations. One historian, claiming
Plato as the source of the idea, pointed out that Smith's
library contained three complete sets of the Dialogues. 3
But Smith could as well have come upon the concept in
Thucydides or Aristotle, or in the work of his own friend
Adam Ferguson, whose Essay on the History of Civil Society appeared in 1767. Every manufacturer, Ferguson casually remarked, knew that "the more he can subdivide the
tasks of his workmen, and the more hands he can employ
on separate articles, the more are his expenses diminished,
and his profits increased."4
The question of originality had been anticipated by
Smith himself. In 1755, before the publication of the Theory of Moral Sentiments and long before the Wealth of Nations, he wrote a paper claiming priority for some of the
leading ideas of both works, including the principle (al11
3
�though not the phrase) of laissez faire. This and other of
his ideas, he pointed out, had been. the subject of his lectures in 1750, his last year at the University of Edinburgh,
and in the dozen years (1752-64) during which he occupied the chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of
Glasgow. The lectures had been written out by his clerk in
Edinburgh, and he could "adduce innumerable witnesses,
both from that place and from this, who will ascertain
them sufficiently to be mine."5 If Smith's claim was unduly proprietary (and uncharacteristically immodest), it
had objective merit. While specific ideas in the Wealth of
Nations were not entirely novel, the implications of the
work as a whole were. Walter Bagehot put the matter well
when he said that the doctrine of free trade was indeed "in
the air," but it was not accepted or established; "on the
contrary, it was a tenet against which a respectable parent
would probably caution his son; still it was known as a
tempting heresy and one against which a warning was
needed." 6 What Smith did-and this was his historic
achievement-was to convert a minor heresy into a new
and powerful orthodoxy.*
Another kind of priority raises more serious questions.
Was it the intellectual revolution wrought by the Wealth of
Nations (assuming there was such a revolution) that was
decisive, or the industrial revolution presumably reflected
in that work? What in fact was the relation between the
two? It is interesting that after several decades during
which the expression "industrial revolution" fell into disrepute, it has recently been revived and is now used less
apologetically. The timing has been somewhat changed,
the preferred date today being 1780 rather than 1760,
which was the date assigned it by Arnold Toynbee when
he popularized the term a century ago.B The chronology
points to the problem. According to Smith himself the basic thesis of the Wealth of Nations had been conceived as
early as 1750, which suggests that it anticipated the industrial revolution, at least as that revolution is commonly defined (not, to be sure, the division of labor or factories,
both of which existed at the time). Most economic historians, acutely aware of the chronology of technological and
economic developments, tend to minimize the connection
*Joseph Schumpeter was far harsher in his judgment. The Wealth of Nations, he said, contained not a "single analytic idea, principle, or method
that was entirely new in 1776," nothing that would entitle it to rank with
Newton's Principia or Darwin's Origin as an "intellectual achievement."
Conceding that it was nonetheless a "great performance" deserving of its
success, he then went on to explain that this success was due to Smith's
limitations.
Had he been more brilliant, he would not have been taken so seriously. Had he dug more deeply, had he unearthed more recondite
truth, had he used difficult and ingenious methods, he would not
have been understood. But he had no such ambitions; in fact he disliked whatever went beyond plain common sense. He never moved
above the heads of even the dullest readers . ... And it was Adam
Smith's good fortune that he was thoroughly in sympathy with the
humors of his time. l-Ie advocated the things that were in the offing,
and he made his analysis serve them.7
4
between the industrial revolution and the new political
economy. Intellectual historians, on the other hand, seeking to ground ideas in sOcial and economic history, use
such words as <~insight" and <~foresight" to signify some
kind of connection, however tenuous.9
Whatever the resolution of this debate-whether it was
from <~ideas" or "reality" that Smith drew his inspiration,
whether the Wealth of Nations was primarily prescriptive
or descriptive-the effect of Smith's work was to give
technology and industry a new and decisive role, not only
in the ·economy but in society. The division of labor (if
only the relatively primitive kind found in a pin factory)
became the harbinger of a social revolution as momentous
as anything dreamed of by political reformers and revolutionaries. It is in this sense that the book was genuinely
revolutionary, in creating a political economy that made
the wealth and welfare of the people dependent on a
highly developed, expanding, industrial economy and on a
self-regulating "system of natural liberty."
Perhaps it was because this revolutionary thesis
emerged so naturally in the course of the book, starting
with the homely illustration of the pin factory, that it was
accepted so readily. Some of Smith's friends were afraid
that the book was too formidable to have any immediate
impact. David Hume consoled Smith that while it required too close a reading to become quickly popular,
eventually, by its "depth and solidity and acuteness" as
well as its "curious facts," it would "at last take the public
attention." 10 In fact, in spite of its forbidding appearance
(two large volumes, a total of eleven hundred pages), the
work achieved a considerable measure of popularity, and
sooner than Hume had anticipated. Within a month of its
publication, the publisher reported that sales were better
than might have been expected of a book requiring so
much thought and reflection, qualities, he regrett~d, that
<~do not abound among modern readers." 11 The first edition sold out in six months, a second appeared early in
1778, and three others followed in the dozen years before
Smith's death. It was translated into French, German, Italian, Danish, and Spanish, and received the ultimate mark
of success in the form of a lengthy abridgement. Smith's
first biographer, writing three years after his death, was
pleased to report that Smith had had the satisfaction of
seeing his principles widely accepted during his lifetime
and witnessing their application to the commercial policy
of England.
There were some critics, to be sure: the economist and
agriculturist Arthur Young, who thought the book full of
((poisonous errors," and the Whig leader Charles James
Fox, who said that he had never read it (although he cited
it in a debate in parliament) and claimed not to understand
the subject but was certain that he heartily despised it. 12
But even the radicals offered little serious objection to it,
some (Thomas Paine and Richard Price, for example) actually declaring themselves admirers of Smith. For a short
time after his death, when anti-French feelings ran high,
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�the charge was heard that his teachings were hostile to
government and therefore subversive. Apart from that
brief period, the prevailing attitude was overwhelmingly
favorable, with some of the most prominent men of the
time-Hume, Burke, Gibbon, Pitt, Lansdowne, Northproudly proclaiming themselves his disciples.
The ultimate accolade, the comparison of Smith with
Newton, 13 recalls the reception given to that other latterday Newton, Charles Darwin. Indeed, the Wealth of Nations and the Origin of Species had much in common: Both
were classics in their own time, and for some of the same
reasons. Each had been amply prepared for by the reputation of its author, by the importance he himself attached
to it and the many years he devoted to it, and by tantalizing previews in the form of conversations, letters, and lec-
tures. And each announced itself, by the boldness of its
thesis, its comprehensiveness, and its imposing title, as a
major intellectual event. Whatever questions might be
raised about its originality or validity, its importance and
influence are hardly in dispute. For good or ill, An Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations heralded the beginning of "political economy" as that term
was generally understood at the time-"classical economics" as a later generation was to know it.
The basic themes of the Wealth of Nations are too familiar to need elaboration: the division oflabor making for increased productivity and thus the increased "opulence" of
all of society; the fundamental facts of human natureself-interest (or "self-love") and the "propensity to truck,
barter, and exchange" -which were the generating force
of the economic process; the "invisible hand" (a metaphor
used only once but implied throughout) which made the
individual's interest an instrument for the general good;
and the "system of natural liberty" which was the only certain means to achieve both the wealth of nations and the
welfare of individuals.l 4 The argument was worked out in
great detail under such headings as money, trade, value,
labor, capital, rent.
One subject that did not appear in the chapter titles or
sub-heads was poverty. Yet this was as much a theme of
the book as wealth itself. Indeed, it may be argued that if
the Wealth of Nations was less than novel in its theories of
money, trade, or value, it was genuinely revolutionary in
its view of poverty and its attitude toward the poor.
It was not, however, revolutionary in the sense which is
often supposed: the demoralization of the economy resulting from the doctrine oflaissez faire, the demoralization of
man implied in the image of "economic man," and the de-
moralization of the poor who found themselves at the
mercy of forces over which they had no control-over
which, according to the new political economy, no one
had any cpntroJ.15 This is a common reading of the Wealth
of Nations, but not a just one. For it supposes that Smith's
idea of a market economy was devoid of moral purpose,
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that his concept of human nature was mechanistic andreductivist, and that his attitude towards the poor was indifferent or callous. Above all it fails to take account of the
fact that Smith was a moral philosopher, by conviction as
well as profession. As the Professor of Moral Philosophy at
the University of Glasgow and the celebrated author of
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he could hardly have
thought it his mission to preside over the dissolution of
moral philosophy.
Published in 1759, The Theory of Moral Sentiments went
through four editions before the Wealth of Nations appeared, and another edition a few years later. Its three
French translations made Smith almost as well known
among the philosophes as Hume was. Today Smith's fame
rests so completely upon the Wealth of Nations one might
be tempted to dismiss the earlier work as just that, an early
work that was overshadowed and superseded by his later,
major work. In his own time, however, his reputation de-
rived at least as much from the earlier book, and this even
after the publication of the Wealth of Nations. (In the
Memoir of Smith written three years after his death, Dugald Steward devoted twenty-six pages, one-third of the
whole, to Moral Sentiments and only seventeen pages to
the Wealth of Nations.) Smith had always planned to revise
Moral Sentiments, and the last year of his life was devoted
entirely to that task. The new edition expanded upon, but
did not substantively alter, the thesis of the original. The
most important change was the addition of a chapter, the
title of which testifies to his abiding concern: "Of the Corruption of Our Moral Sentiments, Which is Occasioned by
this Disposition to Admire the Rich and the Great, and to Despise or Neglect Persons of Poor and Mean Condition." 16
A major theme of controversy among Smith scholars
has been Das Adam Smith-Problem, as a German commentator portentously labelled it-the question of the
congruence of Moral Sentiments with the Wealth of Nations.l7 About the doctrine of Moral Sentiments itself there
is little dispute. The operative word in that book was "sympathy." Sympathy was presumed to be as much a principle
of human nature as self-interest; indeed it informed selfinterest since it was one of the pleasures experienced by
the individual when he contemplated or contributed to
the good of another. "To feel much for others and little for
ourselves, ... to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human
nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their
whole grace and propriety." Smith distinguished his idea
of sympathy from Hutcheson's "moral sense," which was
so radically at variance with self-interest that it supposed
virtue to reside in the denial of one's interest and the defiance of one's nature. But Hutcheson's doctrine, Smith ar-
gued, at least had the merit of maintaining a distinction
between virtue and vice, in contrast to the "wholly pernicious," "licentious system" of Mandeville, which made no
such distinction and recognized no motive, no principle of
5
�conduct, other than self-interest.l 8* Unlike Mandeville or
Bentham, Smith was able to credit such sentiments and to
use unapologetically such words as sympathy, beneficence, virtue, humanity, love of others. There were occasions, he insisted, when the interests of the individual had
to make way for the interests of others, and this regardless
of any calculations of utility.
One individual must never prefer himself so much even to
any other individual, as to hurt or injure that other, in order to
in the charges of "impertinent jealousy/' "mean rapacity,"
umean and malignant expedients," "sneaking arts," "interesting sophistry," "interested falsehood."24 One of
Smith's main criticisms of the mercantile system was that
it encouraged merchants and manufacturers to be selfish
and duplicitous.
Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of
the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby
lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They
benefit himself, though the benefit to the one should be
say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are
much greater than the hurt or injury to the other.20
silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains.
The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his
own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest
of his own particular order or society. He is at all times willing,
too, that the interest of this order or society should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the state or sovereignty, of
which it is only a subordinate part. He should, therefore, be
equa1ly willing that all those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the universe.21
The argument of Moral Sentiments is subtle, complicated, and not without difficulties, but even the barest
statement of it is enough to demonstrate that Smith was
hardly the ruthless individualist or amoralist he is sometimes made out to be. Whatever difficulties there may be
in the reconciliation of Moral Sentiments with the Wealth
of Nations, it is clear enough that Smith intended both as
part of his grand "design", that he had the Wealth of Nations in mind even before he wrote Moral Sentiments, and
that he remained committed to Moral Sentiments, reissuing and revising it long after the Wealth of Nations was
published.22
A close reading of the Wealth of Nations itself suggests
that political economy as Smith understood it was part of a
larger moral philosophy, a new kind of moral economy.
Schumpeter complained that Smith was so steeped in the
tradition of moral philosophy derived from scholasticism
and natural law that he could not conceive of economics
per se, an economics divorced from ethics and politics.2l
The point is well taken, although not necessarily in criticism. The bias and the rhetoric of the moral philosopher
crop up again and again in the Wealth of Nations: in the
condemnation of the "vile maxim," "All for themselves
and nothing for other people"; in the proposition that the
trade of the nation should be conducted on the same principles that govern private affairs; in the denunciations of
manufacturers and merchants who were all too willing to
sacrifice the public interest for their private interests and
were prepared to use any strategem to achieve their ends;
7
*By the same token Smith would have rejected the kind of utilitarianism
espoused by Jeremy Bentham, who said that he could not conceive of a
human being "in whose instance any public interest he can have had, will
not, insofar as it depends upon himself, have been sacrificed to his own
personal interest." In fact, Bentham did conceive of one such human
being-himself, whom he once described as "the most philanthropic of the
philanthropic: philanthropy the end and instrument of his ambition." !9
6
They complain only of those of other people.
The clamour and sophistry of merchants and manufacturers easily persuade them that the private interest of a part,
and of a subordinate part of the society, is the general interest
of the whole.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for
merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise
prices.
The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce
which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to
with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after
having been long and carefully examined, not only with the
most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It
comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly
the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
It is the industry which is carried on for the benefit of the
rich and powerful, that is principally encouraged by our mercantile system. That which is carried on for the benefit of the
poor and the indigent, is too often, either neglected, or oppressed.25
These attacks on "private interests" that were in conflict with the "public interest," especially with the interests of the "poor and indigent," may seem difficult to reconcile with the famous dictum: "It is not from the
benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that
we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own
interest." 26 But this principle of self-interest was predicated on certain conditions: that the butcher, brewer, and
baker not take unfair advantage of others, that they abide
by the rules of the free market, that they not "conspire,"
"deceive," and "oppress." Under these conditions self-interest was itself a moral principle-not as lofty as altruism,
but, in the mundane affairs of life (the provision of "dinner"), more reliable and effective.
Hovering over these individual interests, ensuring that
they work together for the greater good of the whole, the
Hpublic interest," was the benevolent, ubiquitous uinvisible hand." 27 The "invisible hand" has been much criticized. If only, it has been said, Smith had not introduced
that unfortunate metaphor with its teleological overtones,
if only he had confined himself to the austere language of
mechanics and nature, he would have avoided much misWINTER/SPRING 1983
�understanding. There is some justice in this complaint.
The invisible hand was indeed invisible; the genius of the
system of 11 naturalliberty" was that it required no 11 hand,"
no intervention, direction, or regulatiori to bring about the
general good. But the metaphor served the important purpose of keeping the reader mindful of the purpose of that
system. It was by means of the invisible hand that the individual was led "to promote an end which was no part of his
intention"; "by pursuing his own interest he frequently
promotes that of society more effectually than when he
really intends to promote it." zs Without that metaphor the
weight of the argument might have rested with the individual's interests. The invisible hand shifted the emphasis
to the public interest. If the metaphor was unfortunate, it
was not for the reason that it was teleological; on the contrary, its utility and justification lay in the fact that it
clearly expressed the teleological cast of the argument.
The general interest that emerged from Smith's system
was '1general" in the Rousseauan or Hegelian sense of a
general interest more elevated than the sum of individual
interests-Hegelian perhaps more than Rousseauan, the
"invisible hand" resembling Hegel's "cunning of reason"
which contrived to make the interests and passions of individuals serve a larger purpose of which the individuals
themselves were unaware.* It was also ~~general" in the pe-
destrian, utilitarian sense of the totality of interests of all
the members of society. This second sense pointed to the
importance of the "people" and the "poor" in Smith's theory. The "wealth of nations" of the title referred not to the
nation in the mercantilist sense-the nation-state whose
wealth was a measure of the power it could exercise vis-avis other states-but to the people comprising the nation.
And "people" not in the political sense of those having a
voice and active part in the political process, but in the
social and economic sense, those working and living in so-
ciety, of whom the largest part were the "lower ranks" or
"poor."
The concern with the people emerged early in the book
in the discussion of the division of labor, when it appeared
that the great advantage of that mode of production was
the "universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest
ranks of the people ... , a general plenty [which] diffuses
itself through all the different ranks of the society." 29 Addressing the ucommon complaint" that since luxuries had
become available to the poor they were no longer content
with the humble food, clothing, and lodging that had once
been their lot, Smith put the question: "Is this improve*There is no suggestion that the "cunning of reason," as it appeared in
Hegel's Philosophy of History, was inspired by Smith's "invisible hand."
But Hegel had read Smith (as well as other political economists, including
Say and Ricardo), and there are distinct echoes of Smith's "market place"
in the Philosophy of Right, especially in the concept of "civil society," the
realm intermediate between the individual and the state in which individuals pursue their private interests.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ment in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people
to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconveniency to
the society?" His answer was unequivocal.
Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make
up the far greater part of every great political society. But
what improves the circumstances of the greater part can
never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far
greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but
equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the
whole body of the people, should have such a share of the
produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well
fed, clothed and lodged30
The condition of the poor was decisive, Smith reasoned,
partly by sheer force of numbers; being the largest part of
society, their condition necessarily determined the condition of society as a whole. In part it was a matter of "equity"; as producers of the goods enjoyed by the rest of society, they were entitled to a fair share of those goods. They
also had a special claim to Smith's attention because they
were one of the two orders of society-laborers and landlords-whose interests were "connected with the general
interest of society," in contrast to the third, merchants and
manufacturers, whose interests were often at variance
with it.3I Yet the laborers were at the greatest disadvantage: as consumers they were ill-served by a mercantilist
system that promoted high prices and discouraged imports; and as producers by a system that permitted their
employers, by fair means or foul, to keep wages low and
prices high. The poor, in short, were the chief victims of
the existing system-and would be the chief beneficiaries
of the "natural" system proposed by Smith.
Smith's critique of mercantilism is generally read as an
attack on government regulation and a plea for laissez
faire. But it was much more than that, as contemporaries
were aware. Among other things it WRS a criticism of the
prevailing theory of wages. While Smith was not the first
to question the expediency or desirability of low wages, he
was the first to offer a systematic, comprehensive rationale
for high wages. The consensus at the time was that low
wages were both natural and economically necessary: natural because the poor would not work except out of dire
need, and necessary if the nation were to enjoy a favorable
balance of trade. This was the view of Hume, who explained that in years of scarcity when wages were low, "the
poor labour more, and really live better, than in years of
great plenty, when they indulge themselves in idleness
and riot."3Z Arthur Young put it more succinctly: "Every
one but an idiot knows, that the lower classes must be kept
poor, or they will never be industrious."33 Both admitted
that excessively low wages would provide no incentive to
work. "Two shillings and sixpence a day." Young remarked, "will undoubtedly tempt some to work, who
would not touch a tool for one shilling." 34 But this was an
argument for subsistence wages, not for high wages.
7
�It remained for Smith to defend high wages, the "liberal
reward of labour.''
The liberal reward of labour, as it encourages the propagation so it increases the industry of the common people. The
wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which,
like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the
encouragement it receives. A plentiful subsistence increases
the bodily strength of the labourer, and the comfortable hope
of bettering his condition, and of ending his days perhaps in
ease and plenty, animates him to exert that strength to the
utmost. Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always
find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious, than
where they are low: in England, for example, than in Scotland; in the neighbourhood of great towns, than in remote
country places.35
Smith granted that some workers, if they earned enough
in four days to keep them for a week, would be tdle the
other days; but these were a minority. Most workers, he
was convinced, were given to the opposite failing: if they
were well paid by the piece they would so overwork them·
selves as to impair their health. It may have been with
Hume in mind (and out of courtesy to his friend that he
did not quote him to this effect) that Smith disputed the
conventional view. "That men in general should work bet·
ter when they are ill fed than when they are well fed, when
they are disheartened than when they are in good spirits,
when they are frequently sick than when they are gener·
ally in good health, seems not very probable." 36
The doctrine of high wages was a corollary of Smith's
conception of a uprogressive" economy. Since high wages
were the result of increasing wealth and at the same time
the cause of increasing population, only in an expanding
economy, where the demand for labor kept abreast of the
supply, could real wages remain high. "It is in the progres·
sive state, while the society is advancing to the further ac·
quisition, rather than when it has acquired its full complement of riches, that the condition of the labouring poor, of
the great body of the people, seems to be the happiest and
the most comfortable." In a "stationary" state, on the
other hand, the condition of the poor was "dull" and
"hard," and in a a declining" state it was "miserable" and
"melancholy."l7 The division of labor was crucial for the
same reason, because it made for greater productivity and
thus for an expanding, progressive economy where in~
creased wealth could extend to the "lowest ranks of the
people." 38
The idea of a progressive economy places Smith in the
ranks of the "optimists." It may also be his chief claim to
originality. Unlike previous economists for whom one
good could be purchased only at the expense of anotherthe national interest at the expense of individual interests,
agriculture at the expense of industry, the power of the
nation at the expense of the liberty of its citizens, the pro·
8
ductivity of labor at the expense of the happiness of the
laborer-Smith envisioned an economy in which most
goods and interests were compatible and complementary.
Free trade would enhance both freedom and wealth; htgh
wages would ensure productivity and well-being; the self·
interest of the individual would promote, however unw1t·
tingly, the public interest. It was a prescription for a liber·
ating, expanding, prospering, progressive economy m
which all the legitimate values and interests of society sup·
ported and reenforced each other: liberty and prosperity,
the individual and society, industry and agnculture, capi·
tal and labor, wealth and well-being.
This optimistic view of the economy presupposed an
optimistic view of human nature. It is the French philo·
sophes who are usually credited with such a view. But theu
optimism, based upon the potentiality ~nd potency of rea·
son, was not a conspicuously democratic doctnne, at least
not at a time when the mass of the people were unedu·
cated and illiterate. Because reason was so precious, and
because the ordinary people were presumed to be not yet
capable of exercising the degree of reason required for a
truly rational order, most of the philosophes looked to en·
lightened rulers, "benevolent despots," to do for society
what the people could not do for themselves..
.
To Smith (and the Scottish Enlightenment m general) It
was not reason that defined human nature so much as m~
terests, passions, sentiments, sympathies. These were
qualities shared by all people, not in some remote future
but in the present. No enlightened despot was reqmred to
activate those interests, no Benthamite legislator to bring
about a harmony of interests. All that was necessary was to
free people-all people, in all ranks and callings-:--so that
they could act on their interests. From these md1~1dually
motivated freely inspired achons, the general mterest
would ern'erge without any intervention, regulation, or
coercion.
In a sense Smith's was a more modest-"lower," one
might say-view of human nature, and by that token a
more democratic one. If people differed, as they patently
did it was not because of any innate differences but be·
ca~se the qualities common to all had been developed in
them in different degrees. On the nature-nurture tssue, as
we now know it, Smith was unequivocally on the nurture
side.
The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the. very different
genius which appears to disting~ish !llen of different professions when grown up to matunty, IS not upon many occasions' so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters,
between a philosopher and a common street porter, for exa~
ple, seems to ~rise not so much from natu:e, as fro~ hab~t,
custom, and education . ... By nature a philosopher IS not m
genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as
a mastiff is from a greyhound. 39
WINTER/ SPRING 1983
�The idea that differences were less the "cause" than the
"effect" of the division of labor radically differentiates
Smith from other philosophers-Plato, most notablywho had used the concept of the division of labor. While
some of Smith's illustrations and "stages of historyn were
reminiscent of Plato, the heart of his thesis could not have
been more dissimilar. Indeed, given Smith's respect for
classical philosophy, and for Plato especially, one may take
his spirited denial of any difference in "nature" between
the philosopher and the street porter as an implicit rebuke
to Plato. To Plato natural differences were precisely the
"cause" rather than the "effect" of the division of labor:
the division of labor reflected the innate differences
among people, and permitted people of essentially different natures to cooperate for the common good. The only
innate quality mentioned by Smith, and the only one necessary to his system, was the jjpropensity to truck, barter,
and exchange." 40 This propensity was shared by porter
and philosopher alike; it was the common denominator
that made it possible for everyone to participate in the division of labor and for everyone to profit from that division. It was also the common denominator that united the
highest and lowest ranks in a single human species, a species in which the varieties were not half so different as
mastiff and greyhound.
Just as the differences among individuals were functional rather than organic, so the differences among the
orders of society were functional rather than hierarchic.
Those three orders were defined by the nature of their income-rent, wages, and profits-not by their position in a
hierarchy-upper, middle, and lower. In fact wage-earners, or laborers, constituted the "second order." 41 Else~
where Smith did use the terms current at the time, "lower
ranks" or "lower classes," to describe the laborers. What
was important about them, however, was not that they
were of the lower classes but that they received their income in the form of wages rather than rent or profit. In
this respect the laborer was a partner in the economic enterprise, the most important partner, Smith sometimes
gave the impression, since it was his labor that was the
source of value. And labor, like rent and profit, was a "patrimony," a form of property entitled to the same consideration as any other kind of property.
The patrimony which every man has in his own labour, as it
is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the
most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies
in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him
from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner
he thinks proper without injury to his neighbour is a plain
violation of this most sacred property.42
There was, however, one point at which this optimistic
vision failed Smith, failed him so seriously, in the opinion
of some recent commentators, as to make him a prophet of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
doom, a critic of capitalism on the order of Marx-indeed
a precursor of Marx in exposing that fatal flaw of capitalism, the "alienation" of the working class.43
If Smith did anticipate something like Marx's theory of
alienation, as Marx himself intimated, it must also be said
that he avoided the ambiguity that appeared in Marx's
own discussion of that subject as well as in recent Marxist
thought.44 For Smith clearly located the source of alienation (if it may be called that) not in capitalism as such but
in industrialism, and more specifically in the division oflabor that was the peculiar character and the special
strength of modern industry. The poignancy of Smith's argument comes from the paradox that the division oflabor,
which provided the momentum for the progressive economy that was the only hope for the laboring classes, was
also the probable cause of the mental, spiritual, even physical deterioration of those classes.
In the progress of the division oflabour, the employment of
the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is of the
great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very
simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by
their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is
spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the ef-
fects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the
same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the
habit of such exertions, and generally becomes as stupid and
ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The
torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any general, noble, or tender sentiments, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even
of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his
country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally
corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with
abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a
soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders
him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has
been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in
this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual,
social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor,
that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it. 45
This passage is sufficiently powerful in itself, and sufficiently problematic in the context of Smith's work, to
stand on its own without being assimilated to the Marxist
idea of alienation and without taking on all the difficulties
associated with that idea. There were, one might argue,
two different Marxist ideas: that of the "early Marx,"
where alienation arose in the earliest stages of society as a
9
�result of the separation from physical nature and the division of labor in the family; and that of the "mature Marx,"
where it was attributed to the worker's divorce from the
ownership of the means of production and from the products of his own labour. Neither of these ideas corresponds
to Smith's. For Smith the question of ownership was as
irrelevant as the question of nature or the family. His only
concern was the debilitating effect of the division of labor
in the industrial process. In this respect the factory worker
in a socialist regime~ or in any other form of cooperative or
public enterprise, would suffer just as grievously as the factory worker under capitalism.
That Smith held industrialism rather than capitalism at
fault is apparent from the only other passage in the Wealth
ofNations bearing upon this subject. Here Smith compared
the industrial worker with the agricultural laborer, to the
disadvantage of the former. Husbandry, he argued, required a greater degree of knowledge and experience, judgment and discretion than most industrial trades. The ordi.
nary ploughman might be deficient in the arts of "social
intercourse," his voice and language uncouth by the standards of the townsman, but his "understanding," sharpened by the variety of tasks which he had to perform, was
superior to the mechanic occupied with one or two simple
operations. "How much," Smith concluded,
14
the lower
ranks of people in the country are really superior to those of
the town, is well known to every man whom either business
or curiosity has led to converse much with both."46
If the problem was not alienation in the Marxist sense, it
was in its own terms serious enough, serious not only for
Smith himself, who wrote of it with great passion, but for
the reader who may find it a grave flaw in the argument of
the Wealth of Nations. How can one reconcile this dismal
portrait of the industrial worker reduced to a state of tor-
These discordant images are not reconcilable. What can
be said, however, is that the dominant image, that which
informs by far the largest part of the book and which bears
the largest weight of the argument, is the "optimistic"
one: the image of an active, intelligent, industrious worker,
receiving good wages, constantly bettering himself, and
sharing in the ~~universal opulence" created by the division
of labor and the expansion of industry. It was this scenario
that impressed itself on Smith's readers in his own time
and for generations afterwards. Although Marx, in Capital,
quoted the passage describing the worker stupefied by the
division oflabor, it was not until the "early Marx" and the
idea of alienation came into fashion after World War II
that this passage became the subject of serious attention
and that the vision of
~~another"
Smith, a "pessimistic"
Smith began to emerge.*
It is also important to recall the context in which Smith
praised the farm laborer at the expense of the industrial
worker. The first passage appeared in the midst of his denunciation of the scheming merchants and manufacturers
who "seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against
the public." It was then that Smith put in a good word for
the agricultural classes-laborers as well as farmers-who
were not in the habit of conspiring together and who deserved to be defended against those "very contemptible
authors" who spoke of them so contemptuously.5 2 The
second passage appeared towards the end of the work in a
discussion of the functions of government. Of all these
functions-defense, justice, public works, the support of
the sovereign-the subject to which Smith devoted far the
most space was education. After a lengthy account of the
por, stupidity, and ignorance, lacking in judgment, initiative, courage, or any "intellectual, social, and martial vir-
tues" -all this because of the division oflabor-with the
earlier image of the "hearty," "cheerful" worker who, as a
result of the same division of labor, received a "plentiful
subsistence," enjoyed "bodily strength," was "active, dili-
gent, and expeditious," and looked forward to the "comfortable hope of bettering his condition" and ending his
days in ease and plenty"?47 How can one reconcile the
favorable view of the agricultural laborer, who acquired
"judgment and discretion" because he had to deal with so
many different tasks, with an earlier image of the same laborer who, precisely because he went from one activity to
another, developed the habit of "sauntering," became "in11
dolent," "careless," "slouthful and lazy," incapable of any
vigorous application even on the most pressing occasions"? In that earlier passage Smith contrasted the dilatory farm laborer to the factory boy whose task was the
opening and shutting of a valve, and who was inspired, by
boredom itself, to invent a labor-saving device which was
"one of the greatest improvements" made on the steamengine.48
10
*The two Smiths appear most dramatically in the work of Robert
Heilbroner. His influential history of economic thought, The Worldly Philosophers (1953), presented the conventional optimistic Smith. His recent
work introduces a "deeply pessimistic" Smith, this based not only on the
so-called "alienation" passage, which Heilbroner now emphasizes to the
point where it seems to dominate the Wealth of Nations, but on a reinterpretation of Smith's economic theory. So far from positing a "progressive," expanding economy, Smith is seen as predicting decline and decay:
"material decline awaiting at the terminus of the economic journey,
moral decay suffered by society in the course of its journeying."49 This
argument depends on ascribing to Smith something like a Malthusian
theory, in which higher wages lead to an increase of population, an eventual decline of wages, and thus a stagnant and "stationary" economy. But
Smith had anticipated this argument and had refuted it, at least for the
foreseeable future. So long, he reasoned, as the division of labor continued (the division of labor serving as a metaphor for the process of mechanization and invention), the economy would be able to absorb the higher
wages and remain in a progressive, expanding state.50
When John Stuart Mill, almost three-quarters of a century later, argued
for the desirability as well as the inevitability of a "stationary state," it was
under the influence of Malthus and Ricardo rather than Smith, and on
moral and esthetic as well as economic grounds. Finding competitiveness
and material acquisitiveness disagreeable, he preferred a society in
which, "while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer."51
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�history of educational institutions, he posed the question
of the state's role in education. Should, the "public" -the
Hstate, 11 in the marginal notes-pay attention to the
"edu~
cation of the people," and if so, how should this be done
for the "different orders of the people"? It was at this
point that Smith inserted the dramatic warning about the
dire effects of the division of labor. And it was to forestall
those effects, to prevent the "corruption and degeneracy"
of the laboring people, that he then went on to develop an
elaborate scheme of public education.53
The proposal was simple and bold. The "common peo·
pie," including those "bred to the lowest occupation,"
were to be required to master the essential ingredients of
education-reading, writing, and arithmetic. To this end
the state was to establish a school in every district, charg·
ing a fee so modest that even the common laborer could
afford it, the major cost being borne by the government.
Although the schools themselves would not be compul·
sory, some form of schooling would be. To enforce this
provision, Smith suggested that an examination in the
"three R' s" be required before anyone could enter a guild
or set up in a trade. 54
In one sense the proposal was not remarkable. Smith
was simply drawing upon the experience of Scotland
where the parish schools had taught, as he said, "almost
the whole common people" to read and a great proportion
of them to write and reckon.55 In another sense, however,
it was extraordinary, not only because he proposed to ex·
tend to England a state system of education that had never
existed there and that was bound to incur (as it did even a
century later) a great deal of hostility, but because it went
against the grain of his own doctrine. Having spent the bet·
ter part of two volumes arguing against government regula·
tion, he now advanced a scheme requiring a greater mea~
sure of government involvement than anything that had
ever existed before. In the same chapter in which
he made this proposal he criticized the principle of en·
dowments for schools and colleges on the ground that
they gave the institutions an assured income and relieved
them from the necessity of proving their merit; for the
same reason he opposed salaries for university teachers,
preferring fees paid by individual students to individual in·
structors. Yet here, for the "common people," he urged
the establishment of a state-administered, state-supported,
state-enforced system of education with only token fees to
be paid by the parents-enough to give them a stake in the
education of their children but not enough to cover the
cost of education. Perhaps it was to justify this large depar·
ture from his general principle that he painted so dramatic
a picture of the industrial worker whose degeneracy could
only be arrested by a compulsory system of education.
Having made out so strong a case for public education,
Smith went on to extol the virtues of education as such.
"A man without the proper use of the intellectual faculties
of a man, is, if possible, more contemptible than even a
coward, and seems to be mutilated and deformed in a still
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
more essential part of the character of human nature."
Even if the state were to derive no practical benefit from
the education of the lower orders, that education would
still warrant its active concern. In fact the state would ben·
efit from it indirectly: a better instructed people were less
inclined to the disorders that came from "delusions of en·
thusiasm and superstition"; they were more likely to be
"decent and orderly"; feeling "respectable" themselves,
they would be respected by others and be respectful of
others; they would not be easily taken in by "faction and
sedition"; and in a free country, where it was important
that the government have the "favourable judgment" of
the people, it was also important that the people should
not judge the government "rashly or capriciously."56
One commentator has described this view of education
as an "unformulated theory of 'social contro\."'57 If this is
so, any idea of education which is more than purely vocational, which attributes to it any effect on character, sensibility, intelligence, and behavior, falls under the same re·
proach. Moreover, any alternative would be similarly suspect. What kind of education could Smith have pro·
posed which would not have been an instrument of social
control? Had he taken the obvious laissez faire position of
denying to the state any role in education (as his contemporary Frederick Eden, for example, did) would this not
have exposed him to the charge of being unconcerned
with the plight of the lower classes, unwilling to exert himself (and the state) in an effort to improve their condition,
perhaps deliberately keeping them in a state of ignorance
so that they would remain docile and subservient? Or if he
had recommended the kind of education Hannah More favored, reading, but not writing or arithmetic, on the assumption that reading alone was necessary to inculcate
the precepts of religion and the "habits of industry and virtue," was this, too, not an obvious exercise of social con·
troJ?58 And all the voluntary schools of the time-charity
schools, Sunday schools, night schools, industry schools,
schools connected with workhouses and poorhouseswhich provided the rudiments of literacy for large numbers of people who would otherwise have been totally illit·
erate, were these reprehensible for the same reason, or
were they in any way preferable to Smith's plan?
It might be said that it is not Smith's proposal for a comprehensive, state-supported system of education that is
suspect, but the specific moral purpose he attached to it,
this being all the more ominous in view of the role of the
state. Or perhaps the objection is not so much to the exercise of "social control" as to the violation of the "indigenous" culture of the poor, the imposition upon them of
alien "middle-class values." Again, this is to ignore the contemporary context. Smith was not arguing against latter·
day romantics who idealize illiteracy as part of a natural,
superior, folk culture. He was arguing, at least implicitly,
against those of his contemporaries who denied to the
poor the capacity and opportunity to achieve those "middle-class values," who thought that no amount of educa-
11
�tion could civilize, socialize, and moralize them, or who
worried that an educated populace would be restless, demanding, discontent. When Smith urged that the poor be
educated so that they would become better citizens, better
workers, and better human beings, he was not demeaning
the poor but crediting them with the virtues ("values," in
modern parlance) he himself held in such high esteem.
In a brilliant commentary on Smith, Joseph Cropsey has
argued that the dual purpose of his political economy was
to make freedom possible and to make of freedom a form
of virtue. 59 This was also, one might say, the purpose of his
system of education. Just as the laborer, by dint of his labor, was to be a free and full participant in the economy, so
by dint of his education, he was to be a free and full participant in society. For Smith freedom was itself a virtue and
the precondition of all other virtues. It was this cardinal
virtue that he wanted to make available to the "common
people," even to those "bred to the lowest occupation."
If Smith's political economy was not the amoral, asocial
doctrine it has sometimes been made out to be, neither
was it as dogmatically, rigorously laissez faire as had been
thought. 60 His plan of education was only one of several
instances in which he departed from the strict construction of laissez faire, and not unwittingly but deliberately.
He did so when he proposed a law to limit the freedom of
bankers to issue notes, and when he advocated retaining
the law against usury. He also did so when he implicitly
sanctioned the poor laws.
Smith's position on the poor laws has been generally ignored or misunderstood. Because he was so forthright in
criticizing the Act of Settlement of 1662, it is sometimes
assumed that he was also opposed to the poor laws.61 It is
significant, however, that while he did attack the Settlement Act (and the Statute of Apprentices as well), he did
not attack the poor laws. Moreover, his criticism of the
Settlement Act had nothing to do with the giving of relief
but only with limiting the mobility of labor and violating
the liberty of the poor.
To remove a man who has committed no misdemeanour
from the parish where he chooses to reside, is an evident violation of natural liberty and justice . ... There is scarce a poor
man in England of forty years of age, I will venture to say, who
has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this i1l-contrived law of settlements.62
This passage was much quoted (and disputed) at the time,
and Smith was credited with helping bring about the reform of the laws of settlement in 1795. What Smith conspicuously did not do was to challenge the poor law itself,
the obligation to provide relief for those who could not
provide for themselves. Nor was he one of those who, in
the years following the publication of the Wealth of Nations, expressed anxiety about the mounting costs of relief.
He died before the movement to restrict relief reached its
12
peak, but not before Joseph Townsend and others had
raised the alarm and urged the drastic reform, if not the
abolition, of the poor laws.
On the subject of taxation Smith exhibited the same
pragmatic, humane temper and the same concern for the
poor. His first principle was that taxes be levied "in proportion" to the ability to pay; and the corollary was that they
be levied only on "luxuries" rather than "necessaries." He
went on to define ~~necessaries" as "not only the commodi-
ties which are indispensably necessary for the support of
life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to
be without" -linen shirts and leather shoes, for example.
In the same spirit he recommended that highway tolls on
"carriages of luxury" (coaches, postchaises) should be
higher than on "carriages of necessary use" (carts, wagons), so that "the indolence and vanity of the rich is made
to contribute in a very easy manner to the relief of the
poor."63 Today, when it is taken for granted that necessity
and luxury are relative terms, Smith's ideas on the subject
may seem unremarkable. In his own time, when many of
his contemporaries were bitterly complaining about the
"luxuries of the poor," and when the low-wage theorists
were using the evidence of such luxuries-and precisely
linen shirts and leather shoes-as an argument against
higher wages, Smith's views were notably progressive.
So, too, were his views on mercantilisin. Among his
other objections to mercantilist regulations was the fact
that they were generally in the interests of the merchants
and manufacturers and against the interests of the workers. Indeed on the few occasions when they were otherwise, he favored retaining them, even at the expense of
the principle of free trade.
Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are
always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is
sometimes otherwise when it is in favour of the masters.64
Thus he disapproved of the regulation of wages-which
established not a minimum but a maximum rate of
wages-and supported the law requiring employers to pay
their workers in money rather than in goods. "This law
(payment in money] is in favour of the workmen; but the
8th of George [the fixing of wages] is in favour of the masters." For the same reasons he protested against the injustice of permitting masters to combine while forbidding
workers to do so. 65
More important than the effect of this or that policy on
the poor was the image of the poor implicit in these policies. These were the "creditable people, even of the lowest
order" who deserved more than the bare necessities of life,
the '(sober and industrious poor" who were the proper
beneficiaries of a proportionate system of taxation, the
"lowest ranks of the people" who would become more, not
less, industrious as a result of high wages and who would
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�benefit, morally and materially, from a progressive economy. That Smith, like most of his countrymen, thought it
just to devise policies that would favor the "sober and industrious poor" rather than the "dissolute and disorderly"
is not surprising. What is more interesting is his confident
assumption that the overwhelming number of the poor
were sober and industrious. It was this assumption that
permitted him to "connect" the interests of the "labouring poor" with the "general interest" of society. And not
only their interests but their natures. It was because the
poor were presumed to have the same virtues and passions
as everyone else, because there were no innate differences
separating them from the other classes, that they were capable of working within the "system of natural liberty"
and profiting from it as much as everyone else. These
"creditable" poor were capable and desirous of bettering
themselves, capable and desirous of exercising the virtues
inherent in human nature, capable and desirous of the liberty that was their right as responsible individuals.66
This is not the doctrine cynically described by Anatole
France: "The law is equal for all; rich and poor alike are
free to sleep under a bridge." Smith did not pretend that
the "formal" equality of the law, even the "natural" equality of the laws of political economy, could be applied to all
indiscriminately. This is why he devised a state system of
education specifically intended for the poor, why he proposed the kinds of taxes he did, why he did not object to
poor relief, why he supported regulations favoring workers, why he based his system on a policy of high wages and
an expanding economy. He did not shrink from the facts
of inequality or deny the need for correctives and palliatives. But neither did he retreat from his basic assumption:
that the poor, as much as the rich, were free, responsible,
moral agents. Later, this ideal of moral responsibility was
to be turned against the poor, used to justify the denial of
poor relief and the opposition to such protective ("paternalistic," as was said pejoratively) measures as factory acts.
To Smith the idea of moral responsibility had quite the
opposite function: to establish the claim of the poor to
higher wages, a higher standard of living, a higher rank in
life-to whatever goods might accrue to them as a result of
a free, expanding economy.
Between the old "moral economy" and Smith's political
economy there was a gulf-a chasm, some would say. The
former depended, at least in principle, on a system of regulations derived from equity, tradition, and law, a system
prescribing fair prices, just wages, customary rights, corporative rules, paternalistic obligations, hierarchical relationships-all of which were intended to produce a structured,
harmonious, stable, secure, organic order. By contrast, the
"system of natural liberty" prided itself on being open,
mobile, changeable, individualistic, with all the risks but
also all the opportunities associated with freedom. The
contrast is to a certain extent artificial, the old moral economy having been much attenuated in the century before
Smith, and the new political economy having its own
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
moral imperatives and constraints. For Smith political
economy was not an end in itself but a means to an end,
that end being the wealth and well-being, moral and material, of the "people," of whom the "laboring poor" were
the largest part. And the poor themselves had a moral status in that economy-not the special moral status they enjoyed in a fixed, hierarchic order, but that which adhered
to them as individuals in a free society sharing a common
human, which is to say, moral, nature.
1. John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of
Great Britain (1876), in Works, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, London 1907, XXVIII, 516,764.
2. On the early history of the expression "laissez faire," see Dugald
Stewart, Biogrdbhical Memoir of Adam Smith, New York 1966 (1st ed.,
1793), 93, n.1; August Oncken, Die Maxime Laissez-faire et laissez-passer,
Bern 1886; Edward R. Kittrell," 'Laissez Faire' in English Classical Economics," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1966, 610-20; Guy Routh, The
Origin of Economic Ideas, New York 1977,44-45.
.
3. Vernard Foley, "The Division of Labor in Plato and Smith," History of
Political Economy, 1974,242. In his edition of the Wealth of Nations London 1904, Edwin Cannan cited Mandeville as the source of the expression (3). But the passage quoted does not contain that phrase, and the
illustration was watch-making rather than pin-making. In this general
sense dozens of other writers might be credited with it.
4. Adam Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan
Forbes, Edinbmgh 1966 (1st ed., 1767), 181.
5. Stewart, 68. In Smith's first year at Glasgow, 1751-52, he was Professor of Logic. His lectures on moral philosophy started in 1752 when he
was transferred to that chair.
6. Walter Bagehot, "Adam Smith as a Person" (1876), Collected Works,
Camb., Mass. 1968, III, 93.
7, Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody
Schumpeter, New York 1974 (Is! ed., 1954),184-86.
8. Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England,
London 1884 (delivered as lectures in 1881). G. N. Clark traces the association of "industrial" and "revolution" to the early 1800s in France and
the phrase itself to the French economist Jer6me-Adolphe Blanqui (not
to be confused with the revolutionist Louis-August Blanqu~ in 1838,
Friedrich Engels in 1845 (Condition of the Working Class in England),
and John Stuart Mill in 1848 (Principles of Political Economy). But it was
Toynbee's work that popularized both the term and the idea. (Clark, The
Idea of the Industrial Revolution, Glasgow 1953).
9. The best summary of this debate is C. P. Kindleberger, "The Historical Background: Adam Smith and the Industrial Revolution," in The Market and the State: Essays in Honor of Adam Smith, ed. Thomas Wilson
and AndrewS. Skinner, Oxf. 1976, 1-25. See the comments on this paper
by Asa Briggs (25-33) and R. M. Hartwell (33-41).
10. Stewart, 52.
II. John Rae, Life of Adam Smith, London 1895, 286.
12. Jacob H. Hollander, "The Founder of a School," in Adam Smith,
1776-1926: Lectures to Commemorate the Sesquicentennial of the Publication of"The Wealth ofNations", New York 1966 (1st ed., 1928), 25; Rae,
Life, 288-90.
13. John Millar in 1786, quoted by Asa Briggs in The Market and the
State, 28.
14. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan, New York 1937, 11-14, 423, 651. The "invisible hand" metaphor also appears in a different context in the Theory of
Moral Sentiments, 7th ed., London 1792 (lst ed., 1759), I, 464.
15. One of the most effective statements of this view is Karl Polanyi, The
Great Transformation, Boston 1957 (lst ed., 1944). A more sophisticated
version has been advanced by E. P. Thompson, who describes the Wealth
of Nations as an "anti-model" rather than a new model, the negation of
the older paternalist model. The new political economy, he argues, was
13
�"disinfested of intrusive moral imperatives" not because Smith and his
colleagues were immoral or unconcerned with the public good, but objectively, regardless of their moral intentions. ("The Moral Economy of
the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present, 1971,
89-90.)
16. Moral Sentiments, I, 146 ff.
17. August Oncken, "Das Adam Smith-Problem," Zeitschrift- fUr So-
zialwissenschaft, 1898. For recent statements and reevaluations of this
problem, see Ralph Anspach, "The Implications of the Theory of Moral
Sentiments for Adam Smith's Economic Thought," History of Political
Economy, 1972; Joseph Cropsey, "Adam Smith and Political Philosophy," in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas
Wilson, Oxf. 1975; D. D. Raphael, "The Impartial Spectator," ibid.;
Thomas Wilson, "Sympathy and Self·Interest," in The Market and the
State; Joseph Cropsey, "The Invisible Hand: Moral and Political Considerations," in Adam Smith and Modem Political Economy, ed. Gerald P.
O'Driscoll, Jr., Ames, Iowa 1979; Richard Teichgraeber III, "Rethinking
Das Adam Smith Problem," Journal of British Studies, 1981.
18. Moral Sentiments. l, 47; ll, 300, 305.
19. Jeremy Bentham, The Handbook of Political Fallacies, ed. Harold A.
Larrabee, New York 1962 (1sted.,l824), p. 230; Works, ed. John Bowring,
London 1838-43, XI, 72.
20. Moral Sentiments, I, 339.
21. Sentiments, II, 115.
22. The "design," as Smith described it in the seventh edition of Moral
Sentiments, included his moral philosophy, political economy, and theory of jurisprudence. (I, vi-vii.)
23. Schumpeter. !41, 182, 185.
24. Wealth of Nations. 388-89. 424, 460, 463, 577.
25. Wealth, 98, 128, 250, 609.
26. Wealth, 14.
27. Wealth, 423.
28. Wealth, 423.
29. Wealth, !!.
30. Wealth, 78-79.
3!. Wealth, 248.
32. A. W. Coats, "Changing Attitudes to Labour in the Mid-Eighteenth
Century," Economic History Review, 1958, 39 (quoting Hume's Political
Discourses of 1752).
33. Arthur Young, The Farmer's Tour through the East of England, Lon·
don l77l,IV, 36!.
34. Young, A Six Month's Tour through the North of England, London
!770, I, 196.
35. Wealth, 8!.
36. Wealth, 82-83.
37. Wealth, 8!.
38. Wealth, ll.
39. Wealth, 15-16.
40. Wealth, !3.
4!. Wealth, 248-49.
42. Wealth, !2!-22.
43. For differing views of this subject, see Nathan Rosenberg, "Adam
Smith on the Division of Labor: Two Views or One?" Economica, 1965;
E. G. West, "The Political Economy of Alienation: Karl Marx and Adam
Smith," OxfordEcon~mic Papers, 1969; Robert L. Heilbroner, "The Paradox of Progress: Decline a'nd Decay in the Wealth of Nations," Journal of
the History ofldeas,1973 (i:eprinted in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Andrew
S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson, Oxf. 1975); Robert Lamb, "Adam
Smith's Concept of Alienation," Oxford Economic Papers, 1973; E. G.
14
West, "Adam Smith and Alienation: A Rejoinder," ibid., 1975.
44. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick
Engels, rev. Ernest Untermann, New York 1936, 397-98.
45. Wealth, 734.
46. Wealth, 126-27
47. Wealth, 8!.
48. Wealth, 8-9.
49. Heilbroner, "The Paradox of Progress," Journal of the History of
Ideas, 1973, 243.
50. Donald Winch, Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic
Revision, Camb.1978, 143-44.
51. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, ed.J. M. Robson, Toronto 1965,
II, 754.
52. Wealth,
53. Wealth,
54. Wealth.
55. Wealth.
56. Wealth,
126-28.
734.
736-38.
737.
740.
57. Mark Blaug, "The Economics of Education in English Classical Po·
litical Economy: A Re-Examination," in Essays on Adam Smith, 572.
Blaug does not, however, attach to "social control" the usual invidious
implications.
58. M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth
Century Puritanism in Action, Camb. 1938, 159.
59. Joseph Cropsey, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Princi·
pies of Adam Smith, The Hague 1957; Cropsey, "Adam Smith," in His·
tory of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, Chicago
1963. See also essays cited in footnote 17.
60. The modification of the laissez-faire stereotype goes back at least to
Jacob Viner, "Adam Smith and Laissez-Faire," Journal of Political Economy, 1927. Among the more notable contributions to this revisionist interpretation are: Lionel Robbins, The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy, London 1952; L. R. Sorenson, "Some
Classical Economists, Laissez Faire, and the Factory Acts," Journal
of Economic History, 1952; S. G. Checkland, "The Prescriptions of the
Classical Economists," Economica, 1953; A. W. Coats, "Economic
Thought and Poor Law Policy in the Eighteenth Century," Economic
History Review; Coats, "The Classical Economists and the Labourer," in
Land, Labour and Population, ed. E. L. Jones and G. E. Mingay, London
1967; Coats (ed.), The Classical Economists and Economic Policy, London
1971; Thomas Sowell, Classical Economists Reconsidered, Princeton
1974; Nathan Rosenberg, "Adam Smith and Laissez-Faire Revisited," in
Adam Smith and Modern Political Economy.
61. E.g., Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect, Homewood, Ill.
1968 (1st ed., 1962), p. 51. Blaug's claim that Smith condemned the "Poor
Laws in general'' may rest on Smith's criticisms of trade corporations and
assemblies, in the course of which he also criticized those regulations
which made such assemblies necessary-the regulation, for example,
"which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to pro·
vide for their poor, their sick, their widows and orphans, [which] by giv·
ing them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies nee·
essary." (Wealth of Nations, 129). But the poor rates were levied by the
parish rather than by trades, and therefore did not come under Smith's
stricture.
62. Wealth, !4!.
63. Wealth, 777. 821. 683.
64. Wealth, !42.
65. Wealth. !42. 66-67.
66. Wealth. 823, 248, 740.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�A.mbiguities in Kant's Treatment of Space
Arthur Collins
One of the sources of persistent obscurity in the philosophy of Kant is the fact that he introduces a double standard for dealing with questions about what there is. In the
Critique of Pure Reason, this appears first in the culminating assertion of the Transcendental Aesthetic: the assertion ofthe "empirical reality and transcendental ideality of
space and time." To say that space and time are empiri~
cally real means that the things that figure in our experience are spatia-temporal things. These are the things
found in the common-sense world of perception and the
things that make up the subject matter of all scientific investigation. All of these empirical realities exist in space
and time. But, to say that space and time are transcendentally ideal means that they do not characterize things as
they are in themselves, as opposed to things as they appear
in our experience. Things apart from our experience and
independent of our mental activities are not spatia-temporal things. Vis-a-vis things as they are in themselves, space
and time are not anything real at all. They are merely ideas.
In the realm of things as they are nothing corresponds to
our ideas of space and time and these realities do not exist
in space and time. "It is solely from the human standpoint
that we can speak of space, of extended things, etc." (A 26,
B 42). Time, " ... in itself, apart from the subject, is nothing" (A 35, B 51).
One may suspect atl:he outset that the device that Kant
introduces here for treating questions about what there is
may be too powerful for any legitimate use. It looks as
though Kant avails himself of a means for having it both
A frequent contributor on the history of philosophy, Arthur Collins
teaches philosophy at the City University of New York. His last discussion of Kant, "Kant's Empiricism," appeared in the July 1979 issue of the
St. John's Review.
Quotations from the Critique of Pure Reason are from the translation of
Norman Kemp Smith; those from Kant's "Inaugural Dissertation" are
from the translation of G. B. Kerferd.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ways at crucial junctures. Faced with the destructive
claims of sceptics and idealists, Kant is a staunch realist.
The objects of perception are real things. They constitute
a causally connected, spatia-temporal system of material
objects which Kant calls "nature" and our knowledge of
these objects is objective knowledge. When he is pursuing
this realism, Kant likes to label entities envisioned by others that fall outside the sphere of possible experience mere
''Hirngespinsf' and uGedankendingen." But when Kant's
thoughts of human morality and freedom seem to be
threatened by this all-too-causal empirical reality, he is prepared to downgrade it, to emphasize that these empirical
0bjects" are only appearances, to reprimand "stubborn
insistence" on their reality (A 537, B 565), and to rest his
conception of man and the human situation on a further reality that underlies and is more fundamental than
appearance.
As a parallel for "the empirical world" of things we can
perceive and study scientifically, Kant uses the expression
"the intelligible world" for the realm of things in themselves. But in the Critique and all later works Kant consistently asserts that we cannot know anything whatever
about the intelligible world-an odd sort of intelligibility!
Before the Critique, in his Inaugural Dissertation, for example, Kant accepted a traditional concept of an intelligible world as opposed to a world of perception and he believed, in the spirit of Plato and the rationalists, that we
could have knowledge of nonsensible reality. In his mature
writing Kant repudiated the claim to know the nonsensible while retaining the designation "intelligible," although
it is only fitting in the context of the earlier view. The single surviving theme from his earlier position is Kant's occasional speculative suggestion that a creature whose intuition (mode of receptivity) is nonsensible might actually
know things in themselves and that God may know things
in themselves without anything like sense experience.
11
15
�Two kinds of reality: empirical and transcendental, risk
generating two systems of truths, one for each reality. Our
complete and permanent ignorance of things in them·
selves, in Kant's thinking, conveniently avoids the possibil·
ity of conflict between these two systems of truths. The
unknowability of transcendental reality "makes room for
faith" in Kant's own words. But in this connection, too,
the duality of the empirical and the transcendental, or
knowable and unknowable reality, seems too convenient
to be legitimate. An unfriendly critic can read Kant's doc·
trine as an admission that the faith that defends "God,
Freedom, and Immortality," operates only by relegating
them to a region where nothing can tend against them
since nothing can be known at all. At the same time, the
seeming robustness of empirical realism also relies on the
utter unknowability of things in themselves in the sense
that, if we could know anything at all about things in them·
selves, we would immediately recognize their ontological
primacy and the derivative and figmentary status of appearances. The veil of appearances seems to be more than
that in Kant's system, one might argue, only because it is
all that we can know.
Should we reject the dual standard of reality, the merely
empirical reality of objects of experience, and the unknowability of things as they are apart from how they appear to
us? Or is there some fundamental truth in Kant's realism
which is not hopelessly undercut by his transcendental
idealism? These questions go to the heart of Kant's system. In trying to answer them, we will find that the concept of space plays a particularly prominent role.
1 Outer Sense and Idealism
Kant's efforts to distinguish his views from the ideas of
earlier thinkers such as Descartes or Hume bring his conception of outer sense to the fore. Kant often relies entirely on the fact that he endorses both inner and outer
receptivity, while the "problematic and dogmatic idealists," as he classifies them, accept inner receptivity but not
outer. In the beginning of the Aesthetic, he defines outer
intuition or outer sense as a capacity "to represent to our~
selves objects as outside us and all without exception in
space" (A 22, B 37). In contrast, in inner intuition, the
mind "intuits itself or its inner state" (A 23, B 37). Here
Kant quite plainly thinks that "outside us," where we locate what is available to outer sense, means outside the
mind, where located things will not be mental things. Inner sense, just as plainly, has only mental things like
thoughts and ideas for its objects.
Kant thinks that the Cartesian ordering of these matters, inherited by the empiricists, involves a reduction of
receptivity to inner sense alone.
They have no expectaton of being able to prove apodeictically the absolute reality of space; for they are confronted by
16
idealism, which teaches that the reality of outer objects does
not allow of strict proof. On the other hand, the reality of the
object of our inner sense (the reality of myself and my state)
is, [they argue,] immediately evident through consciousness.
[A 38, B 55]
Kant goes on to say that the Cartesian-empiricist fails to
note that the object of outer sense in space is just as accessible to us as the object of inner sense.
In his interpretation of the tradition preceding him, Kant
is surely right. For Descartes, spatial reality, the realm of
extended substance, contrasts at the most fundamental
level possible with the realm of mental things. Extension
does not think and the mind is not extended. To this distinction Descartes very definitely adds the view that spatial reality is never given. It is not, as Kant would put it, intuited. In
Descartes' system, space is identical with matter. The existence of a spatial realm is the existence of extended substance. This existence is viewed by Descartes as something
that must be argued for. Descartes never contemplates arguing for the existence of our own conscious states,
thoughts, and ideas. The point of the cogito in this context is
precisely to show the impossibility of thinking of my own
mental states as something for which I could stand in need
of an argument. Stated in terms of "intuition", for Descartes the mental and inner is intuited, while the nonmental, outer, and spatial is not intuited, but is a matter of a
relatively tenuous hypothesis. For Hume, too, "impressions
and ideas," both of which are mental things, are the only
things "really present with the mind" (Treatise, I, ii, 6), while
the existence of extended bodily things is only recognized
with the help of naturally implanted though rationally unsupported beliefs. In the case of Berkeley, the given does
not include anything outside the mind for, indeed, there are
no extra-mental realities at all.
Thus, the Cartesian-empiricist's conception of consciousness is pretty much what Kant calls just inner sense.
Kant gives us a whole mental faculty, namely, outer sense,
beyond any cognitive equipment assigned us by the idealist tradition. The outer in Kant's system is given in intuition just as the inner is given in intuition. And the outer is
not the mental.
_
It is -not surprising that Kant thinks that his acceptance
of outer sense sufficiently distinguishes his view from any
form of idealism. His theory of outer intuition also explains why he is so unconcerned about egocentric and
sceptical problems which inevitably make up the first order of business from the Cartesian viewpoint. These problems will not arise if we find nonmental objects in space
among what is immediately given. In the Cartesian-empiricist tradition, we can say that the problem of outer reality
is the problem of the existence of spatial things to correspond to our ideas of spatial things, ideas which are not
themselves spatial things. "The problem of the external
world" means the world of spatially locatable things all of
which are, unlike any idea, external to the mind. In Kant's
scheme spatial things are given. They are given to outer
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�sense so that the problem of the exte,nal world cannot be
put in the usual way at all. Kant's empirical realism is the
assertion that objects in space are given.
Sometimes Kant calls the opposed vi'ew "empirical idealism." Just as transcendental idealism means that spatial
things are only ideas and nothing real in the sphere of
things as they are in themselves, empirical idealism means
that contents of our conscious experience of spatial things
consist merely in ideas of spatial things and offer nothing
at all in the way of actually existing spatial objects. The
idealist view that objects of experience are nothing real in
space is "problematic" in Hume, in that Hume thinks that
there may be outer objects as well as ideas, and dogmatic
in Berkeley, who thinks that there cannot possibly be outer
objects as well as ideas. In Kant's thinking, we are not limited to a foundation of ideas of spatial things any more
than we are limited to a foundation of ideas of mental
things. Both are present to us as immediately as anything
can be. Naturally, Kant found it hard to accept early criticisms that bracketed his theory with Berkeley's. Berkeley
denies more explicitly than anyone else the immediacy of
spatial things outside the mind, and then he goes on to
deny the existence of spatial things outside the mind.
Upon the least examination, however, Kant's empirical
realism turns out to be a fragile thing. Although outer
sense represents things "as outside us and all without exception in space," Kant says, again and again, throughout
the Critique, that space exists only "in us," that, like time,
space would be nothing apart from the human cognitive
constitution. Spatial appearances exist only "in the faculty
of representations," (A 104) and "all objects with which we
can occupy ourselves, are one and all in me ... " (A 129).
The mind absorbs spatial objects in this prominent Kantian claim. The innerness and mind-dependence of all objects seems to set at nothing the thought that Kant has
distinguished his position from that of the Cartesianempiricist. When we have come a good way into the Critique, to the Paralogisms wherein Kant explains the illusions to which rationalist philosophy of mind is susceptible, he says
The expression "outside us" is unavoidably ambiguous in
meaning, sometimes signifying what as a thing in itself exists
apart from us, and sometimes what belongs solely to outer ex-
perience. [A 373]
The view so clearly put here contradicts the claim that the
theory of outer sense separates Kant's philosophy from all
the forms of idealism that Descartes' account of mind and
perception generates. Kant tells us here that outer appearances do not exist uapart from us." What can this mean if
not that they do not exist outside our minds and thoughts?
The relevant problem that the Cartesian tradition seemed
to face might be put in the question, "Are there spatial
things which exist apart from us, that is, apart from
our thoughts and representations of spatial things?" Of
course, Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume all know that,
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
within our thought, we find ideas of spatial things and that
these ideas differ from ideas of things which are not spatial. In mounting a proof of the existence of extended reality Descartes is responding to the fact that ideas of spatial
things do not exist apart from us, while spatial things, if
any there be, do exist apart from us.
The whole Kantian theory asserting the necessary existence (if experience is to be possible) of causally connected
and enduring empirical objects, the theory secured with
such energy and subtlety in the Analytic half of the Critique, seems to be thrown away here when Kant says that
none of these realities are anything at all outside our own
thinking. This collapse of the pretensions of outer sense
reminds us that Kant sometimes confines his opposition to
idealism to a very different line of thought. This alternative opposition merely stresses that Kant accepts, while
idealists deny or doubt, the existence of things as they are
in themselves in addition to appearances or objects of experience. Arguing in this vein, Kant places no weight at all
on outer sense, as though he realizes that, in his system,
outer sense is simply not outer enough to reach any nonmental realities that may exist apart from us.
In the section of the Critique entitled, "The Ground of
the Distinction of All Objects in General into Phenomena
and Noumena," that is, into appearances and things as
they are in themselves, Kant goes so far as to reduce the
concept of a reality beyond that of appearances to the status of a "merely negative concept" (A 254, B 309). By this
he means that the idea of noumena is simply the idea of
realities that are not known in experience. Since objects of
experience are all the objects of which we can have any
knowledge, noumena, if there are any, are just objects of
which we have no knowledge. Kant goes on to call the very
concept of such further, wholly unknown, realities a
"problematic concept" and a "limiting concept" (A 255,
B 3ll) and he seems to imply that we cannot get quite as
far as the unqualified assertion that there are any such
noumena. The concept of a further kind of being beyond
appearances only clearly marks the end of the realm of objects of whose existence we are sure, namely, the minddependent objects constituting the empirical world. Kant
is saying that we think of mind-dependent realities as appearances of real entities other than themselves but that,
perhaps, there is no other reality, in which case appearances are not really appearances but, instead, they are the
only kinds of things that there are apart from the minds
which intuit these things. Is this not exactly Berkeley's
view? The idea that, for the things immediately present to
the mind, esse is percipi is the idea that we have no right to
think of these things as appearances. Berkeley's ontology
is limited to the ideas present to minds and the minds to
which those ideas are present. If we are forced to interpret
Kant as surrendering the true outerness of appearances in
favor of a counterfeit outerness of space which exists only
in our minds, then his whole metaphysics must appear an
enormous disappointment and all of the famous and diffi-
17
�cult arguments of the first half of the Critique must seem a
waste of effort.
2 Transcendental Aesthetic
In the hope of salvaging as much as possible from this
threatening disappointment let us examine in more detail
the main doctrines of the Transcendental Aesthetic which
I identify as follows: (a) the metaphysical expositions of
space and time, (b) the transcendental expositions, (c) the
view that space and time are forms of outer and inner
sense respectively, and (d) their asserted transcendental
ideality.
The opening section of the Aesthetic is concerned with
the definition of "intuition" (Anschauung) and related
concepts that underlie Kant's controlling distinction between receptivity and spontaneity, that is, between the
functions of intuition and those of understanding and reason. There follow immediately separate and parallel discussions of space and time. In each case a four~point meta~
physical exposition of the concept is supposed to be
followed by a transcendental exposition, but the passages
are marred by Kant's curious failure to adhere to the distinction between these two points of view, even though
the distinction seems to have been invented by him precisely for the purpose of facilitating this very discussion.
The four metaphysical points are that space, or time, is
(1) not an empirical concept, (2) an a priori and necessary
concept, (3) a singular rather than a discursive concept,
and (4) a concept of something infinite.
The expository confusion in both discussions consists in
Kant's inserting the transcendental considerations between the second and third metaphysical points and then
only partially correcting the disorder in passages that follow and in changes in the second edition. The actual reason for this, I believe, is that Kant wants to make the transcendental points in the context of the premises relevant
to them. These premises are the first two metaphysical
points and only those two. In a later passage Kant himself
explains the arrangement saying that he wanted to save
space. But the confused ordering does not save any space
unless Kant means that, with any other organization, he
would have had to restate the needed metaphysical views
in order to connect them with the transcendental exposition which would be separated from them.
In the instances of both space and time, the four metaphysical points are assertions for which no arguments are
given. Perhaps by a metaphysical exposition Kant means
an account that ought to be accessible to any highly intelligent and philosophically mature common sense. He seems
to expect that the statement of the claims will suffice for
their acceptance. This is not entirely unreasonable in that
there is much to be said for the four points.
The first point, considering only space for the moment,
is that space is not an empirical concept. Kant says that the
18
concept of space is presupposed for rather than derived
from experience. To see what Kant has in mind it is useful
to refer to another similar point that Kant often makes
later in the Critique. Unlike ordinary empirical objects,
space is not itself perceived. So space is not a concept like
the concept ocean or box. These are empirical concepts
which we possess because we encounter such things as
oceans and boxes in our perceptual experience. Of course,
space might be an empirical concept, although not an object of perception, if it figured in hypotheses belonging to
an explanatory theory, in the way in which the concept of
a gravitational field figures in theories that explain the perceived motion of objects. Kant's second metaphysical
point rules out this kind of theoretical status for the concept of space. Space is necessary for any outer experience
at all, while theoretical objects are doubly contingent and
never necessary. Theoretical objects are contingent, first,
because the facts which they are introduced to explain are
contingent facts. But theoretical objects have a second
kind of contingency beyond the contingency of the facts
they explain. For theoretical objects may always be repudiated in favor of other theoretical commitments that explain the same facts even better. The status of space is
nothing like this because, according to Kant, there could
not be any facts of outer intuition without space.
Kant expresses the necessity of space saying that we can
think space empty but we cannot think it away. The inhibition on thinking space away is related to the fact that space
is not something we detect by perceiving it or experiencing it. Things that we do detect by perceiving them, things
like oceans and boxes, we can think of as empty (oceans
empty of fish, and boxes empty of apples, respectively) and
we can also think such things away, that is, think a universe without oceans or boxes among its constituents.
Now thinking space empty is simply thinking away all of
the constituents of the outer universe. 'Since space is not
one of these, we have nothing to bring under the heading
of thinking away space itself. There is nothing else that
might disappear from the outer beyond the things that appear in it, and space is not one of these things. Kant reads
the fact that we perceive things in space and that space is
not threatened by disappearance as the necessity of space.
The two other metaphysical points are of less importance to our present interests. That space is not a discur~
sive concept, as the concepts ocean and box are, means
that it is the idea of an individual. There is just one space
in which all outer things are located. The plural "spaces"
indicates only parts of space and not instances of space,
while oceans and boxes are instances, not parts. This is a
very important assertion since it is the foundation of the
unity and uniqueness of the spatia-temporal universe and,
thus, of the connectability in principle of all objects of possible experience. The final claim, the infinity of space, we
can pass over without comment here.
The metaphysical expositions are reflections on the
concepts of space and time which do not depend on any
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�special commitments, nor on any ch')racteristically Kantian critical or transcendental argume.nts. The transcendental expositions, which are loosely derived from the
metaphysical, plunge us at once into specifically Kantian
doctrine as well as into considerable obscurity. From the
nonempirical yet necessary status of space and time, the
transcendental expositions purport to explain how it is
that we possess knowledge in geometry (in the case of
space) and knowledge of a much more vaguely indicated
body of more or less mathematical doctrine (in the case of
time.) The explanation is more implied than stated, and it
makes minimal sense only in the context of views about
necessary truth, mathematics, and experience which are
not themselves discussed in the Aesthetic, although they
have been sketched in the Introduction to the Critique.
The root idea is that no necessary truth can be justified
on a foundation of empirical evidence. Kant takes this to
have been established definitively by Hume. If we learned
about space empirically, as we learn about boxes and
oceans, no knowledge of space could amount to necessary
truth. But knowledge of space is geometry and geometry is
a body of necessary truth. The discussion here in the Aesthetic makes no effort to explain how truths about space
are actually reached but rests content with the general
thought that, since our idea of space is not derived empirically, propositions about the structure of space can also be
expected to be nonempirical. Kant always takes it for
granted that we do possess knowledge in mathematics and
that the mathematical propositions we know are synthetic
(rather than analytic), and necessary (which requires that
they be a priori.) The tenor of Kant's thought is illuminated by a comment he makes on Hume's view that belief
in strictly universal and necessary propositions is not rationally justifiable: "[Hume] ... would never have been
guilty of this statement so destructive of pure philosophy,
for he would have recognized that according to his arguments pure mathematics would also not be possible; and
from such an assertion his good sense would have saved
him" (B 20). Here Kant shows his conviction that we must
find some explanation for necessity in mathematical
knowledge since we do possess such knowledge, and he
also reveals his rather sketchy knowledge of Hume's opinions. For, concerning geometry, Hume did extend his
scepticism to mathematics in the Treatise of Human Nature, and he said that theorems of geometry are only approximations: "As the ultimate standard of these figures is
derived from nothing but the senses and imagination, 'tis
absurd to speak of any perfection beyond what these faculties can judge of; since the true perfection of anything
consists in its conformity to its standard" (I, ii, 4).
The transcendental expositions of space and time constitute an answer early in the Critique to one form of the
great motivating question, ((How is synthetic a priori
knowledge possible?" The answer that explains how synthetic a priori mathematical knowledge is possible is, however, only a sketch or a promise of an answer the full verTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
sion of which depends not only on the thought that space
and time are necessary and a priori concepts but also on
the claim that there are what Kant calls "a priori manifolds" of space and time and "a priori syntheses" of these
manifolds in the course of which the objects of mathematical truths are "constructed," in Kant's terminology.
It is only because space and time are recognizable as
forms of outer and inner sense that Kant is able to assert
their transcendental ideality. For this ideality means that
things as they are in themselves are not spatia-temporal
things. On the surface of it, such a claim contradicts the
general impossibility of knowledge of things as they are in
themselves. In the absence of the identification of space
and time as forms, Kant could at best assert that we do not
know whether or not things as they are in themselves are
characterizable in spatial or temporal terms. The relevance of the formal status of space can be illustrated in
analogies. Imagine an illiterate who learns to read only
telegrams. At one stage he has come to understand that
the words printed on the telegram make up a verbal message received somehow from a distant person. But at this
stage he interprets every word on the form as part of the
message, including, for example, the words "Western
Union." He will have to learn that these words are imposed by the form and are not part of the content. It would
be absurd for this reader to wonder, after learning the status of "Western Union," whether there might be another
"Western Union" which is part of the content of every
message as it is in itself Of course, we might think that
anything might be part of the hidden content of a message. But no part of the content can have just the role and
meaning that the words "Western Union" have on the
telegram blank because that meaning and role contrast
with content by definition.
Such an analogy is imperfect in that "Western Union" is
part of the telegram form on which the matter is organized, but it is not a necessary part, while, according to
Kant, space and time are necessary forms for the organiza-
tion of the matter that we receive in intuition. The essential contrast of form and content is preserved in the analogy. Once we have identified space and time as forms, it is
absurd to suppose that these concepts might also characterize the unknown source of intuitive inputs. Therefore,
this identification of space and time relieves the appearance of contradiction in the assertion that unknowable
things in themselves are not in space and time.
All of this depends on understanding in what sense we
might think of space and time as forms. The word "form",
which is the same in Kant's German discussion, appeals to
the contrast between matter and form that goes back to
Greek thought. Kant says that space is "nothing other
than simply the form of all appearances of outer sense."
The traditional contrast is filled out when Kant identifies
sensation as the matter of such appearances. According to
the traditional distinction, an individual existing thing has
to have both form and matter. Matter cannot exist without
19
�form, that is, without being anything in particular, and
form cannot exist, Platonism apar'\, without being the
form of some matter. Kant's conception of an appearance
conforms, at least superficially, to this pattern. As far as
outer sense is concerned, the matter of an appearance con~
sists of sensible qualities such as color and texture, which
fill formal elements such as surfaces and volumes and so
constitute perceivable objects of some magnitude.
We saw that the pretension of Kant's empirical realism
seems to collapse with the absorbtion of space by the
mind. This absorption, in turn, is clearly traceable to the
claims of the Aesthetic. Space is identified as the form of
outer sense and, furthermore, as a form imposed by us.
This identification "internalizes" space and it is necessary
for the transcendental exposition. This understanding of
space is required for Kant's explanation of our possession
of synthetic a priori knowledge in geometry. Therefore,
space, the imposed form of outer things, cannot be used to
secure the distinction between Kant's views and the ideal·
ists'. We shall now consider the possibility that the matter
of outer sense might play this role.
-
3 The Construction of Spatial Objects
In expressing his opposition to idealism, Kant's appeal
to the accessibility of objects of outer sense is so clear and
emphatic that it is hard to think of it as simply a mistake.
No doubt the force of the Cartesian contrast between the
spatial, extended, and material world and the conscious
unextended mind inclines him to express his thought
about the nonmental outer in terms of spatiality. There is
certainly something wrong with this mode of expression.
Kant, however, did not simply fail to notice that the mind·
imposed status of space is incompatible with the employment of space as the mark of the nonmental existence of
things apart from us. Is it possible that he rests his rejection
of idealism, not on the form of objects of outer sense, but
on their matter; not on space, but on sensation?
The matter of outer appearance is its sensuous aspect.
This is what Kant calls sensation (Empfindung). Sensation
makes up the stuff of which spatial organization is the required form. This statement has to be replaced by a much
more theoretical understanding of sensations and their relationship to perceivable objects. Our receptive faculty
gives sensations a spatial location. But we cannot think of
this receptivity as literally operating on received sensible
qualities. We cannot suppose, for example, that it is a feature of our receptivity to assign a color sensation to a place
because Kant states very clearly that, prior to any synthesizing activity, individual sensations do not have any
ex~
tension at all. Sensible qualities such as color are the sorts
of things of which we can be conscious as the perceivable
features of an object, as the color of a surface, for example.
As such, sensible features themselves are the product of
synthesis, in this case, of a kind of aggregating activity op·
20
erating on unextended sensations which have been located in the same region. Only the resulting aggregate deserves to be described in color language. The unextended
content of a single sensation is located but is not perceivable. This is the claim of the Axioms of Intuition according
to which all objects of experience are extended magnitudes and, therefore, aggregates, the least constituents of
which are not perceivable.
We are treating a major side of Kant's thinking which
has come to be an embarrassment to modern admirers of
Kant. The machinery of the mind, the transcendental psychology, in which Kant tries to depict the actual procedures whereby raw materials are transformed into a world
of experience is a "wholly fictional subject matter," as
P. F. Strawson described it. If anything is acceptable in
this Kantian enterprise it will certainly have to be drastically redescribed in some way that gets away from the idiom of quasimechanical speculation. At the same time,
however little is retained of this account of the mind making nature, no understanding of what is best in Kant's
thought is possible if these speculations are simply ignored. Neglect encourages, in particular, a mistaken interpretation of the terms of Kant's theories which tends to
place them in a spuriously direct relationship to common
sense concepts.
According to Kant, unknown things as they are in themselves affect us and unextended sensations are engendered
as a consequence. In the process our receptive constitu~
tion deploys these sensations in space. The various combinatory powers that Kant ascribes to the human mind under the title of powers of synthesis survey these located
sensations and assemble objects from them. These are perceivable objects and they, rather than their theoretical
constituent sensations, are the first items accessible to
consciousness. There are no objects of consciousness
more primitive than perceivable objects. Many of the important claims of the Analytic come from the idea that any
conscious experience at all, and any self-consciousness, is
conditioned by the completion of this mental construction
of objects of perception. The ultimate constituents for the
construction of objects with perceivable features are sensations, but they do not have perceivable features. The
term "sensation" in eighteenth century philosophical parlance is ordinarily used for qualities apprehended, such as
heat and color. Kant's constituents are called sensations
only in virtue of the extended perceivable things which
have sensible qualities and which are supposed to be made
out of sensations.
This style of thought, prominent throughout the Critique, becomes easier to understand when we see it in the
context of the thought of Leibniz, who exerted a decisive
influence on Kant in just these theories of mental construction. The whole format for the construction of a scientific world of phenomena out of elements of which we
are not conscious is taken over from Leibniz's account of
apperception. Conscious experience results, for Leibniz,
WIN1ER/SPRING 1983
�from the aggregation of innumerable unconscious petites
perceptions. The motion of the sea is perceived as a roar
only because the mind must aggregate the infinite events
which make up the motion of the water, each one of which
is itself silent, and the mind perceives only the aggregate
(confusedly, without distinguishing the constituent events)
as sound. For Leibniz the spatia-temporal character of
things is phenomenal, that is, it reflects not the reality of
the things experienced but the conditions the mind imposes in the process of experiencing anything at all. So underlying realities are unextended but, to be perceived,
they are represented in aggregates that produce the perspectival spatia-temporal subject matter of human experience and knowledge. So for Leibniz, phenomenal reality is
not a valueless illusion. Phenomena be_ne fundata offer a
kind of surrogate for metaphysical reality and truth. As in
Kant, phenomena are the locus of all scientific thought.
The elements wfiich ai-erelated in our best thought do correspond globally to reality although there is no one-to-one
correspondence of appearance and reality. The ambiguous evaluation of phenomenal reality in Kant's system and
the theory of transcendental ideality have their roots in
Leibniz' s thinking.
We have sketched Kant's idea of the construction of empirical objects out of sensations. We are now in a position
to address Kant's idea of the constructions the mind
makes in the pure or a priori manifolds of space and time.
Kant says that "transcendental logic" differs from ordinary
or general logic, in that it has its own subject matter, an a
priori subject matter, to which the basic combinatory
forms of general logic are applied. The a priori manifolds
of space and time make up this self-contained field of application for transcendental logic (A 55, B 79).
The concept of these a priori manifolds can be understood in terms of what we have said about sensation. Kant
says that our receptivity includes a location-assigning procedure which places sensations in space where they are
ready for synthesis into perceivable spatial objects. Pure
space, or the a priori manifold of outer sense, is just the
idea of the system of locations by themselves, without any
sensations assigned to them. Perhaps there is a big difference between a location-assigning system, and a system of
locations to which things can·be assigned. In virtue of the
former Kant speaks of space as the form of outer intuition,
while only in virtue of the latter can he speak of space itself as an intuition, and an a priori intuition at that. Kant
plainly believes that he is entitled to the transition from
the former to the latter, but there is little or no mention of
this issue in the Critique.
Here we should see the Kantian position as an attempt
at a compromise between the conceptions of space defended by Leibniz and by Newton. Newton insisted on an
absolute container space which would exist whether or not
there were any spatial things to be found anywhere in
space. In the Correspondence with Clarke, Leibniz repudiated this on roughly verificationist grounds and he asTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
serted that space is a system of relations between coexistent entities. There would be no space were there to be no
things spatially related. Kant was attracted by the Leibnizean account but he remained convinced that something
like absolute space is conceptually indispensable because
of a curious argument about incongruent counterparts.
Congruent objects are those that have the same shape and
the same dimensions. Two such figures can occupy the
same space. When superimposed they fit each other exactly. Two gloves of a pair are close to congruence but they
cannot occupy the same space because of the left-hand
orientation of the one and the right-hand orientation of
the other. Since the internal spatial relations of the parts
of each glove are the same, it appears that, were Leibniz
right about space, there would be no difference at all between a universe consisting only of a left-hand glove and a
universe consisting of a right-hand glove of the same dimensions. All relations between coexisting things would
be the same in each universe. Kant is intuitively convinced
that Leibniz's theory of space makes it impossible to represent a difference that would be real here. The problem is
solved by the existence of absolute space, since the two
gloves would have different relations to absolute space and
would necessarily fill different regions of it.
In Kant's system, the whole discussion of the status of
space is brought within the domain of appearances.
Things located in space are, first, sensations, and second,
material objects. Is there space in the absence of spatial
things? There is not in the sense that space is transcendentally ideal and does not exist apart from the outer sense
which is a component of our cognitive constitution. But
space does exist apart from spatial things in the sense in
which outer sense offers a system of places which is independent of the fact that sensations are arranged in that
system. This means that the impossibility of thinking
space away carries an implication for the thing-like character of space itself which goes beyond the metaphysical exposition, which is compatible with Leibniz's theory. Newton thought that we need an absolute container space in
order to distinguish absolute and relative motion. Analogously, Kant thinks that we require such a space in order
to solve the problem of incongruent counterparts. Therefore, although he makes space phenomenal as Leibniz did,
Kant's a priori space with neither sensations nor objects in
it functions as absolute space, within Kant's thinking, just
as absolute space outside the mind functions in Newton's.
This commitment to absolute space allows Kant to
think of the location-assigning aspect of outer sense as an a
priori system of locations. "[S]pace and time are represented a priori not merely as forms of sensible intuition,
but as themselves intuitions which contain a manifold ... "
(B 160). We can think of pure space as something like an
armature on which sensations are organized. The chief
doctrines of the transcendental logic and, prominently,
the Principles, result from the consideration of the powers
of combination that men possess applied to these empty
21
�but a priori manifolds. The Axioms, Anticipations, Analo·
gies, and Postulates are said to be a'priori laws of nature.
They are supposed to hold for the empirical realm because
empirical objects are the result of applying the very same
constructive powers to the same manifolds of space and
time, but when these manifolds are filled with sensation.
The structural laws which result from the application of
combinatory creativity to empty space are true of the
empty proto-objects constructed of empty locations.
Therefore, they are also automatically true when these locations are assigned sensations with the combining procedures unchanged.
In the simplest case, that is, the Axioms of Intuition, we
are to understand that the laws of extended magnitude are
generated along with the extended objects of which they
are true. This is achieved when the pure manifold of nonempirical space is synthesized so that empty points are assembled into empty regions, surfaces, and volumes. Since
the empirical manifold results simply from filling the same
locations with sensation, the same geometrical laws will
hold for empirical and pure space. Geometrically describable objects arise from the aggregation oflocations. This is
the detailed story that lies behind the transcendental exposition of space in the Aesthetic. Whether the constructed
objects are empirically full or empty makes no difference
to their geometrical properties.
4 Sensation and the Objectivity of
Outer Sense
We saw that space, as ithe region of outer things, collapsed back into the mind because space is only a mindimposed form and spatiality does not characterize things
as they are in themselves or even sensations, apart from
the location-assigning propensities of our own minds.
Since the outerness of space is all in the mind, Kant's system seems to be no improvement on the perennial idealistic weaknesses of the Cartesian-empiricist outlook. But we
have raised the question whether Kant intended spatiality
to be the aspect of outer appearances that carried the crucial burden of realism. We have examined Kant's conception of sensation, space, and objects with a view to determining whether or not sensation, the matter of outer
objects, might be the needed support for Kant's anti-idealist assertions. Kant never says that sensation is imposed by
us, or that the mind makes sensations. If he meant sensation to carry the burden of realism, it would be understandable that Kant should frequently assert, as he does,
both that outer sense refutes idealism and that space exists
only in us, and that he should assert both in the same context of discussion. There is much in favor of this interpretation although, as we shall see, it cannot be the whole of
his thought about the connection of outer sense and mindindependent reality.
In a revealing passage just prior to the Transcendental
Deduction of the Categories Kant says
1
22
There are only two possible ways in which synthetic representations and their objects can establish connection, obtain necessary relation to one another, and, as it were, meet one another. Either the object alone must make the representation
possible, or the representation alone must make the object
possible. In the former case, the relation is only empirical, and
the representation is never possible a priori. This is true of
appearances, as regards that element in them which belongs
to sensation. In the latter case 1 representation itself does not
produce its object in so far as existence is concerned 1 for we
are not speaking here of its causality by means of the will.
Nonetheless the representation is a priori determinant of the
object, if it be the case that only through the representation is
1
it possible to know anything as an object. [A 92]
This passage has implications for the meaning of Kant's
entire transcendental philosophy. According to the Cartesian-empiricist way of thinking, our knowledge of external
things, if we have any, is based on the fact that those external things cause our representations. Kant would say that,
within that framework of metaphysical thought, these
philosophers have supposed that spatially extended objects are mind-independent entities that "make possible"
our representations. The revolutionary character of his
thought is that Kant will say that sometimes the dependence runs the other way so that our representation makes
possible the object. At its most idealistic, this amounts to a
reductive phenomenalism in the manner of Berkeley. The
idea of empirical objects of perception is simply the idea of
groups and patterns among transient subjective experiences. But in the passage just quoted Kant expresses a far
less idealistic view and expressly denies the reduction of
objects to representations.
Within the passage there are two themes that we will
consider separately. First Kant says that the empirical part
of representation that is sensation is "made possible'' by
the object. In other words, with respect to sensation,
Kant's view resembles the Cartesian-empiricist line of
thought. Something outside the mind is responsible for
the sensation. The object in question is certainly the thing
in itself. This is the mind-independent reality that affects
us and engenders sensations. The sensation is a representation and as such, it is called a "modification of our receptive faculty" and it is, in consequence, also something
in us and in the mind. But these original representations
are not the product of our own creative faculties. They are
received. They would not exist at all were it not for things
as they are in themselves. We will treat this relation between sensations and reality immediately in assessing the
appeal to sensation as the chief support of realism.
The second theme of the quoted passage will become
important at the end of our discussion. This is Kant's statement that even in those contexts where it is right to say
that the representation makes possible its object, we
should not think that this means that representatioBs •produce objects in point of existence (dem Dasein nach), but
only that the representation makes it possible for us to
know realities as objects. In other words, Kant repudiates
1
1
1
1
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�any scheme which would try to reduce objects of representations to representations themselves, a~ radical phenomenalism, for example, reduces material objects to sense
data. We are never to say that an object of knowledge is
nothing more than our representations and the patterns
detectable among them. Kant's phenomenalism does not
account for the existence of objects known but only for
their objecthood in our knowledge. In other words, we are
constitutionally disposed to represent realities independent of our minds as objects of perception. All of the characteristics of objects of perception have an irreducible
mind-dependence. But it is still independent reality that
has become an object for us. The scheme of representation does not create the object that it represents. In the
last analysis, it is things as they are in themselves that are
represented in experience of spatial objects. In experience, independent reality is represented as a system of stable objects of perception in causal interconnection with
one another. There are a great many passages in which
Kant expresses a phenomenalism far more radical than
this. For the present let us return to the more limited claim
about the character of sensation.
How should we understand the question, "Does the object make the representation possible, or does the representation make the object possible?" Let us call this the
priority question. In itself it seems to presuppose a distinction between representations and objects, while this presupposition is one of the things at issue in the confrontation of realism and idealism. Kant's term "Vorstellung" is
broader than anything the English word "representation"
naturally suggests. It is meant to cover not only perceptual
contents but also all intuitions, pure and empirical. Elementary sensations which are not conscious contents are
nonetheless representations. Furthermore, all concepts,
pure and empirical, are representations. Even concepts
which are defective precisely in failing to represent anything, such as the Ideas of Reason, are representations. It
is important to appreciate the abstractness of Kant's usage
here because it reveals his willingness to speak of representations whether or not they represent anything and
whether or not they are conscious items that represent
something to anyone. In the context of the priority question, Kant is thinking of representations as contents of
perceptual experience like the ideas of Locke, Berkeley,
and Hume, but he is also including elementary unextended sensations which are not conscious and have no
role at all in the empiricist tradition. These, as we said,
come into Kant's picture from Leibniz's concept of petites
perceptions.
Kant means us to think that it is idealists like Berkeley
who hold that representations make possible objects.
Berkeley says that an object like a cherry is a bundle of
ideas of sense, including some red ideas, some round ideas,
and some sweet ideas. There are cherries only in that we
have such ideas in such bundles. When Kant addresses the
priority question himself, his thinking focuses on elemenTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tary sensations and their origin because even red ideas are
a product of synthetic activity. Elementary sensations are
the ones which objects plainly make possible. What objects? Here Kant must mean the things in themselves that
engender sensations by affecting us. So it is, indeed,
Kant's doctrine of sensation and not his theory of spatiality that opposes idealism.
The obscurity that darkens this opinion comes from the
fact that Kant thinks that these very same sensations do
make possible objects, namely, empirical objects. The procedures of combinatory synthesis which we have sketched
operate by assembling perceivable objects out of elementary sensations. So sensations both make possible objects
and are made possible by objects and, in different contexts, Kant gives both answers to the priority question.
We confront here one of the confusions in Kant's
thought that comes from his dual standard for questions
about reality. There are empirical objects and transcendental things in themselves. Sensations are made possible
by things in themselves, and sensations make possible empirical objects. At times, Kant encourages us to think of
things in space as the locus of nonmental being, and he
defines inner sense as access to mental things. This is Descartes' opinion but, if it is also Kant's, then his theory
seems to coincide with idealism. The allegedly nonmental
spatial world is a construct from representations (sensations.) When he asserts his realism, Kant forgets or repudiates the suggestion that spatial things are nonmental and
he counts objects in space as representations along with
sensations. They are all mind-dependent realities and
Kant asks of this whole class of things, Do they make possible mind-independent objects? He decides for realism in
answering this question. Of course, sensations make objects of perception in space possible, but then they are just
appearances. As appearances, they represent realities
which are not just appearances. In our spatial representations, realities which are not representations or appearances become objects for us. "Through the representation
it is possible to know anything as an object."
The underlying difficulty of the dual realities is compounded by ambiguities in the concept of representation.
Consider again Berkeley's understanding of the nature of
a cherry. We should not really describe Berkeley's bundle
theory of perceived objects as the view that representations make possible (or make) objects. The term "representation" is out of place in this description. An element in a
bundle does not represent the bundle anymore than a brick
represents a wall of which it is an element. The idealist
theory really amounts to a renunciation of urepresenta~
tion" as a concept suitable for ideas of sense. The point of
idealism is that there is nothing nonmental for mental
items to represent. An analogous but restricted point holds
for Kant's phenomenalism. The construction of perceivable objects out of spatially deployed sensations by our faculties does not generate an account of objects of perception within which we can say that sensations represent
23
�perceived objects in space. But KaJ!t does like to say that
"we represent objects as outside us ')nd all without exception in space." Using such phrases he allows himself to
think of representations as items having spatial objects
which they represent. But Kant constructs spatial objects
out of elements found in the manifold of outer sense. So it
is quite misleading for him to suggest that those elements
represent spatial objects. In the history of reductive phenomenalism, this illicit use of "representation" frequently
lends plausibility to otherwise unpalatable accounts. As
long as the concept of representation is illicitly retained,
the harshness of the reduction is softened. For the concept implies that there is still a difference between representations and objects of just the sort that the reduction
intends to deny.
We have sa!d~ihat representations make possible empirical objects and are made possible by transcendental ob·
jects. If we delete the implication, which Kant frequently
allows himself, that inner elements represent constructed
objects in space, on the ground that this is an illicit use of
"represenf', a univocal and relatively clear anti-idealist
line of thought emerges and it is, I believe, a major part of
what Kant did want to say on this topic.
What the Cartesian-empiricist tradition calls objects in
space are simply complex representations according to Kant.
The processes envisioned in the Analytic try to describe how
we form such representations. If we ask how it is that spatial
things have the status of representations of anything, we
must say, in Kant's thought, that they inherit this status from
their constituent sensations. So the representational charac·
ter of perceptual experience is traceable to sensation. Sensa·
tion is the proper foundation for realism.
This way of reading Kant's treatment of the priority
question may seem to fall short of his expressed views in
two ways. First, Kant habitually speaks of perceived ob·
jects in space as obiects and seldom as representations, and
much of the Analytic itself is dominated by a usage of "ob·
ject" in which it is obviously spatial things that are objects
and not things in themselves. Second, the priority question, we said, presupposes a distinction between represen-
tations and objects. If we interpret the objects of which
the priority question inquires as transcendental objects,
Kant's ignorabimus will imply that we have no means at all
for making good this distinction. If spatial objects are just
representations we have no further objects to play the role
of things represented.
Concerning the first of these reservations, Kant is cer-
tainly entitled to speak of objects of perception, and em·
pirical objects and objects in space. We could not plausibly
propose that he should only speak of empirical, perceptual, and spatial representations. But all these things are objects only because we think about them, and make judgments about them, and investigate them scientifically.
Conscious contents involve objects and not merely representations because these contents figure as the subject
matter of thought.
24
Objects are given to us by means of sensibility; they are
thought through the understanding. . . . But all thought
must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility [sensible representations], because in no other way can
an object be given to us. [A 19, B 33)
In other words, mind-independent reality becomes an ob·
ject for us by engendering sensations and thence empirical
representations. Then these representations also become
objects of thought and thought about them is thought
about reality precisely because it is traceable to these
sensations.
Reflection on the second reservation bears out this un·
derstanding. Since Kant holds that we can know nothing
about things in themselves (and sometimes goes so far as
to put in doubt the thought that there are any), we are
tempted to think, and Kant is also tempted to think, that
he means that empirical realities are the only ones that can
figure at all in our philosophical account of things. There
is no question, for Kant, of getting beyond the empirical
object. This "going beyond appearance" is the issue for
the old Cartesian-empiricist outlook. Mathematical characterizations, for example, manage to penetrate to things
as they are apart from our experience. Mathematical
thinking, it seems, enables us to get at, and not merely to
represent, reality. But this is no part of Kant's scheme. For
Kant, getting at reality is representing it. We cannot make a
comparison of represented and unrepresented reality. In
consequence, we should not interpret the priority question as presupposing that we can make such a comparison.
Unrepresented reality cannot be compared with anything
because being represented is the condition for figuring in
any comparison we can make.
In his relationship to the idealist problems generated by
the Cartesian philosophy of mind, Kant is actually the
champion of the concept of representation. The idealist
renounces representation by denying reality to anything
but the mental content itself. There is nothing to be represented. The nonidealist within the Cartesian tradition also
rejects the idea of representation in his aspiration to get
beyond appearances so as to compare unrepresented reality with our ideas of it. The great Cartesian question of the
"resemblance" of ideas and their objects expresses this aspiration. This dream survives in Kant's conviction that
God knows reality without representing it, without being
affected by it, and without experiencing it. In the case of
men, Kant grasps, at least most of the time, the thought
that representation is the vehicle of knowledge of the represented, not a barrier which once interposed makes possible only knowledge of the representation itself.
Kant wants to allow space to be absorbed by the mind
and, at the same time, to single out outer sense as the
un~
compromised connection with things that exist apart from
us. Inner sense involves an element of sensation too, but
there is no mind-independent entity represented here, because inner sense is the mind's receptivity to itself. If we
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�construe inner sense as the mind, as thing in itself, affecting itself and giving rise to appearances of itself and its
state, we remain in the realm of the mental. Outer sense
starts outside the mental, not because ifs representations
are spatial, but because sensations of outer sense have
their origin in nonmental independent reality.
That sensation is the essential link to the extra-mental
explains Kant's statement in the Schematism: "Reality, in
the pure concept of understanding is that which corresponds to sensation in general ... " (A 143, B 182). And in
the Paralogisms, Kant can say, in the context of the asser-
atory benefit of the post-renaissance view. The aspect of
our representations that accept mathematical representa·
tion become transcendentally ideal for Kant. Spatial characteristics: figure, magnitude, and motion, are no longer
attributes of mind-independent reality for Kant. They exist only from our point of view. The sensuous component,
ception exhibits the reality of something in space, and in
in contrast, downgraded by the tradition, is the indispensable link to things that affect us in Kant's account.
Each component of this reversal of the evaluation of the
sensible and the mathematical has to be qualified. Kant
offers a new security for extension-dependent qualities
which remain the locus of mathematical description for
him. But the new security is an a priori foundation depen-
the absence of perception no power of imagination can in-
dent on our cognitive constitution. Numerical and
vent and produce that something. It is sensation, therefore, that indicates a reality in space or time, according as
it is related to the one or to the other mode of sensible
intuition" (A 373-4). And a few lines later, "Space is the
metrical representation ceases to be thought of as intellectual penetration that gets beyond appearance. Since
things in themselves are not spatio-temporal, mathematical propositions do not fit them. On the side of the sensible, Kant continues to think of sensation as an effect in us
and does not assert any resemblance between inner and
outer in terms of sensible features. But sensations are the
foundation of objectivity in the sense that they are the
matter of all objects for us, and they would not exist but
for the influence of things outside us. No such claim is
made for the mathematical aspect of representations. So
Kant is able to say that space represents only "possible coexistence" while perception does represent reality be-
tion that sensation is the sole input for perception, 11 Per-
representation of a mere possibility of coexistence, per-
ception is the representation of a reality" (A 374).
5 Primary and Secondary Qualities
Kant's distinction between the formal and material ingredients of empirical intuition is his inventive reworking
of the traditional distinction between primary and secondary qualities. One of the reasons for which it is hard to appreciate Kant's reliance on sensation rather than space for
the basic connection of thinking to the nonmental is that
Kant reverses the traditional evaluation of primary and
secondary. Primary qualities, for the tradition initiated by
Galileo and perfected in the articulation of Locke's Essay,
are those which accept mathematical and prominently geometrical or spatial characterization. It is in respect of primary qualities that our ideas resemble things and correctly
represent a mind-independent reality. Our ideas of secondary qualities involve sensible characteristics like color
and heat. These are literally features of our ideas, that is,
of mental things, but they have no footing at all in nonmental outer reality.
The distinction between primary and secondary qualities is at the core of post-renaissance philosophy because it
explains the success of mathematical science and the failure of the earlier scholastic-Aristotelian program which relied upon a relatively naive interpretation of perceptual experience. The demotion of the sensuous to the status of
wholly subjective appearance fitted the growing understanding of the physics and physiology of perception. The
objectivity assigned to the mathematically representable
side of experience fitted the notion that mathematics is
the "language of the book of nature," with the help of
which we penetrate the veil of misleading sensuous representation to a true conception of outer reality. When Kant
trades this distinction between qualities for a distinction
between form and matter, he discards much of the explanTilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
geo~
cause perception contains empirical intuition or sensation
(A 374). We can say, then, that the synthesized, nonempirical, proto-objects, the geometrical objects of the Axioms of
Intuition, are not representations of anything. But empirical appearances are representations that must have their
object. They derive this status from sensation.
One can recognize patterns of thought from both Descartes and Leibniz subjected to imaginative permutations
by Kant in this context. According to Descartes' conception of "confused" as opposed to
~~distinct"
ideas, we are
disposed to mistake the sensuous mental effect for the extended outer cause. Thus we project sensuous content,
which is immediately intuited but not extended, onto
space, which is extended but not intuited. Descartes
thinks this projection is an understandable human error.
He explains-our disposition to this error saying that we use
the sensuous qualities as clues to the harmfulness and utility of things in the spatial environment. This disposition
contributes to self-preservation and its effect is enhanced
by the fact that we think of the clues as features of, and
not merely effects of, the objects. In this, Descartes supposes, as Kant does, that essentially unextended things
(Descartes' sensuous ideas and Kant's sensations) are projected into space by us, and then thought by us to characterize regions and surfaces. The great difference lies not in
the concept of the projection of the unextended into
space but only in the legitimacy of the projection. Descartes and any other subjectivist on secondary qualities
must say that color characterizes nothing that is actually
25
�extended, since the locus of color is, the mind where there
is nothing extended. For Kant, the same projection is not
an error but an aspect of cognitive functioning which is·
sues in a constructed perceivable object.
Like Kant, Leibniz, too, has it that an essentially non·
spatial reality is represented spatially by the human mind.
Reality is itself not spatial in two senses for Leibniz. First,
space is only a system of relations and never anything like
a container for things, and, second, this system of relations
belongs only to representations or phenomena and not to
things independently of the fact that they are mentally
represented. Leibniz was never attracted at all by the Cartesian method of doubt and the solipsistic starting point
that it fosters. He refuses to enter upon the epistemological enterprise on which Descartes wagers everything. Instead Leibniz offers an overall metaphysical account
which is to be accepted if it does justice to all of our experience and thought. He does not try to show how this account might be reached by any reflective man in the face
of the most extreme scepticism.
Within Leibniz' s account, the ultimate explanation for
the fittingness of our thought to reality is pre-established
harmony. Everyone finds this unsatisfying and Kant expresses his dissatisfaction, saying that Leibniz "intellectualized the senses." Perception is just confused thought for
Leibniz, and all thought is a self-contained activity of the
mind. There is no original input traceable to our being affected by things, because in the last analysis we are not
affected by anything, according to Leibniz, but only programmed in advance to have the mental contents that we
do have.
No doubt Kant inherits from Leibniz a starting point
alien from the Cartesian-empiricist egocentrism and solipsism. It is no part of Kant's plan to doubt whether representations are really representations and then to overcome
this doubt. Kant's acceptance of the Cartesian view that
we are affected by the things that we represent is a repudiation of Leibniz's reliance on harmony as the ultimate
foundation of knowledge. Like Leibniz, Kant understands
the spatial images of conscious perception as the aggregation by the mind of items which are not themselves extended. But like Descartes, Kant thinks that these items
are effects of outer realities. Against Descartes, with
whom he shares the notion of perceptual images as effects
of outer realities, Kant thinks that our idea of color requires that extended things be colored things. Mere ideas
will never make color intelligible without receptivity. Only
because spatial things can actually have sensible features
is it the case that "Perception exhibits the reality of something in space, and, in the absence of perception, no
power of imagination can invent or produce that something." This is related to the view that Hume expressed
saying that all ideas are copies of impressions. Though it is
found in spatial things, color is subjective, in Kant's view,
as it is for the standard theory of secondary qualities.
In this setting of the views of predecessors Kant's rear-
26
dering emerges naturally. There is some objective influence on our faculty or receptivity that is responsible for
the existence and representational character of outer intuitions. In order to think of outer reality consciously we
make spatial pictures by assembling essentially unextended sensations which have been assigned places in the
mind-imposed system of locations. These pictures, in virtue of their empirical content (sensation), represent reality
outside the mind as objects in space. Spatial pictures as
assembled objects really have surfaces and their surfaces
are really colored. Color is an emergent feature which
arises in the synthesis of a multitude of sensations which
have been assigned to locations near one another. Thus,
color stands for, and represents, the outer thing without
resembling it, while the spatial features neither stand for
nor resemble any reality. In some ways this concept of
space is like the psychological concept of a visual field. Geometrical features of things come from the features of
mind-imposed space and play no part in the relation of objects of perception to things outside the mind. This fits
nicely Kant's claim that geometry is necessary and a priori,
and yet geometrical truths are true of empirical objects.
Space is the region of all possible objects ("possible coexistence") and when space is filled with sensation, synthesis
generates apprehendable structures (empirical objects) out
of deployed sensations. That these representations represent the nonmental is due entirely to the contained sensations. The mathematical knowledge we have of such objects is, as Kant says, only a question of getting out what
we have put in ourselves. It is secondary qualities that are
responsible for the fact that experience reaches beyond
merely mental realities, while primary qualities betoken
nothing mind-independent.
6 The Spatial and the Temporal
Were sensation all there is to connection with things
outside the mind, space would be just as mental as time is.
Spatial things would be mental representations of nonmental realities, and temporal things would be mental representations of mental realities. This pleasant symmetry is
not tenable. It is contradicted by the fact that Kant clearly
requires that spatial representations be subjected to time in
order to become participants in the activities of the mind.
Some of the essential doctrines of the Critique depend,
first, on the thought that spatiality per se makes representations unfit for mental status, and, second, it is precisely
the spatiality of spatial representations that renders them
fit vehicles for securing the concept of anything enduring
at all, even of minds as enduring conscious subjects.
Kant segregates the spatial and the temporal with startling rigor. All readers follow him easily when he confines
inner mental objects to a temporal order and allows spatial
distinctions no footing in the mind. This satisfies a widely
shared intuitive conviction that thoughts are not located
WINTER/SPRJNG 1983
�(B)
(A)
(C)
(D)
/
anywhere and that ideas do not displace any spatial occupant Kant's confinement of the mental to time is part of
the common ground of his inner sense and Cartesian consciousness. But Kant's exclusion of time from the objects
of outer sense, which are subjected to space and space
alone, is not attuned to any widely shared philosophical
presumption. As a result, readers of Kant sometimes suppose that he does not mean to exclude temporality from
the outer. It is often said that Kant means to say that all
inner things are subject to time and all outer things to
space and time. And this seems a needed reading lest Kant
be thought to leave no conceptual room for change in the
outer world at aiL Such an understanding, however, conflicts with very simple and clear statements in the Critique
such as this one: "Time cannot be outwardly intuited anymore than space can be intuited as something in us" (A 23,
B 37). Can one hope that even such direct assertions are
open to interpretation or overridden by other considerations? We certainly must say that Kant's ultimate view is
that material objects both fill space and endure in time. In
his thinking, then, the spatial and the temporal are wedded. The point, however, is that they need to be wedded.
No object of outer intuition, considered in itself, is something that exists in time.
As a first approximation for the understanding of this
perplexing view, we can point out that time is not essential
in the realm of the extended, whether or not time, as a
matter of fact, applies to things in that realm. The fact is
that as conscious subjects we confront an outer world in
which there is change. Since this is so, we have to deploy
temporal concepts in describing that world. But this is an
empirical fact It is conceivable that we might have found
an outer reality in which there is no change whatever. Under such circumstances, change would be confined to the
domain of our conscious survey of this wholly static reality. It would not be necessary to ascribe time to both the
inner and the outer. Our first thought, then, is that time is
not absolutely necessary for the very idea of the outer, as
space is absolutely necessary.
The thought of a changeless spatial world leads to a further speculation, and one that is a lot closer to Kant's actual view of space and time. It seems theoretically possible
to deny that there is any change in the actual world and to
assert that the spatial world we do experience is a static
world. All the apparent temporal distinctions in the outer
world will have to be recast as temporal distinctions that
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
apply only in the mental world of experiences. For example, we may think of the sequence of images A-D, in the
figure 1 as the content of consecutive visual experiences of
a subject The natural interpretation of such a sequence
assigns change, and therefore time, to both the outer and
the inner. The subject's inner experience changes as the
outer car passes the tree. But we are not forced to interpret A-D as consecutive viewings of the same outer re~
gion, namely, one in which changes are taking place. We
could think of it instead as consecutive viewings of four
different regions of a wholly static space. If we think of the
images A-D as consecutive frames of a motion picture
film, then the viewing of the film realizes the possibility of
the second interpretation, that is, consecutive experiences
of four different static arrays. This analogy ignores the real
motion involved in the manipulation of the film. When we
view a film we create the illusion of change in the object
by arranging to witness related but unchanging objects in
a special temporal order. In principle, we could think of
our ordinary experience of the world as conforming to this
pattern. Therefore, the ascription of time to the outer is an
expendable convenience.
We made informal use here of the distinction between
the thing seen and the visual experience of that thing.
Kant, too, recognizes such a distinction. He frequently
says that apprehension of the manifold of intuition is always successive, whether or not the manifold itself is successive (inner) or simultaneous (outer). The perception of
a line, however short, (an example Kant likes) involves a
synthesis which is necessarily successive. The allusion to
synthesis in this opinion reminds us that outer sense does
not reveal a world in which the question, "Are there really
changes here, or not?" naturally arises. Due to outer sense
we have a range of intuitions. These are a multiplicity of
individual representations of outer things. For the description of these representations spatial terms are needed and
temporal terms are not Nothing happens in one representation. The ordinary world is not something simply given
to outer sense. The world is constructed by our synthetic
powers (the understanding) operating on material provided by receptivity. In Kant's terms the restriction of temporality to the inner means that all the temporal distinctions used in thinking of the ordinary world are traceable
to synthesis and none to outer receptivity.
Kant often speaks of the products of the synthetic
powers of the mind as objects of outer sense. For example,
27
�a line is an object of outer intuition. This seems unproblematic because a line is a static thing. Its synthesis, how·
ever, is successive and involves time. Strictly speaking,
nothing complex is merely intuited. Even the least com·
plexity is ascribed to synthesis. Combinatory activity-as·
sembling, integrating, collating, comparing, retaining, re·
trieving, reproducing, and, in general, synthesizing-is all
mental activity. Kant often says that we are not conscious
of these operations and some are even "concealed in the
depths of the soul," but this merely emphasizes that he
does think of them as mental processes. No one thinks oth·
erwise. It is inevitable, in Kant's system, that these activi·
ties be temporal activities and any materials involved in
these activities must be in time in order to be accessible for
synthesis.
It is for this reason that Kant confines the Schematism
to consideration of the temporality of intuition. The job of
the schematism is to bridge the gulf between the Catego·
ries as pure concepts of understanding and the empirical
sensibility that offers human beings matter for experience.
The Categories are developed from the forms of judgment
identified in formal logic. Although the transcendental deduction of the Categories is supposed to guarantee that
any reality we are able to experience will conform to these
pure concepts, the deduction does not reduce the merely
formal and logical significance of the Categories. Any ra·
tiona! creature will have experience in conformity with
just these twelve Categories, in Kant's view, but this might
have a wholly different meaning for creatures whose re·
ceptivity is not spatial and temporal as our receptivity is.
So the Schematism interprets the Categories for beings
with sensible and spatio-temporal intuitions. But Kant
seems to ignore the spatial altogether so that, in the Sche·
matism, as he describes it, the Categories are subjected to
a temporal condition. Some readers have supposed that he
might have offered a spatial as well as a temporal Sche·
matism for the Categories. This is not correct. The Gate·
gories are the pure forms that are available for the combination of materials provided by receptivity. Combination
is not intelligible without time. As Kant says, synthesis is
always successive, whether or not the manifold is succes·
sive or simultaneous. Thus Kant calls time the form of all
appearances whether inner or outer. In this view, Kant dis·
tinguishes appearances, which presuppose synthesis, from
intuitions, which do not. Outer intuitions have to be
re~represented as mental experiences in order to enter into
any combinatory activity. For example, the apprehension
of a cube offers an object of outer sense that has spatial
features such as being cube-shaped and no temporal fea·
tures. It is the visual experience of the cube and not the
cube itself that enters into mental activities. When spatial
things are re-represented they trade in their spatial charac·
ter for a new mental character. The visual experience of a
cube is not a cube-shaped experience. It is a datable event
related in time to all other events in the mind.
If outer sense is not directly available for synthesis, this
28
is just another way of saying that we cannot have any im·
mediate or non-inferential knowledge of outer things. The
raw materials of knowledge all have to be representations
in inner sense. But if this is so then in what sense are there
any data of outer sense at all? It seems that Kant's outer
sense has become something like the outer world for the
Cartesian-empiricist. It is a hypothetical source of some of
the data we really do have, namely, the things present to
the mind and available for synthesis. How else can we in·
terpret the fact that in Kant's scheme items that actually
possess spatial features cannot enter into mental processes
or consciousness. They have to be subjected to time. Kant
has internalized the problem of the external world. In or·
der to figure in mental activities, representations must be
temporal representations. When it comes to the supposed
data of outer sense, so often touted as immediate, it turns
out that subjection to time amounts to re-representation.
As Kemp-Smith put it, appearances in space are not really
representations at all, "They are objects of representation,
not representation itself" (Commentary, 295).
No spatial thing can exist as a subjective state. At most a
representation of a spatial thing, a representation which
does not itself have spatial features, can truly exist in the
mind. But the great problem with this is that the spatial is
now cut off from both the inner and mental and from the
metaphysically outer. From the perspective of the inner,
spatial representations are objects that have to be re-repre·
sented in time in order to belong to thought and to the
empirical world the mind constructs. From the perspective of things as they are in themselves, spatial representations are mere appearances. Spatial reality threatens to be·
come empirically ideal as well as being transcendentally ideal.
This instability in the status of the spatial sheds light on
some difficulties in interpreting Kant. Faced with the demand for a distinction between the subjective and the ob·
jective, Kant repeatedly formulates distinctions that seem
to fall entirely on the subjective side. For example, his con·
trast between judgments of perception and judgments of
experience, drawn in the Prolegomena, operates in a realm
that is all appearance. In the Analogies, he purports to dis·
tinguish the temporal order of our experience and the
temporal order in the object. But the only object under
consideration is outer appearance and not
mind~indepen~
dent reality. Such passages result from the fact that Kant
treats outer intuition as a source of input for inner intui~
tion. Then, relative to inner representations, the outer be-
comes a system of represented objects. Thus he is able to
treat outer appearances as if they offered independent objects about which a world of facts could be ascertained.
When he is thinking this way, Kant's conception of the
mind retreats to inner sense, to the traditional Cartesian
consciousness which has to develop knowledge of spatial
things through immediate contact with inner representa·
tions (ideas) of spatial objects. This thought contradicts
the claim on which much depends, in the Paralogisms, for
example, that inner and outer sense are symmetrical, and
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�both are immediate, and objects are given to both. In a
footnote which strengthens the newly composed "Refuta·
tion of Idealism," the Preface to the second edition of the
Critique explicitly asserts that the "permanent" which
must be found in perception "Cannot be an intuition in
me" (B xxxix) for intuitions in me have only the status of
ephemeral representations. Here Kant seems to promote
the object of outer sense, the object of perception, to
mind·independent reality, and simultaneously to reduce
our knowledge of it from the direct intuition claimed ear·
lier to something mediated and inferential.
We will miss what is important for Kant's thought here
if we treat these passages as mere slips into the Cartesian
point of view. The thought that what is permanent "can·
not be an intuition in me" points to an entirely different
significance for the inaccessibility of representations of
outer sense to both consciousness and synthesis. Why is it
that the permanent cannot be identified with any intui·
tion? Plainly, the answer is that anything truly mental, any
subjective state, is essentially transient. The fact that time
is the form of the mental guarantees that everything
purely mental has, as Hume expressed it, "a perishing exis-
tence." Nothing mental could possibly be permanent be·
cause impermanence is the form of mental things. Mere
temporal existence is impermanence.
We have now discovered the deeper Kantian motivation
for the sharp segregation of the temporal and the spa·
tial. Kant's thought of the outer has to satisfy two de·
mands that seem to conflict with one another. On the one
hand, he would like the outer to be intuited and thus im·
mediately accessible like any other intuition. And this is
required for the transcendental ideality of space. On the
other hand, he wants the outer as merely spatial, to be ex·
empted from the ever·vanishing essence of inner things
and mental things, even though the price of this exemp·
tion is separation from mental activities and consciousness. The inaccessibility of the spatial and its tendency to
become something independent of the mind is a conse·
quence of a powerful demand of Kant's theory and is no
mere slip. The defect of the Cartesian·empiricist perspec·
tive is that it envisions a starting point for philosophical
reflection consisting of a conscious mind confronted by
data all of which are perishing mental contents. Some·
thing outside the destructive scope of temporality must be
provided in order to account for the idea of the subject
himself. No concept of consciousness is intelligible which
starts from a framework limited to mental things.
The demand for something not subject to the ravages of
time, and therefore not mental, is the point of Kant's cen·
tral argument concerning apperception and personal iden·
tity. Any conception of mental activity presupposes that
the materials involved be accessible to one subject of con·
sciousness. The possibility of learning, discriminating, recognizing, remembering, and forming concepts requires
that the data be subject to one subject. But inner sense
does not reveal any such "abiding self."
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Berkeley earlier noted that we have no idea of the sub·
ject of experience, and he provided the "notion" of a spirit
to make up for the missing idea. Hume, too, recognized
that we have no experience of the self. Refusing to intra·
duce an ad hoc surrogate like Berkeley's spirit, Hume tried
to reduce the subject of experience to the content of expe·
rience in his bundle theory of the subject. This amounted
to an extension to mental substances of Berkeley's bundle
theory of spatial substances. This is the gist of the history
of the problem of the unity of apperception up to Kant.
Kant takes the bundle theory of personal identity to be the
reductio ad absurdum of the Cartesian·empiricist program
which tries to derive everything from the purely mental,
purely inner, and purely temporal.
Kant insists on a substantial foundation for the unity of
the subject of experience outside the various experiences
of that subject. The great Kantian contribution here is the
recognition that the subject could not possibly be given in
experience. Hume said that when he looked within in or·
der to find himself he found instead only another percep·
tion (perishing mental content). Kant understands that
this is inevitable. Suppose we found a common element in
all our conscious experience and we inclined to think of
this ubiquitous element as our own abiding self. This
would have to be an error. Kant sees that no such element
in experience could be the foundation of the connected·
ness of experiences that makes them all contents for one
subject. On the contrary, experiences stand in just the
same need of connectedness to one another and presence
to a common subject whether or not they have a common
element of any kind. The very idea that I could note a
common element in my experiences presupposes that I, as
a single subject, have all those different experiences, so
that I might note a common element among them. The
common element, if there were one, could not be the rea·
son for the fact that all the experiences containing the com·
man element are mine. We have to look outside the realm of
conscious contents to find a foundation for the unity of
consciousness.
The nontemporal spatial object of outer sense offers a
foundation for permanence because it is not an essentially
perishing object. Of course, the spatial object is not the
sought.for subject of experience. But the nontemporal
outer object provides the minimal conceptual framework
for the idea of the endurance of the subject. Enduring
things in space introduce the "determinate time" within
which the endurance of the subject can be thought.
For in what we entitle "soul" everything is in continual flux
and there is nothing abiding except (if we must so express
ourselves) the "I", which is simple solely because its representation has no content .... [A 381]
So long, therefore, as we do not go beyond mere thinking we
are without the necessary condition for applying the concept
of substance, that is, of a self-subsistent subject, to the self as
a thinking being. [B 413]
29
�Now consciousness [of my existence] in time is necessarily
bound up with consciousness of the '[condition of the] possibility of this time determination; and it is therefore necessarily bound up with the existence of things outside me, as the
condition of the time determination. [B 276]
Endurance does not contradict the essential character of
things that are outside thought. This is the positive benefit
of the Kantian treatment of space as inaccessible to immediate consciousness. The subject cannot be intuited, nor
can it be constructed out of the flux of intuited contents.
It has a stability borrowed from the endurance of outer
things.
A natural objection to Kant's circuitous reasoning about
the subject of experience might run as follows: Consciousness, he says, reveals no enduring substantial subject. It
also reveals no enduring substantial object. The given,
construed as the totality of materials that the mind does
have to work with, entirely consists of perishing contents.
When Kant claims that the outer enduring object is required for the possibility of an inner enduring subject, it
seems that he merely assumes the possibility of the one in
order to provide a conceptual foundation for the other.
Why does he not just assume the existence of the substantial subject and confess that his procedure is really no
more realistic than that of Berkeley?
The essential difference between the inner and the
outer is supposed to furnish the Kantian response to this
objection. For no assumption that Kant could make within
an ontology limited to inner objects could possibly be efficacious just because it is the essence of the inner to be
perishing and insubstantial. Nothing mental endures because time is the form of the mental. So there can be no
question of assuming the endurance of something mental.
Furthermore, this opinion is not an arbitrary dogma. That
the contents of consciousness are essentially transient is
indisputable phenomenology.
The temporal is the realm of all contents of consciousness, so it looks as if we have to posit something nontemporal in order to introduce the least stability in our
thought of ourselves and the world. But Kant would like to
say that we do not have to posit anything because perception acquaints us with the spatial and with things that
have permanent existence in space. The first Analogy of
Experience asserts that our experience is necessarily of en-
during substances. To the extent that the discussion is not
entirely phenomenalistic and reductive, Kant seems to
identify the enduring component of what is perceived
with matter and to assimilate the assertion of the Analogy
to the conservation of matter. This is explicitly Kant's view
in the parallel discussion of the Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde. But there is another side of the idea of permanence that is less theoretical and sweeping and, perhaps,
more attractive.
Permanence requires, at a minimum, that the temporal
parameters of the object perceived be extended beyond
those of the perception of the object. Thus, the idea of
30
permanence is the idea of the existence of objects unperceived. It is this conception of permanence that furthers
Kant's realism. Commitment to permanence in perception is the idea that our perceptions are of relatively stable
objects which endure through gaps in our episodic experiences. Permanence expresses categorical opposition to the
thesis that esse is percipi.
We have seen that the very advantage of nontemporality carries with it the disadvantage of separation from consciousness and the need for re-representation. If we forget
about this problem for the moment, as Kant seems to, the
prospects for his theory are good. Time comes into the picture of spatial reality only via experience. As a re-representation, an experience of a spatial thing has a date, that is a
place in the sequence of all mental contents of a subject.
Nothing merely conceptual obstructs the possibility that
an identical outer thing could be experienced at two different times. This is just what cannot happen with inner objects. I can experience again today the object that I experienced yesterday, but I cannot have the experience I had
yesterday again today. At best, I can have a qualitatively
identical experience, never the numerically identical experience. For objects of inner sense, the date, that is, place in
temporal sequence, is part of the principle of individuation. Therefore, if experiences have different dates, they
are, ipso facto, different experiences. The enduring existence of things in space does not contradict the very essence of spatial existence, while to speak of the enduring
existence of things that exist only in time does contradict
the essence of such temporal things.
Once concepts of spatial enduring objects are given
footing, we are able to speak, as Kant says, of''determinate
time." The outer object exists when we perceive it. It endures between our perceptions of it. A clock is a reperceivable object with the help of which the time between
perceptual experiences is measured. The whole spatial
world is a generalized clock. It makes time determinate in
the sense that it makes it possible to say at just what time
our inner experiences occur. The endurance of the self
that must accompany all experiences is registered in the
objective temporal order of outer things. The dates of objects, clock time, place the whole inner sequence of experiences of objects in an objective context. This is Kant's
completion of his argument on apperception. Outer
things are essential for the temporal continuity of the subject of experience.
This argument appears in various relatively obscure formulations in the Transcendental Deduction, in the Paralogisms, and in the Refutation of Idealism. I have rehearsed
it here in order to emphasize the strategic importance for
Kant of the inaccessibility of the spatial from immediate
consciousness. Immediately accessible contents are essen-
tially transient. In Kant's most theoretical thinking, transience, like permanence, is pressed to the limit. Permanence means conservation of matter forever, and transience means that mental things are all new at each instant.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�The least endurance that goes beyond the instantaneous
depends upon the powers of synthesis' ,and entails a mode
of existence that is not possible within the mind itself. Perhaps these extremes of permanence and transience are
not necessary for Kant's objectives. They seem to come
from a Leibnizean style of thinking about parts and wholes
and infinites that is familiar in the "Inaugural Dissertation" and in the Antinomies. In any case, the general line
of thought is crucial to Kant's philosophy as a whole. To
say this is not to say that he offers a consistent account of
the inner and the outer, the spatial and the mental, so that
his main contentions can be contemplated within the
equilibrium of a coherent and plausible system of concepts. There are inconsistencies which cannot be removed
while remaining faithful to Kant's overall thought because
they lie too deep and Kant's awareness of them is too
slight. Nonetheless, the basis of a generally Kantian reconstruction of most of what he says does seem to be possible.
7 A Sketch for the Consistent Kantian
We saw at the beginning of this essay that spatiality
seems to be equivalent to the locus of extra-mental existence in Kant's initial definition of outer sense in the Aesthetic. This interpretation gave way to an inner and mental status for space in light of the asserted transcendental
ideality of space and the idealist tendency of the claim that
space is only in us. The complete collapse of Kantian realism then seemed to be avoidable only if we could understand outer sensation rather than spatiality as the irreducible connection with mind-independent things. Whether
or not sensation supplies an adequate foundation for
Kant's realism, however, it is clear that the main argu~
ments of the Critique of Pure Reason require that spatiality carry with it an immunity from the transience of all
things of which time is the form. This brings to the fore
once again the identification of space with the region of
nonmental existence.
Failure to resolve strains here leaves Kant seeming to
assert that space is neither the metaphysically outer, since
it is only appearance, nor mental, since it is not subject to
the form of time. A satisfactory reconstruction must start
from the fact that this pressure for an intermediate status
that will bridge the gulf between the mind and the world
arises quite naturally. Some such bridge is, indeed, just
what is needed to overcome the solipsistic viewpoint and
attendant scepticism and idealism. At the same time we
obviously cannot leave space in an entirely unprovided-for
limbo between appearance and reality.
The concept of representation must do most of the gapclosing work. Although he is the champion of representation against the challenge of idealist reductions, Kant frequently yields to the idealist thought that representations
amount to a sort of impregnable epistemological shield
that perfectly protects an ever-virginal reality from the as·
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
saults of enquirers. Every passionate investigation is re-
pelled coldly and all aspiring lovers of truth only get to
know their own fantasies. There is something wrong here.
Representations are involved in all efforts to know anything. But this does not mean that representations block
knowledge from the outset by substituting a surrogate object. The idealist line about representation can be combated, in part, by shifting to use of the verb instead of the
noun. We represent reality as a stable system of relatively
stable material objects. It is reality that we thus represent.
We do not represent our own representations as such a sys·
tern. And, in any case, our representations certainly do not
compose such a system. Our representation of the world
is, itself, a thing of the mind and it has concepts and propositions and images for constituents, not relatively stable
material objects in space. If we resolve to defend Kant's
philosophy and we are asked, "Is reality spatia-temporal?"
we should not answer, as Kant himself often answers,
"Empirical reality is spatia-temporal, but mind-independent reality is not." That reply goes with the idea that our
representations are spatia-temporal and all we know about
are our representations. The right answer should be, "We
represent reality as a spatia-temporal system." This answer
does not change the subject and insist on speaking only
about representations. It is a guarded answer, but not a
negative answer about mind-independent reality. For the
question, "Is reality spatia-temporal?" the answer, "So we
represent it," is a form of affirmative answer. Its force is
very close to that of, "We certainly think so."
If we accept this reading of the relationship between
representation and reality, what are we to make of Kant's
claims that space is only an imposed form, and that space
is transcendentally ideal? The idea that space is a form
comes from Leibniz's analysis rejecting thinghood for
space. Formal status makes space a principle for the organization of simultaneous existants and denies that space
would be anything were there no such existants to be organized. This much does not impair the objectivity of
space. If space is a system of relationships among simultaneously existing outer things then spatial representation is
representation of the outer. Spatial things will be outer
things though space itself is not one of them. This seemed
to be Kant's view in the Metaphysical Exposition of space.
It is only because Kant also thinks of space as a form imposed by us that the spatial tends to become subjective and
ideal.
Why does Kant think that space is imposed by us and is
not a system of relations in which things would stand even
if we did not represent them at all? There are two reasons
for this. First, this conception enables him to explain some
synthetic a priori knowledge, as we saw in discussion of the
Transcendental Exposition. I will simply pass over this
presumed benefit of the ideality of space and will not consider here whether anything of that benefit could be retained if space were not regarded as an imposed system of
relations. However this is decided, we cannot suppose that
31
�Kant flatly asserts that space is imposed simply because
that will enable him to explain our knowledge of geometry
and its application to the world. He must have reasons for
thinking that this status is independently plausible. I want
to call attention to a set of convictions that operate in the
background of Kant's thinking, and sometimes in the fore·
ground. For example,
Those who take space and time for some real and absolutely
necessary fastening as it were of all possible substances and
states do not think that anything else is required in order to
conceive how to a number of existing things there applies a
certain original relation as the primitive condition of possible
influxes and the principle of the essential form of the universe. [Even if we grant it as much reality and necessity as we
can, space] . .. only represents the intuitively given possibility
of universal coordination. [The question remains] ... what is
the principle upon which this relation of all substances rests,
a relation which when seen intuitively is called space. (Inaug.
Diss., 16]
Here Kant is saying that we cannot simply accept space as
the order in which simultaneous existents stand. That ex·
istents stand in any order, that they are related to one an·
other in any way, requires an explanation beyond their
mere existence. "Simply because of their subsistence they
are not necessarily related to anything else ... " (Ibid., 17).
Things must already form a whole or a universe in order to
stand in any relations, even spatial relations. The imposed
character of space comes out of these thoughts without
reference to the explanatory fruitfulness of the idea of
mind imposed space vis-a-vis geometrical knowledge.
To give as much definition as possible to these elusive
thoughts, let us consider reality without worrying at all
about representation or knowledge for the moment. We
can conveniently take God's point of view, remembering
that it is one with which Leibniz and Kant sometimes
seem to have a certain familiarity. Suppose God creates a
planet. It will have all the contents and characteristics that
he has put into it. There will already be spatial relation·
ships between the parts of the planet, but the planet itself
will not be anywhere in space, for there is nothing with
which it is coordinated. Now let God create another
planet. He need not first create more space so that there
will be room for another planet. The fact that it does not
need creating is a reflection of the nonthing-like status of
space, and of its necessary availability. Let us imagine that
God makes the second planet larger and warmer than the
first. As soon as there is more than one thing, in addition
to the properties that each thing has, there will also be a
multiplicity of relations between things. All the relations
seem to have a secondary significance from the point of
view of ontology and creation. They do not place any de·
mands on the creative powers of God at all. A planet will
not have the features it does have unless God actively puts
those features into it in his creation of it. But the relations
do not require anything beyond the creation of the indi-
32
viduals with their features. In creating the second planet,
God does exactly what he would have done had he created
it first. And then it is, automatically, so to speak, some·
where with respect to the first planet, larger than the first,
and warmer than the first. The thought that relations obtain without being created is part of the Leibnizean claim
that relations are not real.
In order to connect this with our reconstruction of
Kant's thinking, we have to add the thought that relations,
and the ones constituting space in particular, have their
existence only in representation. To illustrate this we can
pursue our story of creation. In what sense is one planet
larger than the other, or located somewhere with respect
to the other? Each planet is itself. It has all its properties. It
exists exactly as it would if the other planet did not exist at
all, ignoring some physics. From the point of view of the
planet in itself, if we could speak of such a thing, "larger
than" or "located ... with respect to" do not enter into its
existence at all. Of course, God will know that one planet
has a certain size and the other a certain size. God will
know that one of these is greater than the other. This is
because the planets are assembled into a universe in God's
thought. That they manage to stand as constituents of
anything is mediated by thought.
·
The idea that relations are imposed is the idea that they
only obtain in the context of a surveying intellect or con·
sciousness which provides a connection between things
that would otherwise simply not stand in any relations at
all, even though the several things were to exist. This pat·
tern of thought is clearly visible in Kant's transcendental
psychology. In the absence of a mind whose survey relates
them planets would stand in unrelated isolation much like
the isolation and wholesale disconnectedness that Kant as·
cribes to elements of the unsynthesized manifolds of intui·
tion. Kant's demand for synthesis is not a matter of sup·
posing that the mind will not appreciate the relationships
between spatial things (that they form a triangle, for exam·
pie) without synthesis. On the contrary, they do not form a
triangle or anything else until they are synthesized, al·
though receptivity alone assigns them location. Unsynthe·
sized elements of intuition are simply not related to one
another at all, apart from the fact that synthesis can relate
them. The perceivable features that they have as geomet·
rica! configurations have being as a consequence of syn·
sis. In this context, in the transcendental psychology, Kant
is thinking of both elementary intuitions that need to be
related and of complex intuitions that represent related
things as mental items and not outer realities. But this
thought clearly instantiates the pattern that relativizes re·
lations to a surveying mind.
Quite apart from the issue of the mental status of spatial
things that Kant asserts in his theory of the mental con·
struction of spatial objects out of located but unextended
sensations, his claim that the several constituents of a spa·
tial thing only stand in spatial relations as a consequence
of synthesis is not valid within the terms of Kant's own
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�discussion. The fact that things are in space at all is as·
cribed to receptivity which gives a locati.on to the original
intuitions of outer sense. Kant says that all magnitude
comes from synthesis. But the mere concept of location
cannot be divorced from that of spatial relations in the way
in which Kant requires. We may think with Kant that no
ultimate original sensation is colored or otherwise sensu·
ous, and that the perceivability of the sensuous element in
perception comes from a mental aggregation of many unperceived constituents. We cannot, however, altogether
abandon the idea that the locations to which sensations
are assigned in receptivity are near and remote from one
another prior to synthesis. To withdraw this idea is to
drain the meaning from "location" altogether. Plainly a
certain manifold can be synthesized and perceived as a yellow surface only because many sensations with locations
near one another have similar representational character,
even though we are not conscious of that character on a
sensation-by-sensation basis. The whole doctrine that
traces geometry to receptivity would be lost if we could
not say that the results of a synthesis were significantly determined in advance by the relations between the locations to which the several synthesized sensations are assigned. There is, then, a plain sense in which synthesis
does not create objects with geometrical features out of
mere collections of unrelated sensations. At most, synthesis discovers the geometrical features of pre-existing systems of sensations. Borrowing Kant's own phrase, we
should say that the spatial object is not produced by the
synthesis in so far as its existence is concerned ("dem Dasein nach," A 92) but that the function of synthesis is only
to make it possible for us to know spatial things as objects.
Once we give up the idea that space is imposed by us we
can restate the main themes of Kant while allowing that
spatial things are independent of the mind. The mind contains only representations of spatial things. This is not a
disaster now that we have got clear of the thought that
knowledge by means of representations must be just
knowledge of those representations. Our representations
embrace our thought of the universe as a system of spatia-
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
temporal, causally interconnected, material objects whose
existence does not depend on our thought. Kant surely
wants to make available the anti-idealist result of this externalization of the spatial. In the Paralogisms, for example, Kant says that each subject has his own private time
and that private times are only commensurable with one
another through the public time of spatial existence. Were
space mental, it would be as private as time and would offer no exit from egocentrism. The crucial arguments of the
Critique that we have outlined will be rescued by this understanding, since those arguments require that space be
nonmental while our spatial representations have their
place in the sequence of subjective states.
Whether this reconstruction involves the retraction of
the familiar Kantian claim that things in themselves are
unknown is still not clear, but perhaps it now seems far less
important. Our perceptual knowledge is all conditioned by
complex relationships that obtain between ourselves and
the things we perceive. As empiricists we believe that all
our knowledge is based on perceptual knowledge. If we
mean by knowledge of things in themselves, knowledge
that does not depend on any relations in which we stand to
what we know, then we have no knowledge of things in
themselves. Is there something from which we are, therefore, barred?
What are atomic theory, molecular biology, and radio astronomy telling us, if not about how things are in themselves, as opposed to how things appear? If this sort of
thing is not knowledge of things in themselves, then the
demand for such knowledge seems like the demand to
know what things would look like if there were no creatures with eyes. There may survive enough of a feeling
that there could be some kind of divine, wholly nonrelational grasp of reality to support the idea that there is
something that we cannot know in principle, because our
knowledge depends on relations. But I prefer Kant's
thought that the concept of a noumenon is only a negative
and limiting concept and not the concept of an unknowable reality at all.
33
�BLACK AND WHITE
The right hand of Rachmaninoff, in plaster,
Poses on the piano, exemplifying
Perpetual grasp of the imaginary
Orange. Above, the photograph of Chopin
Wearing his overcoat indoors, the face
Framed in protective jet, the nose connecting,
Like a phrase, the puzzled eyes and lips.
Hands are relaxed in power, but cuff conceals
That all of art's controlled by how you hold
The wrist. Witness another picture, where
With wrists exposed, white beauty and two Jews,
Subalterns on the strings, imparadise
Queen Carmen Sylva of Roumania.
They cut Tchaikovsky's coda, for the dirge
Was deemed indecorous at court. Her reign
Is now, the chaste survivor of the trio,
Retained to touch me weekly with her touch.
Aristocratic still at the piano,
Her fingers knotted, but her thumbs are spades
Or sugar spoons pressing upon my back
To plant the tones that only ghosts require
Of music eaten brown by Brazilian beetles.
I memorize the pulse. Repeated octaves
Refuse admission to the Fourth Ballade,
While in the kitchen, waiting as reward,
Kulitch that must be deftly sawn, not sliced,
And tea from the electric samovar.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
Elliott Zuckerman is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
34
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�The Media-Shield of the Utopians
RaelJean Isaac and Erich Isaac
Why are the media so susceptible to the views of groups,
whose assumption, often unstated, is that a perfect society
can be created? These are groups out of sympathy with
one or more of the traditional values of American society,
who, however, couch their appeals in terms of values that
Americans share and purposes they desire, to their credit,
to achieve: social justice, peace, a pollution-free and safe
environment, equality between races and sexes, the reduction of risk, greater control of the individual over the decisions that affect his life.
We call these groups utopians. Let it be said immediately, they are not a cabal of conspirators parcelling out
areas of action to different groups in a coordinated onslaught on American institutions. They come from diverse
backgrounds and traditions. Who are these utopians?
They are the leadership and professional staff of the
mainline Protestant denominations and their related organizations, including the National Council of Churches,
the umbrella body representing thirty-two Protestant and
Eastern Orthodox churches. They include the leaders of
almost all the peace groups, including the pacifist ones,
like the War Resisters League and the American Friends
Service Committee and those that, while not opposing all
forms of violence in principle, seek to reduce the risks of
war, like SANE, Clergy and Laity Concerned, Physicians
for Social Responsibility, etc. They are the intellectuals in
Rael Tean Isaac has written Israel Divided, Ideological Politics in the Jewish
State (Johns Hopkins University Press 1976) and Party Politics in Israel
(Longman 1981). She recently published an article, "Do You Know
Where Your Church Offerings Go?" in the Reader's Digest (January
1983). Erich Isaac teaches geography at the City College of the City University of New York.
The above article is adapted from a book, The Coercive Utopians, that
Regnery Gateway will publish in the fall.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
a number of institutes and think tanks that have flourished
in the soil of so-called "revisionist history" which places
the blame for world tensions after World War II primarily
on the United States. They are found in a series of community action organizations like ACORN and National
Peoples Action. They are in government bureaucracies,
and have been especially attracted to agencies like the Department of Education, ACTION (in the Carter years) and
the now defunct Community Services Administration,
most of whose personnel have been transferred to other
agencies. They are prominent in the legally independent
but wholly government-funded Legal Services Corporation and in the similarly constituted Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They are found in the environmental
movement, especially in newer national organizations like
Friends of the Earth and Environmental Action, and in
the host of local environmental groups which, spurred by
the issue of nuclear energy, have burgeoned around the
country. They are found in the consumer organizations established by Ralph Nader. They are found in the colleges,
and are particularly prominent in the law and social science faculties of elite universities.
These movements-if not the specific organizationsare familiar to the reader, for they are the daily fare of
press and television. Yet much of what they say in their
own publications would be surprising, even shocking to
the general reader. But the media have acted as a filter,
screening out most of the information that could damage
the utopians in the public view.
There are a number of factors that explain why the media, instead of providing the public with some perspective
on the utopians, have made themselves a sounding board
for them, absorbing and transmitting their perspective on
crucial issues as objective "truth." The most important is
that journalists have a broadly similar perspective on the
major issues the utopians address. Journalist Robert Novak
35
�(of the Evans and Novak column) has called the media the
setting where journalists, regardless of background, are
welded into one homogeneous ideological mold.l Thomas
Shepard, the publisher of Look Magazine until it folded in
1971, noted that with only a handful of exceptions the
men and women who produced Look "detested big business" and "worshipped the ecological and consumerism
reformers. " 2
While these observations are impressionistic, they are
confirmed by surveys of the media elite. Two political scientists, S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman, in 1979
and 1980 interviewed 240 journalists and broadcasters of
the most influential media outlets. The survey found the
media elite were markedly to the left of the American electorate as a whole. For example, over a sixteen-year period
less than twenty percent of the media elite had supported
any Republican Presidential candidate. Their views on issues were in striking agreement with utopian articles of
faith. For example, fifty-six percent of the media elite
agreed that the U.S. exploits the Third World and is the
cause of its poverty.l
The media also have an ambition to hold sway over society in common with the utopians. In response to questions
from Lichter and Rothman, both the media elite and a
comparative sample of the business elite had a very similar
perception of the actual power of different groups in society, seeing the media, business, and unions as those with
the greatest influence. But asked how they would prefer to
see power distributed, the media elite put themselves at
the top, followed by consumer groups, intellectuals, and
blacks. 4
In part the media elite sympathize with the utopians because they define their role in much the same way. Walter
Cronkite is said to have asserted that journalists identify
with humanity rather than with institutions or with authority.s Similarly Julius Duscha, a reporter who became
director of the Washington Journalism Center, said "Reporters are frustrated reformers ... they look upon themselves almost with reverence, like they are protecting the
world against the forces of eviJ."6
For all their cynicism concerning tile motives of busi~
nessmen and politicians, the media elite readily succumb
to hero worship. Ralph Nader was the journalist's image of
his highest self: his own man, in the pay of no institution,
he acted without reference to financial self-interest. Nader
was the true outsider, an almost monastic figure, with his
spare single room lodgings, his bachelorhood and abstemious way oflife. No single figure has captured the imagination of journalists in quite the same way, but the utopians
as a whole benefit from being viewed by journalists as people like themselves, representatives of all the people.
In the case of some of the media elite more than sympathy is involved. Some are utopians, sharing fully their perspective on events. Larry Stern, in a key position as national news editor of the country's second most influential
paper, the Washington Post, shared their attitudes. This
36
emerged, surprisingly, at his funeral, following his sudden
death in 1980 at the age of fifty of a heart attack. He was
eulogized by left-wing journalist I. F. Stone, who praised
Stern as a friend of Palestine and Nicaragua (i.e. the PLO
and the Sandinistas) and for hating "those huge mindless
institutions that devour our substance and corrupt our
fundamental ideals, like the Pentagon and the CIA."7
(More remarkably, Stern was also eulogized by Teofilo
Acosta, head of the Cuban interests section in Washington, identified by intelligence expert Robert Moss as station chief of the DGI, the Cuban intelligence service.
Stern was apparently a friend of Castro's Cuba as well.)
Journalist Les Whitten, who worked with Jack Anderson
on the popular column, seems to have derived his political
philosophy directly from Ralph Nader. He warned a high
school graduating class in Maryland of the "great piratelike corporations that swallow up the blood of the people"
and informed the class that if you lined up the presidents
of thirty big banks and thirty bank robbers you would have
fifty-eight criminals and the only difference was that one
kind did it with a gun quickly while the bank presidents
did it "at eighteen percent a year without a gun." 8
Many in the media-including some of the elite-actually learned their craft in utopian training-grounds. A huge
((underground," later called ualternative" press, bur·
geoned in the late 1960s, its theme that America (often
spelled with a "k" wrapped in a swastika) was a fascist
country. A number of jounalists from these papers subsequently moved into the straight press. The best-selling
novel The Spike described the odyssey of a reporter for
Barricades (an obvious takeoff on the "alternative" journal
Ramparts), whose sensational scoop exposing the CIA
earns him a place on the New York World (clearly the New
York Times). The Spike's hero Robert Hackney was pre·
sumably modelled on New York Times star reporter Seymour Hersh, who wrote for Ramparts before coming to the
New York Times and made his name exposing the CIA. To
be sure, only the first part of Hersh's career paralleled that
of the fictional Hackney, for while Hackney woke up to
the role he was playing on behalf of Soviet disinformation
efforts, there is no evidence that Hersh's utopian perspective has changed.
Even journalists who do not start out as utopians may be
drawn to them because their concerns make good copy.
Utopians are endless sources of the kind of stories that sell
papers. Our tuna is poisoned; the nuclear plant near our
city is in danger of meltdown; nuclear bombs will destroy
all life from ground zero, which is in our backyard. In addition to the inherent drama of scare stories, these stories
have, as the utopians present them, an appealing clarity.
There are good guys and bad guys, victimizers and victims.
This is much more dramatic stuff than cost benefit analyses, probability studies, and theories of deterrence necessary to refute these stories. Moreover, the utopians have
solutions: shut down nuclear power plants, eliminate all
pesticides, rely on the sun, endorse a nuclear freeze.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�If stories told according to utopian formula make good
copy for the press, they are even bett~r suited for documentaries, television's method of exploring issues indepth. Why this is so can be seen from .a candid look into
the documentary producer's world offered in 1978 by Martin Carr, a veteran in producing documentaries for all
three networks. Carr noted that the producer's first step
was to "arrive at a point of view." His goal was to make the
viewer feel as he felt: "If you walk away feeling differently,
I failed somehow." Carr noted the obligation to provide
"balance," but explained that this had to be done carefully, so as not to disturb the documentary's emotional impact. He described a documentary he had made on migrant workers in which, for balance, he had interviewed
the biggest grower in F1orida. But he was a charming man
who could have tipped the emotional balance of the documentary in favor of his position. So he found another
grower whose point of view was the same, but whose personality would alienate the viewer and put him on instead.
As a result Carr reports: "One could only feel a particular
way at the end of the film ... the way I felt about it." 9 The
utopian point of view on most stories shapes visually striking, emotionally compelling documentaries: the good
farmworker against the bad grower; the victims of disease
versus the large corporation; the peasant guerilla against
government-backed exploiters, etc.
On major topics such as the environment, defense, intelligence, and foreign policy, the media serve as a vast
sounding board for the utopians, while at the same time
suppressing sounds the utopians prefer not to hear. Suppression is especially important, for while there is dispute
on how effective the media are in making the public think
the way journalists do (after all, the public does not vote
like the media elite), there is little dispute that the media
determine what it is that the public thinks about. An article in The Journalism Quarterly points out: "If newsmen
share a pattern of preference as to what is newsworthy,
and that pattern does not represent reality, they will
present a distorted image of the world which may contribute to inappropriate decisions and policies."lO
Nowhere are distortions in coverage more evident than
in coverage of environmental issues, particularly nuclear
energy, the issue on which the utopians have expended
their greatest efforts. The impact of the utopian campaign
against nuclear energy on the media is apparent from two
systematic studies, one by the Battelle Center and one by
the Media Center. The Battelle Center study covered four
national periodicals, including the New York Times, from
1972 to 1976 and found that while in 1972 there were more
positive than negative statements on nuclear energy, by
1976 negative outnumbered positive statements by two to
one.ll (This, it must be remembered, was three years prior
to Three Mile Island.) The Media Institute study focussed
on ten years of television evening news coverage, from Au-
gust 4, 1968 to March 27, 1979 (Just prior to Three Mile
Island). Its most telling finding concerned the "experts"
,TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
used by the networks on nuclear energy. Of the top ten
sources used over the years, seven were opposed to nuclear power. The source most frequently used was the
antinuclear Union of Concerned Scientists, the second
Ralph Nader. 12 After Three Mile Island earlier tendencies
became even more marked. Psychiatrist Robert DuPont
examined 13 hours of videotapes of news coverage on nuclear energy and found that fear was the leitmotif of the
stories. Reporters continually examined what DuPont
called jjwhat if, worst case" scenarios. He found almost no
mention of the risks posed by other energy sources or of
the need to balance risks.ll
·
By 1982 the pattern of media coverage had produced serious misconceptions in the American public concerning
the balance of opinion among scientists on nuclear energy.
A Roper poll found that almost one in four Americans believed that a majority of scientists "who are energy experts" opposed the further development of nuclear energy. One in three members of the public believed that
solar energy could make a large contribution to meeting
energy needs within the next twenty years.l 4 An actual
survey of energy experts, however, showed that only five
percent wanted to halt further development of nuclear energy (among those with specific expertise in the nuclear
area none wanted to halt further development). No more
than two percent of energy experts saw any form of solar
energy making a substantial contribution to energy needs
in the next twenty years.l5
The distortions in perception can be explained by the
views of science jounalists, who are far more sceptical of
nuclear energy than scientists. A survey by Lichter and
Rothman of science journalists at major national media
outlets found there was a fascinating, though scarcely surprising, connection between attitudes toward nuclear energy and political ideology. The more liberal the journalist,
the more likely he was to oppose nuclear energy. Indeed
Rothman and Lichter found they could define the issue
more precisely. "We asked them a large number of social
and political questions. The best predictor of opposition to
nuclear energy is the belief that American society is unjust."l6 Moreover, Lichter and Rothman found that television reporters and producers were even more hostile to nuclear energy than print journalists.
The extensive use, especially by television, of the Union
of Concerned Scientists was presumably a major factor in
explaining the discrepancy between what scientists think
and what the public thinks they think. The public, because of its name, perceived this as an organization of sci-
entists. But as Samuel McCracken points out in The War
Against the Atom, its membership is obtained through direct mail solicitation of the public and the only qualification for belonging is a contribution of $15. Its executive
directors in recent years have not been scientists_17 How
many members of the Union of Concerned Scientists are
in fact scientists? The organization keeps silent, but a random sample of 7,741 scientists turned up only one who
37
�was affiliated with the Union of Concerned Scientists. On
that basis Lichter and Rothman estimate that fewer than
200 scientists among the 130,000 listed in American Men
and Women of Science are affiliated with the Union of
Concerned Scientists. IS Little wonder that the organization refused Lichter and Rothman information needed to
poll its membership!
McCracken observes that anyone would see the fraud if
a general membership organization composed almost entirely of laymen and concerned principally with supporting bans on prayer in the schools were to call itself the
Union of Concerned Clergymen_l9 Yet the media persist in
using this organization of utopians, which misuses data as
it misuses the title of "scientist," as its chief authority on
nuclear energy. The media rarely call upon Scientists and
Engineers for Secure Energy, although this is an organization whose members are genuine experts on nuclear en·
ergy and includes seven nobel laureates in physics. Presumably this is because it does not spread the utopian's
message, endorsed by so many in the media, that nuclear
power is immensely dangerous and the authorities are deceiving the public.
Another interesting insight into the weight of sentiment
against nuclear power in the media comes from a Public
Broadcasting Company spokesman who was castigated for
the uniform imbalance of the PBC's programs. He explained that it would be difficult even to find a producer
prepared to do a pro-nuclear film. zo
On questions of defense, the media elite have also supported utopian assumptions. Walter Cronkite summed up
the media perspective in the 1970s in 1974: "There arealways groups in Washington expressing views of alarm over
the state of our defenses. We don't carry those stories. The
story is that there are those who want to cut defense
spending." 21 The American Security Council, which during the 1970s issued reports and ran a series of conferences
and seminars featuring defense experts who warned of the
disrepair of the American military and the massive Soviet
military buildup then going on, became convinced that
there was some unwritten rule in the media not to cover
their activities. But for the media, as a group advocating
increased defense expenditures the American Security
Council was simply not unews.n
Survey results indicate how pervasively media coverage
reflected utopian attitudes. Ernest Lefever, before starting
his own Ethics and Public Policy Center, led a study team
for the Institute for American Strategy which examined
CBS News coverage of national defense for 1972 and
1973. The study showed that during that two-year period
the viewer saw only one minute on the "CBS Evening
News" dealing with the comparative military strength of
the U.S. and U.S.S.R. 22 The study found that 1,400 presentations on the subject of national defense tended to
support the view that threats to our security were less serious than the government thought while only seventy-nine
contradicted that position.
38
With Reagan's victory, the views of those who argued
for more defense spending could no longer be ignored, for
those views represented administration policy. In response, CBS entered the debate with a massive documentary designed to counter the administration position in
June 1981. Described by its anchorman, Dan Rather, as
"the most important documentary project of the decade,"
the five-hour series, "The Defense of the United States,"
was hailed by the Washington Post as the "first documentary epic in TV history." Its theme was that "the United
States is not threatened by any external enemy, but rather
by the tragic propensity of the two superpowers each to
see in the other a mirror reflection of its own fears and
hostilities." Joshua Muravchik and John E. Haynes noted
that in the five hours devoted to examining plans for a
U.S. military build-up, "there was not mention-none-of
the Soviet build-up which precipitated it."2l
Although the public had no way of knowing it, the program's arguments, experts, even its vocabulary were de·
rived from the utopian organizations. To testify that current defense spending was already excessive the program
used "experts" Jack Geiger and Kosta Tsipis. Tsipis is a
member of the board of directors of SANE and Geiger is a
leader of both Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
(in which Soviet physicians join with American physicians
to emphasize the need for the U.S. to disarm). Geiger was
identified only as professor of medicine at the City University of New York and Tsipis as professor of physics at
MIT. 24 The viewer was not informed that they were peace
movement activists.
To show that Soviet influence was already on the decline (and increased defense expenditures, presumably, superfluous), CBS drew on the Center for Defense Information that had issued a report in 1980 purporting to show
that Soviet influence in the world had reached an all-time
low. After Defense Secretary Weinberger spoke of the
need for a strong defense, Walter Cronkite undercut his
statement: "Since 1960, the Soviet influence around the
world actually has declined. Their so-called gains like Afghanistan and Angola take on a different perspective, particularly when measured against losses, like Egypt and
China." CBS then offered a closeup of two lists of twelve
nations, one showing Soviet gains and the other Soviet
losses since 1960. The lists were erroneous but repeated
the errors in the lists published by the Center for Defense
Information.25 The voice of the Center for Defense Information had been transformed into the voice of CBS.
The very vocabulary of the program was derived from
the utopians. The process of arms procurement was referred to as "The Iron Triangle," after the title of a book
recently released by the utopian Council on Economic Priorities. Its author, Gordon Adams, was president of the
Corporate Data Exchange, a new-left research organization started by the Institute for Policy Studies. The book
had been financed, among others, by the IPS mainstay,
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�the Samuel Rubin Foundation. The importance of a term
like "The Iron Triangle" is that it not only conveys a
meaning but an emotional impact. "The Iron Triangle" is
bad. It links the government, the armed forces, and industries that produce military equipment in a closed bond of
steel and. mutual interest against the rest of us.
The utopian campaign•against the intelligence agencies
depended heavily on the media for its success. 11he ·campaign began in the .Jate 1960s, when a series of'books and
articles began to appear, many of them financed 'by the
FuNd for Investigative journalism. The Fund was established by Philip M. Stern, whose 'Stern Fund is a major
furrder of utOpian:projects.' But it scored its first major success when:the NewWork Times• ran a series of articles by
Seymour' Hersh in December 1974 exposing CIA involve.ment in illegal tlornestic surveillance of the anti-war movement. Thisrprecipitated a series of investigations by the
'5\J<fcially appointed Rockefeller Commission and the Sen~te,•·which resulted in "reforms" that went far beyond correction of abuses. The CIA's ability to function in crucial
areas was imperiled. At one point eight committees of
Congress, the armed services, foreign relations, appr<Jpiiations and intelligence committees of both houses, had 'to
be informed of every major CIA operation, which, given
the all-but-certainty ofleaks by staff, meant there could be
no such operations.
The U.S. intelligence agencies were a legitimate subject
of media interest. The problem, however, was that in true
utopian fashion the media were interested only in stories
that revealed intelligence activities as illegal or immoral.
Reports that the intelligence services were failing to perform their task of protecting U.S. citizens were not news.
The major media ignored a conference called "Our Domestic Intelligence Crisis," held by the Coalition for Peace
through Strength in March 1979. There were revelations
at this conference that the public might have thought dramatic. For instance, the Secret Service only received one
fourth of the intelligence it received before the media-assisted llreforms" of intelligence agencies discouraged in·
formants who feared Freed om of Information requests
would expose their identities. It thus had to recommend
that the President not visit certain cities in the United
States. The conference also disclosed that the Federal Employment Security program had been undone: members
of the Communist Party or even of the Weather Underground were no longer barred from federal employment,
even in sensitive positions.Z6 The media showed no interest in informing the public about the necessary services
intelligence agencies provide or about the consequences
of dismantling security protections.
With all the popularity of documentaries about the malfeasances of the CIA and FBI, the networks produced
nothing comparable on the KGB. This was not because
the topic could not be handled. A Canadian team did an
absorbing documentary called "The KGB Connections"
based largely on the testimony of KGB defectors. A great
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
critical success in Canada and Europe, it was turned down
by all three networks, including ABC which had invested
in its production. Challenged for its failure to show the
documentary, ABC countered that it would shortly be
showing its own documentary on the KGB but at this writ;ing, a year later, ABC has not done so. The failure to exam'ine KGB activities by both TV and print media meant, as
James Tyson points out in Target America, that the CIA
seemed to shadow-box against a non-existent enemy. The
utopian contention that covert intelligence activities were
the product of deviant psychologic~] needs of those who
manned corrupt American institutions was reinforced.
Foreign policy, particularly as it touches •0TI human
rights, is yet another area in which the media .alm0st uniformly presents the utopian perspective. Thereason'is not
simply that journalists share that perspective, although
doubtless many do. Covering human rights violations in
totalitarian "socialist" aollntries :is <lifticult, if not impossible, for journalists. S1i1dh·cotnitriies, •when they do not bar
jounmalists :alt0gether, <Control their movements. This
-meams •that information has to come from people outside
'the·coutitry. Information was available on the Cambodian
genocide very early from people who had escaped over the
border. By 1977 Reader's Digest editors John Barron and
Anthony Paul had produced a book Murder of a Gentle
Land which, based on the eye-witness accounts of hundreds of escapees, estimated that between April 17, 1975
and the end of 1976, at least 1.2 million people had died as
a result of the policies of the Cambodian government.
Yet press coverage of events unprecedented in horror
since the Nazi destruction of six million Jews was minimal.
In 1976, the year in which Barron and Paul conducted
their interviews, television network evening news programs mentioned events in Cambodia only three times.
NBC never mentioned them at all. The country's two
most influential papers, the Times and the Washington
Post, together mentioned the subject a total of 13 times.27
In 1977, when what was happening was even clearer, the
three networks had a combined total of two stories. That
contrasted with !59 human rights-related stories on the
networks on South Africa. 28 While the New York Times
did better in 1977, referring to the Cambodian genocide
34 times, this still contrasted sharply with 291 stories of
human rights violations in South Africa. The Washington
Post ran ten items on Cambodia. It had thirty items just on
the death of Steve Biko, the black leader who died under
suspicious circumstances in a South African jail. 29 In 1978
the American Security Council made things convenient
for the press corps by arranging a press conference in
Washington D.C., addressed by Pin Yathay, a civil engineer who had escaped after 26 months in Communist
Cambodia. Yathay reported losing 18 members of his family and provided an eye-witness account of desperation
and cruelty:
And there were many macabre incidents ... the starving peo-
ple who ate the flesh of dead bodies during this acute famine.
39
�I will now tell you a story that I lived myself ... a teacher who
ate the flesh of her own sister. She was later caught, she was
beaten from morning to night until she died, under the rain,
in front of the whole village as an example, and her child was
crying beside her, and the mother died at the evening. 30
A dramatic story. But not one of the networks sent a representative. The Washington Post sent a reporter, but the paper never carried a story.
Hedrick Smith, a one-time Moscow correspondent of
the New York Times and then chief correspondent of the
Washington Bureau, has cast light on why the coverage
was so poor. He noted that the Times-the "bible" of the
other media, in the words of a news executive, was not in~
dined to do stories on foreign countries written outside
them.ll Soviet dissidents in the Soviet Union were the sub·
ject of many stories. Once the same people had found ref·
uge in the United States, they found the press uninterested in their accounts of human rights violations. When
leading figures in the Soviet human rights movement like
Vladimir Bukovsky and Alexander Ginzburg participated
in two days of International Sakharov Hearings in 1979
that brought sixty witnesses to Washington to testify, their
efforts were virtually ignored by the press. The Washington Post ran a story in the "Style" section called "Remembering Russia." That was scarcely the point of the hearings. Similarly, when testimony on conditions in Vietnam
was given before a House subcommittee in June 1977, including eyewitness reports of a Vietnamese imprisoned in
a series of "reeducation camps," the major newspapers
carried nothing.l2
The end result is gross distortion in coverage of human
rights problems. In 1977 the New York Times carried fortyeight items on human rights violations in South Korea and
none on North Korea.ll More than that, as Reed Irvine,
head of the media watchdog group, Accuracy in Media, has
pointed out, a kind of collaboration emerges between the
U.S. media and the countries that most systematically violate human rights.l4.
There may have been an additional reason for the reluctance of the media to report more fully on Cambodia and
Southeast Asia. In the last years of the Vietnam War the
press was an adversary of the war and they were at first
unwilling to believe, later to acknowledge, that the American departure did not lead to an improved life for the people
of that area. For example, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, urging a cutoff of American aid on March 17,
1975, wrote: "Whatfuture possibility could be more terrible
than the reality of what is happening to Cambodia now?"
The possibilities were beyond anything of which Anthony
Lewis dreamed. New York Times columnist Tom Wicker in
the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War was glad to
give the press credit for forcing the U.S. out of the region.
Once, however, there were boat people and millions of
murdered victims in Cambodia, the press did not want to be
reminded of its role. The violent reaction of CBS newsman
40
Morley Safer to an article by Robert Elegant in Encounter in
August 1981 is revealing. Once himself a journalist in Vietnam, Elegant laid bare the shabbiness of the reporting, not
exempting himself from the criticism. Safer devoted a radio
segment to denouncing Elegant, whose article almost none
of his listeners could have seen, as worthy of the mantle of
Joseph Goebbels.l5 The entire subject obviously irritated
media nerves.
Coverage of human rights thus adhered to the utopian
perspective according to which the world's worst human
rights violator was the Union of South Africa, followed by
third world countries friendly to the United States, espe·
dally those in Latin America. As countries came under at·
tack from internal subversion backed directly or indirectly
by the Soviet Union, media focus, in true utopian fashion,
was on the injustices that lead people to revolt rather than
the predictable consequences of these "wars of liberation"
in inaugurating much more repressive regimes. Karen de
Young, now foreign editor of the Washington Post, who
from Nicaragua provided warm coverage of the Sandinistas
in Somoza's last period, admitted: "Most journalists now,
most Western journalists at least, are very eager to seek out
guerrilla groups, leftist groups, because you assume they
must be the good guys. 36 Walter Cronkite, speaking in Portland, said the U.S. should help countries such as El Salvador
"achieve their goals even if it means interim steps of social~
ism and communism."l7 (As Reed Irvine pointed out, communism has yet to serve as an "interim step.")
With rare exceptions-NBC in the fall of 1982 produced
a film "What Ever Happened to El Salvador" that accompanied a Salvadoran army unit on patrol rather than the guerrillas-network documentaries have been hostile to the
government of El Salvador. In September 1982, a CBS documentary focussed on the inevitability of revolution in
Guatemala as a response to tyranny backed by the United
States on behalf of our exploitative business interests. Television journalists, however, bend over backwards in their
efforts to understand the difficulties of the Nicaraguan government. A segment on ABC's "20/20" aired in June 1980
had David Marash make the patently false declaration:
uNicaragua's revolutionary justice system has been given
near unanimous international praise."
The utopian influence on public television is even
greater than on the networks. On public television they
often write and produce the documentaries. For example,
Philip Agee was part owner of an anti-CIA three-hour docu·
mentary "On Company Business" broadcast in May 1980.
The fund-raising prospectus sent out by the producers prior
to the actual filming promised that the documentary would
"show the broken lives, hatred, cruelty, cynicism, and despair which result from U.S.-CIA policy" and that it would
record "the story of 30 years of CIA subversion, murder,
bribery, and torture as told by an insider and documented
with newsreel film of actual events."l8
The "insider" who served as the documentary's central
figure and moral hero was Agee, identified for the viewer
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�only as someone who had worked for the CIA between 1959
and 1969. There was no mention of Agee's role in exposing
the identities of U.S. agents worldwide or of his expulsion
from the Netherlands, France, and England. Intelligence
expert Robert Moss has revealed Agee was found to have
met with the Cuban intelligence station chief in London at
least 30 times before he was expelled from England. If the
viewer had known of Agee's record, he might have discounted everything Agee said. The documentary's solution
was to keep silence. Despite this, Public Broadcasting's director of current affairs programming Barry Chase de·
scribed the program in a memo to all public broadcasting
stations as "a highly responsible overview of the CIA's his·
tory." 39 (Chase clearly did not feel inhibited by the law es·
tablishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that
stipulates programs funded by it must be objective and bal·
anced if they deal with controversial issues.)
The Institute for Policy Studies' Saul Landau has written
films for public television of a similar calibre. "Paul Jacobs
and the Nuclear Gang" (with part of its seed money from
the Samuel Rubin Foundation and Obie Benz, one of the
wealthy young creators of the Robin Hood was Right spe·
cies of foundations 40 ) was a polemic against nuclear energy
and nuclear weapons, relying primarily on emotionally
charged interviews with cancer victims who believed their
disease had been caused by radiation and with the members
of their families. Landau also wrote "From the Ashes ...
Nicaragua," directed by Helena Solberg Ladd, who had
been a lecturer at IPS. William Bennett, Head of the National Endowment for the Humanities which had chan·
neled funds for the film's production under its previous
head, on seeing the film remarked that he was "shocked,
appalled, disgusted" by such an example of "unabashed
socialist-realism propaganda." 41 Author Midge Deeter, ex·
ecutive director of the Committee for a Free World, found
this description too mild: "We almost no longer have a
working vocabulary to cover phenomena like Ms. Ladd's
film."42
Many of the documentaries that appear on public television endorse utopian themes far more overtly than would
be possible on the networks. Public Broadcasting presented
a film on North Korea that could have received the imprimatur of its dictator Kim 11 Sung; a hymn to Cuba called
"Cuba: Sports and Revolution;" two films on China, "The
Children of China" good enough propaganda to win the
praise of the Chinese Central Broadcasting Administration for helping American People "understand the New
China," and "China Memoir" produced by Shirley MacLaine, which even Ralph Rogers, then chairman of the
Public Broadcasting Corporation, admitted was "pure
propaganda."4l Boston Public Television's WGBH funded
a film called "Blacks' Britannica" on British racism, which
won the prize at the Leipzig Film Festival in East Germany.
This was too much even for the producer at WGBH who
complained of the film's "endorsement of a Marxist point
of view."44 When he sought to edit out some of the most
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
blatant segments, the maker of the film brought suit and
the U.S. Communist Party front, the National Alliance
Against Racist and Political Repression, petitioned to join
the suit.45 In the end four minutes of the film were removed, but its Marxist message remained unmistakable.
Another utopian theme-hostility against corporations-is also reflected in the media. A Louis Harris poll in
the fall of 1982 found that an "overwhelming seventy-six
percent" of high level executives believed business and financial coverage on TV news was prejudiced against business.46 The hostility is most pervasive in a surprising areaentertainment programming. A Media Institute study
"Crooks, Conmen and Clowns" found that the image of
businessmen on TV series was overwhelmingly negative,
with two out of three businessmen on two hundred prime
time episodes shown as foolish, greedy, or criminal. While
on occasion a small businessman was shown in a favorable
light, those running big businesses were for the most part
depicted as actual criminals.47
While it might be argued that the businessman simply
offers a convenient "heavy" in plot development, Ben
Stein, in The View from Sunset Boulevard, shows that
there is an excellent fit between the opinions of TV writers and producers and the shows they create. Stein interviewed forty writers and producers of the major adventure
shows and situation-comedies and found that even those
worth millions of dollars considered themselves workers
opposed to an "exploiting class." A typical flippant-serious
comment was made by Bob Schiller, who wrote for Lucille
Ball for 13 years and produced "Maud." He said of businessmen, "I don't judge. I think there are good lepers and
bad lepers."48 Producer Stanley Kramer told Stein: Everything that has to do with our lives is contaminated. The
air, the streams, the food-everything is ruined." 49 That
big business was responsible was self-evident to most TV
writers.
To the media the utopians are inherently more believable than those who oppose them. Cynical about human
motives, journalists seem unable to conceive that "public
interest" spokesmen act from anything but selfless devotion to the public good. Abbie Hoffman could enlighten
them: "There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and
winning."50 Peter Metzger has pointed out another motivation that also has to do with heightening the individual's
sense of power and self-worth. With only a few exceptions
the experts cited by the utopians never made genuine scientific contributions and thus were denied the reward
of recognition by their peers.5 1 They have achieved the
fame and status their scientific work could not gain for
them through serving the utopians' need for men with
credentials.
Mesmerized by the utopians' simple-minded reading of
human nature, journalists are quick to denigrate critics of
utopian orthodoxies. For example, CBS produced a documentary attacking cereal-makers for the high sugar con-
41
�tent of many of their products. (Dan Rather asked a General Foods vice-president if he could sleep at night, given
the damage he was doing to the children of America.) In
pursuit of the requisite "balance" the program interviewed a leading professor of nutrition at Harvard, who denied the cereals did the harm alleged in the rest of the program. The camera simply zoomed in on a plaque on a
Harvard building which indicated that it had been built
through a donation by General Foods.5 2 However effective the visual in undercutting the professor's statement, a
faulty understanding of the reward system in science was
revealed. For scientists, the most important factor in determining career opportunities is the judgment of their
peers, not the approval of company executives who make
charitable contributions to universities.
Journalists are ready to believe the most improbable
charges against institutions they distrust. In January 1982
the New York Times featured a lengthy story by Raymond
Bonner concerning events~ alleged to have taken place a
year earlier: American military advisers in El Salvador had
observed a torture training session for the El Salvadoran
military in which a seventeen-year-old boy and a thirteenyear-old girl had their bones broken prior to being killed.
Bonner's sole source for the story was a deserter from the
Salvadoran army. The narrative that in its original form
claimed that the American advisers were teaching the torture session, had appeared in a leftist Mexican paper but
was such obvious Communist atrocity propaganda that it
took eight months after the original publication before a
taker was found among American journalists, Mr. Bonner,
who offered a ((sanitized" version in the Times. 53
Such credulity leaves the media open to being taken in
by the grossest "disinformation" forgeries. F1ora Lewis, at
the top of her profession as a columnist for the New York
Times, accepted uncritically a supposed State Department
"dissent document," distributed to newsmen by the
Council on Hemispheric Affairs, one of the utopian think
tanks devoted to Latin America, and co-founded by Orlando Letelier, probably "an agent of influence" for the
Cuban government. While the State Department does indeed have a "dissent channel" permitting members in disagreement with policy to have their objections heard at
the highest level of the department, the document F1ora
Lewis accepted as authentic bore the name of a non-existent State Department task force. Lewis devoted her
column of March 6, 1981, to the document that attacked
U.S. government policy in El Salvador. Asserting it had
been "drawn up by people from the National Security
Council, the State and Defense Departments, and the
CIA," she praised the report's "solid facts and cool analysis" and closed by telling the Reagan administration that it
would "do well to listen to the paper's authors before the
chance for talks is lost."
At this point the State Department came out with a detailed report on the forgery that the Times carried as a
news story and F1ora Lewis, her face plentifully covered
42
with egg, wrote an apology in her March 9 column. Similarly, journalist Claudia Wright published an article in November 1982 charging that UN Ambassador Jeane J.
KirkpatEiclt had received a "birthday gift" from the Union
of South Afriea. The basis was a letter from the information counselor at the South African embassy, a crude forgery replete with errors in spelling. 54 (Since Miss Wright is
herself a utopian journalist, the question as to whether she
was herself taken in must remain open.)
Media elite instantly distrust government assertions
that contradict utopian views with which they identify. A
storm broke over the Washington Post and the Wall Street
Journal when it became know that the journalists of both
had relied upon Philip Agee as a source for articles they
wrote attacking a February 1981 U.S. White Paper "Communist Interference in El Salvador." The White Paper
summarized findings from captured documents of the El
Salvador guerrillas, showing the extent of clandestine military support given by the Soviet Union and Cuba to the
guerrillas beginning in 1979. As a result of the furor, even
how the articles came to be written became public knowledge. The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Kwitny told his
editor of his immediate "skepticism over news accounts of
the white paper."55 The Washington Post's Robert Kaiser
said that he had immediately been eager to explore possible deficiencies in the White Paper and so was pleased
when the Post's national editor, Peter Osnos, asked him to
look into the matter. And Peter Osnos revealed that he
had assigned Kaiser after a call from free-lance writer Jeffrey Stein who said: "Look, I can't understand how you all
have let that White Paper hang out there without a look. 56
(Stein was a former fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, suggesting that the utopian grape vine operates
quickly to encourage attacks on anything the utopians
consider damaging to them.) For the utopians it was crucial to discredit the White Paper, since if the American
public recognized the Soviet-Cuban role in El Salvador,
the carefully fostered image of the guerrillas as indigenous
liberal reformers might be undermined.
Philip Agee, according to Arnaud de Borchgrave helped
by his "Cuban friends," provided a forty-six page attack on
the White Paper which was distributed in April by the
Covert Action Information Bulletin. This publication was
started after an internal factional split at CounterSpy, the
magazine that named U.S. agents abroad, with Agee becoming associated with the new magazine. Both the Post's
Kaiser and the Journal's Kwitny obtained copies. Kaiser
subsequently claimed that in an early draft of his article he
had mentioned Agee as a source, but that his editor at the
Post suggested dropping the reference as "unnecessary."57
Confronted with his failure to credit Agee's paper as a
source in this Wall Street Journal story Kwitny was taken
aback: "I was totally unaware that it had any distribution,
except to a few of his friends here." 58 He insisted that
while he had read Agee's paper: "There was nothing I was
drawing from him or anyone else ... I can't really rememWINTER/SPRING 1983
�ber what was in the Agee piece." In a line by line comparison, Human Events reporter Cliff Kincaid showed, however, that not only did Kwitny's criticisms closely parallel
those of Agee, but that Kwitny even repeated a specific
Agee error: he referred to "labor unions" (Agee said "trade
unions") when the document being analyzed was talking
about the Communist Party. 59
Perhaps the most interesting revelations showed the
wide use by journalists of the Agee apparatus and the igno·
rance of those in executive positions on major papers of
the web of utopian organizations. Frederick Taylor, executive editor of the Wall Street Journal, came to the defense of his reporter in a long article on the editorial page
entitled "TheEl Salvador 'White Paper."' The Wall Street
Journal had been accused "at the least of being the dupe of
Soviet disinformation, and at the worst of taking the work
of a discredited left-winger and passing it off as its own."
"It isn't so." As proof, Taylor repeated Kwitny's own
words:
The article originated in my own skepticism over news ac~
counts ofthe white paper in February. It sprouted because of
two events in April. First, having been asked to sort the files
of my recently deceased Journal colleague, Jerry Landauer, I
called someone who had been a longstanding source of Jerry's
on intelligence matters . ... This source, John Kelly, edits a
magazine, Counterspy, which also printed a critique of the
white paper. Kelly supplied me with some leads and documents. 50
To defend the Journal from charges of being a dupe of disinformation and of passing off the charges of a discredited
left-winger as its own by transferring responsibility from
Agee to CounterSpy and to inform the Wall Street Journal's
readers thatthey had all along been kept informed on intelligence matters by CounterSpy, was, to say the least, a remarkable editorial defense.
Apparently there was a similar gap between editors and
reporters at the Washington Post. When a Washington Post
editorial condemned CounterSpy's clone, the Covert
Action Information Bulletin, as "contemptible" and suggested its editors were less than honorable journalists, they
lashed back:
Your diatribe only highlights the gap betwen the editorial offices and the reporters, for your people are among the large
number of working journalists from virtually all the major
printed and electronic media in the country who call upon us
daily for help, research, and of all things, names of intelligence
operatives in connection with articles they are writing.6I
The difficulty journalists have in believing anything the
government says that interferes with their prejudices, no
matter how overwhelming the evidence, has become obvious to government officials. Admiral Bobby Inman, on retiring as deputy director of the CIA, spoke of his frustration
at trying to convince the public of the peril of the Soviet
military build-up when the press would not even believe
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
U.S. intelligence reports that included spy satellite pictures. Inman described an intelligence briefing for the press
on the Soviet and Cuban-backed military build-up in Nicaragua in which reporters were shown photos of Soviet-type
military garrison arrangements, deployed Soviet T-55
tanks, etc. Newspaper accounts the following day used the
word "alleged" to describe the intelligence findings, suggesting that the reporters did not believe them. 62 .
The media do more than believe the utopians. They protect them. News that could prove embarrassing to the utopians is often simply not reported. Reed Irvine has christened this "the Pinsky Principle" after North Carolina
journalist Walter Pinsky, who described his approach in the
Columbia Journalism Review in 1976. "If my research and
journalistic instincts tell me one thing, my political instincts
another ... I won't fudge it, I won't bend it, but I won't
write it "63 Pinsky gave as an example what he called the
great untold story ofthe trial of)oan Little in his home state.
Joan Little was an imprisoned black woman who had killed
her guard and defended herself on the grounds that he had
tried to assault her sexually. Her story was widely reported
nationally. Pinsky explained that he meant that reporters
never reported the role of the Communist Party, working
through its front, the National Alliance Against Racist and
Political Repression, in controlling the entire political
movement surrounding the case. Pinsky says that journalists kept silent "out of concern that the information might
be used in red-baiting anyone associated with the case who
did not belong to the (Communist) party."64
ABC newsman Geraldo Rivera in an interview with Playboy confessed to practicing the Pinsky Principle in his reporting from Panama. When the Panamanian National
Guard was guilty of violence at the time of the Senate vote
on the Canal Treaties, "We downplayed the whole incident That was the day I decided that I had to be very careful about what was said, because I could defeat the very
thing (passage of the Treaty) that I wanted to achieve."65
An interesting example of the Pinsky Principle was the
failure of CBS in its two-part docudrama, "Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones," to say a word concerning
Jones as a Communist Jones had broken with the U.S.
Communist Party, according to his own account, because it
had turned against Stalin and "I loved Stalin." Nonetheless,
his feelings toward the party had clearly mellowed, for his
will provided that in the absence of immediate surviving
family, his estate should go to the U.S. Communist Party.
Jones had also ordered that $7 million belonging to the People's Temple be transferred to the Soviet Union. When the
script's author Ernest Tidyman was asked about the omission he said he did not believe Jones was a Communist.
Asked what Jones's political views were, Tidyman replied:
"None, particularly. He was very liberal, very progressive,
very community conscious." 66 Presumably, for Tidyman,
giving the facts abcrutJones's Communism would interfere
with the image he wanted to convey of) ones as an idealistic
community-builder gone awry.
43
�More recently the Pinsky Principle has been at work in
the refusal of the media to examine the utopian roots of the
peace movement and its links to the international Soviet
front, the World Peace Council. With rare exceptions, nota·
blythe Wall Street Journal and the Reader's Digest, the mass
media have portrayed the freeze as a spontaneous out·
growth of grass roots Middle America. Even when the orga·
nizations that created and promoted the freeze are credited
as in a Newsweek article of April26, 1982, the identifications
are superficial, giving no hint of the agenda of these organi·
zations. For example, although Clergy and Laity Con·
cerned is described as "a powerful force in the disarmament
movement," it is identified only as a group "begun in 1965
to mobilize the religious community against the Vietnam
War." There is an element oflaziness in this: it is easier to
ask a group about itself over the phone than to acquire its
literature which would explain that CALC sees its task to be
joining together those who "hate the corporate power
which the United States presently represents .... "
But more importantly there is unwillingness to transmit
facts that might put the utopians in an unfavorable light.
Eileen Shanahan, assistant managing editor of the Pitts·
burgh Post-Gazette, observed: "I saw it at the Washington
Star and I'm seeing it here. The present 28-35 news room
set is antiwar to a significant degree and also antinuke."67
When President Regan or members of Congress made any
reference to the credentials of the groups behind the
freeze, the prestige media lashed out. A New York Times
editorial on October 6, 1982, labelled all reference to such
matters an "indecent debate." A Washington Post editorial
on the same date said that to bring up such topics was a
Smear."
Probably the most widespread application of the Pinsky
Principle is the failure to identify utopian sources. Identifi·
cation is a crucial service the media offer the viewer or
reader, for without it he has no way of evaluating the infor·
mation offered to him. For example, the New York Times
reported that a National Lawyers Guild delegation to the
Middle East "came away convinced that the Israeli govern·
ment implements a policy of torture for the annexation of
the occupied areas." Since the National Lawyers Guild, the
major organization of radical lawyers, was identified only as
"a group of American lawyers," the reader was not helped
to be properly sceptical of this information.68 Similarly, the
New York Times, which between 1979 and 1981 carried
essays by Fellows of the Institute for Policy Studies on its
Op-Ed page with more than twice the frequency of any
other think tank, including much bigger and better known
ones, identified the Institute in each case only as "an independent research organization in Washington, D.C." The
suggestion was that the reader was being exposed to "independent" thought, not the radical left perspective invariably provided by Institute Fellows.
A particularly dramatic example of misrepresentation
through failure of identification is the media's treatment of
Wilfred Burchett. Burchett is an Australian journalist. As
41
44
far back as 1967 The Reporter, a liberal magazine of the
period, published an article by fellow Australian Denis
Warner which summed up Burchett's history up to that
point:
Stripped of his Australian passport by Canberra in 1955 and
denied Australian citizenship for his three children by a sec·
ond marriage-one born in Hanoi, one in Peking, and one in
Moscow-Burchett is regarded by those responsible for Australian security as a communist and a traitor who ought to
stand trial for his role in the Korean war . ... 69
Burchett was accused by American POWs returning
from Korea of involvement in obtaining phony confessions
from them about America's alleged use of germ warfare.
Burchett showed up again during the Vietnam war. Senator Jeremiah Denton described being interviewed by Burchett while he was a prisoner in North Vietnam. In his book
When Hell Was in Session he says that Burchett lost his cool
"when I implied that he was a cheap traitor who knew in his
heart that he was prostituting his talents for money in a
cause that he knew was false." 70
In these years Burchett's articles occasionally appeared
in U.S. papers, but he was properly identified. For example,
the Chicago Tribune carried an essay on June 5, 1966, with
the following description of Burchett: "An Australian Communist writer, Wilfred Burchett has travelled frequently to
North Vietnam. He wrote this article after returning to his
Cambodian home from his latest trip. It gives a communist
view ofthe war and its effects and it should be read as such."
But starting in the late 1970s Burchett's essays began to
be printed without any identification that could alert the
reader. The New York Times published his essays on the
Op-Ed page, identifying him only as "a left-wing journalist
living in Paris." After Reed Irvine complained to Times
publisher Arthur Sulzberger that this was an inadequate
identification-and Sulzberger agreed-the Times Op-Ed
page, in the following year, identified him as "a journalist
living in Paris." Harper's published a review by Burchett of a
book attacking the CIA, identifying him only as "a left-wing
journalist" and "a personal friend of Ho Chi Minh." The
same Chicago Tribune that had fully identified Burchett in
1966 introduced him to its readers quite differently on August 6, 1982: "A man whose business is informing the world
is an Australian expatriate journalist, Wilfred Burchett,
now living in Paris."
Burchett's autobiography was published in 1981 by the
New York Times Book Company with an introduction by
long-time Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury, who
concluded that Burchett was radical "because he believes
in the underdog whatever the continent, whatever the
color, whatever the creed." 71 Laudatory reviews in the prestige press evaded or glossed over the subject of Burchett's
service to Communist regimes. The New York Times reviewer wrote: "His (Burchett's) uncommon honesty-he is
honest most of the time, if not quite all of the time-give his
WINTER/ SPRING 1983
�memoirs a degree of intellectual tensioi). •>72 (The reviewer
is not clear as to why he thinks being honest "most of the
time" is uncommon honesty. Is "common honesty" to be
dishonest most of the time?) According to the Washington
Post's reviewer, Burchett's story is that of a man "who early
in his life identified what he saw as the forces of decency
and justice and determined to march with them ... if ...
he has on occasion been forced into self-censorship and
compromises, they have been compromises of a nature
known, whatever they may say, to journalists of all political
colors." 73 The most remarkable review of all was by former
New York Times obituary editor Alden Whitman in the Boston Globe. Whitman described Burchett as one of those
rare journalists "who are distinguished for their primary
allegiance to their readers and to the cause of human betterment . ... He seems to wear no one's collar but his own." As
for Burchett's Communism: "Because Burchett so often
reported uncomfortable truths and because so much of his
work was done in China, North Vietnam, and Kampuchea,
word was put out that he was a communist."74
What is involved here is more than "failure to identify."
Implicit is a rewriting of political history. This is a major
utopian target which the media abet. Communists are
transformed into "liberals." For example, Joseph Barnes,
foreign editor of the former New York Herald Tribune, who
was exposed as a Communist by a series of his former colleagues who broke with the party, started to be referred to
in the press as a "liberal" in the late 1970s. The Rosenberg
case has been transmogrified. In 1978, on the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the execution of the Rosen bergs for treason,
Public Television served up a four-year-old documentary
with a new introduction and epilogue, "The RosenbergSobell Case Revisited." Atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were portrayed as individuals singled out for their political beliefs by a malignant government. When Accuracy
in Media wrote to the President of the Public Broadcasting
System to complain about the film's gross distortion of history, the reply came from the program's producer. Ignoring
the long list of factual criticisms AIM had submitted, he
announced loftily that the suggestion the program embodied Communist propaganda reflected discredit on
AJM75.
In 1982 Telefrance USA, which says that its programs
reach 10 million U.S. homes, broadcast a four-part Frenchmade documentary on the Rosenberg case with the emotional title, "The Rosenbergs Must Not Die." They were
portrayed as innocents railroaded by a corrupt government.
Dorothy Rabinowitz in a Wall Street Journal essay noted
that "no more malevolent band of fascists, scoundrels, cynics and thugs" had ever appeared on a screen than the "assortment of characters supposedly representing an American Supreme Court, an American judge and prosecutor
and members of the FBJ."76 The New York Times reviewer
at least dismissed the program. Cablevision Magazine, however, allowed that there was the "recurring paradox of how
a foreigner-an outsider-may have a fuller perspective on
TifE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
a situation, political or otherwise, than someone more directly involved."77
Misidentification and the rewriting of political history
produce reporting that inhibits, rather than helps, public
understanding of political developments. For example,
press coverage of Kathy Boudin, the Weather Underground leader captured during the Brink's robbery in
Nyack, depicted her-to quote from a typical account in
the Boston Globe-as a "child of privilege," "a brainy, popular tomboy who graduated with honors from the 'right'
schools, the type of girl that people once described as allAmerican." But Kathy Boudin was a red-diaper baby, the
child of radical lawyer, Leonard Boudin. The circle of her
father's friends was largely made up of Communists and
those sympathetic to Communism. (The Globe story itself
bore this out by listing some of the individuals she would
have encountered at her parents' dining table, but did not
identify them either). Kathy Boudin's political development would have become considerably less mysterious if
the media had not concealed relevant information.
Journalistic practices like the Pinsky Principle have
grown common as journalists have changed their view of
their proper role. "Advocacy," "participatory," and "activist" journalism have created new models. To some extent
the ((new journalism," as it is sometimes called, has developed because its literary techniques produce more dramatic copy at a time of intense competition from television, with its strong visual imagery. A "composite"
prostitute (and why confuse the reader by identifying her
as such) can offer a more interesting biography than any
single individual. Similarly, a report that suggests the
writer is directly privy to the thoughts and beliefs of his
subject has more impact than an article with tiresome inserts like "A neighbor said that" or "The defendant's lawyer claims that. ... "
The new journalism is also a reflection of the changing
aspirations of journalists. Journalists are now in a position
to set the policies of papers. They were not in an earlier
era, when conservative owners set their stamp upon their
property. With many more years of education than they
used to have, with higher status in society, journalists are
dissatisfied with a role that limits them simply to chronicling what happens. As lawyer Max Kampelman noted in a
1978 essay in Policy Review:
It is understandable that a significant segment of the media
has become impatient with its limited information dissemination role. It is not easy and frequently not exciting for an intelligent person simply to report events. The tendency, therefore, has been for imaginative and socially dedicated journalists to go beyond normal reporting in order to seek fuller expression of their talents or social values. 78
Joseph Kraft notes: "Not only have we traded objectivity for bias, but we have also abandoned a place on the
sidelines for a piece of the action."79 Jim Bormann, a pio-
45
�neer in broadcast news, described. listening to journalist
Alex Kendrick telling a CBS news affiliate session that a
good reporter should not be afraid, while covering a riot, to
throw a few bricks himself. Kendrick urged the contemporary newsman to get involved and then report what he felt
"inside."8 Kraft and Borman are critical of what hapP<;ned. Most influential journalists, however, are pleased
w1th the new role they have assumed. David Broder of the
Washington Post has praised television's Bill Moyers as a
politician "of the most serious sort'' who "is consciously
engaged in the struggle to reshape the future of public policy."81 John Oakes of the New York Times reports the comment of an approving Swiss journalist who told him the
mass media in the United States were "the only real opposition in the country."82
"Facts" are seen in a fresh light by the new journalism.
As writer Naomi Munson pointed out in Commentary,
while reporters had seen their job as sniffing out facts
" more and more these days they have come to regard'
themselves, instead, in a grander light, as bloodhounds of
the 'truth."' 83 The problem with this is that facts then become at best a tool for revealing the truth. At worst facts
become an impediment to the "truth" which must be
sloughed off, ignored, buried, so as not to interfere with
the public's ability to perceive what in a "higher sense" is
true. Gay Talese, a writer who was godfather to the new
journalism, said its techniques allowed the presentation of
"a larger truth than is possible through rigid adherence" to
normal newspaper standards.84
One result of the new journalism was to create a scandal
like the one that erupted over Janet Cooke and the nonexistent eight-year-old heroin addict "Jimmy." After the
Washington Post was forced to return the Pulitzer Prize
which the story had won, it tried to pass off what had happened as the victimization of a newspaper by one of its
reporters. According to the Post's published account, no
editor anywhere was safe from the machinations of a determined liar.
It was not so simple. Newspapers, the Post among them,
had developed a pattern of shutting their eyes to the fictional aspects of the new journalism. When the Daily
News accepted the resignation of its prize-winning journalist Michael Daley a month after the Cooke scandal-he
was accused of manufacturing material for an article on
British Army brutality in Northern Ireland-Daley remarked that he had used pseudonyms and reconstructions
on many of his 300 columns and "no one has ever said anything."85 In the case of Janet Cooke, Vivian AplinBrownlee, Cooke's editor on the District Weekly, to which
she had been assigned in her first year at the Post, claimed
that she did not believe the story from the beginning and
said so to the city editor."
°
I knew her so well and the depth of her. In her eagerness to
make a name she would write farther than the truth would
allow. When challenged on facts in other stories, Janet would
46
reverse herself, but without any dismay or consternation with
herself86
What this meant was that Janet Cooke was repeatedly
caught in misstatements of fact while she worked for the
Post, but the editors, instead of firing her, had promoted
her.
Despite what the Post's ombudsman Bill Green later admitted were "rumblings" in the newsroom, the Post made
no attempt to check the story or even to ask to see Jane
Cooke's tapes or notes. A few days after the story was published, Post reporter Courtland Milloy drove Janet Cooke
through the neighborhood where she claimed Jimmy lived
and he could see she did not know the area. He reported
his doubts to the city editor, but the editor, as he later confessed, thought Milloy was motivated by jealousy.87 The
mayor and police officials asked the Post to disclose the
identity of the child so he could be helped. Presumably the
life of an eight-year-old boy hung in the balance, but the
Post merely launched into high-flown rhetoric on confidentiality, leaving the police to launch an intensive, expensive, and naturally vain search.
The Post's ombudsman, Green, whose task it is to monitor the paper's performance, wrote a column replete with
utopian cliches, without himself bothering to make any investigation into the story:
Jimmy probably doesn't know many of the promises that have
been made to him. There was the Great Society and the war on
poverty. There are police who promise to uphold the law.
There are schools that promise that everybody will be given a
fair start, a chance to make it. There are the agencies that
promise if you get into trouble, you can get help. Beyond this,
there is the country's glittering promise that things will be bet.
ter if you work. 88
Green promised ringingly that Jimmy could be assured that
at least the Post's promise to him of anonymity would be
kept.
Since the police search was finally abandoned, Janet
Cooke would have been safe had she not lied about her
academic credentials. The Post released biographical data
on their prizewinning reporter. Cooke's claim to a Vassar
B.A. she did not have led to the unravelling of the whole
fabric of invention.
The media's reaction to charges of bias is one of genuine
outrage. Irving Kristol has pointed out that "the television
networks and national newspapers are sincerely convinced
that a liberal bias is proof of journalistic integrity."89 CBS
News President Richard Salant retorted indignantly to suggestions of bias: :"Our reporters do not cover stories from
their point of view. They are representing them from nobody's point of view."90 An interviewer asked Washington
Post editor Benjamin Bradlee:
Are you suggesting that it is untrue ... that you have a cadre of
highly motivated, intelligent, skillful, young liberal reporters
WINTER/SPRING
1983
�who tend to slant their stories toward D~mocrats, liberals, as
they write for the news pages?"
He replied: I am very definitely denying that."9l
At the very time Bradlee was saying this, in the spring of
1972, a ucounter~convention" of American journalists,
sponsored by the journalism review More, was being attended by over 2,000 journalists, including such media
"stars" as Dan Rather, Tom Wicker, David Halberstam,
and Murray Kempton. In an article describing the purpose
of the meeting, More explained: "A growing number of
people who put out the nation's newspapers and magazines and splice together the nightly news are no longer
going to accept the old ways of doing things." The "new"
journalists, said More, were ((sensitive" people who turned
"their attention to the kind of journalism that might help
improve the quality of life rather than objectively recording its decline.''92
How do journalists manage to believe they maintain the
professional journalistic creed of objectivity at the same
time that they transmit, as we have seen, the utopian
world view? Many journalists seem to mistake a sense of
superiority for objectivity. In the fifth and final segment of
CBS's series on defense, President Reagan and Chairman
Brezhnev were shown making speeches denouncing each
other. Cronkite then appeared, like the patient parent of
quarreling children, to lament that from both the Kremlin
and the White House came "angry words." Presenting the
United States and the Soviet Union as mirror-image societies seems to constitute self-evident proof of objectivity
to Cronkite and the media elite. Journalists from the prestige media in England revealed a similar concept of objectivity as "a plague on both your houses" during the
Falkland war. They used the term "the British" rather
than "we," outraging much of the public.
Convinced of their own objectivity, the media are arrogant and dismissive when criticized. Reed Irvine notes
that when he and a group of friends who belonged to the
McDowell luncheon group decided in 1969 to start Accu·
racy in Media, they were convinced that if they did research on cases of media inaccuracy, those responsible
would have no choice but to admit they were wrong, issue
corrections, and be more careful in the future. Irvine
laughs ruefully as he recalls: "We soon found out it really
did not work that way."93
The arrogance is sometimes breathtaking, as the media
unhesitatingly ignore in their own case the demands they
make of others. For example, CBS has been the most aggressive of the networks in claiming for television cameras
the right to cover imy event open to the print media. Yet
when CBS held its annual meeting in Aprill980, the press
was admitted, but television cameras were barred. William
Paley, long-time chairman of CBS, declared they would be
disruptive to the audience. Reed Irvine asked whether he
would recommend that Congress adopt the same policy.
The following colloquy ensued:
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Paley: I would not.
Irvine: Just CBS.
Paley: We have adopted the policy, for the time being
anyway, which has been clearly enunciated today.
That's all I can say about it.94
One journalist remarked that it was like distillers holding a
meeting and barring booze.
After CBS aired a documentary in January 1982 that
charged General William Westmoreland with leading a
conspiracy to deceive President Johnson as to the strength
of enemy forces in Vietnam, revelations in a TV Guide article "Anatomy of a Smear" of what the authors called "inaccuracies, distortions, and violations of journalistic stan-
dards" by CBS led the network to commission its own
study. But CBS then kept the report secret, presumably
because it was damaging to the network. It is not hard to
imagine the reaction of CBS if a branch of government had
kept a report secret in comparable circumstances. (Eventually CBS was forced by the courts to release the report.)
The reaction to criticism is sometimes vituperative. Responding to an issue of AIM Report that clearly touched a
nerve, the Post's editor Benjamin Bradlee wrote to Irvine:
"You have revealed yourself as a miserable, carping, retromingent vigilante, and I for one am sick of wasting my
time in communicating with you." 95 After looking up "retromingent/' which means "urinating backward," Irvine
framed the letter and hung it in the office.
All the sins of advocacy journalism, the fictions supporting a "higher truth," the selective coverage, the attacks on
what are perceived as "the bad buys" and whitewashing of
the "good guys" came together in a media crusade against
Israel during its war against the PLO in Lebanon in 1982.
In a major study for Policy Review, Joshua Muravchik has
provided the fullest account of media distortion on a single
topic since Peter Braestrup's two-volume analysis of the
media's coverage of the Tet offensive in Vietnam. Muravchik found variations in culpability: the Washington Post
was much worse than the New York Times; NBC was
worse than ABC which was worse than CBS; Time and
Newsweek, on the other hand, turned in equally abysmal
performances. But all the media were involved in tendentious and inaccurate reporting with one target-to make
Israel look bad.96
Muravchik piles high the examples of media misstatement of fact. For example, wildly exaggerated casualty reports, falsely attributed to the internationally respected
Red Cross (in fact they came from the nonrelated Red
Crescent, an arm of the PLO run by Arafat's brother), continued to be cited repeatedly after the Red Cross had formally repudiated them. These were soon accompanied by
equally inflated portraits of destruction from supposed
eye-witness journalists in Beirut. While all the media were
guilty of this, the prize may well have belonged to ABC
which, in June, before the Israelis had launched any serious bombing of the city, described Beirut as a result of Israeli shelling, as resembling a some ancient ruin."
47
�Symptomatic of the pervasive dishonesty was a photo
distributed by United Press International with a caption
which said it showed a seven-month-old baby who had lost
both arms in an Israeli raid. Secretary of State George
Shultz, in a statement meant to be critical of Israel, said
"the symbol of this war is a baby with its arms shot off." It
was a symbol not of the war, but of the media's coverage of
it. Subsequent investigation showed that the baby had not
been badly hurt -both its arms were intact. And while civilians, including children, were obviously hit by Israeli
bombs, it so happened that in this case the time, place, and
direction of bombing made it clear that the baby had been
hit by PLO shelling, which the media rarely mentioned,
but which was also a feature of the war.
Verbal attacks on Israel were the staple fare of journalists. CBS' Bill Moyers accused her of waging "total war;"
NBC's John Chancellor talked of an "imperial Israel" and
oflsrael as "a warrior state;" ABC's Threlkeld said she was
"the neighborhood bully." Time and Newsweek referred to
Israel's leaders as "stubborn," "outrageous," and utrouble~
some." Even Israel's release of captured PLO documents,
revealing the extent of Soviet involvement in training of
the international terrorist network, surely of interest to the
West, was dismissed as part of Israel's ((propaganda war.n
Muravchik notes that ABC's Steve Mallory developed a
regular routine of arriving at an area after it was hit by Israeli bombs or shells and announcing, usually wrongly,
that there was no military target there.
The stories the media failed to tell were equally important. Except for the Times, the media had almost nothing
to say of the welcome the Israelis received in Southern
Lebanon by Christians and Moslems delighted to be rid of
thePLO.
But perhaps the media bias was best revealed by the television networks' attacks on Israel for censorship. (The
PLO's censorship, exercised by guns directed against unwelcome TV cameras, was never mentioned.) When ABC
broke Israel's censorship by broadcasting an interview
with Arafat that had been disallowed by the censor, Israel
punished the network by temporarily refusing it access to
Israeli television facilities. ABC accused Israel on the air of
"an intolerable act of political censorship." Israel explained that while it exercised only military censorship on
reports from Israel's side of the battle line, its extension of
its facilities for reports from the enemy's side was a favor
to journalists that it would not allow to be used for the
PLO's political advantage. ABC had agreed to the rules
and then broken them. As Israel saw it, it was as if Britain
had been held responsible for "intolerable censorship" for
failing to channel propaganda speeches by Goebbels from
Germany during World War II if German transmission facilities were not working. But as Muravchik notes, while
Israel's position was one with which the public might or
might not have sympathized, they never heard Israel's side
of the story because the networks would not report it.
They were thus as guilty of "censorship" of information
48
possibly detrimental to them as Israel was. The other networks repeatedly showed black screens on which were
superimposed statements like "22 Seconds Deleted by
Israeli Censors" or "Pictures Censored." NBC set a rec~
ord of sorts when in a single news story on June 5 the
network managed to refer four separate times to Israeli
censorship.
Yet IsraeYs censorship-in wartime-was far less restrictive than that of most other countries at any time and compared very favorably with the censorship of other Middle
Eastern countries. Moreover, while dispatches from other
Middle Eastern countries were censored, the networks
only flashed on the screen references to Israeli censorship.
Eventually NBC began to flash on the screen "Cleared by
Syrian censors," and CBS several weeks later followed
suit. But by the end of August ABC, although it often
broadcast from Syria, still made no reference to Syrian
censorship while routinely using "Cleared by Israeli censors." (Ironically if Israel had kept out all foreign journalists, she would presumably have fared much better at their
hands. This is what the British did during their war with
Argentina over the Falklands that was going on simultaneously, and the media kept silent about "censorship.")
Why should Israel specifically have become a target of
the accumulated vices of advocacy journalism? Robert
Elegant, in the 1981 Encounter essay on media performance in Vietnam that Morley Safer found so offensive,
went to the heart of the problem. Elegant in effect prophesied the media's behavior in arguing that the adversary
stance of the press during Vietnam was prototypical of
what the reaction of the Western press was likely to be to
any war: the press, he wrote, serves as multiplier of the
prejudices of the western intelligentsia whose tender conscience moves it to condemn actions by its own side while
condoning those of its enemies.97 Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz noted an additional factor: Israel refuted
all the lessons of Vietnam, showing that military force
could be necessary, even beneficial, and that a Soviet client could be defeated by an American ally. Podhoretz saw
the attacks on Israel as a cover for the loss of American
nerve, acquiescence in terrorism, and appeasement of to-
talitarianism.98 In Muravchik's view the most important
single factor in the anti-Israel bias was that the war violated the precept that "violence never solves anything."
This was the media's adaptation of the utopian perspective which could more accurately be summed up as "Violence from the left is the only violence that solves anything." Muravchik notes that it is ironic that the belief that
violence solves nothing should have become ascendant in
the media under the impact of the war in Vietnam, for at
the end of that war "violence solved everything-to the
satisfaction of the communists."
Given the extraordinary depths to which the media sank
in the reporting on Lebanon, the analysis of the Columbia
Journalism Review on media reporting of the war is interesting. It concluded that American journalism
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�reported what it saw for the most par~ fairly and accurately
and sometimes brilliantly, provided balanced comment, and
provoked and absorbed controversy. For performance under
fire, readers and viewers could have ask~d for little more. 99
Except for the remark that the coverage "provoked and
absorbed controversy," which was certainly true, this
could scarcely have been further from the mark. But it
does underscore the extent to which the major journalism
reviews, of which Columbia's is probably the most influen·
tial, have themselves become exponents of advocacy journalism. If the press is going to change its ways, it will not
be because of monitoring by the major journalism reviews.
Media needs and attitudes and utopian goals dovetail
nicely. From the point of view of the utopians, stories that
the media may like because of their inherent drama break
down faith in authority. When ABC launched "20/20" to
compete with CBS's highly successful "60 Minutes," the
program was known around the studio as the "cancer scare
of the week." While ABC may have pursued ratings, for
the utopians the programs reveal the wickedness or incapacity of government and corporations, which deny thereality of the dangers or fail to meet them. The media rarely
report human rights violations in totalitarian societies because they cannot gain access to them. For the utopians
these are stories that should be ignored, for they might interfere with their effort to mobilize public opinion against
non-Communist countries threatened by those whose aim
is to establish regimes of the sort that already exist in Cuba
and North Vietnam.
While in theory the fondness for scare stories could
make reports on the Soviet military build-up and Soviet
intelligence agencies appealing, here pervasive liberal orthodoxy among journalists comes into play. It leads them
to downgrade the notion that there is such a thing as a
genuine Soviet threat. It also leads them to automatic sympathy with proposals that come from disarmament groups,
which they become extremely reluctant to report on fully
for fear the effect would be to "unmask" them. This prevents the public from developing scepticism about the
programs of these groups. The media's portrait enforces
the utopian view of the world and makes the calls of the
utopians for "de·industrialization," "decentralization of
industry," solar roof collectors instead of central power stations, seem safer to try than they otherwise would. The
utopian agenda becomes more plausible and attractive as
our familiar world is seen to be threatened only by the callousness and rapacity of our own institutions.
1. Quoted in TV and National Defense: An Analysis of CBS News 19721973, Ernest W. Lefever ed., Institute for American Strategy Press, Boston, Va.l974, 14.
2. Melvin G. Grayson and Thomas R Shepard, The Disaster Lobby, Chicago: Follett Publishing Co., 1973, 266.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
3. S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman "Media and Business Elites,"
Public Opinion, Oct./Nov. 1981, 42-44.
4. Lichter and Rothman, Public Opinion, Oct./Nov. 1981, 59-60.
5. Robert J. Lowenberg, "Journalism and 'Free Speech' as' Political
Power," Scholastic, Dec. 1982, 12.
6. Quoted by Joseph Kraft, "The Imperial Media," Commentary, May
1981.
7. AIM Report, (I) September l, 1979.
8. AIM Report, (I) june 1977.
9. AIM Report, (I) Oct. 1979.
10. Sophia Peterson, "Foreign News Gatekeepers and Criteria of Newsworthiness," Journalism Quarterly, Spring 1979, 116.
11. Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, "The Nuclear Energy Debate: Scientists, the Media and the Public," Public Opinion, Aug./Sept.
1982, 51.
12. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept. 1982, 52.
13. Robert DuPont, Nuclear Phobia, The Media Institute.
14. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept. 1982,47.
15. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept.1982, 49.
16. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept. 1982, 51
17. Samuel McCracken, The War Against the Atom, New York: Basic
Books, 1982, 108.
18. Rothman and Lichter, Public Opinion, Aug./Sept. 1982, 52.
19. Samuel McCracken, War, New York 1982, 108.
20. AIM Report, (II) March 1979.
21. Interview with Walter Cronkite, Utica (N.Y.) Press, November 13,
1974. quoted in TV and National Defense, Boston, Va., 1974 Frontispiece.
22. TV and National Defense, Boston, Va. 1974, 37.
23. Joshua Muravchik and John E. Haynes, "CBS vs. Defense," Commentary September 1981,46.
24. Muravchik and Haynes, Commentary, September 1981, 45.
25. Muravchik and Haynes, Commentary, September 1981, 48-49.
26. AIM Report, (I) Aprill979.
27. AIM Report, (II) May 1978.
28. AIM Report, (I) February 1979.
29. AIM Report, (I) February 1979.
30. AIM Report, (II) March 1978.
31. AIM Report, (II) Oct. 1979.
32. AIM Report, (I) july 1977.
33. AIM Report, (I) Feb. 1979.
34. AIM Report, (II) Oct. 1979.
35. Contentions, newsletter of the Committee for the Free World, December 1981.
36. AIM Report, (II) May 1980.
37. AIM Report, (I) june 1982.
38. AIM Report, (II) june 1980.
39. AIM Report, (II) june 1980.
40. AIM Report, (I) March 1979.
41. Human Events, Apri124,1982: New York Times April9, 1982.
42. Contentions, Committee for the Free World, April-May 1982.
43. AIM Report, (I) Sept. 1977.
44. Guild Notes, publication of the National Lawyers Guild, April, 1980.
45. Guild Notes, April, 1980.
46. Business Week, October 18, 1982.
47. Crooks, Conmen and Clowns, Media Institute, Washington D.C.
1981, ix-x.
48. Ben Stein, The View from Sunset Boulevard, New York: Basic Books
1979, 20.
49. Sunset, New York 1979, 33.
50. AIM Report, (II) Sept. 1980.
51. Interview with Peter Metzger, January 29, 1982.
52. AIM Report, May, 1978.
53. AIM Report, (II) july 1982.
54. New York Times, November 12, 1982.
55. Wall Street Journal, August 21, 1981.
56. Human Events, july 11, 1981.
57. Human Ev.ents, July 11, 1981.
49
�58. Human Events, July II, 1981.
59. Human Events, July II, 1981.
60. Wall Street Journal, August 21, 1981.
61. Human Events, Sept. 26, 1981.
62. Daily News, May 12, 1982.
63. AIM Report, (I) Aprill978.
64. AIM Report, (I) April1978.
65. AIM Report, (I) July 1979.
66. AIM Report, (I) May 1980.
67. Bob Schulman, The Bulletin, American Society of Newspaper Editors, October 1982.
68. New York Times, August 2, 1977.
69. Quoted in Review of the News, September 8, 1982, 37.
70. Jeremiah A. Denton Jr., When Hell Was in Session, So. Carolina:
Robert E. Hopper & Assoc., 1982, Chapter 11.
71. Wilfred Burchett, At the Barricades, New York: Times Books, 1981,
viii.
72. Quoted in AIM Report, (II) September 1981.
73. AIM Report, (II) September 1981.
74. AIM Report, (II) September 1981.
75. AIM Report, (I) September 1978.
76. Wall Street Journal, November 16, 1982.
77. Cablevision Magazine, October 25, 1982.
78. Max Kampehnan, "The Power of the Press," Policy Review, Fall,
1978, 18.
79. Joseph Kraft, "The Imperial Media," Commentary, May,l981.
80. Jim Bormann, "Honesty, Fairness and Real Objectivity-Keys to
Journalistic Credibility," Keynote address to Radio and Film News Directors Association, September 29, 1971.
81. AIM Report, (II) June 1982; Human Events September 4, 1982.
82. AIM Report, (II) May 1982.
83. Naomi Munson, "The Case of Janet Cooke," Commentary, August
1981,49.
84. New York Times, May 25, 1981.
85. New York Times, May 25, 1981.
86. AIM Report, (I) May 1981.
87. AIM Report, (I) May 1981.
88. AIM Report, (I) May 198 I.
89. Wall Street Journal, October 14, 1982.
90. TV and National Defense, Boston, Va., 11.
91. Grayson and Shepard, Lobby, Chicago 1973, 255.
92. Lobby, Chicago, 255-56
93. Interview with Reed Irvine, October 24, 1982.
94. AIM Report, (I) May 1980.
95. AIM Report, (II) June 1978.
96, Joshua Muravchik, "Misreporting Lebanon," Policy Review, Winter
1983.
97. Robert Elegant, "How to Lose a War," Encounter August 1981, p. 88.
98. Norman Podhoretz, 'TAccuse," Commentary, September 1982, pp.
30-31.
99. Roger Morris, "Beirut-and the Press-Under Siege," Columbia
Journalism Review Nov./Dec. 1982, 33.
ARRIVAL
The orchid waited eons for the ape.
With seasonal reserve, the old magnolia
Seduced the dragonfly. Unpressed,
The olive and the grape
Lingered in indigo or green,
Too pointedly perceived when not
By simian lens. The field, busy with discharge,
Was barren of delight.
Let ape appear: then fruit and fern, weary
Of insect assiduity, will wink
For recognition, oil and wine
Seek flask and cruet. As we,
No longer naked, know, not to be seen
Too close shows sensibility.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
50
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Benjamin Constant on Ancient
and Modern Liberty
Stephen Holmes
Progressives ritually deplore not only the low level of
popular participation in politics, but also its characteristic
lack of intensity. Conservatives reply that the feverish involvement of ordinarily apathetic citizens can destabilize
and even topple a democratic regime. Benjamin Constant
attempted to combine these two one-sided ideas, ideas that
are conventionally kept at an aseptic distance from one another. In modern societies, he asserted, political tyranny
may be closely associated with attempts to reglorify the
public realm. But tyranny can also be encouraged and sustained by excessive privatization. Too much and too little
civic spirit are equally dangerous. This double claim forms
the theoretical core of Constant's l819lecture on "Ancient
and Modern Liberty." 1
Precursors
The "quarrel between the ancients and the moderns"
which flourished in France toward the end of the seventeenth century was not merely a dispute about poetry. It
reflected a cultural cleavage between religious conservatives who viewed history as a process of degeneration and
advanced thinkers who exalted the refinements of modern
politesse over the crudities of the barbaric polis. 2 Defenders of "the moderns" hoped that a liberation of literature
from unsurpassable classical models would accompany the
gradual emancipation of science from the authority of ArisStephen Holmes teaches political philosophy at Harvard University.
The above essay comes from a book, Boundaries of the Political: the Sceptical Liberalism of Benjamin Constant, that Yale University Press will
publish in 1984.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
totelianism. Constant's vindication of liberal democracy
against the would-be imitators of classical democracy was
certainly influenced by these literary and scientific contests. Constant1 however, drew more heavily on a narrower
tradition of political theory.l
The proximate and primary source for Constant's dichotomy between two kinds of liberty was Montesquieu.
Among its other achievements, De !'esprit des lois drew universal attention to the astonishing differences between
modern England and ancient Sparta. 4 Although he never
used the phrase "modern liberty," Montesquieu had a
clear enough conception of it. In modern societies such as
England, he argued, the essence ofliberty was security. 5 In
Europe, security was notably threatened when nobles were
excessively independent and engaged in anarchic self-help
(as in Poland) and also when monarchs (as in Richelieu's
France) gathered too much power into their own hands. 6 In
either case men feared one another and the calculability of
life was drastically reduced. "In order for men to have this
[modern] liberty, the government must be such that a citizen cannot fear another citizen. 11 7
Constitutionalism, including the separation of powers,
was meant to arrest the seesaw of anarchy and despotism,
to introduce a salutary predictability into civic life. Protection from both baronial reprisals and lettres de cachet was
the essence of English liberty. Men knew that if they did
not break the law neither the police nor marauding private
armies would harass them. Security made it possible to
plan one's life and to enter into long-term cooperative ventures with one's neighbors. A state based on this modern
conception ofliberty enables its citizens to engage in a promiscuous variety of actions and lives. All citizens may contribute to a common pattern, but only as "dissonances in
music agree in the concord of the whole." 8
51
�The compatibility of the moderl)c constitutional state
with unregimented human diversity is one key to Montesquieu's contrast between modern England and ancient
Sparta. He called Sparta free (that is, free from foreign
domination), but he quickly added that "the only advantage of its liberty was glory."9 It was a small "society of
athletes and combatants," 10 where money was proscribed,11 where men were made cruel by harsh disciplinel2 and always ready to immolate their private lives for
the sake of their patrie. Sparta represented the apogee of
politics based on virtue.ll Motivated exclusively by virtue,
Spartans subordinated themselves unflinchingly to a single
overriding purpose: to live and die for the glory of their
state.l 4 They participated in public life, but only in the
sense that they played their parts; they certainly did not
influence" the course of deliberation in personal, idiosyncratic ways. In this 'warrior's guild," 15 in fact, collective
deliberation was less important than gymnastics.
Montesquieu could compare Sparta to a monastery that,
paradoxically enough, secured the undivided loyalty of its
inmates by starving them of all human possibilities except
those associated with the official functions of the group. 16
A modern state could never expect such extraordinary devotion from its citizens precisely because it is too munificent: it lavishes so many extrapolitical possibilities on the
individual that he feels "he can be happy without his patrie." 17 Intense politics based on virtue is thus out of place
in the modern state. Personal honor or avarice may motivate modern citizens; but self-abnegating patriotism cannot. That the English revolutionary attempt to resurrect a
polity based on virtue in the seventeenth century would
collapse in ridiculous hypocrisy was perfectly predictable. IS
Montesquieu's striking counterposition of England and
Sparta had a decisive impact on numerous writers besides
Rousseau.l9 Jean-louis de Lolme was typical. Writing in
the 1780s, he reformulated Montesquieu's contrast as a
distinction between private independence and political
influence:
44
4
To concur by one's suffrage in enacting laws is to enjoy a
share, whatever it may be, of power; to live in a state where the
laws are equal for all and sure to be executed (whatever may be
the means by which these advantages are attained), is to be
free. 20
Passages registering an analogous distinction between
sharing in legislative power and protection from the arbitrary acts of political officials can be found in the eighteenth-century works of Joseph Priestly, Adam Ferguson,
Jean-Charles Sismondi, and others.21 All these writers had a
clear awareness of what Constant would later describe as
the difference between ancient and modern liberty. Nevertheless, the claims to originality advanced at the beginning
of "De Ia liberte des anciens comparee d celle des modernes"
were not entirely unjustified. 22 The abstract dichotomy between ancient and modern liberty was not unprecedented,
but Constant used it in ways that were new.
52
Two Concepts of Liberty
Ancient liberty, Constant wrote, was "active and continuous participation in the exercise of collective power." 23
Modern liberty, by contrast, is "the peaceful enjoyment of
individual or private independence." 24 A hedonistic slide
from "exercise" to "enjoy" signaled the humanly debilitating consequences of modernization. Indeed, Constant's
distinction between ancient and modern liberty cannot be
studied apart from the notion, also inherited from Montesquieu, that European history is a curious blend of progress
and decay. He made remarkable assumptions about the human consequences of modernization:
The liberty of ancient times was whatever assured citizens the
largest share in exercising social power. The liberty of modern
times is whatever guarantees the independence of citizens
from their government. As a result of their character,_the ancients had an overriding need for action; and the need for
action is easily reconciled with a vast increase in social authority. The moderns need peace and enjoyment. Peace can be
found only in a limited number of laws that prevent citizens
from being harassed. Enjoyments are secured by a wide margin of individual liberty_ Any legislation requiring the sacrifice
of these enjoyments is incompatible with the present condition of mankind. 25
Because of the common but erroneous belief that negation
implies deprivation, "negative freedom" 26 is a misleading
translation of Ia liberte chez les modernes. Modern liberty,
as Constant conceived it, is as much a capacity for positive
action as ancient liberty had been.27 The difference only
lies in the character of the action and the field in which it
unfolds. Moreover, Constant distinguished between two
types of freedom in order to investigate the various relations between them, the ways in which they are not only
combinable but even mutually enhancing.
Not merely conceptual, Constant's distinction was initially historical. Each type of liberty, he urged, was originally bound to the institutions and life of a specific society.
Ancient liberty, in its unalloyed form, was only possible in a
sparsely populated, territorially compact, religiously homogeneous and slave-holding warrior's republic. 28 Modern
liberty is the innovation of large-scale, caste-free, internationally open, religiously pluralistic, and intensively commercial societies.29
Although intrigued by the contrast between public participation and private security, Constant did not allow it to
obscure the radically progressive content of modern liberty. In antiquity, "freedom" was a privileged status from
which men could be excluded by the chance of birth. Essential to modern liberalism, by contrast, is the demand
that freedom be distributed to all individuals regardless of
family origin. The relative importance which Constant ascribed to public and private spheres within modern liberty
was a direct function of the modern demand of citizenship
for all.
WINTER/SPRJNG 1983
�Constant's emphasis on a linkage between political
ideals and social contexts was not merely a subsidiary feature of his theory. In explicit contrast to the natural law and
contractarian traditions, he did not attempt to justify his
commitment to the liberal state by adducing ahistorical
traits of human nature. Once again following Montesquieu
and other eighteenth-century (particularly Scottish) examples, he deliberately supplanted the contract myth with a
theory of social change. 30 The liberal state is desirable not
because it mirrors human nature or respects eternal human
rights, but because it is the political arrangement most
adequate to solving the problems of European society
in its current state of economic, scientific, and moral
development.
Constant's conception of social change was also vital to
another striking thesis of the 1819 lecture, an idea elaborated at greater length in De !'esprit de conquete et de !'usurpation dans leurs rapports avec Ia civilisation europeenne of
1814: the modern appeal to classical republican ideals is an
anachronism that can serve only as a rhetorical justification
and partial concealment of political fanaticism and terror. 31
A similar thesis had been propounded by C.F. de Volney
in 1794. Volney too lamented that "we have fallen into a
superstitious adoration of the Greeks and Romans." 32
Cults of antiquity which sprang up during the Revolution
and glorified selfless, Brutus-like tyrannicide suggested this
insight to many observers.ll The myth of ancient republics, Constant agreed, lent a deceptive aura oflegitimacy to
the abusive acts of the Committee of Public Safety: "it is in
the name of liberty that we have been given prisons, scaffolds and countless harassments." 34 The enormous power
of government over society was justified by an ideology
that, invoking ancient community, denied the modern distinction between state and society. During the Revolution,
in other words, the ideal of ancient liberty was a pretext for
oppression.l5 Constant conceded that many of the wouldbe "imitators of ancient republics" were propelled by generous motives.J6 They meant to abolish arbitrary government, seigneurial privileges, and the abuses of the Church.
Their tragic mistake was to have chosen the classical city as
an image unifying their diverse complaints against the ancien regime.
The French Revolution was not the first occasion on
which anticlerical and anti-aristocratic activists appealed to
classical republican ideals:
Since the renaissance of letters, most of those who attempted
to rescue man from the degradation into which he had been
plunged by the double curse of superstition and conquest [Roman Catholicism and aristocracy], believed it necessary to borrow institutions and customs favorable to liberty from the
ancients. 37
Though the image of classical republican freedom may
have been a useful rebuke to the old regime, it was not an
adequate guide to the future. The myth of the ancient city
could serve as a weapon in the assault on Catholicism and
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the inequality of ranks, but it could furnish no clue about
how to replace them.JS Necessarily, attempts to resurrect
anachronistic forms of liberty were political hoaxes on a
grand scale.
The Problem
In modern times, Constant wrote, citizens can no longer
experience political participation as an intrinsically rewarding form of action.l9 But he also said that his contemporaries must learn to couple political participation, which he
described as a path to self-perfection, with individual privacy and independence.40 Which statement are we to believe? Was Constant simply being incoherent? Our perplexity is justified. But it can be dispelled if we examine
how the distinction between ancient and modern liberty
was used during two separate phases of Constant's career.
The 1819lecture contains long sections authored twenty
years earlier in response to exceptional political events. By
1819, the political scene had radically changed. Constant's
former left-wing enemies had vanished, only to be replaced
by equally intractable right-wing foes. In response to this
altered landscape, Constant reelaborated his distinction in
a new direction. No longer threatened by pseudo-democratic fraud, he turned sharply against the civic passivity
that served the interests of the ultras.41 But he left the
passages written years earlier untouched. No wonder
present-day readers feel off balance! Despite these findings, we cannot dismiss the 1819lecture as a jumble of conflicting insights. Constant was right to cling tenaciously to
both sides of his polemic: the atrophy of political life can be
just as perilous as a total repoliticization of society. Constant was struggling to understand the complexities of politics after the Revolution.
The Original Formulation
of the Distinction
A good deal has been written about the two concepts of
freedom and the corresponding democratic traditions.42
What has perhaps been neglected is the history of the distinction itself, especially the context in which it was originally elaborated and the problems to which it was initially
meant as a practical response.
The original version of the "Ancient and Modern Liberty" lecture can be found in Chapter Three of Mme de
Stael's Circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer Ia revolution, a manuscript which was heavily influenced and
perhaps co-authored by Constant around 1798. Constant
and Mme de Stael wanted to convince the Directory that,
instead of merely playing off the Right against the Left, it
should appeal directly to a constituency of its own.
In times of political uproar, civic privatism can prevent
53
�individuals from assuming uncompromising postures associated with !'esprit de parti. The Directory never totally
succeeded in its attempt to arrest the. civil war. Thus, from
1793 until 1799, active participation in French politics
meant being drawn pell-mell into the fratricidal battle:
Even the slightest objection inspires hatred in the exalted par-
ties. This hatred compels every man to ally himself with a
number of his fellows and, just as men travel only in caravans
in places infested with brigands, so in countries where hatreds are unleashed, they align themselves with a party in order to have defenders.43
Constant's vindication of political absenteeism was intended as a reply to Rousseau's glorification of political
participation. He lauded citizen withdrawal and indifference in situations of civil war when participation was
largely a vehicle for partisan hatred and revenge. Civil war
had demonstrated the value of apolitical behavior in a
country "where two opposed parties combat each other
with furor." 44
Constant and Mme de Stael urged the Directory to
draw electoral support from just those individuals who had
remained aloof from the fighting in the years before. The
"inert" and '''{immobile" masses of the nation had views
that were admirably moderate because deeply apathetic_45
They were indifferent to royalty, but not enthusiastic
enough about the Republic to want it to disrupt the nation's tranquillity.46 They were unconcerned about the
fate of the ci-devant privileged caste, but they did not detest the old nobles intensely enough to wish to see them
persecuted_47 They knew that the persecution of even a
few embroils everyone, not merely the persecutors and the
persecuted.48
This majority "wants nothing but its own well-being."49
The desire for peace and prosperity may have signaled a
descent from the heights of antique virtue. But it had politically beneficial side-effects. Moreover, a commitment
to peace was exactly what one would have expected from
most Frenchmen.
Party spirit alm0st -1ilever exists except among individuals
thrown outside lthe.Cirde of domestic life. And two-thirds of
the population df France and of.all,the countries of Europe
are composed of men·.Who.-are·occupied solely with their pecuniary fortune. 50
In order to win the loyalty of these survival-minded
masses, the Directoire should respect their indifference to
politics. It must "never count, in such a nation, on the sort
of patriotism that propelled the ancient republics." 51 Instead of trying to win electoral support by stirring up enthusiasm, by asking citizens for heroic sacrifices of their
particular interests to the general good, the Directory
must acquiesce in individual contrariness. "Liberty today
is everything that guarantees the independence of citizens
from the power of the government." 52 To syphon away
54
votes from royalists and Jacobins, the Directory must offer
private security to its citizens.
De Stael's and Constant's aim in 1798 was to convince
the Directory that the stability of the Republic required an
abandonment of all the enthusiasm-promoting techniques
employed earlier by the clubs, the militant sectionnaires,
and the Convention:
Among the ancients ... in order to capture public opinion, it
was necessary to rouse the soul, to excite patriotism by conquest, by triumphs, by factions, even by troubles that nourished every passion. National spirit must no doubt be cultivated as much as possible within France. But we must not
lose sight of the fact that public opinion is based on a love of
peace, on the desire to acquire wealth and the need to conserve it and that we will always be more interested in administrative ideas than in political questions, because these touch
our private lives more directly_ 53
The majority of the French can have a moderating influence because they are largely indifferent to citizenship
and distracted from public affairs. Justly wary of the intoxicating effect of patriotism, the Directors should heed the
following maxim: "The sphere of each individual must always be respected." 54 To politicize modern individuals in
a total manner is next to impossible, and would be a mistake in any case. In 1798, distinguishing between ancient
and modern liberty meant praising apoliticism and urging
the government to hon<>r the primacy of private life.
The Lecture of 1819
Twenty years later, in 1819, Constant delivered his lecture at the Paris Atheneum. With the shift in the political
situation, the argumentative thrust of his distinction between ancient and modern liberty also changed. In the
France of 1819, there was no cult of.Sparta which Constant might have felt compelled to discredit. 55 There was
simply no threat of a resurgent Jacobinism by this time.
Constant's distinction between ancient and modern liberty has often been distorted by being mislocated exclusively in the context of 1793-1794. The Terror-which
Constant had not witnessed first-hand, for he only returned to France in 1795-provided an important motive
for his rethinking of eighteenth-century liberalism. But
the Directory, the Empire and the ultra-dominated Restoration all influenced his thought in decisive ways. The Directory taught him the insufficiency of "limited" gov.ennment, while Napoleon and the Bourbons helped revi¥eh's
underlyil)g rr~pul:ilicariism, temporarily suspended in the
convulsions of civil strife between 1793 and 1799. By 1819,
Constant had long broken with Guizot and other moderates, and he sat on the far left of the Chamber. Needless to
say, his ultraroyalist enemies never celebrated Rousseau
as a prophet of unlimited popular sovereignty; and as
WINTER/SPRING
1983
�Catholics, they liad·only the faintests)>mpatl!ty, £mr. pagan
antiquity.
•
Constant began his lecture with a "demonstration," following Montesquieu and Rousseau, that the representative system was
discovery of the moderns." 56 He used
the contrast with the direct self-government of the classical city to highlight the uniqueness of representative government. But he did not reduce the modern rupture with
the past to this contrast.
At the opening of the lecture, in a section that did not
appear before 1819, he opposed representation to oligarchic usurpation, not to democratic participation. The representative system was a discovery of the moderns: it was a
technique invented by the Third Estate for putting limits
on that "oligarchy whiclr is the same throughout the centuries."57 At the time, Constant's assertion that representative government is the "only system" that allows modern
men to attain freedom and social peace was immediately
understood as an argument against the ultra program to
reverse the relatively liberal Electoral Law of 1817.
Reminiscent of the regime of the ancient Gauls, the system the ultras wished to impose on modern France also
resembled the constitution of ancient Sparta. A small elite,
the Ephors of Sparta, possessed religious as well as political functions. They had powers to check and limit
the kings. But they also enjoyed executive authority.
They could easily become threats instead of restraints.
They were, in fact, not democratic representatives at all,
"not ... men invested with a mission comparable to that
which election today confers on the defenders of our freedoms." 58 The feudal aristocracy of priests and warriors
idealized by the ultras resembled the Ephors in many respects. Under the ancien regime, "the nobility possessed
privileges that were both insolent and oppressive. And the
people were without rights or guarantees." 59
Shrewdly structured, this argument was calculated simultaneously to entice and to befuddle the antidemocratic sentiments of the French Right. Every royalist had
to applaud the concession that modern France could
never be governed by direct popular self.rule. But the reason why the government established by the Charte 60 was
unlike that of the turbulent classical republics was also the
reason why it was distinct from the Catholic, monarchical,
and aristocratic system of the old regime.
Constant shrewdly replaced Montesquieu's contrast between modern monarchies and ancient republics by a new
contrast, discomfiting to the ultras, between representative and nonrepresentative regimes. Such a contrast had
the embarrassing effect of aligning the Catholic Bonald
with the most radical proponents of pagan democracy.
Taunting the Right, Constant juxtaposed absolute democracy with absolute monarchy.
The parallel drawn between the organization of the ancient city and the social program of the ultras was not
merely negative. More was involved than a shared denial
of the modern principle of representation. In both cases,
"a
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Constant discerned a bias against voluntariness, against
entrusting social choices to unsupervised individuals.
With one eye fixed on the Catholic ultraroyalists, Constant mentioned the power of ancient Roman authorities
to meddle in matters of divorce and marriage. Reflecting
on the ultra education program,, he also remarked that
modern theocrats agreed with ancient republicans: a government should "take possessi<m of the generations being
born" and shape them to. its• own pleasure.6l When he said
(also about Rome) that "les lois reglent les moeurs," 62
his real target was the ultra-not merely Jacobin-idea
that the state should assume the duty of policing private
morality.
In mounting his attack on the French Right, Constant
also focused on religious toleration. There were obvious
differences between ancient civic religions and the modern alliance between throne and altar. Both could, however, be contrasted with a liberal decision to make religion
a private matter: "the ability to choose one's own cult, an
ability that we regard as one of our most precious rights,
would have seemed a crime and a sacrilege to the ancients."63 Distant from antiquity and inhospitable to the
vision of the Social Contract, modern Frenchmen cannot
reconcile themselves to the regimental designs of the theocratic Right. It is not altogether surprising that "the gallant
defenders of doctrinal unity cite the laws of the ancients
against foreign gods and support the rights. of the Catholic
Church with the example of the Atheuians."M These and
other parallels between the ancieNts and' the lilltras were
innovations of 1819. They did not appear in Constant's
earlier discussions of the distinction between ancient and
modern liberty. They betray the immediate;;political objectives of his lecture.
In their interpretations of the Revoluti<m,.Jacobins and
royalists agreed that the Terror had been'necessary to the
demolition of the old regime. Ever since his early pam·
phlet, Effets de Ia terreur (1798),65 Constant had rejected
this shared premise of the Left and Right. He had sought
to disconnect liberty from an incriminating association
with bureaucratic murder. An obvious way to disjoin freedom from the Terror was to split "freedom" in two. One
form (call it ancient liberty) could be found guilty, while
the other (call it modern) would come out innocent. Con·
stant had this strategy in mind in the Circonstances actuelles of 1798 where, together with Mme de Stael, he initially worked out the distinction between ancient and
modern liberty. Throughout the Restoration, moreover,
Constant's need to outmaneuver the ultras led him to
stress the politically harmless aspects of modern freedom. ·
He often wrote of "Ia liberte legale," "Ia liberte constitutionnelle," and "Ia liberte reguliere."66 He tended to discuss freedom in minimalist terms: by liberty he meant the
strict execution of the Charte. 67
But, although Constant no longer felt threatened by the
Jacobins in 1819, he was becoming increasingly exasperated wittin the: ultras. His desire to appease their fears was
55
�evaporating quickly. This turn of events helps explain his
new insistence that freedom from pditics, even if it never
functioned as a pretext for revoluticmary tyranny, was by
no means harmless.
By 1819, in fact, the distinction between ancient and
modern liberty had become Constant's way of exposing
the dangers inherent in his own commitment to civic pri·
vatism. His initial intention may have been to describe
modern liberty as innocent: it had had no role in inspiring
the Terror. But, at the end of his 1819lecture, his theoretical instincts and a changing political scene drew him toward criticizing modern liberty precisely because of its en·
couragement of apathy. Thus, the concluding thesis of the
1819 lecture was this: "Because we are more distracted
from political liberty than [the ancients] were able to be,
and in our ordinary condition less passionate about it, it
can happen that we sometimes neglect too much, and al·
ways mistakenly, the guarantees that it ensures us."68
Constant's Cautious Renewal
of the Appeal to Antiquity
The final section of "Ancient and Modern Liberty"
comes as a surprise. After having devoted twenty dense
pages to his claim that modern peoples are exclusively at·
tuned to private independence and freedom from politics,
after having said that "nous ne pouvons plus jouir de Ia liberte des anciens," 69 and that "the liberty suitable to the
moderns is different from that which was suitable to the
ancients," 70 after all this, Constant abruptly changed his
emphasis: "So, Gentlemen, far from renouncing either of
the two types of freedom about which I have been speaking to you, we must, as I have demonstrated, learn to com·
bine the one with the other." 71
In the body of the lecture, composed in previous years
and geared to different situations, Constant made clear
that "the perpetual exercise of political rights" and "the
daily discussion of the affairs of state" offer "only trouble
and fatigue" to modern nations.72 But in the conclusion,
written in or around 1819, he wrote:
Political liberty, granted to all citizens without exception, al·
lows them to examine and study their most sacred interests,
enlarges their spirits, ennobles their thoughts and establishes
between them a sort of intellectual equality that makes up the
glory and power of a people. 73
The citizenship being praised in the concluding section of
the lecture is only a part-time affair. Nevertheless, we can·
not escape the impression that we are witnessing a dra·
matic alteration in Constanfs tone as well as a reversal in
his theoretical stance. Here, his endorsement of civic in·
volvement is unmistakable. That Constant, at the end of
his lecture, did not denigrate or repudiate political partici·
pation is obviously pertinent to the question of how anti-
56
democratic was his liberalism. But it is not easy to integrate these final pages with the earlier part of his
argument.
On closer inspection, it turns out that two distinct para·
doxes preside over the jolting conclusion of "Ancient and
Modern Liberty." First, there is an inconsistency between
Constant's pessimistic and his optimistic assessments of
popular influence on the government in a modern state.
Modern citizens are said to have no influence on their gov·
ernments. But their active participation is also described
as decisive. Second, there is a flat contradiction between
Constant's claims that: (i) in modern societies, political lib·
erty is a means, while civil liberty is the end, that is, participation is valuable only as a guarantee to ensure private security from government harassment (this distinguishes
modern from ancient participation); and (ii) active civic in·
volvement is valuable in itself; it is an opportunity for soar·
ing above petty individual concerns and furthering self.
perfection.
Viewed separately, both paradoxes seem quite baffling.
Taken together, however, each not only illuminates the
other but also helps explain the structure of the lecture's
conclusion.
Consider the contrast between the pessimistic and the
optimistic assessments of popular influence on modern
governments. Constant's pessimism here echoes Rous·
seau's remark74 that the English are free only once every
several years and solely during the few minutes it takes to
vote; otherwise they are slaves:
Among the moderns ... even in the states which are most
free, the individual, although independent in private life, is
not sovereign except in appearance. His sovereignty is restrained, almost always suspended; and if he exercises this
sovereignty at fixed but infrequent intervals, during which
time he is still surrounded by precautions and obstacles, it is
only to abdicate it75
Constant accepted Rousseau's claim that democratic selfgovernment is impossible in a large country. But he
refused to imitate Rousseau's wholesale rejection of repre·
sentative government on the British model.
Constant decided to adapt himself, without undue ag·
ony, to the new political and extrapolitical possibilities
available in a society incapable of direct democracy. From
a realistic point of view, the marginal contribution of the
average modern individual to any political outcome is
close to zero: "the individual's influence ... is lost in a
multitude of influences." 76 Hence, we should expect most
men to turn their backs on citizenship and devote them·
selves to more rewarding, creative and enjoyable forms of
conflict or cooperation. From Constant's perspective in
1819, however, there was a serious flaw in a way of think·
ing that encouraged men to channel all their energies into
private life. French history had by that time unambigu·
ously demonstrated that civic absenteeism can serve the
cause of tyrants and oppressors. What had been thrown
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�into question was the standard liberal argument that commercial life provides an effective counterweight to excessive political authority. "The progress of industry ... creates for each individual a sphere within which are
concentrated all his interests; and, if the individual looks
outside this sphere, it is only by accident." 77 But when
modern citizens become too absorbed in their private financial business and fail to keep watch over the political
scene, the ambitious few will amass uncontrollable quantities of power.78 Once this has happened, private wealth
will itself be insecure.
Constant believed that economic independence was a
precondition for political influence. Political liberty presupposed civil liberty. He also affirmed the inverse claim:
without effective political influence, economic independence and decentralization cannot be guaranteed. This
second proposition cannot be called a political argument
against capitalism, but it is an insight into the troublesome
political consequences of business-mindedness and the
spirit of commerce.
The historical experiences behind this liberal distrust of
apoliticism were manifold. Just as important to Constant
as the ultra program to limit the franchise was the atrophy
of political life under the Empire. Napoleon had encouraged a withering away of active citizenship in order to consolidate his power.79 He had initially gained popular support for his coup d'etat because many citizens were weary
of the pseudo-republican antics of the Directory. 80 Thus,
the post-revolutionary urge to escape from politics and to
delimit the political sphere had nourished an invasive dictatorship. Constant experienced the pang of enforced depoliticization in his own person when he was ejected from
the Tribunat in 1802. It is inconceivable that, having suffered this humiliation, he would have afterwards viewed
privatization as simply and exclusively a public good.
Constant's argument here might be interpreted as a
democratic rethinking of a dilemma faced earlier by
French aristocrats. In the eighteenth century, the "resurgent nobility" realized they had made a poor bargain when
they sacrificed their political power to Richelieu and Louis
XIV for the sake of cozy privileges and immunities. Without power, their new rights were insecure. 81 Private independence can only be guaranteed by political responsibility. Constant echoed this point, with one major difference.
He wished political rights distributed "to all citizens without exception." 82
To provide his argument with a form more arresting to
modern readers, Constant resorted to a financial comparison. 83 A rich man may, in order to gain time for other
activities hire a manager to handle his fiscal affairs. In
any such' arrangement there comes a point when asaving
time" will be carried too far. A manager left completely
unsupervised may defraud the owner. In the long run, delegating one's power is not necessarily an efficient way to
save time. Like businessmen, citizens must keep themselves carefully informed in order to judge whether their
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
delegated business is being handled honestly and intelligently:
The peoples who recur to the representative system in order
to enjoy the liberty that is suitable to them must exercise a
constant and active surveillance over their representatives.
They must reserve to periods which are not separated by long
intervals the right to dismiss these representatives if they
have betrayed their vows and to revoke any powers they have
abused. 84
Not so enjoyable as the first-hand despoiling, exiling, imprisoning, and executing available to the ancient citizen,
this dismissing and revoking preserved some of the responsibilities of ancient citizens within modern constitutional
government.
From an individual's viewpoint, the importance of his
own civic participation seems negligible and almost imaginary. In the aggregate, however, a participating and well
informed citizen body can certainly prevent the return of
a Napoleon or, more likely in 1819, the gradual confiscation of all political power by the ultras.
There may be no contradiction in Constant's argument.
But there is a problem. The liberal dilemma was how to
motivate individuals to participate, how to galvanize them
into civic activism, given the scant rewards each individual
might expect from time expended on political affairs: "the
danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence and in the pursuit of
our particular interests, we will renounce too easily our
right to share in political power." 85 Civic privatism is a
danger because individuals will be more impressed by the
shorter-term gains than by the longer-term dangers of
apoliticism. Rational calculation leads citizens to see that
they can personally have no "real influence" on political
events,86 and thus may inadvertently encourage them to
expose their polity to dictatorship.
Constant understood that his instrumental argument
for civic involvement (that private rights can only be guaranteed by popular power, that independence will only be
ensured by participation) was not sufficient to rouse men
from the civic sedation administered first by Napoleon
and more recently by the ultra party. Partly because of his
recognition of the insufficiency of the instrumental argument for civic involvement, Constant overturned the previously worked-out logic of his lecture (a logic reflecting his
radically different concerns of 1798) and introduced an
Aristotelian and almost romantic justification of participation. Even apart from its terrible consequences, Constant
concluded, privatism cannot satisfy individuals, even if it
might make them happy. Men could reach bonheur simply
by abandoning their strenuous ideals and sinking into passivity. But happiness was not enough:
No, Gentlemen, I call to witness this better part of our nature,
the noble restlessness that pursues and torments us, this ardor to extend our understanding and develop our faculties.
57
�Our destiny does not call us to!ha)lplness<,:\Jt:>n€,chlill' to'silfperfecbon; and political liberty• isi t!Te< trtosttpoWefhll anti<the
most energetic means of self-J:l'effecHon :'granted us ;.by
heaven. 87
;
Except for "torment" and ainquietude," this passage carefully echoes classical arguments according to which man is
a fundamentally political animal. In radical contrast to the
body of the lecture, it implies that the more time modern
citizens spend on public affairs, the more free they will
feel.
In 1798, when the distinction between ancient and
modern liberty was first elaborated, Constant was still
haunted by the experience of the Revolution and ,espeCially by the idea that political participatimrumeamhnvolvement in plots for Tevenge. He thus viewed patriotic fer·
mentation with a nervous eye. In 1819, by contrast, the
ultra threat caused Constant and his liberal allies to re·
verse their earlier position and speak warmly of "pure, pro·
found, and sincere patriotism," a sentiment capable of en·
nobling the spirits of "tous les citoyens, sans exception." 88
Not merely a means to civil liberty, political liberty was
also seen as an mtegral part of civil liberty. Constant con·
eluded by suggesting that "the greatest possible number of
citizens" must be given influence over public affairs and
admitted to important political functions. Inclusion in
such tasks will give citizens "both the desire and the capac·
ity to perform them." 89 This is the sort of thinking which
~ve!'tually led to the acceptance of universal suffrage as an
mdispensable baSlS for representative government.
The strikingly democratic conclusion to "Ancient and
Modern Liberty" remains puzzling until we understand
how the underlying logic of the argument of 1798 was
adapted to meet the demands of Restoration politics. The
lecture is a palimpsest. It is so complex because it was composed twice, the second version superimposed on the first
after an interval of twenty years. By 1819, Constant's origi·
nal fear of convulsive patriotism had had to make room for
his hope that enhanced civic participation might advance
hberal causes or at least keep the ultras in check.
Civic Privatism and its Problems
The foregoing analysis of the two layers of "Ancient and
Modern Liberty" fails to do justice to the theoretical con·
tent of the lecture. After all, it was Constant's conscious
decision to weave his new and old concerns into a single
pattern of thought. "Ancient and Modern Liberty" gains
its importance from his crucial insight that both the loss of
civic spirit and the revival of civic spirit contain a potential
for tyranny. The right to be distracted from politics is pre·
ClOUS, b!-'t it iS not harmless. 0verprivatization and overpohbCiZahon are symmetncal dangers. The pluralistic and
voluntary pattern oflife to which modern citizens have become accustomed makes us intolerant of societies in
58
which• there are no sharply-etched limits to the political.
Butc·every time we draw such boundaries;-we' seal off im<poltanliiiteasofsotiallife from respiill!iible pi'.blic surveillance and coilttol.-:NaP<?-[eon- craftily used civic privatism
to escape accountability:9° 'The' liberal boundaries of the
political are simultaneously indispensable and fraught
with risk.
This idea is not a palinode or sign of Constant's irresolute _vacillation. It is an insight into the complexity of polihcs m France after the Revolubon. Ultimately, Constant's
success at keeping such ostensibly conflicting ideas simultaneously alive is what makes his thought about •this period so fascinating.
Unusable and even dangerous as a •constructive principle, ancient liberty is helpful as a reminder oflthe central
peril of modern liberty. His sense of this periiJmlly well• be
why Constant was so careful to label participation in-sovereignty a form ofliberty in the first place. Morlll'!squieu'l'iatl
warned against confounding the sovereign 'tptl\iver'\ 6fc•a
people with its '1iberty," and de Lolme adopted thiN·:nne
distinction between freedom and power.9l
Cons_tant's decision to deviate from those who defined
liberty by contrasting it with the exercise of sovereignty
was not casual. He insisted from the start that the influence of citizens on legislation was a form of freedom. He
did not allow active political rights to stand on the sidelines
as a mere alternative to freedom. This refusal to set popular power aside may also illuminate the ending of the 1819
lecture, the apparent contradiction between the notion
that political liberty is exclusively a guarantee and the idea
that it is also a vehicle for self-perfection. By calling popular power a form of freedom, Constant prepared the way
for his conclusion: freedom from politics is not coextensive with liberty. True liberty is an "optimal mix" of public
and private, participation and nonparticipation, citizenship and mdependence, activism and distraction, cooperation and eccentricity. 92
Those who accept Isaiah Berlin's portrait of a privacyaddicted Constant cannot explain why he devoted the last
fifteen years of his life to public service. To be sure the
politics to which he gave himself unstintingly was ~ot a
town-meeting sort of communalism. It was a radical reformist activism. If it was politics with the aim of limlting
politics, it was politics nonetheless. The price of modern
liberty is eternal vigilance. Anti-utopian but reformminded participation was crucial for Constant. In the
Commentaire sur l'ouvrage de Filangieri of 1822, he was
unrelenting about the importance of political citizenship.
In explaining why England was a powerful nation despite
its absurd commercial law, he wrote:
The political institutions, the parliamentary discussions, the
liberty of the press which [England] has enjoyed without interruption for one hundred and twenty-six years have counteracted the vices of its laws and its governments. Its inhabitants maintain their energy of character because they have not
been disinherited of their participation in the administration
WINTER/SPRING
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�of public affairs. This participation, while it is almost imaginary, gives the citizens a feeling of their importance that fosters their activity.93
Spain, by contrast, reveals the dismal fate of a country
where individuals lose interest in themselves because they
are deprived of any chance to influence their own fate:
Spain's "decadence dates from the destruction of its political liberty and the suppression of the cortes."94
Participation in politics, as advocated by the later Constant, was not limited to the periodic surveillance and
controle of the legislators by the electors. It cannot be reduced to a means by which private citizens could defend
their security, goods and jouissances. 95 Constant argued
that concern for the public good was also creative of energetic characters and even national identity. For him, poli- ·
tics was an engrossing passion. He merely wanted to make
sure that it was voluntary, not obligatory. A voluntary politics of reform (based on ideals of civilized humanity) is certainly one of the central possibilities made available by
modern liberty.
We should not, however, allow Constant to give a more
glamorous portrait of the ancient component in modern
liberty than he gave of ancient liberty itself. Constant admitted that he was sometimes bored with public service,
and he never gave flattering accounts of his reasons for
persisting in office. In a revealing letter written in 1800,
when he was first appointed to the Tribunal, he distinguished sharply between happiness and self-perfection,
just as he was to do at the conclusion of "Ancient and
Modern Liberty." He had pursued a political career, he
said:
not as a pleasure-is there any such thing in life?-but as a
task, as an opportunity to fulfill a duty, which is the only thing
able to lift the burden of doubt, of memory, of unrest-the
eternal lot of our transitory nature. Those for whom pleasure
has charms, for whom novelty still exists, and who have preserved the happy faculty of enjoyment, do not need a vocation; but those who have lost their physical and moral youth
must have a distinct mission to do good in order not to sink
into discouragement and apathy. 96
Constant was only thirty-three when he wrote this letter.
Decrepitude was his society's, not his personal, plight. Victimized by an excess of civilization, modern men are incapable of bonheur. The best they can hope for is to quell
their nagging inquietude. Living in a disillusioned age,
Constant decided to call such escapism by the name of
"self-perfection." Idealizing politics was politically useful
in his battle against the ultras.
Modern Imitators of Ancient Republics
Taine, heir to the counterrevolutionary tradition, argued that the Terror was a logical consequence of Enlightenment thought.97 This conservative thesis has been so
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
widely influential that its implausible character is often
lost from sight: if eighteenth-century liberalism leads necessarily to revolutionary dictatorship and murder, then
only the illiberalism of the old regime can sustain social
freedom.
Constant had a different view. The Terror, he thought,
did not result from an excess of freedom. On the contrary,
"the evils of the Revolution stemmed precisely from the
Revolution's having suspended allliberty."98 The liberty
suspended during the Terror had little or no resemblance
to the old aristocratic freedoms which had been sharply
curtailed during the consolidation of French absolutism.
The liberty violated by the Terror was a constitutionally
regulated liberty. It included civil rights, religious tolerance, legal equality, and the political influence of the
Third Estate. Unlike Taine, in other words, Constant saw
no difficulty in criticizing the Terror with categories inherited from the Enlightenment. The 1793-1794 phase of the
Revolution was marked by intolerant fanaticism, secular
priest-craft, and a conflation of the social and the political.
The Jacobins claimed to be establishing a new republic
based on virtue; but they actually recreated a despotism
based, as Montesquieu said all despotisms were, on fear.
Constant never accused the Terrorists of an overexuberant commitment to reason and equality. Rather than
pointing an accusing finger at the Enlightenment, he focused on the revolutionary appeal to classical republican
ideals,99 an appeal that served as a pretext for oppression,
misleading the public and to some extent deluding the oppressors. In so doing he relied explicitly on an Enlightenment mistrust of political recidivism. I00
Robespierre and Saint-Just, who in the crisis of 1793 had
resurrected the Roman institution of emergency dictatorship, were the most notorious modern imitators of ancient
republics. They were not squeamish about using violence
against their real or imagined enemies:
These men thought they could exercise political power as it
had been exercised in the free states of antiquity. They believed that even today everything must yield to the collective
authority and that private morality must fall silent before the
public interest. 101
Robespierre's addiction to Plutarch and Rousseau should
not be overestimated. But his admiration for the ancients
certainly contributed to his self-image as a great moral legislator and founder of a new order.IOZ The classical tradition of civic virtue provided a language in which he could
misdescribe the Revolution and stress the paramount
need for self-sacrifice on the part of all citizens. One of
his favorite exhortations was: "evelons nos ames it Ia hauteur des vertus republicaines et des examples antiques." 103
"Sparta," he rapturously remarked, "shines like a lightning
flash in the immense darkness." 104 "! speak of public virtue," he added in yet another speech, "which worked such
wonders in Greece and Rome and must produce even
more astonishing good in republican France."IOS
59
�Characteristic of the ancient city, according to Constant, was the absence of inalienable rights.l 06 Rights were
not absolute but contingent upon service to the community. They could be legally revoked by the assembled populace.107 In search of justifications for the flagrant violations of judicial procedure involved in revolutionary
justice, the Jacobins were understandably attracted to this
ancient model for the morally impeccable revocation of
rights. Fot similar reasons, "the Spartans of the Convention"108 followed Rousseau in praising the absence of partial associations within the ancient city. Loyalty to family
or Church should never interfere with allegiante to the patrie. Robespierre could encourage the denunciation of
family members for uncivic attitudes and chide wives
whose husbands had been guillotined for harboring unpatriotic feelings. 109 Frenchmen should be exclusively political animals, at least so long as revolutionary government
was in effect. The Law of Suspects defined "treason" so
vaguely as to include boredom and indifference as crimes
against the state.llO Likewise, attendance at local assemblies and the assumption of public office was obligatory,
not voluntary. If you married a foreigner, said "monsieur"
instead of "citoyen/' or went to Church, some zealot
might accuse you of having harmed the public good.lll
This fervid assimilation of the social to the political and
the private to the public was justified by appeals to the
ancient city in which no line had been drawn between
state and society.
Citizenship, for Robespierre, had to be total: "love of
the patrie ... presupposes a preference for the public interest over all private interests." 112 But Robespierre did
not merely denounce conflicting interests. He refused to
admit the legitimacy of conflicting opinions about the
common good. He remarked that there are only two parties in the Convention, the pure and the corrupt.l13 A
crude dichotomy between base self-interest and noble virtue dominated the Robespierrist vision of political life. Patriots, he notoriously suggested, should be concerned with
virtue, not with material well-being.l 14 The same simplistic
dualism supported his near-hysterical attacks on the single
vast conspiracy of the egoistical and demon-driven aligned
against the Revolution.II5 It also underlay his project for
the reeducation of Frenchmen deformed by centuries of
superstition and oppression.l 16 Like a good Plutarchan legislator, ll7 Robespierre was less concerned about granting a
share of legislative authority to the people than with restoring their moral health: "the Legislator's first duty is to
form and preserve public morality."IIB His central aim was
to instill purity of soul into citizens by means of the Revolution: "We want an order in which all low and cruel passion shall be repressed and in which laws shall awaken all
the benevolent and generous passions."ll 9 Men can be inwardly refashioned by governmental edict. Vice can be
legislated out of existence.
For Constant, Robespierre had an absurdly exaggerated
idea of the capacity oflaw to make men morally pure. Con-
60
stant admired the American revolutionaries who were satisfied with a system in which ambition counteracted ambition. Robespierre, by contrast, aspired to create an order
"in which the only ambition is to deserve fame and serve
the country." 120 Instead of rechanneling private vice for
public benefit, he wished to eradicate vice and enthrone
virtue in its stead.
According to Constant, it was this unbelievable attempt
to "improve" men against their will and to resurrect a vir~
tue-based polity on the ancient model that produced the
most gruesome atrocities of the Terror: "The partisans of
ancient liberty became furious when modern individuals
did not wish to be free according to their method. They
redoubled the torments, the people redoubled its resistance, and crimes followed upon errors." 121 The gravest error of the Jacobins was not to have adapted themselves to
the general spirit 122 of the age:
When punishments that reason reserves for great crimes are
applied to actions that some members of society consider a
duty, and that the most honest of the contrary party regard as
indifferent or excusable, the legislator is obliged, in order to
sustain his first iniquity, to multiply indefinitely secondary
wrongs. In order to have a single tyrannical law executed, he
must compile an entire code of proscriptions and blood.123
Robespierre was simply out of touch with the realities of
modern France.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the most common complaint against the old regime was that it was a
holdover from a bygone age. At mid-century, the word
"revolution" had already begun to change its meaning
from going back to going forward. 124 As the Revolution got
underway, the attack on the old regime was conducted less
in the name of an ancient constitution and more in the
name of a desirable future. In this context, it was a skillful
coup de theatre to stamp the most progressive party with
the epithet "anachronism." Indeed, Constant's diagnosis
of the Revolution was part of his strategy of tarring the two
extremes of French politics with the same brush, and thus
of staking out a broad middle position for himself and his
allies. It also allowed him to attack the Terror without
abandoning the liberalism of the philosophes.
The Psychology of Revolution
Constant's most penetrating insight into the leaders of
the French Revolution was that their Rousseauism went
deeper than it first seemed. Rousseau admired Sparta but
was pessimistic about the chances for reviving ancient frugality and virtue in a corrupt modern world. Robespierre is
sometimes depicted as an optimist who tried to do what
Rousseau had declared impossible. But in fact Rousseauist
pessimism permeated the speeches of Robespierre from
1792 until his execution in 1794. 125 His last speech conWlNTER/SPRJNG
1983
�eluded with a typical suggestion that the Republic of Virtue is too good for this world: "The time has not yet come
when men of good will can serve their country unmolested."126 This half-admission that his own goals were impossible to achieve is the most Rousseauist element in
Robespierre's writings. Such a half-consciously perceived
discrepancy between extravagant goals and modest historical possibilities is what Constant had in mind in this sardonic commentary:
Nothing is stranger to observe than the speeches of the
French demagogues. Saint~Just 1 the cleverest among them,
composed all his speeches in short, compact sentences,
meant to jolt awake worn~out minds. Thus, while he appeared
to believe the nation capable of making the most agonizing
sacrifices, he recognized by his very style that it was incapable
even of paying attention.l27
In diagnosing the Revolution, Constant regularly returned
to this dedoublement revolutionnaire. Saint-Just's audience
was not asleep; it was frazzled and distracted. It suffered
from l'arriere pensee and other signs of excessive civilization which Constant later explored in his novel, Adolphe
(1816). Recall this warning of Adolphe: "woe to the man
who in the arms of the mistress he has just possessed, conserves a fatal prescience and foresees that he can abandon
her."l28 Adolphe's torment stemmed partly from his inability to throw himself into any action with complete
abandon. His painful lack of illusions was startlingly mirrored in a psychological portrait Constant painted of the
revolutionary crowd. Although modern individuals can become enthused about certain abstract ideas, they are unfitted for feeling enthusiasm toward particular men.
Adolphe and the French people share "une deplorable
prevoyance'':
The French Revolution was most remarkable in this respect.
Whatever has been said about the inconstancy of the people
in ancient republics, nothing equals the mobility we have wit-
nessed. If, during the outbreak of even the best-prepared upheaval, you watch carefully the obscure ranks of the blind and
subjugated populace, you will see that the people (even as it
follows its leaders) casts its glance ahead to the moment when
these leaders will fall. And you will discern within its artificial
exaltation, a strange combination of analysis and mockery.
The people will seem to mistrust their own convictions. They
will try to delude themselves by their own acclamations and
to reinvigorate themselves by jaunty raillery. They foresee! so
to speak, the moment when the glamor of it all will pass. 29
Constant attributed the savagery and violence of the Revolution to just this lack of conviction, to just this mobility:
"Insurrections among the ancients were much more sin-
cere than among ourselves."ll0 Bloodshed was a tactic
used by eviscerated men to compensate for a deficit of
powerful passions:
An artificial and contrived insurrection requires, apart from
the violence of the insurrection itself, the extra violence
TilE ST. JOHNS REVJEW
needed to set it in motion . ... During the Revolution, I saw
men organizing sham insurrections who proposed massacres
in order-as they put it-to give events a popular and national air.l 31
Void of conviction, but unable to tolerate a rudderless
state of mind, modern men become "pretendus republicains,"ll2 pseudo-zealots more odious and frenzied than
authentic zealots. Their hypocrisy was repellent:
Great sacrifices, acts of devotion, victories won by patriotism
over natural affections in Greece and Rome served among us
as pretexts for the most unbridled outbursts of individual passions. Noble examples were parodied in a miserable fashion.
Because, in earlier times, inexorable but just fathers had condemned their criminal children, modern imitators put their
own quite innocent enemies to death.133
Constant's general understanding of modern European
societies influenced and was influenced by his analysis of
the Revolution. Although he considered the Revolution
an episode in the moral advance toward legal equality, he
never neglected its chilling cruelty. And while he focused
intently on modern misuses of communitarian rhetoric, he
never denied the genuinely progressive outcome of the
Revolution. He thought that the disaster of the Jacobin experiment at legislating public morality revealed the utter
futility of trying to reverse. the course of social change.
The morals and manners of a skeptical, secular, and commercial society leave much to be desired. Legislative command cannot, however, recreate otiose forms of civic vir-
tue and communal belonging.
Because Constant wished to counter Rousseau's pernicious influence on the revolutionary generation and to deromanticize the classical city, he often emphasized the
brutal features of ancient liberty. Despite this tendency,
he was careful to say that the Greeks and the Romans provided the most stunning examples in human history of political freedom. Ancient republicanism, while harsh, was
not despotic. It is only in modern society that ancient freedom becomes a ploy for justifying oppression.l 34 Because
there were no significant boundaries of the political in the
ancient city, total citizenship was not experienced as a violation of the individual or as a restriction on his chances in
life. During the Revolution, by contrast, the ludicrous demand for certificats de civisme revealed how threatened authorities felt by the lukewarm commitment of citizens to
civic life.m Political absenteeism was perceived as treason, as an illicit evasion of the molding-power of a self.
appointed Legislative elite. The pluralism of modern society, including the "line" between state and society, first
made the ideal of ancient liberty into a possible pretext for
political tyranny.
1. "De la liberte des anciens comparee a celle des modemes," delivered
at the Paris Atheneum in 1819 and reprinted in Cours de politique consti·
tutionelle ou collection des ouvrages publies sur le gouvernement represen-
61
�tatif, edited by Eduoard Laboulaye, Paris 1872, val. 2, 539-560. Besides
this lecture, the basic texts in which Constant discusses the distinction
between ancient and modem liberty are Chilpters 6 through 8 of De
!'usurpation of 1814, reprinted in Cours de politique, val. 2, 204-217, and,
most important of all, Book 16 of the recently published manuscript, originally composed between 1802 and 1804, Les "Principes de politique" de
Benjamin Constant, edited by Etienne Hofmann, Geneva 1980, 419-45 5.
This early sketch of Constant's argument is itself a rewritten and expanded version of Chapter 3 of Mme de Stael's Des circonsfunces actuelles qui peuvent terminer la revolution, Geneva 1979, 106-112, a work
written around 1798, but left unpublished until the twentieth century.
We know that Constant actively collaborated on this manuscript. He was
certainly involved with the initial conception of the chapter in question
and can probably be considered its co-author. The actual degree of Constant's collaboration on Circonstances actuelles, however, will always remain a matter of dispute. Since Constant took whole sentences from the
book and simply transplanted them unrevised into his own published
works, we can assume he felt a proprietary attitude toward the manuscript of 1798. The relevant chapter also has a kind of Constantian ring
discordant with de Stael's ordinary tone. But there is room for legitimate
disagreement on this question. The answer to it is also of limited impor·
tance.
2. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress, New Yark 1932, 78-97; Antoine Adam,
Grandeur and Illusion. French Literature and Society 1600-1715, New
York 1972, 142-164.
3. See Thomas Hobbes's dismissal of ancient liberty, Leviathan, Part
Two, ch. 21, Oxford 1965, 165; and David Hume, "Of the Populousness
of Ancient Nations," Essays. Moral, Political and Literary, Oxford 1963,
381-451. Cf. also Alexander Hamilton: "The industrious habits of the
people of the present day, absorbed in the pursuits of gain and devoted to
the improvements of agriculture and commerce, are incompatible with
the condition of a nation of soldiers, which was the true condition of the
people of those [ancient] republics." The Federalist Papers, New York
1961,69.
4. Compare the virtue-based ancient republic (discussed in Books IIVIII of De l'esprit des lois) with the English mixed regime (discussed
chiefly in Books XI and XII).
5. Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois, in Oeuvres completes, Paris 1951,
val. 2, 431 (Xll, 2).
6. Montesquieu, Esprit, 396 (XI, 5) and 354 (Vlll, 6).
7. Montesquieu, Esprit, 397 (XI, 6).
8. Montesquieu, Causes de la Grandeur des Romains, in Oeuvres completes, 119.
9. Montesquieu, Esprit, 363 (Vlll, 16).
10. Montesquieu, Esprit, 272 (1V, 8).
11. Montesquieu, Esprit, 269 (IV, 6).
12. Montesquieu, Esprit, 273 (1V, 8).
13. Montesquieu, Esprit, 252 (III, 3): "Les politiques grecs, qui vivoient
dans le gouvernement populaire, ne reconnoissient d'autre force qui pUt
les soutenir que celle de la vertu."
14. Montesquieu, Esprit, 303 (V, 19).
15. Max Weber, The City, New York 1958,220.
16. Montesquieu, Esprit, 274 (V, 2).
17. Montesquieu, Esprit, 362 (VIll, 16).
18. Montesquieu, Esprit, 252 (III, 3).
19. Montesquieu's definition of freedom as personal security (with no
reference to self-government or the satisfactions afforded participants in
a common endeavor) was echoed in Jaucourt's article on political liberty
in the Encyclopedie: "La liberte politique du citoyen est cette tranquillite
d'esprit que procede de I' opinion que chacun a de sa sfirete, & pour
qu'on ait cette sfirete, il faut que le gouvernement soit tel, qu'un citoyen
ne puisse pas craindre un citoyen." Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire
raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers, val. 9, Neufchastel1765, 472.
20. Jean-Louis de Lolme, The Constitution of England, London 1807,
246.
21. Joseph Priestly, An Essay on the First Principles of Government and of
the Nature of Political, Civil and Religious Liberty, London 1768, 12-13,
62
54; Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, London
1767, 92; Jean-Charles-Leonard Sismondi, Histoire des republiques italiennes du moyen-age, Paris 1809, val. 4, 369-370. These texts are all cited
in Guy Dodge, Benjamin Constant's Philosophy of Liberalism, Chapel
Hill1980, 43-44.
22. Cours de Politique, vol. 2, 539.
23. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 547.
24. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 547.
25. Les "Principes de politique" de Benjamin Constant, 432.
26. Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Four Essays on Liberty,
Oxford 1969, 118-172.
27. Some radically ascetic "noes" may not entail any "yeses," but this is
not the case with modem liberty.
28. "Principes de politique," 421-424.
29. Cours de Politique, val. 2, 556-557.
30. For this point I am indebted to Larry Siedentop, "Two Liberal Traditions" (in The Idea of Freedom, edited by Alan Ryan, Oxford 1979, 153174), though his contrast between French and British liberalism is uncon·
vincing because it requires the expulsion of Adam Smith from the British
tradition.
31. Cours de politique, val. 2, 213-217.
32. Constantin Franyois de Volney, Lecons d'histoire, in Oeuvres com·
pletes, Paris 1846, 592.
33. Robert L. Herbert, David, Brutus, Voltaire and the French Revolution, New York 1972.
34. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 217.
35. Constant's analysis of the masks worn by "modem imitators of ancient republics" was echoed thirty-five years later in Karl Marx's discussion of the role played by Roman costumes and Roman phrases in the
great French Revolution. (Karl Marx, ''Der achtzehnte Brumaire de
Louis Bonaparte," Marx-Engels Werke, Berlin 1978, val. 8, 116.) Curiously
enough, in the very same passage where Marx tacitly repeated Constant,
he explicitly said that Constant was another bourgeois propagandist unaware that "ghosts from the days of Rome'' had watched over the demoli·
tion of feudalism in France. Marx's principal point, in any case, was that
history had instructed the French Revolutionaries to create bourgeois society, and that they had to drug themselves to the banality of their task.
They mouthed public-spirited slogans and struck patriotic poses borrowed from ancient citizens. Marx went on to predict that the proletarian
revolution would be quite different. It would be truly heroic, neither re·
quiring nor admitting any form of self-deception. Unlike Marx, Constant
did not believe the emergence of revolutionary cults of antiquity could
be traced to the cunning of reason. He thought that the Jacobin fixation
on classical virtue was a contingent fact: it was caused by the classical
education of middle class French elites and especially by the paucity of
alternative languages available for attacking royalism and religious orthodoxy.
36. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 548-549.
37. "Principes de politique," 420.
38. Cf. Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens. A Study of Rousseau's Social
Theory, Cambridge 1969.
39. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 555.
40. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 559-560.
41. The ultraroyalists or extreme reactionary party already began to
make fierce recriminations against Louis XVIII for his concessions to
constitutional government in 1814. They were Constant's principal adversaries for the last fifteen years of his life.
42. Cf. George Sabine, "Two Democratic Traditions," Philosophical Re·
view, 61, October 1952,451-474.
43. Mme de Stael, Circonstances actuelles, 106.
44. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 106.
45. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 106.
46. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, l 07.
47. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 107.
48. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 107.
49. Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 108.
50. Mme de Stael, Circonstances. 109.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 110.
Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 111.
Mme de Stael. Circonstances, 111.
Mme de Stael, Circonstances, 111.
John Plamenatz, The Revolutionary Movement in France 1815-71,
London 1952, 21-22.
56. Cours de politique, val.
57. Cours de politique, val.
58. Cours de politique, val.
59. Cours de politique, val.
2, 540.
2, 540.
2, 540.
2, 540.
60. The new constitution of 1814, regally "granted" to the nation by
Louis XVIII, retained the Civil Code, and recognized legal equality, religious toleration, and the right of purchasers of "national lands" to keep
their property. To understand the liberal-ultra battles of the Restoration,
it is important to note that the Charter was a blatantly ambiguous document which, for instance, did not make clear how power was to be apportioned between the king and the Chambers. Guillaume de Bertier de
Sauvigny, The Bourbon Restoration, Philadelphia 1966,65-72.
61. Cours de politique, val. 2, 554.
62. Cours de politique, val. 2, 542.
63. Cours de politique, val. 2, 542.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 553.
Reprinted in Cours de politique, val. 2, 53-69.
Cours de politique, vol. I, 17, 180.
Cours de politique, val. l, 173.
Cours de politique, val. 2, 556.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 547.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 556; see also 557.
Cours de politique, val. 2, 560.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 545-546.
Cours de politique, vol. 2, 559.
Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, edited by Bernard Gagne bin et Marcel
Raymond, Paris 1964, vol. 3, 430.
75. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 542.
76. Cours de politique, val. 2, 553.
77. Benjamin Constant, Commentaire sur l'ouvrage cfe Fi[angieri, Paris
1824, vol. 2, 182-183.
78. Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests. Political Argu, ments for Capitalism before its Triumph, Princeton 1977, 123-124.
79. Louis Bergeron, France under Napoleon, Princeton 1981,87.
80. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 552.
81. Franklin Ford, Robe and Sword. The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy after Louis XN, New York 1965, 19.
82. Cours de politique, val. 2, 559.
83. Cours de politique, val. 2, 558.
84. Cours de politique, val. 2, 558.
85. Cours de politique, val. 2, 558.
86. Cours de politique, val. 2, 547.
87. Cours de politique, val. 2, 559.
88. Cours de politique, val. 2, 559.
89. Cours de politique, val. 2, 560.
90. In the manuscripts of 1802-1804, written under the shadow of Napoleon, we find: "lorsqu'il n'y a dans un pays libre ni liberte de la presse, ni
droits politiques,le peuple se detache entierement des affaires publiques.
Toute communication est rompue entre les gouvernants et le gouvernes.
L'autorite, pendant quelque temps, et les partisans de l'autorite peuvent
regarder cela comme un avantage. Le gouvernement ne rencontre point
des obstacles. Rien ne le contrarie. II agit librement mais c'est que lui seul
est vivant et que la nation est morte." Les "Principes de politique" de Ben·
jamin Constant, 137. The liberal constitutionalism Constant advocated
was obviously not intended to detach citizens entirely from public affairs.
91. Jean-Louis de Lolme, The Constitution of England, London 1807,
245. Referring specifically to the French revolutionaries and their followers, Edmund Burke employed a similar distinction: he wrote that "the
right of the people is almost always confounded with their power." Reflections on the Revolution in France, London 1969, 153.
92. Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, Cambridge, Mass. 1970,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
30-43. Constant, however, was thinking of "interdependence" rather
than a mere "mixture."
93. Commentaire, Paris 1822, vol. 1, 73.
94. Commentaire, vol. 1, 72.
95. According to Isaiah Berlin, Constant defended democratic selfgovernment "only for the reason ... that without it negative liberty may
be too easily crushed." Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford 1969, xlvii.
96. Letter to Mme de Nassau, 20 January 1800, cited and translated by
Elizabeth Schermerhorn, Benjamin Constant, New York 1970, 183.
97. Hippolyte Taine, The Ancient Regime, New York 1876.
98. Melanges de litterature et de politique, Brussels 1829, vol. 1, 68.
99. As Gay and others have stressed, the appeal to antiquity was only one
aspect of the Enlightenment tradition; and it was counterbalanced by a
belief that, in many domains, the moderns had outstripped the ancients.
100. In his essay "Of Refinement in the Arts," Hume wrote: "To declaim against present times, and magnify the virtue of remote ancestors,
is a propensity almost inherent in the human mind." Essays, Oxford
1963, 285.
101. "Principes de politique," 438.
102. "During a conversation in which [Robespierre] attacked the representative system, it is reported that, asked what he would put in its place,
he replied, 'Celui de Lycurge.' " Alfred Cobban, "The_ Political Ideas of
Robespierre during the Convention," Aspects of the French Revolution,
New York 1968, 186; consider also R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Demo·
cratic Revolution, Princeton 1964, val. 2, 124.
103. Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, edited by Laponneraye, New
York 1970, vol. 3, 518.
104. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 608; but also see vol. 3, 194, where Ro·
bespierre notes of Sparta that "this nation of austere republicans has
nothing in common with a nation of 25 million men." Robespierre was
flexible enough that, in order to attack the sectionnaires and the Commune, he often reversed himself and denounced urban self-government
on the ancient model.
105. Robespierre, Oeuvres, 3, 544.
106. This thesis has found a subtle defender in Michel Villey, Leqons
d'histoire de Ia philosophie du droit, Paris 1962, 221-250.
107. According to Moses Finley, "Classical Greeks and Republican Romans possessed a considerable measure of freedom, in speech, in political debate, in their business activities, even in religion. However, they
lacked, and would have been appalled by, inalienable rights. There were
no theoretical limits to the power of the state, no activity, no sphere of
human behavior in which the state could not legitimately intervene provided the decision was properly taken for any reason that was held to be
valid by a legitimate authority." The Ancient Economy, London 1973,
154-155.
108. Melanges de litterature et de politique, vol. 1, 68.
109. Norman Hampson, The Social History of the French Revolution, To·
ronto 1965, 223.
110. "Suspicion was directed not only towards probable authors of acts
already committed, on grounds of definite circumstances susceptible of
discussion and of proof, but also towards the possible perpetrators of
eventual crimes, who were believed capable of them because of their
opinions or even their real or simulated indifference." George Lefebvre,
The French Revolution, London 1968, vol. 2, 118.
111. Fran~ois Furet and Denis Richet, The French Revolution, New
York 1970, 188-189.
112. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 514.
113. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 698 and 612.
114. Norman Hampson, The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre, London 1974, 139 and 173.
115. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 551.
116. On the execution of Louis XVI as an attempt to furnish a republican re-education for the miseducated French nation, see Michael
Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, Cambridge 1974, 1-89.
117. According to Plutarch, Lycurgus "bred up his citizens in such a way
that they neither would nor could live by themselves; they were to make
themselves one with the public good, and, clustering like bees around
63
�their commander, be by their zeal and public spirit carried all but out of
themselves, and devoted wholly to their country." The Lives of the Noble
Grecians and Romans, New York n.d., 69. ·
118. Robespierre, Oeuvres, voL 1, 156.
119. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 541.
120. Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 541.
121. Cours de politique, vol. 2, 213.
122. For Montesquieu's idea of the "general spirit" of a country or age,
see De l'esprit des lois, Book XIX, chapters four and five.
123. Des Suites de Ia contre-revolution de 1660 en Angleterre, 56-57.
124. Consider the two uses of the word "revolution" at the beginning of
Turgot's "A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind," On Progress, Sociology and Economics, edited by R. L. Meek,
Cambridge 1973,41-42. See also Felix Gilbert, "Revolution," Dictionary
of the History of Ideas, New York 1973, vol. 4, 152-163.
125.
126.
127.
128.
129.
130.
131.
132.
Hampson, The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre, 13 3-134.
Robespierre, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 736.
Les "Principes de politique" de Benjamin Constant, 432.
Adolphe in Oeuvres, edited by Alfred Roulin, Paris, 1964, 32.
"Principes de politique," 434.
"Principes de politique," 620.
"Principes de politique," 620.
"Principes de politique," 86.
133. "Principes de politique," 438.
134. This caveat distinguishes Constant's position from the views ad·
vanced by Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 vols., Princeton
1966.
135. M. J. Sydenham, The French Revolution, New York 1966, p. 178;
Hampson, The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre, 198.
SIXTEEN EIGHTEEN
'Why do these gentlemen wish to throw me out
Of the window?' asked an obscure Bohemian secretary
Before he was unexpectedly exfenestrated and miraculously saved
By a pile of castleyard rubbish or an angel of God.
Thus he was flung into History, and with his fall
Introduced three decades of winter, delusion and warThe occasional Adam, perplexed and resurrected, to remind us
That the innocent often are incidentally in castles.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
64
WIN1ER/SPRING 1983
�Mark Aldanov
The Holdup at Tiflis on June 26, 1907:
the ''Exes ''
from The Suicides
translated by Joel Carmichael
The following section comes from Mark Aldanov's last novel,
The Suicides, that appeared in Russian in Western Europe in 1958
after his death in 1957-but has never been published in English.
Bom in 1886 in Kiev, Mark Alexandrovich Landau (Aldanov was
his pen name) won prizes in secondary school for his accomplish~
ments in Greek and Latin. By 1910 he had earned degrees in law
and natural sciences from the University of Kiev and published a
monograph in organic chemistry. Untill917 he lived in St. Petersburg. In some sense the Bolshevik seizure of power in October
made him into an artist and a Russian: he began to write journalism and then novels after he left Russia forever in March 1919. He
wrote first of all in the Russian language press abroad for the more
than two million Russians in exile by 1922. But his novels and
essays also won a wide audience in Europe except the Soviet Union
and the United States. Throughout much of his life he continued
his scientific work. In exile he lived mostly in France but also in
Berlin for a few years and during the Second World War in New
York. He was, he used to say, the only Russian writer abroad who
managed to live from his pen-with difficulty. The following novels of Aldanov have appeared in English: The Ninth Thermidor
(1923); The Devil's Bridge (1925); Saint Helena, Little Island;
The Escape (1932); For Thee the Best (1940); Before the Deluge
(1950); To Live as We Wish (1952); Nightmare and Dawn (1957),
For Aldanov see C. Nicholas Lee, The Novels of Mark Alexandrovich Aldanov, The Hague, Mouton 1968; "Mark Aldanov: Russia, Jewry, and the World," Midstream, March 1981, 41-46.
The Suicides begins with the Social Democratic Congress in
Joel Carmichael translated the memoirs ofN. N. Sukhanov (The Russian
Revolution 1917, Oxford 1952), the only full-length eyewitness account
of the February and October events in Russia in 1917. His essay, "The
Lost Continent, the Conundrum of Christian Origins," appeared in the
Autumn-Winter 1982-83 issue of the St. John's Review.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Brussels in 1903 and ends in 1923. In the manner of Tolstoy (on
whom Aldanov had published a critical work in 1915), itportrays
historical personages as well as private individuals. There are accurate, carefully researched portraits of Mussolini, Wilhelm II, Franz
Joseph, Witte, Lenin, Stalin. The most brilliant is perhaps of Witte.
The portrait of Lenin is superior to its only rival, Solzhenitsyn's in
Lenin in Zurich-in part because Aldanov unlike Solzhenitsyn
knew many men who had known Lenin. Here is one of many characterizations of Lenin:
His favourites of not long before, Zinoviev and Kamenev, were
holding things up. They did not want an uprising. Lenin began
to hate them ferociously. Not, to be sure, for long. In complete
contrast to Stalin he was never rancorous, and was always ready
to come to a friendly accord with any of the people whom he
referred to and considered "scoundrels" and "sons-of-bitches,"
as long as they submitted to him completely. Robespierre could
not talk for two minutes without saying something about ''vertu."
Lenin would never even have pronounced the word, not only
because the world had undergone a c lumge in literary sty I.e. He
simply did not understand just that "virtue" was, and what its
point was if it existed. Surely, it was impossible to make a revolution without scoundrels?
A meditation, born of decades of recollection, study and reflection, on the Europe that was to destroy itself in the First World
War, The Suicides contains many stunning historical judgements-iudgements of simplicity and depth rarely found in academic historians. Aldanov understood the interrelation of events
throughout Europe because he had an uncanny sense-that betrayed itself in the resiliency of his narrative-of the relation of
public events to private lives, especially to private bafflement, incapacity and self-ignorance.
65
�Here is one of many remarks on the outbreak of the First World
War:
According to all profound sociological :theories the assassination
of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand was only the occasion of the
World War. The real causes were quite different: "Anglo-German economic rivalry," "struggle for markets," "internal contradictions of the capitalist order," etc. But the reading of the
simple-minded correspondence of the contemporary statesmen
thrusts another conclusion forward: The assassination in Sarajevo was not an occasion, it was just this that launched the catastrophe. They never wrote or spoke about "the struggle for
markets" or about "the internal contradictions of the capitalist
order" and they had never heard about them. It may well be they
were not even acquainted with the words.
The following section tells the story of perhaps the most famous
Bolshevik holdup. It also represents a turning point in the life of
one of the main characters in the novel, Jambul, who after the robbery leaves the terrorists forever to return to the land and the religion of his fathers in Turkey.
Dzhugashvili is the name Stalin bore at his birth, Koba his nickname. Krupskaya was Lenin's wife. L. R
The Tillis terrorists usually assembled in the same restaurant, the Tilipuchuri. This had nothing to do with conspiracy; they knew that the local police were very inefficient, and would not be too zealous in arresting them. At
that time a policeman's trade, especially in the Caucasus,
was just as daD.gerous as a terrorist's.
The Caucasian Deputy Police Commissioner, Count
Vorontsov-Dashkov, was a man of liberal views. He was
fond of the Caucasians, as all Russians have been, with a
slight touch of benevolent disdain for the Caucasian
accent. In his youth he himself had fought against the
mountaineers for three years, and recalled that there was
never the slightest hostility to them in the army at the time
and that in Russian literature, from Pushkin and Lermontov to Tolstoy, there was scarcely a single unsympathetic
Caucasian. The war had long since been over, but in a confused and almost unconscious way the Commissioner re-
garded the terrorists of the Twentieth Century as a somewhat inferior repetition of Shamil's mountaineers.*
He did not, of course, consort with the terrorists, but he
attempted to maintain human relations somehow with the
leaders of moderate Socialism. They sometimes made private pacts which, however, instantly became public. For
instance, when the Armenians and the Tatars fell out, he
handed the Social-Democratic Party five hundred rifles in
order to arm the working-class guards who were maintaining order, on the word of honor of the Menshevik,
Ramishvili, that the rifles would be returned to the author-
*For Shamil's mountaineers see Leo Tolstoy's short story, A Prisoner in
the Caucasus (1872). L.R.
66
ities as soon as the emergency was over. Before the expected arrival of the Tsar in the Caucasus, he secured the
revolutionaries' word of honor that no attempts at assassination would be made. He did not think such an agreement completely assured the Tsar's safety, but in the
Caucasus, in his opinion, it was a better guarantee than
any police measures. Vorontzov-Dashkov was opposed to
execution; he thought that no matter what you did you
couldn't frighten a Chechen or Ingush with the gallows. In
addition he had almost become a fatalist after the assassination of Alexander II-you can't escape fate.
He had been a favorite of three Tsars. Hence the Government disliked him intensely. The Count's ancient
name, however, his enormous wealth, his independence as
a man who needed no one, even his seignorial appearance
and his manner of talking to everyone in the same way,
and most of all his personal intimacy with the Tsar made
the Government wary. It interfered as little as possible
with his administrative methods in the Caucasus. The
Commissioner's views may have been reflected a little
even in the activities of the police. But even out of simple
caution police agents tried to avoid looking into places like
the Tilipuchuri restaurant unless it was absolutely unavoidable. Everyone in the Caucasus carried cold steel, a
great many were revolutionists, and there were more than
a few primitive bombs being made. "Absolutely every
child is capable of taking a sardine-tin and some drugstore
articles and making a shell that's fit to blow up his nursemaid-," wrote a contemporary.
It is likely that even at that time the Police Department
knew that the "expropriations" were being conducted
from afar by Lenin himself. It may also have known that
for this purpose the Central Committee of the Party had
formed a small, still more central committee, which was so
secret that for a long time the most eminent Social-Democrats never even knew of its existence.
There were only two men on this committee besides
Lenin: Krasin, alias Nikitich, alias Winter, alias-for some
reason-the Horse, and Bogdanov, who had half a dozen
pseudonyms: Maximov, Verner, Rakhmetov, Sysoika,
Reinert, Ryadovey. The members of the Police Department were not particularly interested in the spiritual qualities of the revolutionaries: "They're all swine!" (Some
might have added "including ourselves"). But it was just
these two Bolsheviks whom it was difficult to suspect of
terrorism: one was busy either with philosophy, science, or
heaven knows what; the other was a prominent engineer
who had amassed some money in business and was by no
means a "horse" but an extremely able and skilful activist.
But the people they had assigned as deputies in immediate
charge of terroristic activities in the Caucasus were known
to the police-Koba or Dzhugashvili, and Kamo.
There were fables and anecdotes about Kamo in the
Caucasus. But not even the revolutionists knew much
about Dzhugashvili. They spoke about him even less. Incomprehensibly this man, who was passionately in love
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�with self-advertisement, which he later devoted himself to
with a success unheard of in history, in his youth told almost nothing about himself even to his close comrades:
doubtless he suspected them all of being provocateurs. For
still far more incomprehensible reasons he almost never
spoke about his doings in the Caucasus even later on,
when he could have without the slightest danger.
It was already dusk when )ambul hurried to the restaurant. He glanced into the open window. No guards were
there. Where can they be today? he wondered. He knew
that no one should stay home alone that night-unless
Koba, perhaps-he has no nerves at all, thought )ambul.
He walked on further. After convincing himself that
there were no suspicious-looking people about, he turned
back. Time to eat, he thought, I haven't had a thing since
morning.
Early that morning, after taking the best horse out of the
stable, he had ridden far out of the city and had practiced
with his revolver in a secluded spot in the woods. Even
years earlier he had been able to hit a hull's eye at fifteen
paces. He had stuck a sheet of paper about three times as
large as a playing card on to a tree and missed it twice in a
row. This annoyed him very much, though not much accuracy was needed for the business on the following day.
Lack of sleep, of course! he thought angrily. But what
about it, I don't think it's the first time I've gone into a
dangerous business. Before I used to sleep perfectly well.
He took himself in hand and began shooting better. Before
his last shot he made a bet with himself; if I miss it means
we'll have a fiasco. He had made bets with himself at home
too, with both cards and coins: he got different results, but
even without the cards one thing was clear: whatever happened it was already impossible to withdraw. It would have
meant dishonoring oneself.
Sometimes it seemed to him that he should actually
make bets about something else too: was the whole thing
necessary? He had had doubts for a long time, and they had
recently been growing stronger and stronger. Occasionally
he even asked himself whether they weren't to be explained by his fear of death. His friends said he was absolutely fearless-he simply didn't understand what fear
was. Such remarks got back to him and pleased him. Nevertheless, he thought them exaggerated: people who had
never been afraid didn't exist. Sokolov and Kamo are
braver than anyone I've ever seen, but they must have
been afraid, too.
At last he hit the sheet of paper, actually right in the
center, and he stopped practicing. He had taken along only
one reserve box of bullets, and it was bad luck to take thirteen shots before an action. Seven hits out of twelve, he
thought, not bad, but before I would have done better.
Before, whenever he came to the Caucasus, even from
Paris, he always became lively and merry. Now it was difTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ferent. His usual gaiety had almost left him. He was serious-minded, somewhat solemn. Yes, it's quite possible I'll
be killed. Well, so I'll be killed, there'll just be one )ambul
less, that's all ... I thought the time had gone by when I
would draw up a balance-sheet of my life before a dangerous action; it seems it hasn't quite, he said to himself. He
thought about his aging father: how would this make him
feel?
He thought about Lyuda too, sometimes. He had pleasant memories of her. He didn't know just what she was
doing. At their parting in Petersburg she hadn't asked him
to write (she had simply forgotten). This hurt him. Nevertheless, he sent her a letter from Tiflis. To avoid causing
her any trouble he sent it without a signature, in an assumed handwriting, and without any indication of a return address. There could be no reply. But she probably
wouldn't have answered anyhow, out of pride, he thought.
He didn't write again. It must have been for the first time
since he was fourteen years old that a woman was on his
mind. In general he thought about women very seldom.
The restaurant was empty and stifling, with a smell of
fried onions and freshly ground coffee, each a smell he
liked. Kamo sat at the end of the room. He had evidently
just arrived. There was nothing to eat or drink on the little
table in front of him. He's got himself all dressed up, the
jackass! thought )ambul. The cutthroat was wearing a
dark-red Circassian tunic, a white silk Caucasian coat, and
Moroccan soft-soled boots; the scabbards of the sabre and
the dagger were thickly adorned with turquoise, silver, and
ivory. A white Caucasian fur-cap was laying on the chair.
Thank God he hasn't put on a felt cloak and hood, in June!
)ambul thought. Can he have the bombs on him, too? No,
for the time being Koba's taken the bombs away from
them. Koba may be anything you like, he's not a fool!
After glancing around once more quickly, almost imperceptibly, he greeted Kamo, and sat down opposite him at
the little table.
"Look here, don't sit that way with your back to the wall.
How will you fight if the cops jump in?" asked Kamo. His
Russian sounded almost like a caricature of the Caucasian
accent used for jokes. There was no other language they
had in common. Both spoke Tatar badly.
"Why should we sit side by side at such a small table? If
the cops come in please inform me."
"When should I inform you? A cop runs quickly. Lose
half a second, you're through. Impossible to lose half a second," said Kama, who never understood jokes.
"All right then, I'll know soon enough. There's a backentrance behind you. A cop likes to run through backentrances, too. Hadn't you guessed?"
HNo/' admitted Kama, astonished.
Jambullooked at him, as always, with tender curiosity. It
was only with him that he spoke jocularly now. He knew of
his exploits, which usually succeeded, and he couldn't understand why or how they had succeeded. He doesn't even
understand what a conspiracy is! Jambul thought. He obvi-
67
�ously only has instincts instead of a mind, like a wolf or
1
tiger.
Jambul knew a great many terrorists. He considered So·
kolov the most remarkable of them', and was a little sorry
the executed man hadn't been a Caucasian. The affair in
Tiflis was going to be the work of Caucasians only. All of
them reckless and foolhardy. All of them much cleverer
than Kamo, thought Jambul. Nevertheless he's going to
have the chief role, maybe that's right after all.
"Have you had any vodka?"
uNo."
"Will you have some with me? It may be the last one
we'll have."
"Are both of them watching out for the cashier?"
"Both of them are watching out for the cashier."
"Who's going to be carrying the money?"
"Two will carry money. The cashier and the accountant."
"Are they young? Family men?"
"I don't know."
~~what
are their names?"
"The cashier is Kurdyumov. The accountant is Golov·
nya."
11
ls there lots of money?"
"Annette Sulakhvelidze says-a million. Patsiya
Galdava says three hundred thousand."
"Old wives' tales! Are they going in a carriage?"
"Maybe," said Kamo indifferently. "I'll drink one glass,
no more, before tomorrow morning. I'll drink milk. I won't
drink wine."
"Why not? Did Koba give you orders? Lenin himself
drinks a little. They say he likes Italian wines."
"He doesn't. I brought wine once to Kuokal. A whole
wineskin from the Caucasus I brought. At that time I was
an aide·de.camp. I rode in first class. He thanked me.
Lenin doesn't like wine. But Bogdanov likes wine. He was
so happy! And Lenin gave me bombs, Krasin made them. I
also made them. He knows chemistry. I helped. Good
"They are going in a phaeton."
"What's the guard?"
"Another phaeton."
"But it's not the phaeton itself that's going to do the
guarding. Who's going to be in it?"
"Five men with guns. Caldava says-always five men
with guns."
Don't tell me there isn't going to be a Cossack convoy?"
"There will be a Cossack convoy. It will be behind. It
bombs."
"Many Cossacks. I don't know how many."
"Oh, we'll do away with quite a few people if we're not
finished off first. They have wives, children ... Does that
mean the women couldn't find out anything else?"
uStolypins?"
"Stolypins," Kamo nodded. This was the name for a
new type of bomb, which had been tried out first on Ap·
tekar Island.
"So . . . D'you want something to eat? D'you like
shashlyk?"
"I like shashlyk. I like almond pastry. Are you paying
with your own mon'ey? Not Party money-if it's Party
money I'll have cheese."
"My own, my own. I've never had any Party money and
never will. Tomorrow, too, if it comes off, I won't take any·
thing for myself."
"Will I? You are a fool!"
"But maybe others will, eh?"
"Listen, you want me to kill?"
"No. Of course our own people won't. I know, they're
almost all good fellows, but the others have stolen. What
will you eat with the vodka? I'll pay, I get some from my
father, today there's no sense worrying about money.
What zakuski d'you like?"
"I like everything. Just a little bit. Some cheese ... "
Jambul called over the owner and after some reflection
ordered a lavish dinner (perhaps the last we'll ever have,
he thought); smoked sturgeon, caviar, cheese, shashlyk,
almond pastry, a carafe of vodka, a bottle of the best
Kakhetin wine.
"Now tell me, just don't shout," he said in a low voice,
after the owner had gone away. "Have you seen Patsiya?"
Tve seen Patsiya/' answered Kama, who whenever it
was possible preferred to give answers in the wording of
the question. "I've seen Annette, too."
1
68
11
will be in front, too."
"Many Cossacks?,
"The women couldn't, and you and I couldn't."
"Are there any changes in the plans?"
"Why changes? It's a good plan."
"What does your Koba think?"
"Koba gives the orders, and what he thinks, who
knows?"
11
That's so. He's always lying."
uDon't dare say Koba lies!"
"But in his whole life he never said a word of truth: he's
simply incapable of it."
"Listen. D'you want me to kill you!" said Kamo, and his
face began to flush scarlet. "Lenin-here!" And he raised
his hand high above his head. "Then comes Nikitich." He
lowered his hand. "Then Koba." His hand went down an·
other little bit. "And then you, me, everyone." He placed
his hand on the table.
"Thank you. But your Koba, after all, used to be a Men·
shevik, though he hides it carefully."
"No more Bolshevik, Menshevik. In Stockholm Lenin
got united."
uHe 1ll soon be disunited. 11
"He will not be disunited. But Koba was never a Men·
shevik. Always Bolshevik."
"He was a Menshevik, he was. In the Caucasus we all
were," protested Jambul, who liked to tease him.
"You lie! I kill!".
"No, please, don't kill me. Kill someone else instead. By
the way, do you always carry your Mauser on you?"
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�"Always. Never without."
"Well, another fool," said Jambul, though he was never
separated from his revolver either. "What else did you talk
about with Lenin?"
"Provocateurs we talked about. Lenin thinks provoca·
teurs. Krasin also thinks so. I suggested a plan. I go to all
the comrades. I take three men, good ones, I take along a
stake. A big one. I ask: 'Are you a provocateur?' If he's a
provocateur, we stick him on stake right away. If he gets
scared, it means he's also a provocateur. A good Bolshevik
never gets scared. Lenin didn't want it. Krasin didn't either. He cursed. Cursed a lot. He said, 'You are a savage
and an idiot.' Lenin laughed. It means it's true. I know I
have no culture . . . Do I talk Russian well?"
l'Magnificently.''
"I don't know grammar. I don't know anything. I can't
write. In Georgian and Armenian I can. Badly. I can't do
arithmetic at all," said Kamo with a sigh. "No culture. A
savage. My grandfather was a scholar. A priest."
"Really? A priest?"
"A good man, a scholar. I myself was a believer, oh, what
a believer I was! I prayed a lot. Then I stopped, the comrades taught me. Koba taught me. He taught me every·
thing. Grateful. But I learned badly. My father was a
drunkard. He's alive, but he kicked me out a long time
ago. Because of him I have no culture ... Well, let's talk
business."
"Well, tell me everything."
They went over what was to be done the next day.
There really were no changes in the plan.
" ... We start off at Sumbatov's house."
"But who is finally going to throw the first bomb from the
roof? That's the only thing that still hasn't been decided."
"None of your business, who throws it. Koba knows who
throws it. Not you."
"He'll tell me today, no later. It's just as much 'my business' as his," said Jambul angrily. HI'm risking more than
he is."
"Not more than he. You're not necessary, either. Koba
is necessary."
"I have a different opinion ... But tell me, is it true they
once hanged you?"
"They hanged me. The swine hanged everyone they
caught right off. I stuck my chin into the rope. They didn't
notice. They were drunk. It was disgusting. The swine
went away. I untied myself. Ran away. They didn't hang
me. My chin was sore a month."
"Have you got a pure-blooded horse ready for tomor·
row?"
"Don't say pure-blooded. Say thoroughbred. A Russian
officer told me that. A dragoon. Stationed here. You say
pure-blooded, they see immediately you're not a Russian
officer," explained Kamo with satisfaction.
"So they'll see it immediately, will they? And of course
you're a typical Moscow hussar ... Well anyhow, try not to
get in the way of the bomb on your thoroughbred. It would
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
be a pity about the horse. Does it mean you're going to be
in uniform tomorrow, too?"
"In uniform."
"More fool you. I'm afraid you're going to mess things
up. It would be better if you gave me your part."
1 won't give it to you. You're the fool now."
"And where did you get that medal you've stuck on?
Did you buy it in the Armenian Bazaar?"
"I bought it in the Armenian Bazaar."
"You should have bought a St. Andrew First Class," ad.
vised Jambul, but caught himself up, thinking, he'll do it
too!
"Not St. Andrew First Class. Koba said: 'Stanislas Third
Class with crossed swords and a ribbon!' If anyone was in
two battles in the Japanese war then it's a Stanislas Third
Class with crossed swords and a ribbon. You don't know.
Koba knows."
"Koba knows everything. And what is he going to do to.
morrow himself? Is he also going to shoot from the
Square?"
"He's not going to shoot from the Square. If he's killed,
who'll be left?"
"Of course, of course. Is he excited?"
"He's not excited."
"Is it true he's as evil as the devil?"
"Evil," agreed Kamo, after thinking. "But not like the
devil. His wife died."
"I know. Is it true that she was a believer and couldn't
endure Socialists? Did he love her?"
41
"He loved her so much, so much."
"And I never believed he could love anyone. Iremashvili
told me he was at the cemetery. He himself and Soso-he
calls Koba 'Soso' for old times' sake. They were friends.
Anyhow Dzhugashvili told him, putting his hand over his
heart: 'Only she could soften my heart of stone. Now, I
hate everyone! It's so empty, so unspeakably empty!' I
questioned him over and over. He swore it was exactly that
way! So Koba can't shoot from the Square? Are you worried about him."
"I'm not worried about you. I'm not worried about my·
self. I'm worried about Koba."
"Right," said Jambul. It's really impossible even to get
angry with him, he thought, looking squarely at Kamo. Ka·
rna's eyes were in some incomprehensible way kind, soft,
sad. "Well, fine, but when you grab the sack in the Square
whom will you give it to?"
"I'll give it to Koba. I'll give it to Lenin. I'll give it to
Krasin."
"They're all right. It's true that Dzhugashvili doesn't
care about money. But where can it be held for the time
being? It's not so easy after all to get it across the border."
"None of your business."
"Koba had a good idea. He told me about it. He wants to
hide it in the Tiflis Observatory. He worked there once, I
think, didn't he? He knows every nook and cranny there.
He wants to put it in the Director's sofa. Clever! Clever!"
69
�~~Ask Koba."
"It's clever," repeated Jambul. He' liked the idea primarily because of its originality: the Obs\'rvatory! He thought
with a smile that Koba wouldn't entrust the money to one
man alone. Either he'd take it himself or send a few people, so that it'll be more difficult to steal it. "I would still
like to see him before the action. Will you come with me?"
"I won't come. And I won't give you the address."
"I know the address without you anyhow," said Jambul.
He said good-bye to Kama and went out of the restaurant, once again looking around in all directions. He did
not feel like going home. It was really too late to see Koba,
and actually there was no point to it. He wouldn't have to
spend the night at home, he thought. For that matter,
fate's fate. Anyhow, I won't surrender alive. . . What's
Lenin going to spend the money on? The little periodicals?lf so what a fine thing to go into an action like this for!
Tomorrow I may very well be dead-would it be worth it?
Suddenly he recalled the explosion on Aptekar Island.
He had read the newspaper accounts with even more eagerness than Lyuda, or anyone else; from the very first moment he understood whose handiwork it had been, and
knew all the participants. Now, and not for the first time,
he imagined these unknown, speechless young people, almost just as devoted to Cain as the Klimova girl, going in a
landau to Aptekarsky Street from the Morskaya, how methodically they noted the turns-two more? no, threehow they studied the names of the streets, the house numbers, how they counted the minutes of life left to them.
How for the last time, in front of the villa, they looked at
the earth, the sky, the people, the cab-driver, who had also
been condemned to death by them.
No, I couldn't have done that! thought Jambul with a
shudder. There's a great difference between a death that's
possible and one that's certain, without the slightest, the
most infinitesimal hope of rescue! He thought about the
arrest and execution of Cain. How could he have failed to
commit suicide at the last moment? He couldn't do it in
time, that Hercules! And what if I don't either? ... Nevertheless there's some hope, and there's some sense in this,
too. We'll lay our hands on a million, there'll be an uprising
and the Caucasus will free itself. That's the one thing that
distinguishes our operation from an ordinary armed hold-up,
but that one thing is enough ... Yet, if I'm killed life will
go on exactly as it always has, it's just that I won't know
anything about it. And people won't remember, I'll never
go down in history. Will anyone ever recall anything about
Sokolov? Who, with all his recklessness and heartlessness,
was a super-hero, a match for all the Lenins and
Plekhanovs?
At this late hour Erivan Square was deserted. He looked
at the house from the roof of which some man he didn't
know was supposed to throw the first bomb the next day.
Three princesses, well-known in Tiflis society, lived on the
top floor; good-natured anecdotes used to circulate about
them. Could he be up there already? That would be more
70
reasonable than lifting himself up there in the morning
light. He guessed that the man would mount from the
courtyard by the staircase or the pipes.
He walked up to the gates and tried them. They were
unlocked. Jambullooked around and peered into the feebly lit courtyard. Two men were standing with their backs
to him looking at the roof. One was in a Russian shirt and
sandals. He looked to Jambullike Koba. Really, how can I
possibly work together with such a man! he thought. It was
as though the sight of Koba brought to a head in a flash all
those doubts that had been brewing in him for days and
months.
Tiflis was under martial law. Cossacks rode constantly
about the streets of the city. The policemen stationed at
the Police Commissioner's palace were armed with rifles.
Patrols were stationed at every intersection. Dozens of
people were participating in the preparation and execution of the expropriation. As usually happens in such circumstances, confused rumors about the forthcoming action had reached the authorities. Later the Tiflis prosecutor was to accuse the police chief of lightmindedness. The
police chief, to justify himself, would make some unflattering references to the ideas of the prosecutor.
The "theoreticians" of the expropriations preferred to
call them "engagements in the civil war." They were fond
of military vocabulary. Some of them may have recalled,
from War and Peace, or from the countless newspaper quotations such as "Die erste Kolonne marschiert," the "dispositions" taken by Weihrother before Austerlitz. But it is
possible that in spite of Tolstoy they thought that battles
actually did take place as a result of just such "dispositions." In any case they had carefully worked out a detailed plan of action at Erivan Square: Chiabrishvili, Ekbakidze, Shishmanov, Kalaniadze, Chichiashvili and Ebralidze were going to attack the phaetons carrying the
money that was surrounded by the convoy, Dalakishvili
and Kakriashvili the police detachment near the Town
Council, Lominadze and Lemidze the patrol at the Velyaminovskaya, and so on.
But expropriations are really not like battles. They do
not last for a whole day, or even for several hours, but
barely three or four minutes, and in any case there is certainly no science about them in existence. The Correla~
tion of forces" could not be known to the expropriators,
since at any given moment a patrol of five or ten or even
twenty Cossacks might turn up on the Square. Erivan
Square itself was actually the least appropriate place in
Tiflis for an expropriation. It was crowded, central, and
close to the Police Commissioner's palace. Cossack pa·
trois, heavily reinforced, kept riding across it during those
days almost uninterruptedly. Army and police posts were
permanently stationed near the district headquarters, the
44
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�banks, and at the corners of every one. of the streets giving
into the Square.
The leaders of the enterprise, whose regard for the lives
of others, or for that matter their own, :was not excessive,
had decided to take measures this time to cut down the
number of victims: from early morning on Kama, in an
army uniform, and with a wild look, had been walking
around the Square and in a low voice, interlarding his pe·
culiar Russian with "adroit mysterious remarks," had advised passers-by to get out as fast as possible. This device
was rather senseless: one passer-by was constantly being
replaced by another. In the nature of things, this strange
officer ought to have instantly aroused the strongest suspicions of even the stupidest policeman. He aroused no suspicions at all. He left safely before the start of the action
and took his place in a drozhky harnessed to the thoroughbred. He himself drove standing up (also hardly ever done
by officers).
Some post office official had informed the terrorists
that on june 13th, at 10 o'clock, the cashier of the Tiflis
branch of the State Bank, Kurdyumov, and the accountant, Golovnya, would be receiving a large sum of money
at the Postal Telegraph Office and would then take it to
the bank, in Baronsky Street, past Pushkin Square, across
Erivan Square and on along Sololaksky Street. The official
could hardly have been bribed or frightened by the terrorists, who didn't do things that way. They never promised
anyone money, and unlike many other expropriators did
not even take any money for themselves. They gave everything to the Party. Probably the official also sympathized
with the Party, or else hated the Government like much of
the population of Russia.
Kurdyumov and Golovnya went to the post office on
foot. This was a routine affair for them: money from the
capital arrived in Tiflis often. It would have been impossible to reproach the heads of the bank with lightmindedness: the cashier and accountant had been assigned a
guard, Zhilyaev, and a fairly large detachment of soldiers
and Cossacks.
Probably for reasons of economy, the phaetons were
hired only at the post office. Kurdyumov and Golovnya received the money without counting it. That would have
been dangerous, and for that matter needless: it was sealed
in two huge packages, of 170 thousand and 80 thousand.
In addition the cashier was given another 465 rubles that
weren't sealed. Kurdyumov counted these and put them
in a side-pocket of his jacket. He hid the packages in a sack,
drew a leather band tightly around the neck and carefully
carried it out to the phaetons, accompanied by the accountant, the guard, and some soldiers. The Cossacks
were waiting in the street. Kurdyumov and Golovnya got
into the first phaeton, putting the sack on the rug at their
feet. Zhilyaev and two soldiers were in the second phaeton.
1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
There were another five soldiers in the third. The Cossacks
divided up; some of them galloped on ahead of the phaetons,
some of them behind; there was one Cossack alongside the
first phaeton, near one of the little doors.
Probably one of the expropriators had been keeping the
cashier under observation at the post office, too. In any
case observers were waiting for them in various places
along the road. At Pushkin Place Patsiya Galdava signaled
Stepka lntsirkveli the approach of the Cossacks; he passed
it on to Annette Sulakhvelidze, who was promenading about
in front of the staff building; she made a sign to Bachua
Kuprashvili, who was running along the square with an unfolded newspaper (which was the last general signal). In a
moment he joined the expropriators who were running towards the phaetons.
The first bomb was thrown from the roof of the house at
the corner of the Square and Sololaksky Street. It was followed by others thrown from various angles, and then instantly by a desperate burst of revolver shot. Chaos supervened. There was no question of "disposition." Because of
the smoke almost nothing was visible. People scattered to
all sides as best they could.
Kama's drozhky whirled into the Square from Ganovsky
Street. The reins in his left hand he stood on the footboard
shooting his revolver off in all directions and yelling out
fearful curses. According to the "dispositions" he was supposed to seize the sack with the money in the first phaeton. But it wasn't easy even to find the phaeton that
strangely enough had remained undamaged. The cashier
and accountant had been thrown into the street by the
force of the explosion, and a Cossack killed.
Kama had almost never lost control of himself in his life
and was actually incapable of losing his head whenever he
was carrying out some definite order. He had never felt the
slightest doubts either before the explosion or after it:
Lenin ordered, Nikitich assisted, Koba organized-so
what was there to brood about? Thinking wasn't his business. Now in the Square he acted almost exclusively by
instinct. He may have been the only one who was completely calm, in spite of the din of the bombs, the shooting,
and the savage outcries. He was yelling and cursing desperately not because of anger or excitement, but simply because yelling and cursing were part of the technique of
such actions, as in the old days the cavalry sprang to the
attack with howls and roars.
Bachua Kuprashvili jumped out of a cloud of smoke at
the right and ran off down Sololaksky Street. For a second
a phaeton appeared to be outlined in the cloud, but just
then another bomb crashed and smoke swallowed up the
phaeton again. Bachua's fallen! thought Kama. He's killed!
But the sack, where's the sack! And in that same second
he saw Chiabrashvili, holding the sack in his hand, running towards Velyaminovsky Street, where there was less
smoke, with extraordinary, unnatural, super~human
speed. This was definitely an out-and-out disregard of orders. Kama swiftly wheeled his drozhky around and hur-
71
�tied after him. The thought flashed through his mind that
Bachua might have only been wounded, but it was impossible to return in the drozhky-let the others get him!
It took him a moment to snatch the sack from Chiabrashvili and to rush off again to the conspirators' apartment. A number of the other expropriators were already
there. He took them in with a glance, flung the sack on the
floor and shouted violently:
'Where's Bachua?"
uKilled! ... " "He'll be here soon! ... " "Wounded! ... "
44
0on't know! ... "answered voices panting. The disposi~
tions" hadn't reviewed the question: which was more im·
11
portant-the sack or a comrade? But it was clear enough
that the sack was far more important. But Kama's face
flushed scarlet; he heaped frenzied curses on his comrades. Suddenly the door opened and Bachua, a bloodstained hand to his head, appeared on the threshold.
Kamo, against all rules of conspiracy, yelled something in a
wild voice and flung himself suddenly into a dance. Bachua, barely able to control his panting, explained that he
had lost consciousness on the street only for half a minute,
then jumped up and run on there. No one listened much.
They all talked at once of what they had just done and
lived through. At the top of their lungs they shouted that
they had to speak in low voices: people on the street might
overhear them. Kamo yelled out something, and went on
dancing. Someone picked up the sack, put it on the table
and started loosening the collar. In a flash Kamo bounded
over to the table like a cat. He trusted comrades, and knew
there was not a single thief among them, but Koba had
ordered the packages to be brought sealed: Dzhugashvili
trusted the comrades less.
However, the figures were written on the covers:
"170,000" and "80,000." Not letting the packages out of
his hands, Kamo read them off. He tried to add them in his
head, others helping him: "250,000." The enthusiasm was
general, though a few of them had expected it to be a million. Kamo started dancing about again, holding a package
in each hand over his head. ~'It's done!" "The revolu·
tion! ... " "Now we'll be free! ... " they said. One of the
expropriators said everything had gone offlike clockwork.
That was how they all spoke in Tiflis that day, some with
delight, others with rage. A day later every newspaper in
Russia wrote the same.
Jambul couldn't remember all the details of the action in
Erivan Square, the most terrifying of his life. These lapses
in memory happened to him occasionally when he had
drunk two or three bottles of wine after dinner. In practical matters they had never happened to him before.
The plan had been for him to shoot a policeman standing at the door of the Commercial Bank; he had chosen
this himself; he didn't want to shoot the cashier or the accountant, though he didn't tell his comrades. And just as
soon as he saw Kuprashvili running along with the opened
newspaper he took his revolver out of his pocket and went
over without haste to the bank. The policeman, a beard-
72
Jess young blond, obviously a Russian from the north, was
standing half-turned toward him, gazing curiously at the
approaching convoy. Jambul remembered shooting immediately after the first bomb exploded, even before smoke
hid the carriage-and he didn't understand what had happened. He was incapable, simply incapable, of not hitting a
man six or seven paces from him. He recalled aiming at his
head: a Mauser bullet was supposed to kill outright. The
policeman, completely unharmed, shouted desperately,
turned around and snatched at his own revolver. It was
just at this second that the chaos in the square began. And
without being able to remember how, Jambul found himself some thirty paces from the bank doors, behind the
newspaper kiosk.
He recalled shooting twice more into the pall around the
phaeton, also probably without killing anyone. He remembered later that he didn't want to be killed either. He remembered that for a few seconds he stared brainlessly at
the newspapers hanging on the wall: the Voice of the Caucasus, the Tiflis Gazette . .. Suddenly he saw a Cossack on
a big bay galloping at him whirling his lash. In a flash Jam·
bul's self-possession came back to him. He bounded a few
paces forward and fired. The horse reared up, hit by a bullet in its throat. He stopped. Just then a second bomb burst
and deafened him. Someone ran past him, clutching his
side and yelling something, with a contorted face. The
Cossack wasn't getting up. The phaeton is supposed to go
back along the Sololaksky, Jambul remembered, and ran
off that way. No, the phaeton's smashed now, of course.
What should I do now? For a moment he stood there motionless, still half stunned. Then he rushed off, over to the
kiosk. The Cossack was gone. The big bay horse, expiring,
was writhing convulsively on its side in a pool of blood. His
whole life he would remember its brown eyes with their
distended whites. Then there was a gap in his memory. He
tried and failed to recall how much longer he stayed in the
Square and just what he was doing there.
He came to himself in a broad side-street. People were
running in the street screaming in fear and shoving each
other. He didn't think it proper to run, and walked along
on the pavement at an ordinary, scarcely hurried pace. He
thought he would have to turn off to the right further on,
and that the conspiratorial apartment was very close. I
didn't want to kill it. Why did it have to rear up? I killed it
for the sake of Lenin's little periodicals ... Dozens of people must have been killed ... But not by me ... How could
I have missed that policeman? Suddenly everyone leapt
off the street on to the sidewalks and into the entry-ways: a
squadron of dragoons was hurtling towards them on their
way to the Square. Oh, what horses! thought Jambul ...
Why did it have to rear up? ...
No more shots could be heard, but from the direction of
the square a confused roaring could be heard. The street
was almost empty. Jambul turned off to the right and came
to the conspiratorial apartment. Though the windows
were closed he could hear shouts, clamor, laughter. What's
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�the matter with them, he thought, have they gone out of
their senses? At some other time he might have liked the
Caucasian boldness and contempt for danger, but now he
listened for a moment and passed on. ·
A little further on he came across a wretched-looking bistro. In the doorway the proprietor, pale and excited, was
evidently about to shut down. He glanced suspiciously at
Jambul, and almost refused to let him in, but he did. He
said something quickly and evasively. Fifty? thought Jambul: impossible! There couldn't have been fifty casualties!
Unwilling to talk, Jambul asked for more vodka, and
tossed off a few glasses one after another at the counter. In
a languid way he thought this might arouse suspicion: in
the morning no one gulps down vodka that way ...
"Is there any cognac?" he asked, and on being told there
was only Russian Shustovsky, but that it was good, he ordered some, not in a mug but in a tea-glass. He tossed it off
at one gulp. The owner looked at him in alarm. Jambul
paid and, shaking even more than before, went out. Yes,
yes ... Not very pretty ... Not a cavalry charge in goldembroidered uniforms. . . All for Lenin's little periodicals ... Not pure blood, but mixed with dirt. .. Much
more than in war. .. Perhaps all oflife is a mistake ... Perhaps, yes, it may very well be ... he muttered to himself in
the street.
For the first few days after the expropriation Jambul
didn't see any of the terrorists. He read the newspapers
and drank a great deal, though he had already calmed
down. He had noticed no traces he had left behind and
thought with even more conviction than before that the
Russian police were very bad and in addition were frightened to death, especially in the Caucasus.
Money and another letter arrived from his father in Turkey, at his temporary agreed-on address. The old man
asked his son more insistently than usual to come home;
he also complained about his health more than usual, said
that he wanted to see him once more without fail, and
mentioned the necessity of putting his inheritance in order. Jambul had received such invitations before, too, and
had always declined them. He likes to complain, like all old
people, he thought. Perhaps he's heard something, and is
worried. They seldom corresponded. The old man could
hardly have known with certainty just what his son was
doing. Jambul had said vaguely that he was taking part in
the struggle for Caucasian independence. His father was
able to understand this and even ought to sympathize.
He dined in the restaurants in the center of the city, and
each time made a point of going to Erivan Square. He
could not get the blood-bespattered bay horse, and its eyes
with their distended whites, out of his head. After going
home he read on into the late night. He had gone out to
the Golovin Prospekt and bought some books at random: a
thick Petersburg review, Shakespeare in Russian, To!THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
stoy' s Resurrection. He felt he absolutely had to leave for a
visit to his father. It was possible to leave legally, his passport was perfectly trustworthy. He loved his father but had
always told himself that he was incapable of watching anyone "grow old." But nevertheless he never used to write
about himself so alarmingly. Surely he's not going to die!
I'll be left alone in the world like a splinter ...
That evening he went to bed early and set out on the
wide bed the three books he had bought. At first he did not
read. He thought of his father. He thought of the action in
Erivan Square. He thought of Lenin. He's going to be
overjoyed, manna from heaven ... he said to himself, and
frowned still more severely: the words 'from heaven'
seemed far from apt. He couldn't fall asleep, in spite of the
huge amount of wine he had drunk. He never took sleeping pills, for some reason he was afraid of them. He
opened Shakespeare's plays at random, at the boring play
Cymbeline. He picked up the review. He noticed with irritation that the news-vendor had slipped him an old shopworn issue.
In the news-column he learned that 73 3 people had
been killed that year in Russia, 215 hanged, 341 shot by
order of a court martial, and in only a month and a half 221
had been executed by the new emergency court martial.
Perhaps there'll soon be not 215, but 216 hanged, he
thought, and again said to himself: one Jambul more or
less, isn't it all the same? He often spoke to himself that
way, but knew he was speaking insincerely: this particular
''one" had a certain importance for him. In the news story
some more figures were given of those called "representa·
lives of the authorities" who had been killed-the number
was just as large. Three days ago I didn't make a single addition to this statistic, thank God!
He also read in the review something long and boring
about a "Party of Democratic Reforms," about a Professor
Maxim Kovalevsky, and about a lawyer called Spasovich
who had recently died. "Public morals are becoming more
and more savage," Vladimir Danilovich had recently written from Warsaw: "Bomb explosionS1 shootings, looting,
and assassination take place every blessed day even in the
street." Words like this would once have evoked in Jambul
nothing but a sneer: he disliked liberals. They've had a
good time of it all their lives, he would have thought,
they've never once risked their precious existence. Now
he thought nothing of the kind. He put the paper aside
and opened Resurrection.
He read it until far into the night. He liked Tolstoy as an
artist, but had an even more scornful attitude towards his
ideas than he had towards those of the liberals: Just the
feeble-mindedness of old age, he thought. He found the
scene of the church service in the prison extremely annoying. No, really, it's just blasphemy after all. He didn't have
the right to make fun of other people's faith and he himself doesn't have any: a believer could never have written
that way about church ceremonies. But what oppressive,
terrifying language! he thought as he fell asleep.
73
�And at once the various figures which had been passing
through his mind during the past fe~ days and hours were
all jumbled together, spinning about and springing up into
the most senseless life. Lenin had written a little article on
blood-stained assignations. His father, with a sick, emaciated face, was lying in bed waiting for a doctor who never
came. A blood-bespattered bay horse galloped into his uncle's orchard, drenched in sunlight, and explained hoarsely
that it could no longer serve since it had been killed by a
bullet in the throat from )ambul. Dimitri Nekhlyudov explained to it that there must have been some juridical error: )ambul never killed horses and never would. In the
Tiflis Gazette Spasovich proposed to defend Kate Maslov
for a thousand rubles: "There are only ten Kates in all," he
said, "while a great deal more was taken from Kurdyumov." Lenin tore himself away from his little articles and
said mockingly that he wouldn't give a single ruble, not a
penny for any uprising, everything was needed for the little periodicals, and a fig to all the comrades ...
He was awakened by a knock at the door. It took him a
moment to come to himself. A young chambermaid came
into his room, smiled at him, and respectfully reported
that he was being asked for on the 'phone by His Most
Serene Highness Prince Dadiani. )ambul, tearing himself
away from the warm pillow, looked at her for a moment
agog. Then he remembered that this was the name Kama
wasliving under in Tiflis.
"Please te!Ihim I'll be right down," he said. The chambermaid smiled at him sweetly and went out. He put on a
splendid silken dressing gown he had bought in Paris at
the Place Vendome, and thought of Lyuda, who had been
particularly fond of it. Is it all right to go downstairs in a
dressing gown? He thought, it doesn't matter, it's early,
there'll be no one there. Actually, it was not even eight.
The fool might have rung later, he thought.
HGood morning, your Highness," he said. HWhat's hap~
pened? A very early call."
Kama replied that someone wanted to see him at ten
o'clock. Koba, of course, )ambul guessed.
"At his place," said Kama and hung up without waiting
for an answer, just as though there couldn't be the slightest doubt of )ambul's agreeing. )ambul shrugged his shoulders. I'll come late just for spite!
But it wasn't right to be late in their work, and he arrived
on the stroke of ten, leaving the carriage driver far from
the house Dzhugashvili was living in. The boss, quite
calm, met him with his usual sneer. How I hate the sight of
him! thought )ambul.
He had known this man for a long time. He could not
endure him. Whenever they met he would have an obscure feeling as though he were in the company of a real
evildoer. He never mentioned this about Koba to anyone
and even reproached himself for a baseless and consequently unfair judgment: he knew a good deal about
Dzhugashvili, but still not the sort of thing that would
have justified considering him a malefactor, or "the worst
74
of good-for-nothings." It sometimes seemed to him that
others who knew Koba well had the same feeling about
him and said nothing about it either: something in his very
looks made people wary. Well, in any case I'm not afraid of
him! thought )ambul. His irritation and spite were heightened immediately.
In the room there were Kama, in the same uniform with
the same dark-red embroidered decoration, and a woman
in a cheap, dirty white dress. )anbul remembered that her
name was Mara Bocharidze and that in the band she
worked at the role of a Tiflis house-wife. He greeted her
politely. Koba looked at him with a sneer and carelessly
extended his hand.
"Hello, bicho," he said. This word, which meant "old
boy" or something like it, and was a special little sneer of
Koba's, irritated )ambul still more: It meant, "You're all
just a lot of runts, and I'm a great big fellow." And all the
while, with all his wiliness and boldness, he was a very grey,
coarse fellow, rather shabby looking, with both an innate
and played-up coarseness. He thinks that has an effect on
everyone, thought )ambul: it doesn't on me, but he won't
be coarse with me, he knows it wouldn't be safe.
"Very glad to see you too, bicho," )ambul replied. Koba
turned away from him at once and started talking to
Kama, who was looking at him enraptured. Mara also
looked into his eyes, more in fear than in rapture. Koba
spoke Russian considerably better than Kama, considerably worse than )ambul.
<(That's a matter of course and you do it," he ordered.
)ambul's suggestion was confirmed: Dzhugashvili was assigning them both to take the money over to the Observatory: it was sewn into a large new mattress that was lying
on the floor in Koba's room.
"Yau go with Mara in one carriage, and he'll follow you
in another. Why did you have to be so stupid as to dress up
like an officer! Carrying a mattress! Change your clothes
immediately!"
Timidly deferential, Kama explained, partly in Russian,
partly in Georgian, that he hadn't known about the forthcoming transfer of the mattress. He also expressed the
opinion that it would be better to transfer it in the evening, after dusk.
''I'm not asking you for an opinion! Do as I say!" cried
Koba. Kama nodded instantly. Mara also nodded her head
in fright. Jambul interrupted: "Any street hawker could
move the mattress," he said mildly, as though addressing
no one in particular. "An outsider wouldn't be in any danger. In case of arrest he could explain that he had been
hired, and could prove his alibi. But if they catch Kama
they'll hang him. It's true that a street hawker might give
away the address of the apartment he'd gotten the mattress from," he added, as though naively. A gleam of spite
flashed through Koba's eyes. He stored up )ambul's words
in his memory, but he restrained himself and sketching
out on his face an extremely improbable looking goodnatured smile, said: "I shall ask you to follow them in anWINTER/SPRING 1983
�other carriage. Have you got a revolver on you?"
"I have, bicho. Very well, I'll follow them. Very closely,
of course, else they might be able to drag out the money
and scuttle off," said Jambul imperturbably.
Kamo' s face suddenly turned bestial. "Listen!" he
snarled.
Koba interrupted him instantly and started laughing,
just as good-naturedly. "He is, of course, joking. Now look,
these orders of mine are easy to understand. You and she
will take the mattress to the director. Then you'll go down
into the big hall. At eleven o'clock some astronomer is going to show the yokels all sorts of nonsense. Listen to it; go
together with the crowd, and also go out when the crowd
does. You won't be noticed. If on the way to the Observatory the police attack, start shooting, to the last cartridge,
naturally. And run to the apartment on Mikhailovsky
Street. With the mattress, naturally!" he said impressively.
"And on the way back, Maro, you little ninny, you come back
on foot alone. You have no revolver, you'll get off without
going to gaol. And you two can do as you please, shoot or
don't as you please. You, Kamo, no matter what happens,
you can't escape hanging. For old sins. But as for you," he
said, turning to Jambul, "there's no evidence of anything
against you. For carrying a revolver it'll be a lot if they send
you off to hard labor. Never mind, daddy will wait for you in
Turkey," said Koba, and a little sneer appeared on his face
once again. Jambul flared up. He knows about father too! he
thought: he keeps a check on the comrades!
"And how d'you know whom there's evidence against
and whom there's not?"
"A little magpie had it on its tail, as Lenin said in Tammerfors," said Dzhugashvili. He was very proud of having
spoken to Lenin, and of having, as it seemed to him, made
a strong impression on him. "For the Erivan affair there
can't be evidence of anything against anybody, so there
won't be any against you, either."
'I'll go to the Observatory, but I won't take the money to
Finland."
"And I'm not ordering you to," said Koba. He had long
since decided that Kamo would take it there alone; he
trusted him.
liNor can you order me to do anything!"
Without answering Koba turned to Kamo again. He repeated his orders tersely and clearly; he knew Kamo didn't
understand the first time.
Yes, he knows his business, it's true. But in all my life
I've never seen anyone so repugnant to me, thought Jambul, listening attentively. After finishing his explanation
Koba stood up. The audience is over! thought Jambul.
Kamo and Maro stood up at once, too.
The astronomer, a graybeard in a silken jacket, was
showing the Observatory to a small group of visitors and
wearily making the usual explanations:
THE ST. JOHNS REVJEW
"The man whose portrait you see hanging on this wall
was the great astronomer Nicholas Copernicus. He was
born in 1473 and died in 1543. For a long time he was
thought to be a German, but that was incorrect. Copernicus was a Pole. He discovered that it was not the sun that
rotated around the earth, but the earth that rotated
around the sun. He worked with the aid of a parallactic
instrument consisting of three little pieces of wood with
three degrees. Later on these little stumps of wood passed
into the possession of another famous astronomer, Tycho
Brahe, who treasured them as a sacrosanct relic of the history of science, and wrote verses about them. In these he
said that the earth produced a man like that once in a
thousand years: he stopped the sun and started the earth
moving. For a long time Copernicus couldn't make up his
mind to publish his discovery: he was afraid of being persecuted by the Catholic Church and even more afraid of being laughed at by everyone. It was not until shortly before
his death that he published his immortal work. He dedicated it to Pope Paulus Ill, but it was included by the Congregation in the notorious Index as heresy. Though this
great man was a believer, it may well be that only a miracle
saved him from the stake," said the astronomer, who evidently disliked the Catholic Church. "His work of genius
is entitled De revolutionibus orbium caelestium. There is
a monument to Copernicus in Warsaw, the work of
Thorwaldsen ... "
The word "revolutionibus" caught Jambul's attention.
So there's some kind of a revolution there, too, he
thought, though not the same one. He glanced at the
gaunt, harassed face with the tufts of hair falling on both
sides of the head. Yes, that's not like Koba's face ... Who
knows what sort of a man he was and what he thought
about life? ... So he was a believer? But could he have believed in everything? Did he believe in an afterlife? But
surely he was more intelligent than I, with Kamo and
Koba, even with Lenin thrown in!. If I had any real faith in
me I wouldn't choose such a life for myself. But then what
would I do? The little stumps of wood with degrees are not
for me. I have no gifts at all. But when, why, and what for,
did I ever choose such an inhuman existence? Caucasian
independence? But it's only various Kobas that are probably going to run it after all, and what's the use of hiding from myself that they're a hundred times worse than
the Voronov-Dashkovs. And people like Tsintsadze or
Ramishvili are basically the same liberals as the Spasoviches and Kovalevskys, they can hardly be told apart.
They'll hardly be the ones to come to power, if there's a
revolution, any more than the Kovalevskys will come to
power in Russia. And that's just the reason they won't, because they're civilized, and not wild beasts! he thought, astonished himself at the swiftness with which his attitude
towards the revolution had changed. Nevertheless, he
thought, it's not just because of that bay horse!
The astronomer announced that the tour was over. The
visitors started out. At the exit Jambullooked around again
75
�and went into Erivan Square still at the same artificially
unhurried pace with which he now walked around the
city. His body was alert and tensed in case of an unexpected onslaught. Since the expropriation he had not been
separated from his revolver, though this had no point;
there really was no evidence against him, and if arrested he
would in all likelihood not be hanged.
A few people were standing in the street at the same
spot where the first bomb had fallen. One of them was explaining something, pointing at the jumbled stones. Jam·
bullistened in. Yes, that's probably a blood-stain. Here is
where that Cossack fell who was leaping around the phaeton. But I didn't kill him. Except for the horse, I didn't kill
anyone. He walked on to the newspaper kiosk, stopped
where he had stood then, and again saw the Tiflis Gazette.
He took a few more steps, looked at the place-and suddenly felt sick.
In the Annona restaurant, where there were always a
great many people and there was no chance of arrest, he
sat down for a breathing-spell. He could hardly eat, but he
drank some wine, and listened to the string orchestra. At
the little tables around him people were discussing their
affairs. "We'll have to think all that through and through,"
one of them said.
Yes, and I'll have to think things through and through.
Perhaps I've thought about life, about the most important
things, very little. Now it's too late. Though why is it too
late? There's no one to talk about it with. Koba's a beast.
Kamo's a hero. Everyone claims he's kindhearted, and
here he was getting ready to impale people on a stake!
How strange he used to be religious! Now of course he
makes fun of faith: Koba taught him that. .. Yes, I'm get·
ting old and didn't notice ... I'll have to go see father as
quickly as possible. Thoughts flashed incoherently
through his mind.
On the way home he went in to see the men whose address he used for letters. There was only a telegram from
76
Turkey. He hastily tore it open, ripping the end off the
envelope. It was from an old friend telling that his father
has passed away that night in his sleep, painlessly.
It was evident that the director of the Observatory sym·
pathized with the expropriators. It was, however, possible,
though unlikely, that he didn't know what there was in the
new mattress on his divan. In a short while Dzhugashvili
had drawn everything out of the mattress, and Kamo had
carried it to Lenin in Kuakalla. This time he no longer traveled first-class but second, and was not a Wing Adjutant,
but a mere junior officer.
Krupskaya and Bogdanova sewed the money in the
quilted waistcoat of their comrade, Lyadov. "It sat on me
very skilfully," wrote Lyadov, "and the money was carried
across the border illegally without any trouble."
At the State Bank, however, the numbers of the stolen
five-hundred-ruble notes had been recorded, and they
were wired instantly to every police department in Europe. The five-hundred-ruble notes were exchanged in
batches in various West European banks. In trying to convert them Litvinov, Semashko, Ravich, and a few other
Bolsheviks were arrested. In this way the smaller Central
Committee, that is, Lenin, Krasin, and Bogianov, lost a
small part of the money.
Aside from this there was some unpleasantness with the
Mensheviks, who launched an "agitation," that it was im·
proper having anything in common with "rogues." They
abused Lenin and Kamo in the most horrifying language.
But Lenin was not too vexed by the unpleasantness. At his
dictation Krupskaya added the following to a personal let·
ter of his about this affair: "The Mensheviks have already
started the vilest brawl. They're doing such vile things it's
hard to believe ... What sons-of-bitches! ... "
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�SUMMER
The thrushes' voices, liquid every evening.
Whole hours pass
Soundless but for the rustling
Of maple trees whose leaves,
Flake upon flake of dusky turquoise,
Encrust some liquid inner richness. Summer.
Summer! Unnumbered days pace through a desert
Empty of landmarks, colored scratchy gold.
But the whole mirage
Dappled with havens for birds to perch in
Will have vanished by October
No matter how passionately put together.
Country created root and branch,
Whose every pod and blossom,
Hayfield, hilltop, cloud
Have come to tingle with mythology ...
A tall white horse bridled in green
Passes and repasses on a carousel
That whisks repeatedly out of reach.
Under the pine trees trails make soft
Chiasmuses. This has all
Been marked long since on his chart by the master
Of subterranean bonds. Inside the house
A room at the top of the stairs
Smells of old puppets, contains a twangy piano
Kin to the sea-clogged one that you remember.
Outdoors as well are portents to be noted.
The way the light falls;
One particular maple, lightning-lopped,
Motionless and imposing
As a statue in the meadow;
A dead elm's gesture
Past boggy grass to where the woods begin;
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
77
�Caw of a crow, hawk hovering
Over the line that separates sun from shadow.
What will you do with your life?
Long interlude. The elm and maple wait.
Slats of light
Lean down on you pacing
Through gawky trees that strain for their share of sky,
Teabrown swampjuice slurping underfoot.
The years till now:
This rusty leafchoked bucket once held sap.
Into the trackless competitive hardwood
Dip till the dimness sends you back uphill,
Daylight returning at the top of the rise.
House in a hollow,
Smoke dissolving into early evening,
Somebody playing that piano,
Face or phantom at the attic window:
Benevolent and tiny, it all
Happened repeatedly but long ago.
To an accumulated depth of water
Plummets the pebble thrown, and ripples spread.
The whole of summer will have been one long day.
MAGNOLIAS IN PRINCETON
in memory of Sidonie M. Clauss
Puppies run around the pool
outside the Woodrow Wilson School.
On a bench I try to read,
magnolias dropping overhead,
lavish lacy opening
in the clinging sheath of spring.
Petals milky·pinky pale
slather whiteness like a veil
over the grey branches' bone,
over smudges of light green.
On a sunny afternoon
gorgeous garlands bloom and preen.
78
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Yet a single wintry breath
dooms this Rubens world to death.
Half an hour of cold's enough
to wrinkle creamy rose to rough
russet, parch the baby cheek
and shrink it to a shrivelled scrape
rustling along the stones,
silken skin to rattling bones.
Cold can cut the flowering short.
So can changes in the light.
Take that radiant bridal air
fresh magnolia blossoms wear:
one dark cloud blots out the sun,
all the joyful glow is gone.
Quenched and drawn, they shrink to white,
livid, glaring, harshly bright.
Where then can I look for stable
radiance: perhaps the marble
neoclassically flashing
columns of the Wilson School,
or the snowy puppies dashing
round the azure of the pool,
or the court's blond travertine,
or the trees' faint new green?
None of these. It's going to rain.
Plum-dark clouds come like a stain.
Damp wind ruffles pages, hair,
piled dry petals, and the air.
To avoid the looming cloud,
I prepare to join the crowd
moving up the temple stair.
Petals twitch and stir and fall
as slowly up the scholars file;
the magnolia bank springs leaks
through which distant thunder speaks.
Wait. A tiny ruffling tap.
Here's a petal in my lap,
newly fallen from a branch
as I got up from the bench,
longer than my finger, fresh,
plump, and fragrant, bruised like flesh.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
79
�Slowly I shut my book on this bookmark,
this touch of perfect color blown
undramatically down,
its pink and white already edged with dark.
THE SERVICE FOR SIDONIE
May 3 1980
The rain it raineth every day.
Not this one.
Our fumbling gestures sketching out your loss
preserved as if in amber by May sun.
The dreadful hole no sooner dug than spring
gently conspired to fill it. The two babies'
babbling purled, a rhythmic little brook,
under and through the ceremony's broken
flow (the hushed voices, bubbles burst in weeping).
Inflamed, turned inward, all our eyes were dazzled
at the chapel door by a great blaze of noon
and when we left the porch and stood in the sun
birds embroidered the quiet
with brilliant stitches of incessant song.
Ironic, tender-natural renewal,
brimming with green abundance, speaks of cycle.
But for us mourning you no rhythm softens
today's shared truth. This thing the grace of season
so gently twines its tendrils round remains
a terrible cessation-opening blossom,
richly unfolding, ruthlessly cut off.
RACHEL HADAS
Rachel Hadas published her first book of poems, Starting from Troy, in
1975 (Godine). Her second, Slow Transparency, will appear in September
1983 (Wesleyan University Press). She teaches English at Rutgers University in Newark.
80
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Letters on Legitimacy
Guglielmo Ferrero-Gaetano Mosca
A Note on Guglielmo Ferrero-and his Friendship with
Gaetano Mosca
From 1896 to the end of their lives, a few months apart, at the
end of 1941 and in the middle of 1942, Gaetano Mosca (18581941) and Guglielmo Ferrero (1871-1942) carried on frequent correspondence. Two hundred and twenty-five Letters survive, probably less than a third of the total. In 1896 Ferrero was twenty-five
years old and at work on his first book to win wide recognition,
L' Europa giovane (1897)-the fruit of three years of study and
travel throughout Europe. Thirty-eight years old, Mosca had iust
won the chair of constitutional law at Turin and published the first
edition of Elementi di Scienza Politica-a work that achieved
something of the status of a classic. (A later edition was translated
into English with the title The Ruling Class, New York 1939).
Mosca appreciated the importance of Ferrero's work almost from
the beginning with an essay II fenomeno Ferrero (1897), published
long before Ferrero won international status.
Their correspondence is an extension of their work. Often on almost a day-to-day basis, it discusses the major events of twentieth
century history, the reasons for decadence in Europe, and especially
in Italy, before the First World War, the First World War and the
crisis that came of it, the coming of Fascism in 1922, and Ferrero's
and Mosca's struggle against it within Italy until1925 when open
opposition became impossible, and finally, the dark years that
made the Second World War inescapable. Throughout these letters
the ideas that are to play an important part in their thinking take
shape and modify.
Both Mosca and Ferrero took direct part in political life, Mosca as
a deputy in Parliament from 1908 to 1919 and Senator after 1919,
Ferrero as a frequent political commentator. This involvement in
actual political life lent their work a straightforward and practical
cast that, in their instances, made for a deeper grasp, rather than an
These four letters come from a collection of the surviving FerreroMosca correspondence edited by C. Mongardini, Gaetano Mosca- Guglielmo Ferrero. Carteggio (1896-1934), Milan 1980.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
evasion, of the underlying problems. Both men knew, and in many
instances were intimate with, the leading men of their times. They
had the best information at their disposal, and had read enough of
the right kind of old books to know its limitations. In some sense
the clarity of their view of the public affairs of Italy and Europe,
and of their grasp of the crisis of the twentieth century, testifies to
the depth of their friendship. For them the understanding of public
events, especially the events of crisis, were not an evasion of private
life, but an understanding of the place of their lives in their country
and time, and finally in the whole history of the West. Each of
them was happy enough to be able to grasp the symptoms of the
catastrophe, long before it occurred, that threatened to sweep away
all they loved.
Besides Elementi di Scienza Politica, the only other major work
of Mosca's translated into English is Storia delle dottrine pelitiche
(Bari 1937), A Short History of Political Philosophy (New York
1972). Most of Ferrero's work is translated into English and the
other major languages of Europe.
In his early and middle thirties in 1902-1906, Ferrero published
an account of the self-destruction of the Roman republic and the
settlement of Augustus in five volumes, The Greatness and Decline of Rome. Written in simple narrative style the work is overwhelming in its capacity to evoke and to understand, in its appetite
for life and intelligence. It won Ferrero a world-wide audience, an
audience that made it possible for Ferrero's voice to be heard
throughout the West, even after Fascist censorship prevented publication of his words within Italy after 1925. The work caused an
uproar in the academic world of Italy.
Throughout his life Ferrero wrote weekly columns and monthly
articles that appeared in the major newspapers and magazines of
the world. Some of these articles were collected into books and published every few years: Militarism (London 1902); Europe's Fateful Hour (New York 1911, 1918); Between the Old World and the
New (New York 1914); Ancient Rome and Modern America (New
York 1914); Four Years of Fascism (London 1924); Words to the
Deaf (London 1926); The Unity of the World (London 1931).
In the twenties Ferrero dedicated himself to a cycle of novelsunder the general title La Terza Roma: Le due verita (Milan
81
�1926); La rivolta del figlio (Milan 1927); Gli ultimi barbari, sud ore
e sangue (Milan 1930); Liberazione (Lugano 1936)-that told the
story of Italy since its unification, a subject whose evasion up to
then, in Ferrero's judgement, contributed importantly to the collapse of the Italian government after the First World War. Of all
Ferrero's works, his novels were least read.
Under constant police surveillance after 1926, Ferrero left Italy,
it turned out forever, in 1930-with the help of Mosca who inter·
vened with the Minister of Foreign Affairs to get him a passport.
The University of Geneva and the Institut Universitaire des
Hautes Etudes Intemationales had offered him a chair in modem
history-his first university position. At about sixty he entered into
one of the most courageous and creative periods of historical study
in his life. At the university for more than ten years he gave a
weekly lecture on the history of the French Revolution and Napo·
leon and the consequences of misunderstanding these events in the
nineteenth century-a lecture that was an event in the town as well
as at the university. At the institute Ferrero dedicated himself to
the study of the differences between war in the eighteenth century
and the unlimited total war of Napoleon-a study that led him to
the rediscovery ofVattel, the author of the eighteenth century clas·
sic of international law, Le droit des gens, ou principe de la loi
naturelle, appliquee a la conduite et aux affaires des nations et
des souverains (Leyden 1758).
One of the most important of Ferrero's little books, Peace and
War (London 1933) came out of this study of war. He argued that
part of the catastrophe of 1914-1917 came because statesmen and
generals were ignorant of the character of the war they were fighting and above all had misunderstood the meaning of Napoleon.
His lectures at the university led to four volumes on the French
Revolution and the crisis it brought Europe and the world: The
Two French Revolutions 1789-1796 (posthumously published,
New York 1968); The Gamble, Bonaparte in Italy, 1796-1797
(London 1939); The Reconstruction of Europe, Talleyrand and
the Congress of Vienna, (New York 1941); The Principles of
Power (New York 1942).
In all his historical work Ferrero studied the past in order to discover the present-the opposite of studying the past because one
thinks one understands the present, which often leads to a politicization of the past in the service of present prejudices. Ferrero had
no favourite ages. His grasp of human character and the common
sense that comes of it was too strong for such infatuation. He did
not idealize any times-which meant he did not flinch before tragedy and outrage but still kept a remarkable love of life. He suffered
much, but his work never betrays resignation and depression.
For Mosca, see James H. Meisel, The Myth of the Ruling Class
(Ann Arbor 1958). The Istituto de Studi Storico-Politici of the Uni·
versity of Rome is bringing out his complete works. For a preliminary bibliography of Ferrero's writings, see Guglielmo Ferrero, histoire et politique au vingtif:me siecle, Geneva 1966. For an
account of the surveillance of Ferrero under Fascism, based on police archives, see Helmut Goetz "Guglielmo Ferrero, Ein Exampel
totalitaerer Verfolgung," Quellen und Forschungen aus Italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 61, Tuebingen 1981, 248-304,
which should be compared to Leo Ferrero, Diario di un privilegiato
sotto il fascismo, Turin 1946. L.R.
82
1920
Mosca to Ferrero
Turin, January 28, 1920 Corso Umberto 45
Dear Ferrero,
I received with the usual delay your card of the 18th,
which avoided the postal strike only to fall into the railway·
men's strike. I had previously received the Memorie e con·
fessioni di un sovrano deposto, * which I have already read
and am turning over in my mind.
In the first part it seems to me that, among the many
original ideas, two stand out. The first concerns the great
French Revolution which, while purporting to bring liberty, equality, etc., gave the people instead military con·
scription (timidly already begun by absolute governments
here and there) and a world of taxes and constraints. The
second concerns the Holy Alliance, which you say was
more equitable than the victors in the recent war, and
would have been more able to develop Wilson's idea of a
League of Nations and which, as you rightly observe, even
if it did not give us perpetual peace, at least assured peace
for the span of a generation.
In regard to this second idea, I think that you are indis·
putably right. The principle of legitimacy that guided the
Allies of 1815 produced less injustices and exercised less
coercion on the will of peoples than the victors of the
present day, attempting to organize Europe on the princi·
pie of nationality and the so-called self-determination of
nations. The sovereigns of 1815 were more generous and
moderate toward the defeated. They had more sense of
measure than the leaders of the democracies of today.
They were more consistent in applying the principle they
said inspired them. Now, instead, the principle of self·
determination has been applied in such a way that the
peace treaties prevent the German provinces of Austria
from joining Germany. An enormous-and shamefulinconsistency.
As for the first idea, I still hesitate to say that you are
entirely right. Yes, the revolution did much harm, but it
also did much good. Perhaps almost all the good could
have been achieved without almost all the harm or, at
least, without a great part of it. But you, who are a real
historian, know how difficult it is to reconstruct history on
the basis of an hypothesis, how difficult it is to know what
would have happened if, at a given moment, events had
*Memorie e confessioni di un sovrano deposto (Memoirs and Confessions
of a Deposed Sovereign), Milan 1920. Ferrero called this book "a summary of the history of the nineteenth century" inspired by the memoirs
ofTalleyrand and his principle of legitimacy. Cf. B. Raditsa, Colloqui con
Guglielmo Ferrero, Lugano 1939,73-74.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�developed in a different way from how they did develop. I
remember that Louis XVIII, to whose /TIOderation and political views you rightly pay tribute, used to say that we
couldn't speak ill of the Revolution because it had done so
much good and we couldn't speak well of it because it had
done so much harm. I very nearly agree with him. And let
us go on to the second part where there seem to be two
basic ideas: (!) that Germany should have won the war
and instead she lost it, or, at least, that she lost where she
deserved to win; and (2) that Germany was, in a way,
forced to make war by the atmosphere that took hold of
Europe in the ten or twenty years before the war.
Never mind about whether Germany deserved to win. I
admit that, if the sacrifices Germany made and the terrible
sufferings she inflicted on herself and on her adversaries
entitled her to win, then she deserved it. But . . . after
America entered the war, she was the weaker. She could
hope only in some striking bit of good luck, which did not
occur, or in the cowardice of her enemies, who were not
free to be cowards. The governments of the Entente could
not present themselves as defeated before peoples of
whom they had asked such great sacrifices. Besides, the
abyss of revolution was behind them if they stepped backwards. Perhaps one of them will fall into it anyhow-but
victory was the only hope of salvation. And Germany, as
the weaker, behaved like a gambler who has little money.
She took the greatest risks. Once they failed, she was done
for.
As for the causes of the war and the responsibilities for
its unleashing, I agree with you that certainly not all the
fault is Germany's and the Kaiser's. For ten years and
more the European bourgeoisies had been more or less afflicted with imperialism, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps
in order to take people's minds off socialism. This created
the atmosphere in which the appalling war could break
out. Part of the responsibiiity lies also with the diplomatic
encirclement which England practiced against Germany.
Germany, however, was responsible for provoking the incident which provoked the explosion. As a result that good
part of the world that doesn't see beyond its nose believed
and believes that the entire fault was hers.
And now that Satan, as you say, has finished the job,
what is this poor tortured and suffering world to do?
If you are right, salvation could come from a restoration
of the principle of authority, from rulers with enough
moral prestige not to have to rely exclusively on brute
force. But is this possible in a democratic regime, where
the best way to rise is to humiliate oneself before the
crowd, to flatter it indecently?
Neither of us knows whether or not the world will overcome the present crisis and if present institutions can endure. If they don't, we shall, for sure, fall under demagogic
tyranny, or under bureaucratic and military tyranny or,
worse still, under both together. And Italy, closest to the
looming danger, is not yet aware of it!
I'll come to see you in the spring and we'll talk. I hope to
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
publish a review of your book. Its main points will be those
I have just made.
My family is well. My respects to Mrs. Ferrero. Greetings to Leo.
I am most affectionately,
G. Mosca.
P.S. Please send me the exact address of your brother, the
doctor, who is in Ancona. I should perhaps write to him.
Ferrero to Mosca
(F1orence), January 31, 1920
Dear Gaetano,
Thanks for your letter. My brother's address is: Dr.
Giuseppe Ferrero, Via Montirozzo 59, Ancona.
To understand the book you have to proceed a bit by
deduction, since the writer's real ideas are hidden behind
the ideas-thesis and antithesis-attributed to the supposed author, to keep him in character. What you say
about the Holy Alliance is exactly what I think; it stands
out more in the second than in the first part since in the
first part the sovereign accuses the Holy Alliance of having
been too pacifist, traditionalist, classical, and Catholic, in
spirit if not in religion.
· It is not the same thing with the French Revolution. I
didn't try to decide whether the Revolution was a good
thing or a bad, whether it did more good than harm,
whether it could have done the good that it did without
doing so much harm. These are insoluble problems, because there is no way of measuring exactly the good and
the harm that it did and to make a comparison between
them. My idea-which I meant to have come out of the
thesis and antithesis-is this. In the French Revolution
there is a contradiction among the formulas, the programs,
the doctrines, and the results. This contradiction, disguised during the whole nineteenth century and up to the
World War with a host of devices and compromises, has
now broken quite out of control. The doctrines promised
men liberty, equality, and brotherhood, but events have
yielded a discipline far more demanding, heavy, and oppressive than that exercised by former governments. They
brought up governments harsher and more violent because they are at the same time stronger and less authoritative, governments that now are all turning into tyrannies
based on money and brute force. And all this happened
because the French Revolution undermined all the principles of authority, with their religious basis, of the old regimes and put in their place a new principle, the will or
sovereignty of the people, which doesn't work because it is
based only on a function and can give rise only to electoral
machines. On this point I have come to embrace totally
83
�your ideas, over which I was for a long time hesitant. For
many years I thought that the sovereignty of the people
was a serious principle of authority and could serve as the
basis of a juster, less oppressive, milder, and more human
political and social order than the one that went before.
Deeper study of the nineteenth century, a hard look at reality and longer reflection have persuaded me that you
were right.
Hence I don't doubt that the present order of things
is fated to crumble more or less everywhere and to be
replaced by a militaristic and demagogic tyranny, as arbitrary, capricious, oppressive and cruel as the worst despo·
tisms of the past. What is said on pages 289* and 311 represents my thinking.** I am so persuaded of these things
that already I am preparing myself for this unsparing, bestial despotism by, among other things, cutting down my
needs, luxuries, and expenses, because I am sure it will
leave me only my eyes to weep. Never mind, as long as it
leaves me a pen to write! As for the rebirth of the principle
of authority, to which there is reference on page 311, I believe it is inevitable but in the distant future. We shan't
live to see it. Probably this new principle of authority will
take shape around the persons, institutions, and doctrines
which will defend men against this horrid tyranny.
In short, I think that the movement that began in the
eighteenth century for the liberation of man has come to a
dreadful tyranny and a reign of force: a formidable contradiction from which there must come a political, moral, and
intellectual crisis of vast proportions of the sort that occurred at the end of the Middle Ages, when the Church
became the negation in practice of every principle of the
Gospel. We are in a situation which, in certain regards, recalls the one that gave rise to the explosion of the Reformation and the wars of religion.
As for the pages in which the deposed sovereign says
that Germany should have won the war, it seems to me
that you attribute to them a conclusive value whereas, to
me, they are of only passing importance. The second part
of the book was conceived as a medley of fragments written in accordance with tormenting changes of thought
and feeling under the impact of a blow of misfortune.
Hence there are contradictions, successive stages, jumps.
*The passage referred to runs:
"Men have deposed God and overturned all the idols they had tried to
build on his profaned altars: Science, Liberty, Democracy, Progress, Civilization. All authorities have collapsed. Therefore, force alone rules the
world. Force alone and naked, or barely covered with a red rag or a tatter
of a national flag. It rules the world as it can, with excesses and stops and
starts, without discernment, and tears it apart, for force is so weak when
alone and naked. 0 men, do not harbour illusions: in Europe the only
authority that remains is gold and iron."
**"Slowly and cautiously throughout all of Western civilization, the Revolution has done its work, the work it botched brutally in an hour in
France. Undoing the sacred legitimacy of all authorities, it has left men
no other government than force. From one end of Europe to the other,
force and need are the only authorities-both fake-men still obey."
84
The sovereign says, in his first notes, that Germany should
have won the war but, further on, he realizes that Germany was destroyed by its own strength, that it was defeated because it was too strong and had wanted to be too
strong. My real opinion on this point is expressed on pages
216-217: "Germany had to lose, because it was the
stronger ... n
~~we
wanted to be too strong ... "
This second part of the fifth chapter on confessionspages 212-223-is extremely important, because it contains the development of one of the book's most important
ideas. The first part of the chapter has a purely artistic reason for being, expressing thoughts which, in the second
part, are confuted. At bottom it serves to recall, in fitting
summary manner, the history of the war and Germany's
formidable effort. It is a warning to the states and statesmen of the Entente, who delude themselves that they defeated Germany with the power of the spirit when they
did it with the power of matter. In short, the three ideas
that I wanted to stress with the thesis and antithesis and
that are like Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth are the
following:
a) The French Revolution began a struggle between
the old principles of authority and its own principles. For
the reasons I have explained above, this struggle ended in
the ruin of all principles, old and new. As a result, Europe
after hoping for freedom for a century, has fallen under
brute force-anarchy or tyranny.
b) The world war is not the usual war won by the best
army or the army used the best. It is the bizarre, incoherent, chaotic catastrophe of a political and military system.
In this catastrophe all states exceeded the measure of
force granted human organizations. Institutions absurd in
their principles and dangerous in their exaggeration,
above all conscription armies as they developed after 1870,
were the means of this excess.
c) The responsibilities of Germany, enormous as they
are, are only partial, because from 1789 on all of Europe is
responsible. The World War is the final outcome of the
entire history of the nineteenth century-with the exception of the period from 1815 to 1848. The whole history of
Europe flowed toward this outlet. The whole history of
Europe has been an uninterrupted preparation of this catastrophe-except for the attempt of the old dynasties between 1815 and 1848 to move against the stream. That period from 1815 to 1848 strikes me as the only period when
Europe was governed with real political wisdom. Despite
its faults it would deserve rehabilitation.
If you want to write a review, these elucidations may be
useful to you. My wife holds it against me that I have written a book that is something of a riddle. I must help my
friends unravel it.
Warmest greetings,
yours Guglielmo
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�1923
Ferrero to Mosca
F1orence, May 6, 1923, 7, Viale Machiavelli
Dear Gaetano,
I have read the Elementi.* I am happy, above all, at the
freshness of your thirty-year old book. Except for a few unimportant points it could have been written today. The
outlook on the world, the spirit of the research have not
aged at all, so that reading it, one has no impression of go·
ing back a whole generation. This means that your book
has deep, vital roots. When a book stands up against the
passage of thirty years it has passed the hardest test, and
may endure for three hundred, because it is endowed with
eternal elements.
The new part completes, or rather, develops the old, by
introducing into the synthetic vision the new events and
phenomena of the last thirty years, and your further expe·
riences. You have made two books written with thirty
years between them into one book, without changing or
rewriting the first. This is a rare, perhaps unique, occurrence, and worthy of note.
What I like best in the book is what I might call its ancient spirit, that psychological realism whose origin lies in a
deep, because long thought-out, knowledge of the human
soul, a knowledge that is the necessary basis of politics,
since politics is only psychology in action. I say that your
book is soaked in the spirit of the ancients, because they
had in high degree the same deep-seated realism. You referred in the preface to Aristotle's Politics, and rightly, because your book has an honorable place in the same family. How different from the nebulous ideological fantasies
in which so many political writers are lost today!
This is the most serious, thoughtful, mature, profound
book on politics to appear in Europe in recent years. It
comes at a time at which it is most needed to lead bewildered minds back to the eternal reality of human affairs, in
which alone lies the secret of the good fortune and pros.
perity of nations. Let's hope that it is read and meditated
upon to the extent it deserves. For my part I'll do my best.
I must voice two objections or reservations of a general
character. It seems to me that you don't give sufficient importance to what you call the political formula and I call
the principle of legitimacy of governments. You seem still
to consider it a sort of pia fraus or conventional lie, useful
for justifying governmental power above all in the eyes of
the ignorant masses. I am increasingly persuaded that it is
*Elementi di Scienza Politica, Turin 1896; second edition (here referred
to), Turin 1923. English translation, The Ruling Class, New York and
London 1939.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the essential part of government and that force is only a
subordinate element, which has no true effectiveness unless it is based on the first. A government is not the real
thing unless it has persuaded all those who obey it that it
has a right to command. This is the test of all governments,
not the collecting of policemen and soldiers for the purpose of beating up recalcitrants, a police operation in
which even a Lenin, a Mussolini, and similar revolutionary
bunglers can succeed. And periods in which the right of
the government to command is uncertain and insecure are
always troubled, even if the government has great force at
its disposal.
The other reservation is this. I don't think you have
gauged the true importance of the upheaval that took
place in European civilization in the nineteenth century.
You seem to consider it a normal development of civilization, along familiar lines. But I don't see it that way.
There was a break, an overturning, a violent interruption
of the line, an attempt to overthrow some of the principles
on which all civilizations rested until the eighteenth century. To me this is a point of capital importance. Almost all
the objections which I should make to points of detail
stem from this different way of looking at the nineteenth
century.
I find, here and there, a few unimportant errors. StoJy.
pin** was not killed with bombs but with a revolver shot at
him by a student when he was sitting in a theater. Augustus did not frequently renew the Senate because the nationalistic reaction which, after Actium, brought him to
the presidency and kept him there all his life, did not allow
him or his successors to introduce many new senators.
The first to conduct an operation of this kind was Vespasian, who did not take the new families from Italy, as you
say, but from the western provinces-Cisalpine Gau~
Gaul, above all Spain, and from North Africa. Under Vespasian the Senate, which was what we might call centralItalian, became Euro-Africanl To my knowledge, under
Vespasian and in the second century, there were not many
oriental members. The East was always unwilling to accept Roman political ideas-aristocratic and republican up
to the end of the third century-that instead spread widely
among the Romanized and civilized barbarians of the
West. The East remained faithful to absolute monarchy.
This explains why the West and not the East replenished
the Roman Senate, up to the collapse of the system in the
third century.
I'm getting ready to write about your book. Greetings to
your family.
Yours
Guglielmo Ferrero
**Peter Arcadievich Stolypin {1862-1911), Russian statesman. Prime
minister in 1906, he fought revolutionary ferment with reforms, among
them agrarian reform that dissolved the mir and allowed the peasants to
own property.
85
�1934
Ferrero to Mosca
Geneva, February 17, 1934
Dear Gaetano,
I've read the book of your lessons.* It's rich, substantial,
clear, full of ideas and briskly written, apt for pleasant and
quick reading. I hope it finds many readers. Italy would
need to read books like yours.
The exposition of the doctrines of yours I know seems
precise and exact. And so I extend the same judgment to
those that are new to me. If I have any reservations, it's
about the overly intellectualizing tendency of the book. It
seems to me that you lend too much importance to ideas
as inspiring events. Ideas, in my opinion, are often the
horse-flies of history.
Rousseau, for in-stance. 1 believe that Rousseau's influence on the French Revolution has been enormously exaggerated. In the course on the Revolution that I gave here
three years ago, I maintained that Rousseau didn't make
the Revolution but that the Revolution created Rousseau.** Rousseau's books had made a certain dent but
only on a small number of people who, later, for the most
part, were against the Revolution. But when the Convention found itself isolated and without other support than
assemblage of forces amid a France in ruins, it needed, at
least, a theory to justify its power. It latched onto The Social Contract, glorifying it and making it into a sort of Bible
of democracy.
As for what you say about socialism, I think it isn't at all
exact to say that political equality makes for economic
equality. This is an argument conservatives have abused
for the last hundred years but which seems to me unfounded. The old regime was founded on political and economic inequality; the rich had all the power. I don't believe it's possible to return to this state of affairs, which
collapsed because it was excessive. Equality, economic
and political together, is impossible unless we crystallize
labor into absurd forms. I believe, therefore, that, after
many convulsions and oscillations, the world will adapt to
a state of political equality and economic inequality, such
as a number of countries have already reached. Political
equality will compensate for economic inequality, to the
advantage of the poor. Socialism has, in fact, been more
successful in countries where the government had an oligarchic and aristocratic character and there was still considerable political inequality-Russia, Germany, Austria,
Italy-than in countries where economic inequalities are
great but political equality is ensured by democratic institutions-such as the United States and England before
1914.
The theory of the political formula seems to me also to
need reenforcement. I should substitute this somewhat
neutral phrase with another, more vigorous: principle of legitimacy. Among African blacks or barbarians facts and
rights may coincide: whoever possesses the material instruments of power is thought to have the right to command. Little by little, as a country becomes more civilized,
the fact of possessing the instruments of power no longer
suffices. These instruments must have been acquired with
the observance of certain rules and principles which confer the right, recognized by all, to govern. Outside these
principles there is no longer a legitimate government;
there is usurpation. Whereas you seem to consider the political formula as a sort of plaything or game, which serves,
at best, to moderate the rulers, it seems to me that the
principle of legitimacy is a matter of the utmost seriousness, solemnity, and necessity. It is the very essence of civilization. A civilized people that falls from a legitimate government to a government of usurpation becomes infantile
again. Today, alas, two-thirds of the world's governments
are illegitimate usurpations. During the last twenty years
the world has precipitated into barbarism, just because a
large number of old legitimate governments have fallen
and made way for usurpations. For how long?! That's the
great question.
But we would need to talk all this over face to face. Cordial greetings and good wishesG. F.
Translated by Frances Frenaye
*Mosca's Lezioni di storia delle dottrine e delle instituzioni politiche,
Rome 1932.
**The last version of this course, given at the University of Geneva in
1940-1942 was published almost ten years after Ferrero's death in 1942:
Les deux revolutions francaises, 1789-1796, Neuchatel 1951. English
translation, G. Ferrero, The Two French Revolutions 1789-1796, New
York 1968.
86
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Guglielmo Ferrero and Legitimacy
Carlo Mongardini
Guglielmo Ferrero understood that in our century the
fundamental question for politicians and statesmen was
no longer the exercise of power by an organized minority,
but how to build legitimacy from below. Gaetano Mosca
and Vilfredo Pareto also knew this was the problem.
Mosca opened the academic year of 1902-03 at the University of Turin with a lecture, "The Aristocratic and
Democratic Principle in the Past and Future." 1 In 1920
Pareto wrote a series of articles in the Rivista di Milano on
the transformation of democracy. 2 But neither Mosca nor
Pareto were up to dealing with this in part new subject
because each conceived the structure of power to hinge
on elites and the substitution of one elite for another (Mosca's "circulation of elites"). Ferrero, instead, made legiti~
macy the central question in interpreting contemporary
history and saw it as the key to understanding the crisis of
the modern world.
Ferrero did not think of himself as a professional historian.3 He turned to history in the spirit of Taine,4 one of
his models, uin order to recover, in the comparison of past
and present, the today almost completely lost awareness of
certain rules of life that cannot be transgressed without
running into the reason of things." 5 His avowed desire to
"divide the study of history not into epochs ... but by
types of phenomena";6 his conception of the study of history not as an "effort to recall the past," but as "an exercise
in recognizing the differences and similarities between
past and present," show his concentration on understand·
ing the changes taking place in the society of his day. This
meant-as in the instance of Taine-a new kind of history, not political history, but the history of civil society or
rather of the changes in civil society. The orientation on
Carlo Mongardini is professor of political science at the polytechnic in
Milan. He recently edited the surviving correspondence of Gaetano
Mosca and Guglielmo Ferrero, Gaetano Mosca-Guglielmo Ferrero. Car-
teggio (1896-1934), Milan 1980.
The above article was read at a congress on Ferrero, "Guglielmo Ferrero,
tra societa e politica," at the University of Genova on October 4-5, 1982.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
society allows the application of the categories employed
in studying and interpreting the present to the past (in the
case of Ferrero to ancient Rome) .. In another sense, Ferrero simply pursues the comparison of present and past,
Hthe differences and similarities."
Ferrero was, above all, a student of society, or, as he put
it, a student of "some problems of individual and collective
life."7 We should not be surprised that such study turned
out largely political. By nature and almost by historical necessity, the study of society in Italy is political. 8 Like Mosca's theory of the political class, Ferrero's concern with legitimacy had clearly contemporary relevance. In 1923
Ferrero wrote Mosca of the significance of the principle of
legitimacy:
A government is not the real thing unless it has persuaded all
those who obey it that it has the right to command. This is the
test of all governments. Not the recruitment of a few policemen and soldiers to beat up recalcitrants-a police operation
in which even a Lenin, a Mussolini and other such Revolutionary bunglers can succeed. And times in which the right of
the government to command is uncertain and insecure are
always troubled, even if the government has great forces at its
disposal 9
To understand Ferrero's total concentration on the
principles of legitimacy, we have to recall his experience
under Fascism-clearly revealed in his correspondence,
especially in his letters to Mosca. Mosca's theory of the political class had been an argument against the corruption
of parliamentary democracy; Ferrero's concept of legitimacy was an intellectual weapon against Fascism's violence. In search of a principle oflegitimacy to give stability
to the rule and structures' of representative government,
old Europe flounders between varieties of dictatorship or
"caesarism" and the. threa~ of revolutions that, for their
part, offer no solutions,.capable of substantially modifying
the course of history.
The subject of legitimacy marks our century, especially
after the First World War. Foretold.in the works of SaintSimon, the theory of political class and elites is essentially
87
�an inheritance from the nineteenth century. New subjects
for political thought introduce the 'new century: the new
feudalism, representation, legitimacy, consent. To give
these subjects-whose pertinency is now unmistakabletheir full weight was one of Ferrero's great intuitions.
LEGITIMACY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
The inspiration of these themes by the struggle with
events tends to confirm that Ferrero did not, as has been
written, come upon the idea of legitimacy in Geneva in
1930 while preparing a course on the French Revolution
and Napoleon, lO but more than ten years earlier, as he says
himself. In Principles of Power, he tells how in 1918 a few
pages ofTalleyrand gave him the key to the understanding
of the history of Europe since the French Revolution:
It took ... a universal catastrophe and a few pages from an
old forgotten book before I became aware of the existence of
the mysterious Genii that were helping and persecuting me
without my knowledge .... The World War was just coming
to an end, and the thrones of Europe were falling one on top
of the other with a deafening clatter. To while away the
hours, I started reading some ancient and forgotten tomes
which were somewhat in the spirit of the times. One day,
while reading Talleyrand's Memoirs, I came across seven
pages in the second volume that revealed to me the principles
oflegitimacy. The revelation was momentous. From then on
I began to see clearly in the history of mankind and in my own
destiny. 11
Legitimacy completed a theory of power that Ferrero
first began to elaborate in the early years of the century.
To undo fear, that primordial condition of human nature,
and to create artificial conditions of stability and security,
man fashions power in the same way he organizes social
life and makes civilization. But power performs its task of
dispelling insecurity only to the extent that it draws upon
an objective idea that legitimates it and lends legality to its
actions. "Power can attain its proper perfection, legitimacy, only through a sort of unwritten contract." This
contract grounds power in the reciprocal promise of the
ruled to obey and the rulers to observe certain rules and
pursue certain ends. In every society legitimacy sanctions
the exercise of power. "As soon as the two parties no
longer respect this contract, the principle of legitimacy
loses its strength. Fear returns." 12 Primordial fear returns-but within society. The ruled fear the force avail·
able to the rulers, the rulers' rebellion, and the frailty of
consent on which they can rely. Power can guarantee "the
rules of the game" of living together only to the extent
that it serves the principles that give a society its direction.
Once the ties of the principles of legitimacy loosen, mistrust invades rulers and ruled: insecurity and fear slowly
88
overcome the human soul. An instrument made to combat
fear, power can incite it, both active and passive, when uit
violates the principle of legitimacy that has up to then jus·
tified it."ll The primordial condition of man, Hobbes's
state of nature, is overcome by the institution and religion
of legitimacy, power. 14 But this religion cannot do without
a rational creed, without rulers with authority and without
the consent of the governed. The principle of legitimacy
ties everything together. It is the actual living constitution
of its group. Power, however, cannot rest on an unequivo-
cal relation between rulers and governed. Like any other
institution, it has to come to terms with the basic contradiction "between human liberty and the social necessity
for reactions that can be foreseen." 15 At the basis of power
there is ambivalence, the same ambivalence that Freud
found in the same years at the foundations of civiliza.
tion, !6 and that the Berlin sociologist, Georg Simmel,
thinks accompanies all subordinationP
The principles of legitimacy attenuate this ambiva·
lence. Because they objectify the idea that endows the organization of society from below and above with meaning,
they serve to preserve subordination from abuse. Govern·
ment and the governed both submit to the idea that underlies the institution. From this idea all members of the
group draw the assurance of the obiectivity of the exercise
of power, which is intimately connected to the idea of legitimacy. Ferrero spoke of "the invisible genii of the city."
Again we are surprised by an analogy with Georg Simmel,
who speaks of the "characteristic and deeply rooted capac·
ity of both individuals and groups to draw new strength
from things whose energy stems from them." The ancient
Greeks, says Simmel, created gods "by sublimating their
own qualities" and then expected the gods to give them a
morality and the strength to practice it.lB
Ferrero's principles of legitimacy are modern gods that
men fashion then to draw from them the rules of political
conduct. These gods must remain inviolate in their sanctuaries, because, "every true authority is divine, and no
material force can violate it." 19 uMen will never acknowl-
edge other men's right to command them unless by a feeling of mystical origin which the intellect cannot explain .... A secular state is an impossible contradiction,
and the authority of the state, like that of a father or
mother, is either by nature hieratic, even when stripped of
rites, or apocryphaJ."20 Men's readiness to hold the principles of legitimacy sacred accounts for the religious dimension in politics. The religious dimension comes not only
because politics was born in temples. It inheres in the nature of political things. 21
Because of this religious dimension, the principles of legitimacy make up the actual living constitution in its organization of a group of men from above and below. They
justify power, the power to command and to rule. "Of all
the inequalities among men none has such telling conse·
quences and, therefore, such a need for justification as the
inequality that comes of power. With rare exceptions one
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�man is as good as another. Why should, one have the right
to command and the rest the duty to obey? The answer
lies in the principles of legitimacy!' 22 They make possible
"tacit agreement between rulers and ruled about the specific laws and rules that determine the conferment and
limits of power." This implicit understanding frees government "from the fear of revolt ever present in the enforced obedience of its subjects." And the subjects no
longer "fear and distrust power." 23 Legitimacy becomes a
complex mechanism which includes a choice of purposes
that must win the assent of all; means of achieving them,
clearly identifiable in institutions; a set of capable men, a
political class, with an effective, and not only formal, mandate to represent the people.
This complex picture of political realities shows the
great intuitive understanding and relevance of Ferrero's
contribution to political thought. Power amounts no
longer to the power of the elitists, to a simple matter of
fact that an organized minority conquers and wields. The
problem of power is intimately tied to legitimacy. Power
must be understood as a circular process. Through consent,24 identification, and representation, 25}egitimacy rises
from below, while power comes down from above in the
actions of the political class that exercises it.26 A more
complex conception has overcome the one-sided vision of
the elitists. The principles of legitimacy work as the invisible "genii of the city."
Through the principles of legitimacy the prevailing
needs of society find realization in an idea that underlies
the formation and guides the actions of a group. This idea
makes up, to speak in juridical terms, the actual constitution of every organization 27 It balances the force available
to the government, which achieves its objectivity through
this idea, and the consent that rises from below. With the
disappearance of this idea consent breaks up and the force
power exercises grows more pronounced and subjective in
its exercise. Mistrust and fear increase. jjNo government
can endure if it is not upheld by a certain force. But woe to
the government that wants to do and command too much!
Some force is necessary, too much is harmful. A government needs authority, prestige, respect. A government
can never have too much authority. The state is authority,
not force." 28 "The principles oflegitimacy have the task of
freeing rulers and ruled from their mutual fears. They increasingly substitute consent for coercion in their relation.
They are, therefore, the pillars of civilization. For men's
effort to free themselves from the fears that torment them
is civilization." 29
The elitists had, however, taught Ferrero that political
conflict cannot be reduced to a conflict of principles:
No principle of legitimacy can thrust itself upon a nation
solely by its own power; in the beginning every principle is
imposed by an organized minority that attempts to overcome
the repugnance and incomprehension of those who are
bound to obey 30
THE ST, JOHNS REVIEW
The time described in these lines is the time of the rise
of a new principle, the phase of prelegitimacy. For principles oflegitimacy "are born, grow, age and die. Sometimes
they differ and collide. Their life cycles and their struggles
make up the invisible web of history."l 1 Prelegitimacy involves the minority that assumes the role of introducing
the new principles. Legitimacy, in contrast, implies all the
forces at work in the political sphere, above all majority
and opposition. The opposition cannot be suppressed
without damage. "Whatever the nature of the suffrage by
which sovereign people express themselves ... , it is obvious that its will cannot be identified with either the will of
the majority or with the will of the minority, that each is a
different section of the unique sovereign will and that the
latter is to be found in the juxtaposition of the two willsmajority and minority. It is therefore impossible to suppress the will of either one without mutilating the sovereign will and drying up the source of legitimacy." 32 In a
system of solid political liberties the opposition must be
free to perform its task. "For the minority to be able to
offer a serious and fruitful opposition it requires a firmly
established system ... so that the will of the people may
not be falsified by coercion, intimidation, or corruption.
But a false majority, which would only be a disguised minority, would always be too frightened of the opposition to
allow it to make loyal use of the political freedom it needs,
or to respect the freedom of suffrage sincerely." 33 Such
conditions of "false majority" foreshadow a crisis oflegitimacy, the outbreak of force and fear on the political stage.
Anarchy spreads. And power threatened threatens in return even to the point of a recourse to a "policy of assassination," a policy that begins in the modern world with the
rise of Napoleon.l4 The break-up of legitimacy means
a return to the original condition of insecurity and precariousness. The mechanisms of defense and aggression that
men had thought laid aside forever come to life again, now
magnified by power. A power that feels threatened and attacks nascent rebellion, and, thereby, excites new and
fiercer violence.
That political struggle cannot be understood entirely in
terms of principles of legitimacy does not mean that Ferrero considers principles oflegitimacy instruments of justification in the hands of the minority that holds power.
This refusal to reduce principles of legitimacy to mere instruments of justification, distinguishes Ferrero's princi~
pies of legitimacy from the political formula of Gaetano
Mosca, at least in its early elaborations.* The principle of
legitimacy also includes the political formula but is not
equivalent to it. The two expressions, legitimacy and polit*In the last chapter of Storia delle dottrine politiche, Bari 1933, Mosca
describes the political formula (the entire chapter is translated in J. H.
Meisel, The Myth of the Ruling Class, Ann Arbor, Mich. 1958, 382-391):
One of the first results of the new method was the notion of what,
since 1883, has been known as the political formula, meaning that in all
societies, be their level ever so mediocre, the ruling class will justify its
89
�ical formula are, in fact, only in appearance similar.l5 Like
power, the political formula comes' from above. The prin·
ciple of legitimacy, however, involyes all participants in
the political process, for it provides the basis for the tacit
contract that institutes rule. The difference between legitimacy and the political formula may be subtle. In my judgment, 'however, it shows the difference in perspective
from which Mosca and Ferrero viewed the role of legitimacy in the dynamics of politics. Upon the reading of the
just published second edition of Elementi di scienza Politica in 1923, Ferrero wrote Mosca in a letter already
quoted in part:
It seems to me that you still don't give sufficient impor-
tance to what you call the political formula and I call the principle of legitimacy of governments. You seem still to consider
it a sort of pia fraus or conventional lie, useful for justifying
governmental power, above all in the eyes of the ignorant
masses. I am increasingly persuaded that it is the essential
part of government and that force is only a subordinate element, which has no true efficacy unless it is based on the first.
A government is not the real thing unless it has persuaded all
those who obey it that it has a right to command.36
As I remarked at the beginning, legitimacy had contemporary relevance for Ferrero. Ferrero wanted to understand the political crisis of his own times. He concluded
that absence or insufficiency of a principle of legitimacy
had allowed the history of modern Europe continually to
oscillate between varieties of dictatorships or Caesarism
that surreptitiously seek to restore the old principles of legitimacy and revolutions that vainly try to impose with
force new principles of legitimacy that have no place in a
quantitative civilization. The democratic principle based
on universal suffrage is too frail to sustain rule. It comes
down to number simply, to an electoral machine. It has
lost all metaphysical and moral significance.J7 It has corrupted representation. For the most part, it came from
above: "Universal suffrage was everywhere thrust upon
the masses by a minority recruited from the upper class
and supported by a few popular groups. It came from
above exactly like monarchic power. And it descended
from above because the government, after admitting that
the will of the people was alone or in part the source of
legitimate authority, was unable to stop in midstride for
power by appealing to some sentiment or credence generally accepted in
that period and by that society, such as the presumed Popular or Divine
Will, the notion of a distinct nationality or Chosen People, traditional
loyalty toward a dynasty, or confidence in a man of exceptional qualities.
Of course, every political formula must reflect the specific intellectual
and moral maturity of the people and the epoch in which it is adopted. It
must closely correspond to the particular conception of the world prevailing at that time in that particular society, in order to cement the moral
unity of all the individuals who compose it.
Any indication that a political formula has become "dated," that the
faith in its principles has become shaky, that the ardent sentiments
which once inspired it have begun to cool down is a sign that serious
transformations of the ruling class are imminent.
90
very long at arbitrary distinctions that restricted sovereign
rights to a part of the nation. The people means everyone.
A simple irresistible solution." 38 Universal suffrage also
failed to endow the collectivity with the mystery of value.
The consequences were profound: "the collapse of all
authority":
The ruin of all principles of authority in which Western civilisation believed is the greatest destruction caused by the
war. . . . All authority has collapsed. Sheer force rules the
world, force alone, stark naked, or covered up with red rags or
the torn shred of a national flag. Force governs as best it can,
with excesses and sudden starts, without discernment. It tears
the world apart. For force is so weak when it is naked and
alone. 39
With the collapse of all authority after the First World
War, Europe on the one hand entrusted itself to the myth
of "regenerative violence" that has not and never will prevail and which has only spawned various madness:
The Revolution has not won and could not win because it did
not give birth to a new principle of authority. Universal suffrage is not a principle of authority, but an electoral machine
for collecting votes and putting together assemblies, large and
small. When has the world ever been governed by a machine?
A government is eyes, arms, brains, thought, and will. A machine is a piece of blind inanimate matter, moved by external
force. 40
On the other hand, everyone in Europe called loudly for a
"strong government". But governments of that time were
a strange mixture of strength and weakness, "immense
force bolstered by tottering authority."41 All this resulted
in a series of dictatorships that could not justify their
power and sought to revive as much as possible the old
monarchial power42 Dictatorships and revolutions appealed to each other and justified each other in a vicious
cycle that kept out the crucial problem: the not merely formal, but the actual legitimacy of power. After 1930, Ferrero wrote, "The confusion becomes general. We must go
to the bottom of the problem; distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate governments by means of definitions that go to the root of the problem; study intermediate forms and drive out the mental chaos of our wandering
by the effort to understand it."43
What did Ferrero think would become of the principle
of legitimacy? Its future depended on overcoming this period of transition in which men believed they could build a
civilization solely on quantity. "The world," Ferrero said
to Bogdan Raditsa in 1939,
will not recover order, peace, and freedom to live and think
until the day it rediscovers the eternal ~rinciples of any civilisation: quality, limits, and legitimacy. 4
Mankind, or at any rate its elite, now faces a decisive turning
point: it has become too well informed, too sure of itself, too
skeptical to believe in a principle of legitimacy as a religious
WINTER/SPRJNG 1983
�absolute without wanting to know why. It wants to reason
everything out, even principles of legitimacy. Therefore it
must not remain content to reason only to the point where
every principle of legitimacy appears a'!:>surd or unjust. It
must go beyond that to the very bottom of the problem. It
must discover the nature and the task of principles of legitimacy, so that from them it may deduce rules for a rational
ethics of authority that will transform the former mystical
veneration of government into a widespread knowledge and
sentiment of respective duties: those of the government toward its subjects and those of the subjects toward the government. There is no other solution. The problem of government today looms before the West like an enormous and
precipitous mountain, full of crevasses, glaciers, and ava-
lanches, that bars the path to all mankind.45
An Augustus who could restore the state "beginning at the
beginning with the legitimacy of the government" is called
for-not a Caesar. "We shall sink deeper and deeper into
disorder until we constitute a government whose credentials are in order, whose legitimacy, or right to govern, is
unarguable before the conscience of the nation". 46
INTUITION AND LIMITATIONS IN
FERRERO'S THINKING
Ferrero's identification of several crucial elements in
the crisis in the relation of individual to society brings his
work close to us. In the context of individual and society,
the problem of legitimacy is not only a political but also a
social problem. Social life is founded on dimensions at the
same time objective and subjective. The principles of legitimacy, in Ferrero's meaning, make sense just because
they at the same time embody the objective dimension of
collective life and the subjective assent to it through identification with the institutions that carry out the principles
of legitimacy.
Principles of!egitimacy can only rise from a balance between the objective and subjective dimensions of life. But
Ferrero deals with the sames problems that Simmel
treated in his analysis of the money economy, that Max
Weber saw in terms of formal rationality, that Freud described as civilization's discontent. 48 But Ferrero concentrates his attention chiefly on the political consequences
of the crisis in legitimacy-and on the succession and alternation of varieties of anarchy and totalitarianism that
justify and reinforce each other.
The end result of doctrines that promised men liberty,
equality, and fraternity, Ferrero wrote to Mosca in 1920,
has been the coming of governments "harder and more
violent, because stronger but less authoritative ... that today are all turning into tyrannies based on money and
force .... As for the rebirth of the principle of authority, I
believe that it is inevitable but that it will come about
slowly, in a distant future. We shall not live to see it. Probably the new principle of authority will take shape around
persons, institutions, and doctrines that will defend men
against this dreadful tyranny."49
Ferrero did not mean to write political theory. From the
point of view of theory, there are, in fact, many things to
criticize: his too formalistic and sometimes too abstract exposition of legitimacy that is more bound to principles
and, therefore, to the images of legitimacy, than to the
mechanisms of consent and of identification that bring legitimacy; the consequent impression of neglect of daily realities, of the relations and interaction of social life that
produce power and legitimation; and finally his recourse
to language that too often resorts to emotion rather than
proof.
Ferrero has, however, at least two great merits. He went
beyond the power theory of the elitists. And with the theory of legitimacy he made a notable advance on the theory
of ideology and upon Mosca's political formula. Many of
Ferrero's books and many of his views show the marks of
time. I believe, however, that these two themes could provide the beginning of a new chapter in political analysis. In
Italy, Ferrero wrote, at least, the introductory paragraph of
that chapter.
Translated by Frances Frenaye
modern culture, in Ferrero's view, founded on quantity,
on the increase of numbers, on progress defined in terms
of production, on a money economy, has provoked a crisis
in the subjective dimension of social life. Faced with the
increase of complexity and at the same time with the
fragmentation of social life, with role conflicts and manifold expectations that sweep him up, the individual, as
Simmel observed, defends himself with indifference and
gives up identifications that might disturb the unity of his
mental life. 47 The impossibility of striking a balance between the objective and subjective dimensions of life is
the crisis in legitimacy. It was in its capacity to balance between subjective and objective life that Ferrero found the
"religious" implication of the principles of legitimacy.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
l. Later reprinted in Gaetano Mosca, Partiti e sinddcati nella crisi del regime parlamentare, Bari 1949.
2. Vilfredo Pareto, Trasformazione della democrazia, Milano 1921.
3. Bogdan Raditsa, Colloqui con Guglielmo Ferrero, Lugano 1939, 63.
4. Ferrero came to Taine through Cesare Lombroso, who also considered him one of his teachers. His way of conceiving and approaching history is certainly very similar to Taine's. Both men had the idea of studying the past in order to understand the reasons for a contemporary crisis,
whether in France after 1870 or in Italy at the turn of the century. It may
well be that Ferrero's sensitivity to the problem of the legitimacy of
power came also from Taine. For the relationship of Taine, Lombroso,
and Ferrero, see M. Simonetti, "Georges Sorel e Guglielmo Ferrero fra
"cesarismo" borghese e socialismo" (with 27 unpublished letters from
Sorel to Ferrero 1896~1921), Il Pensiero Politico, 5, l. On Taine, C.
Mongardini, Storia e sociologia nell'operra di H. Taine, Milan 1965.
91
�5. Guglielmo Ferrero, Lavecchia Europa e_ Ia nuova. Saggi e discorsi, Mi·
lan 1918, 36.
•
6. Guglielmo Ferrero, Storia e filosofia della storia, Nuova Antologia, November 1, 1910. Reprinted in B. Raditsa, Colloqui, Lugano 1939, 100.
7. B. Raditsa, Colloqui, Lugano 1939, 63-64~
8. Cf. C. Mongardini, Profili della sociologia italianc1, Rome 1982.
9. C. Mongardini ed., Gaetano Mosca-Guglielmo Ferrero. Carteggio
(1896-1934), Milan 1980, 331. A translation of the entire letter of May 5,
1923, appears in "Letters on Legitimacy" in this issue of the St. John's
Review.
10. Cf. N. Bobbio, "II potere e il diritto," Nuovo Antologia, Aprill982.
The exact date is important. Because if we date the idea from the course
given in Geneva in 1930, we must recall that Max Weber's Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft, posthumously published in 1921, contains a famous characterization of the forms oflegitimate power. Actually, Ferrero had amply
developed his idea of legitimacy in Memorie e confessioni di un sovrano
<kposto, Milan 1920.
11. G. Ferrero, Principles of Power, New York 1942, 18-19. This book
first appeared in an edition (published by Brentano's) in French, the Ian·
guage of its writing, in New York in 1942.
12. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942, 42.
13. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942, 42.
14. There are, however, important "differences between Ferrero and
Hobbes, Cf. D. Settembrini, "Riscopriamo Guglielmo Ferrero," Tempo
Presente, June 1982.
15. G. Ferrero, The Reconstruction of Europe, New York 1941, 32.
16. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, first published in
German at the end of 1929.
17. Georg Simmel, "Ober und Unterordnung" in Soziologie, Untersu·
chungen iiber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, Berlin 1908. Translation
in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited and translated by Kurt H.
Wolff, New York 1950, 181-306, 193:
Man has an intimate dual relation to the principle of subordination.
On the one hand, he wants to be dominated. The majority of men not
only cannot exist without leadership; they also feel that they cannot;
they seek the higher power which relieves them of responsibility; they
seek a restrictive, regulatory rigor which protects them not only
against the outside world but also against themselves. But no less do
they need opposition to the leading power, which only through this
opposition, through move and countermove, as it were, attains the
right place in the life pattern of those who obey it.
18. Cf. G. Simmel, "Comment les formes sociales se maintiennent,"
L'annee sociologique, 1897. Also, in a later, longer draft, "Die Selbsterhaltung der sozialen Gruppe" in Soziologie, Untersuchungen tiber die
Formen der Vergesellschaftung, 3 Leipzig 1923, 375-459. English translation of the earlier draft, "The Persistence of Social Groups," American
Journal of Sociology 5, March 1898, 662-698; 6, May 1898, 829-836; 4,
july 1898, 35-50.
19. G. Ferrero, Memorie e confessioni di un sovrano deposto, Milan 1920.
On the nature of principles of legitimacy, cf. also, L. Pellicani, "Rivoluzione e totalitarismo," Controcorrente, October-December 1974.
20. G. Ferrero, Memorie, Milan 1920, 280. Because of their sacred char·
acter all principles of legitimacy, even originally partly rational, "can be·
come absurd in their application." The rational element in principles of
legitimacy "is accidental, external and unsubstantial" (G. Ferrero, Power,
New York 1942, 25). Moreoever, the rationality of a principle of legiti·
macy remains internal to the principle itself (117).
21. Cf. Georges Burdeau, La politique au pays des merveilles, Paris 1979,
6 ff.
92
22. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942,22-23.
23. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942,281.
24. Ferrero showed unusual foresight in distinguishing between types of
consent, especially between active and passive content. For instance,
Power, New York 1942,40-41,278,293. On types of consent, C. Mongar·
dini, Le condizioni del consenso, Rome 1980.
25. Political representation is, in Ferrero, the "supporting structure of
the democratic system" but it does not imply a close relationship between representatives and represented. The relationship passes through
the principles of legitimacy just as every action of the government
passes through them. Cf. Pier Paolo Portinaro, "Democrazia e dittatura
in Guglielmo Ferrero," Comunitd, 33, 181, October 1979.
26. Power, New York 1942, 171.
·
27. Ferrero's recall in Power (132) of Hans Kelsen, "one of the greatest
exponents of constitutional and international law of our time," is not ac·
cidental. A little further on (143-144), he seems to subtly argue with him:
Efficacy has a role in the eternal drama of legitimacy, but a different
role from that assigned to it by contemporary thought. Though attached to it, legitimacy never depends directly on the efficacy of gov·
emment, which may increase or diminish over a long period of time
without affecting legitimacy.
28. G. Ferrero, Memorie, Milan 1920, 292-293.
29. G. Ferrero, Power, New York 1942, 48.
30. Power, 169.
31. Power, 49.
32. Power, 173-174.
33. Power, 175.
34. Power, 201-203.
35. N. Bobbio ("II potere e il diritto," Nuova Antologia, April 1982)
seems, instead, to lend them the same meaning.
36. See the discussions between Mosca and Ferrero on "political for·
mula" and "principles oflegitimacy" in Gaetano Mosca-Guglielmo Fer·
rero. Carteggio (1896-1934), Milan 1980, 330-332 and 453-55. Transla·
tions of both these letters (May 6, 1923 and February 17, 1934) appear in
"Letters on Legitimacy" in this issue of the St. John's Review.
37. G. Ferrero, Power, 53.
38. Power, 182-183.
39. G. Ferrero, Memorie, Milan 1920, 289 and 295.
40. G. Ferrero, Memorie, Milan 1920, 285-286.
41. G. Ferrero, Words to the Deaf, New York 1925, 71.
42. G. Ferrero, "Reflexions sur une agonie," L'illustration, April 21,
1928.
43. G. Ferrero, Power, 130.
44. B. Raditsa, Colloqui, Lugano 1939, 83.
45. Power, 283-284.
46. G. Ferrero, La democrazia in Italia. Studi e precisioni, Milan 1925,
107.
47. G. Simmel, "Die Grossstadte und das Geistesleben" in Die Grasstadt, Dresden 1903, 185-206. English translation, "The Metropolis and
Mental Life," in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, New York 1950, 409424.
48. Ferrero uses the concept of identification in much the same way as
Freud, and gives it much the same importance in the interpretation of
modem society. Cf. G. Ferrero, Power, 35-36,48. For Freud, Civilization
and its Discontents (1929).
49. Mosca-Ferrero. Carteggio, Milan 1980, 295-297. A translation of this
letter of January 31, 1920 appears in "Letters on Legitimacy" in this issue
of the St. John's Review.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�My Memoir of Our Revolution
from City of Ends
Daniel Ardrey
That morning his picture appeared on the wall-and on
all the walls all over the city. I saw from my window a small
crowd looking up at it-! went down to look myself. We
studied it in silence. He was a handsome man-no doubt
about it-and fair with his blond hair combed back en
brosse. Though the picture was a grainy black and white
snapshot you could see his eyes were blue-either that or
pale brown. Written beneath it were simple wordsBROTHERS AND SISTERS
UNITE
FOR
VICTORY
AND
THE
REvOLUTION!
They sent a shiver through us like a small shock-it was
the first time he was to speak to us and we weren't used to it
yet. Nor were we used to reading: our lips moved as we
read and our heads jerked on from word to word. As we
stood there looking up we all knew that this was our expec·
tation and our fulfillment. I looked around and saw tears in
some of the women's eyes-Marissa was there and snif·
fling into a much worn hankerchief. My reaction was one
of enormous relief as though a huge burden had been
lifted from my shoulders. My back straightened involun-
Daniel Ardrey lives in Boston.
The above selection comes from an unpublished novel, City of Ends.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tarily and I raised my chin. Marissa came over to me-her
eyes were reddened.
Isn't it too wonderful?
she asked.
Yes, it is
I answered-it was trueIt's what we all hoped for.
I patted her on the shoulder-! wanted to console her
though there was nothing to be sad about. His picture
alone had given us new meaning.
The rest of the day I saw small groups of people clustered in front of it speculating.
What's he like? Will we ever see him? Where' s he
from? Look at those eyes. And the chin. And the
hair. What'll he do?
And so on. The kinds of questions people asked to flesh
out their initial excitement. Because above all we wanted
to think of him as a man. There was something about his
face-perhaps the jutting of his chin, perhaps his piercing
eyes-that inspired confidence and respect. And, of
course, we saw him as the personification of our Revolution. From now on it was going to cease to be amorphous
and confusing. We were like those wakened from a deep
and troubled sleep-to see in his face that which we'd
dreamt and forgotten, or never known. I went about my
business as usual-though nothing was as usual then. It
was before and after, light and dark-a total change and so
clearly defined. If our Revolution was to have a human
face, his, it was also going to take on a personality, also his.
That would make it so much easier to understand, I
thought-no longer were we going to be perplexed and
baffled and because of it always afraid. No, this was itand the act of reading his words gave me a feeling of intimate relation to him. Although he was addressing us as
brothers and sisters we couldn't be that-we would have
to be children and led. Not that we'd mind-it was only
93
�logical. The Revolution had made us all children anyway.
Though some of us were older than others, the Revolution
had led us into a world that was fresh and clean and beautiful-like a child's. There was also the unknown-so much
of it I couldn't say-that's where he came in. Like a father
he'd tell us what was and what wasn't. That is to say, define our beliefs and behavior. We all had a sense of this-in
some way or another-and if we were discussing the color
of his eyes or hair we were also thinking of these other
things.
I went about my business humming, arranging things on
my shelves. The shutter to my shop was half up and while
my back was turned Roderigo came in. I heard his voice
behind me and knew who it was.
Well, what do you think?
What?
Is he for real? Or is it a plot? Somebody out to get
us.
I was so startled I dropped what I had in my hand. I had to
bend down to pick it up before I turned to him. I saw he
was serious.
How can you think that?
I said.
It wouldn't make sense.
Maybe not. Or maybe not now, maybe later.
Roderigo shrugged with his face, his shoulders didn't
move, and sat down on an orange crate. He took a toothpick from his coat pocket and began to pick at his teeth.
We'd be fools to fall for it if it weren't for real,
wouldn't we?
he went on.
I suppose so,
I said. I sat down on something and scratched the side of
my forehead-it was to give me time to think. He was
studying me with great care.
You know,
he beganWe all think we're so clever. I mean that we know
how to get by. And we do. Look at us.
He moved his hand palm upward in a half circle.
But what else do we know?
Pause. He answered his own question.
Not much, maybe nothing. We don't have the
faintest idea what we're getting into, do we?
Maybe not,
I said thinking how best to phrase itBut everyone was thinking the same thing at the
same time. It was like we all knew what was going
to happen and didn't know what it was.
My turn to pause.
That means something, you can't deny it.
I don't.
He took the toothpick and balanced it on his forefinger.
He studied it for a momentIt's his face that frightens me. Maybe any face
would, but this one more than most.
94
I don't feel it,
I said-
Nobody else did, you'll get used to it. Maybe you'll
even trust him.
Maybe.
He wiped the toothpick on his sleeve and put it back in his
pocket. It was going to be one of those conversations without an end. He got up, looked over my shelves and
shrugged-this time with his shoulders and not his face.
Then he went out without a word. Roderigo was one of
those people who made you feel like you'd made another
mistake-and that you'd go on making them. Usually he
did it with a laugh-this time he didn't. I didn't care. It was
his problem, not mine. I never like to convince someone of
anything-my convictions were for myself. I didn't even
think much about them. I thought that I was born with
them. And that we all were. I believed that the Revolution
was a victory for all of us-whether or not we believed
in it.
It was the kind of day I kept trying to remember something I wasn't trying to forget. All day it was there. Like a
little particle of sand irritating the tissue around it. By the
time I lay down and fell asleep I'd been exhilarated so long
I was exhausted. It was then I realized-almost dreaming
it -that it was in fact the Anniversary of our Revolution.
How amazing he should've appeared then!
His name was Kamal. It was one of many things we were
soon to find out about him. After the first wall poster there
were many others-each one with his picture at the top
like an emblem. Or like his signature-in this case its position reversed-as if he'd signed his statement at the beginning to ensure its authenticity. That way we were to know
what followed was genuine and to be believed in. Each
morning I looked down at the wall from my window-the
shutters now left open day and night-and saw there was
another poster up. I threw on my clothes and raced downstairs. Others on the street did likewise-some of us stood
still buttoning our shirts or still combing our hair. We soon
got better at reading-our lips moved less-though there
was still a murmuring as we read. It was communal: we did
it together and enjoyed it. We didn't even notice that for
the first time we were together and that it was through and
because of him.
He told us a great deal about himself-his life history as
it were-but always in passing. His main subject was-as it
had to be-the Revolution. But we knew about that-or
thought we did-so it was him we were curious about. He
seemed to realize this. At the end of a short textWINTER/SPRING 1983
�THE REVOLUTION MUST GO ON, DO NOT
BETRAY IT, YOU ARE THE BYES AND
EARS, BEUEVE IN THE REVOLUTION AND
IT WILL BEUEVE IN YOU
and so on-were a few lines about himself. It was these we
read and reread until each of us knew his life history by
heart. His poor parents and their harassment by the tax
collectors of the Old Regime. How his brother had died as
a child from starvation. How his mother had wept and carried the body for days even though it was lifeless. How his
father had worked twelve and fourteen and sixteen hours a
day for a pittance. How he-Kamal-had had to work as
hard as a child-and how he'd begun to read. His reading
fascinated us-we did little of it ourselves and thought
that a man of action would do likewise. No, in his youth he
was almost scholarly. He'd gone to a seminary, then to a
university on scholarship, and then on to do post graduate
work abroad-all this while he worked nights as a sole support of his family. His father had become a cripple-victimized by a work accident that twisted his back and for
which there was no compensation. His mother had great
difficulty breathing-from the noxious fumes she'd had to
inhale at her factory. It was almost a blessing when she'd
died-for her last years were spent gasping for breath like
a fish out of water. We read in awe of someone who could
transform himself from such a background to a life of
scholarship-and then out of nowhere to become the embodiment of the Revolution.
The wall posters became a vital part of our lives. You
saw parents taking children down to read them-then children saying them to themselves as they walked home. The
wall posters were not easy to read-they were pasted one
on top of the next and the wall itself was often pitted and
cracked to begin with. So reading one wall poster was a
reminder-admittedly subconscious-of all the others you
had read that were under it. In this way, the Revolution
that often seemed to have little or no history began to take
on a collective past for us. There was another problem
with them-their printing. We had little experience of it
and whoever was doing it was learning his craft as he went.
There were differently shaped letters in the same word,
smeared ink that ran in the rain, and lines of printing that
went up to edge of the poster and off it -so between that
and the line below was a gap of meaning our reading had
to leap over. We learned to interpret these signs as we
learned to read-they made the text all the more intriguing. At the bottom of each poster was an imprimatur in
tiny letters-Errico studio, it said. We wondered where
that was-we never knew. What an honor to be the first
among us to read his thoughts-like walking up to him and
shaking his hand.
At this point there were those who had doubts. About
him. About the course of the Revolution itself. As days
went by and summer began I heard more and more people
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
whispering. I thought of Roderigo. I hadn't seen him since
he'd confided in me. I was sure I had doubts myself-to
have seen Kamal in person would've dispelled them for
me. And for most of us. But he didn't appear. We weren't
dealing with an ordinary man. He knew of our doubts as I
was sure he knew of everything in our minds. I always got
the feeling he could read them-the same way we read his
through the wall posters. Before long we read there would
be a sign-one that would show each of us that he was real
and the real extent of his powers.
THERE IS GOOD AND THERE IS EVIL IN
THE WORLD. THE REVOLUTION IS GOOD.
ALL ELSE IS EVIL.
It was simple-we understood.
THERE IS ONE TRUTH AND THAT IS THE
TRUTH OF THE REVOLUTION. IT IS UKE
LIGHT. WITH IT YOU CAN SEE AND WITHOUT IT YOU ARE LOST IN THE DARK.
BROTHERS AND SISTERS, BELIEVE!
We wondered what that sign was going to be. There was all
sorts of speculation. People spoke of a trembling of the
ground or other kinds of apparently natural phenomena.
Perhaps we got a little too metaphysical in our enthusiasm.
When his sign came it was as striking as it was appropriate
and all the more convincing for us.
It was late one evening and I was in my room sitting by
myself in the dark. I heard a scratching at the door. It was
Oggi-who else? He was among the sceptical but I sensed
in him someone waiting to believe. I let him in and he
dropped his weapons in the corner with a clunk. I made
some coffee and we sat sipping it. The windows were open
and there was a pleasant breeze blowing the curtains back
and forth. They brushed against my arm from time to
time-for a moment I thought I'd been touched by some
hands. It sent a sensation through me I wasn't sure of. It
was as we sat there-the two of us not talking-that we
began to see it happening. The city was lighting up. Bit by
bit. The area by the marina went on. Then that near the
National Museum. Then near the foot hills. Oggi and I put
down our mugs as one and stood up to lean out. We still
didn't speak but our shoulders rested against each other.
Then my own room lit up and it became as bright as day.
Brighter. It was blinding. We turned from the window to
try and look. I shielded my eyes. There were flashes that
seemed to go off in my head. I blinked a few times and
began to see. There was a single light bulb hanging from
the ceiling by a cord-l'd long ago forgotten about it. And
there it was on again. I laughed. Spasmodic. Nervousness
mostly. And the expression in Oggi's face was miraculous.
A cross between anger and being hurt. Then amazement.
95
�He went up to the bulb and touched it with his finger. He
jerked it back and brought it to his ,mouth. It was already
too hot. He was shaking his head back and forth. Of course
he knew what it was-we all did-but electricity was so
strange for us. To have been without it for so long and
then to have it again-that was ridiculous. There was a
switch on the wall that'd been there all the time-! went
over to it and moved it down. The bulb went out. I moved
it up and the bulb went on again. Oggi laughed and put
out his finger to touch it-then stopped. He smiled at me
and shook his head. Then he went to the switch and
flicked it back and forth several times. The light went on
and off again. Each time we laughed and louder. And
harder. Soon we were laughing so hard Oggi got the hiccups. I slapped him on the back and he stood hiccuping
and shaking his head.
Unbelievable!
he gaspedUnbelievable!
I couldn't have agreed more though the strange thing was
that we did believe. And we knew we owed it all to Kamal.
That summer was so mild. The breezes came off the sea
and kept the city cool and temperate. It was so pleasurable.
We felt a new and assured sense of security.
It was a time for hard work and no play-Kamal told us so
and we believed.
THE REVOLUTION WANTS YOUR SPIRIT
AND YOUR HANDS
we read-and all of us wanted to join in. Oggi came bythis time his hands were empty and he carried no
weapons.
I buried them,
he answered my inquiring lookI'm not going to be needing them.
And he was gone-in search of a trowel or some digging
implement. Such was our confidence! In ourselves. In Kamal. I walked wherever I pleased and in the middle of the
street. All over I saw groups of children and young
adults-they were picking up bricks, one by one, and setting them in piles. For so long the city had been a place
caught in mid-movement-it was the Revolution that had
stopped it like that. I passed a bank where the construction
looked like it was still going on. The hoists were in place,
mortar had hardened on the trowels, the ladders still led
up from floor to floor. It was these things we thought we
could get going again. Everywhere there were people
96
clearing and scraping and washing off. When I walked past
they looked up and waved-then went back to their work.
There was a sense of camaraderie-to be out and working
together felt so good. Because it was for us-and for him.
I had my problems-that is, my business. There were so
many things I'd saved up that were all of a sudden of no
use-most obviously, candles. I was loathe to throw them
away so I simply stuck them in the back of my shop. You
could never tell, I told myself-how often I'd predicted
one thing only to have another happen. My motto was to
keep it -whatever it was-even if at the time it made no
sense. I had to find new things-and fast-so I was out
looking around the city for one thing in particular. Light
bulbs. I'd had to wade through piles of junk to get my
hands on one of seventy-five or a hundred watts. For me it
was a new technology-to survive I had to adapt to it.
Wherever I found one I unscrewed it from the socket and
wrapped it in tissue paper. Light bulbs were so fragile unlike most of what I carried-candles were a lot easier to
take care of but then no one was going to want them. I
spent my days walking all over the city looking for light
bulbs-and I found them. Where I expected-where
they'd been left-in apartments and offices long since
abandoned. To me they were small and precious and delicate. And it wouldn't be long before everyone else thought
so too. We were so excited by the electricity that we left
our lights burning day and night. You'd see people switching them on and off for the sheer fun of it-like Oggi and
me. When it was dark and I was walking around I could
look in and see the bulbs burning. People were gathered
under them and looking up. No one drew their shades or
closed their shutters-at night we had no sense of our own
exposure. It was still so new to us. But I knew that sooner
or later the bulbs we had were going to go out-and others
would be in demand. I was trying to get my hands on every
last bulb I could find-to be ready for that time.
I had always to be one step ahead-if not I'd never make
it. The Revolution was carrying me and everyone else
along with it-that is, we never knew what was going to
come next. Everything-whether living or not-was part
of it-light bulbs as much as the rest. So meaning was
everywhere. If I had one ability above all it was my apprehension of this. It was easy to see that people were part of
the Revolution-even a child knew that-but many of us
never knew that things were also a part of it. Perhaps what
gave me so much confidence in Kamal was my sense that
he understood this too.
THE REVOLUTION IS IN YOUR HANDS. WASH
THEM! THEY MUST BE CLEAN!
EACH THING YOU TOUCH IS THE REVOLUTION.
IT IS THERE BEFORE YOU. IT IS THERE
AFTER YOU. REMEMBER YOU ARE NEVER
ALONE!
WINTER/SPRJNG 1983
�The most evident thing about his writings was his fondness for exclamation marks. I'd forgotten at first what they
were for-someone reading a wall poster next to me had
told me. Then I'd understood. How mcire than anything
else they conveyed his sense of urgency and emotion. It
was strange for us to think of him as emotional-the Revolution as we'd understood it had no room for that. It was
Kamal who showed us how mistaken we were. He made it
come to life for us.
THE REVOLUTION IS YOU. IT LIVES IN
YOUR HEART. IT BREATHES AS YOU
BREATHE. BELIEVE IN IT AND YOU WILL
UVE FOREVER!
Perhaps that's why we were no longer afraid of it-to be in
fear of yourself wasn't the same thing as to be in fear of the
unknown. Kamal made the Revolution familiar to us all.
He made us see it was something to feel for and even to
love.
Love wasn't too strong a word. We had no word that
meant the same thing all the time-or even for very long.
Love came closest to that. It wasn't a word I'd have used
for someone else-not for Oggi, much as I cared for him.
Nor for my mother, though you were supposed to love
your mother. She had made that relationship one that
couldn't be expressed by a word. The Revolution was different-it was in direct contact with each of us. It was Kamal who showed us what that meant.
LOVE THE REVOLUTION AND IT WILL LOVE
YOU BACK!
To us it was true and like so many things he showed us we
saw it as if for the first time. I always thought he could read
our minds but was more than that, he knew what we were
going to think before we thought it. In that sense all time
was present to him at all times-while we kept living our
day to day lives. When we read
THE REVOLUTION MAKES YOU JOYOUS
TODAY. YOU WILL BE SADDENED TOMORROW.
it was so. The next day our mood changed. We were subdued-some of us cried. I was ashamed of myself. Marissa
came by. I gave her what she wanted and asked for nothing
in return. She was part of us and understood. Her eyes
were wet and she reached up and touched me on the
cheek. Then shook her head.
I don't know
she said! don't know. I feel sort of sick like something's
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
gone out of me. I've lost something and I don't
know what.
I felt that way. I didn't say it. I helped her out of my shop
and down the street. I felt saddened by the rocking of her
limp against me. That mood didn't last.
THE REVOLUTION IS PEACE. PEACE BEYOND WORDS. As THE REVOLUTION IS
BEYOND WORDS. PEACE BE WITH YOU!
We felt better. There was Kamal again-penetrating into
each of our hearts and minds. Holding us. Gentle. Reassuring. For Oggi-for me-for everyone-he was more than a
father. He was fatherhood, too. Imagine-then-what it
was like to hear his voice for the first time!
It was late summer-hot, not unbearable. I sat in my
room wondering what to do next. I'd sold all my light
bulbs. They'd gone in a flash when their true value became apparent. Once the old light bulbs had all gone out.
There were no more to be had. I'd gone through more
piles of junk looking for them-no luck, they weren't
there. Much to my amazement I'd begun to start selling
candles again. That's what I meant about my business being unpredictable. Now the problem was what I was going
to live on next. That's what I was thinking about when I
heard it. A rumbling. Like distant thunder. I brushed the
curtains aside-there were no clouds. I listened some
more. It was continuous. I went down into the street. Everyone else was there-including Roderigo and Old Jubal.
I hadn't seen either in a long time. Roderigo winked at me.
Old Jubal adjusted his canes and waved with one handthe same gesture as if he'd opened a door. The rumbling
was there and getting louder. All of us were looking up at
it. There was a small black box-some form of loud
speaker, I supposed-affixed high up on a building. The
rumbling was coming from it-not continuous as I'd first
thought. Spaced. In a monotone.
OmOmOm
Pause
OmOmOm
Pause again.
Om Om Om
I felt like I was looking into something-there was movement and getting closer. My head began to ache some.
Then a crackle. High pitched. So piercing our first reflex
was to clap our hands over our ears-the crackle came
through them-through flesh as through stone. So when
97
�the voice began there was relief and a collective sigh. For a
few moments our ears kept ringing. I wasn't sure what I
heard. The words seemed to have echoes to them. It was a
man's voice-curiously shrill and feminine and sounding
none too cheerful. It took us a while to figure out whose it
was-though there was no one else's it could've been. I
was standing behind Old Jubal and saw him stroking the
grey stubble on his chin. Then his hand came out to mehis canes moved and he came closer.
It's him
he whispered. I didn't hear him. I was straining to hear the
voice from the black box.
It's him! Kamal!
This time I heard. There was a rustling among usRoderigo was nodding his head beside me. I realized it
too-how strange! We hadn't thought of him having a
voice-much less a voice like this one. It was so unpleas·
ant-like a querulous school teacher we'd long ago forgotten. Then there it was again. We were face to face with
it-and with him. Kamal. A real person, voice and all,
when we'd gotten used to him as a manifesto on a wall.
He knew this. He was still reading our minds:
Some of you may not like my voice, I don't like it
either. In fact, I don't think of it as my voice. It's
too harsh. It's not how I think of myself. It hap·
pened to me under torture. It was the torturers of
the Old Regime, they did it to me. You don't
know what it is, torture. I hope you never find out.
It destroys your body and your mind, one through
the other. The people who do this to other people
are no longer people.
Pause. There was some static. Kamal went on.
I lived through it somehow. You can if you believe
each day is your last, if you're willing to give it up,
all of it. I was. I didn't know what this meant. You
can't know while it happens to you, no one can.
Afterwards my voice was never the same.
Another pause. None of us moved. We stood with our eyes
fixed on the black box.
It took me a long time to get used to it. I'd stand in
front of a mirror and practice saying words. None
of them sounded right to me. I hated them. I
hated those who'd done this to me. Then one day
I realized something. I don't know how we find
out such things, they come to us from elsewhere,
as though there is another presence in us at that
time. What had happened was that my voice was
no longer mine alone. It was mine and that of the
Revolution. The Revolution was going to speak
through me. It was the pain and screaming that
took my own voice from me. It was the Revolution
that gave it back to me with a meaning. That is
why I wanted you to hear me. Some of you will be
disappointed. Then you will hear me again and
again. You won't notice it any more. It'll be the
most natural thing in the world. Like your own
98
voices that you hear every day. Because it is not
me you are listening but yourselves. There is one
voice for all of us. I listen. I look. I can even look
· into you. I know what it is you need, I know you as
I know myself. We are all children of the Revolution. That is why we are brothers and sisters. It is
the Revolution that gives life, life and meaning. It
is as close to truth as we can get. Without it we are
lost. So I say to you, believe in the Revolution, believe in its truth. If anyone tells you otherwise,
they lie.
There was the crackle again. Then
OmOmOm
and silence. It hung in the air around us. We were stunned
and didn't move. I wanted to cry like a little boy. I felt Old
Jubal reach out and touch me. I looked down at him. His
whole face was shades of grey, his skin, his stubble, his
hair. It was his eyes that were so striking-they too were
grey and flecked with something that sometimes shone.
Like now.
Well, my friend, we've heard him
he whispered
Let's go home.
I didn't know where his was or if he had one-I assumed
he meant mine. He got his canes moving and we moved
off-! was behind him. I didn't want to go-I felt I was
tearing myself away. There was something about the place
where I'd stood as I listened. There was something about
his voice. It was hard to get used to and hard to forget. It
was from then that we truly began to believe in Kamal. I
supposed it was because his voice was so unexpected. It
was the unexpected in the Revolution that always convinced us because it had no precedent.
What do you think of him?
I meant Kamal. This time I saw his head shift and even in
the dark I saw a kind of sparkle in his grey eyes.
We need him
Old Jubal saidWe need him as much as he needs us. Without us
he's nothing. And he knows it.
That was his answer-all of it. I waited for more-there
wasn't any. Old Jubal was that way-cryptic-enigmaticsometimes illusive. Questions weren't much help-he
talked about what he wanted to talk about. Often his
dreamsThey are as life
he saidOnly more so.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�I didn't know much about dreams-I 4sually couldn't tell
if I had any. Old Jubal said he remembered each one.
I had five last night
he went on.
Let me tell you some, my friend. In one I was a
little boy again with my feet. I was playing football. Dribbling. I must've been a center forward. I
was dribbling back and forth from one goal to the
other. No one could catch me. The players on
both teams tried to catch me. They couldn't.
They couldn't get near the ball. I kept it. It danced
from my feet as through on a string. Then they
got me cornered. All of them. Like dogs. I began
bouncing it on my head. They were jumping up
and down around me trying to get it. They wanted
to reach out and grab it with their hands. They
couldn't, they couldn't touch it.
He paused.
My friend, I am always afraid. You should be too.
I shrugged. I wasn't-for the time being.
Not now
I said.
You should be, you must be.
He answered.
The Revolution needs people. It feeds on them. I
go all over. I see things other people don't see.
There are so many parts of the city, large parts,
with no one there. I ask myself where they are.
Can you tell me where they are, my friend?
I didn't know-! didn't say.
I'll tell you. They've been eaten!
What? Eaten? Ridiculous! How? Why?
He was thinking. I was too. What did he mean? I couldn't
say it was nonsense-Old Jubal wasn't like that-! had to
figure out what he meant. It was dark now. The candle
flickered and went out. There was a faint glow from the
city's lights-whitish. The stars again looked brighter now
that the lights were less.
It's simple. You won't like it, my friend. The Revo·
lution is hungry all the time, starving. It doesn't
like dogs and cats. If it did there aren't enough of
them anyway. And they're scrawny. So what's it
going to live off? The answer's obvious.
Pause.
Us! Look how nice and plump we are. Even when
we don't eat much. Not you so much. Not me. The
others. I'm old and I stink. After my good meal of
beans and hot sauce I might taste good. I doubt it.
But think of all the boys and girls out there. And
they're so young and tender. All that meat! Do you
think the Revolution can resist?
You don't really believe this?
I exclaimedIt isn't possible.
It is, my friend, it is. What I mean is this. The Revolution is living off us, it has nothing else to live on.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
And when we are gone it will go too.
I heard the clatter as he bent and picked up his canes. It was
so dark I couldn't see his face-there was some light on the
table beween us.
I'm old
he said
And I don't taste good. It doesn't matter much to
me. It's all the others I'm afraid for. And that
means you. Think about it.
Pause.
Now it's time to sleep and dream.
We did. That night I dreamt for the first time I could
remember.
We got up and set off down the street. It was then that
we heard the
Om Om Om
and the crackle that followed it. There wasn't anyone else
under the black box above us so we stopped by ourselves.
Brothers and sisters
it began-it was Kamal, of course-by now we knew his
voice by heart.
I must be honest with you. I have bad news. The
Revolution is in danger. What I can't say at this
time. Believe me it is. I will reveal it in due course.
It is a danger to all of us. It comes from within and
without. We must be vigilant.
He paused and there was a coughing. The first time I'd
heard him cough-strange to hear. Oggi looked over at
me-l shrugged. Kamal went on-the first few words halt·
ing as if to catch his breath.
The Revolution is a living thing. We must never
forget that. Like any thing that lives it can be
threatened. A threat to it is a threat to all of us. And
a threat doesn't always look like what it is. We must
learn to look for it. Look for anything that doesn't
fit in. Anything strange, anything unknown. You
know the Revolution. It is yours. Look for things
you don't know.
He paused again. I thought I heard music in the background like a band on parade. He coughed some and muffled it with his hand over his mouth. Much as we thought of
him as the embodiment of the Revolution, I didn't think
we thought of him as a man like other men. Even his shrill
voice made him distinct. His coughing had the opposite
effect. It sounded all too human. We waited and he went
on.
To conclude. There is a clear and present danger.
There are always others who would take my place.
99
�You will not know them. They will not know you as
I do. They haven't my face 'or my voice. Beware of
them. I will be among you ..
There was the crackle and the Om sound and Oggi and I
stood looking up at the black box expecting more. I felt he
was talking to each of us-as if he were present in the box
and looking down at us. Kamal was so enigmatic-we could
never be sure what he meant. There was danger, yes, but
what kind? how to look for it? and how for him to be among
us? The idea of his walking around shaking hands seemed
preposterous. That clearly wasn't what he meant. But we
were learning-always-to wait and watch. The Revolu·
lion had so much to teach us. I felt a little like a child who
had still to learn not to touch what was hot because it
burned.
the morning at the same time I opened my shutter-then
someone would come along and raise it. Like Marissa or
Roderigo. They'd sayThese are really worth twice as much
once they bought it After they left I doubled the price. By
midday I might've gone up two or three times-particu·
larly if it was something people really wanted-like ice on a
hot day in summer. Or in late spring as it then was. Ice was
a marvelous commodity because it melted and was so per·
ishable. I kept it buried in sawdust in the basement and
brought little chunks of it up-gradually at first, then to·
ward the end of the summer all at once. My timing had to
be so precise. If I waited one day too long by then it was
worthless. That's what had happened to Kamal's coins.
They shrank in value day by day. What was more amazing
they shrank in size too. They got lighter. His image on them
got blurred. And the metal itself changed color. It got redder, then turned bluish and finally went green. I asked for
more and more of them in exchange for less. A pack of
cigarettes, for example-especially good American ones
like Viceroys or L and Ms. These went from a handful of
coins to a bagful in the space of a few days. As always
Marissa caught on fast-she started buying cigarettes
when I'd thought she didn't smoke. It wasn't the cigarettes
she was after-it was the coins she wanted to avoid.
How to read the Revolution: that was the trick. It wasn't
simply a question of reading the wall posters-by now
these appeared with monotonous regularity and were read
and as soon forgotten. Nor did we pay that much attention
to his voice-it still came on at all times of the day or night
and we listened while doing something else. Having heard
his story the first time the retelling of it held no great inter·
est for us. His voice we got used to also-the shrillness of it
we came to think of as artifact of the broadcast itself. When
he told us to be on the alert we paid attention-for a timethen our attention lagged. Perhaps we already recognized
that the Revolution would go its own way-not that he,
Kamal, would lead it. He never appeared to us in personwe began again to doubt his existence-in spite of the elec·
tricity and the coins. We might have thought differently
had we to approach him on bended knee or grovelling on
our stomachs. Then we would've thought of him as a
God-but we didn't. I didn't know how it happened: how
we came to think of him as simply another image-as de·
based in time as the coinage on which his face appeared.
That was of more interest to us. The reading of it for a
while was a great skill like divination. Particularly to me in
my business-the coins even without any denomination
were as tricky as the Revolution itself. I'd learned to accept
them-take them as money-when I no longer cared much
about money. I took them in lieu of things. I'd fix a price in
100
The Revolution played such games with us. We were
children to it-the city and all of it our playground. We got
used to this or thought we did-it was all a game, we
thought. Perhaps that's why the real children were so good
at it. They caught on fast. They didn't have a sense of time
to hold them back. And that's why we thought so little of
the past, if at all. It was an impediment to us, a dangerous
one. To get rid of it-to forget-was to be ready for what
came next. I wasn't. I was waiting for her to come back.
This time I hadn't forgotten.
Old Jubal paused and ran his right forefinger along his lips.
I knew the sign-it meant a story.
When I was a student,
he began,
I wasn't very good, as a student. I'm always forget·
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�ting things-simple things. Like how to multiply
and how to spell and each subject we get to I think,
"This is the hardest subject. I'll be so glad to get
through it." But, no, my friend, it wasn't. There
were harder subjects. And harder teachers to go
with them. I had to learn algebra and trigonometry
from an Egyptian. And chemistry and physics
from a Greek.
Pause.
I never get over it. When I think it's going to get
easier it doesn't. So I leave.
I quit school. I never go back. Maybe I join the
army-maybe I drive a taxi. It doesn't matter. I
don't remember. I forget it with all the things I
studied. All I learned is this-to give thanks for
the present. So simple, eh?
He raised an eyebrow.
You know what I mean?
I nodded. Old Jubal sometimes took a long time to get to
the point. He jabbed his finger at me.
No, you don't. If you did you wouldn't be here.
I looked down at my feet. I didn't want to say anything to
offend him. I let him go on for a while-I wasn't paying
much attention. I thought of Lelia for a bit-then of what
I had to get done that day. Suddenly his canes were moving and he propelled himself over and against where I sat.
My friend, suppose I tell you that in days all of this
will be gone. Poof. Like that.
He made a gesture with his left hand as he said it -the
fingers shot out from his closed fist and then closed again.
Gone. Like you're in a desert and dying of thirstyour lips are swollen and black. You stink like I
stink.
I raised my hand to say no-to say I didn't mind. He
brushed it aside and went on.
Eh? what does it matter? You see palm trees,
some silver water below them. So you run. You
can't breathe but you run. You get there. And
what do you find? Eh? Surprise. No surprise.
More sand. Nothing but sand.
He paused.
It's like that, you know. To me this Revolution is a
living thing. It needs to eat and drink. Nobody
sees this now. They will. It's going to get thirsty.
It's going to suck up everything in sight. And all
the things you can't see. You and me with it.
Nothing is ever going to be the same-except
worse.
He was sweating-he wiped the sweat from his forehead
with the back of his hand. I don't know what I'd expected
him to say. I believed him-why not? It was always that I
didn't know what it meant. I got up to get him another
cigarette-the air was thick with smoke-! smelt it all over
myself. He didn't want it-he waved me to sit down. His
eyes fixed me.
You still don't know what I mean.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
It wasn't a question.
I don't know myself. What it means for all of us. If
I did I wouldn't be here.
We sat. I thought of Lelia. She didn't belong in our company-the city wasn't a place for her. It was better for
those like Old Jubal and me-those who didn't expect
much-those who didn't care much when they didn't get
it. That was the Revolution again-doing things to timegetting rid of the past and the future. To leave us with a
present that had so few references to it. I should've left
then-! should've listened-! should've known. I didn't. I
had a sense of fear.· That should've been enough. I
should've taken her and gotten out. It wasn't going to be
like that though.
Somehow we'll manage. I always seem to get by,
I said and I left it at that. He scowled at me and opened his
mouth. I saw the gold filling flash.
What about her?
he asked and got up and got his canes moving. He brushed
past me and was gone. It was then it struck me-l didn't
know whom he'd meant. I hadn't told him about Lelial'd never mentioned my mother. With Old Jubal that
didn't matter-he knew there was someone else.
It was Oggi who told me-although I could've found out
from anyone. He came early-I heard his scratching at the
door and let him in. It was drizzling and his face and matted hair glistened with it. He was bursting to tell me-but
wouldn't until I'd asked him over and over. Then it came
out-there were rumors throughout the city that Kamal
was gone.
See!
he smirked! told you so! Didn't I tell you? I knew it.
And then-spitting out his contemptWhat else could you expect from someone like
that?
I didn't answer-there wasn't one. We knew something
had happened-it took us time to find out what. There
was a great surge of happiness, almost elation. And there
was also a sense ofloss. No one knew what to do next. Now
everything seemed possible. Oggi and I headed out into
the street to see what was going on. All sorts of rumors
were on everyone's lips. There was a rustle among people
like dried leaves-on each face, expectancy. As the day
went on we got more and more excited-by the sense of
ourselves and the Revolution. The drizzle stopped. The
clouds broke up and moved west. The sun shone brightly
on streets that were slick and wet. Oggi and I walked aim-
101
�lessly. I wished Lelia were with us-that would've made
the day perfect. I intended to go and get her. I didn't. Per·
haps because I didn't like to think of her as part of the Revolution. To me she was something secret and private-and
all the more precious for being so.
Oggi got more impetuous. He dragged me along behind
him when I wanted to stop and chat. There were rumors
flying all over-that Kamal had fled by boat or by land or
that he'd been picked up by plane. That he'd taken hundreds of suitcases with him containing the sum total of our
wealth. That he was limping and coughing as he went and
hadn't long to live. Strangely we didn't care why. We
pushed and jostled each other in the streets-we slapped
each other on the back and clasped hands. There was a
great feeling of togetherness and moment like swallows
out at sunset and circling. We all felt part of the great undertaking that was our Revolution. No longer was it personified by a man. It was greater than any of us, no matter
how great he might seem. With Oggi that afternoon I felt a
great sense of clarity and companionship. The high purpose of the Revolution was raising us above ourselves. It
was such a great feeling-it was all over so soon. Amazingly, we never knew we were a city under siege until it
was over. We went back to our rooms and slept that night
and dreamt of the Revolution in myriad forms-and while
we did so it ended.
Like that.
Or so it seemed.
The following morning we found out what had taken
place without our knowledge. Oggi and I were hanging out
the window. The air was crisp and the sun bright. He was
humming to h1mself.l was scratching my head-! always
had this itch there when I woke. Then both of us stopped
what we were doing.
What's that?
he said. I looked out and saw it too. For there it was-a
small dark figure at the far end of the street-looking like
anyone else walking down it. Except it wasn't. We knew at
once it wasn't. It got closer-it turned out to be a boyabout Oggi's age or a little older. He was walking nonchalantly down the middle of the street-as if he knew it well
or didn't care. He wasn't one of us-that was for sure. He
was dressed in black and wore a soft hat. His chest was
crisscrossed with bandoliers and there were weapons over
his shoulders and in each hand. It was most of all his face
that was different. More angular than one of ours and
much darker. As he got closer we saw it was leathery as if
endlessly burned by the sun. We saw him look up and see
us-sort of. There was no reaction beyond the flicker of
his eyes.
He went on and many others like him followed. We saw
them filling the end of the street. They made it black with
their bodies. They moved down it until there was nothing
but blackness in it. They weren't all the same. Some were
older. Many were younger and no more than children.
Some had armbands that showed authority. They were all
102
heavily armed-like walking arsenals, I thought. And their
faces all looked hard and leathery, no matter how young
they looked. By now the windows all along the street were
filled with us looking down. You could sense the questions
on everyone's lips. Who were they? Where did they come
from? What was happening? I looked over at Oggi-his
lips were moving as if he meant to speak and didn't know
what to say. The presense of obviously superior beings
filled us with fear and trembling.
A little later we heard the first sounds of the cars and
trucks-the grating of gears and the revving of engines.
The air began to fill with the smell of gasoline. Smoke and
fumes hung in a grey brown cloud over the city in that
direction and drifted to cover the rest of it. And the cars
and trucks were coming out from under the cloud and
roaring down the street. And all the streets all over the
city. The cars and trucks were of all sizes and shapes and
descriptions. Each was jammed full of heavily armed men
also dressed in black. They were in jallopies and in the
backs of roadsters, on dump trucks and pickup trucks, in
jeeps and station wagons. It was awesome. The air was
thick with smoke and fumes. We were soon coughing and
wheezing and gasping for breath. We weren't used to the
smell of gasoline nor to the exhaust-it made us dizzy.
The noise of the engines was deafening-we covered our
ears with our hands. It was no use-the sound went
through walls as easily as through flesh. We were overwhelmed by it. I felt too tired to move, even to hold up my
hands. They fell to my sides. There was a great fatigue
over all of us. Our euphoria of the day before was dead and
gone. None of us had the faintest idea what was going on.
We waited to be told.
The cars and trucks came to a stop all over the city with
their engines still running. The fumes rose from them and
made our eyes water. It was as if we were crying and many
of us were. Men with megaphones soon appeared in the
streets. Their voices boomed off the buildings and echoed
in our rooms. There was nowhere they couldn't be heard.
Citizens,
they saidDon't be afraid. We have come to help you, to liberate you from your oppressors, to give you back
your freedom. You have only to follow instructions and no harm will come to you. Stay inside
and don't come out.
So we did-for days.
To pass the time Oggi and I played games. All kinds of
games-tic-tac-toe, blind man's bluff, jacks, charades, pin
the tail on the donkey-anything to try and take our minds
off what was happening. Or had happened. Soon we began to get used to it-as did all of us-and we saw that, no,
this wasn't the end of the Revolution. It wasn't over. What
had happened to it we didn't know. There was no way to
tell. Each of us was alone with our fears and doubts. The
Revolution remained. It was the one thing we had that was
permanent. More so than buildings or streets, certainly
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�more so than ourselves. The Revolution was like nature to
us-if everything else were taken away '\t remained. So we
sat in our rooms~ each of us alone, no matter how accompanied. For us the Revolution was our greatest
consolation.
It never ceased to dumbfound me that when change
took place it was either so slow it never occurred to us or it
was so fast it was over before we had any awareness of it.
Instead we had to get used to it-as if it was a state of
things that'd always been-when the youngest of us
could've remembered a time when it wasn't. To have done
so would've meant great peril-this above all was an ac·
cepted fact. That's why remembrance for us was so much
a process of selectively forgetting. To start over each day
with new relationships-between people and between
things-and to accept them as givens. It was a criterion of
life for us-the one that mattered if all others didn't. And
so often they were in doubt-how could they not be? It
was hard, if not impossible, to know what was constant in
ourselves when we had so little to measure it against. For
me that was what made Lelia so remarkable-though she
herself didn't think so. In that sense I supposed I was like
every romantic who had ever been. I thought of her as a
North Star or a Southern Cross-to navigate by across
endless dark wastes. Not surprisingly, then, as soon as we
could go out, I did-to her.
She was sitting mending while her old aunt snoozed.
She let me in, gave me a kiss on the cheek and went back
to her mending. That was her livelihood. People brought
her shirts that were torn, dresses that'd been ripped, socks
with gaping holes in them-for we had always to make do
with what we had. I sat across from her and watched-she
was wearing a denim skirt and a white cotton blouse with
her hair in a pony tail. To me she looked like a little girleven though she was almost as old as I. That didn't matter-however she looked I worshipped her. And I worried.
How she was? Was she afraid? Hungry? Lonely? She was
all of these-and quite happy too. I never got over that
either: how anyone could be happy and mean it. But she
was and she did. Her happiness was infectious. I got it by
being near her. I'd smile-to myself at first-then outwardly. I'd get up and go look in the mirror-she used it for
fittings-and see the smile on my face, to make sure it was
there. It was. I saw it. Then I'd go sit next to her and hold
her hand. We'd sit there quietly-her hands still-she
wasn't doing anything-and I thought of us as sharing her
happiness-which was becoming mine too. Extraordinary!
That I was so happy-when all around-the whole city in
fact-was in such a state of turmoil and doubt. It was simTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ply that she seemed more real than anything else. I'd
watch her fingers making the intricate patterns of stitch or
weave and I could've sat there all day as though I were
watching bees building a honeycomb-driven to it by the
geometry in their minds. If I wanted to hold her hand
she'd let me for a while-she knew what it meant to me
and she liked it. Then she'd slide her fingers out of mine
and say
I have to go back to work.
It was all she had-I couldn't say no. It was still more than
anyone else had that I knew of.
Reassured she was all right, I soon left. Something was
bothering me-that is, everything. I wanted to walk and
have my own sense of what was happening. Because the
Revolution had taught me to use my eyes and all of my
senses-and to try and believe them. So as I walked I saw
the city getting used to its occupation. The cars and trucks
that so awed us were everywhere-as were the men in
black who were so heavily armed. They were ominous. But
they did nothing. They stood chatting in groups or sat in
their trucks oiling their weapons. They nodded as I passed
yet made no movement to stop and search me.
I saw Marissa limping along a street-she saw me at the
same time and her face lit up. She had some shopping bags
with her and asked when I was going to open. I told her the
truth. That I had nothing to sell. I promised to let her
know when I did. Many of us were out in the streets trying
to figure out what was going to happen next. There were
as many rumors as people and most of them were about
them. Our guardians, our protectors-whatever they
called themselves. We weren't sure. None of us talked to
them and they made no effort to talk to us. That was how
we referred to them-not knowing otherwise how to call
them. At that point they seemed quite peaceful-in spite
of their appearance. The smell of the gasoline was the
most striking sign of the occupation. It pervaded the city
with its sweetish odor, actually quite pleasant at times. But
there were also the fumes of the cars and trucks when they
were running. These made us short of breath and our eyes
watery. We saw everything through their grey brown haze.
The colors of the city were made dull and flat, from what
they were. In that sense the occupation didn't feel threatening to us-it was more like a change in the weather. And
the weather was strange. It drizzled off and on for days. A
warm drizzle, it was still late summer. There was a greenish mildew on things and their surfaces stayed moist and
slippery. All this time we thought we were getting used to
it. Kamal and what he represented was long gone and forgotten. Then there was the most surprising reminderlike a voice from the dead-in the form of a wall posterobviously his last.
BROTHERS AND SISTERS,
it read-
103
�I BESEECH YOU TO LISTEN TO ME ONE LAST
TIME. I WILL NEVER BE WUH YOU AGAIN
AND I MUST ASK YOUR PARDON FOR MY ERRORS.
FOR ME THE REVOLUTION WILL ALWAYS BE THE
GREATEST THING IN MY LIFE-AS YOU ARE
BECAUSE WE ARE ALL PART OF IT. I AM
GOING NOW-MY EYES WILL CLOSE AND I
WILL CROSS MY ARMS ACROSS MY CHEST. YOU
WILL BE WITH ME ALWAYS. I WILL NOT DIE
ALONE. I WILL THINK OF EACH OF YOU.
I WILL ASK PARDON OF EACH OF YOU. I
KNOW YOU BETTER THAN YOU CAN KNOW. FOR
ME THE FUTURE IS A BLESSING BECAUSE THE
REVOLUTION ALWAYS HAS A FUTURE. I
THINK OF EACH OF YOU FACING IT AND I SAY
BE BRAVE! COURAGE!
IT IS WHAT KEEPS US TOGETHER. WE WILL
ALWAYS HAVE IT AS LONG AS WE LOVE THE
REVOLUTION ABOVE ALL. FAREWELL, AND BLESS
YOU, MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS!
He was gone. We knew that..Not how. Not why. Kamal
never meant so much to us before. We realized that he had
seen what we hadn't. Now we were truly alone. We would
try to forget him because we had to. We knew that much.
But in forgetting him there would be a void where he had
been.
Fortunately Oggi was fascinated by spare parts and all
things automotive. He wasn't doing anything else so I had
him go out and scavenge the city looking for them. He'd
come back with the distributor caps and the oil filtersand all sorts of others I'd never heard of. He was getting
older and more responsible-I told him to keep them and
see what he could do with them. He was mesmerized by
the New Regime-or rather by its most obvious signs-the
cars and trucks roaring up and down the esplanades and
the avenues. To him they were a source of incredible
power-almost magical-yet I also knew how he hated the
New Regime. Most of us did-perhaps all of us-and for
no particularly good reason-beyond that it had so little to
104
do with our lives. And that it was different. Whatever the
reason our hatred of it was always unstated. No one gave a
sign of it-not as such-it was there in the flicker of an
eyebrow or the running of a finger across the bridge of the
nose. You had to know it was there to see it-once you saw
it there was hatred everywhere. It was directed most of all
toward a single enigmatic figure-or rather his name.
7Carlos7. The two things for us were the same.
For us he was a protean figure-a chimera of sortsthat we knew and didn't-all the more horrible for our ig·
norance of him. His image-of which there was nonewas the heart and soul of the Occupation. He came with
them-apparently he was their leader. So it was natural to
compare him with Kamal and the comparison was striking.
Because we never saw him-actually we never saw either
of them-but we never even saw a picture of7Carlos7 nor
heard his voice. He was there all the more so in his name.
To many of us it was the most horrible thing-some
wouldn't say it-if they did they spat it out. They weren't
supposed to, though. There was a way to pronounce itmeasured and without intonation. And we had to make
our peace with it. His name was an ominipresent sign of
the Occupation. Of course the Occupation wasn't what
they called it-to them it was still the Revolution. We got
used to their terms-we had to-and those who didn't
trembled as they spoke. As always your own language was
the fastest way to betray yourself. To whom? Not to usalthough us was less and less definable. They made their
presence merge with ours. Some of us became them. As
time went by what we might've once said to anyone we
would soon say only to ourselves or to loved ones. By then
they could be anyone. They made friends easily-a pack of
cigarettes or a stick of gum would do the trick. Before long
you were saying things you shouldn't. Or maybe you in·
tended to. This whispering went on all the time all over
the city-like a gentle breeze in early summer. In fact, it
was that time of year. The city had never been so beautiful. The trees had rich green growth on them. Flowers
were blooming in all the gardens. Or where gardens had
once been, in piles of rubble in the streets or out of the
cracks of walls. The city took on a festive air. There were
gay colors everywhere-bright blues and pinks, the reds of
roses and poppies, the oranges and yellows oflillies. When
Lelia and I went walking-we did so each evening arm in
arm-she loved to gather them and make a bouquet. She
set one in my room and one in hers-so even when she
wasn't with me I smelt the rich perfume of her flowers that
she was smelling, too. I'd gotten somewhat used to hershe more so to me-though at times I still moved too
abruptly and startled her. One of the joys of being with her
was the chance I got to forget myself.
I seemed a part of her-as did everything else. To me
even the Revolution paled beside her-she was gentle,
yes, she was also more vivid. I loved to watch her do
things-as much as I was coming to love her at rest. To
watch her make a pot of tea. It was such fun. Who
W!NfER/SPRING 1983
�would've believed it? Of course the pot was a can and the
strainer was a linen bag and the tea was a fine black substance like dark sand that the strainer never kept out.
There I was picking the tea from between my teeth with
the tip of a toothpick-the tip of my penknife. Still, I loved
to watch her making it-for me a ritual of great beauty and
meaning. Perhaps that's why I loved her. She illumined
everything she touched.
I couldn't fail to be aware of the incongruities of our relationship-there were so many. I to her. She to me. Both
of us to each other. Both of us to the Revolution. And to
the city. And to the Occupation. And to 7Carlos7. Whoever and whatever he was. We didn't discuss it. It was so
obvious because we lived there. Each of us wanted to find
something beyond what we had-and we had. We cherished it-yet we were afraid. That in spite of ali-or the
little-we could do something would happen to destroy it.
Which was why we never mentioned to each other any of
these things. Because any of them could. There was between us a conspiracy of silence and blindness-not to acknowledge what was there at every hand. At every word.
Whether they were there or not. The Revolution was in
language and thought-as was the occupation. As was
7Carlos7.
He wasn't something you could shut out. He was there
as we spoke between ourselves. He was there to me as I
thought. I thought of him as a mastermind that got into
each of our heads and spread like a bacillus. Yet to all intents and purposes there were no signs of it. Or him. Except in the oblique ways we learned to recognize. I always
thought two tenses belonged particularly to him-the pas-
Because no matter how many times you'd said it, as long as
you hated him-and by inference them-there was the
distinct possibility you would gag on it. As though swallowing gasoline. To mumble, to stutter, to pause in your enunciation-incredible-these were all life threatening acts.
Acts of insurrection they were called. No wonder we practiced his name so much. And the more we practiced the
more we got used to it. Our hatred submerged into ourselves. And we might just as well have hated ourselves.
Maybe we did. Hatred was such a mutable thing for us. We
didn't feel it. Then we were called upon to say his name.
And we did. No emotion-then a flicker of it-his name
spoken evoked it in us. It was then we were truly in danger.
Perhaps we got away with it that time. Perhaps we didn't.
It was so hard to tell. All we knew was that some of us disappeared-as though bodily sucked out of our lives. To
our friends and our relations there was no trace. We were
gone as if we'd evaporated. We knew speech had something to do with it. We knew the Occupation and 7Carlos7
obviously did. But the disappearances were as enigmatic
as his name. They happened. To some of us-to many.
There was no explanation. It was no wonder, then, that we
felt as if we were living on the edge of something at all
times. One false step and we'd be over the edge and gone.
To Lelia and me in love each day was an end in itself.
sive and the imperative. As in
That should be done,
and
Do it!
Incredible that so much power should be concealed in
such little phrases. And not just power-hatred-on our
part. As we recognized the source of that power. It was
insidious-we were made aware of it at all times-even
the most private. Because there was no privacy-as a concept it was dead and gone. There was a sense of concealment, of something to be hidden, not of something that
belonged to us. 7Carlos7 was the manifestation of this
awareness. I never knew for sure if he was a man or not. I
assumed so-it wouldn't have been the first time I was
wrong. He was definitely a presence.-One that spoke to
us in the passive and the imperative. A voice, without a
face, without a voice, nonetheless, a voice. Lelia didn't like
to say his name even to me. It made her uneasy, at times,
nauseous. I couldn't blame her-but we had to learn how
to say it as naturally as saying our own. I made her practice-! practiced myself. To say a name that was the object
of hatred without intonation was the hardest thing for
us-for anyone. That's why it was so revealing-that's
why they made us do it. We had to. It came up all the time.
Every time you said it there was the threat of revelation.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
I couldn't see the point of anything. The Occupation
had been going on for so long we thought it'd always been
there. It settled on us like the clouds of dark exhaust and
haze. We coughed all the time and spat blood and mucous.
The sun moved across the sky like a greyish orange ball.
Seen through the grey haze. The sunsets were fantastic
colors of purple and red. It was hot and muggy that summer. Moving my body and all the spare parts took all my
strength and some I didn't have. And there were times
when Oggi wouldn't do anything-he'd curl up on a pile
of spare parts, pick one up and oil and grease it for hours.
He was blacker than I was, pitch black. His eyes stood out
white in contrast. And he'd lie there for hours rubbing the
part back and forth whistling. The whistling got on my
nerves. When I asked him to stop he shrugged. And
stopped. A little later he started again. It wasn't the two of
us-it was everything. The heat. The air-or what was
now air. The furtiveness that had come over us. 7Carlos7.
And fear.
There was so much of it-all different kinds. There
were more fears than we ever had words for, all of them
would have made our language nothing but synonyms for
fear. Myriad ones. Because it was everywhere and in every-
105
�thing. Most of all it was the fear of disappearance-that
we'd wake one morning and be gone. So many had. Fear
abstract and fear particulate. In contrast the spare parts
business had become a tired joke to me. I'd gotten into it! didn't want to think about it anymore. I wanted-if want
was the word-to sit in my room and be alone with my
fear. To be with someone else was to see fear in them.
With Oggi the fear took the form of whistling and rubbing.
With someone else it was a cough or running a hand back
and forth over the walls or floor. It was a fear of themthey like everything else were now signs of the Occupa·
tion. Fear of cars and trucks. Fear of them as people. Fear
of the little man who came to my shop. Fear of myself.
Fear of giving myself away. Fear of speech. A name-his
name. So many specific fears-fear of each object we
came in contact with-each fear a little different from the
others. To anyone not living as we were such fears
would've seemed unbelievable. Fantastic. Like a chi!·
dren's story of ogres and giants and princesses carried
away from them by princes on the wind. To us it was the
most natural thing in the world. Fear had always been part
of the Revolution-now it was more so-taking a new
form with new objects. Whatever was part of the New Re·
gime was part of fear. Those of us who weren't-that
meant all of us-had it in our blood. Like water we drank it
in and it came out like urine. It passed through us-we
were where it was for a time-then on-through us over
and over-the process repeating itself-endless.
There it was again-the face-or part of it. I saw it for
an instant-then my food came through and the panel
closed. That was it-my contact with the outside worldthat and my bit of blue sky-or whatever color it was. I'd
thought I could get used to anything-the Revolution
made us that way-adaptable or not at all. As always there
was something else-something we didn't expect because
we'd never thought of it. In one sense I'd disappeared. To
everyone I'd known I was gone-ceasing to exist. Yet to
myself-the one person that really mattered-! was very
much there-all the more so because so much else was
gone. The face was the only thing human around-it
peered through the panel in the door-if I didn't move it
studied me. The eyes staring-the ears and chin cut off by
106
the door-that made the face disembodied. In spite of that
it was companionship of sorts. I called to it-it never an·
swered. Or its answer was my food-on the floor~ I didn't
get there in time to catch it. Splot. I had to scoop it up with
the side of my hand and lick it off. It tasted of the floor and
the fungus that grew there. A grey green fungus that flour·
ished because the floor was moist and cold. That was my
vegetation-my flora. And my fauna was a small bug about
the size of my thumbnail that crawled over the walls. I got
used to it-it was the first thing I looked for each daythough I no longer thought of them as days. There was
light-there was dark-there was a sense of alternation
back and forth between them. That was what my calendar
had been reduced to. Each day I got up and washed my
face at the pipe in the corner-! then squatted over the
hole..:.. I balanced myself with my hands against the wall.
That was perhaps the pleasantest experience of the daymy bowel movement. I looked forward to it. Afterwards I
felt relief. Almost composed. My body felt in a state of
equilibrium-I'd gotten rid of what I'd eaten and my
waste. I felt a need to be only myself-and no more. I felt
no suffering as such-~he only thing that bothered me was
the bed springs. They squeaked and rattled when I moved
on them. I never got used to the sound. It woke me at
night-over and over-which is why I had no nightmares.
I woke before they could form. Which is why I was always
so tired. Exhausted. There was no way to get relief from
the things in my mind. They kept piling up-all the things
I didn't think of. And kept forgetting. They were there and
had weight-getting heavier and heavier the more I
couldn't sleep. I tried to sleep on the floor. The cold and
moisture and slime of the fungus were worse than the bed
springs-they made my skin creep. So I went back to
sleeping on the bed-bad as it was it wasn't the worst.
Nothing seemed so bad to me that in time wasn't ordi·
nary. I looked for the bug and saw where he was-! waited
for the face to appear and thought of it as my face. The
eyes staring at me through the panel were the only reflec·
tion of myself I had. I wondered about all the things that
didn't happen. They would've been explanations of what I
was in for. There weren't any and I never knew. Not at
that point. There was no questioning and no duress. At
times I thought I heard cries in the distance. No one ever
came for me. Maybe they weren't cries but doors closing. I
had nothing to go by. Beyond the face, or the part of the
face, which in itself told me nothing. Except that it was
part of something human-that I too was part of. But the
humanity of it was less than I was used to. And I wasn't
used to much. I had nothing to do and nothing to think of.
I lay on the bed and tried not to move. That became a skill
in itself. To alter my weight so the bedsprings wouldn't
squeak. Because it was all I had I became more and more
aware of my body. Preoccupied with it, in fact. I studied
my hands and the way they moved. I spent hours bringing
my thumb across to touch my little finger-or closing my
fingers into my palm to make a fist. Each motion that
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�seemed simple enough in itself got increasingly complex
when looked at in detail. I tried to move my fingers so
slowly I couldn't see them move. As if I were a creature
that was going to live forever and had all the time in the
world to do whatever it wanted.
Before I did anything I thought about it to decide if it
was worthwhile. That is, if it had a purpose. Most things
didn't. So I eliminated them-in the same way I got rid of
waste with my bowel movement every day. I wanted to get
by on less and less. To be like the bug on the wall that took
all day to get from one point to another. He too had all the
time in the world to go back. There was a lot to learn from
him. Somehow I'd decided he was a he. And I studied his
movements with the same intensity that the face studied
me. Eyes staring, lids unblinking. The bug made me care·
ful of where I stepped and how I moved. The last thing I
wanted to do was to crush the bug inadvertently. I was
concerned for him. When he didn't move for an unusual
length of time I got up, ever so slowly so the bedsprings
rustled but didn't squeak, and went over to take a look.
Perhaps I saw his antennae quiver or one of his wings was
raised-his wings weren't much-stumps more like. What·
ever it was adequate-my companionship remained as~
sured. I went back to bed as slowly as I'd moved from it.
One thing above all never ceased to amaze me each time I
lay down-its length. Because it was mine. My feet
touched one end and my head the other-the bed itself
didn't seem accidental. That is, it seemed part of a greater
plan, one that in time might be revealed to me. Not that I
was unhappy with where I was. I felt more secure than I
might've felt elsewhere. But that peace of mind was an ar·
tifact, as was my bodily composure. I had only to think of
her, any part of her, an ear, a little finger, a lower lip-and
my body began to shake as from a fever. The bedsprings
squeaked. The walls appeared to vibrate in time. My heart
pounded and my skin prickled. It was the obverse oflovefear. The thought of her-any thought of her-triggered
it-and cast my whole being into doubt. I shuddered. The
bedsprings rattled. I didn't know what was happening to
me. I held onto the bedframe for dear life. And this didn't
happen once-it was over and over. I couldn't stop myself.
She was so dear to me that all else was at risk. I tried to
steady my mind-to look for the bug-to count the days.
It helped a bit. Afterwards I lay gasping for breath. Each
move I made was tentative.
One of those days was the Anniversary of the Revolu·
tion-I didn't know which.
I didn't mean to get angry-it happened like that-like a
light had gone off in my head-or I saw a flash and that
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
was the stimulus for it. Whatever the cause the transition
was so fast I wasn't aware of it. There I was not angrythere I was very much so. Pounding the door. Kicking it.
Not feeling the pain in my feet. No sensation, in fact. The
anger had taken me over as if it were another life form. I
was screaming-or shouting-whatever it was it was loud.
I heard my own voice so much magnified it wasn't mine.
My hands and feet seemed to be on their own too. It didn't
last very long. I hadn't the strength for it. It was there in a
short burst of tremendous energy. It was as soon spent.
Gone. I went back to nonanger, my muscles flaccid, my
skin sensitive again. It amazed me that I'd even been able
to get angry. There was nothing to get angry at. The face
wasn't there. The bug was high up and out of sight, the
blue sky was still blue sky. My anger-or any other emo.
tion I might've had-was incongruous. It had no purpose.
It didn't belong there. Without it I lapsed back onto the
bed. In time the face appeared in the door, my food came
through and the bug showed up on the wall not far over
my head.
I felt ashamed of myself. In relation to everything else
my anger was such a pettiness. I went and scooped up my
food. I ate. I was so used to the fungus I didn't taste it. If
the food smelled to me it was simply the smell of it. Not
bad. Not good. A characteristic of existence without crite.
rion. I began to identify with the bug. I thought of myself
looking down at myself on the bed. Larger and whiter than
necessary. And curious too. Why all the moving about?
And the noise? And the huffing and puffing? Imagine!
There was no sense of real economy about it. Truly the
whole thing was an enormous waste. It was so much better
to be so much smaller again I had the sense of going into
myself and looking out. In my head, I'd become as small as
the bug-the rest of my body was an enormous encum·
brance. I stopped eating. The food piled up in front of the
door in a little mound. It began to stink-not its own smell
anymore. Worse. Much worse. A smell with color-a
greenish orange. I became aware of the face looking in at
me more and more. I looked back as if from beyond. I no
longer thought it could see me. I saw a finger appear and
scratch the side of the nose on the face. And the expres·
sion-or that part of it I was exposed too-didn't stare as
much. I saw the face turn sideways. There was an ear and
hair. I heard a voice from very far off, like an echo. Or the
echo of an echo. Like a scraping. There was an intonation
to it so I took it to be a voice. It amazed me how much
better I began to feel. Lighter. Buoyant. The carcass I'd
been carrying around all these years was finally getting
manageable. I lay on the bed and had no need to think of
the springs and not moving. They squeaked, if at all, very
faintly. It was at this point I thought of my disappearance
as taking place. Not their disappearance of me. That had
already happened. This was mine of myself-as if bit by
bit I were withdrawing from my own existence. It was a
feeling most pleasant-not unlike that at the end of my
bowel movement. After much pushing and squeezing I
107
�was left with a sense of self and a relief from waste. I felt an
obvious lightness-not giddy-I remained clear-eyed and
stable. Things seemed far away and distant and had no
·
hold on me.
It was in this state I saw the door open and a man come
in. He had a stool under his arm and he set it on the floor
and sat on it. He looked very small-no larger than my
hand-the stool was small too. The size a child might have
for its dolls. He said nothing. He watched me and I
watched back. Then with alarm I realized he was getting
larger-or my sense of him was. I tried to hold myself back,
to keep away; I couldn't. I kept coming closer, as he did,
getting larger. I felt myself getting heavier and weighed
down, dense. It was his being there that'd done it to me. I
knew that much. And as he got larger his appearance took
on more detail. He was dressed as an officer of some sort.
There were epaulettes on his shoulders and gold braid
hung down from them. His uniform was a dark green and
creased so sharply there were angles to it. At some point I
was aware again I was my normal size. I saw his forefinger
tapping on his knee. What he thought of me I couldn't
know. His face-it wasn't the face in the door-was without emotion, though not without interest. I propped my·
self up in bed. The springs squeaked. I saw how close he
was, the dark color of his uniform filled my field of vision.
His hand reached into his pocket, took out a cigarette and
reached across and put it between my lips. The smell of
the tobacco, rank and acrid, and the dryness of its taste
against the tip of my tongue was a shock to me. The sec·
ond shock was when he lit it. The flame from his lighter
flared in my face and I jerked my head back. Then there
was the smoke from the cigarette itself. I puffed. It filled
my head and made me dizzy. I gagged on it. I coughed. I
felt the cigarette slipping from my lips. It did, onto my
chest, I watched it burn a small hole in me. I meant to
reach forward and grab it, but I couldn't move my arms or
my hands. My body twitched. There was the pain of the
burning, intense, pointing into me. Then his hand came
over and took it off and put it back in my mouth and held it
there. I puffed again. The smoke made me giddy. It filled
the room. It clouded over his face. It made my eyes water.
They closed. There was the burning pain in my chest,
though the cigarette was between my lips. I had to finish. I
knew that. I puffed and puffed. My head felt full of the
smoke. It also began to feel composed. Relaxed. My hands
didn't move but my fingers opened out from my palms. I
looked up at him, he must've seen it in my eyes. I was
grateful. He smiled, a narrow smile, no creasing of his
cheeks. Nonetheless a smile. I tried to smile back. I
thought I did. He took the end of the cigarette from be·
tween my lips and threw it in the corner.
That's better? No?
he said.
Mundt's the name. Pleased to meet you.
Pause.
How are you feeling today?
108
I meant to answer. I tried to. I opened my lips in an 0 to
speak. I thought of what I was going to say. Something in·
nocuous like fine or OK. Instead I said nothing. I mouthed
my answer. I knew I was saying nothing. I didn't know
why. He must've understood-this Mundt. He nodded
and his hand came forward and patted mine. It was then I
saw how huge his was. How hairy at the knuckles. How
large the knuckles were in relation to the rest of the finger.
There was something strange about them too. There was
an extra joint and the tips of the nails buried themselves in
the flesh at the tip of the fingei. I was more impressed with
his hands than with his uniform. I watched them as he
spoke.
Even if we don't expect you to be happy here, it's
not that bad is it?
Pause.
Food every day. Drink. Time to think things over,
no?
His forefinger pressed against his thumb-they flattened
out and the forefinger of the other hand came over to
stroke them.
Not at all what you expected, eh? A bit of a surprise?
I looked up-there was a twinkle in his eye. He settled
back on the stool.
You know we don't want anything from you. I
mean we're not going to torture you or anything
like that. I bet you've heard stories about interro·
gations. Electrodes to the genitals. All night beat·
ings on the soles of the feet. Maybe someone told
you about being hung upside down from a bar?
He sighed. His lips were large like his fingers. I nodded and
kept nodding. He seemed to expect it.
I thought so. It doesn't happen here. I don't know
where people get such ideas. They make them up
and then they believe them. There's nothing to be
afraid of. It's only natural to be like that, people
are. So what? It means nothing.
I looked down and saw the tips of his fingers come to·
gether to form a point. He looked down at it -then ·at me.
You can't help what you are, we know that. Nor
can anybody else. I mean if you're a petty bourgois that's what you are, no?
I nodded.
So we don't care about your little tricks. They
don't make any difference to us.
His voice was guttural and flat -as if he were resigned and
had said it many times before. A strange fellow this
Mundt-nice enough. I nodded as much as I could with·
out overdoing it. I wanted him to see I agreed with every·
thing he said.
If you hoard or steal or fabricate we don't care.
People don't believe it but we don't. If you call
yourself an entrepreneur that's your business.
He paused. His hand came up to the side of his face and
he ran his forefinger along his nose. My eyes moved up
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�with it and I found myself looking into his. I didn't mean
to. It happened without my awareness of it. They were
dark grey-the color of slate. I looked down as fast as I
could. I didn't want him to get upset. He licked his lips and
continued.
You know this place isn't so bad. There are lots of
people like you here. Well meaning. They don't
think they've done anything. I mean you don't
think you've done anything, do you?
I didn't nod. I shook my head. I'd almost nodded. I caught
myself in time. My mouth opened to speak, to say something, to explain. I didn't. I couldn't.
Everyone's the same.
He sighed.
That's why interrogations are useless. So we get
you to confess, then what? The next day you don't
remember any of it. If we want you to remember
we have to keep telling you. Day after day. It's
useless for everyone. Besides, there's nothing you
know that we need to. The whole thing is a waste.
He looked down at his feet. His fingers were twisting together so I couldn't tell his hands apart. I'd stopped nodding-! didn't know what to agree to. He shrugged and
looked up. I looked down. I'd been watching him with my
head down with the upper part of my eyes.
You didn't expect me to come, did you?
I shook my head. I nodded. I wasn't sure which I meant.
No one does. You know people think we don't
know.
He looked sad as he said it.
That your life here, or out there for that matterhe waved his hand toward the bit of blue skyGoes on and nobody sees what you're doing. It's
not so. We know. Because you don't know don't
think we don't. Maybe we miss something once in
a while, a little thing here or there, not much. But
we know enough to know.
Pause. He looked toward the window, some light from it lit
his face and made it lighter.
You know there are a lot of things in life people
don't figure out. They get older and they die and
they never know. I think we're all that way somehow, no?
He said it softly, as if to himself. I nodded, not so much to
him: I felt that way too.
Well, I'll tell you one thinghe turned and looked down at me. The light was gone
from his face.
You're better off here than anywhere else.
His thumbs came out of his belt and he pointed a forefinger at my head.
Right here. Now.
Pause.
You know what I mean?
I thought I did. Yes. I nodded. He turned away slightly; he
started to say something and stopped, as if to rephrase it.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Let me put it this way,
he went on.
You live here. You grow up. You get old. All the
time you get by. Maybe better. Maybe worse. You
think you've got it all figured out. In your business
maybe your're putting something aside for your
old age?
He turned back as he said it. Abruptly he sat down on the
bed. The springs didn't squeak then. They went baing,
boing, baing. The room reverberated with the sound of his
sitting. I felt his immensity loom over me. There was no
defense. I was helpless like a newborn baby. All the while I
felt frail and ancient. He spat out his next words as if he
were mad and I tried to shrink back into the bed.
Don't bother. There isn't anything to figure out
anymore. You'll never see it again whatever it was.
His forefinger came down stiff in the middle of my forehead.
You've had it. You know it. I know it. Life isn't
what it used to be. Don't forget that.
Pause.
You can't go back to your little village and grow
corn. If you had such a village. There aren't any
more.
His forefinger lifted off and hung over my head-suspended.
There's a lesson in all of this, no? So what if you
learn itshrugit won't do any good.
He put his hands on his thighs-about to get up. He licked
his lips. They were moist and glistening.
Maybe we should have many lives? To come back
and next time try what didn't work out this time.
Amusing. People in villages think like that. Except
they're all dead and they don't come back.
He got up. I followed him with my eyes to his full height.
I say good-by now. You enjoyed my visit? Interesting, eh?
I nodded for the last time.
It makes for a change, I know. We all need a little
change now and then. Make the best of it, I tell
you. It1l turn out all right.
He was looking straight at me, his forehead furrowed.
There were beads of sweat on it.
If you have nothing and you want nothing, what's
to lose? Eh, nothing.
That was it. He didn't say anything else. He looked down
at me for a bit, pensive, abstracted. Then he turned and
left. The door shut behind him with a thank. The face appeared in it, looked at me and left. I was alone again-except now I had the vivid impression of this Mundt's presence. He loomed in the air around me even after he'd
gone. I didn't think why he'd come or what he'd meant. I
knew what I'd understood-what I knew. I agreed with it
all. I really thought I had nothing left to lose.
109
�WITH 0RJAN AT THE GREAT JAPAN EXHIBITION
Someone in Stockholm counted out the skins
And told you how many golden buckToothed beavers had been killed to make
The coat. And yet it's not the coat that draws
Astonished glances from these Portuguese
With their ungainly noses.
They recognize in cheek and forehead, frozen
To silence by the snow, then quick
As evergreens released to freshness,In lips configuring a phrase
Of sleek imbalance, molded by chosen
Vowels lifted to sadness in a lilt
And overheard as music-in these
They feel what I, when thunderstruck, had felt:
That the same fancy etched your look
As prompted the master of the brush
To practise for a lifetime his bamboo
And then exhaust it in a single stroke.
Only the tiger is unsurprised,
Alone in the cold salon.
His liquid stripes are yours, his curvings yours,
And with a bounding your seraphic shadow
Impresses strangeness onto silk,
Enshrines a celebration in a screen.
ELLIOTT ZUCKERMAN
110
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�The Division of the West-and Perception
Leo Raditsa
Introduction
We live in a divided world. This is a common phrase that
statesmen repeat, and their audiences ignore and forget.
And that nobody much understands: it is too obvious.
This division is not only a "political" fact-Churchill's
"Iron Curtain" -but the most fundamental fact of our
lives. It reaches every aspect of our living our art, our
thinking, and our perception. It involves most of the nations of the world and all areas of life. Its main characteristic is a capacity to spread and to touch everything. Because
it is at once so close and so remote, it is at the same time
obvious and incomprehensible. We call this division "total
1
war" -and that name haunts our imagination.
This division has in fact replaced the devil, who-many
thought-had been done away with. But with the withering of religion, or at least of the readiness to cope with neither its presence nor its absence, the devil has not been
known as such. Somewhere the free nations sense they
face evil, but are embarrassed to know it. Knowing it unflinchingly stinks somehow of a relapse into superstition.
There is no devil. But we believe men can be angels. The
greatest murder in this century has come in the name of the
greatest aspirations; aspirations that many dare not deny,
lest they lose the good opinions of their neighbors; aspira-
Leo Raditsa has recently published Some Sense about Wilhelm Reich
(New York 1978), "Augustus' Legislation Concerning Marriage, Procre-
ation, Love Affairs and Adultery" (in Aufstieg und Niedergang der
Roemischen Welt, Berlin 1980, 13,2), "Iranians in Asia Minor" (in The
Cambridge History of Iran, Cambridge 1983, 3,1), ''The Source of World
Terrorism," (Midstream, December 1981) and "Why Were We in Vietnam?" (Midstream, June-July 1982).
The above essay comes from an unpublished book, Rationality and
the Perception of Depth, and the Division of the West in the Twentieth
Century.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tions that paralyze those incapable of living them and
which, therefore, can be exploited to excite guilt. The totalitarian regimes parrot our ideals of "self-determination of nations, or of "peace" back to us.
Such divisions are not common. But they have occurred
before. During the Peloponnesian War, during the Reformation, and in the Wars after the French Revolution,
which began the crises we continue to live. 1 The characteristic of such wars is that they spread, that they increase
on what they feed, that they are always world wars. They
touch everybody and everything. And they cannot be
stopped except by men who understand them, because
they are about things men do not understand. Hitler said
men will only die for things they cannot comprehend 2
The division of the West first occurred in 1914. It has
continuously intensified and spread not only on battlefields, but in the minds and hearts of men. In the aftermath of the Second World War, especially in 1947-48, it
grew deep and unmistakable. Until the sixties and the Indochina War few could deny it-although many, in order
to find the strength for the next step, chose at times to
ignore it. Like the violence after the First World War, the
renewal and intensification of the division after 1945 surprised many and disappointed all who had endured the
carnage in the promise that it would bring about a new
world, with a living peace and tangible concord. But these
disappointments are the very stuff of the war that has
brought about the division of the West, for it continually
excites expectations in order to disappoint them.
The First World War was a conventional war that surprised a world that took itself to be deeply at peace, and
baffled it, for it had no idea what the war was about. In the
inebriation of the expectation of a new world that overtook
the world in 1917, the war destroyed many major govern-
111
�ments and constitutions, above all in Russia and Germany,
Austria, and a few years later in Ihlly. This destruction of
governments and the exultation at their destruction, which
found expression in the myth of "revolution", in the myth
that a spontaneous upheaval of the people swept away the
governments, became the most telling characteristic of this
continuous war that has brought about the division of the
West, and that continues to deepen it.
This division spreads through polarization. Polarization
divides the world into two attitudes (ideologies) that over·
come a world made of states of various size. In its final effects polarization takes place in people's minds. It func·
tions on the assumption that before you can destroy
people and the governments that protect them, you must
destroy their capacity to reason, to perceive the difference
between freedom and slavery, between the constructive
and the destructive. The ultimate model of this polarization for international relations is civil war or sedition. This
is now called, with the ignorance of the educated, "revolution" and "class war." The characteristic of civil war 1 ac·
cording to both Thucydides and Hobbes, is precisely that
it spreads, that it is unstoppable, and that it reaches men's
minds themselves, their perception. That it alters their
perception. The struggle centers on perception, the very
perception that has been the battleground of Western phi·
losophy since at least the seventeenth century. But now
ceaseless war for more than two generations has turned
the questioning of philosophers into a matter of life and
death for everyone. For those who cannot see will neither
live nor survive.
On its deepest level this division and polarization of the
world functions to prevent contact, that is, perception in
depth-the world seems flat to our eyes-and its equiva·
lent in the mind and heart, the experience of rationality
and the self-evident. It tends to divide and to polarize qualities such as freedom and authority, and distort them into
shadows or dim reflections of themselves. In the instance
of freedom, into license; in the instance of authority, into
authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Once so distorted,
these qualities tend to define each other in their hatred
and in their destruction of each other, rather than in an
aggressive dialogue. Such a dialogue would be the true
Aristotelian mean, the mean in depth, not the mean of
compromise. Because it cripples rationality and the
strength, confidence, and courage that come with it, polar-
destruction of forms in the name of freedom, there is a
yearning for their restoration that has something of the
straightforwardness of the eighteenth century about it;
but more assurance, resilience, and sobriety-and more in·
nocence and wisdom, the innocence and wisdom that
comes after suffering. 3 Constitution and form generally
provide the test of content, of the readiness to act on what
one says. They allow us to tell the difference between acts
and propaganda, between feeling and impulse. In contrast
to this is the attitude, typically communist, that the end
justifies the means, that content-good intentions and
promises of a radiant future-authorizes the destruction
of forms, of law, and constitutions.
Finally, this polarization tends to make us perceive ourselves as indistinguishable from our enemies, in the illusion that not telling our differences might make for our
survival It makes us feel as destructive and self-destructive
as those who want to destroy us. The Soviet attempt to
dominate the world feeds on this self-hatred. This polarization spreads largely because of unacknowledged fear of
the actual military dangers that threaten us. Who looks at a
map?
I have been writing as if the division between the free
countries and totalitarianism were fundamental But the
real division occurred before there was any totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism is a consequence of the division and the
incapacity to cope with it, not its cause. The division in its
starkest, unadulterated form took shape during, and especially after, the First World War. That war that nobody really understood started out between different peoples, not
between freedom and slavery. In 1914, at the start of the
war, one could still speak of freedom without equating it
with democracy. The world was bigger than democracy,
and politics was much less important, and life more easily
distinguished from it.
The division of the West, and the disturbances in perception I have mentioned, betray themselves most strikingly in art. Nobody can see the world whole; except-and
this is crucial~the words that are written in Russia but
published in the West. Western painting has tended more
and more toward a form with content, without a recognizable world, while painting in the totalitarian world pretended to see a world it could not perceive.
ization fashions an immobilizing situation. Force, rather
than strength, appears to be decisive. And is often in fact.
The division of the West also shows itself in a separation
of form and content, especially in politics. In the free West
we are impatient with the safeguards and the indirectness,
the due process of representative and parliamentary democracy. We do not understand representation. We want
to seize on problems directly, and, therefore, take political
demonstrations, which intimidate thought, words and
action, for granted. In the East of Europe and in China,
where people have known the murder that comes of the
112
1 The Division since 1945-and Stagnation
since 1917
The division of the West shows itself most obviously in
the division of Germany, a subject so obvious that nobody
pays much attention to it, and also in the division of Korea,
and China-with Taiwan-and, of course, until 1975, of
Vietnam. The division of Germany also means the diviWINTER/SPRING 1983
�sion of Europe. Without the division ,of Germany there
would be no division of Europe, or of the rest of the world.
The division of Germany never intended by the free
West exists because there is no peace 'treaty. The nonexistence of a peace treaty is not some unimportant formality for just the same reason that marriage is not merely
a piece of paper. The lack of a peace treaty means we did
not know how to settle the Second World War despite victory and the apparent cessation of the fighting in Europe.
It meant the war had not ended, or that it had ended in a
mere truce.4 A formal treaty would have required the removal of all Soviet troops not only from Germany but
from all of what has come to be called Eastern Europe
since the War. The absence of a peace treaty meant the
war continued, no matter how fervently we wished to
deny it.
Our incapacity to restore full sovereignty to Germany
and to force the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Europe
may mean that we did not have the confidence to risk full
sovereignty in Europe again, even if we had know how to
restore it. That we preferred to bring totalitarianism and
the Soviets into the middle of Europe rather than to face a
full-fledged restoration, or attempt at restoration-and restoration in all cases meant creation of legitimate governments, a process that receives its first real test with the passage of a generation. Somewhere in the first volume of his
memoirs, Kissinger says as much. He admits that the
spread of totalitarianism, and the consequent division of
much of the world between free countries and totalitarian,
has given the world a kind of stability it did not have before. I think this dreadfully wrong. I think that the war has
gone on more intensely, first of all with the Soviet seizure
of half of Europe without having to fight us or the rest of
Europe for it. Only it has gone on without direct fighting,
in Europe, between the free countries and the Soviets.
But whether it is wrong or not, dreadful or not, is not the
real question. There is no way of settling a war one does
not understand. And unless you can settle it you are probably condemned to eventual undoing in war-in battle or
not-for the incapacity to bring victories into settlements
turns them into mere incidents in a war that cannot be
stopped.
Nineteen forty-five complicated the situation for free
countries whose constitutions, especially if they are inherited, presuppose a capacity to distinguish between war and
peace. It forced nations to carry on wars, and pretend they
were at peace-a situation that tied the tongues ofleaders in
free countries, and forced them into something like totalitarian hypocrisy, for they could act but could not explain
why they acted, which meant that eventually they could not
act at all and lost the confidence of their electors.
Because the division of Germany and Europe and the
consequent antagonism between the Soviet Union and
the United States means that the war is not over, the
United States and the free countries must go along with
the Soviet Union in its passionate profession of hatred of
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
nazism and fascism, a hatred that seems to increase with
the passage of time. Until recently this going along meant
"no enemies on the left"; for the left was portrayed as the
only sure antidote to fascism and nazism. Stalin at Yalta
had infuriated Churchill by calling any government that
was anti-fascist, democratic.5 In his footsteps, the Soviet
Union continues to equate a democracy" with antifascism
and antinazism, and to call any country it desires to undo
"fascist." Since 1967, at least, it has used the word to
smear Israel, whose capacity to defend itself stirs Soviet
hatred and keeps it from seizing the Middle East. 6 In
much of the West, perhaps most obviously in Italy, until a
few years ago, when it became apparent to many that the
most organized and deadly terrorism came from left, it was
enough to call anything "fascist" to discredit it without
further discussion.
The power of this little word "fascism" must come from
somewhere. It cannot come from the fearful memory of
the past, especially in a time that shows itself most in its
forgetfulness. Its power comes from the past's persistence
in the present, from the continuation of the war in the
present, and the refusal to see it. But at the same time this
little word masks the way the war continues in the present,
for it pretends the danger from nazi Germany persists. In
fact the same danger does persist but it does not come
from the same regime.
The Soviet Union and China continue nazi Germany's
War. This exploitation of the memory of a fear, which is in
some way comfortable because safe, to distract from actual terror and murder going on daily before our eyes, is
only possible because of the incapacity to end the war
which shows itself in the division of Germany. The division of Germany, and the division of the West that comes
from it, continue the war and at the same time make it
impossible to face our past and resolve Germany's future.
This evasion of the past means that we must keep its memory alive artificially, especially the memory of past hatreds,
the main drive of Soviet propaganda. It makes it impossible to acknowledge that the defeated were not entirely
wrong, the victors not entirely right. A peace treaty, a real
peace treaty, would have meant acknowledging that nobody was entirely right. To know that neither side was entirely right, is to know our tragedy for what it is, to recognize that something was destroyed in those wars that was
valuable and that it is not going to be easy to recreate, restore or refashion. To know the tragedy of our times for
what they are, would mean facing present danger instead
of seeking relief from it in the horror of a past whose horror people did not recognize at the time.
The insistence that the Allies, who included the Soviet
Union, were entirely right, and the Axis entirely wrong
made it impossible to tell the Soviet Union to withdraw its
troops from Eastern Europe immediately after the war, for
those who are entirely right can do no wrong. The concentration on the myth of the past is a way of avoiding the
present, especially the continuance of the past in the
113
�present. Acknowledging we were not entirely right or
wrong would make the world whole again. It would make a
tougher, more straightforward, more painful-and much
less dangerous place. Until we understand that peace is
much harder than war, the war that calls itself peace will
continue-which means it will spread. The politicization
of all areas of life, which is the first sign of its advance, will
also spread.
This insistence of being wholly right has made our cen·
tury incapable of distinguishing real greatness, whose de·
fects are obvious, from the parody of it by little weak men
who might have been great. No time since the time of the
Trojan war has been so niggardly in the recognition of
greatness, and, therefore, such a patsy to thugs and mur·
derers. Like Hitler and Stalin, whom it adores when they
are alive, hates after their death. This hatred after adora·
tion amounts to disowning your own life after living it.
And it goes on. You only have to read the unbridled-and
never convincing-hymns of praise to Chou En·Lai and
Mao Tse·Tung and North Vietnamese party men in Kis·
singer's memoirs to see it. This fascination with these little
men who seem all powerful but whose apparent omnipo·
tence is only made of weakness is a fascination with mur·
der.
At the end of the Second World War, before the distor·
tions that pass for memory-like the myth that only the
Communists resisted Hitler-that prolong the Second
World War took hold, men like James Forrestal and Walter
Lippmann knew the importance of the future of Ger·
many, not only for Germany, but for all of Europe and,
therefore, for the whole world.? And they did not hesitate
to speak of it openly, in a way that appears unabashed
now. The sacrifice of Poland, and the public denial of it in
the final communique at Yalta, made it impossible for the
British and the United States to do much more than
weakly insist on German unity at Potsdam. The loss of Po·
land, which had been the subject of torturous negotiations
throughout 1944 that Churchill had stated repeatedly
would decide the peace, made it impossible to settle Ger·
many. It set the terms of the struggle we have lived with
ever since without, for the most part, understanding it in
any terms that allow a mastery of it. Instead, with the doc·
trine of containment we accepted the Soviet terms of the
struggle without realizing that the readiness to go along
without a settlement meant continuing the war.
This evasiveness about Germany, and the obsession
with the Second World War that has come with it, has had
its consequences. It was Germany, in an effort to deal with
its future on its own, not the United States, that initiated
the policy of "detente" in 1967-as Kissinger admits in his
memoirs. The United States acquiesced to German "Ost·
politik" because it did not dare oppose it. This policy has
drawn Europe away from the United States without
strengthening it. In the years after the war men foresaw
these consequences of going along with the actual division
of Germany, and insisted on its unity more clearly than
114
they do now that the consequences are here for all to see:
"Certainly we cannot default Europe to Russia" -to do so
would be to invite attack "within the next two decades" by a
totalitarian land colossus armed with all the sea and air power
which the whole of Europe could, under authoritarian management, produce.
. .. "As you know, I hold that world stability will not be re·
stored until the vacuum created by the destruction of German power and the weakening of the power of Western Europe has been filled-in other words, until a balance of power
has been restored in Europe." Such a balance of power would
include military strength, but "I believe that economic stabil-
ity, political stability and military stability must develop in
about that order.''s
In an important book in 1968, The Discipline of Power,
George Ball tried to recall the importance of Germany.
But his words even then sounded quaint and old fash·
ioned:
For the future of Gerrriany after two wars is a riddle we must
solve with care. It lies at the heart of the relations between
East and West. It is in many ways the most intractable and
quite likely the most important problem we face. 9
The absence of a peace treaty meant in the most spe·
cific terms that the fighting on the European fronts had
come to a halt but that the war had not ended, because
there were no coherent terms for ending it. There is no
way of ending a war you do not understand. The U.N.,
which had served as a distraction from the discussions for
the future of Poland at Yalta, substituted the aspiration for
peace in the future for actual negotiations for a peace
treaty that made some sense of the world in the present. It
served also to blind people to the startling fact that the
United States and Britain had thought little in concrete
terms about settling the war, that they did not know what
to do with victory in a war that had been forced upon
them-and that they had brought upon themselves.
25 Aprill947 ... At the conclusion I said it was manifest that
American diplomatic planning of the peace was far below the
quality of the planning that went into the conduct of the war.
We regarded the war, broadly speaking, as a ball game which
we had to finish as quickly as possible, but in doing so there
was comparatively little thought as to the relationships between nations which would exist after Germany and Japan
were destroyed. The United Nations was oversold; sound in
concept and certainly the only hope for improvement in the
world order, it was built up over-extravagantly as the solution
to international frictions that had existed for centuries. Now
there is a danger of its being cast aside by the American public in a mood of frustration and disappointment. 10
A few months later, on July 26, Robert Lovett, the Un·
der Secretary of State, deepened Forrestal's analysis:
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�... He spoke of the lack of planning fqr peace in the State
Department and the casual and off~the-cuff decisions of the
late President, and referred to Churchill's remark that at
Yalta he had been dealing with the "shell of a man" and not
the man himself. Lovett added that the great political error in
the postwar period was the failure to insist upon the writing
of peace treaties while our troops and military power were
still evident in Europe. Nothing, he said, could have stopped
the American forces which were at that time deployed in Germany. II
Probably nothing betrays more the confusion and the
desperation of statesmen after the war than the occurrence of meetings like Yalta and Potsdam, the first of
many summit meetings that have never brought agree·
ment. They were born of a desperate notion that a few
"great" men could make peace on the strength of their
"personal" friendship. And that is part of the reason why
"friendship" has become a word we blush to use. They
substituted talk for negotiation. At Yalta Churchill spoke
often as if he were in Parliament-but there was no one to
listen. Roosevelt was exhausted unto death-and Stalin
had no use for words except as traps for those who spoke
them. And by pretending to hear them in private, he kept
Churchill from speaking them in public where they might
have really counted. In some sense Yalta and Potsdamand not the U.N.-were the first to substitute the aspira·
tion for peace in the future for the actual negotiation of
peace in the present. And the substitution of aspiration for
the action of actual agreement was just what Stalin
wanted, for he knew the cultivation of aspiration you had
no intention of fulfilling weakened and, eventually, undid
men.
The policy of unconditional surrender made the conclusion of a peace treaty difficult, for it destroyed German
sovereignty and no peace treaty could be concluded with·
out Germany's consent. Conclusion of a peace treaty re-
quired the restoration of, or at very least the agreement to
restore, German sovereignty. And the restoration of sover-
eignty or its creation-for it amounts to the same thingas the whole history since the First World War shows, is
extremely difficult, and in any case requires much more
than a generation. Rousseau thought it impossible. Cer·
tainly, it is impossible unless the victors realize its difficulty. Neither to restore it entirely or to destroy it
entirely-the situation of Germany since 1945-means
threatening the sovereignty of the victors and all their al·
lies whose assurance of sovereignty depends on them, especially when there are regimes like the Soviet that feed
on the destruction of sovereignty, for whom war called
"revolution" and "peace" means the destruction of sover-
eignty. And without the recognition of sovereignty, there
can be no experience of reality, of the difference between
life and death, war and peace. Without it all nations invite
questioning not only with words, but with acts that aim to
destroy any people or nation not strong enough to resist.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The most obvious consequence of the absence of a
peace treaty, the division of Germany, is an extreme exam-
ple of the communist technique which threatens many nations called independent but actually struggling for sovereignty and legitimacy. This technique splits countries
against themselves under the cover of a supposedly spontaneous civil war that is actually aggression from the outside. In the extreme instance of Germany, the defense of
West Germany might mean the destruction of all of Germany in the actual outbreak of war. To defend itself Ger.
many must risk its destruction. This contradiction that defense would bring destruction is at the center of the peace
movement, which started in the Federal Republic in response to the decision of Italy, Germany, and Britain to
accept the Pershing II and cruise missiles at the end of
1979.
The division of the West that dwarfs the relations between nations also reproduces itself within the free nations through polarization in thinking to the point that in·
dividuals of the "Left" and the "Right" experience
different meanings for same words. Thucydides gave this
incapacity to experience the same meaning for the same
words classic expression in his description of the civil war
in Corcyra-a description that is at the heart of Hobbes's
thinking, and, therefore, of our political understanding of
domestic political life.
The received value of names imposed for signification of
things, was changed into arbitrary. For inconsiderate boldness, was counted true-hearted manliness: provident deliberation, a handsome fear: modesty, the cloak of cowardice: to be
wise in every thing, to be lazy in every thing. A furious suddenness was reputed a point of valour. To re-advise for the
better security, was held for a fair pretext of tergiversation.
He that was fierce, was always trusty; and he that contraried
such a one, was suspected. He that did insidiate, if it took, was
a wise man; but he that could smell out a trap laid, a more
dangerous man than he. But he that had been so provident as
not to need to do the one or the other, was said to be a dissolver of society, and one that stood in fear of his adversary.
In brief, he that could outstrip another in the doing of an evil
act, or that could persuade another thereto that never meant
it, was commended.
Hobbes, however, was little concerned with war from
abroad, and especially with war from abroad that calls itself
sedition. He saw the threat to civil life as coming mainly
from within, and not from the exploitation of domestic discord as a cover for aggressive war. War from abroad that
wins an unwilling consent by calling itself sedition is something the twentieth century's incapacity to perceive events
has brought upon a world too unsure of itself to distinguish
the new from the merely self-destructive.
In contrast to the Peloponnesian War and Corcyra, however, the polarization today in free countries comes not
primarily from actual violence within the country but occurs in men's minds in response to war masking as civil
115
�violence elsewhere in the world, often in places no one
ever thought of much, before the ohset of fighting.
The division and polarization shOjVS itself not only be·
tween individuals but within them-' individuals who feel
torn between, in appearance, mutually exclusive interpre~
tations of all events. One man's hero is another's murderer.
Because we fear the responsibility of choosing, such a
division and polarization brings paralysis. And paralysis is
often a prelude to violence-or to helplessness in the face
of violence. Aristotle meant something like paralysis when
he used the word stasis for events which until recently
many called "revolution" in the illusion that their violence
brings movement and change instead of springing from
the incapacity for change.
This polarization in thinking would not work its way
into men's reasoning without the fear of the Soviet Union
and Communist China, mostly unacknowledged, behind
it. Lately, too, the Soviet Union has openly excited fear
with its threats of nuclear war, and, before that, with its
sponsorship of supposedly indigenous terrorists throughout the world-a sponsorship that governments even now,
with the exception of Italy and Israel, do not take seriously
because their awareness of it influences neither their
words nor their actions. 12 This open resort to terror is in
fact an attempt to bring the fear that reigns in totalitarian
count!ies to the whole world.
Propaganda always feeds on suppressed anger and fear.
Once people face the facts that inspire this unacknowledged fear, for instance the extermination in Afghanistan
and the use of gas in Afghanistan, Laos, and Cambodia,
the propaganda loses its grip-and men return to their
senses. Individuals and newspapers like the Wall Street
Journal, L'express, II Giornale Nuovo have driven governments to at least acknowledge Soviet sponsorship of terrorism, manipulation of the peace movements, use of gas in
Afghanistan, Laos, and Cambodia. In the face of sceptical
hostile journalists' questions about terrorism, the then
Secretary of State, Alexander M. Haig, referred to the
work of one private journalist, Claire Sterling. But especially in foreign affairs, governments are supposed to bring
men to their senses-not men their governments. We are
already in a situation that calls upon individuals to say
things their governments dare not acknowledge-the situation of individuals in totalitarian countries.
The last presidential election somewhat undid this tendency to polarization in thinking in the United Statesand also in free Europe-because it showed the capacity
of millions of individuals to come to their own conclusions,
to think with their own heads, despite the pounding and
manipulation of almost all major media. It made facts self- ·
evident that men had hardly dared mention in public a few
years before. There was, however, an immediate attempt
to reintroduce ideological stereotypes, like a drug that
some men, and especially some men who have come to
speak for the Democratic Party, could not get along with-
116
out. In somewhat veiled terms, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. recently pleaded openly for this kind of polarization, even as
he scornfully admitted that Reagan's election has reasserted common sense perception and the meaning of
words enough to weaken the ideological rigidity that had
intensified polarization during the long years of South
Vietnam's and the United States' fight to save Indochina.
In the attempt to reintroduce this polarization, exploitation of the yearning for peace and the terror before nuclear death plays an important role, a role similar to the
"anti-war" movements more than ten years ago:
In foreign policy the administration has presided over the re-
militarization of the Cold War. [Soviet propaganda characterizes any Western attempt to defend itself as a reintroduction
of the Cold War.] It has conveyed the distinct impression that
it regards nuclear weapons as usable and nuclear war as winnable. Far from regarding the nuclear arms race as a threat to
the future of humanity, the administration appears to regard
it as the great means for doing the Soviets in.13
The government appears tongue-tied before this attempt to rewaken ideological thinking. It avoids straightforward facts and telling details and resorts to platitudes
that are barely distinguishable from ideology, and betrays
something approaching inverted agreement with those
who wish to undo it. This evasiveness bespeaks fear and
stirs the suspicion it would dispell. For instance, President
Reagan in his address on March 8, 1983, and on other occasions, exaggerated the effective exercise of American
strength in the years immediately after the Second World
War-the years that, unwittingly, made for the continuation of the war they meant to end, and thereby, increased
the chances for the collapse of the West that has to some
extent occurred.
The absence of a coherent peace, and the consequent
unacknowledged continuation of the war, meant we knew
what we were against but not what we were for. It meant
containment-the resignation to the perpetuation of the
division in the hope that it would end. The truth of the
matter is probably that nobody at the end of the War really
expected peace. For otherwise they would have thought
seriously about it. Because they did not expect it, they
asked only to be allowed to aspire to it.
The paralysis that first betrayed itself in this resignation
shows itself not only within countries but in the general
stagnation in international relations which some take for
"stability" -which, in turn, fosters stagnation in attitudes
that prevent the perception of facts, and their significance, at the moment of their occurrence.
Soviet propaganda speaks as if the truce in Europe and
the far East in 1945 had just occurred. And in some sense,
that is true-in the psychological sense. In the free countries the same old arguments are repeated from generation
to generation, but always as if they were new, the same
illusions reappear and must be dispelled. This repetition of
the same arguments responds unawares to the rigidity of
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Communist propaganda-and sometimes is actually occasioned and manipulated by Communist disinformation.l4
At the time of the Soviet attack on Afghanistan in December 1979, George Kennan explained Soviet aggression in
much the same terms that Forrestal in 1944 said hampered
American perception of Soviet aggression:
After a Socialist woman's attempt on Lenin's life on August 28, 1918, Radek, the Bolshevists' star writer, quoted
Lenin's ''winged words'' in Izvestia:
Even if ninety percent of the people perish, what matter if
the other ten percent live to see the revolution become universal?18
I find that whenever any American suggests that we act in
accordance with the needs of our own security he is apt to be
called a god-damned fascist or imperialist, while if Uncle Joe
suggests that he needs the Baltic Provinces, half of Poland, all
of Bessarabia and access to the Mediterranean, all hands
agree that he is a fine, frank, candid and generally delightful
fellow who is very easy to deal with because he is so explicit in
what he wants.l5
In a world that thinks of itself as constantly on the move,
little changes-in perception and understanding. Again,
Forrestal in 1947 could be describing the situation today:
A few pages later in a somewhat different context Melgounov comments:
Not for nothing do the three capital letters which stand for
the title of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, of the
Che-Ka, stand also for the three Russian words which denote
"Death to every man." 19
In Afghanistan a few years ago, to the ignorance of almost all Western newspapers, an Afghan Communist in
charge of a prison echoed the Soviet words of 1918:
It looks to me as if the world were going to try to turn conservative but the difficulty is that between Hitler, your friends to
the east, and the intellectual muddlers who have had the
throttle for the last ten years, the practical people are going to
have a hell of a time getting the world out of receivership, and
when the miracles are not produced the crackpots may demand another chance in which to really finish the job. At that
time it will be of greatest importance that the Democratic
Party speaks for the liberals, but not for the revolutionaries. 16
But stagnation does not mean "stability"-it means drift
towards totalitarianism, drift for the most part unperceived.
And the stagnation does not go back to 1945 only. It
reaches back to 1917. Soviet actions to the world have not
changed since 1917 and early 1918. They are only an extension of the terror that began in 1917 and 1918 in Russia
to as much of the world as will not resist the methodical
resort to terror, sometimes not even disguised with hon-
eyed overtures of peace in the name of a spontaneous uprising for freedom. lri 1923 Guglielmo Ferrero said that
Russia had in four years suffered the distintegration that
had taken the ancient world four centuriesY In 1925 the
Russian historian, educated and trained in the world of
Nicholas II, Sergey Petrovich Melgounov, published The
Red Terror in Russia, in the major languages of Europe,
that described the atrocities of the Bolsheviks without uttering the word Marxist. But all that has been forgotten.
And because it has been forgotten we recall anything that
happens with difficulty.
The man who will read Melgounov will see the stagnation that surrounds him. He will see that the generations
have come and gone and that little has changed in Bolshevik practice since 1917, the practice that instructed Hitler
and showed him the world would ignore, and forget what
it did not ignore. The practice of getting others to do the
murdering for them, and still others to justify and exult in
it. The practice of blaming others for the murder they did
themselves: uThe Terror was forced upon us."
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Their commander-in-chief was one Sayyed Abdollah. With
my own ears I heard him say: "A million Afghans only must
remain alive: we only need a million Communists: the others,
we don't need them, we will liquidate them.'' 20
Nothing has changed. The children shot today in Afghanistan are the descendants of the children shot in Russia in 1917-1918.21 The murder that went after almost
every person of noticeable energy and independence in
the countryside in South Vietnam by 1965-information
available in a book published in the United States in the
same year-went on in Russia beginning in 1917.22 There
was nothing spontaneous even then: it was cold and methodical. And why is it that murder, as long as it is spontaneous, seems alright to forget? The terror that wracked
Germany in the last years, and-almost unnoticed by the
rest of the world-wracks Italy now, that threatens the life
of every judge who dares condemn a terrorist, of every
courageous journalist, of the wives and children of prison
guards and wardens who do not cooperate-all that started
in 1917 in Russia with the seizure of wives and children as
hostages for shooting. And yet we, and our newspapers,
treat murder in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cambodia, or Italy,
when it is noticed at all, as if it had not happened before.
Neither are peace overtures at the moment of murder
anything new. For instance, the present Soviet peace overtures to Europe-together with threats of nuclear annihilation-meant to stop the American defense of Europe
with Pershing II and cruise missiles at the moment that
men and women drown in excrement and are buried alive
in Afghanistan.2l In 1917 and 1918 in Russia the shootings
never stopped on the nights before amnesties, the most
dreaded nights. And the greatest murder in Russia in 1917
and 1918 came with the aboliton of the death penalty.
When I think how few of these occurrences that ought
to be the currency of our thinking about the war called
peace figure in our memories, and contrast it with the hor-
117
�ror that grows with the years at thepmrder of five million
Jews and unumbered millions of others, I conclude that
only the destruction of fascism and nazism in war allows us
to experience its horrors after (and almost because) we can
do nothing about them. But we ignore the present murder, and the murder that preceded it, because we can do
something about it-if only not ignore it.
The resentment and hatred in much of the world at Israel's courage-that makes others perceive their cowardice-bespeaks a certain disingenousness in this horror at
past murders we can no longer do anything about. A disingenousness that serves to distract from present murder
and present cowardice and that shows itself nakedly in the
current Soviet and Arab propaganda that compares Israel
to the Nazis. Israel is one of the few nations in the world
that stands up to murderers, and takes words seriously,
that has learned the lessons of World War 11-the war that
does not cease.
But although the Communists have not changed since
1917, they have renewed themselves. They have returned
to their source as Machiavelli (Discourses 1, 3) said all republics and sects must. (But a regime that finds itself in
undermining the governments of the world, let alone its
endurance and renewal, was more than Machiavelli could
imagine.) First with the seizure of half of Europe and
China after the Second World War, and then with the
theft of Cuba-while the world wondered whether Castro
was really a "Communist"-and most lately with the undoing of many helpless and unwilling countries after the
fall of Saigon in April 1975: Cambodia, Laos, South
Yemen (in 1968), Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua. And Grenada in 1979. I almost forgot little Grenada
which lies on the oil routes through the Caribbean and
whose youths now go to Cuba six months every year for
indoctrination. The Communists helped precipitate the
destruction of the government of Lebanon in 1975 and of
the government of Persia in 1978. They are now fighting
to seize El Salvador and Afghanistan. And with each successive conquest there is less information and more lies.
And the world watches as if in a dream. It has been a rough
"short course" in the geography not learned in our renowned universities.
Each new conquest means a return to 1917-1918, and
reconfirms its lessons. To talk of the weakening of ideology in these circumstances is nonsense. Each conquest
strengthens it. Violence undoes the illusions and the beliefs of victims-but spreads the fear that makes for illusion and the lip-service to ideology in the rest of the world.
We are not getting farther away from 1917 as the years
pass on: it is approaching us. That is what I mean by stagnation-and what the Communists mean with their talk of
the inevitability of history.
Nineteen seventeen is nearer, because we cannot re~
member it, because we have less conception of what happened than men did in the early twenties. I do not mean
only the atrocities, but the simple facts. We still mindlessly
118
call October a Hrevolution", as if it were some popular up~
rising, instead of a few organized armed men's seizure of
a state. There is little understanding that the war, and the
collapse of the army in the face of peace propaganda, were
the decisive events-propaganda for peace, intenser and
more dangerous, but otherwise not unlike the outcry in the
United States and Europe during the Vietnam War.24
All the endless talk for more than two generations about
Hclass warfare," "the masses," "alienation," usocialism,"
the division of many intellectuals outside Russia into "Stalinists" and "Trotskyists", all this talk, this supposedly
"passionate" talk, that takes itself for philosophy, but is actually only verbiage, serves to obliterate the perception
and remembrance of these few fearful facts. And this incapacity to know the facts of the twentieth century reflects
itself also in a general incapacity to tell the story of our
times, to write simple narrative history in which living
statesmen count, and there is a reality to cope with. 25
And this incapacity to remember and see the facts leads
us to speak and even act as if we had adversaries worthy of
respect, as if they were partly right. We let communist regimes get away with murder. We do not even remind them
of it, and do not distinguish between these regimes and
their peoples. And the more they get away with murder,
the more they return to 1917, the more they can ignore
the nagging emptiness within. The force of this emptiness, and its fragility, shows itself in their denial of rejection, especially of the rejection of their agents and party
men:
My career in the KGB was developing successfully, and it
promised to be even better in the future. But my KGB and
party superiors did not know that for many years I was devel-
oping dissatisfaction with and finally total resentment of the
Soviet socialist system. When I was a university student I had
the chance to learn about the night~marish cruelty and atrocities of the Stalin regime which slaughtered up to 20 million
Soviet citizens. After graduating from the university and being transferred from one Central Committee, Communist
Party, Soviet Union affiliated organization to another, I wit·
nessed firsthand the fact that the Soviet socialist system was
not working for the good of its citizens. I came to the understanding that it is a totally corrupt dictatorship-type regime
with rotten moral standards. Most of the slogans put forward
by the Kremlin leaders I came to understand are aimed at de-
ceiving peoples of the U.S.S.R. and of the world. And I clearly
understand that Marxism-Leninism is actually a perverted
type of religion imposed on millions of people.
Over the past 3 years the Soviet authorities are progressively
using all ruthless and, even by Soviet law, illegal means to
force and blackmail my family to cooperate with them. The
main reason for the indescribable torture of my family by the
Soviet authorities is that the KGB is obviously under pressure to
present the Soviet Politburo with "proof' that the reasons for
my defection to the United States were not political. They cannot admit that a major in Soviet intelligence could possibly be a
hidden dissident.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Speaking about the Soviet Union, they have a problem, because my file in the KGB does not lead them to find anything
bad about me because there is nothing-it is impossible for
them. It is against the Soviet Communist rzature to admit that
a KGB major defected for political reasons. It just cannot happen by their ideas-they know that it can, but they cannot tell
that to the Politburo or the Russian people. (My emphasis)26
Tolstoy describes this emptiness in Napoleon, and the
dependence of its persistence on the approval of much of
the world. At Borodino for once the suffering of battle
breaks through to him. But he cannot yield to his feelings,
because of the praise of half the world. He orders the continuation of fire that he does not desire against Russians
who will not give way, because he thinks the world expects
it of him:
This day the horrible appearance of the battlefield overcame
that strength of mind which he thought constituted his merit
and his greatness . ... With painful dejection he awaited the
end of this action, in which he regarded himself as a participant and which he was unable to arrest. A personal, human
feeling for a brief moment got the better of the artificial phantasm of life he had served so long. He felt in his own person the
sufferings and death he had witnessed on the battlefield. The
heaviness of his head and chest reminded him of the possibil-
ity of suffering and death for himself. ...
Even before he gave that order the thing he did not desire,
and for which he gave the order only because he thought it was
expected of him, was being done. And he fell back in that artificial realm of imaginary greatness, and again-as a horse walking a treadmill thinks it is doing something for itself-he submissively fulfilled the cruel, sad, gloomy, and inhuman role
predestined for him.
And not for the day and hour alone were the mind and conscience darkened of this man on whom the responsibility for
what was happening lay more than on all the others who took
part in it. Never to the end of his life could he understand
goodness and truth, too remote from everything human, for
him ever to be able to grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as they were by half the world, and
so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity.
(Emphasis mine)27
But the victory over Napoleon brought Europe a hundred years of stability because Talleyrand understood that
only the removal of Napoleon could dispel! the "artificial
phantasm" that was destroying the life of Europe in the
name of improving it, and persuaded Alexander I of it28 In
contrast, the First World War precipitated totalitarianism
in much of Europe, and the Second World War, dedicated
to its destruction, ended with its greatest advance. In contrast to the French revolution, which brought war to all of
Europe in the name of freedom, the First World War
brought totalitarianism in its aftermath.
There is in recent history a specific date for the renewal
of this emptiness' attack on the truth that began in 1917,
and for the West's collaboration with it, a date that showed
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that the capacity to tell the truth-without which no free
country could survive-was at the center of the struggle.
On April 16, 1943, the government of Poland in London
announced the discovery of bodies of "many thousands"
of Polish officers they suspected the Soviets had murdered
near Smolensk in the forest of Katyn. 29 Instead of supporting the Polish government which was eventually to have
ten divisions fighting in the West, the British and American governments tried to silence it. Stalin broke diplomatic relations with the government of Poland and started
the long diplomatic struggle for Poland that went on
throughout 1944 and which Churchill knew would decide
the fate of Germany and Europe, and, therefore, of the
peace.
A Hungarian Stalinist until he joined the uprising in
1956 that brought him his death, Miklos Gimlas described
this process of throttling the capacity to say, and understand, the obvious that has threatened many of the governments and newspapers of the world since 1917, and
that made a decisive advance in the long years of the war
for Indochina. Because they succumbed to, and even in
some instances encouraged, the frenzy in the United
States and Europe that took itself for passion that undid
that war, their words now ring hollow-the so-called "credibility gap":
Slowly we had come to believe ... that there are two kinds of
truth ... that truth of the Party and the people can be different and can be more important than the objective truth and
that truth and political expediency are in fact identical . ...
And so we arrived at the outlook ... which poisoned our
whole public life, penetrated the remotest corners of our
thinking, obscured our vision, paralysed our critical faculties
and finally rendered many of us incapable of simply sensing
or apprehending truth. This is how it was, it is no use denying
it.30
In just those years of the Indochina war the first authentic voices since 1917 from within Russia broke upon the
world, and showed its startled eyes that the capacity to tell
the truth, which had made Russian art one of the centers
of Europe in the nineteenth century, had survived the socalled Russian revolution, that Russia still lived, that
things were at the same time worse than we had known,
and better than we had imagined in that abandoned country. At the same time that the West succumbed to an onslaught of lies, voices in the east dismissed them with a
sureness that made us blush at the obvious we desired to
deny-and did deny. Loudly, because we knew it to be undeniable. But the Indochina war ended with the first major Soviet advances throughout the world since the seizure
of eastern Europe in 1945.
These voices embarrass much of the West because they
remind it of its evasiveness and willing blindness. Almost a
generation ago, Michael Polanyi described this incapacity
to face simple facts, and draw their consequences, in
words that tell even more today:
119
�Many academic experts will refuse'· to recognize today that
mere thirst for truth and justice has 1 caused the revolts now
transforming the Soviet Countries. They are not Marxists,
but their views are akin to Marxism in Claiming that the scien·
tific explanation of history must be based on more tangible
forces than the fact that people change their minds3l
This incapacity to cope with the truth, and tell it, makes
it difficult for free governments to explain their policies
and even sometimes to enjoy the confidence of their
actions. There is no way to act effectively in free countries
without straightforward explanation of actions. For action
needs the test of public explanation to win natural assurance. During the war in Vietnam, the United States did
much of what was necessary, but did not dare justify it or
say it openly, did not dare know what it was doing. The
government was simply not able to find the words to ex·
plain its actions. This incapacity to explain its actions
amounted almost to acting publicly in secret. This evasiveness not only bred suspicion, but undid confidence both in
the government and finally in the people, who for many
years lent the government a confidence it turned out not
to have. It also kept the government from realizing that it
did not have a strategy for winning. That even today the
word Winning" sounds uncomfortable is a measure of our
past evasiveness. The government lost the war with words,
not on the battlefield, because it did not understand its
actions enough to explain them. A Soviet commentator, in
contrast, understood its actions very well, precisely because he did not have to suffer the test of public explanation:
11
I really tore the stupid Americans to shreds this morning ... I
held them up to shame for escalating the War in Vietnam.
What idiots they are in Washington! Rotten humanists in
white gloves! They want to hold Communism back, the fools.
But it doesn't have to be stopped; it needs to be squashed.
But they don't understand, not a damned thing! The only fellow they ever had who understood what a cowardly bunch of
jackals all these Stalins and Khrushchevs and Maos and Hos are
was John Foster Dulles, may his soul rest in peace. He knew
you can talk with Communists pleasantly and politely, just
as long as you hold a gun to their heads. Then they are quiet
and peaceful, as smooth as can be. But any other approach is
useless ...
I read all these people like Alsop, Lippmann, and Pearson,
and not one of these pundits is smart enough to say straight
out: Tell the Russians to go to hell and get on with the job in
Vietnam. The Russians won't dare to raise a finger against
you. They're scared to death. And the Chinese won't touch
you either. But they'll make a terrible lot of noise. All you
have to do is snap back at them properly and quietly, as
Dulles did, and they'll shut up. They'll be begging for peace
themselves. How stupid life is. We can't write what we think
but they can't do what we think either. They are afraid of their
own left-wingers. I've been there, I know. (My emphasis)32
This incapacity to explain action publicly, and, therefore, more often than not, to understand it privately with
120
any confidence, leads to an incapacity to understand the
significance of action. To understand the importance of
acts, especially in a situation where the threat of total war
is constant and, therefore, unreal, and "little" wars continue regardless-and where the fighting is far away and
engages only the Soviets or their proxies directly-you
have to go to the books about the camps. They are the only
books of manners, of diplomacy, we have-our Odyssey.
The first rule of the camps is, pay attention to actions, not
words-one's own actions and the actions of others:
Only dimly at first, but with ever greater clarity, did I also
come to see that soon how a man acts can alter what he is.
Those who stood up well in the camps became better men,
those who acted badly soon became bad men; and this, or at
least so it seemed, independent of their past life history and
their former personality make-up or at least those aspects of
personality that seemed significant in psychoanalytic thinking. 33
Diplomats should now go to the books on the camps to
learn what they are up against in dealing with totalitarian
regimes. For our world no longer has any strangers, or,
at least, no longer knows how to recognize and greet a
stranger. And in the camps there are no strangers-and
everybody knows it unmistakably.
In their concentration camps totalitarian regimes betray
the desperation that possesses them, and that informs
their actions among the nations: in their readiness to allow
criminals to victimize the innocent captives, in their resort
to terror, including threats to relatives and friends still outside, to make men do anything to survive, above all in their
effort to prove there is no such thing as courage, that life is
merely existence, to destroy men without directly killing
them, to make them scared of the breath they breathe.
And all this not swiftly but in a long drawn-out cunning
cat-and-mouse game that raises expectations and crushes
them, that exploits the yearning to survive (at the price of
betraying all one is), and the illusion that one might just be
different from the dead and dying, to turn a man into an
apparently willing victim, because his will-and his lifehave shrunk almost beyond his experience. Melgounov
was already clear in 1925 about this slowness:
Besides, the policy of the Soviet Government is a policy capa·
ble always of postponing its wreakings of revenge, so that persons may "disappear", may be sent into exile, or thrown in
gaol, long after they have been granted official guarantees of
immunity. 34
Melgounov mentions no countries-in addition to individ-
uals-because he did not imagine that the violence consuming Russia might spread to the world. All this slowness, especially the exploitation of the wish to survive at
almost any cost, has betrayed itself in the fear of war that
has obsessed the West since 1917. More than twenty years
passed before the Communists finally struck South Vietnam openly.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�Terror and destruction appear to wprk. Few can cope
with them without wreaking equal destruction-Indochina was an important exception-in return, destruction
that usually works to the advantage of tfuose who want to
destroy.
The camps teach that there is no "negotiation" without
hard-headed courage, and the strength that comes of it,
that does not lead to irremediable surrender in which the
victim, individual or country, is made to consent to his
own destruction, which wants to change man, to reach his
core, but which destroys many, and discovers unexpected
strength in some.
Who knows whether it is not in man's lack of an internal core
that the mysterious success of the New Faith and its charm
for the intellectual lie? By subjecting man to pressure, the
New Faith creates this core, or in any case the feeling that it
exists. Fear of freedom is nothing more than fear of the void.
"There is nothing in man," said a friend of mine, a dialecti~
cian. "He will never extract anything out of himself, because
there is nothing there. You can't leave the people and write in
a wilderness. Remember that man is a function of social
forces. Whoever wants to be alone will perish." This is proba-
bly true, but I doubt if it can be called anything more than the
law for our times. Feeling that there was nothing in him,
Dante could not have written his Divine Comedy or Montaigne his Essays, nor could Chardin have painted a single
still-life. Today man believes there is nothing in him, so he
accepts anything, even if he knows it to be bad, in order to
find himself at one with others, in order not to be alone. As
long as he believes this, there is little one can reproach in his
behaviour. 35
The emptiness Milosz means is Baudelaire's ennui. It
means not being able to taste life, not feeling alive, not being alive. "Whoever wants to be alone will perish." But
whoever does not stand alone will not live. People who
cannot feel life, whose words have no meaning, feel that
there is a wall between them and life, that there is no core.
The incapacity to experience life, to feel alive, makes people feel as miserable as poverty-and, ashamed. They
wince in envy at individuals who can feel these things. In
free countries envy tortures all the more, because it is clear
that nothing keeps one from life except oneself: there is
nobody to blame.
Totalitarian ideology promises to dispel such emptiness,
but totalitarian states simply crush anything that is not
empty. They murder and persecute individuals not possessed by it. It is the insistence on this emptiness, on proving that there is nothing else, nothing that can stand up to
it, that drives totalitarian regimes to expand. For free
countries excite murderous envy, because they remind totalitarian regimes that everyone might not be empty, that
there might be men who can say "no," who might love life
enough not to do anything to survive. But baffled by their
freedom that mercilessly drives them to experience their
incapacity to live, the free countries, for the most part,
cannot conceive that anybody could envy them:
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
... very many people: living in totalitarian countries, having
survived terror and been brainwashed by propaganda, are not
only genuinely content with their position, but virtually consider themselves to be the happiest people on earth. This,
however, engenders an inferiority complex vis-3.-vis the democracies, so that the inhabitants of totalitarian countries often turn into implacable enemies of freedom, ready and willing to destroy everything that reminds them of the free will
they have lost. This also applies in many respects to the intellectuals of those countries, who often display a pathological
fear of freedom.
A man who has been accustomed to breathing fresh air all his
life does not notice it, and never realizes what a blessing it is.
He thinks of it only occasionally when entering a stuffy room,
but knows that he need only open the window for the air to
become fresh again. A man who has grown up in a democratic
society and who takes the basic freedoms as much for granted
as the air he breathes is in much the same position. People
who have grown up under democracy do not value it highly
enough. Yet there are weighty reasons for their dissatisfaction with this society .... 36
This reluctance to take their own measure that makes it
difficult for the free countries to realize that the totalitarian regimes are murderously envious of their freedom-in
some sense experience it more deeply than the free countries because they have deprived themselves of it-makes
it difficult for them to experience communist hypocrisy
and duplicity. At the end of the war some experienced the
West's incapacity to perceive Communist duplicity more
vividly than now:
The sheer duplicity of the Soviets during these negotiations is
beyond the experience of the experts in the State Department, with the result that any future promise made by the
Soviets is to be evaluated with great caution. It appears that
they do not mind lying or even our knowing that they lie, as
long as it is for the benefit of the state_37
Perception of totalitarian duplicity would lead to awareness that the Communist regimes speak in a different dimension, that the same words mean different things to
them, in the precise sense that the same words meant different things at Corcyra. This double vision in which the
relation to world and self, and of language to truth, is at
stake, is precisely the disturbance in perception that I
mentioned in the introduction which betrays itself in the
division of the West and feeds upon it-and makes it difficult for us to distinguish between our friends and enemies:
30 Aprill947 Jimmy Byrnes came in this morning and in talking about the Russians he said they are "stubborn, obstinate
and they don't scare." I reminded him of our conversation
about two years ago when he chided me for being too extreme in my views about the Russians when I told him that
[when] he harbored the illusion that he could talk in the same
fashion with the Russians that he could with the Republican
opposition in the Senate he was very much mistaken. At that
time I told him that when he spoke so to speak, using language
121
�in a third dimension, the Russians spoke in a fourth, and there
1
was no stairway. 38
The dissociation of words from facts, which makes it impossible to grasp the meaning of events until afterwards,
when nothing can be done about them, results from not
perceiving totalitarian duplicity, and the incommensurability of vision that comes with it. Such dissociation and
double vision makes people helpless before aggression.
Brezhnev in 1973 meant just this dissociation when he
called for "cooperation" between the two sides despite
their incapacity to talk to each other-as if they were interchangeable, and the truth did not separate them:
For years we have been piling up arms without interruption.
Until now we can destroy each other many times over, not
simply once. Why not persuade our people to work together,
even if we hold ideological positions, we will perhaps never be
able to reconciliate?39
One of the New York Times correspondents in Indochina, Sydney Schanberg, experienced this double vision
in his own flesh when he could not recognize the revolution of his dreams in the murder before his eyes, patients
left to die on the operating table and the rest, in Cambodia
in the spring of 1975 after the fall of Saigon:
... In almost every situation we encountered during the
more than two weeks we were under Communist control,
there was a sense of split vision~ whether to look at events
through Western eyes or through what we thought might be
Cambodian revolutionary eyes.
Brutality or Necessity?
Was this just cold brutality, a cruel and sadistic imposition of
the law of the jungle, in which only the fittest will survive? Or
is it possible that, seen through the eyes of the peasant soldiers and revolutionaries, the forced evacuation of the cities is
a harsh necessity? Perhaps they are convinced that there is no
way to build a new society for the benefit of the ordinary
man, hitherto exploited, without literally starting from the beginning; in such an unbending view people who represent the
old ways and those considered weak or unfit would be ex-
pendable and would be weeded out. Or was the policy both
cruel and ideological? (My emphasis)40
Because totalitarian leaders see the freedom of the West
with more clarity than much of the West, they desire to
undermine and destroy it with the free West's involuntary
cooperation and consent-to exploit the West's fear of its
own self-destructiveness, that showed itself in the First
World War and in the decade before the Second World
War, to turn it against itself. To win this unwilling cooperation they exploit the West's unacknowledge guilt at going
along with the cat-and-mouse game of murderers ever
since 1917.
The United States now goes along with this cat-andmouse game in El Salvador. Intelligent and honest journalists, who do not know much history, observe rightly that
122
the United States contributes to the polarization it might
have prevented with the swiftness of confidence-which
they do not, however, call for:
It was certainly possible to describe some members of the
armed opposition, as Deane Hinton had, as "out-and-out
Marxists/' but it was equally possible to describe other members of the opposition, as the embassy had at the inception of
the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FOR) in April of 1980,
as "a broad-based coalition of moderate and center left
groups." The right in El Salvador never made this distinction:
to the right, anyone in the opposition was a communist, along
with most of the American press, the Catholic church, and, as
time went by, all Salvadoran citizens not of the right. In other
words there remained a certain ambiguity about political
terms as they were understood in the United States and in El
Salvador, where "left" may mean, in the beginning, only a resistance to seeing one's family killed or disappeared. That it
comes eventually to mean something else may be, to the extent that the United States has supported the increasing polarization in El Salvador, the procustean bed we made ourselves.41
Violence, in appearance random, in which, in contrast
to outright war, you never really know who you are fighting, makes for the "ambiguity of political terms" that Joan
Didion talks of. Because the United States will neither pull
out entirely or move decisively, the violence goes on and
on, and the propaganda war spreads throughout the world
in the doubts of men. To prolong means to lose, because it
means to prolong uncertainty and to increase the "mixed
signals" from the United States the El Salvadorans complain of, rightly. The continuation of violence means that
men, especially men outside the country ofviolence, will
want most of all an end to it. It means victory for the few,
weaker and more violent, who will destroy freedom in El
Salvador. The focus on El Salvador that comes of going
along with this cat-and-mouse game also keeps the United
States from lifting its eyes to the real threat and instigator,
Cuba, and to the danger to Mexico-from seeing the
whole situation in the Caribbean, and in the world.
The cat-and-mouse game feeds off dread of the "Right,"
of fascism and nazism. But it may actually in the slow unceasing course of defeat provoke the brutality it dreadsas a young writer observed in profound criticism of the
President of Yale's recent outburst against the "Moral Majority":
Neither your Address, nor any other manifestations of liberal
Democrat culture take notice of the real dangers to the
United States, such as the latest measures of Soviet militarization, like the abolition of military draft deferment for college
students or the creation of military bases in Afghanistan for
advancing further into the Middle East. But these real dangers exist, they will really grow, they will produce real fear,
and on this fear real fascists or Nazis will capitalize. 42
And this may be just what Soviet policy wants-in spite of
itself.
WJNTER/SPRING 1983
�2 The Roots of the Division in the Past
I have described how the division betrays itself in politics since 1945, in the division of the world, in the division
of Germany and of countries like Korea, and in the polarization of thinking, and the excitation of irreconcilable factions within free countries, and within individuals within
those countries, and of the workings of this division, of
how it turns countries against themselves and individuals
against themselves, of how it increases the forces within
an individual that paralyze him in the name of freeing him
from them.
But this division that shows itself most startlingly in politics since 1945, goes much deeper than politics. It tends to
politicize all life. Even in Italian elementary schools and
high schools factionalism that calls itself "Left" and
"Right" holds sway-a telling indication of the adults' incapacity to speak to each other. 43
The politicization shows itself most tellingly in the politicization of freedom, in its equation with democracy, in
the incapacity to conceive of democratic constitutions
springing from freedom, rather than freedom springing
from democratic constitutions. The astonishing, fairly current, assertion that the greatest achievements in art, philosophy, and the writing of history have occurred in democracies shows this parochialism in its nakedness.
In the paradox of contradiction, the war now abroad
means to destroy constitutions in the name of directly realizing this freedom that politicization devours. For it hates
democratic constitutions for their modesty, for their readiness to build on this freedom, and yet measure their distance from it. For these constitutions with their checks
and balances, their respect for opposition, their due process, their dedication to law and justice above all expediency, express both our yearning for freedom and our inca-
pacity for realizing it, directly. In its genius the American
constitution bases its confidence in men on a distrust of
their natures, and, therefore, distinguishes what men do
from what they think, say, and desire. It, therefore, makes
men experience their disatisfaction with themselves-the
difference between their good opinion of themselves and
their actual self.
Art and philosophy and the writing of history, when
they are not propaganda masquerading as art, have always
been greater than politics and free constitutions, have always shown their foundation in nature and in living man,
in the freedom that is greater than constitutions and underlies them. In this sense art and philosophy and history
are silent. They do not incite to action, but allow one to
experience the springs of action, life itself, in another dimension of make believe and recall.
The shrinking of freedom within political bounds that
corresponds to its containment within the frontiers of a
few countries, shows itself in unmistakable terms in the
emptiness of much of what passes for art, philosophy, and
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
history-and in its unacknowledged politicization, and in
the public's fascination with it and incapacity to distinguish it from actual art. Substitute the word "communism" for "sex" in many novels written today, and they
will betray the yearning to incite to action, with the most
powerful stimulants, characteristic of propaganda, the
ideological drive to obliterate the obvious, the self-evident,
the lovely plainness of the day-as Lev Navrozov has observed.
In contrast our great art-and we have some-is above
all unassuming, unassuming enough to undo pretension
and masks, and make you blush. The plainness of our
humdrum existences which leaves little space for anything
but life, whether lived or not, escapes and baffles like a
new Circe everything but this unassumingness which
bears no pretence and makes no show, and seems, and in
some sense is, effortless-which does not mean it comes
without struggle. Above all it knows that the most important things come unasked. I am thinking, for example, of
Montale, Morandi, the Grass of Onkel, Onkel, Godard,
and Truffaut. In Sinyavsky's A Voice from the Chorus it
moves even in the camps, for the book is made up of the
author's letters from the camps-in a world that, at least in
the West, writes few letters for other than official purposes. In some sense no real story can now be told on the
unmistakable level of art without this unassumingness
that recalls the simplicity of nature, and is the only
strength we have that is undeniable. Nadezhda Mandelstarn in Hope against Hope showed Stalin's unmistakable
smell for this unassumingness, and his refusal to give up
the scent until he destroyed it.
Besides showing itself in art, philosophy, and the writing
of history, the mirrors of the soul, this freedom greater
than democracy lives in individuals, in the lives they lead,
in the language they speak, which bears all history in it,
which is always greater than the meanings it shows, which
always shows life rediscovering its meanings, and, therefore, always surprises-all living that in happy times goes
on untouched by politics. Because this freedom lives in individuals, and in some sense begins with them, the war
now going on aims at destroying all individuals capable of
experiencing freedom and, therefore, nature to some extent. Igor Shafarevich meant this destruction when he
wrote " ... socialist ideals must (bring) . . . the withering
away of all mankind, and its death.":
... the economic and social demands of socialism are the
means for the attainment of its basic aim, the destruction of
individuality.
... Such a revolution would amount to the destruction of
Man, at least in the sense that has hitherto been contained in
this concept. And not just an abstract destruction of the concept, but a real one toa.44
To the extent that the world-wide war to destroy freedom has made freedom smaller than democracy, which
123
�can only spring from it and realize it within limitations,
and allow individuals to realize it, but which cannot create
it, for it already lives, and we know its presence even in its
partial absence, totalitarianism has already succeeded.
Because individuals realize the attack is against them,
and that their governments are in some sense complicit
with it, just as they themselves are complicit with it, they
tend to be distrustful rather than critical of their democratic governments and of themselves-a distrust that like
the shrinking of freedom shows the success of totalitarianism has no geographical frontiers, because it has no sovereignty, because it subdues all life within its own frontiers
and, therefore, must feed on life without.
But this struggle against totalitarianism that has subordinated freedom to politics, and threatens the individual, is
in a sense simply a byproduct of the First World War and
of the incapacity to understand and end it. Unlike the wars
of Napoleon whose armies attempted to bring the French
Revolution to all of Europe, the First World War did not
begin as a total revolutionary war. It began as a conventional war which surprised everybody.lt turned into a total
war because nobody understood it. And its very uncontrollability, which came of this incapacity to understand it,
and which betrayed itself in enormous casualties, turned it
into a revolutionary war in 1917, for the betterment of humanity, to justify those casualties. In 1917 to keep its soldiers in the trenches, the Italian government promised
them a new world. 45 1917 also brought the Fourteen
Points, and the veneration of Wilson's picture almost like
an icon in much of Europe. The First World War was not
born of the revolution. It unleashed it.
The men who defeated Napoleon did not only know
what they were against. They knew what they were for.
They knew concretely enough what they were for, for Talleyrand to explain to Alexander I that there could be no
peace without the removal of Napoleon from power, and
restoration of monarchy in France. In contrast, the men of
1914 so little understood what they were about that they
allowed a war they had not understood to turn into a total
war against all governments-that is, into a war against
themselves.
Because revolution, the war against governments that
sets individuals against each other and against themselves,
came after and as a result of the First World War, became
the content of the First World War after the fighting on
the fronts ceased, because the war produced revolutions,
and not the revolutions the war, the division of the West
precedes the struggle against totalitarianism, and underlies it, and is deeper than it.
In 1918 in a remarkable work, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Thomas Mann clearly grasped the underlying
meaning of the struggle that had rent Europe, and sensed
that the incapacity to grasp it, that betrayed itself in 1918
in the flight into principles that masked disrespect for the
defeated in their desire to change them, would also make
it impossible to experience the tragedy that gripped Eu-
124
rope, both victors and defeated, and, therefore, to end the
war in peace:
... Berufen sein, sei es zu einem Wissen oder einer Tat, zu
der man nicht geboren ist, das schien mir immer der Sinn der
Tragischen-und wo Tragik ist, darf Liebe sein. 46
The First World War represented a renewal of Rome's
struggle against the world in antiquity and in the sixteenth
century which Germany had resisted:
Der lmperialismus der Zivilisation ist die letzte Form des
roemischen Vereinigungsgedankens, gegen den Deutschland
protestiert . .. 47
For Thomas Mann in 1918 it was clear that the accidental war had been about something real and almost palpable, his own living and all the world he had known-and
that because it had been about something real, neither the
defeated not the victors could be entirely right.
Mann saw the First World War as a struggle between
France and Germany, between France that embodied the
principles of the French Revolution, and Germany and
the German-speaking world, and probably also Russia
(which an accident of diplomacy had put on the side of the
Allies). He understood that total war had distorted France
as much as Germany, for total war tends to obliterate the
differences between victors and defeated.
Germany stood for art as opposed to "literature"-the
novels that led Madame Bovary to destruction-for work
in distinction to employment, for culture as opposed to
civilization, for authority as opposed to liberty, which he
distinguished from freedom, for feeling as opposed to principle, for philosophy, for freedom as opposed to democracy, which tended to spread politics everywhere, and after the French Revolution, had brought war to all of
Europe. By art as opposed to "literature," he meant an art
that was greater than politics, and which taught its readers
the limits of politics. He dared even to write that he had
hoped Germany would win the war.
But the greatness of Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen
comes in the awareness that breathes throughout it that
this world is gone forever, and that its disappearance will
have consequences. It is a book full of the sense of loss,
and, therefore, full of sorrow and depth, a warm depth
whose profoundity does not frighten. Betrachtungen eines
Unpolitischen is as much a farewell to Germany as Buddenbrooks was a farewell to his parents and his family, and
Lubeck and the world of the Hanseatic cites. From now on
he would be on his own without a past in a world that was
on its own.
The time of wandering in which all were homeless had
begun-the time in which men no longer knew how to
greet a stranger, and, therefore tell the difference between
a stranger and friend, in which men no longer wrote letters, in which all knew the devastating loneliness of losing
oneself in a crowd, in which a great deal of cash no longer
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�meant wealth, in which great cities assured anonymity,
and the elites of the world lived as if in villages, in which
the country of the homeless would inherit the defense of
what was left of a Europe that could not defend itself, in
which love would be called sex, and blushes feared, in
which egalitarianism was taken for the simplicity of nature, in which any difference smote the heart with something like the pangs of unrequited love, in which envy
would be taken for enthusiasm, in which few could conceive less was more 1 in which you wrote books because you
feared to speak your mind to your neighbour, in which
plain good sense would be taken for untutored naivete, in
which gradually artists disappeared and all men became
"artists," in which everything had to be learned in school,
in which men thought they were the first in history to
make love, in which men protested against death, in which
shame's place in nature was beyond imagination.
1918 was probably the last year Mann could have written such a book Later he praised democracy, because it
was all that was left, and never with anything like the
depth of his farewell to the world of his youth. For after
1918 you could no longer address individuals without exciting crowds, without inspiring the passions that made
things worse in the name of making them better, without
provoking the politics that seduced individuals to their
death by promising to do for them what they could not do
for themselves.
You had to get along with what was left-that is what
Mann's farewell meant. But getting along with what was
left meant knowing the consequences of destruction. It
meant that in the future Europe would live only in individuals wandering and alone throughout the world in a silence that told of embarrassment at great works and at
greatness itself, and that took any inadvertent sign of lifefrom which all art springs-as something untoward:
... Ich sprach von europaeischer Verhunzung: Und wirklich,
unserer Zeit gelang es, so vieles zu verhunzen: Das Nationale,
den Sozialismus-den Mythos, die Lebensphilsophie, das Irrationale, den Glauben, die Jugend, die Revolution und was
nicht noch alles. Nun denn, sie brachte uns auch die Verhunzung des grossen Mannes. Wir muessen uns mit dem historischen Lose abfinden, das Genie auf dieser Stufe seiner Offenbarungs-moeglichkeit zu erleben_48
About twenty years after Mann's Betrachtungen, Kafka
understood clearly that the separation of feelings from understanding that the principles of the victors had helped
bring about-and against which Thomas Mann had said
Germany had always protested-had brought about the
demonization of feelings that might destroy the very
things they would have preserved when not divorced from
understanding. By feelings Kafka meant, I think, the wild,
and quite passionless, indignation that drove political
propaganda, and threatened to undermine the little authority that remained in government and individuals.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
... One ought not to provoke people. We live in an age which
is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to
do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a
crime. War and revolution haven't ceased to rage. On the
contrary. The freeing of our feelings stokes their fires.49
Mann knew that something real had been destroyed.
And because something real had been destroyed, and because men did not realize it had been destroyed, the destruction, the war, would continue, even as the protests of
desperation against it increased. This destruction pretended to free the core of man, that showed itself in the
capacity to say "yes" or uno," but actually it sought to de~
stray this core, to paralyze the capacity to say "yes" or
"no," to destroy the living, the capacity to live. It did this
by turning life itself into politics, into propaganda that
drove people into ecstasy with its promises to change human nature.
When Mann realized that there could be no peace after
1917 because neither defeated nor victors could admit
they had been both right and wrong in the traditions of
eighteenth century law, he meant the disappearance of
doubt in international relations, the doubt that finds remarkable description in the late Richard Hofstadter's
sketch of the qualities that make for art and philosophy:
It is, in fact, the ability to comprehend and express not only
different but opposing points of view, to identify imaginatively with or even to embrace within oneself contrary feelings and ideas that gives rise to first~rate work in all areas of
humanistic expression and in many fields of inquiry.50
The democracies recognized this doubt, that is ultimately
the doubt, and the questioning that comes of it, of Socrates, in their recognition of opposition and criticism in their
domestic life. But after 1917 it no longer held any sway in
international life where victors and defeated could no
longer admit they were both right and wrong. Instead they
wanted a rigidity they took for assurance-a rigidity which
robbed them of confidence and made them fear themselves, and which made them weak in peace and harsh in
war, and which finally obliterated the distinction between
peace and war.
But this rigidity in international relations which brings
with it the destruction of traditional international law (ius
gentium)-the Germans were not even invited to the
peace negotiations after the First World War-cannot but
slowly paralyze the doubt within the domestic life of free
countries. It shows its stiffening effect in the spread of ideologies, and the polarization they bring, within free countries. For this doubt to live within countries, it must also
show itself outside of them in the recognition of the uncertainty of relations between nations, which allows the continuation of present friendships, because it recognizes that
the friends of today might be the enemies of tomorrowand the enemies of today, the friends of tomorrow. 51 This
recognition of uncertainty means the recognition of the
125
�differences between nations, which, in turn, brings the
recognition that freedom is bigger than constitutions, and,
therefore, does not require similar constitutions everywhere, that some peoples can live' in freedom without
spelling their freedom out in written documents, that freedom is old, slavery new. In his characteristically sententious remark at Yalta that the wars of the twentieth century unlike other wars allowed the victors to impose their
political systems on the defeated, Stalin meant the opposite of living with this uncertainty. 52 But this uncertainty
inspired the traditional law of nations (ius gentium), which
is older than almost all nations now living, and which knew
it lived precisely because it sought its assurance, not in the
written guarantee of treaties, but in the threat of war for
violation of traditional practice-for instance, the seizure
of ambassadors, something the Persians did at their peril
in the nineteenth century.
The incapacity to settle the war with a real peace, which
brought the defeated as well as the victors to the peace
table, blurred the distinction between victors and defeated, precisely because a real peace would have meant
recognizing their differences, and the differences in their
political traditions. It would have meant not destroying
the institution of the Kaiser, or at least realizing the serious consequences of its destruction. It would have meant
understanding the risks involved in undoing the empires.
It took more than a generation and much disaster to make
the world understand that the destruction of governments
prolongs a war instead of ending it, because legitimate governments do not grow up overnight:
July 29, 1945 ... He (Ernest Bevin, Foreign Minister of Great
Britain) then made a rather surprising statement-for a liberal and a labor leader: "It might have been far bett~r for all of
us not to have destroyed the institution of the Kaise.~after the
last war; we might not have had this one if we hadn't 'done so.
It might have been far better to have guided the Germans to a
constitutional monarchy rather than leaving them without a
symbol and therefore opening the psychological doors to a
man like Hitler . .. " 53
The blurring of the distinction between victors and defeated showed itself in the collapse of governments among
both the defeated and victorious. For Italy, which Mussolini seized by bluff in 1922, and Russia, at least until
Kerensky, had been victors in the war with Germany. And
the collapse of France in 1941, in face of the might that
came of the collapse of the democracy that defeat had imposed on Germany, should also probably be included in
this list. This collapse of governments among both defeated and victors shows the war had overwhelmed both.
In a sense the story of the two decades between the wars
is the story of how victors and defeated undid each other
in unwilling cooperation. Defeat is a serious business. It
should teach the victors modesty of aims. The extent that
the war had overcome both defeated and victors showed
itself also in the victors' blindness to the significance of the
126
failure of democracy in Italy, and then in Germany. Nations who had persuaded themselves they had fought the
war for democracy ought to have been profoundly alarmed
at the collapse of these governments-not to speak of the
collapse of the Tsar, and a few months later, of the justborn democracy in Russia in 1917. Blindness to the significance of the failure of democracy in Italy, and later in Germany, led to complicity with the regimes that replaced
them. And this sense of complicity paralyzed the democracies in the face of their aggressions. In some sense nazism
and fascism and communism were the creatures of the victors who had not known the responsibilities of victory:
If the realists had wanted to train up a generation of
Englishmen and Englishwomen expressly as the potential
dupes of every adventurer in morals or politics, commerce or
religion, who would appeal to their emotions and promise
them private gains which he neither could procure them nor
even meant to procure them, no better way of doing it could
have been discovered.
... The British government, behind all its disguises, had dedared itself a partisan of Fascist dictatorship.
... I am writing a description of the way in which those
events (the English government's unstated policy of undermining the government of the Republic of Spain and the governments of Abyssinia and Czechoslovakia) impinged upon
myself and broke up my pose of detached professional
thinker. I know now that the minute philosophers of my
youth, for all their profession of a purely scientific detachment from practical affairs, were the propagandists of a coming Fascism. I know that Fascism means the end of dear
thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my
life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle,
fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall
fight in the daylight. 54
Those are famous words of Collingwood's in 1939. But
governments had started teaching this confusion to their
citizens long before. In a letter on February 15, 1918,
Robert Lansing, Secretary of State, argued strongly
against giving money to the Bolsheviks in an assessment
that even to today sounds raw and outspoken because of
its accuracy:
.. . Mr. Walling had a keen appreciation of the forces which
are menacing the present social order in nearly every European country and which may have to be reckoned with even
in this country. It is really a remarkable analysis of the dangerous elements which are coming to the surface and which are
in many ways more to be dreaded than autocracy; the latter is
despotism but an intelligent despotism, while the former is a
despotism of ignorance. One at least has the virtue of order,
while the other is productive of disorder and anarchy. It is a
condition which cannot but arouse the deepest concern. 55
Despite this advice, a few days later on March 11, 1918,
Woodrow Wilson, unwilling or unable to distinguish the
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�violence in Russia from his own promises of democracy to
the world-promises made in 1917 to give the fighting
meaning-wrote encouraging words to the Soviet Congress:
... The whole heart of the people of the United States is with
the people of Russia in the attempt to free themselves forever
from autocratic government and become the masters of their
own life. 56
Wilson's measureless aspirations wished to dispell the
memory of the hatreds shown the world in allied wartime
propaganda. But they matched this hatred in fierceness.
Their measurelessness also made them difficult to distinguish from the measureless aspirations of those out to destroy all government that continued the hatred of the war
in the ostensible repudiation of it. Both the builders and
destroyers of governments meant to repudiate the past, including the immediate past of the Great War. There were
to be new times-times the world had never seen before.
They repudiated the past because the past embarassed
them. But this embarassment measured only their shame
for the present. They shrunk from the past, because they
would not know they were ashamed of the present. Underneath this measurelessness that came of shame for a
present that was beyond coping, and that was so difficult
to distinguish from "revolutionary" fervour, and was in
some sense its complement, there was always fear of war,
and the suspicion of governments that comes of the fear of
war-enough combined to weaken any government.
It was almost as if the world no longer knew how to
mourn the dead only to forget them. It did not realize that
continuing the war in the measurelessness of aspirations
meant not mourning, not feeling sorrow. And that not sorrowing meant forever the leaden guilt at so much massacre whose incomprehensibility had undermined the confidence of statesmen everywhere, made them incapable of
concluding an effective peace, and undone the word courage-a guilt that no amount of freneticizing about the future would dispel. There has been perhaps no time with
greater cause for sorrow that sorrowed less. The past
stopped in 1917.
But the appeal to measureless aspiration to give meaning to the slaughter did not only bring the past to a stop. It
nourished the suspicion that violence brought progress,
made the world better, that it might be the only way to
change things. For the measureless aspiration for peace
and a new world meant man had changed, and the only
change that men knew had come of violence, now called
"revolution" instead of war, because the word "revolu-
tion" excited hope, war dread. And it tells something
a bout these measureless aspirations that almost every
country that totalitarianism seized first went through democracy.
The belief that violence brought progress made the suspicion that men had done intolerable damage to themselves intolerable. It banished prudence, common-sense,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
sobriety, and most of all pessimism, all words hardly anyone dared show in public, whose meaning men no longer
knew-or dared conceive-except darkly, and in the silence of their own minds, a silence that the deafening roar
of aspiration in all public places made men fearful of trusting. Everything, but above all disaster, became the occasion for exuberance that men mistook for hope-just as
they took their sentimentality, especially the sentimental
whining for peace, for goodwill. But unlike hope and sorrow and goodwill, this exuberance and sentimentality despite its illusion of energy made men helpless in the face of
those who used the same exuberence and sentimentality
to undo them. Because of its measurelessness it made it
hard to grasp obstacles that would have shown their aspirations their limitations and, therefore, increased the responsibilities of the victors by facing them with the choice
between what they might do-and what they could not.
But the very measurelessness of the aspirations that increased because they did not face these obstacles made for
the assumption hardly anyone dared question in public,
that men had actually changed, rather than simply destroyed ages of inheritance.
In this unwillingness even to ask whether destruction
might not have made things worse, our time contrasts with
Rome in her civil wars. Open almost any page of Cicero, of
Sallust and even some of Caesar, and you will see there a
confidence we cannot conceive that their words will live
forever because they tell of men who had destroyed themselves and their freedom, and had little illusion that it
would not be forever, and that nothing would come of it,
except sorrow for the loss they could not help. And so it, in
fact, turned out, only much more slowly than now, because they recognized the loss-preferred sight to the exuberance of willing blindness, and did not deny the dullness
that had overcome them.
The readiness to justify events after their occurrence in
order to find a meaning for a war that nobody understood-except the totalitarians, who confused their confidence that destruction ignored had irremediable consequences with understanding-which showed itself in the
resort to aspirations for a new world in 1917, put free governments behind events. Between the wars, the complicity
that came of not grasping the significance of the collapses
of democracy in various countries increased their slowness
in grasping events and responding. It made them helpless
in the face of the continuation of the war until it was too
late. And in the Second World War, the depth of their unacknowledged sense of responsibility for the disaster made
them merciless in their self-justification, and incapable of
respecting their enemies, and blind to the consequences
of an alliance, born of necessity, with a totalitarian regime
worse than nazism and fascism, that had to some extent
inspired them. Towards the end, Hitler remarked that he
was the amateur, Stalin, the pro.
The situation of the free countries behind events has
persisted until the present-with the exception of the
127
�swift confidence of the beginning of the Korean War. But
even the Korean war ended not in a settlement, but in a
battle truce between commanders that reinstituted the division of the country that precipitated the war. The
United States remained in the situation of response-not
mastery.
To remain behind events weakens confidence in governments, for it shows them not enough on top of events
to understand them. And understanding, in our situation
of neither war nor peace, where many states are illegitimate and others lack the confidence of legitimacy, is crucial. In a normal situation of balance of power, such as prevailed in the nineteenth century or in the eighteenth, not
haunted by the fear of war, and where subversion is not
prevalent, response may be enough-not in ours.
The situation after the First World War allowed little
room for error. It called for more honesty, more straightforward practicality, for more courage than war itself. But
the war had consumed courage. Even the world that had
yielded so much death embarassed people. It was too serious to bear mention. The destruction of the First World
War meant human nature was on its own everywhere.
People felt the demands of truth, and knew they had to be
met, unflinchingly. All the art between the two wars tells
that, and shows that bravery-and, for the most part, it
moves as if there were no longer any history, or govern·
ments worthy of notice-as if the world lived only in private life and private sensation. But it was not easy to face
human nature. The whole period between the wars is
driven by the conflict between the necessity of facing human nature, and the unreadiness to face it. F1ight into aspiration relieved the conflict-but it did not restore confidence. It devoured it.
More than governments, people realized they were on
their own, in something like the state of nature, not of
choice as the excitation of aspiration pretended, but of necessity-of the necessity of past events, of destruction and
of the incapacity of settlement -a necessity that totalitarians called "the inevitibility of history," because they
counted on individuals' incapacity to cope with it.
The yearning for total freedom that took flight into aspiration, and that in the unrecognized desolation appeared
like necessity itself, did not amount to a capacity for it.
Precisely because the war had subordinated freedom to
politics-and made freedom the stuff of international relations-and in order to subordinate it to politics, dismembered it, politics tended to devour everything before it in
the search for a freedom greater than itself that would
show it its limits. These limits live in individuals' capacity
enough to distinguish between "yes" and "no."57 Hitler
came to office legally, and Mussolini also. The combination of a yearning, and incapacity, for measureless free~
dom that was taken to allow everything exposed men to
the most ruthless among them, to men like criminals, in
their incapacity to yield to natural law, to use Hobbes's
words that mean the words nature speaks to those who listen to it, in their thwarted genius. The incapacity to distinguish actual genius and nature from its distortions and parodies led to fascination and admiration for criminality-a
fascination that has again betrayed itself in the last twenty
years, and which paralyzes.
And the tragedy is that in its attack on nature, and its
attempt to destroy it, totalitarianism also uncovered nature, but only in war for it knows only war, which it cannot
distinguish from revenge or defense, and unmistakably reminded of its presence. In the midst of the "insane gran·
deur" of the Second World War, Milovan Djilas realized
that the fighting, after bringing his hardness out, also softened him, for a moment that disappeared until words recalled it to him a generation later:
Then, unobtrusively yet insistently, various thoughts came to
my mind concerning the Germans, the Partisans, and ideology. Why were doctors from Berlin and professors from Heidelberg killing off Balkan peasants and students in these ra-
vines? Hatred for Communism was not sufficient. Some
other terrible and implacable force was driving them to insane death and shame. And driving us, too, to resist them and
pay them back . ... This passion, this endurance which lost
sight of suffering and death, this struggle for one's manhood
and nationality in the face of one's own death ... this had
nothing to do with ideology or with Marx and Lenin. When
the sun rose, I suppressed these abysmal thoughts, for I
sensed how destructive they were for the ideas and organization to which I had given myself. But I never forgot those
thoughts ... 58
Nazism and fascism and communism were a vengeance,
and an exploitation, of 1914-1917, a vengeance and exploitation not only of the defeated upon themselves, but also a
vengeance and exploitation of the victors upon them·
selves-for why else did they tolerate the spread of these
destructive movements?-for principles they could not
live up to, that made them unrecognizable to themselves,
that made them feel like liars when they spoke and defenseless in the face of their enemies, now at home as well
as abroad, and more insidious than soldiers on a battlefield. For it turned out that they were not able to act in
accordance with what they had said in 1917, most obviously when Hitler seized the Rhineland in March, 1936:
to say uno," that is, in nature. And totalitarianism, in the
name of freeing this nature, attacked this capacity to say
"no" directly in each individual-with the argument that
it embodied the truth, and the truth could not be resisted.
It attacked nature itself, as if there had never been any
governments. And it discovered, to almost everybody's
amazement, that many individuals did not have resilience
128
-Maison aurait pu arreter Hitler sans risque de guerre quand il
a occupe la Rhenanie en 36?
-Sans aucun risque. On le sait. Aucun. Hitler avait donne
l'ordre a Ia Bundeswehr d'entrer en Rhenanie, avec une reserve imposee par le haut commandement. Si les troupes
franc;aises avanc;aient, les troupes allemandes se retiraient.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�On le sait aujourd'hui. On sait que, en mars 1936, on aurait
pu changer le cours de l'histoire. Cela fait partie de rna philosophie de l'histoire. C'est une date, une date fondamentale,
oil il suffisait de Iuddite et d'un peu de courage pour changer
le cours de l'histoire. Mais, malheureusement, Hitler avait raison. II n'y avait aucune chance de trouver en France un
gouvernement pour prendre cette decision. 59
Nazism and fascism reached deep yearnings, yearnings
for authority and its reassurance, not only in Italy and Germany but throughout the West-so that the world not unfortunate enough to continue them draws its breath interror at their memory, and shades its eyes from them even as
it feels driven to look, and is dull, with few important exceptions, to their continuation in the present, and the
widespread sympathy for them, in their denial in communism. Nazism and fascism arose in deeply traditional countries whose traditions war had partly destroyed and repudiated almost entirely-but which individuals could not
relinquish even if they would. (For politics is swifter than
character, and in the twentieth century risks uncontrollability because it does not acknowledge its conflicts with
character. No time's politics has denied obvious things
more, feelings, and common sense that comes of feeling.
For the political exploitation of aspiration is the greatest
underminer of feeling.) Nazism and fascism exploited the
yearning for the old values, destroyed in the First World
War, mercilessly: self-respect, duty, respect for accomplishment, the yearning for civil order, the compatibility of
freedom with obedience, the yearning for deserved deference, for meaningful life, for glory-and above all for courage. But they knew their murderousness, and did not hesitate to display it. Mussolini took responsibility for the
murder of a member of parliament, Matteotti, which had
aroused the greatest public outcry Italy had ever known, in
parliament in 1924. Communism, in contrast, with its
promise of a new world with new values without the harshness, cruelty of the old values denies its murderousness,
and, therefore, its hypocrisy is more seductive. For Djilas,
the murderousness of Communism is only a question:
"Killing is a function of war and revolution or could it be
the other way around?"
The blindness that came of the public exploitation of
aspiration to deny private experience tended to make the
world unrecognizable to those who lived in it. This blindness to world and self, this incapacity to see the world,
which led to the insistence on facts without understanding
or on understanding without facts-and, thereby, increased the susceptibility to propaganda-is the disturbance of perception that led after the Second World War
to actual political division of the West and the war that
progresses by dividing the rest of the world and individuals
against themselves.
The wars set what we would like to be against what we
actually were, in a way that made it difficult to experience
what we were, and to distinguish it from what we yearn to
be. Most simply, by setting liberty, the liberty of principle,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
against authority that springs from some contact with nature, the wars rendered difficult the growth of liberty and
authority in each other's presence. Without both liberty
and authority the experience of freedom in the actual living of individuals, from which the liberty in constitutions
springs, cannot live. Instead the separation of both liberty
and authority, and the setting of each against the other,
tends to provoke the distortion of their extremes, permissiveness, license, and weakness on one side, and cruel and
stifling authoritarianism on the other (whether from the
"left" or "right" matters little).
Liberty and authority are not the only qualities set
against each other in this conflict. The World War that has
not ceased deepens the division between form (principles)
and content, between will and desire. With the result that
these qualities are often experienced as antithetical, and
distorted in that experience. For instance, will into the
cruel rigidity of totalitarian dogma that cannot respond to
questioning, and desire into mere wish and arbitrary fancy
that cannot stand up to anything, and for instance, imagines it can get peace by demanding it, merely.
This division and polarization of qualities that can only
flourish in the give-and-take of each other's presence-a
give-and-take that is the ground in nature of the dialogue
between government and opposition in free democracies-hampers perception of political reality. After 1917,
and even more, after 1945 when the rigidity of the situation grew more obvious, and the force of that rigidity began to make itself felt throughout the world, this trouble in
perception has hampered fitting, effective negotiation and
action. Most simply, it attempts to undermine the capacity
of individuals (and also of governments) to distinguish between actual freedom and slavery that masks as greater
freedom. The struggle against totalitarianism goes on first
of all in the heart's mind. For without clarity of mind
among those for the moment spared violence, there can be
no resolute action against actual violence that takes place,
for the most part, not on battlefields, but at the will of often few well-trained and supplied men who strike at random, and who know that prolonged violence works to their
advantage both within the country they desire to seize,
and in the world elsewhere.
The inability to grasp what goes on before one's eyes, to
feel and to understand, instead of feeling in order not to
understand, or understanding in order not to feel, the incapacity to see, and to acknowledge that one does not see, is
the disturbance of perception that lies at the center of the
division of the West, and is increased by it. This dissociation is the driving force behind the division of the West. It
shows itself most dramatically in painting that like all art
often betrays the deepest capacities for living of an epoch.
129
�Perception
'
A little after 1945, first in America and then throughout
the Free World, painting that could see neither the world
nor man but that, until its collapse into emptiness in the
sixties, somehow expressed the anguish of the inability to
see, without acknowledging it, won public acceptance.
This painting shows perhaps more dramatically than anything else the incapacity to perceive and understand that
finds its general expression in the division of the West, and
in the drift and stagnation-and violence that involves
everybody-that has come of it after 1945. Significantly,
this painting also betrays the flattening and affectlessness
that comes of polarization: it has no depth, no world to see
and touch. For depth comes only within the give-and-take
of freedom and authority-and not when they are set
against each other and driven into the distortion of their
extremes. At most this painting betrays anxiety-the anxiety that comes of the inability to see, and increases it.
The process that culminated in painting that saw neither world nor man had started long before 1945, in fact
almost immediately after the impressionists, and well before the First World War brought the division that showed,
at the same time that it increased, the difficulties of perception and understanding, of apprehending world and
self that the West has struggled with since the destruction
of antiquity-and which have put the disappearance of antiquity at the center of its awareness and its language, and
its thought and art.
In the decades just before the First World War, a deepening division first appeared that grew into open opposition between form and content that distorts each and dims
the sight of the world and self. In Picasso's work a sharp
break occurs several years before the First World War between the paintings of the Blue and the Rose periods,
which still strive for feeling and vision-or, at least, openly
face the inability to feel in their risk of sentimentalityand the pre-cubist paintings like Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon (1907) whose intellectual brilliance blinds one
momentarily to their deadness of feeling. In contrast in
the German-speaking area there occurs especially in the
work of Munch and Kokoschka an over-concentration of
feeling, at times frightening, because without the assurance of vision, without a sense that the picture actually
shows the living world-that there is a world to distinguish
from a rising dream.
To put it crudely, painters in the world that was to become the allied sphere tended to formalism without feeling and in the German-speaking sphere to feeling which
because unsure in form became difficult to distinguish
from nightmare, and, at its weakest, daydream. Much of
this work in either sphere does not reflect the world and
the experience of beauty but, with differences in intensity,
the inability to see it. It often leads one further from the
world-and into a self that recognizes itself in its isolation
130
from the world, a self that cannot get out of itself, and,
therefore, suffers the temptation to narcissism. In either
sphere, painters appear to struggle against something, a
transparent mirror that throws their self back at them,
against a transparent wall that impedes vision, even as it
allows them to catch sight of the world they strive to see
and touch, just beyond reach. Already also, depth begins
to fade into flatness.
This transparent wall that gets in the way of their eyes'
reaching and, therefore, turns the world into something
recognizable, but at the same time incomprehensible,
sometimes into the very opposite of what the mind and
common-sense know to be out there, is the source of the
division of the West that hardened, and, thereby, provoked the violence that could destroy it in 1917, to spread
it after 1945. The iron curtain, too, is a transparent mirror
that baffles the eyes with the image of the self it throws
back-and, thereby, makes narcissism and spurious intimacy meant to exorcise danger without acknowledging it,
and the sense of entrapment that comes of them, the way
to self-enslavement and destruction.
Since depth and a strong sense of the whole composition appeared in painting in Italy from 1200 to 1600 for the
first time since antiquity, this transparent wall made itself
felt despite, and because of, the lucidity of vision and
depth that came with it. In painting in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries in Spain and the Low-lands, it almost disappeared entirely except for a certain stiffness, for
an incapacity to allow movement, for a tendency to freeze
movement like a snapshot. (This holding still distinguishes
painting since the Renaissance from the ancient art that
inspired it, for ancient art moved freely, especially obviously, in Greek vase painting and Etruscan frescoes.) Even
when it appears to disappear altogether, this stiffness, the
transparent wall, betrays itself in the awareness that the
painting is a painting, in the awareness of the eyes of the
painter, and of the hindrances that keep them from losing
themselves in their seeing.
This painting from 1200 to 1600 in Italy, and afterwards
throughout Europe, realized the reciprocal relation between sight and understanding, and, ultimately, between
seeing and rationality, but always at a certain distance
from nature, which lent it the stiffness I have described. It
depicted nature as well as men and history but it always
subordinated nature, even in the North in the seventeenth
century, to man and memory-to the recall of the past.
Some of the paintings of Durer and of Rembrandt are perhaps exceptions. In artists like Leonardo or Rembrandt
drawing was knowing. They could not see without understanding what actually lay before their eyes. In our words,
Leonardo and Machelangelo were researchers. With this
one overwhelming difference, they did not fear wholes,
that is, important conclusions. (Machiavelli, at the beginning of his Discourses, remarks that artists had been the
first to dare to learn from antiquity. And daring to look at
antiquity meant looking at your own world, without flinchWINTER/SPRING 1983
�ing, as Machiavelli's own work showed.) And everything
about this art bespeaks confidence, and awareness and
confidence in the face of tragedy. The whole sense of !tal·
ian painting in this time is of overwhelming lucidity, of a
world pressing in upon the eyes, of joy and fearlessness in
sight. They are wild in their beholding. The same seeing of
this many citied world-as many citied as Ancient
Greece-showed itself in the individuals who dared look
again openly at the sky-and to understand the great
works of antiquity, to look history in the face. After
Caravaggio, who reaches an unbelievable unity of depth,
shape, and movement, seeing and knowing again suffer
separation in Italy. In subsequent years there is much ges·
turing, there are dramatic, highly brainy compositionsbut there is little sight, sense of the whole, except as design, or depth. This gradual withering of contact becomes
apparent soon after the burning of Giordano Bruno in
1600. Such things are not done with impunity. But in the
North sight and understanding found a new softness in
their relation, and a lucidity more distinguishable from
clarity of mind than in Italian painting-and, therefore,
less easily capable of giving an account of itself in words,
but for all that not less explicit and meaningful.
The tradition of painting in the West since 1200 which
could see both men and events, could both remember and
know, at the expense, however, of a certain remoteness
from nature, found breathtaking renewal in the work of
Delacroix and Manet, just before the impressionists drew
upon it to abandon it, and to yield to nature directly.
In the half century or so before the Great War, Turner,
the impressionists and post-impressionists saw into the
quick of nature, and in that sight knew themselves a part
of it-without sentimentality or self-consciousness, and, in
contrast, for instance, to the woodenness of Claude Lor·
raine, with an easy sweetness still sets the world moving.
Even in Cezanne, whom we all too often see with Cubist
eyes, there is little separation between form and content,
between what is seen and how it is seen. Everywhere, perhaps most startlingly in Seurat and his associates, there is
an unassuming confidence that what is seen will gather
shape of its own. Many of these painters do not distinguish
shape from intensity (energy). They often do not sharply
define edges or outlines which arise, instead, of them·
selves, unexpectedly, in their work. For a whole world has
its parts. They distinguish but do not separate earth and
sky. Both throb with movement in their works, which har·
bour no empty spaces. They distinguish trees, plants, and
earth from the space and air around them. They do not
separate them from it. Their space is not empty, but vibrant and full and soft like the trees, plants, and flowers
reaching or showering or bursting into it. In Turner light
softly pulsates, in Vincent the sky glows and pulsates,
sometimes almost harshly:
The sacrifice of the sharp outline of objects shows that the
vision of the painter is focused not upon the objects but upon
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the space itself. ... Above all, in the use of the divided touch,
the painter conveys to the painting and through the painting
to the observer the vibrating, pulsating quality of the atmosphere ...
One of the results of this technique is to give to their paintings (the paintings of Monet, Renoir, Pisarro) a depth offield,
a sense of profoundness, a three-dimensional quality that
other paintings suggest but do not fully achieve. The impressionists accomplish this by making us aware of the space, not
simply as the coordinate of objects and events, but as an objective reality itself.60
In the brief moment of the impressionists the transpar·
ent wall, the stiffness, did in fact entirely disappear, and
movement reappeared unequivocally for the first time
since antiquity, but at the cost of seeing human beings:
men and women more or less disappeared from the can·
vas. To live on, the open embrace of nature of the impres·
sionists had somehow to come to see man, to remember
and to know, as well as to see nature as if there were no
man. Otherwise it would turn to mere evasion in the fa].
lowing generations:
Before the impressionist impulse disappeared in the morass
of twentieth century political thinking, it found expression in
the work of two men (Gauguin and Van Gogh) whose lives
dramatized the final struggle.6l
In the general streaming, sometimes harsh, especially of
Vincent's last pictures, only the men and women suffer an
emaciated, almost leaden holding-still, quiet and resigned,
but nevertheless forced enough to make you sense the
bound writhing in their bodies-the characteristic expres·
sian of Christian Europe. They bear the haggard and
pinned-down-in-the-chest look of helplessness, the cutting
and cynical knowing sensitivity that knows everything but
can do little, so full of pity and hate, yet also at the quick of
love, which, despite the blurring of postwar prosperity and
its convention of goodwill, still makes its presence felt.
Vincent wanted to discover the streaming outside man
within him also. He betrayed man's unwitting unwilling·
ness to yield to it:
Beyond the head ... I paint infinity. I make a simple background out of the richest, most intense blue I can contrive,
and by the simple conjunction the blonde head is lit up by the
rich blue background and acquires a mysterious effect like
that of a star on the deep azure.62
The tragedy Gauguin and Van Gogh lived came because they attempted to see nature in man as well outside
of him. For the seeing of the impressionists to live on they
knew they had somehow to transform and to renew the
tradition of Manet and Delacroix that the impressionists
had abandoned to yield to nature.
Renewing the tradition that had culminated in Manet
and Delacroix meant rediscovering the rational. It meant
experiencing the reciprocal relation between sight and un·
131
�derstanding, and finally between genitality and rationality.
It meant seeing man. Seeing man meant recognizing the
irrationality that separated nature outside of him from nature inside him, and kept him from both. It meant keeping
up the impressionists' contact with depth despite the superficial hardness of man, and the fragility that rendered
many men fearful of depth. It meant rediscovering the rational without abandoning nature, rediscovering it in nature. Otherwise renewal would be mere wooden repetition. In the failure of the successors of the impressionists
to see the world whole, the division of the West first
showed itself in acute form.
In this shorter perspective, the incapacity of painting to
see the world and human beings in this century, which led
it to turn the transparent wall itself into the subject of
painting, at the cost of the whole and depth, and finally, of
the obliteration of world and even self, simply represents a
breakdown in the capacity to maintain and expand the
contact with life of the impressionists, to deal with its contradictions, with the contrast between the impressionists
daring in touching nature and their corresponding incapacity to remember men and events, to experience both
the public world and the private, and their relation, to
combine seeing and knowing. The contact with nature
could not go on without resolving this contradiction, without undoing man's self-exile from nature.
Until the impressionists, painting coped with this transparent wall by actually seeing it, and, therefore, acknowledging it and keeping it distinct from the painting, at the
same time that it made you aware inescapably that the
painting was a painting. The impressionists dissolved the
transparent wall and its stiffness.
Unable to maintain the contact with nature of the Impressionists, and no longer able to work in the service of
religion, which in previous centuries, with its mediation
between the desire, and the incapacity, to experience nature, had kept art from yielding to despair, contemporary
art cannot but serve, often unawares, propagandistic purposes. It weakens those who attend to it. It steals courage
away from them. Instead of reflecting nature, it makes
mock theological, demagogic-and, therefore, unwittingly
political statements. It betrays a world grown flat and,
therefore, largely the creature of wish, of wish that takes
itself for desire, but dreads will.
The breakdown in seeing after the impressionists, and
the unacknowledged fixation in it that lends a frantic impatience to much art, in the midst of stagnation, closely
parallels the incapacity to grasp the meaning of events
and, thereby, to master them, in politics of this century.
Here, too, as in painting, man destroys world and self because he cannot maintain real contact with life in himself
and outside of himself, because he cannot stand living,
its rough disappointments, its joys, its depths and its
heights-and yearns for it more desperately, the more he
deprives himself of it, and, therefore, succumbs to increasing alternations of violence, in the name of discovering
132
and changing the nature of man, and negotiations to put
an end to that violence that turn out simply to tighten and
spread its hold on men.
Another example of the division and opposition between form and content that shows itself in painting in
this century appears in the contrast between the programmatic "internationalism" that blurs the distinction between peoples, and, thereby, puts the past beyond the
reach of memory, of the Allies and the frightening discoveries in the German-speaking countries, beginning at the
end of the nineteenth century, that man was often not capable of distinguishing between rationality and irrationality, that the rational in appearance often masked the irrational that in crucial moments betrayed itself in undoing
it, that freedom was more than many could stand. I mean
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis took seriously the truth
that individuals had to come apart, had to know their helplessness, before they could experience their strength, and
discover their wholeness, that "nothing can be sole or
whole that has not been rent". Not explicitly a response to
the war's destroying that would not cease, it knew how to
start at the beginning with individuals-with the existence
that yearned for life which had survived the destruction
that still threatened it. Like Socrates and his ignorance, it
nurtured the confidence that the rational, once freed of
the irrational that drained its energy, might spring up of its
own strength.
Psychoanalysis did not aim directly at the truth, but at
the distortions that obstructed the truth. But it made it
possible again to experience the unwitting presence of the
truth, for it uncovered the quick of life moving at its own
sweet will-and the fearfulness that kept individuals from
it, a fearfulness that individuals took for fear of destruction, but which numbed them to the rational fear of the
destruction that actually threatened them. Because of its
simplicity, stubborn enough always to threaten it with reductionisms, and because of its refusal to indulge in assurances-for it knew it could not know what would become
of it-it provoked much hatred and resentment. Hatred
and resentment that otherwise sought disguise in political
exhilaration that was nothing but forgetfulness.
But psychoanalysis had its limitations-above all in its
incapacity to know its limitations. Others might have
shown it its limitations, but unfortunately the strength of
its truth drove those that denied it, to deny it entirely, and
those that accepted it, to accept it entirely. With such
friends it hardly needed enemies. Both friends and enemies in unwitting cooperation perpetrated the divisions
psychoanalysis meant to overcome, especially a resignation to, and even an exultation, in the irrational psychoanalysis meant to expose in order to overcome. To some
extent the attempt to undo the irrational, in order to free
the rational, spread the irrational, and lent it something
approaching social acceptance. Social acceptance meant
taking the irrational for inevitable-instead of struggling
against it to undo it. It meant turning the popular misunWINI'ER/SPRING 1983
�derstanding of psychoanalysis against psychoanalysis in
the pretense of accepting it.
The weaknesses and limitations of psychoanalysis came
of its strengths. Superb in its grasp of'the present, it is
weak in its comprehension of the past and its life, except
as it continues like a foreign body unassimilated in the
present. It is weak, too, in conceiving of the future except
in the shape of the irrational distortions of the present.
Breathtaking in its comprehension of individuals, and in
its resilient affirmation of feeling and nature, psychoanalysis cannot conceive of society as more than a crowd of solitary individuals. It explains institutions too exclusively in
terms of the necessity of curbing irrational secondary
drives. It does not conceive of rational disagreement and
conflict. It cannot explain why people speak except to
lie-as Otto Rank put it. It takes the rational in history for
nothing more than a cover for the irrational. Despite its
destruction history knows creation also. Creation that
could not live without institutions and rulers and men, ca·
pable of some direct contact with rationality and, there·
fore, nature. For only direct contact with rationality can
withstand irrationality. Direct contact with rationality
means understanding that the irrational arises from a distortion of the rational, that the rational can be discovered
in the irrational. Psychoanalysis instead assumes that the
rational arises in history only in response to irrational
actions and desires which it secretly wishes, but does not
dare to imitate-and that therefore, because of this inverted agreement, almost always succumbs to them directly, or to a severity in repressing them that reaches the
corresponding extreme of irrationality, as if there were no
mean.
This pessimism that at its worst turns to resignation
comes of not recognizing the limitations of psychoanalysis. It can undo the irrational. But it leaves the affirmation
of the rational to itself. This readiness to leave the rational
on its own comes in part of the rational realization that
rationality, unlike irrationality, is unpredictable, that ra·
tionality cannot be foreseen until it arises of itself, that the
truths of one generation are the lies of the next. But it also
arises from an irrational antagonism to philosophy that it
takes not for the thought that comes after the dissolution
of the irrational, but for mere rationalization of the irratio·
nal. Because it does not acknowledge it has no use for
thought, it is unwittingly materialistic, even though it has
made possible the rediscovery of the soul-a grotesque
phrase that tells something of our plight. Because psycho·
analysis does not acknowledge it cannot take responsibility
for its discoveries, it tends to forget that the world is bigger
and older than its discoveries.
This contrast between the desire to apprehend a reality
beyond politics and the sensitivity to nature and feeling in
the defeated German-speaking empires and the principled
world of the Allies with its chiliastic declarations and its
yearning for the observance of treaties and covenants it
did not have strength of heart to enforce is another exam1HE ST. JOHNS REVJEW
pie-similar to the division in painting-of the distinction
between form and content turned under the stress of unlimited war into opposition in which each distorts the
other, so that content and feeling turn to phantasy and
dream, form to propaganda. Ultimately this opposition
leads to a world in which the democracies insist on limits
without conviction, and the totalitarian regimes pretend
to conviction without limits, a world in which individuals
and nations say one thing, do another, and neither know
what they do, nor believe what they say, and will not distinguish between words and actions. In the twenties and
thirties the democracies trusted the honeyed words of tyrants rather than their own eyes witnessing outrage because they could not draw this distinction between words
and actions. In the same years Wilhelm Reich discovered
that the actions of patients, the way they held their hands
and heads, how they sat and so on told more than, and
sometimes the opposite, of the words they spoke6l
This reluctance in distinguishing between words and
actions shows itself now in the unwillingness to declare Poland and other countries in eastern Europe in default on
their debts even after their refusal to pay interest on them.
This reluctance threatens the international western monetary system, and to some extent domestic currencies, for it
shows that in the name of avoiding a debt crisis actually
already upon them-and us-Western bankers and their
governments will not insist on obligations that make for
the trust that gives money much of its value. This tendency to take words for action shows itself even more in
the codification of traditional practices of international
law (ius gentium) in international treaties that imply an unwillingness to defend these practices except with words.
For these treaties wish away the distinction between the
enforcement oflaws within nations and the state of nature
between them, where only the threat of war guarantees
traditional practice. Would the Soviet Union use gas so
blatantly in Afghanistan and Laos had it not signed international treaties that assured it that nations with a voice
would disapprove but not act to stop them?
The struggle of painting with reality, and its awareness
of its incapacity to yield to sight, until its collapse into
something of blindness in this century, has a close parallel
to philosophy's struggle to understand man's relation to
the outer world since at least the seventeenth century.
The impressions of Hume, and the difficulty of their relation to world, and the appearances of Kant that are entirely within the individual, and yet have some exteriority,
for the space, without which their appearance would be
impossible, is both within the mind and in some sense outside it, are both attempts to cope with the transparent mirror of the painters. In its sense of the presence of this barrier, and of its incapacity entirely to cope with it, to rid
itself of it or to live within it, philosophy since the seventeenth century like painting since the thirteenth distinguishes itself from philosophy in antiquity, which encompassed both nature and man, and nature in man, because
133
�it was ready to suffer tragedy rather than submit to it, unawares. For the ancients the barriers that kept man from
nature in himself and outside of him, that changed emotions like love into lust, anger into hatred, courage into ar·
rogance, rationality into ideology, aspiration into self destruction, energy into frenzy, and so on, were within man,
a stiffness he himself maintained, and, therefore, could
dissolve into softness, rather than between man and the
world. They appeared like barriers between man and the
world only because man did not realize they were within
him. Because ancient thinkers realized that the barriers
were within man, and not outside of him, they pursued
the dissolution of distortions that showed themselves in
thinking, rather than accommodating themselves to them.
These distortions that keep man from world and self are
also always distortions in seeing.
The discovery of rationality in antiquity amounted to a
rediscovery of nature. The discovery of rationality in nature made it self-evident that evil destroyed life within
man as well as outside of him, and that politics, unless it
distinguished rational from irrational, would degenerate
into the destructiveness of irrationality in the name of the
rational, that politics betrayed the self that was really no
self at all, but mere distortion, of men who did not dare
know themselves, and, therefore, hated nature and themselves. In contrast, much of philosophy since the seventeenth century attempted to accommodate to these distortions, to live within them, and, therefore, has been more or
less unable, with the exception of Hobbes with Thucydides as his teacher, to comprehend violence from without
that attempts to destroy the barriers that occasion these
distortions, but actually only increases them. The uneasiness of this accommodation to distortion shows itself in
the extraordinary effort of many of these philosophers
who begin with the doubt of world and self to complement
their thinking about knowing with political philosophy
that, however, begins with the assumption that men cannot perceive the world directly, or know themselves. In
some sense they sensed that politics might attempt to
undo their accommodation to distortion, which was to
lead to an unprecedented mastery of nature but which,
however, at the same time that it demanded an experience
of nature made it all the more difficult. This effort to find a
way for men to rule themselves without knowing themselves, for unlike antiquity that only yielded to the nature
it understood, modern thought had mastered some nature
before understanding it, has worked to an extraordinary
extent, but it is aiso extraordinarily weak in the face of
men who think they know no doubt, because they cannot
distinguish dogma from truth. The attempt to apply the
doubt that in its accommodation to distortion had yielded
the assurance to master nature-without understanding it
entirely-to politics led inadvertently to a situation that
demanded the rediscovery of the doubt of Socrates,
which, in contrast to the doubt of philosophy since the
seventeenth century, had led to the experience of nature,
134
to the quick of life and, thereby, of rationality, but not to
the mastery of nature. I say, inadvertently, because these
philosophers had tried to fashion systems in politics that
with their emphasis on written and designed constitutions, on what people did rather than what they thought,
on procedure rather than content, in some sense asserted
there were no answers, and, thereby only questions without answers. The doubt of Socrates, in contrast, suggested
that you had to get along without the answers, not that
there were none, but that the answers would come of
themselves with the dissolution of distortion, that the answers were living itself.
This thinking could deal even brilliantly with public domestic life. For in domestic life it was possible to live as if
there were no public answers. But international affairs
were another matter. For constitutions did not regulate international affairs. In some sense the wisdom of the new
philosophers discovered its limitations, and its greatest
challenge, at the frontiers. For beyond the frontiers, in the
life between nations, you had to get along without the answers in order to discover the truths specific occasions de-
manded. In the life among nations you could not live as if
there were no answers. Yau had to live without the answers. The struggle that culminated with the impressionists, and collapsed after them, was an attempt to turn the
doubt of the new philosophers, which resigned itself to a
certain isolation from the world and self in order to master
them, into the doubt of Socrates that allowed the world
and self to live, and, thereby, to resolve the contradictions
and separation, but not the distinction, between domestic
public life and life between the nations. For art has no
country except in the eyes of the beholder. International
affairs demanded more than the assurance that comes of
recognizing distortion without dissolving it. There could
be no science of international affairs, only the truth discovered in specific circumstances. Only the readiness to live
without the answers could lead to the discovery of those
truths which did not yield to science.
Conclusion
I have written of difficulties in perception, and in thinking that distinct from perception cannot, however, win re-
silience and lucidity without lucidity in perception which
is the perception of life and of life perceiving itself. For
there cannot be thought, distinct from brooding and ideology, without perception, without apprehending the world
and events upon their occurrence, without the experience
of beauty without which confidence in the truth cannot
live. For truth is the perception of nature, of beauty moving in individuals at its own sweet will. It is nature perceiving itself, and, therefore, naming itself. But that the lucidity of thought follows upon the lucidity of perception does
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�not mean it is the same thing as perception. Quite the contrary. The lucidity of perception makes it possible to distinguish thought from perception, to know thought's independence from perception, to know th~t man is a bit of
nature, but a bit of nature that names himself and the
world. For it is man that thinks, not nature. But man can
think only when the nature within him moves freely
enough to perceive nature outside him, for the thoughts
he thinks are nature's.
This disturbance in perception precedes and underlies
the political crisis. At the same time the political crisis increases and deepens it. The incapacity to turn victory into
peace, into coherent peace, that marks almost all the wars
of this century, which is really an incapacity to foresee the
consequences of victory, to master events, indicates that
there is something in events that men cannot grasp and,
therefore, prevent.
Since the events of 1914, governments have been forever behind events. They have not overtaken events;
events have overtaken them. Understanding comes after,
not. during or before events. With the result that the understanding that comes after events seeks almost always to
make up for past defeats and disasters. In its anxiety to
make up for the past it often misreads the present, and, is
thereby, drawn into repeating the past, just because of the
urgency of its wish to avoid its errors. Events fool this
belated understanding. The very attempt to anticipate
events because of past slowness impedes the perception of
events unfolding in the present, which in turn further saps
the confidence anticipation meant to restore. The war in
Indochina did not so much undo the lessons of Munich as
show that they had not been profoundly enough learnt to
rediscover them in a war of disguised aggression.
The attempt to justify present judgment solely on precedent serves to obscure ambivalence, the ambivalence
that impedes the straightforward-and fearful-assessment of present events. This ambivalence showed itself
during the war for Indochina in the collapse of much of
the establishment in agreement with the protesters without even, for the most part, defending its policies. The protesters were not mistaken in their perception of hollowness in the establishment. In some sense each generation
has to rediscover the truths of the past generations on its
own. The recall of the past is indispensable just because it
teaches that it cannot substitute for present judgment.
But too ready recourse to the past for justification rather
than instruction betrays evasiveness in the present. The
gift that comes of recalling the past is the realization that
you are on your own in the present.
In the two World Wars, whose destructiveness showed
itself in the incapacity to turn victory into peace and,
therefore, in simplifications that told themselves they
came to terms with fundamentals-as if the uncontrollability of destructiveness showed men their true face, and
not the face they drew up against the truth, to deny the
truth-something essential was destroyed. I mean the
THE ST. JOHNS REVlEW
readiness to experience reality, the consequences of action, character, the courage of sight and pleasure except as
a matter of principle or propaganda, the plain light of the
day that fills up the day and which had moved the brushes
of the impressionists. I mean finally the capacity to distinguish one thing and another, and especially rational from
irrational. Men would believe anything and nothing. And
it did not seem to make much difference, whether they
believed something or nothing.
In either instance the force of aspiration impeded the
experience of actual strength. This incapacity to distinguish the irrational from the rational shows itself in disturbances in sight, in the incapacity to see wholes. Because of
this disturbance in perception little is self-evident, for the
self-evidence is in some sense a whole. And this in countries whose constitutions depend upon self-evidence, and
the experience of good will that comes of it. Amidst the
simplifications, the simple became embarassing like blushing,-and complexity became the refuge of bafflement
that would not experience itself. The irrationality in the
simplifications shows itself in its unwillingness to stand
questioning and outright opposition-and in the attempt
to suppress it outright, and in the willingness to foster, and
often to finance, all sorts of spurious opposition, which is
in more or less inverted agreement with what it ostensibly
opposes. This fostering of spurious opposition, besides
clouding obvious facts-for obvious facts are also
wholes-in doubt, fosters a bizarre combination of recklessness of speech-obvious but unnoticed in the "op-ed"
pages of newspapers with large circulation-and flattery.
Few societies in the past have betrayed such a hunger in
their fear of straightforwardness and goodwill for both servility and the intimidation of insult, for the qualities they
claim most to despise. The fear of straightforwardness
shows itself in the involuntary and overwhelming condescension that meets the words of those like Solzehnitsyn
who do speak their minds unflinchingly, a condescension
that imbues the truth with the stink of its own rot.
Like sight, and because of the difficulties of sight, of recognizing the obvious, feeling too is more difficult-seems
about to disappear entirely into emptiness. In this confusion of rational and irrational, artificially provoked by tales
of atrocity and the like, and in the consequent attempt to
suppress them indiscriminately, which leads to a despairing emptiness, Baudelaire's ennui, a person in genuine an~
ger or in love will feel outrageous-like what he imagines a
Nazi to have been. Feeling-and not pornography-feels
pornographic and often stirs in those who witness it, envy
and hatred. We barely recognize ourselves.
The present division of the West serves to blur the
memory of this destruction. No time has been so obsessed
with its unwilling destructiveness, so fearful of it as to be
unable to distinguish it from rational self-defense. But the
memory will not go away. It lives on in the suspicion of the
incapacity to distinguish irrational and rational that gnaws
at our confidence and makes us unceasingly uneasy. This
135
�lack of confidence shows itself in our readiness to ridicule
the past and its confidence, and to' exaggerate its failures.
There is much contactlessness in the West, and brutally
cruel, distorted contact in the East: where the flesh itself
turns wooden but where also life stirs in the destruction,
after the destruction, where almost the only unmistakable
voices we hear find words~ voices that arouse contempt
that is only a defense against fear, shame, and embarassment-the embarassment and fear of Adam and Eve after
eating the apple.
The ambivalence that shows itself in the fear of distinguishing rational and irrational induces paralysis. Paralysis
leads to drift. Drift in turn makes for the spread of the irrational-of subversion, sedition, terrorism, above all for the
spread of the ideological and propagandistic stereotyping
of events, and for the sense of helplessness that comes of
not perceiving the significance of events. All these hinder,
and prevent swift and effective-the two are almost synonymous-action.
The indecision that comes of this paralysis finds it most
openly cruel expression in the precarious balance the two
"superpowers" hold between life and death-a balance
that tests the love of life-and which at the same time that
it points to the difficulty of choice, insists on its necessity
in the starkest terms. Were people, and especially governments, capable of choice in the less overwhelming matters
of their lives, for instance, capable of outspoken support of
the Israeli measures to restore sovereignty, and to undo
the international terrorist bases in Lebanon, it would not
come to such a harrowing choice. But drift and its paralysis
often leads governments, and others whose work calls for a
rational response to irrational challenges, to connive with
this irrationality-because of a perverse unacknowledged
admiration for it. If the coming negotiations with the Soviet Union will bring no sensible advantage to the West
and no relief to the East European nations-as in view of
the current crackdown in Poland and within the Soviet
Union appears unlikely-they will turn into creatures of
this murderous fascination with the irrational.
Successful coherent peace-in contrast to the exploitation of the yearning for peace to undo the readiness of selfdefence-requires choosing freely to face harsh dangerous
realities in the absence of the overwhelming necessity of
battle. In some sense it requires more courage than battle.
It requires unevasive words. For evasive words can be
worse than bullets. " 'Bullets kill. Words prolong the death
by giving false hope. It is worse to prolong.' "64
At stake in unevasive words is the truth which alone can
give the political systems that seek to protect its stirring
the strength to act effectively to avoid the large scale wars
their dread of war may otherwise bring upon them. For
the truth alone is bigger than these constitutions which
cannot live, and, therefore, survive without it. It is the air
they breathe.
The truth means distinguishing between irrational and
rational, the only distinction that can bring the willing con-
136
sent without which freedom cannot live. Distinguishing
between rational and irrational means distinguishing between authority and authoritarianism, between genitality
and secondary desires which often seek refuge in either
totalitarian asceticism or license, between love and pornography, between self-defense and murder. It means taking risks-and distinguishing between passivity and apathy and safety. The incapacity to take these risks, and to
make these distinctions, shows itself in an indiscriminate
dread of all feeling-and in the resort to collective indignation and ideology to still the uneasiness of its absence-the
absence of life itself moving at its own sweet will. Without
the flow of feeling there can be no experience of rationality, no experience of affirmation and denial, without
which the distinctions between self-defense and killing,
love and pornography, genitality and secondary desires. In
each of these distinctions the difference the perception of
which makes the distinction possible is between actual
feeling moving of its own sweet will and the yearning for it
which makes people susceptible to ideology which often
brings the opposite of what it promises, death instead of
life. Only the flow of actual feeling-in distinction to the
yearning for it that shows itself in sentimentality and cruelty-can distinguish between strength and force, between consent and manipulation, between rational defiance and stubborness and spite, the defiance that
preserves rather than the revolt that destroys, and names it
freedom.
In some sense totalitarianism has done nothing but call
our bluff, our incapacity to live up to our ideals, to feel the
freedom that is actually ours, that is all about us but which
few experience in themselves, that is, the contrast between the knowledge that there is nothing outside stopping us and an inner sense of the constriction which keeps
us from moving. I mean the yearning for the simplicity of
nature, for its spontaneity, for its strength, for its openess-and also the dread of it and the disgust with it which
unlike the nineteenth century we cannot experience with
any forthrightness.
The nineteenth century could live somehow with the
sense that man was not entirely himself. It could perceive
still, somehow, its limitations at the same time that it knew
these limitations were somehow self-imposed and artificial. At the same time, however, it realized with clarity that
all that most inspired it wished those limitations away, and
might one day destroy them, although for the most part it
enjoyed still enough of the modesty of nature to understand that destroying these limitations would only spread
and intensify the paralysis they actually served to limit and
define.
Until the First World War destroyed the delicate balance between what it wanted and what it saw it was, the
nineteenth century was happy, because confident enough
to live within these contradictions. And this capacity to
live within them without denying them lent it the boldness of clarity so that its words sparkled and did not dread
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�warmth and courage in peacetime, and could tell outrage
without hesitation. And it could suffer, and, therefore,
events did not make it suffer. And it knew the meaning of
chance and that there was nothing inevitable in events,
that nothing that happened had to happen. It knew that
you could not explain what happened if you assumed it
had to happen. Because it knew that nothing was inevita·
ble, it knew responsibility, it knew it made events-it did
not entertain the conceit that events happened to it-that
is, it knew how to suffer, how to sorrow, how to feel com·
passion instead of murderous pity that betrays itself in a
swift look of the eyes that acknowledges everything to
deny it. It also knew how to tell outrage without hesitation,
that is, it could stand self.criticism and distinguish it from
self-hatred. Because it knew real indignation and, thereby,
real self-love and courage-and something of the taste of
life-it knew how to prevent the exploitation of its guilt
for the purposes of nourishing complicity with actual outrage, complicity that shows itself, gives itself away, by its
indulgence in worked-up indignation against largely imaginary outrages, for instance, the world~wide "uproar" about
American "atrocities" in Vietnam which were exceptions,
and of greater rarity than in most wars, and the eerie passivity that meets the murder in Afghanistan, in Cambodia:
it took the New York Times two years to pick up the story,
and then only after the New York Review of Books reviewed a French book about it. (People in the Soviet Union probably know more details about the murder in Cambodia than Americans.)
In some sense more ambitious for the truth than the
nineteenth century, that is, less capable of putting up with
even the mere appearance of hypocrisy, we end up more
oblique than the nineteenth century. Because we will not
know this hypocrisy, the plain straightforwardness of the
nineteenth century, and its readiness to acknowledge matters it could not cope with, embarrass us. We take our hypocrisy for the truth itself. And so things that were plain as
the day a generation ago, are now obscure; for instance,
that George Orwell wrote 1984 against Stalinism, not
against Hitler and nazism. And we barely notice lying in
politics, the lying that took George Orwell's breath away,
as Joseph Adelson remarked recently. For instance, the
major newspapers take Andropov's calling the President of
the United States a liar more or less for granted.
This greater obliquity, greater because unacknowledged, and, therefore, not experienced as obliquity, but as
a kind of disingenous straightforwardness or naivete,
comes from the inability either to stand the truth-or to
get along without it. With the result that we are uneasymore uneasy, the more we protest against uneasiness.
Much of what we take for boldness amounts merely to unacknowledged timorousness, for instance, the suspicious-
ness of all authority, especially government, of the media-which makes for the excitement of the denial of
common sense in the hope of, thereby, reaching depth, as
if the denial of the obvious amounted to getting at the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
heart of things, when in fact the simplicity of the obvious
overwhelms with its lucidity only with the perception of
depth. Otherwise the obvious appears fragile, brittle, ungiving, dead, dull, unpalatable, and boring.
Totalitarianism, unlike the despotism that existed before Napoleon, and which Montesquieu described, parodies our ideals and exploits our incapacity to live up to
them entirely-an incapacity which shows itself in our
readiness to take freedom for granted, and in our unwillingness to conceive that others envy it, and desire to undo
it.
The division of the West intensifies this division and
ambivalence within individuals, and to some extent
springs from it. A whole world means whole people, it
means people and societies capable of distinguishing between truth and lies, and knowing that the truth lives. It
means distinguishing between love oflife and resentment
and self.hatred, between freedom and license.
Like battle the balance of terror attempts to force this
wholeness on individuals at the same time that it threatens
to intensify the division that undoes this wholeness by inviting people and nations to yield to this terror instead of
facing up to it. Yielding to this terror will not bring peace
but only an intensification of war, and the further spread
of totalitarianism, which is a kind of continuous war of in-
dividuals against each other and against themselves, unceasing and apparently impossible to undo from the inside
without support from outside, support that must take
risks, including the risk of conflict, to be meaningful. And
not to resist means to yield. Even the leaders of many of
the peace movements will now upon questioning admit
that peace means yielding to totalitarian violence in the
name of undoing the much greater daily "violence" in life
under "capitalism".65 They are not after peace at all but
after intensification of violence which kills without knowing it, their kind of violence, which, like totalitarian violence, does not distinguish between peace and war. Totalitarianism dreads this wholeness more than anything, for
only this wholeness can see through it and dispel it. The
spread of totalitarianism roots in our own indecisiveness,
in our own paralysis, in our own incapacity to see what is
going on. And this procrastination prolongs and thereby
increases cruelty, and involves almost everybody in it. For
short wars are much more merciful than unending wars as
Lebanon should have showed Vietnam had taught usbut did not.
1. Cf. Guglielmo Ferrero, The Two French Revolutions, New York 1968.
2. Quoted in Theodore Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality, New
York 1950: Man kann nur fuer eine Idee sterben die man nicht versteht.
3. Cf. Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build A Castle-My Life as a Dissenter,
New York 1979; Adam Michnik, L'eglise et la gauche, Paris 1979. For
China, the writing of Wei Jingsheng, introduced by Simon Ley, "La lutte
pour la liberte en Chine," Commentaire 7, Autumn 1979, 353-360. In his
most recent book, Cette lanc;inante douleur de la liberte (Paris l98l), Bu.
kovsky betrays startling silliness in making sense of his experience of life
in the West since he left Russia.
137
�4. Cf. Brian Crozier, Strategy of Survival, London 1978; Leo Raditsa,
"The Present Danger," Midstream, February 1979, 59-70.
5. Foreign Relations of the United States (Conference Series), Washington, D.C. 1945, I 850-855 and elsewhere.
6. For the background of this propaganda, Bernard Lewis, "The AntiZionist Resolution," Foreign Affairs, October 1976, 54-64.
7. Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy, New
York 1947. Lippmann's remarkable book shows deep mastery oflessons
G. Ferrero had drawn from the Congress of Vienna (G. Ferrero, TheReconstruction of Europe, New York 1941; cf. G. Ferrero, La fin des aventures, guerre et paix, Paris 1931).
8. Letter of James Forrestal to Chan Gurney, Chairman of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, December 8, 1947. The Forrestal Diaries,
edited by Walter Millis, New York 1951,349-350.
9. George Ball, The Discipline of Power, Boston 1968, 151, cf. 149-168.
10. ForrestalDiaries, New York 1951,265-266.
11. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951,296-297.
12. For Soviet thinking about nuclear war, see Joseph D. Douglass, Jr.
and Amoretta Roeber, Soviet Strategy for Nuclear War, Stanford, Ca.
1979. For Soviet involvement in terrorism, Stefan T. Possony and L.
Francis Bouchey, International Terrorism-The Communist Connection,
Washington, D.C. 1978; Claire Sterling, The Terror Network, The Secret
War of International Terrorism, New York 1981. See also, Leo Raditsa,
"The Source of World Terrorism," Midstream, December 1981, 42-49.
13. The Wall Street Journal, December 7,1982.
14. For Soviet disinformation, see Soviet Active Measures, Hearings before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives, July 13-14, 1982, Washington, D.C. 1982, especially the testimony of Stanislave Levchenko, 137-169. See also the testimony of
Ladislav Bittman in Soviet Covert Action (The Forgery Offensive), Hearings before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence, Senate, February 19, 1980, Washington,
D.C. 1980. In 1968, the year of the beginning of detente in Europe, and
of increased Soviet involvement in terrorism, the head of the KGB's Disinformation Directorate, described the duplicity of disinformation (testimony of Arnaud de Borchgrave to the Senate Subcommittee on Security
and Terrorism, April24, 1981):
... our friends must always be encouraged to write or say precisely
the opposite of our real objectives. Conflict between East and West is
a permanent premise of Soviet thought-until the final demise of
capitalist power in the West. But this must be constantly dismissed
and ridiculed as rightist cold-war thinking.
Except for scope and boldness, disinformation has changed little since
the end of the war. Cf. the testimony of Bogdan Raditsa. May 11, 1949,
Communist Activities among Aliens and National Groups. Hearings before the Special Subcommittee to Investigate Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Senate, Washington, D.C.,
1949.
15. Letter to Palmer Hoyt, September 2, 1944. Forrestal Diaries, New
Ymk 1951, 14.
16. Letter to Stanton Griffis, United States Ambassador to Poland, October 31, 1947. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951, 335.
17. Quoted by Caetano Mosca, Elementi di Scienza Politica 2, Turin
1923,450.
18. Sergey Petrovich Melgounov, The Red Terror in Russia, London
1925, 33.
19. Melgounov, Red Terror, London 1925, 41.
20. The words are Dr. Abdallah Osman's who was arrested toward the
end of 1978 for his western education. Quoted in the important article by
Michael Barry, "Afghanistan-Another Cambodia?," Commentary, August 1982, 29-37, 32. See also, Leo Raditsa, "Afghanistan Fights," St.
John's Review, Winter 1982, 90-98.
21. For one instance of the shooting of children, The Washington Post,
February 7, 1980.
22. For South Vietnam, Douglas Pike, Vietcong, The Organization and
Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, Cambddge, Mass. 1966, 249.
138
23. Michael Barry, "Afghanistan-Another Cambodia?," Commentary,
August 1982, 29-37.
24. This ignorance showed itself dramatically in the movie Reds that did
not even distinguish between the February revolution to establish democracy and the October seizure of power, and barely mentioned the
war. In this movie American mindlessness led to distortions that Soviet
schoolbooks, which mention that the Bolshevik minority destroyed all
democratic institutions, do not dream of. And except for an important
essay by Joel Carmichael ("Warren Beatty's Bolsheviks," Midstream,
March 1982, 43-48) and a letter of Lev Navrozov (Commentary, June
1982) nobody noticed. In fact one critic called the movie gently "condemnatory"-as if condemning was more important than telling what happened, and letting the condemnation take care of itself.
25. For this tendency, see the brilliant esSay by Jacques Barzun, Clio and
the Doctors: History, Psycho-History and Quanta-History, Chicago 1974.
26. Testimony of Stanislav Levchenko, July 14, 1982, in Soviet Active
Measures, Washington, D.C., 144, 145, 156.
27. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Louise and Aylmer
Maude, New York 1942, 10, 38.
28. Cf. G. Ferrero, The Reconstruction of Europe, New York 1941; also
The Gamble, Bonaparte in Iwly, 1796-1797, London 1939.
29. See the statement of Lieutenant General Marian Kukiel, Polish Minister of National Defense, in Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, The Rape of Poland,
New York 1948,29-30. The Soviet regime had about 14,500 Polish officers murdered near Smolensk and other places in Western Russia in
1940. In an article showing the Soviet and Polish regime's aggressive persistence in denying responsibility for the massacres, Nicholas Bethell
("Katyn and the Little Conifers, Encounter, May 1977, 86-90) quotes an
official diplomatic report of May 24, 1943, from the British Ambassador
to the Polish government-in-exile in London, that did not flinch in description of the, in its judgement, necessary evasiveness of Churchill's
government:
In handling the publicity side of the Katyn affair we have been constrained by the urgent need for cordial relations with the Soviet government to appear to appraise the evidence with more hesitation and
lenience than we should do in forming a common sense judgment on
events occurring in normal times or in the ordinary course of our private lives; we have been obliged to appear to distort the normal and
healthy operation of our intellectual and moral judgments; we have
been obliged to give undue prominence to the tactlessness or impulsiveness of Poles, to restrain the Poles from putting their case clearly
before the public, to discourage any attempt by the public and the
press to probe the ugly story to the bottom. In general we have been
obliged to deflect attention from possibilities which in the ordinary
affairs of life would cry to high heaven for elucidation, and to withhold the full measure of solicitude which, in other circumstances,
would be shown to acquaintances situated as a large number of Poles
now are. We have in fact perforce used the good name of England like
the murderers used the little conifers to cover up a massacre.
30. Quoted in Michael Polanyi, "Beyond Nihilism" in Knowing and Being, London 1969, 20.
31. Michael Polanyi, "The Message of the Hungarian Revolution" in
Knowing and Being, London 1969, 28.
32. Leonid Vladimirov, The Russians, New York 1968, 101-102.
33. Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart, Autonomy in a Mass Age,
New York 1971,24.
34. S. P. Melgounov, The Red Terror, London 1925,97.
35. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, New York 1953,72.
36. Mikhail Agursky, "Contemporary Socioeconomic Systems and their
Future Prospects" in Alexander Solzhenitsyn ed., From Under the Rubble, New Ymk 1976,78,74-75.
37. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951,482.
38. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951,262-263.
39. Giuseppe Josca, Carriere della Sera, April27, 1973.
40. New York Times, May 9, 1975.
41. Joan Didion, "El Salvador, the Bad Dream," New York Review of
Books, December 2, 1982.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�42. Andrei Navrozov, "Letter to A. Bartlett Giamatti," The Yale Free
Press, October 14, 1982.
43. Cf. Vittoria Ronchey, Figlioli Miei, Marxisti IJtmaginari, Milan 1975.
44. Igor Shafarevich, "Socialism in Our Past and Future" in From Under
the Rubble, New York 1976, 58-59.
·
45. For a fine account of the first appearance of this propaganda in 1917,
especially in Italy but with general reference to the whole West, see Ro"
berto Vivarelli, 1l dopoguerra in Italia e l'avvento del fascismo (1918-1922),
Naples 1967, especially 1-114.
46. Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Berlin 1922 (first
published 1918), 130.
47. Mann, Betrachtungen, Berlin 1922,47.
48. Thomas Mann, "Bruder Hitler," (1939), Gesammelte Schriften, Ham·
bmg 1960, 12, 852.
49. Gustav Janouch, "Conversations with Kafka," Encounter, August
1971, 15-27.
50. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, New York
1962, 32.
51. The" .. , and hold them (our British brethren) as we hold the rest of
mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends!" of the Declaration of Independence.
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
52. Foreign Relations of the United States (Conference Series), Washington, D.C. 1945, I.
53. Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951, 80.
54. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, Oxford 1939,44-52 and 147167. Quotations from 48-49, 163-64, 167.
55. Quoted in George F. Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, Princeton, N.J.
1956, 272-273.
56. Quoted in Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, Princeton, N.J. 1956, 511.
57. For a classic description and analysis, Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psy·
chology of Fascism, New York 1946 (first edition 1933).
58. Milovan Djilas, Wartime, New York 1977, 285.
59. Raymond Aron, Le spectateur engage, entretiens avec Jean-Louis Missika et Dominique Walton, Paris 1981,62.
60. Alexander Lowen, "The Impressionists and Orgone Energy," Orgone Energy Bulletin, 1, 1944, 169-183, 173.
61. Lowen, "The Impressionists," OEB, l, 1944, 178.
62. Vincent Van Gogh in his description of his "Portrait of the Painter
Bosch". Quoted in Lowen, "The Impressionists," 181.
63. W. Reich, Character Analysis\ New York 1949.
64. James Webb, Fields of Fire, New York (Bantam edition) 1979, 182.
65. Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac, "The Peacemaking Utopians" in
The Coercive Utopians, Chicago 1983, forthcoming.
139
�REvmw EssAY
On Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth*
GREGORY S. )ONES
The editor of The New Yorker magazine, William
Shawn, has described Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the
Earth as a work that "may someday be looked back upon as
a crucial event in the history of human thought." 1 This is
extremely unlikely. Schell's main conclusion, that calls for
radical changes in the world's political structure, is based
on a fallacious quasi-mathematical argument. Apart from
this argument, Schell's understanding amounts to a wish
for a world where people could live in peace. Schell does
not explain how we can construct a more peaceful world.
Schell's main argument hinges on the possibility that an
all-out nuclear war could lead to human extinction:
To say that human extinction is a certainty would, of course,
be a misrepresentation-just as it would be a misrepresentation to say that extinction can be ruled out. To begin with, we
know that a holocaust may not occur at all. If one does occur,
the adversaries may not use all their weapons. If they do use
all their weapons, the global effects, in the ozone and elsewhere, may be moderate. And if the effects are not moderate
but extreme, the ecosphere may prove resilient enough to
withstand them without breaking down catastrophically.
These are all substantial reasons for supposing that mankind
will not be extinguished in a nuclear holocaust, or even that
extinction in a holocaust is unlikely, and they tend to calm
our fear and to reduce our sense of urgency. Yet at the same
time we are compelled to admit that there may be a holocaust, that the adversaries may use all their weapons, that the
global effects, including effects of which we are as yet unaware, may be severe, that the ecosphere may suffer catastrophic breakdown, and that our species may be extinguished. (Emphasis in original.)
Schell then puts argument in mathematical form:
To employ a mathematical analogy, we can say that although
the risk of extinction may be fractional, the stake is, humanly
speaking, infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In
Gregory S. Jones is a senior policy analyst at Pan Heuristics, a Los
Angeles research firm. With Albert Wohlstetter he wrote Swords from
Plowshares: The Military Potential of Civilian Nuclear Energy (University
of Chicago Press 1978).
140
other words, once we learn that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the
game will be over, and neither we nor anyone else will ever
get another chance. Therefore, although, scientifically speaking, there is all the difference in the world between the mere
possibility that a holocaust will bring about extinction and the
certainty of it, morally they are the same, and we have no
choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though
we knew for a certainty that their use would put an end to our
species. (Emphasis in original.)
A small probability of an infinite harm (in this case, human extinction in large-scale nuclear war) has to be treated
the same as if the probability of this harm were a certainty.
To reduce the probability of nuclear war to zero, Schell
argues for complete nuclear and conventional disarmament worldwide. He also wants to change the world's political structure to "create a political means by which the
world can arrive at the decisions that sovereign states previously arrived at through war." In the near term he supports a nuclear freeze, talks between the nuclear powers to
reduce the probability of accidental nuclear war, and
George Kennan's proposal for halving the nuclear arsenals
of the superpowers.
Schell argues against unnamed (and, to me, unknown)
people who might think that the human extinction is not
all that bad. If only we would recognize the seriousness of
the situation, we would create this new world order.
The real problem, however, is Schell's argument that a
finite probability of an infinite harm can be treated as if
the harm were a certainty-and not that people do not
take human extinction seriously. This argument's total indifference to the actual probability of a catastrophic nuclear war is the trouble. For as long as there is a chance of a
catastrophic nuclear war, the argument does not change.
To halve the current probability of a catastrophic nuclear
war does no good; to double the current probability of catastrophic nuclear war does no harm. Any world with some
chance of catastrophic nuclear war is equivalent.
*Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth, Alfred A. Knopf, New York,
1982.
WINTER/SPRING 1983
�The logic of this argument should lead Schell to reject
half-measures like a nuclear freeze, etc.,(even if a nuclear
freeze lessened the chance of nuclear war). For such measures will not eliminate catastrophic nu.clear war. A nuclear freeze will, in fact, increase the chance of nuclear war
since it will prevent improvements in the safety, security,
and survivability of our nuclear systems and impede the
development of precise forms of nonnuclear attack with
the potential to replace nuclear weapons for many missions. Even in a totally disarmed world with a new political
order, as Schell admits, the political order could break
down, a war could break out, and with nuclear weapons
reconstructed, a nuclear catastrophe could occur:
In a disarmed world, we would not have eliminated the peril
of human extinction from the human scene-it is not in our
power to do so-but we would at least have pitted our whole
strength against it. The inconsistency of threatening to perpetrate extinction in order to escape extinction would be removed. The nuclei of atoms would still contain vast energy,
and we would still know how to extinguish ourselves by releasing that energy in chain reactions, but we would not be
lifting a finger to do it. There would be no complicity in mass
murder, no billions of dollars spent on the machinery of annihilation, no preparations to snuff out the future generations,
no hair-raising lunges toward the abyss.
All this is very well. But the logic of the argument yields
no reason to prefer Schell's totally disarmed world to our
current one.
The probability of nuclear war is quite important and it
is vital that we keep this probability as low as we can. To
reduce the overall risk to ourselves and at the same time
improve the quality of our lives it is, however, important to
use our resources proportionately to our actual needs and
risks. For example, at any second (to use some of Schell's
frenzied prose) the earth could be struck by an asteroid
large enough to have catastrophic consequences to the
earth's biosphere leading to human extinction. There is
substantial evidence of such collisions in the past. (Some
hold such a collision led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.)
Telescopes to scan the skies for such asteroids and stocks
of large nuclear armed missiles (the size of our Saturn
moon rockets) ready to intercept and blow up these asteroids would reduce the risks of such collisions. We do not
man such telescopes and missiles because the risk (once
every hundred million years or so) does not warrant the
relatively modest expenditure.
The risk of nuclear war is greater than the risk of large
asteroid collisions. But the price of trying absolutely to
avoid nuclear war is also unacceptably high, because it
would cost us more than just money. Schell chides us for
continuing to cling to our current system of nation states
which we use to support what he calls "our transient aims
and fallible convictions." These include such trivialities as
liberty and justice.Z The logic of Schell's beliefs and of
much that is current in the antinuclear movement would
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
lead one to do almost anything to avoid a nuclear holocaust.
Surrender to the Soviets would be the easiest way, especially if one is willing to give up liberty and justice. How to
be neither red nor dead, however, is our real problem.
Schell's argument has so little content that it can be
used to support anything or nothing. Pierre Gallois and
Raymond Aron used the vacuous argument of a finite
chance of an infinite harm that Schell uses to argue for
world disarmament and a new world order, to advocate
spreading nuclear weapons to a very large number of
coun'tries.l They held such distribution would make for a
very peaceful earth because nuclear weapons would enable every country to deter an attack. This would be true
even for very small countries, since there would always be
a slight chance that their nuclear weapons would survive
an enemy surprise attack and do the enemy's cities enormous damage. Gallois and Aron argued that even a very
small possibility of this enormous harm would deter an
enemy.
Of the two notions that comprise his solution, total disarmament and a new world political order without war,
Schell correctly takes the new world order for the primary
requirement, for once achieved it would make disarmament easy. It is striking that Schell has no idea what this
new world political order would look like nor how to bring
it about. He leaves these tasks to his reader:
In this book, I have not sought to define a political solution to
the nuclear predicament-either to embark on the full-scale reexamination of the foundations of political thought which
must be undertaken if the world's political institutions are to be
made consonant with the global reality in which they operate
or to work out the practical steps by which mankind, acting for
the first time in history as a single entity, can reorganize its political life. I have left to others those awesome, urgent tasks,
which, imposed on us by history, constitute the political work
of our age.
There is nothing new or original in the thought that it
would be nice to have a world where people settle their
political differences peacefully. There are problems, however, not amenable to easy solution-questions like who
should rule the Falkland Islands, where should the Palestinians live, how to bring liberty and justice to people living in totalitarian countries as well as improving the quality of government in our own country. People have
worked and will continue to work hard to solve these and
the many other political problems in the world today.
They do not need Jonathan Schell to tell them how serious
and important this work is. But finding solutions has not
been and will not be easy and there's nothing in Schell's
frantic book that will make this task any easier.
1Quoted in Newsweek, March 14, 1983, 67.
Schell complains that the nuclear powers "put a higher value
on national sovereignty than they do on human survival."
3 Pierre Gallais, The Balance ofTerror(with Foreword by Raymond Aron),
Boston 1961, 129 ix. I am indebted to Albert Wohlstetter for pointing out
this connection.
2 Elsewhere
141
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Radista, Leo
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Lord, Susan
Bolotin, David
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Aldanov, Mark
Carmichael, Joel
Brann, Eva T. H.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude
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Zuckerman, Elliott
Isaac, Rael-Jean and Erich
Holmes, Stephen
Hadas, Rachel
Ferrero, Guiglielmo
Mosca, Gaetano
Mongardini, Carlo
Ardrey, Daniel
Jones, Gregory S.
Kocsis, Joan
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�Editor:
]. Walter Sterling
Managing Editor:
Thomas Parran, Jr.
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Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
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The St. John's Review (formerly The College) is published by
the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland 21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Samuel S. Kutler,
Dean. Published thrice yearly, in the autumn-winter, winterspring, and summer. For those not on the distribution list,
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for three years, payable in advance. Address all correspondence to The St. John's Review, St. John's College, Annapolis,
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Volume XXXIV
SUMMER 1983
Number 3
© 1983, St. John's College; "Mission over Hanoi," © 1983,
James Webb. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in
part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Cover: Randall Hall, from an etching by F. Town send Morgan.
Composition: Action Camp Co., Inc.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
�fhe St. John's Review, Summer 1983
3
Homo Loquens from a Biological Standpoint
Curtis A. Wilson
18
Solstice on the First Watch (poem) }. H. Beall
19
The Ground of Nature: Shakespeare,
Language, and Politics Paul A. Cantor
25
Nominal Autobiography in Shakespeare's Sonnets
Margreta de Grazia
32
Blackwater (poem) RobertS. Zelenka
33
Mission over Hanoi (narrative from A Country
Such as This) james Webb
41
Truth-Telling and the Iliad Douglas Allanbrook
51
The Supreme Court and School Desegregation:
Brown v. Board of Education Reconsidered
Murray Dry
63
OCCASIONAL DISCOURSES
Class Day Address 1983
Chaninah Maschler
64
The Horizon as the Last Ship Home (poem) }. H. Beall
65
Against Time Eva Brann
��Homo Loquens
from a
Biological Standpoint
Curtis A.Wilson
The words homo loquens, in the title I announced for
this lecture, mean speaking man, man the speaking one. As
a designation for the human species, homo loquens perhaps has an advantage over the official zoological designation, homo sapiens, man the sapient, wise, discerning one,
the one who savours the essences of things. The human
capacity for loquaciousness is somewhat more obviously
verifiable. But what has that capacity to do with things bio·
logical? This is a complicated and problematic topic. Forgive me if I first approach it by slow stages, then attempt a
gingerly step when the going becomes treacherous. I wish
to begin with a small technical matter, an aspect of the
physiology of speech-production.
Respiratory patterns in different species of air-breathing
vertebrates differ in many details. Different species have
special regulatory systems, adapted to special behavior
patterns. There is the panting of dogs, specially adapted
for cooling; birds, during flight, have the unique ability to
increase their intake of oxygen a hundredfold; the sperm
whale can go without breathing or dive for 90 minutes, the
beaver for 15, man for about 2 1/2; and so on. All these
differences are species-specific.
In a human being, the respiratory patterns during quiet
breathing and during speech are remarkably different (see
Table I). The volume of air inhaled, as shown in the first
item of the table, increases by a factor of 3 or 4 during
speech. The time of inspiration, as compared with the
A lecture delivered at Annapolis in September 1975.
In forthcoming issues the Review intends to publish Mr. Wilson's lectures, The Arcltimedean Point and the Liberal Arts (September 1958) and
Groups, Rings and Lattices (September 1959).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
time for a complete cycle of inspiration plus expiration, decreases by a factor of 3. The number of breaths per minute
tends to decrease drastically. Expiration, which is smooth
during speechless breathing, is periodically interrupted
during speech, with a build-up of pressure under the glottis; it is during expiration that all normal human vocalization occurs. The patterns of electrical activity in expiratory and inspiratory muscles differ radically during quiet
breathing and during speech. Both chest and abdominal
musculature are utilized in breathing, but during speech
the abdominal musculature is less involved, and its contractions are no longer fully synchronized with those of
the chest musculature. In quiet breathing, one breathes
primarily through the nose; during speech, primarily
through the mouth.
More than you wanted to know, I'm sure. My point was
to show that breathing undergoes marked changes during
speech. And remarkably, humans can tolerate these modifications for almost unlimited periods of time without ex·
periencing respiratory distress; witness filibusters in the
U.S. Senate. Think now of other voluntary departures
from normal breathing patterns. If we deliberately decide
to breathe at some arbitrary rate, say, faster than ordinary
-please do not try it here-we quickly experience the
symptoms of hyperventilation: light-headedness, giddiness, and so on. Similar phenomena may occur when one
is learning to play a wind instrument or during singing instruction; training in proper breathing is requisite for
these undertakings. By contrast, talking a blue streak for
hours on end comes naturally to many a three-year-old.
The conclusion must be that there are sensitive controlling mechanisms that regulate ventilation in an autono·
mons way during speech. More generally, it is evident that
3
�we are endowed with special anatomical and physiological
adaptations that enable us to sustain speech for hours, on
exhaled air.
Do we speak the way we do because we happen to possess these special adaptations, or did these adaptations develop during evolution in response to the pressures of natural selection or the charms of sexual selection? I think
there is no way of answering these questions; it is difficult
enough when one can refer to skeletons, which fossilize;
behavioral traits do not. But whatever the answer, there is
still this further question, whether the genetic programming for speech extends beyond the mere provision of vocal apparatus? Might it not, in addition, determine the
make-up and structure of language in a more detailed and
intimate fashion?
Such a question runs counter to views that are widely
held. Is not language, after you have the voice to pronounce it with, fundamentally a psychological and cultural
fact, to which biological explanations would be largely irrelevant? Do not languages consist of arbitrary conventions, made up in the way we make up the rules of games?
Wittgenstein speaks of language as a word-game, thereby
likening it to tennis or poker. Is it not apparent that the
conventions of any particular language, like the rules of
tennis or poker, are transmitted from generation to generation by means of imitation, training, teaching, and learn~
ing? Are not these the important facts about language, the
facts that reveal to us its nature?
Until recently, students of linguistics and psychology
have tended uniformly to answer these questions in the
affirmative. To many, the extraordinary diversity of human tongues has seemed argumerit enough against any assumption of linguistic universals, that is, characteristics of
language imagined to be rooted in human nature. The reductio ad absurdum often mentioned is the attempt of the
Egyptian king Psammetichos to determine the original human language. As reported by Herodotus, Psammetichos
caused two children to be raised in such a way that they
would neither hear nor overhear human speech, the attendants being instructed meanwhile to listen out for their
first word. The report was, that it was Persian. The experiment is said to have been repeated in the 13th century by
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, and again around
1500 by James IV of Scotland, who was hoping that the
children would speak Hebrew, and thereby establish a biblical lineage for Scotland. No result was reported.
Stress on the arbitrariness of language has been enhanced by a coalition between linguistics and behaviorist
psychology. Behaviorist psychology is led, by its premisses, to the view that language is merely an arbitrary use to
which the human constitution, anatomical and physiological, can be put, just as a tool can be put to many arbitrary
uses by its manipulator. A recent account that views language in this way is the book Verbal Behavior by B. F. Skinner. Along with other behaviorist scientists, Skinner holds
that all learning can be explained by a few principles
4
which operate in all vertebrates and many invertebrates.
The process is called operant conditioning. Learning the
meaning of a word, Skinner holds, is like a rat's learning to
press a bar which will cause a buzzer to sound, announcing
"food pellets soon to come". Learning grammar, likewise,
is supposed to be like learning that event A is followed by
event B, which is in turn followed by event C. Many an
animal can be trained to acquire associations of this kind.
Skinner would hold that there is nothing involved in the
acquisition of language that is not involved in learning of
this kind.
Unquestionably, we would be mistaken to deny the importance or the power of the conditioned reflex, either in
language acquisition or in other learning. The experimental psychologists have recently announced that even the
visceral organs can be taught to do various things, on given
signals, with rewards provided immediately afterward to
reinforce the action. We are told that rats, with the reward
held out of another shot of electrical juice in a certain center of the brain, have been taught to alter their blood pressures or brain waves, or dilate the blood vessels in one ear
more than those in the other. Similar achievements in
operant conditioning are held out as a bright future hope
for humans. What rich experiences in self-operation are
not in store for us?
On the other hand, the successes of this technology do not
necessarily tell us much about the character of what it is that
is being conditioned. The behaviorist treats the organism as a
black box; he controls the inputs and records the outputs;
what goes on in the box is not, as he claims, an appropriate
concern of his. He cites the similar situation in quantum
physics. In the case of quantum phenomena, the physicist
cannot successfully describe what is there when he is not
looking, not using probes that interact with whatever it is.
But, between the situation in quantum physics and the situation in the study of animal behavior, there is this difference.
Animal behavior goes on, observably so, even when the ani-
mals are not being experimented on. May it not be important
to try to observe this behavior, before we set out to change it,
as we can, so frighteningly, do?
Those who study the behavior of animals in their natural habitats nowadays have a special name for their study,
Ethology. Long hours of patient observation, much of it
during the last 50 years, have demonstrated how intricate,
how unexpectedly adaptive, how downright peculiar, are
the patterns of behavior specific to particular species of
animals. Many of the patterns function as communica-
tion: the elaborate courtship rituals of birds, the less elaborate ones of butterflies and certain fish; the way in which
two dabbling ducks, on meeting, lower their bills into the
water and pretend to drink, as an indication of nonaggressiveness; and so on. Among these behaviors, there is one
that has been called truly symbolic. That is the dance of
the honeybee, the symbolism of which was first recognized and deciphered by Karl von Frisch in the 1940's. Let
me describe it briefly (see Figure l).
SUMMER 1983
�The dance that a forager bee performs in the dark hive
gives, by a special symbolism, the dista,nce and direction of
the food source she has found. If, for the Austrian variety
of bee, the food source is less than 80 meters away, she
performs a round dance, running rapidly around in a circle,
first to the left, then to the right. This in effect says to the
hive bees: "Fly out from the hive; close by in the neighborhood is food to be fetched."
If, on the other hand, the food source is more than 80
meters away, the forager will use the tail-wagging dance.
The rhythm of the dance tells the distance: the closer the
source, the more figure-of-eight cycles of the dance per ·
minute. The tail-wagging part of the dance, shown by the
middle wavy line in the diagram, tells the direction, in accordance with a curious rule. On the vertical honeycomb
in the hive, the direction up means towards the sun, and
the direction down means away from the sun. If the tailwagging run points 60° left of straight up, the food source
is 60° to the left of the sun, and so on. Directions with
respect to the sun have been transposed into directions
with respect to gravity, the directions are reported with errors of less than 3o.
This same dance is used in the springtime when half the
bees move out of the hive and form a swarm, seeking a
new nesting place. Scout bees fly out in all directions, then
return and dance to announce the location they have hit
on. It is important, of course, that the selected spot be
protected from winter, winds, and rough weather, and that
there be abundant feeding nearby. The surprising thing is
that not just one nesting place is announced, but several at
the same time. The dancing and the coming and going can
continue for days. By their dances the bees engage in mutual persuasion, inciting one another to inspect this site or
that site. The better the site, the longer and more vigorously the returning bee dances. The process continues until all the scout bees are dancing in the same direction and
at the same rate. Then the swarm arises and departs for
the homesite it has thus decided upon. Mistaken decisions
are few.
The dance of the honeybee is symbolic in a genetically
determined way. That human language is not genetically
determined in the same way is easy to show: the language
a child learns, whether Swahili, Cantonese, Urdu, or any
other, depends solely on the language of those by whom
he is brought up.
The vocabulary of a human language is not genetically
fixed. I do not believe, however, that the discussion of the
biological foundations oflanguage can properly end at this
point.
My reasons for saying this are two. In the first place,
there are certain features of human speech which are not
facts appear to be most easily accounted for by assuming
that there is such a foundation, forcing human speech to
be of a certain basic type.
Secondly, this same assumption receives support from
the study of primary language acquisition in children. It is
not that Psammetichos was right, or that children if left to
themselves would commence to speak proto-IndoEuropean or any language resembling an adult human language. All genetically determined traits depend for their
appearance, to a greater or lesser degree, on features of the
environment. The genes or genetic factors do not of themselves determine body parts or physiological or behavioral
traits. Rather, they determine developmental processes,
which normally succeed one another in a determinate
way, but can be profoundly affected by environmental influence. These facts point to the possibility that genetically determined traits might appear only in the course of
maturation, and then only in response to specific influences from outside the organism. Ethologists inform us of
many instances of species-specific, genetically based behavior that emerge only in this way. An example is imprinting. Thomas More described it in his Utopia. Chicks
or ducklings or goslings, a few hours or days after hatching,
enter a critical period. Whatever object they first encounter during this period, within certain limits of size, and
moving within appropriate limits of speed, they begin to
follow, and continue to follow through childhood. The object followed can be, and usually is, the mother; but it can
also be an ethologist like Konrad Korenz on his hands and
knees, or something stuffed at the end of a stick. Failure to
develop imprinted responses during infancy may cause behavioral abnormalities in the adult bird-abnormalities
that cannot be corrected by later training. Imprinting is
only one of many known species-specific characteristics or
behaviors that appear in the course of development, in response to what are sometimes called "releasers", environ-
mental stimuli of specified kinds. It will be my contention
that important features of human linguistic capacity are of
this kind.
After discussing these two points, I shall conclude with
certain reflections on what they might mean.
I begin, then, with three features of human speech that
do not appear to be found in the natural communication
systems of animals (see Table II):
l. Phonematization
2. Concatenation
3. Grammar
What is meant by phonematization? The vocalizations
heard in the human languages of the world are always
within fairly narrow limits of the total range of sounds that
humans can produce. We are able to imitate, for instance,
found in the natural communication systems of animals,
the vocalizations of mammals and birds with considerable
but which are found universally in all known human languages, present or past. The existence of these features is,
at the very least, consonant with the possibility that there
is a genetic foundation underlying human speech. The
accuracy, given a little training, but such direct imitations
never seem to be incorporated in the vocabularies of hu-
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
man languages. In all human languages, the meaningful
units, words, or more strictly speaking, morphemes, are di-
5
�visible into successive, shorter, meaningless sounds called
phonemes. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units
into which an utterance can be divided. A morpheme can
be a single word such as ' water"; it can be more than one
word as in "spick and span"; and it can be less than a single
word, as in the "er" in "whiter", which turns the adjective
1
"white" into a comparative. Phonemes are the meaning-
less sounds into which morphemes can be divided. A pho·
neme is not, strictly speaking, a single sound, but rather a
small class of sounds; it can be defined as the smallest distinctive unit functioning within the sound system of alanguage to make a difference. Refinements aside, the central
fact I wish to convey is this: in all languages, morphemes
are constituted by sequences of phonemes. This is a fact
that the inventors of the alphabet were probably about the
first to come to understand.
The fact could have been different. One can imagine a
language in which the symbol for a cat was a sound resembling a miaow; in which size was represented by loudness,
color by vowel quality, and hunger by a strident roar. Morphemes in such a language would not be analyzable into
phonemes.
All human languages are phonematized, but each language uses a somewhat different set of phonemes, in each
case a small set.
Parrots and mynah birds excel other animals in the imitation of human speech, but it is doubtful that they speak
in phonemes. The matter could be put to a test. A parrot
that had heard only Portuguese, and had acquired a good
repertory of Portuguese words and phrases, could be transferred into an environment where he would hear only English, and have the opportunity of repeating English exclamatory remarks. If these remarks emerged with a
Portuguese accent, then it would be clear that the parrot
had learned Portuguese phonemes, which he proceeded to
use in the vocalization of English words. In the opposite
case, we would conclude that the parrot had the capacity
to imitate sounds accurately, but had not acquired the
habit of using phonemes for the production of speech.
In the human child, speech by the same test would turn
out to be phonematized.
The second general characteristic of human speech I
have listed is concatenation. Human utterances seldom
consist of single morphemes in isolation; in no human
speech-community are utterances restricted to single morphemes; in all languages, morphemes are ordinarily strung
together into sequences. To be sure, the peoples of many,
perhaps most cultures, are less garrulous than we; they use
language only in certain circumstances and only somewhat sparingly, while we talk a good deal of the time. It is
nevertheless true that humans in all speech-communities
concatenate morphemes.
The third property presupposes concatenation; it is the
property of grammatical or syntactical structure. By
"structure" I am going to mean a set of relations that can
be diagrammed. In no language are morphemes strung to-
6
gether in purely random order. Native speakers of a language normally agree in rejecting certain utterances as ungrammatical, and in recognizing certain other utterances
as grammatical. According to Noam Chomsky, for instance, the sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is grammatical, though meaningless or nearly so;
the concatenation "furiously sleep ideas green colorless",
the same words in reverse order, is ungrammatical. The
one concatenation admits of a syntactical diagram, the
other does not.
It is generally assumed in linguistics that the grammar of
a language is completely describable by means of a finite
and in fact small set of formal rules. For no natural language has such a description been achieved as yet, otherwise one could program a computer to utter the grammatical sentences in the language. Apparently the mechanism
involved in the grammar of a natural language is complex.
I shall return to this topic again; the point now is just the
universality of grammar-a relatively complex kind of system-as a feature of human languages.
All three properties I have described are, so far as the
available evidence indicates, without cultural histories.
Phonematization, concatenation, grammatical structure,
are features of all known human language, past or present.
And although languages are always in process of change, it
is not the case that these changes follow a general pattern
from a stage that can be called primitive to one that can be
called advanced. No known classification or analysis of human languages provides any basis for a theory of the development oflanguage from aphonemic, non-grammatical, or
simple imitative beginnings.
These facts are consonant with the hypothesis that
there is a genetic foundation underlying human speech,
forcing it to be of a certain basic type, and in particular, to
have the features I have just described. In support of this
hypothesis, I take up now the development of language in
the child.
The first sound a child makes is to cry. Immanuel Kant
says the birth cry
has not the tone of lamentation, but of indignation and of
aroused wrath; presumably because [the child} wants to
move, and feels his inability to do so as a fetter that deprives
him of his freedom.
More recently a psychoanalyst has written of the birthcry:
It is an expression of the infant's overwhelming sense of inferiority on thus suddenly being confronted by reality, without
ever having had to deal with its problems.
In view of the anatomical immaturity of the human brain
at birth, these adult interpretations are rather surprising.
No doubt the infant in being born undergoes a rude shock.
But crying is a mechanism with a number of important
functions; one of the earliest is clearing fluid out of the
SUMMER 1983
�middle ear, so that the child can begil) to hear. The mechanism is ready to operate at birth, and ,the infant puts it to
work. The sound made in crying changes slightly during
childhood, but otherwise does not mature or change during one's life. Crying is not a first step in the development
that leads to articulate speech; it involves no articulation;
the infant simply blows his horn without operating the
keys.
A quite distinct sort of vocalization begins at about the
6th or 8th week after birth: little cooing sounds that appear
to be elicited by a specific stimulus, a nodding object resembling a face in the baby's visual field. A clown's face
painted on cardboard, laughing or crying, will do for a
while. The response is first smiling, then cooing. After
about 13 weeks it is necessary that the face be a familiar
one to elicit the smiling and cooing. During cooing, some
articulatory organs are moving, in particular the tongue.
The cooing sounds, although tending to be vowel-like, are
not identical with any actual speech sounds. Gradually
they become differentiated. At 6 months they include vocalic and consonantal components, like /p/ and /b/. Cooing develops into babbling resembling one-syllable utterances, for instance /rna/, /mu/, Ida/, /di/. However, the
babbling sounds are still not those of adult speech.
The first strictly linguistic feature to emerge in a child's
vocalizations is contour of intonation. Before the sound sequences have determinable meaning or definite phonemic
structure, they come out with the recognizable intonation
of questions, exclamations, or affirmations. Linguistic de-
velopment begins not with the putting together of individual components, but rather with a whole tonal pattern.
Later, this whole becomes differentiated into component
parts. Differentiation of phonemes is only approximate at
first and has to be progressively refined. The child is gradually gaining control of the dozen or so adjustments in the
vocal organs that are required for adult speech. By 12
months he is replicating syllables, as in "mamma" and
"dada". By 18 months he will normally have a repertory of
three to 50 recognizable words.
I have described this development as though mothers
were not trying to teach, but of course they normally are.
It is nevertheless a striking fact that these stages emerge in
different cultures in the same sequence and at very nearly
the same ages, and in fairly strict correlation with other
motor achievements. Detailed studies have been made of
speech acquisition among the Zuni of New Mexico, the
Dani of Dutch New Guinea, the Bororo in central Brazil,
and children in urban U.S.A.; in all cases, intonation patterns become distinct at about the time that grasping between thumb and fingers develops; the first words appear
at about the time that walking is accomplished; and by the
time the child is able to jump, tiptoe, and walk backward,
he is talking a blue streak. Among children born deaf, the
development from cooing through spontaneous babbling
to well-articulated speech-sounds occurs as with normal
children, but of course the development cannot continue
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
onward into the stage at which adult words are learned
through hearing. Among the mentally retarded, these developments are chronologically delayed, but take place
with the same correlation between various motor achieve-
ments. Given the variety of environmental conditions in
these several cases, it seems plausible to attribute the
emergence of linguistic habits largely to maturational
changes within the growing child, rather than to particular
training procedures.
The specific neurophysiological correlates of speech are
little known, but that there are such correlates and that
they mature as speech develops is supported by much evidence. The human brain at birth has only 24% of its adult
weight; by contrast, the chimpanzee starts life with a brain
that already weighs 60% of its adult value. The human
brain takes longer to mature, and more happens as it matures, including principally a large increase in the number
of neuronal connections. A large part of the discernible anatomical maturation takes place in the first two years; the
process appears to be complete by about 14 years of age.
By this time the neurophysical basis of linguistic capacity
has become localized in one of the two cerebral hemispheres, usually the left. If by this time a first language has
not been learned, no language will ever be learned. Speech
defects due to injuries to the brain that occur before the
finallateralization of the speech-function are usually overcome; but if the injury comes after lateralization, the
speech defect will be permanent.
Capacity for speech does not correlate uniformly with
size of brain. There is a condition known as nanocephalic
dwarfism, in which humans appear reduced to fairy-tale
size; adult individuals attain a maximum height of between two and three feet (see Table III). Nanocephalic
dwarfs differ from other dwarfs in preserving the skeletal
and other bodily proportions of normal adults. Brain
weight in these dwarfs barely exceeds that of a normal
newborn infant. The brain weight of the nanocephalic
dwarf, given in the middle row, is only a little over a third
of that of a 2 !12 year old boy, but the ratio of body weight
to brain weight is equal to that of a 13 !12 year old boy.
These dwarfs show some retardation in intellectual
growth, and often do not surpass a mental age-level of 5 or
6 years. But all of them acquire the rudiments of language,
including speaking and understanding; they speak grammatically, and can manufacture sentences which are not
mere repetitions of sentences they have heard. The appropriate conclusion appears to be that the ability to acquire
language depends, not on any purely quantitative factor,
but on specific modes of organization of human neurophysiology.
One further point concerning the neurophysiological
basis of language. The main evidence here is provided by
aphasias (aphasis = " + </Java<, not + to speak). These are
failures in production or comprehension of language, re-
sulting from injuries to the brain. And this evidence argues, for one thing, against regarding language ability as
7
�being encoded simply in a spatial layout of some kind, say
a network of associations in the cerebral cortex. Subcortical areas are involved, as well as cortex. The aphasias most
frequently involve, not disruption of associations, but
rather disruption of temporal order, affecting either phonemes in the production of
words~
as in spoonerisms, or
words and phrases in the production of sentences. The patient is unable to control properly the temporal ordering of
these units, and as a consequence they tumble into the
production line uninhibited by higher syntactic principles.
In general, the symptom is lack of availability of the right
thing at the right time.
Language is through-and-through an affair of temporal
patterns and sequences. The neurophysiological organization required for this cannot be simply that of associations.
In the making of speech-sounds, for instance, certain mus-
cles have to contract, the efferent nerve fibers innervating
these muscles are of different lengths and diameters, and
as a consequence the times required for a nerve impulse to
tion, in which elements connected with one another are
separated temporally in the production line.
Let me return now to the description of stages in the
primary acquisition of language by a child.
At about the end of the first year of life, the child normally utters his first unmistakable word. For a number of
months, while the child is building up a repertory of about
50 words, he utters only single-word utterances. He frequently hears sentences like "Here is your milk", "Shall
daddy take you by-by?", and so on, but he will neither join
together any two words he knows nor can he be induced to
do so on request. Does he lack the memory or the vocalizing power to produce a two-word utterance? The evidence
is against these suppositions. Then, roughly between 18
and 24 months, he suddenly and spontaneously begins to
join words into two-element phrases: "up baby", "baby
highchair", "push car", and so on. What explains the shift?
An important observation at the one-word stage is that
these single words are given the intonations or pitch-con-
go from brain to muscle differ for different muscles.
Hence the nerve impulses for the production of a single
phoneme must be fired off from the brain at different
times, and the sequences of impulses for successive phonemes must overlap in complex ways. In the simplest sequential order of events, it thus appears that events are
tours of declarative, interrogative, or hortatory sentences.
The single-word utterances seem to function in meaning
selected, not in response to immediately prior events, but
single-word utterances, both "push" and "car" would have
primary stresses and terminal- intonation contours. But
in the same way as sentences will function later on: "Doggie" might mean, for instance, ~'There is a dog". When the
two-word construction ''push car" appears, it is not just
two single-word utterances spoken in a certain order. As
in accordance with a hierarchic plan that integrates the requirements for periods of time of several seconds' duration. All this patterning in time is thought to depend on a
physiological rhythm of about 6 cyles per second, in relation to which other events are timed. Arrangements of this
complexity do not come about by learning. The evidence
here, as well as the observations I have already described
as to the way voice-sounds develop in children, points to
the existence of an innate mechanism for the production
of phonemes, one which is activated by a specific input,
the appearance of the human face, and which matures in
stages.
Could anything similar be argued for competence in syntax, the ability to understand and produce grammatical sentences? Here you will undoubtedly be more doubtful, for
surely the grammars of different languages are different.
Please recall that the sets of phonemes used in different languages are also somewhat different. The universality of
phonematization is compatible with different languages
employing different subsets of the humanly possible phonemes. The claim for universality of grammar must be of
similar kind. The grammars of human languages are not of
just any imaginable kind of ordered concatenation of morphemes. Rather, they derive from a certain subclass of the
gressive differentiation of the parts of utterances on the
other.
Imitation plays a role in this process, but it is seldom
mere parroting. In Table IV I have listed some imitations
actually produced by two children, whom I shall call Adam
and Eve; both were about two years old.
First note that the imitations preserve the word order of
the model, even when not preserving all the words. This is
not a logical necessity; it is conceivable that the child
might reverse or scramble the order; that he does not suggests that he is processing the utterance as a whole. A second fact to notice is that, when the models increase in
length, the child's imitation is a reduction, and that the
imaginable orders, a subclass involving phrase structure and
selection of words is not random. The words retained are
what has been called "deep structure". The production of
grammatical sentences turns out to pose requirements simi-
generally nouns, verbs, and less often adjectives: words
sometimes called "contentives", because they have se-
lar to those necessary for the temporal ordering of pho-
mantic content; their main grammatical function lies in
nemes; a serial order in which one clement determines the
next is insufficient; there has to be hierarchical organiza-
their capacity to refer to things. The forms omitted are
what linguists call "functors", their grammatical functions
8
when they are two words programmed as a single utterance,
the primary stress and higher pitch come on "car"; and the
unity of the whole is indicated by the absence of a terminal
pitch contour between the words and the presence of such a
contour at the end of the sequence.
What appears to be happening is that the child is by
stages increasing his span, his ability to plan or program
longer utterances. Grammar is already present in embryo.
Further development will be a process of successive increases in span or integration, on the one hand, and pro-
SUMMER l983
�being more obvious than their semantic content. The
omission of the functors leads to a kind of telegraphic language, such as one uses in wiring home: ('Car broken
down; wallet stolen; send money American Express Baghdad". In the child's telegraphic utterances, how will the
appropriate functors come to be introduced?
While the child engages in imitating, with reductions,
the utterances of the mother, the mother frequently imitates, with expansion, the utterances of the child (see Table V). The mother's expansions, you will note, preserve
the word order of the child's sentences, she acts as if the
child meant everything he said, and more, and it is the
"more" that her additions articulate. She adds functors.
The functors have meaning, but it is meaning that accrues
to them in context rather than in isolation. The functors
tell the time of the action, whether it is ongoing or completed; they inform us of possession, and of relations such
as are indicated by prepositions like in, on, up, down; they
distinguish between a particular instance of a class as in
"the highchair", and an arbitrary instance of a class, as in
"a sandwich"; and so on.
How or to what extent these adult expansions of the
child's utterances help the child to learn grammatical usage is uncertain. It has been found that immediate imitations by the child of just uttered adult sentences are less
frequently well-formed than spontaneously produced utterances. The view that progress toward adult norms arises
merely from practice in overt imitation of adult sentences
is clearly wrong. The child rather appears to be elaborating
his own grammar, making use of adult models, but constantly analogizing to produce new and often mistaken
words or forms.
Take pluralization (see Table VI). In English there are a
few irregular plurals, as of mouse, foot, man. The child normally regularizes these plurals: mouses, foots, mans. Instead of foot vs. foots, some children give feet for the singular, feels for the plural. One does not get an initial
fluctuation between foot and feet, such as one would expect if only imitation of adult forms were at work.
Most English plurals are regular and follow certain formal rules. Thus we have mat vs. mats, but match vs.
matches. Words ending in sibilants, such as match, horse,
box, add a vowel before the s of the plural. Children have
difficulty with pluralizing these words, and tend at first to
use the singular form for both singular and plural. Sometimes a child will analogize in such a way as to remove the
sibilant, substituting for instance, for box vs. boxes, the singular-plural pair bok vs. boks. Then at some point the child
produces the regular plural of a sibilant word, say, boxes.
Frequently when this happens he may abandon temporarily the regular plural for non-sibilant words, so that one
gets foot vs. footses. What is happening? Overlaid on the
child's systematic analogic forms, there is a gradual accumulation of successful imitations which do not fit the
child's system. Eventually these result in a change in the
system, often with errors due to over-generalizing.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Consider also the past tense inflection, which in English
bears considerable similarity to the plural inflection (see
Table VI again). There are regular forms like walk-walked,
and irregular ones like go-went. Among the regular verbs,
the form of the past depends on the final phoneme of the
simple verb: so we have pack-packed and pat-patted. In the
case of past-tense inflection in contrast with pluralization,
however, the most frequently used forms are irregular, and
the curious fact is that the child often starts regularizing
these forms before having been heard to produce any
other past-tense forms. Thus goed, doed, corned appear
among the first past-tense forms produced. The analogizing tendency is evidently very strong.
The occurrence of certain kinds of errors on the level of
word construction thus reveals the child's effort to induce
regularities from the speech he is exposed to. When a child
says, "I buyed a fire car for a grillion dollars," he is not imitating in any strict sense of the term; he is constructing in
accordance with rules, rules which, in adult English, are in
part mistaken. At every stage, the child's linguistic competence extends beyond the sum total of the sentences he
has heard. He is able to understand and construct sentences which he cannot have heard before, but which are
well-formed in terms of general rules that are implicit in
the sentences he has heard. Somehow, genius that he is,
he induces from the speech to which he is exposed a latent
structure of rules. For the rest of his life, he will be spinning out the implications of this latent structure.
By way of illustration of this inductive process, and of a
further stage in the achievement of grammatical competence, let me indicate some aspects of the development of
the noun phrase in children's speech (see Table VII). A
noun phrase consists of a noun plus modifiers of some
kind, which together can be used in all the syntactic positions in which a single noun can be used: alone to name or
request something, or in a sentence as subject, object, or
predicate nominative. The table at the top gives a number
of noun phrases uttered by Adam or Eve at about two
years of age. Each noun phrase consists of one word from a
small class of modifiers, M, followed by one word from the
large class of nouns, N. The rule for generating these noun
phrases is given below in symbols: NP is generated by M
plus N.
The class M does not correspond to any single syntactic
class in adult English; it includes indefinite and definite
articles, a possessive pronoun, a demonstrative adjective, a
quantifier, a cardinal number, and some descriptive adjec-
tives. In adult English these words are of different syntactic classes because they have very different privileges of
occurrence in sentences. For the children, the words ap-
pear to belong to a single class because of their common
privilege of occurrence before nouns; the lack of distinction leads to ungrammatical combinations, which are
marked in the table by an asterisk. Thus the indefinite article should be used only with a common count noun in the
singular, as in ((a coat"; we do not say ('a celery", "a
9
�Becky", "a hands". The numeral two we use only with
count nouns in the plural; hence we do not say "two sock".
The word "more" we use before mass nouns in the singu~
lar, as in "more coffee", and before count nouns in the plural, as in "more nuts"; we would not say "more nut". To
avoid the errors, it is necessary not only that the privileges
of occurrence of words of the class M be differentiated,
but also that nouns be subdivided into singular and plural,
common and proper, count nouns and mass nouns.
Sixteen weeks after Time I, at Time II, Adam and Eve
were beginning to make some of these differentiations; articles and demonstrative pronouns were now distinguished
from other members of the class M. Articles now always appeared before descriptive or possessive adjectives, and demonstrative pronouns before articles or other modifiers.
Twenty-six weeks after Time I, the privileges of occurrence had become much more finely differentiated. Adam
was distinguishing descriptive adjectives and possessive
pronouns, as well as articles and demonstrative pronouns,
from the residual class M; Eve's classification was even
more complicated, though she was a bit younger. Also,
nouns were being differentiated by both children: proper
nouns were clearly distinct from common nouns; for Eve,
count nouns were distinct from mass nouns.
Simultaneously with these differentiations, further integrations were occurring: the noun phrases were beginning
to occur as constituents in longer sentences; the permissible combinations of modifiers and nouns were assuming
the combination privileges enjoyed by nouns in isolation.
Thus the noun phrase, for Adam and Eve, was coming to
have a psychological unity such as it has for adults. This
was indicated by instances in which a noun phrase was fitted between parts of a separable verb, as in "put the red
hat on". It was also indicated by substitution of pronouns
for noun phrases in sentences, often at first with the pronoun being followed by the noun phrase for which it was
to substitute, as in ((mommy get it my ladder", or ((I miss it
cowboy boot".
Whether any theory of learning at present known can
account for this sequence of differentiations and integrations is doubtful. The process is more reminiscent of the
development of an embryo than it is of the simple acquisition of conditioned reflexes or associations. What is
achieved is an open-ended competence to comprehend
sentences never before heard, in terms of a hierarchical
structure, that embeds structures within structures.
To illustrate, let me use, not a child's sentence, but an
example that Chomsky excerpts from the Port Royal
Grammar of 1660 (see Figure 2). The sentence is: "Invisible God created the visible world". The sentence may be
diagrammed as shown in the figure; Chomsky calls these
diagrams phrase markers. There is a phrase marker for
what he calls surface structure; this has the function of determining the phonetic shape and intonational contour of
the sentence. And there is a phrase marker for what he
calls deep structure; this shows how prior predications are
embedded in the sentence, and determine its meaning.
10
Are formal structures like the one indicated by this diagram really operative when linguistic competence is being
exercised? There are a number of indications that this is
so. One indication is the extent to which the understanding of language involves resolution of ambiguities, or disambiguation as it is sometimes massively put. Consider the
sentence "They are boring students" (see Figure 3). This
has two different interpretations, which are represented
by the diagrams of Figure 3. In interpretation A, the word
((boring" is linked with the word ((students"; the students
are thus characterized as boring. In interpretation B, the
word "boring" is linked with the word "are", which thus
becomes the auxiliary verb in the present progressive
tense of the verb "to bore", it is the students who are being
bored, by certain other persons designated by the pronoun
"they", but otherwise mercifully unidentified. In an actual
conversation, the context of meaning would have led us to
apply, as quick as a thought or perhaps more quickly, the
correct phrase marker to the interpretation of the sequence of uttered sounds.
Other examples show how deep structures are essential
to understanding (see Table VIII). Consider the two sentences:
John is eager to please.
John is easy to please.
These sentences have the same surface structure. But a
moment's thought shows that the word "john" has two
very different roles to play in the two sentences. john in
the first sentence is the person who is doing the pleasing;
in the second sentence he is the person who is being
pleased. John is the underlying subiect in the first case, and
the underlying obiect in the second case. Deep structure
or grammar is involved in understanding the difference in
meaning of the two sentences.
An opposite sort of case occurs when the surface grammars of two sentences are different, although the meaning
is essentially the same. Consider this sentence in the active mode: "Recently seventeen elephants trampled on
my summer home". Now consider the following sentence
in the passive mode: "My summer home was trampled on
recently by seventeen elephants." A native speaker of English feels that these sentences are related, that they have
the same or very similar meanings. Yet their surface structures are very different. Recognition that both sentences
are describing the same event presupposes that speaker
and hearer refer them both to a single deep structure embodying the single meaning. Something similar happens in
recognition of similarity between visual patterns, where
there is no point-to-point correspondence between them.
Now all of this is unlikely to seem astonishing, for it is
very familiar. You and I, like the bourgeois gentilhomme,
have been speaking and listening to more or less grammatical prose for a long time now. People living at the seashore
are said to grow so accustomed to the murmur of the
SUMMER 1983
�waves that they never hear it. Aspects of things that could
be important to us may be hidden by their familiarity. The
point I have been seeking to make is one that is due to
Noam Chomsky, a linguist I have been depending on
more than once this evening. The grammaticality of hu·
man languages involves properties that are in no sense necessary properties of a system that would fulfill the func·
of names automatically. Names, other than proper names,
refer to open and flexible classes, which are subject to ex·
tension and differentiation in the course of language us·
age. Categorization and naming involve relations between
categories; nothing ever resides in a single term; a means
nothing without b and probably c and d; b means nothing
without a and c and d. Children go about assimilating the
tions of human communication. A grammar, for instance,
relations that are embodied in language, not merely imita~
tively, but in an active, inventive, and critical way. They.
in which statements would be generated word-by-word,
from left to right, so to speak, so that any given morpheme
would determine the possible classes of morphemes that
might follow it, is a kind of grammar that might have been
used, but was not. Instead, human speech involves dependencies between non-adjacent elements, as in the sentence "Anyone who says that is lying", where there is a
dependency between the subject noun "anyone" and the
predicate phrase ''is lying". All operations in human languages, transforming, for instance, an active into a passive
sentence, or a declarative into an interrogative sentence,
operate on and take account of phrase structure. Example:
we form the interrogative of the English sentence, "Little
Mary lived in Princeton", by introducing an auxiliary to
the verb ("Little Mary did live in Princeton"), then inverting the order of the auxiliary and the noun-phrase which is
the subject, to get "Did Little Mary live in Princeton?" It
would be entirely possible to form interrogatives in a dif.
ferent way independently of phrase structure. There is no
a priori reason why human languages should make use ex·
elusively of structure-dependent operations. It is Chomsky's conclusion that such reliance on structure-dependent operations must be predetermined for the language
learner by a restrictive initial schematism of some sort,
given genetically, and directing the child's attempts to acquire linguistic competence. Put differently, one does not
so much teach a first language, as provide a thread along
which linguistic competence develops of its own accord,
by processes more like maturation than learning.
The Chomskian analysis requires that we take one more
step. The fact that deep structures figure in the understanding and use of language shows that grammar and
meaning necessarily interpenetrate. The child's grammatical competence matures only along with semantic compe-
tence, the organization of what can be talked about in
nameable categories and hierarchies of categories. This
process, like the development of grammatical compe·
tence, involves successive differentiations. Sensory data
are first grouped into as yet global classes of gross patterns,
and then subsequently differentiated into more specific
patterns. The infant who is given a word such as "daddy",
and has the task of finding the category labelled by this
word, does not start out with the working hypothesis that a
specific, concrete object, say his father, uniquely bears this
name. Rather, the word initially appears to be used as the
label of a general and open category, corresponding to the.
adult category of people or men. Infra-human animals are
taught with difficulty, if at all, to make the generalizations
involved in naming, whereas children fall in with the ways
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
are full of impossible questions:
"How did the sky happen? How did the sun happen? Why is
the moon so much like a lamp? Who makes bugs?"
At first, they are ultra-literal in their reactions to idioms
and metaphors. When grandmother said that winter was
coming soon, the grandchildren laughed and wanted to
know: "Do you mean that winter has legs?" And when a
lady said ''I'm dying to hear that concert", the child's sar·
castic response was, 11 Then why don't you die?" Some~
times reconciliation of adult requirements requires genius.
Chukovsky reports that a four-year-old Muscovite, influenced both by an atheist father and by a grandmother of
orthodox faith, was overheard to tell her playmate: "There
is a god, but, of course, I do not believe in him." The active
analogizing and generalizing of 4- and 5-year olds is dis·
cernible in the odd questions they can put:
"What is a knife-the fork's husband?"
"Isn't it wonderful? I drink milk, water, tea, and cocoa, but
out of me pours only tea."
"What does blue look like from behind?"
For a certain period, there is a special, heightened sensitiv~
ity to the strangeness of words and their meanings; by age
5 or 6 this talent begins to fade, and by 7 or 8 all traces of it
have disappeared. The need has passed; the basic princi·
pies of the child's native language have been mastered.
What is it that has in fact been gained? We say, knowl·
edge of a language. But what is a language, my language?
Thoughtfully considered, this is a well-nigh impossible
question, because a language is not a simple object, existing by itself and capable of being grasped in its totality. It
exists in the linguistic competence of its users; it is what
Aristotle would call an actuality of the second kind, like
the soul, or like knowing how to swim when you are not
swimming. Through it I constitute myself a first-person
singular subject, by using this short word"!", which every·
one uses, and which in each seems to refer to something
different, yet the same. And through it I am brought into
relation with others-the ubiquitous "you" -and with the
public thing that is there for both you and me, a treasury
of knowledge and value transmitted through and embedded in language.
11
�We hear language spoken of as "living language", and
there is evidence enough to make' it more than a metaphor. Language reproduces itself from generation to generation, remaining relatively constant, yet with small mu-
tations, enough in fact to account for its growing and
evolving, leaving vestiges and fossils behind, and undergoing speciation as a result of migrations, like Darwin's
finches on the Galapagos Islands. A change here provokes
an adjustment there, for the whole is a complex of relations, mediating between a world and human organisms
that are a part of it. The way a word is used this year is, in
biological lingo, its phenotype; the deep and more abiding
sense in it is its genotype.
It is we, of course, who are accomplishing all this; but we
do not know how we accomplish it. It is mostly a collective,
autonomic kind of doing, like the building activities of ants
and termites, or the decision-making of bees. It takes generation after generation, but we are part of it whenever
and however we utter words or follow them in the sentences that we hear or read, whether lazily or intently,
whether with habitual acceptance or active inquiry. Always the words are found for us, and fitted with meanings
for us, by agents in the brain over which we exercise no
direct control. We can either float with the stream, sometimes a muddy tide of slang and jargon and cliche, or strug-
virile but, staggeringly, to world, suggesting that man makes
himself and his world.
The dichotomy, the tension, emerges in the The ban cycle of myths (see Table X). Following a suggestion of LeviStrauss, I am listing elements of it in chronological order
from left to right and from the top downward, but in
columns, to show the repetition of similar elements. Cadmus is sent off to seek his sister; he kills a dragon, a
chthonic monster, that will not permit men to live, and
sows the teeth of the dragon in the earth; from the teeth
sprout up armed men who kill one another, all except five
who become the ancestors of the The bans. In column I are
listed events of the myth in which blood relations seem to
be given too much importance. In column II are listed
murders of brothers by brother, of a father by a son: here
blood relations are brutally disregarded. Column I is thus
opposed to column II. In column Ill, chthonic monsters
that were killing off humans are themselves killed by men;
we can interpret this as a denial of the autochthonous origin of man, an assertion that man has now become self-
ering what it is that we mean as we proceed. We "articulate"; the word once meant division into small joints, then,
by an effortless transition, the speaking of sentences.
There are unexpected outcomes. We may find that our ut-
sufficient, himself responsible for his continued existence.
In column IV are listed the meanings of the names of the
Labdacidae, including Oedipus; the etymologies all indicate difficulty in walking or in standing upright. In myths
throughout the world, this difficulty in walking or standing
is characteristic of the creature that has just emerged out
of the earth; the names given in column IV thus constitute
an assertion of the autochthonous origin of man. Column
IV contradicts column III, just as column I contradicts
column II. The myth deals with a difficulty of one sort, not
by resolving it, but by juxtaposing it to another, parallel
type of opposition. Neither man's rootedness in nature nor
terance is ungrammatical or illogical; or we may discover
his transcendence of nature is unproblematic.
that the connection of ideas leads in directions we had not
The study of language and its acquisition by children indicates that our language has genetic foundations or roots.
These, however, have their fruition only under appropriate conditions, only through culture. Man is by nature a
cultural animal. He does not fabricate his linguistic culture
out of whole cloth.
On the one hand, it becomes conceivable that a universal grammar and semantics might be formulated, describing the species-specific features and presuppositions that
characterize human linguistic behavior universally. On
the other hand, nature's gift of language brings with it an
apparent freedom from deterministic necessity not previ-
gle cross stream or upstream. Sometimes we can, sensing
the possible presence of a meaning, attempt a raid on the
inarticulate; we can launch ourselves into speech, discov-
previously considered. In any case, phonetic, syntactical,
and semantic structures are being actualized in time, with-
out our quite knowing how. Yet we can strive after that
lucidity and precision which, when achieved, make language seem transparent to what there is.
I have already been carried beyond the two propositions
I set out to defend, and in doing so, I have moved into a
region of ambiguity. The question as to what is determined by nature, independently of us, and what is manmade, is an ancient and disturbing question, embedded in
old etymologies and myths.
(See Table IX). In more than one language, the word
''man" is derived from ''earth". So it is in Hebrew: Adam,
Hman", comes from the word for "ground". As shown in the
upper diagram, the IndoEuropean root for "earth" gives us
''man" and "human" as well as "humus". The notion here
is that of the autochthonous origin of humans, their origination from the earth itself; it is a notion found in early cultures all over the world. An implication would seem to be
that man is like a plant in his naturalness. On the other
hand, as shown in the lower diagram, the IndoEuropean
root "wiros", "man" or "the strong one", leads not only to
12
ously present. Most of our sentences are quite new; it is
uncommon for one sentence to come out the same as an-
other, though the thoughts be the same. Our utterances
are free of the control of detectable stimuli. The number
of patterns underlying the normal use of language, according to Chomsky, is orders of magnitude greater than the
seconds in a lifetime, and so cannot have been acquired
simply ··by conditioning. While the laws of generation of
sentences remain fixed and invariant, the specific manner
in which they are applied remains unspecified, open to
choice. The application can be appropriate. Articulate,
SUMMER 1983
�structurally organized signals can be raised to an expression of thought.
Achievement here is subject to change and old laws, and
it depends on a sensitivity to old meanings as well as new
'
possibilities. It requires both strength and submission.
./"
/'"
/1
Tidal volume
Time of inspiration
Time of inspiration
+ expiration
500-600cm 3
about 0.4
During Speech
!500-2400cm 3
about 0.13
Breaths per minute
18-20
4-20
Expiration
Continuous &
unimpeded
Periodically interrupted, with
increase in subglottal pressure
Electrical activity
in expiratory
muscles
Nil or very low
Chest & abdom- Mainly chest; slight desynina!, closely syn- chronization between chest
chronized
and abdominal muscles
Airways
Primarily nasal
-..
--.
\
'J
I
\
(
'
I
"\
/
'-J/
?-
I
f
I
\
\
'
I
I
)
I
\
'
"
.....
./
Active in inspira- Active in inspiration & in extion & nil during piration till expiratory muscles
expiration
become active
Musculatures in·
valved
--
J', "\""-
I
I
/
-~-
Nil or very low at start of
phonation; then increases
rapidly and continues active
to end of expiration
Electrical activity
in inspiratory
muscles
/
)
I
Breathing
/'
"\
I
I
(
Respiratory Adaptation in Speech
Quietly
"'-
,.
-
TABLE I
-
Primarily oral
TAIL-WAGGING DANCE
TABLE II
Species-specific Features of Human Speech
1. Phonematization
''Morphemes":
the smallest meaningful units into which an
utterance can be divided.
Examples:
water
spick and span
"er" in "whiter", "taller", etc.
''Phoneme":
the smallest distinctive unit of sound functioning within the sound system of a language to
make a difference.
Examples:
/pi vs. /b/
/t/ vs. /d/
FIGURE 1
I
/
Phonematization: all morphemes in all natural human languages
are divisible into phonemes.
2. Concatenation:
\
single morphemes are strung together into
sequences, rather than being used in isolation.
3. Grammar or
in no human language are morphemes strung
together in purely random order.
Examples (Chomsky):
Grammatical: "colorless green ideas sleep
furiously"
Ungrammatical: "furiously sleep ideas green
colorless"
Syntactical
Structure:
ROUND DANCE
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
13
�TABLE III
TABLEV
Comparative Weights of Brain and Body in Humans,
Including Nanocephalic Dwarf, Chimpanzees,
and Monkeys
Adult Expansions of Child Pronouncements
Age
BodyWt. Brain Wt.
(kg)
(kg)
Human (male)
Human (male)
Human (male)
Nanocephalic
dwarf
2·112
IJ.)/2
18
12
J3.1/2
45
64
13·112
3
adult
12-l/2
47
3-l/2
12.3
34
47
34
yes
yes
yes
yes
34
no
no
no
1.100
1.350
1.350
0.400
Chimp (male)
Chimp (female)
Rhesus monkey
Speech
Acquisition
0.400
0.450
0.090
adult
104
40
Mother's Expansions
(Additions circled)
Baby highchair
Ratio
(Body:
Brain)
Utterances of Child
Baby(is in thCihighchair
Mommy eggnog
Mommy~eggnog
Eve lunch
Eve )is havingjlunch
Mommy sandwich
Mommy\'ll have :1\sandwich
~satlun thdwall
Sat wall
Throw Daddy
Throwlit toiDaddy
Pick glove
Pick~glove@ji]
TABLE IV
TABLE VI
Imitations by Adam and Eve, Two Years of Age
Plural Inflection
Model Utterance (Parent)
Child's Imitation
Tank car
Wait a minute
Tank car
Wait a minute
Daddy's brief case
Fraser will be unhappy
He's going out
That's an old-time train
It's not the same dog as Pepper
No, you can't write on Mr. Cromer's shoe
Daddy brief case
Fraser unhappy
He go out
Old-time train
Dog Pepper
Singular
mouse
foot
vs.
Plural
mouses
foots
or:
feet
man
feets
mans
Write Cromer shoe
Contentives
Nouns: Daddy, Fraser, Pepper, Cromer;
tank car, minute, brief case, train, dog, shoe
Verbs: wait, go, write
Adjectives: unhappy, old-time
Functors:
the
the
the
the
the
the
the
Regularization of irregular forms:
possessive inflection 's
modal auxiliary will
progressive inflection -ing
contraction of the auxiliary verb is
preposition on
articles the and an
modal auxi1iary can
Words ending in sibilants
First Stage:
Possible
Second Stage:
Third Stage:
box (as well as horse, match, judge, etc.) treated as both
singular and plural
bok vs. boks, in analogy with normal "s" pluralization,
replaces box vs. boxes
after box vs. boxes is produced, then we also get foot
vs.footses, hand vs. handses
Past Tense Inflection
-------------corned
----------gocd
go
come----------------------went
came
----------doed
do........______
........______did
14
---------- buyed
buy
------------bought
SUMMER 1983
�TABLE VII
TIME I:
FIGURE 2
Noun Phrases with Generative Rule
A coat
*A celery
That Adam
That knee
More coffee
*More nut
*Two sock
Two shoes
*Two tinker toy
*A Becky
*A hands
The top
My Mommy
My stool
Chomskian Phrase Markers
Big boot
Poor man
SURFACE STRUCTURE
Little top
Dirty knee
Sentence (S)
~
1\
Subject
Predicate
(NAse)
M
a, big, dirty, little, more, my, poor, that, the, two
Adjective
Noun
j
j
Invisible
N Adam, Becky, boot, coat, coffee, knee, man, Mommy, nut, sock,
God
stool, tinker toy, top, etc.
TIME II:
Subdivision of Modifier class with Generative Rules
A. Privileges peculiar to articles
Obtained
A blue flower
*A my pencil
Rule: NP-+Art
+M +N
(Not:
NP~M
Obtained
Not Obtained
*That a horse
*That a blue flower
*Ungrammatical in adult English
+N
the visible world
Sentence (S)
~
Predicate
Subject
~
God
~
S
Verb
Subject
Object
I~
I
Created
j
j
j
God
is
the world
invisible
S
~
Copula Pred. Adj.
Subject
j
the world
Pred. Adj.
Copula
*A that horse
*A that blue flower
*Blue a that flower
Rule: NP- Dem +Art+ M
j
created
+art+ N)
B. Privileges peculiar to demonstrative pronouns
Object
DEEP STRUCTURE
Not obtained
*Blue a flower
*Nice a nap
*Your a car
*My a pencil
A nice cap
*A your car
Verb
/
j
is
j
visible
FIGURE 3
"They are boring Students": Two Interpretations
INTERPRETATION
A
Sentence
~
Predicate
Subject
I
V~~tive
Pronoun
j
They
Copula
j
are
Adjective
j
boring
Noun
j
students
INTERPRETATION B
Sentence
~
Subject
I
Predicate
~ect~
Pronoun
Aux
I
I
They
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
are
Progressive
I
boring
Noun
\
students
15
�TABLE VIII
TABLE IX
Evidence for "Deep" Structure
Some Etymologies
guman
deep structure different:
Surface structures different,
deep structures the same:
{Germanic)
John is eager to please.
Surface structures the same,
[
John is easy to please.
Recently seventeen elephants
trampled on my summer house.
dhghem -------~~--- gumen
(IndoEuropean)
(Old English)
= "earth"
] ="man"
homo, humanitas-- human
(Latin)
(English)
My summer home was recently
[ trampled on by seventeen
elephants.
·
humus
humus
(Latin)
(English)
= "mould", "ground"
Visual patterns recognized as similar,
although no point-to-point correspondence exists between them.
chth6n -----chthonic----autochthonous
(Greek)
(English)
= "from the earth
= ''earth"
= "of the earth"
itself"
v i r - - - - - - - - virile
(Latin)
(English)
.
~="man"
WITOS~
(IndoEuropean)
"man"
~
~;rmanic, Old
~!n?.~~~", ~
"the strong
one"
alt,old~
weorold world
(AngloSaxon) (English)
= "age of man",
"world"
(AngloSaxon)
= "age"
16
SUMMER 1983
�TABLE X
II
BIBLIOGRAPHY
III
Blood rela-
Blood rela-
Chthonic
tions overemphasized
tions underemphasized
monsters that
would not
permit men to
live are slain
by men
IV
Difficulties in
walking
straight and
standing up-
right
Cadmus seeks
his sister
Europa, rav-
ished by Zeus
Cadmus kills
the dragon
The Sparti (the
sown dragon's
teeth) kill one
another
Labdacus
(Laius' father)
="lame"
Oedipus kills his
Laius (Oedipus'
father) ~ "left-
father, Laius
sided"
Oedipus kills
the Sphinx
Oedipus =
"swollen-foot"
Oedipus marries his mother,
Jocasta
Eteocles and
Polyneices,
brothers, kill
one another
Antigone buries
(In the preparation of this lecture I made use of the following books: the book by E. H. Lenneberg, as well as the
book edited by him, was particularly useful.)
Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, Coral
Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971.
Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, Mass.: M.LT. Press, 1965.
___, Cartesian Linguistics, New York: Harper & Row,
1966.
___ ,Language and Mind, New York: Harcourt, Brace,
and World, 1968.
David Crystal, Linguistics, Penguin, 1971.
Karl von Frisch, The Dance Language and Orientation of
Bees, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard,
1967.
Kurt Goldstein, Language and Language Disturbances,
New York, 1948.
E. H. Lenneberg, The Biological Foundations for Language, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967.
E. H. Lenneberg (ed.), New Directions in the Study of Language, Cambridge, Mass.: M.LT. Press, 1966.
Martin Lindauer, Communication Among Social Bees,
New Yark: Atheneum, 1967.
john Lyons, Noam Chomsky, New Yark: Viking Press,
1970.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed.
Bally & Sechehaye; tr. Baskin; New York, 1959.
B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior, New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1957.
her brother,
Polyneices, de-
spite prohibition
Column I : Column II : : Column IV : Column III
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
17
�SOLSTICE ON THE
FIRST WATCH
There is no magic. What we perceive
as lightning wending its electric way
along the surface of the skin
is only the silent, whispered dance
of chemicals and electric fields
that move like ocean waves through us
in our private sea.
Then those lights in the sky,
translucent curtains of fire
ice-green and red, resolve themselves
when we focus as abstractions
of the abstract impulse of nerve
on nerve in mindless dark.
Yet these movements sometimes
overwhelm our doubts with a heat,
shimmering in the way that light
walks on the surface of water
like the original solstice did,
When the doubting soldiers saw
something move with the dim hours
of the first watch along the edge
of the sea, then out on it, a figure
of a singular man walking, the image
Of water touching the feet. Rumours
floated lightly on the tongue and words
took root that something happened.
What they held as true was true,
But the nets of words cast along
some shore of meaning circumscribed,
And the road from there
leading into the endless stars
and the mountains
cast us into a land
not quite our own.
J.
H. BEALL
James H. Beall is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, Md.
18
SUMMER 1983
�The Ground of Nature:
Shakespeare, Language, and Politics
Paul A. Cantor
I
In recent years, several critics, myself included, have
been 'trying to call attention to the importance of politics
as a subject in Shakespeare's plays. 1 This attempt to expand the scope of Shakespeare criticism has met with
considerable resistance, Sceptics have argued that
Shakespeare was not at all interested in politics, he was interested only in character or psychology, or in presenting
certain religious beliefs, or in developing a tragic worldview, and so on, Generally the counterarguments have
taken the form: "Shakespeare was not interested in politics, he was interested in X," where X is some subject
thought of as excluding political concerns. But most recently a new challenge to a political approach to Shakespeare has begun to loom on the horizon. Instead of offering an alternative subject as the focus of Shakespeare's
interest, this approach denies that his plays are about anything at all, that is, about anything other than themselves.
Remaking Shakespeare on the model of twentieth-century
literature, this approach views his works as fundamentally
self-reflexive, not attempting to represent anything in the
real world but instead calling attention to their own fictiveness as works of art. According to this view, any attempt to
study politics as a subject in Shakespeare would be hopelessly naive, based as it is on an antiquated and outmoded
mimetic theory of art.
I am referring of course to the most fashionable of current schools of literary criticism, deconstruction. OrigiPaul Cantor is a member of the English faculty at the University of Virginia. His new book, Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism, will be published by Cambridge University Press in March
1984.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
nally applied primarily to nineteenth- and twentiethcentury literature, this form of analysis is gradually being
extended to the interpretation of all historical periods,
including the Renaissance, According to this view,
Shakespeare's plays are written in language, and language
is a self-contained system, an endless play of signifiers,
Hence if Shakespeare's plays are about anything, they are
about language itself. As J- Hillis Miller writes of literature
in general:
If meaning in language rises not from the reference of signs to
something outside words but from differential relations
among words themselves, ... then the notion of a literary
text which is validated by its one-to-one correspondence to
some social, historical, or psychological reality can no longer
be taken for granted. No language is purely mimetic or referential, not even the most utilitarian speech. The specifically
literary form oflanguage, however, may be defined as a structure of words which in one way or another calls attention to
this fact, while at the same time allowing for its own inevitable misreading as a "mirroring of reality." 2
From the point of view of deconstruction, then, a political
reading of Shakespeare can only be a misreading. The
plays have no political meaning; indeed they have no determinate meaning at alL All the details that might cause
us to wonder-inconsistencies, contradictions, seeming
errors that call out for analysis to uncover some deeper significance-all these puzzling aspects of the plays merely
work to keep us from coming up with a coherent and univocal interpretation and thereby to preserve the work's indeterminacy of meaning.
Miller, for example, has written an elaborate analysis of
what most scholars have been content to dismiss as a
printer's error in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: the
19
�appearance of the name Ariachne in one of Troilus'
speeches, which seems to be a conflation of two names
from Greek mythology, Ariadne and Arachne. The intrusive i provokes Miller into a frenzied fantasia of epistemological speculation:
Slip of the tongue or of the pen? Ignorance on Shakespeare's
part? Error of the scribe or of the typesetter who has put in
one letter too many? The extra i ... produce[s} a gap in the
meaning and call[s] attention to the material base of signs,
marks on the page which the eye interprets . ... The little i in
"Ariachnes" has the effect of a bit of sand in a salad or of a
random sound in a symphony, the flautist dropping his flute,
the snap of a breaking violin string. . . . The conflation in
"Ariachnes" of two myths which are and are not congruent is
precisely in agreement with what happens in Troilus' speech,
namely, an anguished confrontation with the subversive possibility of dialogue, reason divided hopelessly against itself . ... The principle of identity is the basic assumption of
monological metaphysics . ... The "whole shebang" of Occidental metaphysics is, the reader can see, brought into question in Troilus' experience and in his speech. 3
By the time Miller has finished deconstructing, the unity
of Shakespeare himself has disintegrated:
One ofthe certainties which dissolves with the undecidability
of context ... is the concept of authorizing authorship, or
indeed of selfhood generally in the sense of an ultimate generative source for any act of language. There is not any "Shakespeare himself." "Shakespeare" is an effect of the text, which
depersonalizes, disunifies . ... The works of Shakespeare are
so comprehensive and so profound an exploration of the possibilities inherent in the English language as it inherits the
concepts, figures, and stories of Occidental culture, that it
seems they must have been written by a committee of geniuses.4
Faced with the dissolution of Shakespeare himself, we can
hardly find time to mourn the loss of the mere meaning of
his plays.
One hopes that Miller is being playful in this particular
essay, turning in a virtuoso performance as he makes an
epistemological mountain out of a textual molehill. But
however playful the deconstructive approach to Shakespeare may be, it will have serious and lasting consequences if it succeeds in diverting us from the genuinely
challenging task of thinking through the authentic problems in Shakespeare's texts. We have not yet been flooded
with articles and books deconstructing Shakespeare, but
one senses that it is only a matter of time. To try to ward
off the damage that might be done we might consider
whether Shakespeare himself offers any thoughts on the
nature of language, thoughts which might well prove to be
a better guide to his plays than those of contemporary critics. Unfortunately, we have no theoretical writings of
Shakespeare to which we might refer to establish his own
view oflanguage or ofliterary meaning. When one turns to
the plays for a clue, one finds statements of precisely the
20
mimetic theory of art which contemporary critics despise.
Consider, for example, Hamlet's famous advice to the
players:
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this
special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of na·
ture: for any thing so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing,
whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as
'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature,
scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time
his form and pressure. 5
Hamlet's invocation of nature as a standard, his naive faith
that theatre has a purpose, his conventional use of the mirror metaphor for art, above all his idea that art must serve a
moral function, all of these attitudes would suggest to con·
temporary critics that Hamlet should have dropped out of
school at Wittenberg and headed off immediately with
Laertes to study in Paris. But we can never simply identify
Shakespeare with any of his characters, and thus even if
Hamlet may be an unreconstructed realist, we can say
nothing about the epistemology of his author.
Does language itself ever become thematic in Shakespeare? Normally his language seems transparent: we look
through the characters' words to what they are talking
about. But is there any place in which Shakespeare's language calls attention to itself, not as all great poetic language does through its beauty, but simply as language as
such? For language itself to become an object of our attention, it must get in our way, we must stumble over it on our
way to the things it normally represents. I will argue that
the most self-conscious use of language in Shakespeare is
to be found in one of his most political plays, Henry V.
What I have in mind is Act Ill, scene iv, of this play, the
central scene of its central act, a conversation between the
French princess Katherine and an old gentlewoman
named Alice. In one of the most peculiar scenes in all of
Shakespeare, we suddenly bump into the brute fact oflanguage. The scene is almost entirely in French. As such, it
violates one of the most basic linguistic conventions of
drama. When portraying foreigners on stage, dramatists
take the liberty of having them speak, not their native language, but the language of the play's audience. There are,
of course, variations of this convention. Sometimes more
or less awkward devices are used to supply translations.
But basically, even in today's science fiction films, Americans can timewarp to distant galaxies and still find twoheaded green insects speaking fluent twentieth-century
English. Even within Henry V, Shakespeare normally follows this convention of having aliens speak our language.
Act Ill, scene vii, takes place entirely among Frenchmen
and yet the conversation is conducted solely in flawless
English. We are in fact so accustomed to this dramatic
convention that we are hardly aware of its oddness.
If there is any scene in all of Shakespeare which calls
attention to the artificiality of dramatic representation, it
is, then, Act Ill, scene iv, of Henry V. By violating one of
SUMMER 1983
�the basic conventions of drama, it reminds us of how conventional drama is. Suddenly shopked by hearing the
French people we see on stage actually speakmg French,
we ought to reflect on how all our lives we have unthinkingly accepted foreigners speaking English in the theatre.
If that is not enough to qualify as a self-conscious use of
language, this scene is itself a little language lesson.
Katherine is trying to learn English from Alice, who has
been in England and can instruct the French princess in a
vocabulary she may soon need to know. In fact, this is the
only reason Shakespeare can get away with presenting an
entire scene in French. Katherine keeps pointing to vari~
ous parts of her body and asking Alice what they are called
in English. It should take an audience only a few moments
to catch on to what is transpiring, and indeed this scene
plays quite well in the theatre_ The basic trick is fairly obvious and the fact that Alice does manage to get out the
names for the various body parts in her broken English ensures that even the densest audience will not get lost.
Still, it is worth noting that in the one scene in which
Shakespeare most clearly calls attention to language as
such, he specifically calls attention to its referential aspect.
Act III, scene iv, works only because language is not a selfcontained system, but makes reference to an external
world. The naively mimetic act of pointing is at the center
of this scene. Shakespeare even seems to dwell on the one
quality of language most disputed by contemporary theorists: its translatibility. His characters make an easy transition from French to English because both languages refer
to the same world of nature. The entire language lesson
revolves around something quite ordinary and natural: the
parts of the human body. The point seems to be that the
body provides a natural common ground for human understanding. All human beings have basically the same
bodies: thus on the level of the body they can discourse
with one another smoothly, even moving from one set of
conventional names to another without misunderstandmg.
But Katherine's English lesson does not come off completely without a hitch. When she goes to learn the English word chin, she mispronounces it sin, and when she
hears Alice say the English words foot and gown, she mistakes them for two indecent words in French, in fact the
French equivalents of the two prime four-letter words in
English. Shakespeare evidently has no illusions about the
complete translatability of one language into another.
When one moves beyond the basic level of the body to
moral significances, things very quickly become more
complicated. Chin becomes sin: what is perfectly ordinary
and natural in one language can become distorted into
something objectionable in another. One language's propriety can become another language's profanity, as happens with Katherine's misunderstanding of the word
gown. Here what does the covering in English becomes in
French what is supposed to be covered up. The seen becomes the obscene.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
II
If my reading is correct, one may still wonder: what is a
scene about language doing in the middle of one of
Shakespeare's history plays? Henry Vis a play about a great
English monarch who tried to conquer France- With Act
III, scene iv, Shakespeare subtly suggests that the problem
of conquering France is ultimately a problem of language.
Henry wishes to unite the English and the French nations,
but considering the fact that they do not speak the same
language, that is not going to be an easy task_ On a very
low level-the level of the body-English and French do
translate easily into each other. That suggests that the English and the French could be united only on the basis of
the material concerns which all human beings share, the
concerns they all have by virtue of having the same bodies.
In Act III, scene iv, Katherine terminates her language lesson by saying (in French): "That's enough for one time;
let's go to dinner" (III.iv-61-62)- She turns quickly from
the strain of her intellectual pursuits to an activity which
can satisfy her body's needs rather than her mind's. As we
see, when Katherine tries to learn another language, her
enquiries center around the body and its basic needs: food,
clothing, sex. Languages translate easily into one another
only when they remain on the level of the lowest common
denominator of human needs. When Katherine moves beyond purely material concerns, and touches upon issues
like the profanity of language, blunders start to creep into
her translations. Human beings evidently are not as easily
united in their spiritual concerns as they are in their material.
Thus Act III, scene iv, portrays comically a very serious
problem facing Henry V_ In many respects, all men do categorize the world the same way, and the different names
they attach to things do not lead to misunderstandings_
But when men divide the world into categories which embody evaluations, such as the decent and the indecent or
the sacred and the profane, they often differ fundamentally as to where they draw the line. When Ancient Pistol
has a French soldier at his mercy, the frightened man calls
upon his deity: "0 Seigneur Dieu!" But Pistol thinks that
his opponent has merely introduced himself: "0 Signieur
Dew should be a gentleman" (IV_iv.6-7)_ Pistol unintentionally secularizes the French Dieu into the English Dew_
Once again, this seems to be merely a comic error, but it
does point to a deeper problem: the French and English
worship different gods. To be sure, on the surface they
share a common Christianity, but Shakespeare has gone
out of his way to differentiate the two regimes, even in
terms of their beliefs. The god of Henry V turns out to be a
"God of battles" (IV.i.289), providing him with the basis
for leading his citizen army into war. Judging by Act III,
scene vii, what the French worship is their horses and
their mistresses, and in precisely that order (IILvii.39-44).
The French in Henry V put their faith in chivalry, which
helps to explain why they are defeated by the more practi-
21
�cal and down-to-earth English. The misunderstandings
which occur when the French and English try to speak to
each other in Henry V are not merely the result of ignorance of each others' languages, for their languages embody basic disagreements in their values and beliefs.
These disagreements may well be what makes one people distinct from another, what gives them their national
character, and as such they are political disagreements. To
unite the French and the English, Henry V would thus
have to disregard everything that makes the French
French and the English English, in short everything
that makes either nation interesting as a people. When
Shakespeare finally shows Henry trying to unite the two
kingdoms in Act V, he presents the task concretely as a
problem of language. Henry must woo Katherine to be his
queen, and that requires learning her language: "It is as
easy for me, Kate, to conquer the kingdom as to speak so
much more French. I shall never move thee in French, unless it be to laugh at me" (V.ii.l84-87). The dialogue between the English king and the French princess does take
many comic turns because of the potential for misunderstanding as they grope for a linguistic common ground:
K. Hen. Fair Katherine, and most fair,
Will you vouchsafe to teach a soldier terms,
Such as will enter at a lady's ear,
And plead his love-suit to her gentle heart?
Kath. Your Majesty shall mock at me, I cannot speak your
England.
K. Hen.
0 fair Katherine, if you will love me soundly with
your French heart, I will be glad to hear you confess it brokenly with your English tongue. Do you like me, Kate?
Kath. Pardonnez-moi, I cannot tell wat is "like me."
K. Hen. An angel is like you, Kate, and you are like an angel.
[V.ii.98-ll0]
The result of this effort to span the two nations is a kind
of pidgin English and a pidgin French. Two of the richest
and most complex of languages must be radically reduced
and simplified for communication to take place between
Henry and Katherine. It is certainly unusual for Shakespeare to present a romantic dialogue between a king and
a future queen entirely in prose. And yet Shakespeare evidently realized that it is precisely the poetry of love that
would not survive the effort to move between two languages. Henry is a very prosaic suitor:
Henry is obviously no Romeo, and in wooing his Juliet his
linguistic resources seem meager indeed. And his love suit
ultimately elicits a kind of bastardized blend of English
and French:
K. Hen. Come, your answer in broken music; for thy voice is
music and thy English is broken; therefore, queen of all,
Katherine, break thy mind to me in broken English-wilt
thou have me?
Kath. Dat is as it shall please de roi mon pere.
[V.ii.243-47]
We see here in linguistic terms the futility of Henry's effort to bring France and England together. Henry is overreaching himself. He hopes for some kind of grand synthesis of England and France that will enable his dynasty to
conquer the world:
Shall not thou and I, between Saint Denis and Saint George,
compound a boy, half French, half English, that shall go to
Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard?
[V.ii.206-209]
But the practical result of Henry's efforts would be a bland
mixture of French and English characteristics, reduced to
the lowest common denominator and hence losing sight of
all the higher ideals of either nation. Even if Henry's early
death had not destroyed his hopes, Shakespeare suggests
that there was a basic flaw in Henry's plan for producing a
superkingdom out of two linguistically distinct nations.
Henry's experience in his own country should have
taught him the difficulties of spanning a linguistic gulf.
One measure of Henry's legitimate achievement is that
Shakespeare presents him as the king, not just of England,
but of Great Britain. One of the keys to his military success is that he is able to lead not just Englishmen against
the French, but Irish, Welsh, and Scottish troops as well,
soldiers from remote corners of his realm who seem to
have an almost pagan fierceness that gives the British
army its strength in battle. But the mixture of men Henry
leads is not wholly harmonious. They do not always speak
the same language, or at least they do not always speak it
with the same accent. This often leads to tension among
the troops. In Henry IV, Part One, Shakespeare suggests
the potential for disharmony among the nationalities that
go to make up Great Britain, and presents the problem in
terms of language. The rebel conspiracy almost falls apart
as the Englishman Hotspur and theW elshman Glen dower
question each other's linguistic competence:
I' faith, Kate, my wooing is fit for thy understanding. I am
glad thou canst speak no better English, for if thou couldst,
thou wouldst find me such a plain king that thou wouldst
think I had sold my farm to buy my crown. I know no ways to
mince it in love, but directly to say "I love you" . ... Marry, if
you would put me to verses ... Kate, why you undid me . ...
I speak to thee plain soldier. If thou canst love me for this,
take me! if not, to say to thee that I shall die, is true; but for
thy love, by the Lord, no; yet I love thee too.
[V.ii.l22-27, 132-33, 149-52]
22
Hot.
Let me understand you then,
Speak it in Welsh.
Glend. I can speak English, lord, as well as you,
For I was train'd up in the English court,
Where being but young I framed to the harp
Many an English ditty lovely well,
And gave the tongue a helpful ornament,
A virtue that was never seen in you.
[Ill.i.ll7-l24]
SUMMER 1983
�As Glendower shows, the non-English members of the
British nation are very sensitive to the charge that they do
not know the English language, and feel constrained to
point out that they can in fact use it better than a native
speaker.
The same issue comes up in Henry V, in a scene in
which an Irishman, a Welshman, and a Scotsman quarrel
over the conduct of the wars in France. The Irishman will
not abide any ethnic slurs from a Welshman:
Fluellen. Captain Macmorris, I think, look you, under your
correction, there is not many of your nationMacmorris. Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain,
and a basterd, and a knave, and a rascal. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?
[III.ii.l20-24]
One of the political lessons of Henry V is that all the nationalities that go to make up Great Britain must learn to
put aside their linguistic differences and to recognize their
common interest. This is certainly the point of the humiliation of the Englishman, Ancient Pistol, at the hands of
the Welshman, Fluellen:
You thoUght, because he could not speak English in the native garb, he could not therefore handle an English cudgel.
You find it otherwise, and henceforth let a Welsh correction
teach you a good English condition.
[V.i.75-79]
Henry encourages this kind of linguistic peace among his
subjects. One aspect of his genius as a monarch is the way
he generally understands the connection between language and politics. He has made sure that he can speak the
language of all his people, and this ability stands him in
good stead when he needs to lead them in wartime. He can
deal with his troops on a man-to-man basis:
For forth he goes, and visits all his host,
Bids them good morrow with a modest smile,
And calls them brothers, friends, and countrymen.
[IY.Cho.32-34]
Even as Prince Hal, Henry understood the importance
of language to a king. One of the reasons he offers for his
truancy from court is his desire to get out among his people and learn how they speak:
I have sounded the very base-string of humility. Sirrah, I am
sworn brother to a leash of drawers, and can call them all by
their christen names, as Tom, Dick, and Francis . ... They
call drinking deep, dyeing scarlet, and when you breathe in
your watering, they cry "hem!" and bid you play it off. To
conclude, I am so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour,
that I can drink with any tinker in his own language during
my life.
[II.iv.5-8, 15-20]
It may seem strange to hear a future king priding himself
on his knowledge of London slang. But Hal puts this
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
knowledge to good use once he becomes Henry V. He
might not have overestimated his ability to absorb France
into his kingdom if he had realized the implications of the
fact that he lacks such familiarity with the slang of the
Paris underworld. Henry has a difficult enough time making one nation out of people who speak the same language
with different accents. But to create one nation out of
men who do not even speak the same language is beyond
even Henry's political skill.
III
At first sight, Henry V seems to deal exclusively with political and military subject matter. But as we have seen,
language as a theme is surprisingly pervasive in the play.
The reason of course is that language itself turns out to be
a political theme. As Shakespeare shows in Act III, scene
iv, though language provides a natural common ground for
human beings, it also tends to reflect the conventional differences which separate them, differences rooted in the
different regimes under which they Jive and hence political differences. Language thus becomes a political problem, and any effective leader like Henry V must learn to
use language as a political tool. Falstaff's great contribution to Henry's education is to teach him the art of rhetoric, how to bend language to achieve a desired effect.
Henry V opens with the English court using all their linguistic skill to fabricate a pretext for invading France. By
an artful interpretation of the French Salic law, the English establish Henry's claim to the French throne. Still, language is not totally pliant, even in the hands of a master
rhetorician such as Henry V. Thus ultimately language
sets limits to politics, or at least one may say that a political
man can ignore linguistic problems only at the peril of his
political achievement.
If one asks why of all Shakespeare's plays, Henry V displays the greatest self-consciousness about language, the
answer seems to be that only in an environment of competing languages does one begin to notice the importance
oflanguage as such. With the clash of English and French,
or even the rivalry of various dialects of English within the
British nation, one starts to grasp the distinction between
nature and convention in language. As Act III, scene iv,
suggests, there could be no communication among human
beings if language were not somehow rooted in the world
of nature. Reference to the substratum of nature is what
makes possible translation from one language to another.
But free and perfect translation is not always possible, because language is not simply natural to man, the way animal cries are innate and species-specific. Men have to create their languages for themselves, and in the process end
up introducing conventional distinctions into their language systems. Unlike other beings we know, humans use
their languages to dispute; their languages convey not just
information and emotion, but opinion. Shakespeare seems
to set up Act Ill, scene iv, to move between the natural
23
�and conventional poles. of language. We travel from the
simplest act of naming things in nature to the complex cultural reaction of shame and indignation. As we see, m a
given language, the name for a perfectly natural bodily
function or organ can in fact become an obscenity.
Perhaps more than any other, the category of the obscene reveals what is distinctive about human language,
because it shows the link between language and social
mores. Good language can become a matter of good manners. Princess Katherine's reaction tu what she hears as
the prime curse words of her language shows her to be a
proper and well-bred child of her culture: "0 Lord, those
are bad words,, wicked, coarse, and immodest, and not
proper for ladies of honor to use. I wouldn't utter those
words before French gentlemen for all the world"
(IJJ.iv.52-56). For Katherine, the words are unacceptable
in French society, but English society is evidently another
matter and she goes on to repeat them as she reviews her
whole lesson. She derives her sense of linguistic propriety
from her own regime, and., strangely enough, her modesty
seems to cease at its borders. In general, human language
is bound up with human sociability. Men would not create
languages if they were not social beings and they constitute themselves as societies in part through !helf languages, embodying whatever is distinctive in the way they
view their world in the way they carve it up into linguistic
categories. That is why language is ultimately a political
phenomenon, and even something over which men might
go to war. 6
We obviously cannot expect to have exhausted the relation of politics and language in Shakespeare by examining
one scene or even one play. Still, I hope I have done
enough to suggest that in his view of language, Shakespeare is closer to Aristotle than to jacques Derrida. In
fact, the connection I have been trying to make between
language and politics is adumbrated by Aristotle in his Politics, when he establishes that political life is natural to
man l>y pointing to the fact of human speech:
Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any
other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say,
makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she
has endowed with the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice
is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found
in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of
pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another,
and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth
24
the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the
just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he
alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and
the like, and the association of living beings who have this
sense makes a. family and a polisJ
Act III, scene iv, of Henry V calls attention to just this political aspect of language, the way it reflects the conventional distinctions which are the heart of a given polis or
regime. The fact that Shakespeare sets the one scene of
his which is most self-conscious about language in a larger
political context suggests that he shares Aristotle's view of
the bond between the fact that men are political animals
and the fact that tfuey speak the kind of languages they do.
Thus if anyone were to question a political approach to
Shakespeare by claiming that his plays are not about pohtics but about language, I think we could comfortably answer solely on the basis of Henry V: if Shakespeare's plays
are about language, then they are still about politics, because for Shakespeare language itself is political in nature.
At the very least, I hope I have shown that no abstract theory of language, least of all one which views language as a
self-contained or self-referential system, can serve for understanding Shakespeare's plays. Even when Shakespeare
calls attention to language as language, he does so in a living human context, one in which language plays a fundamental role in the complex interaction of man, society,
and the world of nature.
1. See, for example, the pioneering work by Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa,
Shahespeare's Politics, New York: Basic Books, 1964. See aJso II_lY Shahespeare's R'ome: Republic and Empire, Ithaca: Cornell Umvers1ty Press,
1976 and the collection of essays edited by John Alvis and Thomas West,
Shakespeare as Political Thinker, Durham: Carolina Academic Press,
1981.
2. J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dichens and Georg~ Cru_ihshank, ~os ~ngeles:
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Umvers1ty of Cahforma, 1971,
pp. 1-2.
.
.
3. J. Hillis Miller, "Ariachne's Broken Woof," Georgw Rev~ew, 31, 1977,
pp. 45-47.
4. Miller, "Ariachne's Broken Woof," p. 59.
5. III.ii.17-24. All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare, Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1974.
6. On the connection between war and language, see All's Well That
Ends Well, IV.i, where the enemy is seen as the barbarian, the man who
does not speak an intelligible language.
. .
.
7. Politics, 1253a7-20. Quoted in the translation of BenJamm Jowett m
Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle, New York: Random
House, 1941, p. 1129.
SUMMER 1983
�Nominal Autobiography
in Shakespeare's Sanne ts
Margreta de Grazia
Once upon a time, in the last decade 0f the eighteenth
century, there lived a reportedly lackluster young man,
named William-Henry Ireland, who repeatedly heard his
father say that he would' give half his substantial library for
the possession of a single signature by Shakespeare_ Eager
to please· his father, William-Henry began leafing through
16th century papers and documents but he could not, alas,
locate a Shakespeare signature. He consequently did the
next best thing: he made one himself He took a facsimile of
one of Shakespeare's signatures from a contemporary edition of Shakespeare and set about reproducing it on old
parchment with an ink concocted of three fluids which,
when held a few seconds before the fire, dried to look a
venerable 200 years old_
Thus begins the story of the most famous of Shakespearean forgers, who, incidentally, fired by this initial success,
when on to produce, or rather fraudulently reproduce,
promissory notes, a profession of faith, love verses to Anne
Hathaway, and most impressive of all a manuscript of
the complete King Lear-all in Shakespeare's own hand.
There is much of interest in this account: the dull youth's
pathetic need to impress his overbearing father, the eager
gullibility ofsuch eminent men of letters as Tames Boswell,
who kissed the forgeries and counted himself blessed to
have lived long enough to see them, and the bardolatry that
even today makes the William-Henry Ireland forgeries-almost as valuable as the Shakespearean originals would have
been-had they existed_ What is of interest to me here,
however, is only one particular of this account: the importance conferred upon Shakespeare's signature; the desire
Margreta de Grazia· received her doctorate from Princeton University
and teaches English at the University of Pennsylvania. Last year she was
a Fellow at the National Humanities Center working on her forthcoming
book on language, selfhood, and Shakespeare's Sonnets before and after
the eighteenth century.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
to possess Shakespeare's name written out in his own hand.
Why should Shakespeare's signature be relevant to a discussion of Shakespeare's autobiography? The answer is
quite simple: a signature is a form of self-representation, a
way of making oneself present in writing. So too is autobiography. Signatures and autobiographies are each forms of
writing in the first person. Curiously enough, the prizing of
signatures coincides with the emergence of the term autobiography: both take place in the decades around 1800.
(The OED credits Southey with the first use of the term in
English in 1809), When the way in which a man writes his
name (his signature) changes, so too does the way in which
he writes about himself (his autobiography). As I hope to
indicate, the way in which a man writes his name changes
after the sixteenth century and that change becomes visible by the end of the eighteenth century when Shakespeare's signature becomes a precious collector's item. And
the way a man writes about his life changes no less radically
after the sixteenth century as I hope to show in my discussion of the only work we have by Shakespeare written in
the first person: his Sonnets.
Shakespeare would have been utterly baffled by the coveting of his signature, the coveting that drove WilliamHenry into literary fraud. There is no evidence that Elizabethans were interested in signatures except for the
practical purpose of identifying oneself as the writer of a
message or of contracting oneself to the terms of a legal
document Independent of the letter or document on
which it appeared, independent of its personal, official, or
legal context, a signature had no importance. A signature
alone on a blank piece of paper would have been meaningless and worthless, no matter how illustrious the signator.
In fact, the name signed was not even necessarily written
by the bearer of the name. It was apparently common prac-
tice for one man to sign for another without acknowledging
the substitution. Secretaries, for example, often signed the
25
�names of their employers on both personal letters and official documents. Walsingham's secretary did, so did Lord
Grey's; a secretary signed Essex's name on confidential letters to the Queen. Nor were signatures on legal transactions necessarily authentic. A clerk taking down or copying
a deposition might himself sign it with the name of the
deponent. A witness to the making of a will might himself
sign it. in the name of the testator, without indicating that
he had done so. A man's signature then was not exclusively
in his own hand in the sixteenth century. In this respect, it
was transferrable, like that other mark by which a man of
means might identify himself: the signet or seal, the wax
impressed with an emblem or device. As Hamlet deftly illustrates when he affixes the royal seal to the orders for the
execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, one need not
be the owner of a seal to use it; so too, one did not need to
be the possessor of a signature in order to sign it.
Not only is there little concern about who signs one's
signature; there is also little concern about the style in
which it is signed. The several sixteenth century writing
manuals we possess, like Peter Bales' Writing Schoolmaster,
for example, and John Davies of Hereford's The Anatomy
ofFair Writing, give no special instructions on the writing
of signatures. In the forming and connecting of letters, a
writer has the same freedom in signing his name as he does
in writing anything. It is this freedom that makes it virtually
impossible for experts to attribute a work to an author on
the basis of paleographic evidence alone: attesting to the
difficulty is the controversy still raging after one hundred
years (among paleographers and editors, at least) over the
identification of the hands in the manuscript of the Play of
Sir Thomas More. A writer may use any of the six or seven
hands that writing masters of the period identify (Secretary, Bastard Secretary, Exchequer, set hand of the Chancery, etc.) or a combination of any of them.lt is not unusual
for the same writer to switch from one style to another in
the same manuscript, sometimes changing hands in midsentence, and then sign his name in still another, or tore-
vert to one of the hands he has already employed. The
same diversity that characterizes a writer's manuscript
then, characterizes his signature. To add to the diversity,
the spelling of his name regularly varies, often quite widely.
We have only six authenticated signatures by Shakespeare,
all taken from the last four years of his life, so we do not
know how many of the eighty-three documented variants
ture? How would it be recognized if it had no distinct form?
Would every variation be considered a signature so that a
man would have numerous signatures? What then would
constitute a forgery?
There may be only one signature that conforms to our
assumptions of what a signature is: Queen Elizabeth's.
Elizabeth's signature possesses the uniformity of spelling
and handwriting that we require. In each of the abundant
samples of her signature that we possess, the orthography
and calligraphy are stable from the time she ascended the
throne as a young woman to her dying day at the age of
seventy. In fact, it may be that in this period the word signature could only be properly applied to her signed name or
its official surrogates. All the instances I have seen indicate
that the word referred exclusively to the Queen's signature
or else to that of her notaries whom she authorized to extend her written power.
How are we to understand the Queen's possession of an
exceptionally stable signature in an age when signatures
were commonly unstable? I do not believe we should take
this to mean that only Elizabeth had a definite sense of self,
that only she was sufficiently conscious of her identity to
record and circulate it in a uniform and recognizable signa-
ture. I think a consideration of the problem might involve
determining in what respect Queen Elizabeth was different from her subjects. Perhaps it was not that she had a
more distinct sense of self but that she was a different kind
of self altogether. And indeed such a singular self was attributed to her by that very principle she referred to in ascending to the throne, the principle of the "King's Two
Bodies": "I am but one body, naturally considered," she
declared, "though by [God's] permission a Body Politic
also." Accordingly, Elizabeth had two selves, two bodies,
one natural and ephemeral like that of any person, the
other politic and continuing like that of no other person.
Perhaps it is in that unique capacity, as an embodiment of
state and church, that Elizabeth possessed a fixed signature. It would have reflected, then, not a distinct and individuated self, but rather a secular and religious corporation. Her signature was not a projection of selfhood, but
rather an extension of the power and authority invested in
her by her monarchal position, by her crown. When her
representatives signed their names on official documents,
their signatures took on like stability and uniformity. When
acting as Elizabeth's surrogates or delegates, as appendages
on his last name he used. The six we possess are written in
of her corporation or body politic, as it were, their names
six different scripts and in six different spellings, even
though three of them appear on the same document, the
document that is probably the most important a man signs
assumed the fixity of her own. This might explain what
in his lifetime: his will. Because the signatures are so varied
authenticity of even the authenticated signatures. If a
Queen's Privy Council, sign their names uniformly on
state papers but on their own personal correspondence
vary their signatures considerably.
To summarize, signatures in Shakespeare's time were
name may be signed an indefinite number of ways, what is
with one regal exception and attendant special cases not
to be used as the standard of authenticity? If a signature has
necessarily written in one's own hand and not orthograph-
no consistently recurring form, can it even be called a signa-
ically or paleographically consistent. The signator had no
in form and because Elizabethans did not necessarily sign
their own names, some paleographers have questioned the
26
appears a most curious phenomenon: that such statesmen
as Egerton, Cecil, and Walsingham, all members of the
SUMMER 1983
�inviolable personal or legal relation to his signature. His
signature had no fixed form making,possible its identifica·
tion with one particular individual. I think we would have
to say that in our sense of the word, 'there were no signa·
tures in Renaissance England. Names were written out,
sometimes by their bearer and sometimes not, and typi·
cally without respect to uniformity. They had a function
certainly, as when affixed to the bottom of a letter or on a
legal document, but no value apart from that supplied by
the context in which they appeared.
How then has it come about that a mere scrap of paper
with nothing on it except for Shakespeare's signature is
worth a fortune? (Even a spurious or doubtful signature
was estimated at a million dollars in 1971.) To answer that
would involve a consideration of a complex network of
eighteenth century developments that would include the
standardization of language, the rise of private bank ac·
counts, and the institution of laws governing copyrights
and power of attorney. More centrally, it would involve a
description of a changed notion of the self-of individuality, personality, and character, all three concepts which ac·
quire their present emphasis in the late eighteenth century. I will not pursue this matter here; but in passing let
me offer one or two observations which I think are illuminating. The eighteenth century began to posit and assume
a new relation between the signature and the signator. At
the same time that William-Henry Ireland risked simulating a Shakespearean signature, signatures of various men
of note started to be prized and collected. It is then that
the word autograph is used no longer exclusively to refer to
writing in one's own hand (a manuscript) but is used primarily to distinguish the writing of one's own name. And
of course, we in this country have no trouble recol1ecting
when its revolutionary synonym fohn Hancock became
to read them as autobiography. The nineteenth century
avoided reading them as such in order to avoid the disheartening conclusion that the greatest poet of the language was, by his own admission, an adulterer, sodomite,
and perjuror, that he was, as one Victorian critic chastely
put it, "not immaculate." A wide range of nineteenth century approaches to the Sonnets might be seen as moves to
clear Shakespeare of such charges. The Sonnets were writ-
ten not by Shakespeare but by another; or else only partly
written by Shakespeare (the offensive ones assigned to
other poets) or if written entirely by Shakespeare then
written on behalf of friends or clients, or if written on his
own behalf then not as any direct reflection of his own experience but rather as fictions, dramatizations 1 allegories,
bearing as remote and complicated a relation to his experience as the plays. The need to impersonalize the Sonnets
culminates at the turn of the century with an influential
discussion of them as insincere exercises in literary artifice
that could not be about Shakespeare-or about anything
else for that matter.
In this century, moral compunctions have ceased to determine readings of the Sonnets, at least in any obvious
way. We are free therefore to read the Sonnets as autobiography. And in recent decades, they have largely been read
as Shakespeare's account of himself, whether that account
is thought to consist of people, places, and events that constituted his outer life, or of the ideas, feelings, and beliefs
that animated him inwardly. Both historical and psychological approaches have their practitioners, though only
the most indomitable continue to dig and delve for facts
(for the precious little they uncover still needs to be verified from the very outside sources they seek to enlarge).
There is a much richer yield to be gotten by probing the
Sonnets for Shakespeare's inner workings. No extraneous
current in our English. Autographs became of value be-
considerations constrain such readings, not even struc-
cause they were seen to possess a personal and intimate
relation to the individual who wrote them. It is not long
tural considerations: since the 1609 ordering is not necessarily Shakespeare's, the Sonnets can be read as two units
divided at sonnet 126 where the subject appears to
until the science of graphology will emerge, the inference
of personal traits on the basis of handwriting, the analysis
of characters (in the Elizabethan sense of letters) to deter·
mine character (in our sense of personality).
Autographs are not the only form of personal writing
flourishing in the eighteenth century: collected letters,
journals, diaries, and autobiographies enjoy an unprece-
dented popularity on which book-sellers are quick to capitalize. Like these forms of writing, an autograph is a type
of self-representation that intimates or displays the private
and personal.
A signature can be seen as an abbreviated or cryptic auto-
biography; an autobiography can be seen as an expanded or
amplified signature. With an awareness that both forms of
first person writing underwent radical changes after the six-
teenth century, we finally reach my announced subject:
Shakespeare's Sonnets as autobiography.
The Sonnets are the only work we have that Shakespeare wrote in the first person, yet it has never been easy
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
change, as a collection of discrete or interconnected
groups variously demarcated, as 154 independent poems,
or as one integral sequence following either the 1609 order
or whatever order a reader prefers. A variable text coupled
with critical ingenuity is bound to yield prolifically, perhaps even inexhaustibly-were it not for interference
from the outside: from critical theory.
In the last decade, critical theory has made it difficult to
take any first person enunciation at face value. There is no
necessary relation between the historical author and the 'I'
of a work any more than there is between him and a char·
acter in a play or narrative: the first person thereby becomes simply another third. Post-structuralist theory goes
further still, cutting the tie between writing or speech and
its ostensible source, first person or otherwise. Its originthe speaking or writing subject-is dismissed as an acci-
dent of circumstance. Where the accidental aspect of that
accident of circumstance prevails, the 'Sonne,ts form a
27
�shimmering Derridean surface of free-floating signifiers;
where the circumstantial aspect dominates, the Sonnets
constitute a political, historical, and social artifact. As far as
I know, we don't yet have either a full reading of them en
abyme or as ~~cultural poetics." What we do have, however,
is not far from either in its deposition of the author:
Stephen Booth's 800 pages of extravagantly fine criticism
on the Sonnets that bring not a single comment to bear on
the man who wrote them. In one important respect we are
where moral compunctions left us at the turn of the century: dissociating the Sonnets from their author and concentrating on the impersonal features of poetic language.
In what is to follow, I would like to make it possible to
begin returning to the Sonnets as autobiography; as Shakespeare speaking about himself. But the self that is spoken
about is not a lover of acute sensitivity, a thinker of profound imaginative powers, a poet of heightened perception, or a craftsman of exceptional skill. The self of the
Sonnets is the self as a name. In speaking about that nominal self, the Sonnets do not represent it in the same way
that a self-portrait represents the artist, for that relation assumes a subject with an existence apart from the image
that portrays him. In the Sonnets the self cannot be separated from the speaking about the self; he exists as a name
coming into contact with other lexical units and occupying various syntactic positions.
I would like to look at the Sonnets as what the use of the
first person leads us to suspect they are: Shakespeare's
speaking about himself. But to do so, requires both a new
sense of self and a new sense of speaking, both of which
depend on a new sense of the workings of a proper name.
It is in the last line of sonnet 136 that Shakespeare announces his proper name: "my name is Will." And it is in
this sonnet that the subject most visibly functions as a
name whose actions are interactions with other words
within his own discourse. Each of the seven times the
word 'will' is repeated in the sonnet, 'Will' as the subject's
name cannot be distinguished from 'will's' various other
designations. The first time it is pronounced in the injunc-
tion, "Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy will," [I. 2] the
proper name 'Will' confuses our subject with other men:
the name might designate another man by that name~his
mistress's husband, for example, or another lover, not to
mention the several historical candidates scholars have
nominated. The proper name then is not proper to him; in
fact, it is not even exclusively proper. It is a common
name too, a synonym for desire or lust, common because
denoting a class or state of being, common also because
held in common by all men, more common still in vulgarly
referring to the organ (male or female) that is both instrument and object of lust. Not only does 'will' work as both
proper and common noun; it works too as verbal auxiliary
denoting future resolution, as in line 5: "Will will fulfill the
treasure of thy love." (The verbal form extends not only
the sound of the noun it follows~"Will will" ~but also its
sense, protracting it by projecting it into the future.) Son-
28
net 136 thus conflates personal and generic name, proper
and common noun, noun and verb. Will's name, rather
than distinguishing him, makes him indistinguishable not
only from other men who bear his name (his namesakes),
but also from other words that sound identical to it (homonyms).
We might say that as a sound~the sound wal~the subject Will remains at leastphonetically distinct from the different sounding words that surround his name. The difference, however, is only Phonetic, for every noun in the
sonnet that is not 'will' is a semantic substitute for will in
one of its several senses. Nouns work like pronouns, each
referring to the same subject rather than introducing a
new one. No special case has to be made for "love" in line
4 as, synonym for will as desire, nor for ulove-suit" as ex-
pression of that will; and it would take only some thumbing through Booth's commentary to identify the other
nouns with will as sexual part, male or female: "soul" [l. I]
refers to the sexual counterpart to the spiritual essence;
"things of great receipt" [l. 7], "store's account" [l. 10],
and "treasure of thy love" [I. 5] designate female sexual
capacity, the feminine empty, "nothing" [l. 12] or "none"
[l. 8] when not supplied by masculine "number" and
"one" [l. 10]. Verbs too relate to will, to acts of will:
"come"[!. I] refers to sexual climax, "check"'[!. I] to its
deferral; "knows" [l. 3], "proves" [I. 7], "reckoned" [l. 8]
to forms of carnal knowing; "fulfill" [I. 4] and "fill" [1. 6] to
sexual satisfying, "is admitted" [l. 3] and "hold" [l. II] to
female compliance. Adjectives modify sexual traits,
"sweet" [l. 4] and "great" [I. 7] are anatomical desirables,
"blind" [l. 2] applies to lack of sexual discernment; and
adverbs specify degrees of sexual penetration: "so near"
[l. l], "thus far" [I. 4], "with ease" [I. 7]. With the exception of conjunctions, prepositions, and articles, every word
in the sonnet is either a homonym or synonym for the subject's name, thereby literally verifying his admission in
sonnet 76: "every word doth almost tell my name" [I. 7]. A
language made up of homonyms and synonyms for his
name renders him anonymous. Among so many verbal
counterfeits, he can "pass untold" [I. 9] for without difference there can be no identity.
Such uniformity of vocabulary renders syntax purely
perfunctory or superficial. The word 'will' and its synonyms monopolize all grammatical positions. Phonetic repetitions make this abundantly audible in lines 5 and 6"Will will fulfill the treasure of thy love,/Ay fill it full with
wills, and my will one" ~but the same syntactic appropriation occurs in line 3's more varied syllables: "And will thy
soul knows is admitted there," which would lose nothing
in terms of sense if rendered, "And will thy will wills is
willed there"; even "thy" and "there" in this line can be
eliminated since the situation the sentence urges would
blur genetive distinctions, making his will hers, thereby
also doing away with the need for the spatial differentia tor
"there." Throughout 136, underlying the phonetic variables is the same semantic formula: "Will is will" or "Will
SUMMER 1983
�wills," a pure instance of the circular reasoninKthat Elizabethan logics identify with inordinate willfulness. The
couplet's fallacious syllogism follows the same tautology:
"Make but my name thy love, and love that still,/And then
thou lov'st me for my name is Will."
Sonnet 136 then looks like a supreme instance of willful
discourse. Will uses language to obtain his will, to prevail
rhetorically over his mistress' will so that he might have his
corporeal one. In doing so, he appropriates language, infusing its vocabulary, syntax, and logic with his likeness.
Or is it the other way around? Has he appropriated and
personalized the language or has it appropriated and verbalized him? Has it seized upon him as a name not of his
own choosing and locked him within a tight system of verbal interrelations from which he cannot emerge? The very
question brings to mind that one sense of will which the
sonnet conspicuously excludes from its homonymic ranging but which is central to any scheme even loosely Christian: will as choice, as free will. The sonnet, a petition to
his mistress, highly contrived and therefore seemingly
controlled, looks like an act of will, more so than other sonnets because of its excessive ingenuity. But if the will to
which it gives voice is lust, is Will speaking voluntarily? If
desire drives him to speak, he has not chosen to speak but
does so involuntarily, as an animal cries. Would this then
place him in the viciously inexorable cycle of sonnet !29's
"lust in action," caught up in a habitual and therefore involuntary routine of "had, having, and in quest to have,"
in this sonnet at the stage of "in quest to have" or "Mad in
pursuit"? Without any form of self-reference, 129 seems
the most impersonal sonnet of the collection; but it becomes singularly personal if we remember that Will makes
himself synonymous with lust, with involuntary will, so
that the battery of adjectival phrases in 129 ("perjured,
mur'drous, bloody, full of blame"} pertains to him as well
as to the abstraction he so knowingly and tellingly defines.
Even though his name is never spelled out in 129, it could
be said of this sonnet too that "every word doth almost tell
my name" (sonnet 76), especially when "Will" is heard in
the couplet, as phonologists lead us to believe it was in the
sixteenth century when 'well' and 'will' were pronounced
identically: "All this the world well knows, yet none knows
well." In sonnet 129, too,. the subject is present as a name,
either stated and. pronounced or implied and understood,
entangled in verbal relationships of sound and sense.
It is not only in sonnets like !29 and 136 that the subject's proper name surfaces. Through its homonyms and
synonyms, it presides over the entire collection. The first
verb in the sonnets is a synonym for will ("From fairest
creatures we desire increase") and the last two Anacreontic
sonnets concern the transformation of "hot desire" into
"holy fire of love." The youth's self-will thwarts the opening communal desire and Will's appetitive will frustrates
his final solitary desire. The first group of sonnets, the
procreation group, evolves around the idea of will as bequest "beauty's legacy" [sonnet 4], that would extend its
THE ST: JOHNS REVIEW
possessor into the future. The last two Anacreontics describe a therapeutic well that cures "men diseased" with
the exception of the subject who retreats back to the
chronic and pathological routine that admits of no change
of future. At both ends, the Sonnets are bracketed by synonymic and homonymic variants of the subject's proper
name.
Within those brackets, Will consistently emerges in a
state of incompleteness seeking to be made whole, seeking
the fulfillment that is happiness. Will exists in a state of
perpetual want that is at once lack and desire. The lack,
heightened by a consciousness of time and death, takes
the form of the multiple privative states that characterize
him: debt, poverty, sickness, loneliness, absence, lameness, bareness, pain. It seeks to complete itself through objects that would both contain him and make him content.
In the youth, in verse, in the mistress and in various combinations of the three, Wiil would be fulfilled (thereby deferring the "well-contended day" [sonnet 32], the consummation of death, with whose "fell arrest" all men must "be
contented" [sonnet 74]. In seeking fulfillment in another,
Will repeatedly attaches himself to versions of himself.
The youth is his "next self': in relationships personal and
grammatical the two are interchangeable. One mirrors the
other to such a degree that it is often assumed they share
the same name. The mistress too is a projection of himself,
of the desire by which he identifies himself, so that her
outer darkness figures forth his inner defects, her black
eyes reflect his blindness, a relation clenched verbally in
the sound "my mistress' eye" [sonnet 153] that designates
both her ocular (and sexual} eye and his pronomial I, recapitulating his self-gratifying conflation of her will with his
own. In loving either object, he falls into the same pattern
from which he tries to break the youth in the first seventeen sonnets: of self-love, "having traffic with thyself
alone" [sonnet 4], "self-willed" [sonnet 6]-the state fullblown in the monumentally monolithic sonnets of the
!20's that make ungrounded claims to self-sufficiency, as
in the supremely, in fact divinely, solipsistic, "I am that I
am." The tautology then of 136 is the collection's central
configuration: will desires will, the self seeks to complete
its wanting self in images of itselflargely of its own making,
a narcissistic and incestuous relationship that cannot be
separated from the homonymic and synonymic pleonasms
all generating from the subject's proper name.
In this paper I have been urging that the Sonnets be
read autobiographically in relation to their author, but not
in a relation to him as a particular individual experiencing
temporal and psychological events, but as a name functioning within discourse. We are accustomed to thinking
of a proper name as a social, political, and religious marker
that positions its bearer within his family, state, and
church; but it is crucial to see it also as situating its bearer
in language, as any name situates its referrent there.
If we resist having a proper name work like any other
word, it is because we tend to distinguish sharply between
29
�the names we use to identify people and the ones we use
to identify everything else. We set them apart from ordinary vocabulary by capitalizing them, and our dictionaries
omit them or relegate them to an appendix of their own.
Yet there is indication that our distinction between proper
and common was not so hard and fast for Elizabethans.
Proper names especially in manuscript were not always
capitalized, while common names in the arbitrary orthography of the day sometimes were. Nor was special attention given to their spelling. Shakespeare's last name, as I
have mentioned, received as least eighty-three different
spellings, spellings ranging from Shaftspere to Shaxbee to
Chacsper; it appears as Shagspere on his marriage bond
and as Shaxberd on a court record crediting him with
Comedy of Errors and Measure for Measure.
Just as no conventions of punctuation or spelling singled
out proper names, so too no lexicons excluded them from
the rest of the language. Though there were no comprehensive monolingual dictionaries in the sixteenth century,
there were hard word lists that defined proper names as
well as neologisms and technical vocabulary. Bilingual dictionaries too would often include Christian names among
their other entries. Of course proper names had the
unique function of designating an individual rather than a
class, of naming one single man named, for example, Will
rather than a collective general group named, for example,
man. But the frequent instances in which proper names
are used generically in contexts as diverse as proverbs and
Biblical glosses, suggests that the distinction was hardly inviolable. Will, as we have seen, referred not just to one
man but to all men; so did the name Jack as in the proverbial "Jack shall have Jill" repeated in Love's Labor's Lost; so
did Tom and Dick and Harry, though Harry IV wittily exempts himself from those generic catch-alls and substitutes Francis in his stead; so do Peter and John so that
New Testament commentaries explain that the name of
Peter belongs both to Simon and to all men that are faithful and John Donne explains that not just he alone but all
men are Johns, though not all may be true Johns.
There is more in the period that invites us to treat
proper names as if they were common. The original and
derivative forms of both proper and common names were
thought to provide access to the truth of what they named.
The tradition of Biblical exegesis that originated with the
Church Fathers (Origen, Jerome, and Augustine) examined the Hebrew forms of names for both people and
things in order to comprehend their true designations. Hebrew names were thought to be God-given and therefore
to retain vestiges of the original language that man, before
the Fall and Babel, had shared with God. By analyzing Hebrew names, exegetes sought to recover the relation between thing and sign that Adam had intuited when he assigned true names to the animals in Eden. Churchmen,
especially Protestants who preferred etymologies to catholicizing allegories, relied heavily on this form of philological investigation in order to move from sign to know!-
30
edge-of-the-thing-signified. In his sermons, John Donne
frequently acknowledges his indebtedness to this form of
inquiry, as in this injunction: "To know the nature of the
thing, look to the derivation, the extraction, the origination of a word." Launcelot Andrews too devotes long passages of his sermons to etymological excursions, sometimes devoting entire sermons to a single word, as he does
in one of his Nativity Sermons in which he celebrates the
birth of the Incarnational Word by concentrating on one
word that names him-lmmanuel. For such writers, no
form of human reasoning draws a mind so close to truth as
the investigation of the names God in the Old Testament
11
gives to both men and things: His nominals be reals."
Etymologizing was not, of course, limited to religious
studies or to the Hebrew language. It had precedents in
classical and medieval writing: Plato's Cratylus was seen to
recommend the same sort of investigation in respect to
Greek and Isidore of Seville was consulted for Latin derivations and developments. The dictum of the fifth century grammarian Servius was applied to words in all languages: "names are called names because by them things
are known." Elizabethan grammars were traditionally divided into two sections, etymology and syntax, and Elizabethan logics invariably included etymology or notatio as a
valid place from which to argue. Typically in this period,
the discussion of any subject will begin with a discussion
of its name. Thomas Eliot begins his Book of the Covernow with an exploration of the word republic; Thomas
Wilson introduces his logic, The Rule of Reason, with an
extended discussion of the words logic and reason, and
Thomas Morley in his Introduction to Practical Music prefaces his descriptions of various musical terms with their
derivation, explaining, for example, why motet derives
from motion. In discussing any type of subject matter, a
writer commonly begins by interpreting its name and proceeds by following the discursive lines emerging from this
interpretation.
It is my thesis that when that subject happens to be a
man, say William Shakespeare, the same practice is followed. His name, as I hope I succeeded in showing, provides the focus for the writing that is about him. John
Donne says of the names in the Bible-those of the children oflsrael for example-that it is not so much that the
names are in the history as that the history is in the names. I
think Shakespeare's history or story of himself, his autobiography, is also contained in his name-his proper name
and its common homonymic and synonymic cognates.
Since his name is given to him and not chosen by him, and
since the phonetic and semantic interrelations into which
it draws him are inscribed in language and not put there by
him, his writing can never be entirely his own. If he had
been given another given name, his autobiography would
look and sound quite different. It might, in fact, resemble
one of the at least forty other English sonnet collections
that remain from the 1590s and early 1600s.
These sonnet collections also tell the story of their writSUMMER 1983
�ers. A quick scanning of the major ones reveals immediately that Shakespeare was not alone in fashioning his sonnets around his name. Edmund Spenser's Amoretti tells
the story of Edmund, ed mundo; they'largely turn on his
repudiation of the mundane and worldly vanity that he
himself narcissistically reflects, as in the exceptional two
sonnets [35 and 83] that mirror or echo one another word
for word and conclude with the self-referrential: "All this
worlds glory seemeth vayne to me." Sir Phillip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella tells the story of Phillip, phil ippos, lover
of horses or the ((horse to love" he becomes in his own
emblematic allegory in which he is Cupid's horse [49];
though he euphemistically rechristens himself Astrophil,
lover of a star, he is not, as Stella well knows, aiming so
high. Fulke Greville's Caelica tells the story of Greville,
and "grief' and "ill," as he himself insists, "do best decipher'' [83] him in his protracted despair of skies both Caelican and celestial. Henry Constable's Diana tells the story
of Constable whose recurring motto "preserver ever," refers to his characterizing constancy which takes the form
of stubborn and relentless importunity. William Percy's
Coelia tells the story of another Will whose self-centered
self-love is doubly suggested by his name: once, by his
given name, Will, and again by his self-reflexive family
name, Percy, per se, for himself. Barnabe Barnes's
Parthenophil and Parthenope tells the story of Barnabe
Barnes; the echoing first syllables of his two names unite
to form the sound bar bar, the sound Greeks identified
with bar-barians, outsider or non-Greeks of unrefined
speech and unrefined manner; Barnabe Barnes's sonnets
are barbaric in both word and deed: their typically stuttering phrasing expressing desire that is anything but civilized culminates in the final poem-a reiterative sestina
describing the orgiastic rape of his mistress.
In each of these sonnet sequences, the writer's name
functions as a rubric that informs and shapes his self-presentation. His name, as both proper and common noun,
provides his entry into language and sets him in relation to
those terms that constitute the story that tells of him. In
describing it this way, I do not mean to suggest that the
name is prophetic or oracular, that it dictates or predicts
an inescapable course. Every name that I have mentioned
contains an option like that option present in Shakespeare's name. Just as his name, Will, refers to both voluntary choice and involuntary appetite, so too Edmund's
name contains two worlds (in alignment with Augustine's
two cities); Greville's holds two types of grieving, one amorous pining and the other penitential contrition: Phillip's
contains two types of loving horses, the horsemanship that
puts man properly in control of his horse or the horsemanship that inversely gives the horse free rein of him. Constable's presents two types of constancy, stiff-necked infatuation and right-hearted devotion. To be sure, the name is
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
given to the bearer, but the sense in which the name is
taken is of the bearer's own choosing. It is that choosing
between the options contained in the writer's name that
makes the sonnets autobiographical, that makes them
about one self rather than another. But because the options in each case are those every Christian man must
face, this form of sixteenth century autobiography can
hardly be said to individuate, to reveal an individual distinct in experience, thought, and feeling from all other
men.
I began this paper with a discussion of signatures as selfrepresentation and then proceeded to a reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets. as an autobiography centered on his
name, and have ended by suggesting that other Elizabethan sonnet sequences are autobiographical in the same
respect. Through the course of the paper, I have gradually
enlarged my focus: I have moved from signatures to a single Shakespearean sonnet, to Shakespeare's Sonnets in general, and finally expanded to include several Elizabethan
sonnet collections. In this final paragraph, I would like to
enlarge my scope still further, in fact, I will enlarge it about
as far as it can go.
My final words concern man and language in the sixteenth century. Although this paper has focused on a
rather small body of Elizabethan literature, its ultimate
aim is to challenge an assumption so prevalent that it is
rarely recognized as an assumption. Like all assumptions,
it has a beginning, and in time it will no doubt have
an ending too. It begins in 1860 with Jacob Burkhardt's
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and perhaps
has in 1980 culminated with Stephen Greenblatt's highly
applauded book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Burkhardt proclaimed that the greatest achievement of the
Renaissance was the discovery of the individual; Greenblatt demonstrates through the study of six major Elizabethan figures how the Renaissance individual selfconsciously generated his own identity. Attending such an
assumption is the equally pervasive view that in a world of
emerging individuality, language is first and foremost selfexpression, a means of articulating, asserting, and projecting selfhood. In my discussion of one of the dominant
modes of first-person writing in the Renaissance, the sonnet sequence, I hope I have provoked a serious rethinking
of that two-fold assumption. No individual emerges from
the Sonnets, no individuated psychological and emotional
entity with personalized thoughts and desires. Insofar as a
self can be said to emerge, it is a self as a proper name, a
name which rather than singling out its bearer draws him
into a complicated network of verbal interrelations that
form the pattern of his experience. Though the central
terms may differ, other sonnet writers find themselves in
variations of the same pattern and so must have Shakespeare's original readers, whatever their names.
31
�BLACKWATER
The summer ends. The winds -of aurumn rise
Chilling the earth at evening. Darkness falls
Suddenly and early. In heavy skies
From north and west assemble geese, their cails
Drifting and tossing in uneasy air.
High clouds catch final sunlight, burst aflame,
Vanish. Circling above the water, where
Rushes and grasses wait, wild mallard home.
I have come here for refuge. In the night
Shapes of the sleeping birds merge with water;
At land's edge softly their muted cries touch
And interweave the lapping waves. A white
Moon hovers near the branches of a fir;
Ten thousand stars burn cold and out of reach.
ROBERT
S. ZELENKA
A former tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, Md., Robert Zelenka is a
teacher, poet, scholar.
32
SUMMER 1983
�Mission over Hanoi
From A Country Such as This
James Webb
A garbage detail was throwing trash off the fantail of the
U.S.S. Shiloh. Leftover food, bags upon bags of paper and
cans, large wall lockers, unidentifiable boxes, all bounced
and rolled in the white wake of the steaming ship, mixing
with the foam. Red Lesczynski could see pieces of garbage
for miles behind the ship, all the way to the horizon in the
late afternoon sun, as if the Shiloh were marking off a trail
on the otherwise amorphous reaches of the blue, unending South China Sea.
He and a dozen other pilots were shooting their .38-caliber survival pistols, using the trash as targets. Lesczynski
practiced often off the fantail, .although he did not know
many downed pilots who had either dared or had a useful
opportunity to fire the .38 at the North Vietnamese. When
you were hoping for rescue, you evaded, as silently as possible. When rescue was hopeless, you didn't commit suicide by firing your weapon at a people who outnumbered
you 17 million to I.
But it was a way to let off steam, to relieve the boredom
of shipboard life. Except for the combat missions, he
might have been a monk at a retreat alone in a midocean
cloister with the other members of his sect. It was flat, tedious, with a day's highlight being dinner in the wardroom
and the movie afterward, or perhaps a game of chess or
Go. That in itself heightened the tension of the missions,
rather than allowing one to gear up for them. There was so
little movement or variation on the ship, and yet three of
every four days the Shiloh was "on the line" he was flung
off the carrier deck two and sometimes three times a day
by a steam catapult, as if his F-4 Phantom were a pebble in
1
©1983 by James Webb. A Country Such as This is to be published this
Fall by Doubleday. James Webb graduated from the United States Naval
Academy in 1968. He chose the Marine Corps and served as an infantry
officer in Vietnam. Among other decorations he holds the Navy Cross
and the Silver Star. Mr. Webb has previously published Fields of Fire and
A Sense of Honor.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
a slingshot, to form an attack group over the sea and then
race through ground fire and missiles toward a bombing
target where for ninety seconds every fear in the world was
real, exploding all around him, calling for the most minute
recesses of his concentration. Then it would be over and
he would find the boat again, that square little speck in the
sea, and set the tail hook of his aircraft on top of a cable on
its angled deck, jerking to a violent stop. The whole thing
took little more than an hour, and he would again be surrounded by the tedious calm. It was the paradox that
taunted him, as if he were a lobster being dangled over a
boiling cookpot for a few seconds every -hour, only to be
returned to the tank. What would the lobster think, if it
could think, when it was again safe in the tank but knew it
would soon be once more dangled over the pot?
Salt air covered him like a scab; he loved the smell and
the taste. The snub-nosed pistol jerked in his hand as he
fired again and again at a five-gallon can that had once
held cooking oil. He couldn't tell whether he had hit the
can.lt bounced in the churning wake like a Ping-Pong ball,
and was soon out of range.
"Ah, the hell with it." He returned his weapon to the
chief petty officer in charge of the "famfire detail," and
left the open platform of the fantail, entering the bowels of
the aircraft carrier.
More men lived on the U.S.S. Shiloh than in Ford City.
And ali' of them had jobs. The huge Forrestal-class supercarrier was home to 4,100 men, and 80 aircraft. It weighed
76,000 tons, fully loaded. It was longer than three football
fields, and had four acres of flight deck. Its power plant
could summon 280,000 horsepower from four geared
steam turbines, enough to push the Shiloh through any
sea at 35 miles an hour. It carried more than 26 million
pounds of fuel in its hull. The Shiloh had deployed from
Alameda, California, just after Christmas 1965, and had
been operating as the center of a twelve-ship task force on
Yankee Station off the coast of Vietnam since mid-January
33
�1966. In its five months of Yankee Station duty, the Shiloh
had been to Subic Bay, Philippines; twice, for four days
each time, and to Yokosuka once, for three days. Other
than that, the Shiloh had been constantly "on the line." Its
pilots had flown 17,000 missions, and dropped 22 million
pounds of ordnance onto North Vietnamese targets.
Lousy targets, mostly. The wrong targets. Lesczynski exited a narrow, honeycombed passageway and began crossing the hangar deck. It was filled with aircraft undergoing
maintenance or being rearmed and refueled. A-4 Skyhawk
and A-6 Intruder attack craft, EA-6 Prowler electronic war·
fare planes, RA-5 Vigilante reconnaissance jets, S-2F antisubmarine planes, and SH-3 Sea King helicopters vari·
ously mixed with his own F-4 Phantom fighters across its
reaches. The hangar deck was long and wide and dark, its
bulkheads and deck a musty gray, like a basement. The
flight deck was two levels higher; planes moved up and
down on four huge elevators.
He was the executive officer of his squadron, and was
slated to take command of it within six months. He
stopped for a few minutes, chatting with crewmen who
were working on the F-4s, checking their efforts and assur·
ing them, with simple words, of the importance of their
jobs. Then he set out again, heading for the flight wardroom, for dinner.
In one corner of the hangar deck a group of sailors was
playing a fast game of basketball, shouting and running,
shirtless in the tropical heat. Across its middle, a line of
men extended from a ladder that went to the deck below,
waiting to enter the main galley and eat dinner. A few of
them wore the tight, multicolored shirts of flight deck personnel, but most of them were dressed in blue dungarees
and baseball caps. Many were reading from ever-present
paperback books that fit perfectly inside rear dungaree
pockets. Others conversed, clowning around and rau·
cously taunting each other. Many wore tattoos on their
forearms.
Lesczynski grinned blandly as he passed the different
groups of sailors, waving to a few of the men he recog·
nized. They were young and they all worked hard, twelve
hours a day for months on end, enduring cramped quar·
ters, long lines, and the lonely isolation of shipboard life.
They worked because they believed, or because it was a
job, or because it bought them liberty in arguably exotic
ports. Some worked because they didn't want to go to the
brig. It didn't matter. They kept the ship going twenty·
four hours a day, no matter what.
The 1-MC blared into every compartment, preceded by
a boatswain's eerie whistle. It was Big Brother. "Now hear
this. Now hear this. The smoking lamp is out, throughout
the ship, while handling ammunition. I say again, the smoking lamp is out, throughout the ship, while handling ammunition . .,
Lesczynski walked out the forward end of the hangar
deck, and climbed a ladder up to the "02" level, between
the hangar deck and the flight deck. The flight wardroom
34
was on the "02" level. It was less formal than the ship's
wardroom below, designed cafeteria-style to accommodate
the more fluid schedules of the pilots. In contrast to the
main wardroom, there were no Filipino stewards to hold a
tray of food in front of an officer, as if he were an aristocrat
dining downtown. No seating by rank. No careful conversation, designed to teach one the art of gentle avoidance.
Lesczynski liked the flight wardroom.
Commander Jimmy Maxwell was holding court with
two junior officers. Lesczynski's friend since his first days
of flight training was now the executive officer of the A-6
attack squadron, and like Lesczynski was on the "fleet up"
program, which would give both of them command within
a few months. Maxwell had gone spry and gray after fifteen years in the cockpit. Crow's-feet were etched deeply
into the corners of his eyes. His tight hawk's face was selfassured, and animated. Maxwell waved to Lesczynski, who
joined them. Then he smiled sardonically, without joy, his
leathered face emanating a resignation that might have
been anger, had he the luxury to question policy.
"They bagged another A-4 today."
"Over that Dong Khe site?"
"Yes, sir, old LBJ sure knows how to treat his boys. You
know why he calls us his boys, don't you? Son, I'm from
Mississippi, and I know what that means. It means he
thinks he owns us. What was it he said? The military can't
bomb a shithouse without his approval."
Lieutenant Nick Damsgard, new to the squadron and
on his first Western Pacific deployment, leaned forward,
his heavy brows furrowed earnestly. "If he'd let us go after
Dong Khe a month ago, we could have flattened it."
Maxwell feigned alarm. "You don't shoot up missile
sites before they're ready for you! They're not part of the
war until then. What do you want to do, win this god damn
thing?"
They all laughed, staring into their food, dry chortles
that indicated none of them really thought it was funny,
not when they were dangling their very lives over the
North every day in pursuit of a goal that Lyndon Johnson
had never made clear to himself, much less them. Maxwell
snorted again. "If Goldwater had won in '64, this war
would have been done with in a week, and there wouldn't
have been enough of North Vietnam left over to plant rice
on. "
Frank Salpas, also a new lieutenant, stroked his moustache, staring down into his food. 1'l'm not so sure, Com·
mander. This is a different kind of war. Johnson seems
pretty serious about doing the right thing. I mean, he's trying. He's putting at least a half-million ground troops in
the South."
Maxwell snorted again. The constant attrition of the air
war was getting to him, Lesczynski could tell. "It's not how
many troops he's got on the ground, any more than it's
how many goddamn bombs we're dropping. It's what
you're doing with them! You tell me what the hell it means
to fight a 'limited war,' all right? Do you think North VietSUMMER 1983
�nam is fighting a limited war? Shee-it. Do you feel like
you're a little bit at war when you're jinking up there,
dodging SAM missiles? Johnson won't let us knock out
SAM sites while they're being built. He won't let us take
out ships in Haiphong harbor that have SAMs visible on
their goddamn decks! He won't mine the harbor. He won't
let us go after operational MiG airfields. But we're 'his
boys' when we get our asses shot off! He must think this is
a god damn golf game or something, and he needs to give
the North Vietnamese some kind of handicap!"
Damsgard looked up from his tray, smiling ironically.
"He's stuck with a war that he doesn't know how to fight.
He just wishes it would all go away. This whole 'Rolling
Thunder' operation is a joke. Tell me how much we've disrupted the life of the North Vietnamese."
Maxwell nodded earnestly, agreeing. "Here we've got a
whole fleet of B-52 bombers that could put Hanoi back
into the Stone Age, and old LBJ sends them off to make
toothpicks out of trees on the Ho Chi Minh trail. And here
we've got light attack planes and precision fighters, and
the man sends us against the North day in and day out.
Not against targets that will hurt the North Vietnamese,
but against 'interdiction targets.' I don't know know many
pieces of railroad track I've blown away in the last five
months. But I can guarantee you that Russia and China
and the other communist countries have been replacing
them as fast as we've been blowing them away. The North
Vietnamese probably love what we're doing. It keeps their
people united. It doesn't really hurt them. And it keeps the
aid rolling in from the communist bloc."
"Can you imagine these sorts of restrictions during
World War II?" Lesczynski had listened quietly, eating his
food, but could no longer restrain his own frustration. "We
couldn't have hurt the Japanese by simply shooting down
the aircraft that attacked us. Hell, they'd still be regrouping, putting together fleets and forays! We went to their
hearts. We took the war to them. We blew away their
planes on the ground, we knocked out their industry. We
took out Tokyo." He pointed a fork, growing animated.
"Last week. Remember? Knock out the Sai Thon rail yard,
they say, but if one bomb hits the steel mill next door
you're iri deep shit!"
They all three watched him attentively. He did not often talk about the conduct of the war. For the most part,
he viewed it as unproductive, a negative morale factor for
the men who served under him. But tonight he felt unsettled, provoked. "This isn't going very well at all. Are we
going to say that the Japanese were more evil than the
North Vietnamese, and that they deserved more of our
wrath? Why? The North Vietnamese are clearly trying to
take over the South by military force. It's the North Vietnamese who have almost their entire army in the South
right now. We have stated to the world that the South
should not be subjugated against its will. If that's worth
fighting over, then it should be worth a serious, total effort. How long is it going to take Johnson to understand
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that the North Vietnamese believe they're winning, and
that this sort of bombing reinforces that belief?"
He had grown his moustache back. His lips curled into a
whimsical smile underneath its thick red gash. 'Til tell you
the truth. I don't think McNamara has the guts, and I
don't think LBJ has the clarity of thought, to fight this war.
It's that simple."
Lieutenant Salpas grunted once, then nodded, a slow
cynical grin growing underneath his moustache. "Did you
hear about LBJ's big Silver Star for gallantry in action in
World War II? Went out on a reconnaissance flight as an
observer from Congress, and the plane got shot at. He sat
there in his seat and watched, and then decided that since
he didn't shit his pants, he deserved a medal. Take a look
at his pictures. He loves to wear the lapel pin."
Maxwell grunted back, a combative grin streaking his
narrow face. "Uh-huh. Well, if that's what it takes, he can
come out here and go on that Alpha Strike with us 'boys'
tomorrow, I can make sure he gets the goddamn Medal of
Honor."
•
•
•
The real question was why they kept doing it, so well
and with such precision, day after day, week after week, in
the face of a steady trickle of losses that had been deceptive at first, but eventually overwhelming. So many shipmates, so many planes, downed for the honor of interdicting a system that by the very nature of their bombing
would grow stronger with greater outside support.
Sitting in his stateroom after dinner, Red Lesczynski
scanned the classified briefsheets from the past few weeks'
activities, one of his prerequisites as squadron executive
officer.
June 12-19: Interdiction. 100 railroad cars damaged or
destroyed, Qui Vinh, Pho Can, and Nam Dinh rail yards
damaged extensively. 5 major highway bridges dropped.
Junks and barges "lucrative."
June 20-26: Interdiction. 40 trucks, 100 junks and barges
damaged or destroyed. Me Xa highway bridge, Mai Duong
railroad and highway bridge dropped, considered essential
to the Hanoi/Haiphong transportation system. Russian
SA-2 missile site damaged in conjunction with attack on
Mai Duong. Extensive damage to yards and facilities at
Qui Vinh, Sai Thon, and Van Coi.
June 27-July 2: Interdiction. 200 railroad cars, numerous
trucks and bridges damaged or destroyed. Major strikes
against Dong Khe SAM missile site, the Dong Can military area, and Bien Son barracks.
He tried to measure those frail statistics against the terror that produced them, and the loss:
June 14: A-3 lost over North Vietnam. Orange ball seen
by observers. Crew MIA.
June 15: F-4B hit during attack on PT boat. Pilot, RIO
eject over water, rescued by SH-3 helo.
June 15: A-4E downed by ground fire, North Vietnam.
Pilot ejects, is seen on ground. POW or MIA.
35
�June 17: A-4C hit by ground fire during pullout from
dive on Vinh railroad. Pilot ejects, radios from ground that
he is about to be captured. POW or MIA.
June 19: A-1 F crashes ahead of ship after night catapult
launch. Pilot missing.
June 20: A-lH crashes ahead of ship after night catapult
launch. Pilot not recovered.
June 21: RF-8A downed by antiaircraft fire. Good ejection. Enemy defenses prevent helicopter approach. MIA.
June 21: F-8 damaged by MiG-17, 4 F-8s respond. l F-8
downed. Good ejection observed. Another F-8 downs
MiG with Sidewinder missile. 1 MiG destroyed. 1 pilot
MIA.
June 25: A-4E hit by antiaircraft fire. Pilot ejects over
water, rescued by SH-3 helo.
June 25: A-6A lost directional control on bombing run.
Pilot and RIO eject. Pilot rescued by SH-3 helo. Chute of
RIO seen, but not located. RIO MIA.
June 27: A-4E crashed during borrib run on barges. No
ejection sighted. Pilot MIA.
June 27: A-4E caught fire en route to strike. Pilot
ejected, rescued by Air Force HH-43 helo.
July 1: A-4E hit by ground fire during withdrawal from
strike. Good chute sighted. Pilot not recovered. MIA.
Well, let's see. Two years of time and salary, minimum, to
get an adequate iet pilot to the fleet. A half a billion dollars,
I'd say, to build this carrier, equip it, and put it on the line.
Millions of dollars for every plane, and the load it carried.
The reputation of our country riding in every cockpit-its
military reputation, its sense of political wisdom. And people, count two weeks of them, lost blowing away railroad
tracks. Railroad tracks! Pissed down the tube, Lyndon Johnson, pissed down the tube.
The feeling had grown over the previous six months until, every time he read such statistics, Red Lesczynski felt
as if he were somewhere between a gladiator and a whore,
although he would never publicly relate this to his men.
There was something almost malevolent in the way Navy
further admonitions from Johnson and McNamara to his
."boys," rather than warnings to those supplying the com-
and Air Force pilots were being wasted, in the restrictions
things; bicycles, even cars. At home, Lesczynski's Satur-
forced on them. God forbid that they should go after the
enemy's political centers, even though the communists
had been killing government officials in the South for a
decade. There was something supposedly inhumane
about attacking any area where there might be civilians,
although no such inhumanity had been seen in any other
war, or even in the South in this one. They flew against
railroad yards and were not allowed to attack MiG training
bases. They could not attack Soviet missile sites until they
were operational, and then, of course, it was like walking
down the tube of a cannon. They had indeed, as Jimmy
Maxwell had lamented over dinner, produced photographs of ships unloading missiles at Haiphong harbor,
and were ordered to stay away. In fact, the North Vietnamese had protested before the International Control Commission a few weeks before that U.S. planes had made
day afternoons belonged to John and his tools. There
would be other times, and he dwelled on that, but he
would never be able to see his children through the same
lens as before.
He read several hours a day. That was the one salvation
of shipboard life. He had brought more than thirty books,
and would soon be finished with them all. He had made
meticulous notes. They were a mixed bag of classics and
military oddments. He was trying to understand this war,
the Pacific, Japan. Japan was the key, and always had been.
He pulled out an old, faded volume written in 1920 by a
Russian general, Nikolai N. Golovin, in collaboration with
Admiral A. D. Bubnov. The Problem of the Pacific in the
Twentieth Century. He had found it in a secondhand bookstore in Washington. Among other things, the book had
accurately predicted both the timing and the course of
World War II.
"provocations" against foreign ships at Haiphong, causing
36
munists.
When did a missile become a missile? When did a war
become a war? When did a military professional finally cry
"foul" to this commander in chief? At times Lesczynski
tried to emphathize with Admiral Kuribayashi, who had
commanded the Japanese defenses at Iwo Jima during the
Second World War, fully knowing that he would lose the
battle. Like the Japanese commander, who died in the battle, Red Lesczynski believed not in the specifics of what he
was doing, but in what his effort represented.
He thought a lot about Jerry Schmidt as he whiled away
his hours on the Shiloh, wondering how the intense CIA
agent was dealing with the similar botching of the war
down South. Johnson and Westmoreland were obsessed
with world opinion, on the one hand knowing that it
would take a half-million American soldiers to establish a
combat presence and the support functions it would need
in order to operate halfway around the world, and on the
other not wanting to appear to be the "aggressor" in the
war. The result was piecemeal escalation, with the North
Vietnamese controlling the pace and thus the entire initiative in the war. The units in the field were performing admirably, but the United States was continually reacting,
continually behind. It was not a happy time if you were a
believer.
Sophie wrote him every day. The letters came in
bunches, with the resupply. When he had been young, he
had believed that a man could get used to being away,
could program it into the other cycles in his life. But it had
gotten harder each time, .so that now, at thirty-seven, it
was as if he had split himself in two. So much of him was
left with her, and with the children. J.J. was starting high
school. How he longed to watch his son on the football
field. Katherine was going through puberty without her father's advice. There were so many questions about dating
that she would now throw at J.J. Little John liked to fix
SUMMER 1983
�He checked his notes:
p. 43: "Japanese imperialism is not a~ invention of a handful of politicians. It is the expression oLthe spirit of modern
Japan."
p. 81: "The motives that will prompt Japan to engage in
the struggle are so deep and so vast that not one but several
wars will have to be waged before a solution is reached."
p. 38: "When Europeans fight they always endeavor to set
their own strength against that of their opponent. The Japanese endeavor to use the opponent's strength against him. By
this method you add your opponent's strength to your own
and may therefore win in spite of being weaker."
He pondered the last paragraph for several minutes before opening up the book. It made him want to show it to
Kosaka. It represented a combination of those two favorite
Japanese games, jujitsu and Go. It also made him wonder,
in an oriental triple-thinking way, whether there was indeed some connection between what he was doing and Japan's growing strength. He didn't feel smart enough to figure that out, at least not yet.
He read carefully for an hour, marking the book and taking notes. The last paragraph of Russian wisdom that he
added to his thick three-hole binder stayed with him as he
left his small desk and climbed into his bed.
p. 153: "The realities of the Pacific include the necessity of
all international agreements being backed by actual force. We
may deplore this fact the more bitterly that mankind has but
recently suffered such heavy losses in blood and treasure, but
such is the present condition of the world, and the primary
principal of positive science in search of the truth."
*
*
*
"Now, pilots, man your planes. I say again, pilots, man
your planes."
In the gray sea dawn a stiff wind pushed into the Shiloh's prow, beating insistently against the faces and chest
of pilots and sailors who busied across the long, plane-cluttered flight deck. The aircraft carrier had turned north,
into the wind, and geared up to thirty-three knots for
launching. The steady wind across the deck would help lift
the aircraft by increasing their relative ground speed. In
minutes, thirty-two of them would scream off from three
different catapults of the Shiloh, each plane taking a small
dip in front of the bow as it shifted from the pull of the
catapult to its own power, and then disappear.
Red Lesczynski left the F-4 ready room with seven other
pilots and reached his aircraft. He did a quick but thorough preflight, walking around the sleek, long-nosed jet
alongside its blue-shirted plane captain, an act that had his
life in its hands, but one that had been done so many thousands of times that it was down to a series of quick looks
and jokes with the plane captain.
"All set, Christianson?"
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The plane captain grinned through snaggled teeth. Underneath the tight cap and the Mickey Mouse sound attenuators was a boy hardly older than his son. "It'll get you
there, Commander. Big one today, huh, sir?"
It was indeed, one of the largest raids of the air war, and
one of the closest ever to downtown Hanoi. He checked
his payload. A cluster of Mark 82 five-hundred-pound
bombs hung close to each wing, above cylindrical pods
that would fire Zuni five-inch rockets. Four F-4s, including
his own, would go in first, taking out as many of the radarcontrolled antiaircraft guns and missile sites as possible.
Twelve A-6 and six A-4 attack planes would follow with
heavy bombloads, going after the Bac Giang petroleum
storage area outside of Hanoi. Four of his F-4s would hold
back as a RESCAP, to come to the aid of aircraft under
attack by MiGs or damaged by ground fire. Two A-3 tank·
ers would accompany the flight for emergency refueling.
Two "Shrikes," especially configured A-4s, would provide
immediate counter-battery fire to missile sites that locked
onto the group as they went toward the target. An EA-6
"Q" aircraft would fly at the head of the group with the
F-4s, in order to provide electronic jamming and surveillance. And finally, an RA-5 would follow up the strike,
making a photograph for damage assessment. Once Lesczynski's F-4 flight rolled in, it would only take ninety seconds for the whole strike to be done with.
"Now, pilots start your engines. I say again, pilots start
your engmes."
He checked his survival gear inside the cockpit. The kid
in the blue shirt gave him the signal and he fired it up. The
A-4s went off the forward catapults, followed by the A-6s.
The sun was burning a narrow streak across the sea to
their right, the east, where eight thousand miles away his
family was then finishing dinner and speaking sorrowfully
of his absence. It was the July 4 weekend and they were in
Ford City. The flight deck was filled with aircraft roaring
down catapults and others taxiing toward them, with thin
sailors dressed in colored jerseys, red and blue and white,
yellow and purple and green, each jersey indicating without words their jobs. He followed a series of yellow-shirted
men who looked like funny insects with their goggles and
bulbous sound attentuators, the men pointing forcefully at
him, ensuring they had eye contact with him, and then
pointing again to the next yellow shirt, who guided him
through an intricate maze of equipment and aircraft toward his launching catapult.
On the forward left catapult they hooked his Phantom
into its bridle. He spoke briefly with Ted Cunningham, his
back-seater, a young lieutenant (jg) on his first combat
cruise, ensuring all their gear was a "go." His thumb went
up and then he saluted, a signal to the NCO outside, and
suddenly he was being slung along a ramp toward the ravening, empty sea, all the while gunning his Phantom with
everything it had, going from a full stop to 240 miles an
hour in the time it took him to whisper "Please, God," and
then the jet gave a sighing dip just in front of the bow,
37
�down toward the waiting water, and after that he was free,
airborne, making a slow turn to the left, picking up the rendezvous TacAn: 335 degrees, 15 miles, 10,000 feet, circle
to your left
They gathered quickly, the A-6s below him at 9,000 feet,
the A-4s below that at 8,000, the "dogs and cats" below
that, all circling with undeniable beauty in the clear blue
sky. Each of the flight leaders checked in and he then
heard Maxwell, the strike commander, give the word back
to the ship.
"Combat this is Mad Dog One. All aboard. Departing
with thirty-two."
They flew in loose formation, the F-4s and the "Q" up
front, the others spread laterally behind them in four plane
flights. As they approached the coastline Maxwell checked
in with the airborne coordinator, a C-130 orbiting in a safe
area over Laos, giving him the on and off target times.
"Combat Nail this is Mad Dog One with thirty-two, estimated eight oh five with estimated eight oh seven, over."
"Roger, Made Dog One, you're clear. New time on target zero eight ten."
Lesczynski grinned nervously, imagining Maxwell's
curses as they pulled into a wide, five-minute circle. The
Air Force was hitting the southern outskirts of Hanoi from
bases in Thailand. They'd either been late or had a pilot
down.
Then it was their turn and they powered in hard and
low, just above the green as it slipped suddenly under
them. They were "feet dry" now, over hostile ground.
They jinked as they flew, moving suddenly left and right to
throw off SAM missile radar intercepts.
"Okay, let's go."
Lesczynski pitched up suddenly, moving almost vertically, as if rising from the green earth itself. The other
three F-4s followed close behind. He came down in a
straight line, directly toward the target. The attack aircraft
would come in afterward at various angles, avoiding a pat-
tern that might be picked up by North Vietnamese radar.
"Red One, inl"
He had seen the gun sites on the photos during the preflight briefing and they were clear now as he roared toward
them, their little puffs going off around him. His aircraft
unleashed a string of Zunis, their smoky trails impacting again and again, and then he pulled out of the dive,
away as the bombs fell behind him. It all happened in a
few seconds, and the Phantoms made their turn, heading
back toward the new rendezvous over the sea.
"Red One, off."
The A-4s were next "Blue One, in."
He could hear the chatter as they talked to one another,
quick instructions.
"Heads up!"
"Look out, John!"
"Go left, now."
((Blue One, off."
Here came the first flight of A-6s. "Hawk One, in."
38
It was all so sterile once you'd made it through.
"Hawk One, off."
It was almost over. "Mad Dog, in."
"Break break break, be advised Mad Dog One is down."
The mission, his obligations, the world, all changed in
five seconds. jimmy Maxwell had been bagged. Lesczynski
immediately began to turn his fighter around and return to
the site. He had no munitions left, but he could not bear
the thought of having to stand before Louise Maxwell and
not assure her that he had done everything in his power to
help her husband.
He heard Maxwell's wingman, speaking with a forced
calm. "Okay, we got two good chutes. I've got them in
sight" The wingman contacted the airborne coordinator.
"Combat Nail, this is Mad Dog, got a bird down just off
the target I see him on the ground. I'm over him. We got
two other birds out to tank, and they'll be back directly to
you."
"Roger, Mad Dog, we'll direct."
The fire from the petroleum tanks rose twenty thousand feet, red and orange with oily curls of smoke. Lesczynski jinked and zigged and zagged, changing altitude,
shaking radar scopes, moving back toward the target They
were too far inland for the Search and Rescue helicopters
that operated off forward destroyers. The only hope was
for a jolly Green Giant to come overland from Thailand.
That would take twenty minutes or so.
"They're locked onto us, Commander!" Lieutenant (jg)
Cunningham was a seatful of terror in back of him. Red
lights flashed on the instrument panel, indicating that a
SAM radar had indeed locked them into its sights. He
jinked several times. A missile flew past them. It looked
like a telephone pole as it raced toward the heavens.
"That was too close!"
Maxwell was talking on his "beeper" survival radio. He
was about a mile west of the target. The jolly Green was
on its way. Lesczynski could hear Combat Nail instructing
it. A group of enemy soldiers was moving across a wide
field, sweeping, looking for Maxwell and his bombardier. If
the soldiers got too close it was all over. Lesczynski dove at
them from the sky, thinking to pin them down, to distract
them. They wouldn't know he was out of ammunition.
The 85-millimeter battery was in a hidden emplacement, off to his left It puffed once and he saw it for the
first time, all six guns firing until his field of vision on that
side was loaded with its flashes. A dozen orange balls were
coming at him, drifting up into space with a filmic slowness, an unreality, and he knew he was bagged. A shell
ripped through his lower canopy as he tried to pull out of
the dive and the stick became uncontrollable, the aircraft
unresponding, a dead horse on which he was saddled, rolling slowly to the left In the space of a half second, the time
it took to let go of the stick and reach for the ejection lever,
he realized that both his legs were wounded, his oxygen
mask had been torn off by shrapnel, the oxygen bottle near
his feet had exploded and set the cockpit aflame, and he
SUMMER l98l
�was peering at the ground through a hole in the underside
of his Phantom, a mere thousand feet below. The ground,
Vietnam, death, was coming up to meet him. His Phantom
was still going five hundred miles an hour.
He pulled the ejection lever and nothing happened. He
pulled it again and he was propelled through the closed canopy, the jet now at five hundred feet. His chute opened just
enough to break his impact. He hit the ground at a fortyfive-degree angle and bounced into the air again, doing a
full, almost graceful loop and then landing on his knees and
forehead, a three-point thud.
making him fall. Both his legs were bleeding, the blood
gathering in the nonregulation, powder-blue socks Sophie
had sent him. He felt silly, as much as anything else, in his
white boxer undershorts and the funny socks.
Under a clump of trees a nurse dressed the cuts on his
head, ignoring his arm and legs. It grew quiet. Finally the
all-clear siren sounded over the ubiquitous loudspeakers
and they walked him to a dirt road, where he was loaded
into a green munitions truck. A blue uniformed commissar
met the truck in front of a small cluster of buildings. He
had a terse, bulbous face. He seemed amazed at Lesczynski's size. The commissar was the first person to speak
It was all so loud. That was his first, woozy thought as he
staggered to his knees and then tried to stand. In the cockpit it had been sterile, except for the radio chatter. Suddenly the world was swimming with roars and explosions;
missiles going off, the 85-millimeter battery pumping out
three shells a second at other aircraft overhead, bombs and
missiles coming back down from the covering jets, rifles
and pistols shooting into the air with futile pops. The petroleum storage area was a towering, crackling backdrop a
mile away, whose flames reached forever into the sky, as
high as Mount Everest.
The soldiers who had been searching for Maxwell were
now sweeping toward him instead, spread laterally across
the dry rice paddy, the AK-47s pointing at him. They filled
his vision as he tried to stand, thirty of them moving in a
half jog. He reached back to disconnect his parachute, an
automatic, unthinking move, but it wasn't coming off.
Then he looked down and noticed that his left arm was
hanging useless, unresponding but for little twitches, like a
chick trying helplessly to fly. The bone in his upper arm
had snapped completely in two, and the part still attached
to his shoulder was jiggling, causing the rest of the arm to
flail around.
He couldn't even surrender. He raised his right arm into
the air and they took it for a threat, half of them dropping
into firing positions and the other half rushing him. A soldier grabbed the dangling arm and twisted it behind him,
in a tight hammerlock that kept on going until his detached wrist was up behind his head. He hit the man unthinkingly, trying to stop the pain. The others charged
him, then noticed the arm was loose and merely beat him
up instead of shooting him.
They acted as if they had never seen zippers before.
They cut his flight suit off him, stripping him down to his
undershorts, and tied a rope around his neck. In the distance, he saw a Jolly Green Giant helicopter pop in just
over the trees where Maxwell had been and then disappear, under heavy air cover. He had seen nothing of Cunningham, his back-seater. They walked him across the dry
field. Loudspeakers were everywhere, blaring terse urgencies he did not understand. An old man tried to come at
him with a scythe, and the soldiers pushed him away. The
soldiers took a delight in suddenly yanking the rope and
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
directly to him. He closely examined Lesczynski's features, then made a judgment.
~<Russki?"
"Polski." He didn't know what else the man might have
meant. "American."
They took him into a large, bare room and made him sit
on the floor. People gathered at its open windows and
stared at him. Shortly, an officer in green clothes, wearing
a pith helmet, entered the room with three armed soldiers.
The officer's face was expressionless, but his eyes had the
frozen intensity of a professional killer. He stood in front
of Lesczynski and spoke in fluent English.
"] am going to ask you some questions. If you do not
answer you will be severely punished."
44
1 need a doctor."
HLater, if you demonstrate a proper understanding.
What is your name?"
"Stanislaus Lesczynski."
"What is your rank?"
"Commander, United States Navy."
"What ship did you take off from?"
"I can't answer that, according to the Geneva Agreements."
The officer issued a command in Vietnamese. Someone
behind Lesczynski kicked him hard in the head, knocking
him over. Two men grabbed him by the arms, dragging
him to the center of the room. His bad arm was up around
his head again and he screamed in agony. The crowd outside the room responded with a chant, louder and louder.
He felt alone, so alone. I'm going to die in the midst of
strangers who hate me.
They tied his ankles together, and then his wrists and
his elbows so that they touched, the ropes so tight that
they cut the blood off like tourniquets. It was done with
one rope, so that his back was arched and his frame was
immobile.
They kicked him and beat him and pinched his hands
and arms with pliers until the skin was completely numb
and the limbs were paralyzed, as if they did not exist. Each
time they asked the same question. Finally, awash with
guilt at such a small surrender, he relented.
"U.S.S. Shiloh."
"What squadron?"
The same routine. The three guards took turns to see
39
�who could hit his face the hardest. He began to realize that
he was in a small sense winning, because he was making
them pay for information they already had. Finally, he
could stand it no longer.
"VF-907."
"What kind of plane were you flying?"
"You ought to know. You shot it down."
"What was your target?"
Out of one window, past the hateful enjoying faces,
tongues of red flame still licked the noonday sky. "Where
all that fire is coming from."
The interrogator left the room for a few minutes. He returned with four photographers, who immediately began
taking pictures. He walked directly to Lesczynski and
shoved his head down to the floor. A soldier pointed an
SKS rifle into the back of Lesczynski' s head, and pulled
the trigger.
In the millisecond it took for the trigger to squeeze and
click, Lesczynski came to a sort of unrelenting peace with
his captivity. He was in such pain at that moment that he
welcomed any relief, even death. His mind went to other
things as he stared into the dirt floor. I wonder where they'll
bury me. I wonder how long it will take for Sophie to find
out. What is it like for a bullet to hit your head?
The trigger clicked. The firing pin hit an empty cham·
ber. The crowd outside taunted him. And he knew that,
for some perverse reason, they needed to use him more
than they needed to kill him.
They blindfolded him and loaded him into the bed of a
truck, and in twenty minutes he was in Hanoi.
self with that thought. And far away, in the corner of one
eye, he could see the petroleum plant still burning.
At the International House they kept him outside, in a
flower garden, for ten minutes. When the guard came to
guide him inside, he refused to move unless they gave him
water. He had asked before, and been denied. He had not
drunk anything since breakfast, a lifetime ago on the
South China Sea. Finally the guard relented, and gave him
two glasses of ice water. He knew he would pay for his obstinance, but it didn't matter. There would be so many
things to pay for that they would all blend in, anyway.
There were Caucasian reporters in the press room-; as
well as Asians. He did his best to march up to the podium,
and saluted when he reached it. In the Orient, the man
who shows no fear is king, that's what MacArthur had said,
but he was not really thinking about MacArthur at that
moment. He was remembering Crane Howell, the hobbled, irascible professor at the academy who had grown old
before his time, who had survived the work camps and the
beatings of the Japanese. If he was lucky, he would live to
be old and beaten also. There was no use hoping for more.
It was now his fate.
The reporters asked him no questions. He was merely
meant to be an object on display, like elephant tusks after a
safari. Afterward, the trucks drove him back to Hoa Lo
prison, better known among American fliers as the Hanoi
Hilton, through a different section of town, through same
groups of chanting people. And then the fun began.
For ten days they beat him. For ten days they did not let
him sleep. For ten days they asked him the same questions, over and over, slapping and punching, keeping him
*
*
*
"Put these on. You are going to a press conference."
The interrogator threw him a pair of oversized flight
boots and an Air Force flight suit, freshly washed. They
untied his hands. He had been sitting on a small stool in
the Hoa Lo prison's interrogation room for five hours, go-
ing through the same string of questions and beatings as
before. They had to help him into the clothes. One of the
guards fashioned a sling for his arm out of thin gauze.
They loaded him onto the back of a military truck and
made him stand at the front of the truck bed, holding onto
a bamboo pole. The truck lumbered through endless Hanoi
streets, another truck in front of it with a spotlight on him,
another one following, filled with journalists. Crowds
gathered on every street at the urgings of the Big Brother
loudspeakers, chanting at him and throwing things. Warm
urine covered one side of his face. Feces impacted on the
bamboo rail near his hand. The crowd periodically surged
against the truck, forced back by troops with bayonets. But
even Red Lesczynski could tell the whole thing was staged.
The demonstrators were somehow flat, mechanicaL They
looked sideways, for their controllers, as often as they did at
him. Wonderful stuff for pictures. Red Lesczynski on display.
Hanoi was actually a beautiful city. He preoccupied him-
40
in leg irons, laughing as he urinated and shit on himself.
For ten days they allowed his wounds to fester, until his
legs were swollen and the gashes had turned black, the blisters splitting and draining onto the floor, as if he were a
frankfurter on a spittle over a hot fire. For ten days they
worked the ropes, tightening them and loosening them to
regulate his pain, until he developed infected blisters that
would make permanent scars, his "varsity stripes" along
his wrists and upper arms. For ten days he saw no one but
the guards, heard no voices but Vietnamese, found himself locked inside a seven-foot-square repository of darkness and filth that made him wish over and over that he
could merely die and see the end of it.
And after ten days, he found himself writing with
numbed fingers the words that they dictated into his delirious, semideadness:
I. I condemn the United States Government for its aggressive war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
2. I have encroached upon the air space of the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam.
3. I am a war criminal.
4. I have received humane and lenient treatment from
the people and the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
SUMMER 1983
�Truth-Telling and the Iliad
Douglas Allanbrook
The terrible word truth implies a parity between what
we see and what we say. There are two books which most
vividly exhibit this quality of truth. These two books are
the Iliad and Thucydides' history. I sometimes think that
they are the only two that do so consistently. Both books
reflect in their words and accounts, speeches and stories,
the real that is in front of our eyes and that is so difficult to
own up to or to talk about. It would be too much to attempt to talk about both of these incomparable books, and
tonight I shall talk only about the Iliad. It would be too
much to attempt in an hour to talk with any kind of completeness about the Iliad, and I shall merely try to fix your
attention upon the salient features of the poem's words,
similes, Gods, and story. The thesis underlying the pointing out is the traditional one that the Iliad is the truest and
most famous poem because of its unvarying and harsh vision, its unwavering eye. The singer of the poem never
turns aside into the justification of Gods, cities, or individual men. He tells the truth as he see it. His poem is the
artifact of things as they are.
Everyone who talks about Homer is indebted to the po·
et's commentators throughout the ages. A lecture of)acob
Klein's focused my attention on the dimensions and passion of the story of Achilles and Zeus. I have also been influenced in what I have to say by two modern writers on
the Iliad, Redfield and Whitman, and have used certain of
their observations, though disagreeing with certain of
their conclusions. The writer who looms hugely on the horizon of any talk about Homer, and who is Homer's most
important critic, is Plato. This lecture certainly disagrees
with his criticisms, all the more so as it is clear that Plato
loved and revered the poem.
The beginning of the road through the poem will be to
look at words, at nouns which name things; then Homer's
similes will be examined; next proper names and lists and
Douglas Allanbrook is a composer and tutor at St. John's College, An":
napolis, Md. His most recent works arc a "Serenade for Piano and Orchestra" and a set of three "Love and Death Songs" for high voice and
chamber ensemble.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
catalogues; next the names of the Gods and what they illuminate; and finally the story itself as it illuminates the men
and gives them to us as models for our own looking in gen·
era!. There may be a certain madness in this method of
looking at things; generally when we talk about things we
argue about them, justify them, or attempt to shove them
into the artificial frame of a problem to be solved. Homer
is not rhetorical, and language talking about him should
not be either, although it is well nigh impossible to talk in
any way consonant with his purity and passion.
Homer names everything he sees and has lots of time at
his disposal. He has a lovely flexible hexameter to fit his
words into, and while his grammar is simple, his vocabulary is enormous. Everything to be seen is named specifically. Reading the poem at random one finds words for
yoke-rings for oxen, for two-handled goblets, and a word
for the tiller of a boat which is always in the plural because
the boats he talks about had two tillers. When Odysseus
sails back with Chryse in Book I, returning her to her father, all the details of the docking are spelled out:
But Odysseus
meanwhile drew near to Chryse conveying the sacred
hecatomb.
These when they were inside the many-hollowed harbor
took down and gathered the sails and stowed them in the
black ship,
let down mast by the forestays, and settled it in the mast
crutch
easily, and rowed her with oars to the mooring.
They threw over the anchor stones and made fast the sterncables.
[!, 430-436]
When Priam in Book XXIV comes to Achilles' shelter all
details of the wagon which will convey Hector's body back
to Troy are named:
... and they in terror at the old man's scolding
hauled out the easily running wagon for mules, a fine thing
new-fabricated, and fastened the carrying basket upon it.
41
�They took away from its peg the mule yoke made of
boxwood
with its massive knob, well fitted with guiding rings and
brought forth
the yoke lashing (together with the yoke itself) of nine
cubits
and snugged it well into place upon the smooth-polished
wagon-pole
at the foot of the beam, then slipped the ring over the peg,
and lashed it
with three turns on either side to the knob, and afterwards
fastened it all in order and secured it under a hooked guard.
carrion dogs see is a mystery. You recall the opening of the
poem:
[XXIV, 265-74]
[1, 1-7]
Achilles' shelter where the fateful meeting with Priam
takes place is described minutely:
It is not clear that birds and dogs see what we see, and for
us their sight seems pitiless. Certainly as the opening of
the poem sings, they are always present, looking from on
high as the vultures do, or circling the edges on ground
level like the dogs.
Nothing is said about these objects named; they are
named as what they are, and not so much written about as
presented. What is seen is named specifically as what it is
when it reveals itself to sight. It is not that a vase is twohandled, it's a two-handled vase; it is not that a cauldron is
unfired, it is an unfired cauldron; it is not that a chest is
made of cedar, it is a cedar chest. Even more clearly we
never see a sword, we see a bronze sword; we never see
red, we see a red fire. Direct perception is always correct, it
cannot lie. The stick seen under water does appear
crooked, and it would be false in this primary sense we are
talking about to say that it was straight. It is crooked to our
vision, and something would be wrong with the world if it
were not. Sentences that remain true to this firstness or
primacy of vision as imaged in a word are always indicative. Nouns in such sentences indicate things. They are
placed in their sentences in time as objects are in space.
This is language approaching the state of painting, while
simultaneously, in this poem, the words are being sung. A
painting argues nothing, proves no point. Music although
in time, and an aspect of language, argues nothing, proves
no points. Paintings and music see and hear for us. Similarly with so many of the words and sentences of the Iliad;
they argue nothing, they prove nothing, they say clearly
what is seen in a perpetual and vivid present, in moments
of firstness and primary sensing, moments that are the opposite of the infinite and the unbounded, that are crystallized facets in the eye of attention focused on each object.
There is no reality worth a damn unless it is attended to,
and attention must be fixed with a word that is an image.
The sentences in the Iliad are almost all indicative. The
sun is out, and there are no nebulous futures or contraryto-fact conditions. Nothing is hypothesized, nothing is abstracted, nothing needs to be proved, as there are no problems to be solved and there is no path of discourse which
leads from or goes under what is in front of us.
Certain special words in the Iliad occur over and over
... a towering
shelter the Myrmidons had built for their king, hewing
the timbers of pine, and they made a- roof of thatch above it
shaggy with grass that they had gathered out of the
meadows;
and around it made a great courtyard for their king, with
hedgepoles
set close together; the gate was secured by a single doorpiece
of pine, and three Achaians could ram it home in its socket
and three could pull back and open the huge door-bar;
three other
Achaians, that is, but Achilleus all by himself could close it.
[XXIV, 448-56]
After the death of Hector, when Achilles thinks of
"shameful treatment for glorious Hector", everything is
named:
In both of his feet at the back he made holes by the
tendons
in the space between ankle and heel, and drew thongs of
ox-hide through them,
and fastened them to the chariot so as to let the head drag.
[XXII, 396-98]
As we the listeners to the poem follow the action of the
story and listen to the words, it is as if we were looking
down on the plain in front ofTroy.lt is as if the names, the
nouns, the substantives, were glinting in the sunshine. All
the objects in the bright space between the blackhulled
boats and the Skaian Gates glitter and shine; they reveal
themselves to our eyes as if we were movie cameras or vultures or dogs. The art of Homer is like the movies; there is
the camera eye, the selection of objects to be photographed, the quick shifts of scene from the beach to the
interior of a house in Troy, the close-ups and the dialogue.
Strictly speaking, a camera sees nothing; it records for a
director who has a story to tell. What exactly vultures and
42
Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the
Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong
souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the wil1 of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.
SUMMER 1983
�again. Each occurrence of the word is specific and apt in
its naming. But in its manifold occurrences the word casts
a web of meaning which links together all of the occurrences. The most notable of such w6rds is the word "fire."
In Book I the pyres of the dead Achaians consume the
bodies of those stricken of Apollo's plague. In Book V
when Diomedes begins his day of glory Pallas Athene
"made weariless fire blaze from his shield and helmet" (V,
4). Hector's funeral is conducted with quiet finality, and
his body burns accompanied by the proper lamentations
of his family and his city. Fire finally reaches the boats of
the Achaians and accomplishes the plan of Zeus for Achilles' glory. When Hector is dead on the ground, killed by
Achilles and the trickery of Athenc, the Achaians remember that fire:
And the other sons of the Achaians came running about
him,
and gazed upon the stature and on the imposing beauty
of Hektor; and none stood beside him who did not stab
him;
and thus they would speak one to another, each looking at
his neighbor:
"See now, Hektor is much softer to handle than he was
when he set the ships ablaze with the burning firebrand."
[XXII, 369-74]
Patroklos' body is consumed by fire together with the
bodies of the twelve young Trojans slaughtered by Achilles for the greater glory of his friend, and Achilles circles
the pyre dragging Hector's body by the heels. In the terrifying climax of the poem Achilles stands on the ditch and
bellows, his head encircled with a nimbus of fire. He
strikes terror into the hearts of the Trojans, who well sec in
it their own destruction. Achilles is like fire, short-lived, destructive, gleaming, and irresistible, a pile of ashes at the
end-"consumcd by that which it was nourished by," to
speak as our best poet speaks. Achilles also looks like fire.
In Book XXII, just before the end of Hector, Achilles
closes in on him "like the flare of blazing fire" (XXII, 13 5).
The word "fire" becomes more than the sum of its individual instances. It becomes part of the meaning of the
whole poem as we see the work of fire and the lives of the
heroes, and the heat of the battle, and the burning of
corpses, and the sacrifices to the gods, and the certain future fire which will consume Troy and finally cast young
Astyanax, Hector's son, to instant death over the walls.
The meaning of such a word is what we mean, I suppose,
by the word "symbolic." The word is in each specific instance precise, but in its many instances its meaning
spreads abroad to encompass a whole network of signification. We grasp the enormity of its meaning without demonstration or argument. It exhibits itself, and shines in our
eyes.
One word, according to authorities, is dangerous to utter. The first word of the poem, the subject of the poem in
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the objective case, is a special holy word, a "tabu." The
word is, of course, 1'-~""· the wrath of Achiles which will
bring manifold destruction, etc. It is a word that is reserved
for Achilles and the gods; it names a brooding and potential power. It always presages some terrifying future. It is
hardly adventitious that 1'-~"" is the first word in this poem
whose story has a tension and a resolution that is as clearly
aimed as the loosing of an arrow toward a target. In the
network of meaning in the poem it is clear that this sacred
"wrath" is like fire. Any ordinary wrath blazes up like a
fire, but this wrath is like a holy fire, which is not to be
gazed at any more than the head of a Gorgon is. Through
it the will of Zeus is accomplished, and many heroes
slaughtered. The word occurs very rarely in the poem,
while the word fire is ever-present in the fabric of the
story. The word is avoided, although one can circle around
it by talking of things that are like it or by finding circumlocutions that glance toward its meaning. The meaning of
the word is the story itself, as the poet clearly announces in
his invocation to the goddess.
Vision and the naming of things, or seeing and saying,
have yet another aspect which has been hidden and only
hinted at in what has been said so far about the Iliad. We
see only what we pay attention to, and the poet pays close
attention. We see a particular object only by coming to it
from something else or by going from it to something else.
The specialness of what we see is not only that it is a brazen sword with a golden handle, but that it is different
from anything else in its very particularity. It is also different from anything that is next to it, or indeed it could not
be seen. It may be like something, but must always remain
different. Words used truthfully reflect this, and that is
why Homer constantly uses similes and very rarely employs metaphors. It is, after all, a special kind of lie to say
that my love is a rose. She is a girl and she is like a rose, or
better like a red, red rose. Achilles is not a fire, he is like a
fire, and he docs not fight water, but battles with a special
river which runs along the edge of the battlefield and
which has one name which is employed by the gods, the
Xanthos, and another name, the Skamandros, which is
used by humans. It is clear that fire and water are antithetical, but it is in the samenesses and differences presented at
once in a simile that vision is both clarified and respected
for what it is. To be sure, there are a few metaphors in
Homer. People sleep "their brazen sleep," "night wraps
up their eyes," or someone is called "the scourge of Zeus."
Similes, however, are the ever-present figure of speech in
Homer, and they range from the simplest ones to comparisons of enormous complexity and irony. Simple similes
give flashes of vision as the images dart from like to like
while preserving the necessity of seeing things as separate.
Ajax carries his shield "like a wall." Athene and Hera walk
into battle eager to help the Achaians "like shivering
doves." Men attack "like lions"; their armor "glitters like
the thunder flash of Zeus."
Complicated similes reveal more, and Agamemnon is
43
�never seen more clearly than in the simile near the beginning of Book XI. Let us read it:
And as a lion seizes the innocent young of the running
deer, and easily crunches and breaks them caught in the
strong teeth
when he has invaded their lair, and rips out the soft heart
from them,
and even if the doe be very near, still she has no strength
to help, for the ghastly shivers of fear are upon her also
and suddenly she dashes away through the glades and the
timber
sweating in her speed away from the pounce of the strong
beast;
so there was no one of the Trojans who could save these
two
from death, but they themselves were running in fear from
the Argives.
[XI, 113-121]
Agamemnon has just killed and stripped Isos and Antiphos, two sons of Priam. Achilles had previously caught
them on the slopes of Mt. Ida and released them for ransom. This time Agamemnon struck Isos in the chest above
the nipple and hit Antiphos by the ear with the sword, and
eagerly stripped off their armor, which armor he had seen
before when Achilles had brought them in from Ida. Before this we have heard Agamemnon's fierce words in
Book VI when his brother Menelaos was moved to pity a
Trojan:
"Dear brother, o Menelaos, are you concerned so tenderly
with these people? Did you in your house get the best of
treatment
from the Trojans? No, let not one of them go free of sudden
death and our hands; not the young man child that the
mother carries
still in her body, not even he, but let all of Ilion's
people perish, utterly blotted out and unmourned for."
[VI, 55-60]
This side of Agamemnon was present to the listener before the simile in Book XI, but what the listener to the simile becomes startlingly aware of is a truth about Agamemnon as he is placed in juxtaposition with Achilles. What
was begun and seen in Book I when the two men stood
apart in their bitter quarrel is now made manifest. Agamemnon may be a bumbling king of kings, an unsure
leader of the host, too big for his boots, but for all that he is
a killer, like the lion of the simile. Earlier in Book XI you
will recall his shield with the face of the Gorgon upon it,
the symbol of fear and trembling and horror. We never
have physical description of the heroes in the Iliad; we
don't know the color of their eyes or of their hair. Only
ugly Thersites with his peculiar eggplant-shaped head is
described in physical detail. We know Achilles is beautiful,
44
and that Priam is so in another way. We envisage great
Ajax, the wall of the Achaians, and noble Diomedes. The
great, vacillating, and violent Agamemnon is always
present to our eyes after this simile, all the more so as he is
remembered by being placed in conjunction with Achilles,
who had spared the lives of the two boys that Agamemnon
is here shown slaughtering as a beast slaughters.
Ten books later Homer portrays Achilles slaughtering
yet another boy whom he had previously ransomed. This
is the near-monstrous book in which Achilles butchers
Trojans beside the river Skamandros and then launches
himself against the divine river itself. You recall what he
says to the boy before killing him:
"So, friend, you die also. Why all this clamour about it?
Patroklos also is dead, who was better by far than you are.
Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid
and born of a great father, and the mother who bore me
immortal?
Yet even I have also my death and my strong destiny,
and there shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a noontime
when some man in the fighting will take the life from me also
either with a spearcast or an arrow flown from the
bowstring.''
[XXI, 106-lll]
If we were to construct a simile ourselves it would not be a
bestial one; with all of our later stories in us we might well
liken Achilles to an Angel of Death, but we would never
liken him to a lion.
Let us now examine another simile earlier on in Book XI
than the one we just looked at. The two armies are facing
each other, drawn up in two lines:
And the men, like two lines of reapers who, facing each
other,
drive their course all down the field of wheat or of barley
for a man blessed in substance, and the cut swathes drop
showering,
so Trojans and Achaians driving in against one another
cut men down, nor did either side think of disastrous panic.
[XI, 67-71]
Here our seeing is wrenched from the world of war to the
world of peace. Reaping a harvest is the co-operative work
of a group of men, and the grain is a blessing, and bread is
life-giving and puts strength into the body, and the man
who owns the field is blessed in his substance. Two things
that look alike-the lopping-off of stalks of grain and the
cutting down of human bodies-are both hard work. The
result of one is fruit and nurture, and of the other desolation. We of course use Homer's simile constantly, but as a
metaphor. We speak of "death, the grim reaper," or of infantry soldiers being "mowed down" by machine~gun fire,
or even push our metaphorical perversity so far as to speak
of "body counts" as if we were numbering the stalks of
grain that fall or counting our merchandise. Metaphors
SUMMER 1983
�conceal the truth often, if they are not downright lying.
Men are not lions and bodies are nOt for counting. No man
is an anonymous unit to be counted. Agamemnon is like a
lion slaughtering a young deer, and foot soldiers killing
each other in facing lines are like reapers. The seeing of
one thing as like another thing to the eye but also as startlingly different to the intelligence reveals the character of
what is seen. In this grim poem of violence, wrath, and war
there is never a simile which lulls us into acceptance of war
as something ordinary, never a passage which lets us get
used to it. It is always seen for what it is, the field of hateful
Ares, not the field of peaceful harvest. The difference between the scenes of peace and the scenes of war make the
battlefield agonizingly clear. War is not excellent, although
heroes gain glory in it. The poem, in its truthfulness, never
suggests for a moment that we will ever be without war.
The famous simile at the end of Book VIII, so often
commented upon throughout the ages, accomplishes a
vaster kind of seeing by means of likeness and difference.
Book VIII, as you will recall, is where Zeus puts into play
his plan for Achilles' glory. The Achaians will be driven
back temporarily and Hector will be unleashed. Hector has
just boasted of what he has and will accomplish, and has
voiced the poignant and overweening wish:
"Oh, if I only
could be as this in all my days immortal and ageless
and be held in honour as Athene and Apollo are honoured
as surely as this oncoming day brings evil to the Argives."
[VIII, 538-41]
The first likeness and difference here is between stars and
fires; another likeness and difference arises as one gazes
upon the still moon-and-star-lit landscape and the thousand fires burning in the plain between the river and the
ships. Quiet and peace envelop both the plain and the
landscape. Stars and fires both glitter, and both seem uncountable in their numbers; there are a thousand fires and
each has fifty men, and who can count the stars. The
beauty and terror and quiet which are behind the truth of
the view come all from the awful differences. The landscape is a world of peace inhabited by a shepherd whose
heart is gladdened by the clarity of the night. The stars in
their purity and eternity, though shining, are the antithesis of the fires, which will be ashes as the day dawns and
destruction begins. We, the listeners, grasp the scene like
visitors from another realm, from another star-system,
knowing the past and the future; yet simultaneously we
are not from another realm or from another star-system,
but live on the plain, waiting anxiously for another dawn.
We are ourselves like a simile of sameness and difference
in our attending to the poem, as we are both like and unlike what we see.
A whole host of similes introduces the whole host of the
Achaians in Book II before the mighty catalogue unfolds
in all its specificity. First the gleam from their bronze dazzles the upper air as an obliterating fire lights up a vast
forest. Next, pouring from their ships and shelters with the
earth resounding under their feet and under the hooves of
their horses, they are likened to nations of birds, of geese,
of cranes, of swans settling in clashing swarms onto a water
meadow. The host takes position, thousands of armed
After this he sacrifices to the gods, but they "took no part
of it/ ... so hateful to them was sacred Ilion" (VIII, 55051). The simile is as follows:
So with hearts made high these sat night-long by the
outworks
of battle, and their watch fires blazed numerous about them.
As when in the sky the stars about the moon's shining
are seen in all their glory, when the air has fallen to stillness,
and all the high places of the hills are clear, and the shoulders
out-jutting,
and the deep ravines, as endless bright air spills from the
heavens
and all the stars are seen, to make glad the heart of the
shepherd;
such in their numbers blazed the watchfires the Trojans were
burning
between the waters of Xanthos and the ships, before Ilion.
A thousand fires were burning there in the plain, and beside
each
one sat fifty men in the flare of the blazing firelight.
And standing each beside his chariot, champing white barley
and oats, the horses waited for the dawn to mount to her high
place.
[VIII, 553-65]
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
men, as leaves and flowers appear in their season. Next
they stand in such numbers, their hearts burning to break
the Trojans, as multitudinous nations of swarming insects
which, avid for milk, drive hither and thither about the
sheepfolds in spring when the milk splashes in the milkpails. Only this last simile switches to the world of men
and peaceful human work. The order has been: obliterating forest fire, nations of birds, leaves and flowers in sea-
son, nations of insects about the stalls of shepherds. The
focus finally narrows down to the leaders of the host, and
last of all to the leader of the leaders, Agamemnon:
These, as men who are goatherds among the wide
goatflocks
easily separate them in order as they take to the pasture,
thus the leaders separated them this way and that way
toward the encounter, and among them powerful
Agamemnon,
with eyes and head like Zeus who delights in thunder,
like Ares for girth, and with the chest of Poseidon;
like some ox of the herd pre-eminent among the others,
a bull, who stands conspicuous in the huddling cattle.
[II, 474-81]
This whole great list of similes, with its carefully controlled
45
�order of seeing things, and all of the other similes we have
looked at, have one characteristic which is so simple that it
almost escapes notice. Everything is compared to something that is always as it is, whether the comparison is to
objects or animals, to activities or to landscapes, or to the
recurrence of spring: lions, reapers, goatherds at their
rounds, nations of birds and insects, forest fires, stars. The
great succession of similes just looked at in Book II has as
its function the focusing, the funneling of our attention to
the great list of proper names and place-names which follows in the Catalogue. Proper names, of course, are all
over the Iliad, not merely listed once in the Catalogue. No
one in this poem is anonymous, whether he be an
Achaian, a Trojan, or an outlander speaking some outlandish speech. No one in this poem dies without being
named, and his name is attached to where he came from.
In this the poem is true to all of us. We may not all be
brothers, but we all have names and parents and were born
someplace, and to ignore this is to lie in the blackest manner known to lying. No one is a number, and people are
not to be counted, they are to be named. There are many
warriors in this poem named at the moment of their death
who otherwise play no part in the story:
So Iphidamas fell there and went into the brazen slumber,
unhappy, who came to help his own people, and left his
young wife
a bride, and had known no delight from her yet, and given
much for her.
First he had given a hundred oxen, then promised a thousand
head of goats and sheep, which were herded for him in
abundance.
Now Agamemnon, son of Atreus, stripped him ...
[XI, 2 41-46]
Or consider poor Gorgythion, named by name and descent, and immortalized by a simile:
Gorgythion the blameless, hit in the chest by an arrow;
Gorgythion whose mother was lovely Kastianeira,
Priam's bride from Aisyme, with the form of a goddess.
He bent drooping his head to one side, as a garden poppy
bends beneath the weight of its yield and the rains of
springtime;
so his head bent slack to one side beneath the helm's weight.
[VIII, 303-308]
If I were to tell the truth about the war that I knew, it
would certainly not be an account of the so-called strategy
of the vain and posturing commanding general. Rather I
would tell of a boy from the tobacco-growing country of
the upper Connecticut river in Ivlassachusetts who married a young virgin from his own town a month before sailing, and who met his death quickly, shot from behind by a
German patrol.
The Catalogue in Book II is the very triumph of specific-
46
ity, a great parade of proper names and places drawn up in
the plain for the listener to hear about. The Muses themselves are invoked as being goddesses who know all things,
and who remember all those who came beneath Ilion. It is
as if I, in telling the terrible story of Gettysburg and Antietam, were to call on some recording angel to help me with
the resounding catalogue of names and places from Portland, Maine, to Chattanooga, Tennessee. The catalogue
has the endless fascination of an exhaustive list; the listener checks off every place he has ever head of, and learns
some new ones. A Canadian humorist once commented
that the Catalogue of Ships in Homer had all the dignity
and beauty of the New York Telephone Directory. To
which one can only reply that the Telephone Book is fascinating in its very specificity; it is better than imagination,
or rather it feeds the imagination, and fills the reader with
wonder and terror at the thought of all those names, nationalities, streets, and boroughs.
So far in this lecture tonight we have examined names
of objects, names of animals, names of artifacts. Certain
names such as <lfire" and <lwater" assumed a vaster meaning, even though each instance of their use was specific.
We talked finally of proper names, proper nouns, people
rescued from anonymity as they died and were named. We
have yet to see the truth of the named heroes, Achilles and
Hector and Ajax, the meaning their names assume for us,
although much was revealed about the name Agamemnon
by the lion simile. To some sceptics it may seem suspect to
talk about the name of Achilles as having meaning. Achilles' mother is a goddess, and most of the other heroes are
of divine descent. Is there any real referent for us in such
names? Was Achilles ever? He's not Alcibiades, or Caesar,
or General Patton. Can the name of a person which is not
linked to a real person have any relation to the truth? The
names of the gods disturb listeners more than the names
of the heroes. This may be more so nowadays that in previous ages, though no one was more upset by the names of
the gods than Socrates. What are the names of the gods
referring to? Are they merely allegorical names? Dare we
even give names to gods? The names of the gods must
have been like a thorn in the side of many of your thoughts
and discussions about Homer. By a kind of reversal of
meaning you may well have been put off by the fact that
the gods appear so real; they are married, they have domestic quarrels, brothers and sisters detest each other,
they have mansions, they eat together; goodness as such
seems to have little to do with them, though they certainly
exhibit specific excellences. Another knot to disentangle
in the Iliad is that great Zeus is so different from the other
gods. He stands apart from the other immortals with a divinity and power which Achilles' appears akin to. Zeus'
dire silence throughout the long tension of much of the
poem, until Achilles' day arrives and the plan of Zeus unfolds in its double-edged fulfillment, is the very will of the
poem, as the poet tells us in the opening lines. Even this
great mystery, Zeus, however, is hoodwinked by his wife,
SUMMER 1983
�and his threats to her and to the rest of his family are never
carried out. Another aspect of the g0ds which may disturb
our listening to the story as true may be best stated by remembering that Herodotus says that Homer and Hesiod
named and defined the gods. Certain listeners may be
used to considering the gods as formless, as Good, as not
being something that was written up by a poet; in other
words many listeners have been used to the gods as being
real by the very fact of their not being like anything we see
and by their not being embodied in a fiction. The gods are
called the "deathless" ones, the immortals, and it is by examining closely this name that I propose that we get closer
to the truth of their names. This real name, the "deathless
ones," is a name that speaks of a lack of something. They
don't die, and we do. It is not merely that they are bigger,
more beautiful, and more powerful than we are; most importantly they are other than mortal. In all of this the gods
are like similes, and our vision of ourselves and the world
as it is is sharpened by the presence of the gods. I am in no
way saying that they are similes, and God knows they are
not metaphors. They are like similes in that they sharpen
our attention to what lies around us. The fact that they are
without death but like us gives their actions at times a kind
of frivolity. War is a comedy for them; if Ares and Aphrodite are wounded in the battle before the walls of Ilion it is
only a kind of play which will be put right by their parents.
Artemis, the killer maiden, is spanked by her mother until
the deadly arrows fall out of her pockets.
The gods are like and unlike the listeners to the poem in
another way. They look down on the plain of Troy, and see
what goes on; they know the beginning, the middle, and
the end of the story, and enjoy it just as we do; and again
like us turn aside from it and go on about their own affairs.
They are the guarantors of the fiction. The difference
again is of course that they are "deathless," and their enjoyment is completely aesthetic, unsullied by suffering or
the approaching evening. The following short poem by
Emily Dickinson is not for them, though in some awful
way one suspects that they might appreciate it, as mere
aesthetes among us do:
I like a look of agony,
Because I know it's true;
Men do not sham convulsion,
Nor simulate a throe.
The eyes glaze once, and that is death.
Impossible to feign
The beads upon the forehead
By homely anguish strung.
The lives of the gods obviously can never be tragic; their
dangers and their wounds are only ripples on a surface.
Ichor runs in their veins, not blood, and they are nourished
with nectar and ambrosia. Their deathless light in the upper air makes the listener see more clearly the plain of
Troy and the slaughter and passion and travail which take
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
place there. They resemble the simile of the stars and the
campfires.
All seeing necessitates something different next to what
we see. We see a chair because it stops being a chair when
it is in place, and next to something else which is not a
chair, even if it be air. The limit of life is death, and we
apprehend mortality in the Iliad by watching the deathless
ones. We, the listeners, see what we are in the poem by
seeing what we are not, and the heroes of the poem itself
are always face to face with the deathless ones and with
death; they are descended from the deathless ones in half
their being, but receive no guarantees from their descent;
they have no insurance against the end of life. It is more
difficult to pin down what is revealed to us by the character of the gods. Ares may be the easiest one to talk about
first, even though he is related to no special hero in the
poem. He is sung of as despicable and quarrelsome, and he
changes sides from the Achaians to the Trojans. Athene in
Book V instructs Diomedes:
"Be not afraid of violent Ares,
that thing of fury, evil-wrought, that double-faced liar
who even now protested to Hera and me, promising
that he would fight against the Trojans and stand by the
Argives.
Now, all promises forgotten, he stands by the Trojans."
[V, 830-34]
He is accompanied by allegorical figures of Terror, Fear,
and Hate when we first meet him in Book IV, just before
Diomedes' great day. Zeus, his father, hates him. At the
end of Book V he says to his son:
"Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar.
To me you are most hateful of all gods who hold Olyrnpos.
Forever quarrelling is dear to your heart, wars and battles.
[V, 889-91]
In this poem where war is the daily doing of the heroes it is
a remarkable sign of the clear vision of the poet that the
god of war is associated with no single hero, and is shown
as a despicable, brazen, and howling youngster who bellows, and is worsted by his sister and hated by his father. It
cannot be merely that Ares represents one aspect of war,
defeat, and terror, as one noted commentator argues. Ares,
the god of war, is simply and clearly a vision of the nature
ofthe battlefield. No single hero is illuminated by him as is
Achilles by Zeus, or Paris by Aphrodite. This same vision
of war is present throughout Thucydides, and seems to
guide his hand as we watch the spectacle of barbarism unleashed upon Greece not by barbarians but by war. The
same vision enlivens the vivid scenes of the battle of Waterloo in Stendahl and the battle of Borodino in Tolstoy.
Ares has no favorites and takes no sides.
Apart from Ares, seeing what the gods are like means
looking harder at the person each is linked with. Helen is
not like Aphrodite when she says to her in Book III,
47
�'"Strange divinity! Why are you still so stubborn to beguile
me?"' (III, 399), and, later in the same speech:
"I am not going to him. It would be too shameful
I will not serve his bed, since the Trojan women hereafter
would laugh at me, all, and my heart even now is confused
with sorrows"
[III, 410-12]
Helen is humiliated by her goddess when she is told to repair to her chamber and Paris is scooped out of the battlefield and dumped into her bed. To the old men on the wall
she seems like a very goddess in her beauty, but within herself she is divided and at war with herself, and it takes Aphrodite's curses and anger to drive her to Paris' arms.
When Athene stays Achilles' hand in Book I at the
height of his murderous quarrel with Agamemnon, Achilles is already debating within his chest two courses. Again
the goddess is like and unlike him, and is seen by no other
man. She does not make him do what he does; she holds
him back from one course and points him to the other
course he had already been debating within.
Zeus and Achilles are alike in their loneliness, in their
withdrawal, and in their detachment and lucidity as they
view the plain and the battle. When Thetis comes to Olympos she finds Zeus apart from the others "retired at a distance" -a phrase used only of him and Achilles. The neardivine and excessive nature of Achilles' wrath is the blood
and heart of Zeus' plan, and Zeus, unlike Achilles, is the
mind of it; he is the guarantor of Achilles' glory. Zeus and
Achilles hold the tension of withdrawal throughout all the
mighty battles of the middle books. Only in furthering
Achilles' glory does Zeus stand apart from his family in
strife and threaten them, a parallel to Achilles' days in his
tent and his standing alone in his wrath even after the embassy of men closest to him. The difference between Zeus
and Achilles is the difference between the deathless one
and the death-haunted one. However alone Achilles is,
and however near to divinity he may be in his ruthlessness
and his wrath, he remains mortal. He is fallible at the moment of his greatest glory. The terror hidden behind Zeus'
nod of the head when he accedes to Thetis' petition, the
double-edged truth of his promise, lies all in Achilles' love
for Patroklos. The poet insists by the constant witness of
others on the lovable and gentle nature of Achilles' friend.
Briseis, the captured woman, bears most touching witness
to this in Book XIX. At the end of her lament for him she
says, "'Therefore I weep your death without ceasing. You
were kind always"' (XIX, 300). Greeks in a later age marvelled that Patroklos was older than Achilles, and yet so
beloved. Patroklos weeps for the fate of the other Achaians in front of Achilles, and Achilles' indecision in the face
of his friend leads him to give permission, the fatal permission to enter the battle, clad in the mighty armor of Achilles who loves him. This weakness of judgement is the beginning of the train of events which are sung of as the pit
48
of loneliness and detachment and ferocity. The irony of
his act is voiced by the poet in the unspeakable prayer of
Achilles to Zeus, Apollo, and Athene just before Patroklos'
departure:
"Father Zeus, Athene and Apollo, if only
not one of all the Trojans could escape destruction, not one
of the Argives, but you and I could emerge from the slaughter
so that we two alone could break Troy's hallowed coronal."
[XVI, 97-100]
Zeus has not tricked Achilles, he has stood behind and
deepened what was already present. Achilles is better and
deeper and more terrifying and monstrous than other men
just as Zeus is first among the gods. Achilles' wrath and his
pride go beyond the human range, but his everlasting
memory remains because of Patroklos, because he is, as
are other mortals, dependent upon another.
The gods, and especially Zeus, may indeed foresee what
they foresee, but all there is for them to foresee are men's
actions. Zeus foresees Patroklos' death, but Achilles'
judgement is responsible for it, and he is the fount of his
own suffering. The gods are the unchanging look of the
present state of affairs, which is the perpetual state of affairs.
The hardest pill of all to swallow in the poet's fiction is
the role of the gods in the deaths of Patroklos and Hector.
Theirs are the most important deaths to the story, and
they are the most touching and lovable of the heroes. Both
men are tricked by the gods, and at the end, defenseless,
they are slaughtered like pigs. Patroklos, dying, foresees
mighty Hector's death, and when that death comes in the
story the hero, again defenseless, tricked by Athene after
his nightmare run around the walls of Troy, falls. What is
the intent of the poet in presenting the deaths of these
two heroes in such a manner? The full weight of the meaning has to be faced and grappled with. The poem is peopled with heroes who gain their glory in battle and who
exhibit and are praised for their courage in mortal combat.
Their courage cannot consist in merely killing-that
would be bestial. Their excellence must consist in seeing
what death in battle is like and then facing it. The truth, as
presented by Homer in these scenes, with all the help of
the apparatus of Apollo's and Athcne's intervention, is
that the moment of defeat is the end of the story and the
story must end in defenselessness:
"No, deadly destiny, with the son of Leta, has killed me,
and of men it was Euphorbos; you are only my third slayer."
[XVI, 849-50]
says Patroklos to Hector. Hector, dying, says to Achilles:
"Be careful now; for I might be made into the god's curse
upon you on that day when Paris and Phoibos Apollo
destroy you in the Skaian gates, for all your valor."
[XXII, 358-60]
SUMMER 1983
�Achilles, the clearest seer of all, answers him:
'
"Die: and I will take my own death at whatever time
Zeus and the rest of the immortals choose to accomplish it."
is robbed by a small weakling, both should lie. Our ordinary daily life and our daily reading are enmeshed in a web
of rhetoric: our arguments, our constant justifications, the
man or of a cause. Aristotle in his book on rhetoric illus-
speeches we listen to, the sermons we attend to, the daily
editorial page, the puny talk of personalities that waver in
front of our eyes in the penumbra of our TV sets. As probable stories are the bread and butter of our daily existence,
Aristotle intends to exhibit a whole side of our being in his
rhetorical treatise. When in the Poetics he finds poetry
more philosophical than history, he intends to say that poetry is more general; but nearly in the same breath he observes that the poetic story must be probable, must be believable, or no one would be caught by it. We have insisted
that the Iliad is not rhetoric, but we must also insist that it
share with rhetoric the probability of its stories. Nothing
will work unless it appears probable. The enormous difference is that in the Iliad we begin with the story and end up
with the man, whereas in rhetoric we begin with the
man in the dock and then proceed to a probable story in
order to justify or accuse the prisoner. That is why it is possible to talk of an Achilles or an Ajax or of a David the
King, while it is so offensive to talk of a Napoleon or a
Michelangelo or an Alcibiades. Alcibiades and Napoleon
did particular things, and any historian who is not merely a
chronicler will argue about their doings after the fact of
the Battle of Waterloo or the Syracusan expedition, although he will falsify if he makes his account a necessary
and inevitable story. Waterloo could have been avoided,
and Alcibiades might well have taken Syracuse if he had
not gotten drunk on a certain evening in Athens. The poet
is under no such restraint. l-Ie tells stories that could happen, stories that arc truly probable and that unfold inexorably. Such a nexus of inevitability is the heart and soul of
fiction; it gives it its generality and its truth. It is like the
view of the gods from Olympos as they watch the plain of
Troy. It is what the word fate means in the poem. It is
what makes Homer's Iliad or true fiction in general applicable to the whole of things, and it is what takes such poems and books out the the realm of rhetoric and away from
the dreary round of one thing after another, and away
from the endless talk of justifying and accusing, buying
and selling, all under the whip of power and self-love.
Many have regarded the Iliad as if it were the Gorgon's
head~something too fraught with terror, too harsh and
grim, to be accepted as true and primary. It is easier to consider it merely as the first book to be met with, and to think
that later books will somehow deal with it, employing it as
the opening gambit in a long history of dialectical opposites, or to assume that somehow philosophy will have certain consolations which can soften or deal with the greatness and monstrosity of Achilles. I would propose, in
concluding this lecture, that we consider it both first and
primary among all books which the listener is acquainted
with. That Achilles is first and primary in the poem is reflected in the whole sophisticated structure of the work.
trates a side of this by noting that when a large, strong man
He is first in courage, truthfulness, strength, beauty, ter-
[XXII, 365-66]
Courage is defined by seeing and facing such moments in
the imagination, even before they happen, and understanding that the gods are no help at the end. When one
man kills another in battle, the one killed has nowhere to
turn; the end is slaughter. The gods at such a moment are
merely the bright noonday sun beating down upon the
deadly killing place in the space between the city and the
ships.
It is only at the end of this lecture that the most important and revealing aspects of the Iliad's truth-telling
emerge. An entry into this last consideration of the poem
will be to say what the poem is, and what the poem is not.
It is a story, but it is not rhetoric; no appearances are saved.
It is a fiction which exposes things, and its exposition is
never an apology or an argument or a hypothesis. Milton,
great arguer and lawyer, and also great poet, calls upon his
muse in these words:
... what is in me dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That, to the height of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
[Paradise Lost, I, 22-26]
Milton intends to be an advocate and to save his client by
means of his poem. There is nothing to be saved in the
Iliad, only something to be seen. Certainly we listeners
may argue for all generations about Achilles, but Homer
has done his job when he has told his story, and he is vastly
uninterested in dialectic.
The truth of the name Achilles is the story of Achilles,
and the story is not rhetorical. We don't see the heroes until they act, and they act in a story that is composed, that is
a fiction composed by Homer. The story of Achilles is not
like a story delivered in court by a lawyer in defense of his
client. Achilles is not on trial. The story is not a probable
fiction after the existent fact of Achilles sitting in the dock
of justice. It is not history either, although that the Trojan
war was fought and that Achilles may have been there
lends credibility to the fiction. In a trial both the prosecuting and the defense lawyers will try with all their art to tell
a probable story about the man in the dock, a story which
will support or lend credence to an action already committed. The man on trial is accused of some crime, and a probable story or account of his actions will give an appearance
of truth to his guilt or to his innocence. This is the essential use of rhetoric: to tell a probable story in defense of a
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
49
�ror, and friendship. He demands and receives more glory
than any other hero, and loses what· he cherishes most at
the moment that he is glorified by the gods. After Patroklos' death he is not present on the scene as other men
are. His loneliness and wrath then have a detachment and
ferocity beyond all ordinary human bounds. Yau will recall
what he says to the boy he slaughters by the river. After
Patroklos' death he eats no human food until he sups with
Priam in Book XXIV. He is both great and monstrous, a
disturbing fact which piety would have be otherwise. He
manages the funeral games with perspicuity and tact, seeing all the heroes for what they are, and even awarding
Agamemnon a prize while refraining from asking him to
compete. When he and Priam look at each other and admire each other, they both see things with a clarity born of
suffering and passion, and Priam kisses the man-killing
hands of Achilles, the hands that killed his son, and Achilles lifts the body of Hector into the smooth-rolling cart.
There is no conversion or turning around of Achilles in
Book XXIV; he quietly and simply sees steadily and truly
with no illusions. He will fight again and die, and so will
Priam, and the world is as it is, and nothing will change. He
sees as a god sees, but remains a mortal. At the same time,
Achilles' primacy in the poem in no way impugns the
other heroes; in particular the civilization of the poem
makes Hector and Priam figures that one cherishes, and
even loves. Both of them are men one would choose to live
with in a city, or in the arena of political life. There is no
Goliath or Satan or Turnus in this story. Ajax is a paradigm
of strength and courage and fidelity, and his name remains
with us as such. Odysseus is better at counsel than Achilles. Diomedes has his incomparable day of glory. Nestor's
loquaciousness is the virtue of his age, and there is wisdom
in stopping action to listen to the past, though it be tedious
at times.
The proposition that I proposed submits that the poem
50
itself has the same kind of primacy among all the books
you read that Achilles has in the poem. I do not intend this
merely historically, although it is perfectly clear that the
book has an enormous importance in its chronological
firstness. How marvelous it would be to have Alexander
the Great's copy of the Iliad as edited by his teacher Aristotle. Rome's greatest poet, Virgil, had to face the Iliad as
if it were the Gorgon's head. Plato had to tame Achilles,
and face down the truth of the poem and the power of its
beauty. Homer is like an ever-present star on the horizon
for Dante and Milton. All of the above mentioned facts
from the history of literature and philosophy are so, but
the primacy of the Iliad lies in its perennial freshness and
truth. It is about what impinges most importantly on anyone, if he will but look around. There are other books one
might choose if he were running a city, as one might prefer
Hector to Achilles in running a city hall or state. There are
other books which have the sagacity and lie-telling abilities
of Odysseus, and there are many Nestor-like books of prudence, full of memory. The Iliad does not eliminate these
books any more than Achilles blots out the greatness of the
other heroes. For us in this eccentric little college, it is
rightfully the first book. Philosophy must come after.
It may have seemed trivial in matters of such importance to have talked so long about nouns, proper names,
similes, and story telling, and it is probably not consistent
with the spirit and greatness of the Iliad to be arguing in its
behalf. Homer has no ax to grind, no thesis to prove, and
the thunder of Zeus would strike him dead if he tried to
solve any problems. He is like a roving camera eye or an
omnipresent eagle, and only Shakespeare can match his
impartiality. In his poem the sun is always high noon, and
the angle of its light is a right angle. The virtues commensurate with its seeing are courage and truth-telling, and the
primacy of the poem shows that these indeed are the true
human excellences.
SUMMER 1983
�The Supreme Court and School
Desegregation: Brown v. Board of
Education Reconsidered
Murray Dry
I
"We conclude that in the field of public education the
doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." So wrote Mr.
Chief Justice Earl Warren, for a unanimous court in Brown
v. Board of Education, 1 the school segregation case, which
was decided on May 17, 1954. In his definitive history of
this case, Richard Kluger explained that "all the Supreme
Court had truly and at long last granted to the black man
was simple justice."
Now the law says that, like them or not, white America may
not humiliate colored Americans by setting them apart. Now
the law says that black Americans must not be degraded by
the state and their degradation used as an excuse to drive
them further down. 2
This apparently simple case has been surrounded by notoriety and controversy from the day it was decided. james
Reston reacted to the Court's reliance on social science evidence to establish the inherent inequality of segregation
with a day-after column in The New York Times entitled,
"A Sociological Decision: Court Founded its Segregation
Ruling on Hearts and Minds rather than Laws." Reston
said of the Court's work that it read "more like an expert
paper on sociology than a Supreme Court opinion"; it "rejected history, philosophy, and custom as the major basis
Murray Dry teaches political philosophy, American constitutional law,
and American political thought at Middlebury College (Vermont), where
he is a professor in the Department of Political Science. He has published work on the separation of powers, Congress, and the congressional
veto.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
for its decision and accepted instead justice Benjamin N.
Cardoza[sic]'s test of contemporary social justice." 3 Over
the years the meaning of the case was extended far beyond
its original legal scope. The Times, in its editorial on the
tenth anniversary of Brown, described the decision as ''significantly broaden[ing] the role of the judiciary in the defense of human rights."
How swiftly will we complete the arsenal of laws required to
provide effective safeguards against racial discrimination?
And, more fundamentally still, how fully, how peacefully, and
how fast will be accomplished the transformation of attitudes
necessary to make equality real and in every community
North and South?4
The expanding expectation from school desegregation to
the elimination of all racial discrimination to a broader
transformation of attitudes was repeated in the Times in
its extensive reporting on the twentieth anniversary of
Brown, but this time with a note of scepticism.
The question is whether the momentum generated by the activities of the last twenty years has set in motion an irreversible process which will almost automatically lead to racial justice in this country, as some whites seem to think, or whether,
as most blacks hold, the largest and hardest job is yet to be
done, and whites have quit the game before the first quarter
has even ended. 5
Other twenty-year appraisals of Brown revealed disagreement on its accomplishments. A black dentist from
Mississippi was quoted as saying: "We have accomplished
things in the past few years that I thought it might take
decades to achieve. Some of this is a result of white recog-
51
�nition of black voting power, but a lot of white people here
have had a change of heart." Black leaders Bayard Rustin,
Robert S. Browne, and Roy Wilkins expressed concern
about the gap between educated and uneducated blacks
and emphasized the need for more political and economic
power.
By 1974, if not the most surprising, perhaps the most
disturbing result of the school desegregation decisions,
and one requiring most serious consideration, was the phe-
nomenon of ~(white flight" in Northern metropolitan
school districts. Kenneth Clark, the black psychologist
whose studies on black children's self perceptions were
used by the NAACP in its litigation, and which were cited
by the Supreme Court, said: "the whole morality issue of
the school desegregation issue disappeared when it moved
North,"6 meaning support for the decision eroded as its
consequences were felt by Northern whites. Another ex·
planation for the condition of Northern metropolitan
school systems referred to "the hard facts of demography,
ethnicity, and the inexorable flux of human migration." 7
Alexander Bickel, late constitutional law scholar and
professor at Yale Law School, who was involved in the
original Brown decision as a clerk for justice Frankfurter,
supported the latter view in the New Republic in 1970.
Distinguishing desegregation, as the dismantling of dual
school systems, from actual integration, Bickel explained
how the combination of private schools plus racially sepa·
"Schools are socializing institutions. They arc the only in·
stitutions where all children are required to do so [sic]. If
we cannot desegregate education, I don't think we can de·
segregate anything." On the other hand, Constance Baker
Motley, who represented )ames Meredith in his bid to de·
segregate the University of Mississippi and who was a fed·
era] judge in 1974, said:
It seems today Brown has little practical relevance to central
city blacks. Its psychological and legal relevance has already
had its effect. Central city blacks seem more concerned now
with the political and economic power accruing from the new
black concentrations than they do with busing to effect
school desegregation. 11
Whichever explanation of "white flight" is preferred
and however one views the educational results, the num-
bers show more black elementary and secondary school
pupils in majority white schools in the South than in the
North or the border states in 1974. In the District of Columbia, the school system had become virtually all black
and the brightest black students had also left the public
schools .I'
Meanwhile, as the Supreme Court decided its first met·
ropolitan school district implementation cases-Char·
lotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina in 1971 and Denver,
Colorado, in 1973 13 -controversy over judicial power in-
areas permitted all but poor whites to flee from public
schools affected by court-ordered integration schemes. He
also noted that government and its intended beneficiaries
tensified. In the first case, the Court upheld a district
court order for dismantling a dual school system which in·
cluded busing pupils to approach a racial balance guideline. Because this decision disregarded the provision of ti·
tie IV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act defining desegregation
were at cross purposes: while the court and HEW were re-
as the assignment of pupils without regard to race, and ex-
zoning and pairing Southern schools to integrate them,
black leaders in Northern cities were trying to decentralize
come racial imbalance, it produced numerous Congressio-
rated residential patterns in mainly northern metropolitan
plicitly prohibiting the assignment of students to over·
school systems to gain community control. 8
nal proposals to restrict the Supreme Court's jurisdiction
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission took a very different
view of the Brown mandate. In the conclusion to its 1976
Report, the Commission acknowledged no distinction be·
tween integration and desegregation, denied that the
courts were eliminating anything other than de jure segregation, denied that pupil assignment for racial balance had
become the Brown mandate, and simply affirmed the con·
stitutional right to equal educational opportunity. The dif·
ficulty with this formulation was that while it denied that
desegregation had become a mandate for racial balance in
the public schools, its only test of the extent of desegrega·
over school desegregation cases. In the second case, the
tion in the nation's schools was numerical.9
The different views about the Brown mandate in the
1970s reflected different views of education. The Coleman Report on Equal Educational Opportunity 10 ques·
tioned the link between integration and educational
achievement. The Civil Rights Commission and scholars
who rejected the Coleman Report viewed integrated
Supreme Court upheld a district court order to institute
a district-wide remedy-involving pupil assignment
throughout the district for racial balance-on the basis of a
finding of segregative intent by the school board in one
part of the district, notwithstanding the absence of any
history of a dual school system. This case produced the
first dissent, that by justice Rchnquist, and every major
desegregation case thereafter has produced a divided
Court.
As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of Brown v.
Board of Education, the confusion over its mandate and
the extent to which it has been fulfilled, controversy over
the actions of the Supreme Court and federal district
courts, and concerns over education have not abated. The
Supreme Court is still finding racially segregated systems
that have not been dismantled, the federal government is
still bringing suits for desegregation, and Congress is still
schooling as a socializing experience essential for racial
trying to restrict the courts' powers to order busing for ra-
harmony in the United States. The Supreme Court ex·
pressed this view in its Brown opinion, and the Staff Direc·
tor of the Civil Rights Commission reaffirmed it in 1974:
cial balance. In addition, the gap between the educational
52
achievements of blacks and whites has not been narrowed,
and the National Commission on Excellence in Education
SUMMER 1983
�has recently issued a report arguing that "the educational
foundations of our society arc presently being eroded by a
rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a
nation and a people." 14
To mark the upcoming thirtieth anniversary of Brown, I
propose a reconsideration of the Supreme Court's opinion
in the school desegregation cases. I do this for two related
reasons: the importance of the issues in the original cases
and the connection between the opinion handed down
and the subsequent controversy over the case. I shall argue
that Brown was a great but flawed judicial achievement
and that the flaws were avoidable and have made a great
political task even more difficult. The flaws concern the
following topics: (1) the exercise of judicial review, especially in light of problematic constitutional history and
precedents which must be overruled; (2) the distinction between de facto and de jure segregation and the importance
of the distinction for American government; and (3) the
meaning of education in America. My argument will show
that the treatment of precedents and principles was weak;
that the use of social science data unwittingly led to a confusion about the de facto/de jure distinction; and that the
Court accepted a flabby view of education which concealed different and often conflicting educational purposes. My reconsideration will proceed in the following order: the 14th amendment and the precedents, the cases
and the opinions, scholars' commentary, and finally a revised opinion.
II
All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United
States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall
make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or
immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any
State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without
due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdic·
tion the equal protection of the law. [14th Amendment, section 1]
The 14th Amendment and the Precedents
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyers who represented the litigants in the segregation cases faced two constitutional challenges: first, nothing in the language of the
14th amendment clearly prohibited school segregation,
and study of the Congressional debates surrounding the
amendment's ratification revealed lack of clarity at best
and no intention to prohibit school segregation at worst;
second, in 1896, the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson,
upheld a Louisiana statute providing "equal but separate"
accommodations on intrastate rail cars, on the grounds
that the law treated both races equally and the regulation
was reasonable in light of the customs of the people. The
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
alternative position was stated by the sole dissenter, Justice John Harlan, Sr., who argued that the intention of the
Civil War amendments was to remove the race line from
government. The most moving formulation of this position goes: "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither
knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of
civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law."l5 This
was an interpretation of the 13th and 14th amendments,
since the languages of the 13th was explicit only about
slavery or involuntary servitude-and it was stretching the
latter term to argue that segregation laws were includedand the 14th amendment made no reference to race. Still,
it was generally conceded that the purpose of the 14th
amendment was to protect the newly freed race against
discrimination in its civil rights. Furthermore, in an earlier
case, Strauder v. West Virginia, decided in 1880, the Supreme Court invalidated a law which excluded Negroes
from serving on juries in sweeping language which Harlan
was able to quote in support of his argument in Plessy.
The words of the amendment, it is true, are prohibitory, but
they contain a necessary implication of a positive immunity,
or right, to exemption from unfriendly legislation against
them distinctively as colored-exemption from legal discriminations, implying inferiority in civil society, lessening the se·
curity of their enjoyment of the rights which others enjoy,
and discriminations which are steps towards reducing them
to the condition of a subject race.l6
In the majority opinion in Plessy, Justice Brown narrowed the reach of the Strauder precedent by distinguishing between political and civil rights, which included the
right to serve on juries and, presumably, the right to vote
and the right to sue to make contracts, and social equality,
such as a right to be free from enforced segregation in
places of public accommodations. The Plessy majority's
position did have something in its favor, even though, as I
shall argue later, Justice Harlan's position stated the American standard and the deeper truth of the matter. Justice
Brown cited a Massachusetts case upholding segregated
schools and an Indiana case upholding laws forbidding intermarriage. While these cases were decided before the
14th amendment, it is doubtful that the framers of that
amendment intended their work to invalidate such laws.
Even the government's friend of the court brief in Brown,
which supported the litigants, acknowledged this:
In 1868 public schools had been hardly begun in many states
and were still in their infancy. School attendance was, as a
general matter, not compulsory. The Negroes had just been
released from bondage and were generally illiterate, poor and
retarded socially and culturally. To educate them in the same
classes and schools as white children may have been regarded
as entirely impracticable. 17
Stare decisis refers to the doctrine of following previous
decisions where the law is settled, in order to maintain stability and respect for the law. But this is not sufficient,
since the 14th amendment did intervene between the ear-
53
�lier state decisions and Plessy and the language did permit
the interpretation offered by the Court in Strauder and
urged by Harlan in dessent in Plessy.
A second defense of the Plessy opinion can be offered.
Given the deep-rooted prejudices of the whites, the recollections by the blacks of the injuries sustained, the natural
differences which a change of law does not eradicate, the
deep apprehension of Southern whites about racial comingling, as well as the actual condition of most of the newly
freed negroes, a case can surely be made for the reasonableness, apart from the wisdom, of enforced segregation
in public accommodations at that time. We shall return to
this topic,l8
The Court faced the following alternatives as it studied
the briefs and prepared for oral argument in Brown and
the companion cases: (1) to affirm the decisions of the
lower courts on the authority of Plessy; (2) to reverse the
lower courts without overturning Plessy, on the grounds
that the school conditions were not in fact equal and could
not be equalized with racial segregation; (3) to reverse the
lower courts and strike down segregation, by finding Plessy
no longer applicable in the field of education; or (4) toreverse the lower courts, strike down segregation, and repu·
diate Plessy as wrong then and wrong now.
Counsel for the states with segregated schools took the
first position; counsel for the challenging students and parents alternated between the second and the third positions; and the Supreme Court, in its first consideration of
the case, alternated between the first and third positions
and then, when it decided to overturn school segregation,
settled on the third position.l9
Two Supreme Court decisions involving segregation in
higher education had eroded the force of Plessy and also
permitted the NAACP lawyers and the government, in its
amicus brief, to argue that Plessy did not have to be overturned to invalidate school segregation. In Missouri ex rei.
Gaines v. Canada, decided in 1938, the Supreme Court invalidated a law which provided for state funding to send
qualified Negro law students to law schools in any neighboring state and ordered the petitioner admitted to the law
school at the State University of Missouri.
By the operation of the laws of Missouri a privilege has been
created for white law students which is denied to negroes by
reason of their race. The white resident is afforded legal education within the State; the negro resident having the same
qualifications is refused it there and must go outside the State
to obtain it. That is a denial of the equality oflegal right to the
enjoyment of the privilege which the State has set up, and the
provision for the payment of tuition fees in another State
does not remove the discrimination.20
Oklahoma had a similar law which was challenged by a Negro who had applied to the state's university for a doctorate in education. After the Gaines decision, Oklahoma
amended its statute to provide for admission of Negroes to
the university, but on a segregated basis. This meant sit-
54
ting at a special desk in a designated area, in classes, in the
library and in the cafeteria. In McLaurin v. Oklahoma
State Regents, 21 decided in 1950, the Supreme Court
found such state-imposed restrictions productive of inequality of educational opportunity and hence a violation
of equal protection of the laws. In a third related case, decided the same day as McLaurin, the Supreme Court invalidated Texas's provision for a separate in-state law school
for Negroes and ordered petitioner admitted to the University of Texas law school, to which he had applied for
admission. In Sweatt v. Painter, the Court took note of the
inequality in number of faculty, variety of courses, etc.
when comparing the University of Texas law school with
Texas State University for Negroes, and then it added:
What is more important, the University of Texas law school
possesses to a far greater degree those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law schooL Such qualities, to name but a few,
include reputation of the faculty, experience of the administration, position and influence of the alumni, standing in the
community, traditions and prestige.22
Hence both the Court's previous cases and its hesitancy to
argue that the South had been acting unconstitutionally
for nearly sixty years led it to address the constitutional
question presented by Brown in terms of the effect of segregation itself on public education.
The Cases and the Arguments
The Brown cases were five in number and they were divided into the state cases, which came from Kansas, South
Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, and the federal case,
from the District of Columbia. The cases were first argued
in December 1952 and then, when reargument was called
for-ostensibly to hear more about the 14th amendment
but also to give justive Frankfurter time to get a unanimous Court decision against segregation 23 -they were reargued in December 1954. Two separate unanimous opinions of the Court were handed down on May 17, 1954:
Brown v. Board of Education et al., which included all four
state cases, and Bolling v. Sharpe, which covered the District of Columbia. The constitutional issue was the same
in all cases and the lower court treatments had all followed
Plessy. In the South Carolina (Briggs v. Elliott) and Virginia
(Davis v. County School Board) cases, the three-judge district courts found inequality in facilities but sustained the
state provisions for segregation and ordered equalization.
In Delaware (Gebhard v. Belton), the Delaware Court of
Chancery found inequality and ordered the plaintiffs admitted to the previously all-white schools, but indicated
that the State could obtain a modification of the order after equalization. In Brown, the Kansas case, the three
judge district court denied relief since the facilities were
equal, but it did find that "segregation in public education
SUMMER 1983
�has a detrimental effect upon Negro children."24 In the
District of Columbia (Bolling v. Sharpe), the district court
dismissed the complaint. 25
The two opinions, Brown and Bolling, came to the same
result in different ways. This may have been due, in part,
to the different lawyers arguing the cases for the plain·
tiffs 26 and, in part, to the different constitutional provisions. The state cases involved the 14th amendment's
equal protection clauses; the federal case came under the
5th amendment, which addresses Congress and has no
equal protection clause. Since it was not surprising to have
the same result for the District as for the state, it was not
surprising for the Court to use the due process clause,
which is also in the 14th amendment, to fashion the same
result as it did with the equal protection clause. Yet the
argument in Bolling was not only different, it was closer to
Harlan's Plessy dissent, it did not rely on social science
data, and it would not have lent itself to expansion the way
the Brown decision did. I shall first examine the major
Brown opinion, noting the sources of controversy and confusion; then I shall turn to Bolling v. Sharpe.
The order of topics in this brief opinion is: the intention
of the framers of the 14th amendment; the relevant prece·
dents since Plessy; the importance of education today; the
reason why segregation on the basis of race in public
schools is necessarily unequal; the conclusion, or holding,
that the plaintiffs and others who were similarly situated
are denied equal protection of the laws; and, finally, a call
for reargument on the implementation question, so that
the Court "may have the full assistance of the parties in
formulating decrees."27
On the first point, the Court argued that study of the
ratification of the 14th amendment yielded inconclusive
results for the question of school segregation. It buttressed
this contention with the reminder that free public educa·
tion was just beginning in 1868. While the school case
precedents, discussed above, had not overturned Plessy,
they did permit the Court to argue that equal protection
of the laws involved more than the tangible factors of
education, such as classroom facilities and number of
teachers. 28
The Court proceeded to describe education in 1954 as
"perhaps the most important function of state and local
governments," as ''the very foundation of good citizenship," and as "a principal instrument in awakening the
child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to
his environment." With that out of the way, the Court
asked: "Does segregation of children in public schools
solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facili·
ties and other 'tangible' factors may be equal, deprive the
children of the minority group of equal educational oppor·
tunity?" Its immediate answer, and it was only here in the
reading of the opinion that Chief Justice Warren tipped
his hand and let the participants and spectators know what
the Court had decided, was: "We believe that it does."29
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The critical argument concerning the effect of segrega·
lion on education is first stated by the Court in its own
words and then the words of the lower court in the Kansas
case.
To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their
hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. The
effect of this separation on their educational opportunities
was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case by a court
which nevertheless felt compelled to rule against the Negro
plaintiffs:
~<Segregation of white and colored children in public
schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children.
The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for
the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with
the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the
educational and mental development of negro children and
to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in
a racialQy] integrated school system."lO
The argument is in two steps: first, racial segregation
generates a feeling of inferiority; and, second, this will af·
feet the hearts and minds of the Negro children in a man·
ner that will significantly impair their ability to learn.
In the first sentence, the infinitive "to separate" is the
subject, and it clearly refers to a separating agent, i.e., the
school board on the direction of the state legislature. In
the passage quoted from the district court, however, segre·
galion is said to have a greater impact when it has the force
of law. This implies, however, that it has some impact, and
a harmful one, in terms of feelings of self-worth and hence
motivation to learn, even without the force of law. This
must refer to de facto, or actual, segregation. This is the
basis, in the Brown opinion, for the extension of the Brown
holding from the prohibition of de iure segregation to the
prohibition of de facto segregation.
People have disagreed on what Brown required and
whether its mandate has been carried out because the core
holding, or rule of law, outlawed de iure segregation, but
the dicta implicated de facto segregation. The debate over
busing is a debate over whether Brown and the subsequent
cases stand for the proposition that schools should be de·
segregated, that is, made free of positive acts of segregation by public officials, or whether schools should be
integrated, regardless of what the cause of the actual segre·
galion may be.
The Supreme Court supported its argument by asserting that notwithstanding the extent of psychological
knowledge at the time of Plessy, its finding was "amply
supported by modern authority." Its citationll began with
the work of Dr. Kenneth Clark, who had conducted atti·
tude tests on Negro children using black and white dolls;
he testified at the trial in the South Carolina case. NAACP
55
�lawyer Jack Greenberg was quoted as saying that "the
main function of the social science testimony was to help
the courts~and especially the Supreme Court~convey
the confidence of its common sense perceptions of what
the nation knew about right and wrong in this regard."l2
The inclusion of Clark's doll studies reveals that modern
social science is not always a sound vehicle for proving the
soundness of common sense knowledge. Clark's studies
have been subject to extensive criticism, covering the ef
feet of the interview situation on the children and the lim·
ited number of cases. In addition, the one test which com·
pared responses from Northern and Southern negro
children, and hence had some direct applicability to school
segregation, conflicted with the intended thesis. There
were eight questions to the test; one asked the children to
pick the doll which resembled them. The Northern Negro
children identified themselves with the white doll m
greater proportion than the Southern children, 39% to
29%. 33 This hardly proved the psychological harm of
school segregation.
Even if the dubious Clark tests are omitted, however, it
does seem odd that psychological findings should be the
basis for striking down a Supreme Court precedent and
establishing a new constitutional right, that of equal educational opportunity. Suppose subsequent perception
tests revealed, as some did, 34 that Negro children suffered
from greater doubts about their own worth in integrated
schools? One can well imagine how, under certain circum-
stances, this could occur; would that justify segregation?
The social scientists were not altogether responsible for
the extensiveness of the Court's findings, however. The
Supreme Court apparently accepted uncritically the finding of fact of district judge Walter A. Huxman, a finding
that changed the emphasis from the original formulation
presented by the expert witness in his court. Huxrnan
started with the finding that segregation had a detrimental
effect on Negro children; then he found that detrimental
effect to be greater when it had the sanction of law. The
source of this finding was the testimony of Louise
Pinkham Holt, an assistant professor in the psychology de-
parison to private discrimination and turned it into a major
premise. I do not wish to suggest that a more accurate
treatment of the expert testimony in the Kansas case
would have made all the difference for the development of
the Brown mandate and the popular acceptance of the decision, but the extended claim, unsupported by evidence
and not nearly so common-sensical as the case against government-enforced segregation, surely lent itself to confusion over the meaning of desegregation and charges of bad
faith.
Let us return to the second school desegregation opinion, Bolling v. Sharpe. Chief Justice Warren began by noting that equal protection and due process, while not identical, both stem "from our ideal of fairness." Arguing that
some discrimination "may be so unjustifiable as to be vio-
lative of due process," Warren proceeded to attack ra.cial
classifications as "contrary to our traditions" and hence
"constitutionally suspect." This put the burden of proof
on the government to justify the regulation, as opposed to
making the complaining party prove that a constitutional
right had been violated. The meaning of "liberty" in the
due process clause was defined as extending to "the full
range of conduct which the individual is free to pursue,"
which cannot be restricted without a proper governmental
objective. Warren then concluded, again for a unanimous
Court, that usegregation in public education is not reason-
ably related to any proper governmental objective, and
thus it imposed on Negro children of the District of Columbia a burden that constitutes an arbitrary deprivation
of their liberty in violation of the Due Process Clause."36
This argument focuses on the government's action and is,
therefore, applicable to government-enforced segregation
only.
The line of argument in Bolling v. Sharpe has been used
in subsequent cases involving race classification; a suspect
classification, such as race, alienage, or national origin,
triggers a strict scrutinizing of the governmental action.
While it resembles Harlan's argument that the Constitution is color-blind, it does not rule out the possibility of justifying racial classifications in special circumstances, such
partment at Kansas University. In answer to the question,
as, for example, affirmative action. It has not been promi-
"[D]oes enforced legal separation have any adverse effect
upon the personality development of the Negro child?"
she replied.
nent in subsequent school desegregation cases, however,
where the focus has been on the dismantling of dual
school systems and the determination of a segregative act
on the part of a school board, even where segregation was
The fact that it is enforced, that it is legal, I think, has more
importance than the mere fact of segregation by itself does
because this gives legal and official sanction to a policy which
is inevitably interpreted both by white people and by Negroes
as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group. Were it not for
the sense that one group is inferior to the other, there would
be no basis-and I am not granting that this is a rational basis-for such segregation.35
The fact is that the expert witness was focusing on state
enforced segregation; the judge picked up a casual com-
56
not required by state law, as it was in the Southern states.
Scholars' Commentary
Criticism of the Court's opinion focused on the intention of the 14th amendment, the principle of stare decisis,
and the dubious character of the social science evidence.
In his famous critique, Herbert Wechsler argued that
while school segregation was wrong and it was desirable to
end it, the constitutional basis for the Supreme Court's
SUMMER l983
�taking the initiative in the matter was dubious 37 Wechsler
found the social science argument unimpressive and
doubted that the Court's judgment truly rested on that basis. He thought the judgment "must have rested on the
view that racial segregation is, in principle, a denial of
equality to the minority against whom it is directed; that is,
the group that is not dominant politically and, therefore,
does not make the choice involved." But he found this argument inadequate as the basis for a decision based on
"neutral principles/' that is, "based on reasons that in
their generality and their neutrality transcend any immediate result that is involved." It seemed to him to "involve
an inquiry into the motive of the legislature, which is generally foreclosed to the courts." He thought there was
something to the Court's Plessy statement that, since the
law spoke of equality, the badge of inferiority was in the
eye of the beholder. To Wechsler, the issue in the case was
not equal protection, but freedom to associate under the
due process clause, and the challenge was to explain why
one desire for association should overrule another desire
for disassociation.
Wechsler was not satisfied with the reason he attributed
to the Supreme Court, because he regarded it as "a choice
among competing values or desires," which lay in the
realm of mere fiat and was, therefore, inappropriate for a
judicial argument. The only exceptions to this position
were "values that can reasonably be asserted to have constitutional dimension";3 8 what they are Wechsler did not
say, and if asked why they do not include prohibition
on race classification, he probably would have referred to
history.
The responses to Wechsler's challenge to justify the
constitutional basis for the Brown opinion have tended to
reaffirm the inappropriateness of race classifications or to
specify what jim Crow legislation meant in fact. Both
Louis Pollack and Charles Black cited C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow to the effect that
such laws "were constantly pushing the Negro further
down." On the question whether "separate but equal" can
really be equal, Pollack concluded "that the constitutional
doubts instantly generated by statutes drawing racial lines
have not been allayed."l9 And Black, whose treatment of
historical examples is fuller, responded this way:
Equality, like all general concepts, has marginal areas where
philosophic difficulties are encountered. But if a whole race
of people finds itself confined within a system which is set up
and continued for the very purpose of keeping it in an inferior
station and if the question is then solemnly propounded
whether such a race is being treated 'equally,' I think we
ought to exercise one of the sovereign premgatives of philosophers-that of laughter40
Both scholars may be right, but neither presents a full argument in support of his position.
A further defense of Brown comes from Alexander
Bickel, who took issue with Wechsler's claim that courts
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
should not attempt to settle value questions. Drawing on
his study of Lincoln, Bickel argued that "the constitutional function of the Court is to define values and proclaim principles," and "it is at the heart of the utility of
such a process to proclaim the absolute principle that race
is not an allowable criterion for legislative classification." 41
For the source of that principle, we need to consider his
discussion of judicial review. In the first chapter of The
Least Dangerous Branch, Bickel makes the distinction,
which is not explained, between "immediate material
needs" and "certain enduring values." Then, he says that
"our system ... like all secular systems, calls for the evolution of principle in novel circumstances," and he continues by asserting that the most fundamental principle of
American government is the rule of the people 42 It seems
that for Bickel the character of our democratic government is very much open to chance, that is, to the changing
needs of a persistent majority. If that is the case, it is very
hard to understand how the Supreme Court, which possesses only the judicial power, should be permitted to take
the lead, as it did, in the matter of school segregation.
Bickel's explicit justification for this action reflects his
notion of a Constitution whose very principles, and not
merely their application, evolve. This notion is worthy of
consideration not only for its own merits, but because it
forms a part of Bickel's defense of Brown, and this defense
is based on a study which assisted the Supreme Court in
its deliberations. As one of justice Frankfurter's law clerks
during the 1952 term, Bickel was asked to study the history
of the 14th amendment in order to determine the lawmakers' intent on the school segregation issue. Frankfurter circulated the memo which resulted from Bickel's
year-long study to the other )ustices 43 Bickel later published a revised version of this memo in the Harvard Law
Review in 1955. In that article, Bickel concluded that while
a general grant of legislative authority would not have
passed Congress, and hence one cannot say that the framers intended to outlaw segregation, still:
May it not be that the Ivloderates and the Radicals reached a
compromise permitting them to go to the country with language which they could, where necessary, defend against
damaging alarms raised by the opposition, but which at the
same time was sufficiently elastic to permit reasonable future
advances?
Acknowledging that the framers of the 14th amendment
did not compare to the framers of the Constitution, Bickel
nonetheless attributed to them "an awareness ... that it
was a constitution they were writing, which led to a choice
of language capable of growth." 44 We learn from Kluger
that Bickel acknowledged in his notes to Frankfurter that
such was a "charitable view of the sloppy draftsmen of the
Fourteenth Amendment." 45
Bickel's view of constitutional construction was shared
by Frankfurter and possibly by other members of the
Court. To some extent it follows Chief justice john Mar-
57
�shall's famous account of constitutional construction in
McCulloch v. Maryland, but with 'a substantial revision.
Faced with the question whether Congress should insti·
tute a bank, notwithstanding the absence of any specific
authorization in the Constitution's enumeration oflegisla·
tive powers, Marshall distinguished constitutions from
statutes. Because a legal code is prolix and a constitution,
which is to be understood by the public, only marks great
outlines, ''we must never forget that it is a constitution we
Negro slaves in the Southern states, but it was not incon·
sistent with the Declaration of Independence.
Second, American government was understood to be re-
The place to start is with Harlan's argument that the
Constitution is color-blind. While he may have been
publican, as distinct from the limited monarchy of Great
Britain. The framers' views on qualifications for voting
and office-holding reflected support for popular govern·
ment. Consequently, we can conclude that any legally·
based class structure, while not necessarily inconsistent
with natural right, was not consistent with the form of gov·
ernment appropriate for America. Therefore, there can
only be one class of citizenship recognized by American
law. How could America move from a condition of slavery
in the land of freedom to equal citizenship for the newly
freed race? The task seemed impossible to Tocqueville,
when he observed the condition of the races in America in
the 1830s49 After the Civil War, however, colonization
was out, and the only question was, how to bring the newly
freed race up to full citizenship. We are now at the prob·
!em of Plessy v. Ferguson. In light of what has been said,
the issue in the case may be described as follows: which is
the best way to achieve full civil equality for blacks,
through stages of development and accommodation, or all
at once; and, even if all at once is preferred or regarded as
the sounder choice, is a political choice for gradualism so
wrong in the narrow legal sense, since neither the original
unreasonable as to require constitutional condemnation?
Constitution nor the 14th amendment made this principle
explicit, he nonetheless stated the higher truth of the
American Constitution. Why is that? The explanation
needs both to take note of the natural right teaching of the
Declaration of Independence, which articulates the most
fundamental principles of American government, and
then to consider the application of those principles to the
American political community. We must answer three
questions: (l) What is the teaching of the Declaration of
Independence? (2) What application does it have to Amer·
ican government in general? (3) What application does it
have to the distinctive condition of chattel slavery in the
land of freedom, reinforced by racial difference, which is
then eliminated, first as a result of military and political
necessity, and then through constitutional amendment?
First, according to the self-evident truth of the Declaration
of Independence, all men are naturally equal in their rights
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These rights
are universal but pre-political; they apply to all men as
men, but they have nothing to do with citizenship in any
political community. Because the rights are not secured by
To argue that full civil equality is incompatible with Jim
Crow legislation does not deny the existence of the social
sphere, which the Plessy opinion distinguishes from politi·
cal and civil rights. I take issue with the Plessy argument
on the relationship between law and the social sphere. To
the extent that we can distinguish the social from the po·
litical (including the civil), the former refers to the volun·
are expounding."46 But Marshall never meant, as Bickel,
following Holmes and Brandeis before him, did, that the
fundamental principles of the Constitution are themselves
open to change over time. 47
Is it possible to provide an interpretation of the issues in
the school segregation cases which does justice to Plessy,
reaches the same result as Brown, and does not rely on a
view of the Constitution and the judicial function according to which the most important principle is the rule of the
majority and all else is subject to changing needs?
A Revised Brown Opinion
nature, men consent to form governments. If government
is to be based on consent and limited to the securing of
rights, the resulting community would seem to need the
support of self-love or interest. No one has a natural right
to join any given political community. It was on this basis
that Jefferson proposed emancipation and colonization of
the slaves in Virginia in 1783 and Lincoln opposed slavery
as morally wrong and in opposition to the Declaration,
without advocating political equality48 A colonization pol·
icy may never have been practical, given the number of
58
tary actions of individuals and private associations; their
decisions regarding association and disassociation consti-
tute action in the social rather than the political sphere.
Then we must distinguish the social sphere, as liable to
government regulation, from the purely private sphere,
which is not. Congress may be justified in prohibiting cer·
tain forms of racial discrimination in the social sphere, on
the authority of the commerce clause, as it did in the 1964
Civil Rights Act, but neither Congress nor the state may
tell anyone whom to invite to dinner. Furthermore, the
civil rights legislation reflects a concrete and healthy con·
sent-giving, which distinguishes it from judicial interven·
tion in the social sphere. Finally, what distinguishes the
legislative action in· Plessy from the legislative action of
1964 is that the former, by legally enforcing a dual citizen·
ship, is inconsistent with our republican form of government, as discussed above, while the latter is consistent
with it.
The distinction between commercial activity and social
activity in the narrow sense of socializing is important for
understanding the best case ever made for the gradualism
approach to full citizenship for Negroes. In his Atlanta Ex·
position Address of 1895, one year before Plessy, Booker
T. Washington emphasized vocational education for
SUMMER 1983
�blacks as a way of their attaining self-sufficiency. He argued from expediency as well as principle for racial coop-
derives its importance from our form of government, or, to
eration in commercial matters, and he was willing to let
social association wait. In a sentence which appears to an-
form of government is instituted to secure. Ours is a gov-
ticipate Plessy and which puts it in its best light, he said:
"In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as
the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to
mutual progress." According to Washington, "No race
that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world
is long in any degree ostracized."' 0
This position was vigorously criticized by W. E. B. DuBois, on the grounds that it distorted half-truths about the
Negro and his position and that it had the effect of getting
both races to accept the Negro's subordinate position as
permanent. 51 It is not easy to decide who was right at the
time. Surely commercial success and education seem to
depend on civil and political rights and higher education;
on the other hand, Washington was, as DuBois acknowledged, the most influential black leader of his time among
both races and the blacks surely needed the assistance of
the white majority. But it is not necessary to settle that
debate in order to say that to the extent that Plessy ever
was a legitimate decision, it was within the context of a
gradualist approach to bringing full civil rights to the
newly freed race. If 1896 was arguably too soon after slavery to accomplish this, especially in light of an appraisal of
hatreds and fears and the actual condition of the black
race, surely by 1954 it was easy to review the history of Jim
Crow legislation and pronounce that the South had not
proceeded in good faith, that Harlan was right about the
consequences of judicially validating Jim Crow legislation,
and that the practice was in violation of the Constitution
because it implied second class citizenship. Plessy then
turns out to be no longer valid, not simply because we wish
to change a practice which a current majority of the country abhors, but also because the only defensible grounds
for the decision implied a timetable for transformation
which had long since expired.
III
Conclusion
This treatment of Brown has intended to show that the
Supreme Court's achievement was substantial but flawed,
and that the flaws involved (l) the exercise of judicial review, especially as it concerns the overturning of the Plessy
precedent, (2) the distinction between de facto and de jure
segregation, and (3) the meaning of education in American political life. The first topic has been treated above; it
remains to show the connection between the Court's
treatment of the other two topics in its Brown opinion and
the subsequent problems in connection with the implementation of Brown.
The distinction between de facto and de jure segregation
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
be more precise, from the way of life which our republican
ernment which is instituted to secure rights but which
refuses to take note of their right exercise. It is a government which looks up to an individual's right to pursue happiness without defining the content of that happiness.
Ours is therefore necessarily a limited government if we
consider the things it can legitimately require of its citizens. Because rights or individual claims take precedence
over duties, or obligations of citizens, American political
life necessarily knows and respects a private sphere. Our
form of government is similar to Plato's account of democracy in that we tend to regard all desires as equal; it differs
from that account, and hence from a pure democracy, in
its attempt to avoid the excesses of democratic license.
Our way of doing that, however, in contrast to that of
Plato's account of the best regime, is mainly through institutional checks and balances and a strict scrutiny of governmental powers rather than education as a means of
cultivating human excellence, moral or intellectual. Consequently, certain democratic vices, associated with the
emancipation of our desires and passions, are tolerated so
long as the resulting activity does not harm another in life
or limb. Love of one's own is generally more powerful than
love of community; in American government, or in any liberal democracy, the political constraints on self-interest, as
Tocqueville called them, are minimal. 52
And now we come to race differences and the problem
of slavery in the land of freedom.sl The severity of the
problem of reconciling individualism with racial harmony
was discussed by Tocqueville, Jefferson, Lincoln, and
W. E. B. DuBois. The transformation of the former slave
race into black Americans presents such difficulties because no government, and certainly no liberal government, can eradicate prejudice, which is a reflex of self-
love, and the natural racial difference makes it impossible
to eradicate race prejudice. On the other hand, eradication is not only not necessary, it is not appropriate. The
limited objectives of liberal government make it possible
for government to treat its citizens equally under the law
and for individuals to associate in distinctive groupings
and even take pride in their differences. This is precisely
what W. E. B. DuBois discovered and advocated in 1897.
If we carefully consider what race prejudice really is, we find
it, historically, to be nothing but the friction between different groups of people; it is the difference in aim, in feelings, in
ideals of two different races; if, now, this difference exists
touching territory, laws, language, or even religion, it is manifest that these people cannot live in the same territory without fatal collision; but if, on the other hand, there is substantial agreement in laws, language and religion, if there is a
satisfactory adjustment of economic life, then there is no reason why, in the same country and on the same street, two or
three great national ideals might not thrive and develop, that
men of different races might not strive together for their race
ideals as well, perhaps even better, than in isolation. 54
59
�More recent expressions of the same thought, if not as
comprehensive, can be found in Malcolm X's Black Nationalism and in Black Power. 55
If there is a range of legitimate associations and disassociations, regarding religious and ethnic background and
economic status as well as race, then the rules for such
as~
sociation should be minimal and, generally, should proceed from a government authority which reflects the consent of the governed. Thirty years after the Brown decision
we note that the federal government and especially the
federal courts are still involved in the administration of
school systems. To a large extent, this is because the implications of the Brown opinion, regarding equal educational
opportunity, made it difficult for the courts to recognize
the limits of legitimate court intervention.
This became clear when the desegregation suits
reached metropolitan school districts, starting in North
Carolina and then reaching Denver, Detroit, Columbus,
and Dayton, which cover the major Supreme Court decisions of the 1970s. The problem is this: once the clear cut
cases of dual school systems are eliminated, what is the
test to distinguish a school board's disciminatory act of
segregation from racially neutral actions and individual
choices, including where to live and whether to go to a private school? The Supreme Court has not yet thrown out
the distinction between government-enforced and adventitious segregation-for it would be difficult if not impossible to justify such judicial action; but it has not come up
with any clear principle or test for distinguishing racial imbalance that results from a segregative act from racial imbalance that is adventitious.
The lower federal courts, which have the responsibility
for implementing Brown, have tended to view racial imbalance as presumptively illegal, the result of a segregative
act; often that act is no more than the failure to draw lines
or construct new schools in ways that would have increased the actual racial balance, regardless of neighborhoods. With some exceptions the majority of the Supreme
Court has tended to follow the lower courts on this. The
decisions in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Denver
cases 56 approached the position that the Constitution required metropolitan communities to fashion plans to eliminate racial isolation in the public schools, even if it required system-wide transportation of students. In the
former case, the Court justified its decision by linking all
the racial imbalance to the condition of the dual school
system in 1954, a doubtful assumption; in the latter case, a
narrow and limited finding of segregative intent reversed
the presumption for the entire district and this led to the
system-wide judicial remedy. The majority did pull back,
in the Detroit case in 1974,57 from upholding a lower
court's inter-district metropolitan remedy, on the grounds
that there was no evidence of inter-district segregation.
The dissent pointed out that very little actual integration
was possible within the Detroit school system by itself and
the state was responsible for education. But was the politi-
60
cal process required by the Constitution to give racial balance precedence over community control and neighbor-
hood schools?
Then in two cases decided the same day in 1979,58 the
Supreme Court upheld system-wide remedies, following
the reasoning of the lower courts (in one case the trial
court and in another the court of appeals, which reversed
the trial court) that the existing racial imbalance was, in
each case, a remnant from 1954, when even though it was
not officially sanctioned, there was in fact a dual school
system. Of course such arguments have some plausibility,
since the very distinction between de facto and de jure is, at
the boundary, a fiction. Clearly, public authorities follow
private wishes, and there was indirect government in-
volvement in housing discrimination in 1954; hence it had
an effect, indirectly on the school system. But the connec·
lion between that discrimination and school attendance
patterns 25 years later is nebulous. The Court seems to be
driving the mathematical principle of racial balance to the
limits of its logic, with no good results to show for it. In the
name of equal educational opportunity, it is sanctioning
lower court ordered plans which consider nothing but racial balance. This has produced, or accentuated, "white
flight" and it has not improved anyone's education.
The most instructive judicial reflections on the Court's
dilemma come from Justice Powell, whose cautious attitude toward judicial power resembles Frankfurter's. In his
opinion in the Denver case, justice Powell described the
Brown mandate as having evolved from neutral desegregation to "an affirmative duty to desegregate." He went on
to question the continuing utility of the de facto/ de jure
distinction.
In imposing on metropolitan southern school districts an af.
firrnative duty entailing large scale transportation of pupils, to
eliminate segregation in the schools, the Court required these
districts to alleviate conditions which in large part did not
result from historic, state-imposed de jure segregation.
Rather, the familiar root cause of segregated schools in all the
biracial metropolitan areas of our country is essentially the
same: one of segregated residential and migratory patterns
the impact of which on the racial composition of the schools
was often perpetuated and rarely ameliorated by action of
public school authorities. This is a national, not a southern
phenomenon. And it is largely unrelated to whether a particular state had or did not have segregative school laws. 59
Powell proposed that in place of scrutinizing the actions
of the school board for "segregative intent," the Court
hold the states responsible for operating "integrated
school systems" and examine their actions (such as location of new facilities, attendance zones, etc.) with a view
toward their general integrative effect. Powell did not discuss the busing question, nor did he indicate whether he
thought the Court's role would be reduced as a result of
his proposal. He apparently abandoned his argument for
abandoning the de facto/ de jure distinction, for in his disSUMMER 1983
�sent in the 1979 Columbus case, he noted that it was impossible to expect school boards to bring about desirable
racial balance and that judicial mandates would probably
generate further white flight and resegregation. In other
words, he came to see that desegregation would not produce an integrated school system, unless the courts were
willing to sustain racial balance as a constitutional imperative. Even then, to succeed the courts would have to insist
on consolidated school districts and eliminate private
schools.
We turn, finally, to the Supreme Court's view of education. Justice Warren called it "the very foundation of good
citizenship" and "a principal instrument in awakening the
child to cultural values."60 This formulation conceals two
problems or complications. The first is that education as
socialization is problematic, however necessary it may be.
Numerous Supreme Court cases indicate that there is a
fine line between illegal indoctrination and permissible inculcation of habits of citizenship; quite understandably,
the individualistic bent of the first amendment freedoms
frequently limits this form of education. The freedom involved here is not only one of association, but it includes
conceptions of racial identification. In Brown the Supreme Court accepted the racial amalgamation view of integration as if it were the only valid formulation. It ignored
the view of integration which emphasizes a substantial
separation within the larger integrated society. This view
was prominently stated by Black Power and Black Nationalism advocates in the late 1960s, but it was more fully
stated much earlier by DuBois, as we have already noted.
Certain kinds of "freedom of choice" are much more likely
to succeed than a judicially enforced uniformity. One
man's consent may be another man's prejudice, but if
community control, in the form of residential schools and
local school boards, has any validity, it must apply to communities which are largely white as well as to those which
are largely black.
Second, the Supreme Court must understand that education involves more than mere socialization. It should not
say, as it did in a 1969 case upholding a student's right to
wear an armband expressing opposition to the Vietnam
War in class: "The principal use to which the schools are
dedicated is to accommodate students during prescribed
hours for the purpose of certain types of activities. Among
the activities is intercommunication among the students."61 Here the Court unwittingly likens secondary
school education to the operation of a day care center.
And even when it prudently permits race to be taken into
account in a complex admissions process for higher educa-
tion, as it did in the famous Bakke case, it should not lend
its support to a statement which confuses academic
achievement and intellectual powers with minimal aca-
demic competency. Justice Powell, whose vote and opinion were decisive in Bakke, cited with approval and then
appended to his opinion the Harvard College Admissions
affirmative action statement; it said that "the number of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
applicants who are deemed to be 'not qualified' is comparatively small."6 2 If these statements truly reflect the authoritative view of education in America, it's no wonder
that we have become "a nation at risk."
The great achievement of Brown v. Board of Education
was that it struck down the Plessy doctrine of "separate
but equal," which eventually, and necessarily, led to the
complete elimination of state-enforced racial segregation_63 The single opinion which accompanied the unanimous decision in Brown was an important part of the
Court's achievement; it facilitated the dismantling of genuine dual school systems. Neither the unanimity nor the
accommodating spirit of the Brown II implementation decision in 1955, which called for desegregation "with all deliberate speed," could prevent substantial Southern resistance for a decade. While I have criticized the Court's
opinion and offered a fuller and, in my opinion, sounder
argument for the decision, not even a perfect opinion ac-
companying the Court's unanimity would have eradicated
racial prejudice or actual inequality in American life. I
have argued that the eradication of either is beyond the
limited powers of a liberal democratic government. I do
think that if the Court's opinion had presented a sounder
treatment of the ordered liberty that we can reasonably expect from our government, it would have prevented the
numerous judicially ordered pupil assignment plans which
enforce racial balance in the public schools and do nothing
more than drive students desirous of education, white and
black, out of the public schools. And, if the Court's opinion had presented a sounder view of education than the
amalgamation view of integration, we would have more re-
spect for the variety of legitimate views on racial identification and less confusion about education as training and
habituation versus education as intellectual development.
]. 347
u.s. 483, 495 (1954).
2. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black
America's Struggle for Equality, New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1976, pp.
710, 747.
3. The New York Times, May 18, 1954, p. 14.
4. Times, May 17, 1964, p. IDe.
5. Roger Wilkins, "The Sound of One Hand Clapping: Twenty years After Brown; Negro Progress and Black Rage," in Times Magazine, May 12,
1974, p. 43.
6. Ji'or the passage quoted from the dentist and statements by Rustin and
Wilkins, see U.S. News 6 World Report, May 20, 1974, "After 20 Years:
New Turn in Black Revolution," pp. 24ff; for the Browne interview, see
Roger Wilkins, op. cit.; for the Clark quote, see Times, May 12, 1974, p.
42.
7. Times, May 12, 1974.
8. "Desegregation: Where Do We Go From Here?" The New Republic,
February 7, 1970.
9. Fulfilling the Letter and the Spirit of the Law: Desegregation of the Nation's Public Schools, Report of the United States Commission on Civil
Rights, August, 1976; see summary and conclusion, pp. 293-313, including table 4.1, p. 296.
10. James S. Coleman, Equality of Educational Opportunity, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office; 1966; the Report and its findings
were briefly discussed in William Chapman's newspaper article, "Key As-
61
�sumptions of Desegregation Under Challenge," in the Washington Post,
May 12, 1974, "Outlook," pp. C.2ff.
11. Both quotations come from the Times story of May 12, 1974,
p. 42.
12. See Washington Post, May 12, 1974, "Outlook," p. c.lff.
13. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1
(1971); Keys v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado, 413 U.S. 189
(1973).
14. The basis for the first statement is the gap between the Scholastic
Apptitude Test scores of Negroes and whites, which was over 100 points,
on the 200 to 800 scale, for both the verbal and math sections in 1981. See
The New York Times, January 14, 1983, p. 1la. The test results accompa·
nied an article on the NCAA proposal to require college freshmen to
have a minimum combined SAT score of 700 (out of 1600) in order to be
eligible to compete in interscholastic athletics. The Commission's Re·
port, entitled "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative of Educational Re·
form," was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 4, 1983.
15. !63 u.s. 537.
16. 100 U.S. 303, 307-08 (1880). This was cited by Harlan in Plessy at 163
u.s. 537, 556.
17. Quoted by Kluger at p. 652. All the briefs and oral arguments in the
case can be found in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme
Court of the United States: Constitutional Law, ed. by Philip B. Kurland
and Gerhard Casper, Arlington, Va.; University Publications of America,
Inc.; 1975, volumes 49 and 49a.
18. These remarks go beyond the argument of the opinion of the Court.
They draw on the reflections of Jefferson, Tocqueville, and Lincoln,
which will be discussed below.
19. For as full an account of the Supreme Court's deliberations as is possible, including the distinctive contributions of Justice Frankfurter and
the significance of Chief Justice Vinson's death, after the first oral argu·
ment, and his replacement by Chief Justice Warren, see Kluger, chapters
22-25.
20. 305 u.s. 337, 349-50.
21. 339 u.s. 637.
22. 339 u.s. 629, 634.
23. See Kluger, pp. 614-616.
24. See 354 U.S. 483, 487, note I.
25. 354 u.s. 397, 398.
26. This may have been due, in part, to the different lawyers. See Klu·
ger's account of James Nabritt, who argued the District of Columbia case
at p. 521. op. cit. From the very outset of the litigation, in 1951, Nabritt
challenged the race classification for public schools.
27. 347 U.S. 483, 495. The original implementation decision, known as
Brown II, was decided in 1955. The cases were remanded to the lower
courts to enter orders and decrees "as are necessary and proper to admit
to public schools on a racially non-discriminatory basis with all deliberate
speed the parties to these cases." 394 U.S. 294, 30l.
28. Pp. 491-2.
29. P. 493.
30. P. 494.
31. P. 494, note II.
32. Kluger, p. 439.
33. The study which the Court cited, "Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development," Midcentury White House Conference, 1950, did not involve North-South comparisons. The study which
did, "Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children," was writ·
ten by Clark and his wife, Mamie. It compared the responses from chil·
dren in Massachusetts with children in Arkansas. The work was originally
published in Newcomb and Hartley, eel., Readings in Social Psychology,
New York: Holt; 1947; it was included in the third edition, published in
1958, at pp. 602-611. Table 4 makes the North-South comparisons. Kluger gives a full account of Clark and his tests and the varied reactions of
the NAACP lawyers and other scholars; see chapter 14, and pp. 353-6,
498, and other references under the index heading, "Clark," "tests." The
problem with Clark's tests was first brought to my attention by Hadley
Arkes, in his essay, "The Problem of Kenneth Clark," in Commentary,
November, 1974.
62
34. See Chapman's discussion of the Coleman Report and later studies,
in the Washington Post, note 10 above, and David Armor's "The Evidence of Busing," in The Public Interest, Summer, 1972.
35. Kluger, p. 421.
36. 347 u.s. 497, 499-500.
37. See Kluger, chapter 23, for a discussion of the Justices' deliberations.
38. "Toward Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law," in 73 Harvard
Law Review 1, November, 1959, pp. 33, 19, 33, 34, 15, 16.
39. "Racial Discrimination and Judicial Integrity: A Reply to Professor
Wechsler," in 108 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1 (1959); re·
printed in Selected Essays in Constitutional Law, 1938-1962, edited by
Edward L. Barrett, Jr., et al., St. Paul: West Publishing Co.; 1963, p. 819;
the quotation is from p. 839.
40. "The Lawfulness of the Segregation Decisions," in 69 Yale Law Jour·
nal421 (1960); reprinted in Selected Essays in Constitutional Law, p. 844;
the quotation is from p. 847.
41. The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Poli·
tics, Indianapolis: Babbs Merrill Company; 1962, p. 69.
42. Ibid, pp. 24 (see also 27), 25, 28.
43. See Kluger, pp. 653-655.
44. "The Original Understanding of the Segregation Decision," 69 Har·
vardLaw Review 1, November, 1955, pp. 61, 63.
45. Kluger, p. 655.
46. 4 Wheaton 316, 407(1819).
47. See The Least Dangerous Branch, pp. 106-7, where Bickel mistakenly
likens Marshall's to Brandeis' view of the Constitution as a "living organism."
48. For Jefferson, see Notes on Virginia, Query XIII; for Lincoln, see his
Peoria Speech, October 16, 1854, as well as the Lincoln-Douglas De·
bates.
49. See Democracy in America, Vol. I, Part II, chapter 10, edited by J.P.
Mayer, Garden City, New York: Anchor Books; 1969.
50. "Atlanta Exposition Address," in Herbert J. Storing, ed., What Coun·
try Have I? Political Writings by Black Americans, New York: St. Martins;
1970, p. 61. Washington gave his address in 1895. Nowhere in his autobiography, Up From Slavery, where he includes the text and discusses the
reaction to the speech, does he refer to the Louisiana law of 1890, which
was challenged in Plessy v. Ferguson. However, in 1915, he wrote an essay
in The New Republic arguing forcefully against segregation laws in terms
of both expediency and morality. See "My View of Segregation Laws," in
The New Republic, December 4, 1915, pp. ll3-1l4.
51. See "Of Booker T. Washington and Others," in Storing, op. cit., pp.
92-102, especially pp. 97-101.
52. This argument draws on Leo Strauss' discussion of natural right in
ancient and modern political philosophy. See Natural Right and History,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1953, and the title essay in What is
Political Philosophy?, Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press; 1959.
53. For this formulation and the subsequent argument I am indebted to
Herbert}. Storing, whose essay "The Founders and Slavery," was given
at St. John's College on March 5, 1976, published in the bicentennial is·
sue of The College (pp. 17-25), and subsequently reprinted in Robert H.
Horwitz, The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, Charlottes·
ville, Va.: University of Virginia Press; 1976.
54. In Storing, What Country Have I?, p. 82.
55. See Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet," and Stokeley Carmichael
and Charles Hamilton, "Black Power: Its Need and Substance," in Star·
ing, op. cit., pp. 146-163; !65-181.
56. For the citations, see note 13.
57. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717.
58. Columbua Board of Education v. Penick, 443 U.S. 449; Dayton Board
of Education v. Brinkman, 443 U.S. 526.
59. 413 u.s. 189,220-222, 222-223 (1973).
60. 347 u.s. 483, 493.
61. Tinker v. Des Moines School District, 393 U.S. 503, 512 (1969).
62. University of California Reb'ents v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 321 (1978).
63. When Virginia's anti-miscegination law was invalidated in 1967 (Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1) all Jim Crow legislation had been eradicated.
SUMMER 1983
�OccASIONAL DiscouRsEs
Class Day Address
1983
Chaninah Maschler
In the year of the chartering of St. John's College1784-Kant published a little essay whose opening sentences might serve as a statement of the moral aim of a
liberal arts education. The essay is called What is Enlightenment? and it begins roughly as follows:
Enlightenment is man's exodus from self-incurred minority.
To be a minor means, not to be able to use one's reason except as directed by someone else. Such minority is selfincurred when it is not due to lack of rational competence but
to lack of resolve and courage. Sapere aude, Dare to know!
Have the courage to use your understanding. That is the
motto of enlightenment.
Laziness and cowardice are to blame for the fact that so large
a portion of mankind, after nature has long discharged them
from tutelage and promoted them to adult estate, nevertheless gladly stay minors all their life and why it is so easy for
others to set themselves up as their guardians. It's much more
comfortable not to be of age: If I have a book that understands for me, a pastor, rabbi, priest who serves as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, I need not trouble myself_ Why think if I have the money to pay others to
take care of the irksome chore for me?
That it takes effort, continual downing of lassitude, to
be or become free needs no elaboration. But why does it
take courage, more courage, perhaps, today, or courage of
a different sort, than in 1784? If courage is called for, there
must be something dangerous, or at least frightening in
the offing.
Many of us~ tutors and students~ precisely if we are or
have been happy at this institution of learning, describe
our St. John's experience on the model of Anderson's fairy
A tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, Md., Chaninah Maschler previously published a translation of Lessing's Ernst and Falk: Conversations
for Free Masons (Autumn/Winter 82-83) St. John's Review.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tale of the ugly duckling: You remember, in high school or
at Columbia or Yale or Princeton, we didn't fit; we were
lonely; doubted ourselves and our competence. Then,
upon coming here, and learning to trust and act on continual Kantian invitations to self-reliance, we found ourselves
flourishing amongst our own kind. We concluded: We are
swans really! Our egg got mislaid with duck parents and
duck schools!
But I don't see anything frightening in the fact that you
turn out to be a swan rather than a duck. Anderson's is a
self-indulgent, sentimental, self-congratulating tale, with
which we ought to be done. That we should "find ourselves" as noble swans is not the import of Kant's sermon.
So I want to tell a different parable, though upon reflection you will recognize a formal likeness between the story
I ask you to junk and that which I ask you to live with.
Before turning to the story, let's reminisce:
Do you remember the innocent days of Euclid proposition I 27? It gave us confidence that the local condition of
equality of alternate angles would guarantee that, no matter how far the straight lines making those angles with a
transverse be extended, the straight lines would never
meet (dfn 23, P- 190 Heath). I can still hear the voice of the
student at the board who showed that, supposing the condition of equality of alternate angles met but the attribute
of parallelism denied of the lines, one and the same angle
AEF would have to be both greater than and equal to the
angle EFG_ Reaching the crucial step of the argument,
she could not contain herself and shouted: "Oedipus
Schmoedipus, he can't marry his mother."
What she meant was, of course, that though tragic individuals may find themselves burdened with incompatible
roles, mathematical individuals~angles, lines, figureswhile normally playing different roles in the course of a
demonstration-else the demonstration would not work,
63
�wouldn't have a "middle term" to link the "extremes" of
the enunciation-mathematical individuals, I say, are utterly secure from conflation of incompossible roles.
Some of us thought that what Socrates taught in theRepublic is that we should live in admiration of those serene
mathematical individuals who are utterly free of faction.
(Cf Rep. VI, 500C; IX, 582; X, 606)
Should we?
Every time I read the fable of the wolf and the lamb and
hear the voice of reason weakly bleating ". . . et que par
consequent en aucune {aeon je ne puis troubler sa boisson"
(" ... from which it follows, by rational necessity, that I
cannot have muddied His Majesty's waters") I think on
the freshman mathematics tutorial and that Euclidean
clincher-atopon, impossible, ridiculous-which, La Fontaine reminds us, proves impotent when reasoning with
wolves.
That men might, by redesigning and reassigning power,
be prevented from becoming wolves to men was the great
hope of the philosophers of the enlightenment. We still
live in that hope. But we must persevere in it without the
prop and sop of grand theories of history's "tending" that
way-the way of the sweetly reasonable lamb.
And why is that? Because of a story told by those who
taught Aesop himself, a story perhaps told again by the
poet who sang Songs of Innocence and of Experience; I
mean William Blake. Here is the story:
Once upon a time there was a tiger cub who was being
raised by a herd of goats. He learned their language,
adapted his voice to their gentle way of bleating, and
though his teeth were pointy and made for tearing, he nibbled grass goat-fashion. One night the herd was attacked
by a fierce full-grown tiger. The goats scattered but the
cub stayed. He was amazed at the sight of the tiger, but
not afraid. He let out a bleat and began to tear up some
grass. The great tiger roared at him: "Why do you make
that silly sound? And what are you chewing there?" He
grabbed the cub, carried him off to his den, and there ordered him to get his teeth into a bloody raw piece of meat
left over from a previous foray. The cub shuddered. The
old one force-fed him. just as the cub was about to spit out
the morsel he began to taste the blood. Overcome, he
smacked his lips and licked his jowls, rose up, opened his
mouth. Stretching and arching, lashing his tail, there suddenly came from his throat a great roar. His teacher asked:
"Now do you know who you are?" (Adapted from
Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies ofindia, New York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1956.)
Sri Ramakrishna told the ancient story in answer to
Kant's question, "What is enlightenment?" and I pass it on
to you to counterpoise the tale of the lamb which, though
greatly consoling, and true, is also false: The wolf is not
just the other fellow: The i-sounds of Blake's tiger poem
and the -am's of the song of the lamb rhyme out I AM.
THE HORIZON AS THE
LAST SHIP HOME
On a diagonal of light,
the world hinges. The sea
slants blue miles away
to the horizon. At that
edge, the air is burning
like the wreck
of the last ship home.
J.
64
H. BEALL
SUMMER 1983
�Against Time*
Eva Brann
*Given as two Friday Night Lectures at St. John's College in Annapolis on February 18 and 25, 1983.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
65
�Contents
I. Approaches to the Inquiry
I.
2.
3.
4.
5.
67
Time Language
Time Puzzles
Time in Science
Temporal Sensibility
The Philosophers
II. Aristotle: Time as the Number of Motion
73
I. Time and its Measures
2. The Now
3. Memory
III. Augustine: Time as the "Distention" of the Soul . . . . . . . . . . . .
Husser!: The Phenomenology of Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
78
80
I. Retention
2. The Diagram of Time
IV. Kant: Time as Inner Sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I.
2.
3.
4.
5.
82
Inner Sense
Understanding
Imagination
Time and Space
Temporal Thinking
V. Heidegger: Temporality as the Meaning of Existence
86
I. Ecstatic Temporality
2. Difficulties
VI. Time and Imagination
89
I. The Non·Being of Time
2. Time as Noticed Passage
3. The Phases of Time
a.
b.
c.
d.
The
The
The
The
Present
Past
Future
Past as Paramount Phase
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . l 00
I.
II.
Ill.
IV.
Main Texts
Supplementary Texts, Studies, Commentaries
Collections
Time in Science
Notes l-37 ................................................ 101
�Against Time
That time has no being and no power, that the past is
most to be cherished by those who have least taste for bygones, that our own temporality is the work of the imagination-these are the reflections that I want to articulate and
confirm in the following inquiry, for I believe and hope to
show that opinions of this sort are necessary for thinking
of ourselves as free and for filling our lives with substance.
I. APPROACHES TO THE INQUIRY*
Given this purpose, the first question is where to begin
an inquiry whose object appears to be both ubiquitous and
nowhere. There seem to be so many likely approaches to
the topic of time: through attention to our all-pervading
talk of time in ordinary life and through the neat enigmas
which even the lightest musing upon time generates,
through the science of nature which claims to determine
its concept, and through the observations of poets, novelists, and psychologists concerning our temporal sensibilities. All these efforts provide necessary grist to the mill of
reflection, but Time itself does not seem to be revealed in
or through them, and the very profusion of speculation
bears witness to its elusiveness. There remains the way
through philosophy, where time is treated in conjunction
with the question of being-and particularly of human being. Here the nature of time becomes at last a direct
theme. I shall, therefore, after a brief review of the other
approaches, devote the middle section of this study to an
interpretation of the five philosophers who seem to me to
have given the most coherent and pregnant answers to the
question What is Time?, and conclude with a section of my
own thoughts on, or rather against, time.
1. TIME LANGUAGE
The first and obvious way to get to the nature of time
might seem to be through examining the mentions of time
in ordinary language, through attending to what everyday
speech says of time, for example: My watch tells the time,
and I can give you the time. Do you have the time to give
*All references are to books listed in the Bibliography.
Eva Brann recently published Paradoxes of Education in a Republic'{Unlversity of Chicago Press, 1979).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
me some time? I am wasting my time, while having the
time of my life. Time is money, and the times are bad. At
this point in time he has no comment, but time will tell.
Time heals and at the same time, time destroys. The time
is coming; the time is now; the time is past. We live in time
and through times, are on time, race against time, kill time,
donate time, are true to the end of time, and imagine once
upon a time.
Now the very profusion of usages, although it is an index of the great frequency of our references to time 1,
seems to me to preclude the discovery of a central meaning without our falling into the error of decreeing which of
these usages is canonically ordinary. Certainly, how time
occurs in daily speech is suggestive: Augustine, for instance, begins his inquiry by asking how it is that we can
speak of time as long or short (XI 15), and Heidegger refers
to the observation that we speak of time as passing away
and not as coming into being ( Logik, par. 20). It turns out,
however, that both authors, far from being guided by what
is said, conclude that ordinary speech obscures the nature
of time.
It seems, all in all, that from listening to the use of the
term time one, but only one, crucial conclusion can be
reached: Time is always spoken of metaphorically or figuratively. It may be treated as a spatial dimension with
length and points, or as a possession to have and to give, or
in a personification, as an agent of multifarious potency.
Its power is sometimes benign but far more often hurtful,
as in the insistently grim time-figures of the Shakespearean Sonnets: devouring Time, confounding Time, decaying Time, swift-footed Time, sluttish Time, Time's injurious hand, Time's fell hand (19, 55, 63-65).
Most time references are well-worn and mean little; they
are time-honored phrases, once perhaps heartfelt, for disposing of the mysteries of change. When we talk of time as
healing we consign to a hackneyed phrase the miraculous
restorative power of nature and the blessed oblivion of
which memory is capable. Poets, on the other hand, tend
to give time injurious epithets, because, I think, they speak
more often and more accurately of the high, intense, and
vulnerable configurations of life than we do in ordinary
speech.
The word "time" is not, of course, remotely all that language says of time. All our sentences require tensed verbs,
particularly "is," "was," and "shall be." But can their use
tell us their meaning? Or must we not rather know what is
meant by present, past, and future, the three phases of
time, to understand the use of aspects and tenses?
67
�2. TIME PUZZLES
'
A second start might be made from the puzzles about
time which can be so copiously and near-spontaneously
generated. For example, why does time seem to have a forward arrow and a leading edge? 2 Does it progress in a continuous flux or in atomic jerks? Is it within or outside of us,
in the soul or in the world? What is the "now" in which
alone things are present and which reason reduces to a
point between past and future? And above all, how is it
possible that anything be in that past which is no longer, or
in the future which is not yet? There are many more such
problems, even excluding those concerning temporal con-
tinuity, which belong primarily to mathematics.
Such conundrums are easily disposed of by the positivist, who obviates them by pointing out that in ordinary life,
before the onset of a philosophical seizure, no one is at all
inconvenienced by them, so why concoct enigrnas? 3 To be
more than idle puzzles they must arise in the context of a
well-grounded inquiry into time itself. They are not its beginning but its by-products.
acute literature about the philosophical implications of
time in nature, or more accurately, in the science of na-
ture. (For all references see Sec. IV of the Bibliography.)
Three branches of physics seem to be especially amenable
to philosophical interpretation: Thermodynamics seems
to have implications about the forward motion, the socalled "arrow" of time and its irreversibility. Relativity theory appears to have exploded the common sense notion of
universal time or the simultaneity of the present moment
throughout space. Quantum theory throws in doubt the
continuity of time.
But intriguing as such theories are, because they are
bent on interpreting with ingenuity and vigour the unignorable discoveries of physics, they help only incidentally
and negatively with the question: What is time? For in
these theories time is invariably understood as a privileged
process or motion, either a macro-motion or an atomic vi-
bration; the temporality of these timing-motions is itself
left unexplained-as indeed it should be since such an explanation would no longer be amenable to verification by
observation. The implication is that time really is an aspect
of motion to be got at only in telling time. But time-telling
is commonly taken to be a three-cornered affair, involving
an observable event, a timing device, and an observer who
3. TIME IN SCIENCE
In view of the fact that time is the basic independent
variable of all the physics accessible to laymen, it would
seem reasonable to turn first to the science of nature, that
is, to physics, for help in the search for the nature of time.
Reflective physicists and philosophers of physics have, accordingly, propounded powerful theories of time. At the
very beginning of the science of dynamics stands the most
extreme theory of the reality of time, Newton's self-subsisting, equably flowing, absolute world time-and its
equally extreme opponent, Leibniz's relative time, a mere
order of phenomenal succession. 4 Newton's theory of an
absolute temporal flux may well be integral to the theological purposes of the Principia, but it does not seem to be
operational within its physics. It is a philosophical rather
than a physical requirement. In contrast, the plain statement by a great physicist of the most minimal notion of
time conceivable is fairly recent, namely Einstein's wholly
operational or instrumental definition of local time as "the
position of the small hand of my watch" (p. 39; an instrumental definition is one in which the term is defined
through the instrument and the operation which measures its magnitude). Although it may seem strange at first
that after two and a half millenia of arduous exploration of
the question "What is time?'' the outcome should be that
time is what the clock tells, one soon sees that this definition is the cleanest and clearest reflection on time that a
physicist can give. For in physics time must be positive,
that is to say, it should be no more than an observable
quantity the method of whose measurement is defined.
There is then an enormous and intellectually most
68
can distinguish and relate the two and communicate his
findings. And though a physical theory may include the
observer with respect to his relative motion or his unavoid-
able interference with the observation, it is regarded as the
part of psychology to deal with the distinguishing and relating itself, that is, with the internal observer. In sum, in
physics time itself is the name of a fundamental motion,
while the telling of time is not ultimately explicable in
physical terms.
Furthermore the philosophical interpretation of physical time is by no means univocal, any more than are those
of philosophy in the wider sense, with which the philosophy of physics does, after all, eventually merge. Therefore,
through this approach a clarification of the concepts of
time implicit in various physical theories is the most that
can be expected.
Let me give very brief versions of three accessible cases
in point.
I. Eddington introduced the phrase "Time's Arrow" to
sum up the observations of thermodynamics. Let there be
a partitioned container, isolated from outside influences,
and let one part be filled with air, the other empty. Now
remove the partition, and the molecules of air in their individual random motions will over time spreed through the
whole vessel (while the probability that they will ever again
simultaneously collect at one end is so vanishingly small as
to make the case practically impossible). The aggregate of
molecules as a whole will then have less organization and
will be said to show increasing "disorder," by which is
meant here a certain kind of homogeneity. Its measure is
called "entropy." The large-scale phenomenal effects of
this statistical law of nature are quite familiar in life:
SUMMER 1983
�Things left to their own devices tend to fall into sprawling
disorder.
Now Eddington interprets this irreversible process of
nature as an intrinsic forward tendency of time itself. If he
is right, physics is indeed capable of revealing the nature
of time. There are, however, many and much debated difficulties, for example, whether the universe is an isolated
system, whether a probable event and a process subject to
fluctuations can be imputed to the steady underlying
action of time, whether to show that time is "anisotropic,"
that is, directed, is necessarily to show that it advances,
whether the physical law applies as well to life. But the
most telling difficulty for present purposes is this: An observer can assert that time is reversible, for example, that if
the time coordinate were imagined as reversed the planets
would exactly retrace their orbits, only if he also imagines
his own time as maintaining its direction so that he can
compare the two successive motions. Would notthe same
hold for an observer of irreversible processes, so that he
would have to say not that physical time itself was advancing, but that "disorder" was irreversibly increasing with
time, namely his psychological observer's time the question of whose advance is no longer a matter for physics?
There is a counterargument, to be sure, namely that human memory itself, the condition of time-telling, is an entropic process since it has an entropic physical basis. But
that leaves us with the question, certainly no longer in the
realm of physics, whether the human observer of nature
can logically himself be subject to its law (Eddington, Ch.
IV; Gruenbaum, Chps. 8, 9; Schlegel, pp. 55 ff.; Whitrow,
Ch. IV 3, 4).
2. Einstein begins his 1905 paper, which sets forth the
special theory of relativity, by defining what the common
place far off it will be said to occur at the same time or
simultaneously, with our clock-time for the arrival of its
signal. Further, clocks which are synchronized with a third
are said to be synchronized with each other. Therefore
simultaneity is not universal "nowness" but merely what it
is defined to be by the synchronizing process.
Next Einstein lays down two fundamental axioms. The
first of these is the principle of relativity itself, which says
that the laws of physics governing a system are not affected if the whole is put into uniform rectilinear motion.
The second is that the speed of light is absolute, namely
the same whether the light is emitted from a stationary or
a moving source. Within a page Einstein has shown that
two clocks which are affixed to the ends of a moving rod
and which have been separately synchronized with a clock
in the stationary system, and so with each other from the
point of view of the stationary observer, will not appear to
meet the criteria of synchronicity from the point of view
of the moving observers. What the stationary observer sees
as simultaneous the moving observers do not. That means
that what one observer takes to be the same moment
comes apart for another observer into different moments.
There is no absolute signification to the concept of simultaneity. The now is not universal.
This result is usually interpreted as confuting the common sense notion of a universal contemporaneity, the feeling we have in ordinary circumstances that our now is ev-
eryone's now. But I wonder if that follows. The theory
means by <(the same time here and there" an operation
definable in terms of observations, namely, the relating of
clocks by a signal which takes time to travel back and forth.
The speed of the signal, namely the speed of light, is the
crucial element in the formula which shows that events
sense of mankind had so far taken as a natural given,
simultaneous in one system will not be so in another rela-
namely what it means to say that it is the same time at
places very far apart. His need to do so follows immediately from his definition of local time as what the clock
tells, and that, in turn, embodies a deep reflection on the
nature of physical knowledge. For nothing is to be counted
as scientific theory which does not ultimately refer to possible sensory events. So to tell what time it is at a fixed
place somewhere far off we must have a clock and an observer there and sensible signalling between him and us.
Now even the fastest signal, light, takes time to go there
and to be reflected back; we all know that the light from
the star we now see is not the light being emitted by the
star now. That means that a procedure for synchronizing
both clocks must be established so that we here can say
what time it is there now.
Einstein defines such a procedure. The time for the
light signal to come and go is taken to be equal by defini-
tively moving one. If that signalling speed were to be increased beyond all bounds, an impossibility in physical
theory to be sure, simultaneity would be reinstated.5
But are we in our thinking and imagining bound by the
physicist's requirements? Can we not in our thoughtswhich are as swift as the ships of Homer's Phaeacians,
namely instantaneous-extend ourselves over all space at
once? If our thinking were in principle incapable of coming under the requirements of science we might well imagine any number of friendly extra-terrestrials, moving and
stationary, all thinking of us and of each other simultane-
tion. We signal our time to the remote observer who sets
his clock by it just as he reflects the signal. Upon receiving
it we set our clock to a time exactly half way between our
sending and receiving the signal. The two clocks are thus
said to be synchronized, and when an event occurs at the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ously, now. A concord of consciousnesses is not inconceiv-
able. I cannot think that the deep-seated human sense of a
universal now can be confuted by a definition of time and
a canon of knowledge not its own (Einstein, I 1-2; Reichenbach, par. 19; Dingle, pp. 460 ff.).
3. In Plato's Sophist the debate between the proponents
of being and becoming is called the Battle of Gods and Giants. This battle rages between interpreters of relativity
theory and furnishes my last example of the difficulty of
extracting a clear philosophical interpretation from physical theory. The argument arises over the interpretation of
69
�the Minkowski diagram, which is a geometric representation of a world in which the space coordinates are interdependent with the time coordinates. A number of authors
claim that the relativization of simultaneity and the involvement or covariance of space and time so spoil the objectivity of the temporal order, that is, the unambiguous
and universal separation of past and future, that one can
no longer speak of becoming in the world. The world is a
four-dimensional continuum of three spatial and one "spa·
tializing" time coordinate, spatializing in the sense that in
this geometric diagram the motion of any substantial point
is represented by a stationary curve. This world is already
"written." It is and does not become, though it appears to
us successively, like a prepared cartoon strip we read by
moving our eyes. Thus the only change is that in the per·
ceiving consciousness of the observer, and if there is real
time it is only his psychological time.
The defenders of becoming argue, on the other hand,
that the perturbations of time pointed to by proponents of
being do not occur for causally related events, whose succession is preserved in all frames of reference; only the succession of causally unrelated and of simultaneous events is
relativized. So nothing, they claim, stands in the way of
positing real, that is, causally conditioned, becoming.
Aside from self-contradictory use of the term "being" to
mean static appearance and the too-narrow use of the
term becoming for causally related succession, the difficulty in drawing philosophical conclusions about time and
the world, even supposing the physicists came to terms,
seems to me to be that the interpretation really concerns
only the representation of the theory, that is, a model of its
world, not the world itself (Frazer, pp. 415 ff.; Whitrow,
pp. 227-228; Gruenbaum, Basic Issues, 195-228).
It seems that while the study of physical theory is indispensable to an understanding of process and motion, it
can be no more than suggestive with respect to time. But
that really implies that time properly speaking must belong not to nature but to the observer.
4. TEMPORAL SENSIBILITY
Sometimes it is the matter itself which arouses wonder
and perplexity, while sometimes the world's preoccupation with it excites curiosity and concern. In the case of
time the two motives for starting a study seem to me to
coincide.
There is certainly plenty of external evidence for our
world's pervasive fascination with time. In the decades
close to us there is no getting away from observations to
the effect that the rate of change of the human environment has increased stupendously, and this increase is usually expressed as a speeding up of time itself. "Innovation"
is the incantatory term which people feel they must utter
to keep time from outrunning them. Complementing this
70
general sense of the urgency of our situation there is also a
flood of scientific work on time; for example, intriguing biGllogical experiments on the temporal rhythms of animals
and jet-setters, psychological studies of time perception
and estimation, sociological accounts of time management
in different cultures (e.g., Zerubavel).
But this overwrought sense of time's power did not arise
only after the First World War. It had been in the offing,
one might say, for two millenia, but it first broke out
acutely almost two centuries ago, in Hegel's writings. It infected common opinion with the notion that the times are
informed by a supraindividual force whose laws human
science can divine and with whose ends human beings
must, on pain of merciless punishment, cooperate. There
was the widespread sense that this movement of time was
coming to a culmination, either in an earthly paradise or in
a man-made apocalypse. There was a passionate elevation
of personal time in its vitality over space in its dead externality (Bergson, Note 27, 3). There were discoveries of the
interdependence of space and time (Einstein, Alexander,
Note 6). And, as was to be expected, an irritated reaction
against this "time-mind" soon followed (Lewis, Note 7).
But most weightily, there was the claim that the philosophical situation of our time forces us to view the ground
of human being itself as temporal (Heidegger, Logik
p. 267).
Although cataloguing the elements and sources of what
everyone is saying is a dry and dubious business, I cannot
help speculating, or rather summarizing the speculation of
others, on how time, having been dethroned from its
mythical majesty by Aristotle, returned as the demon
force of modernity.
Four root references seem to me discernible, four
causes to which the temporal preoccupation oflate modernity is referrable.
First and fundamentally this preoccupation is the secular residue of Christianity. Christian time has a beginning,
an end, and an internal epoch. These are the Creation, the
Final judgment, and the birth of God as man. Our otherwise apostate world retains a secularized sense of impending doom, of a man-made catastrophe (which long antecedes the concrete fear of nuclear annihilation), and,
alternately, of coming salvation through progress toward a
divinization of mankind or a return to an original creaturely equality in a terrestrial paradise.
A second cause is the simple fact that we come late in
history, not in the sense in which Greek philosophers posited innumerably repeated cycles of the discovery and loss
of art and wisdom (Note 13), but because we have behind
us a minutely documented civilization, classical antiquity,
uniquely brilliant and irrevocably bygone, to which we
have a peculiar relation. For modernity begins with a selfconscious, systematic transformation of the classical categories of thought and conduct. Hence the shape of modern preoccupations is not quite intelligible without
reference to their ancient origins. At the same time we
SUMMER 1983
�seem to have every reason for forgetting those origins as
being superseded. For we have more power over nature
and are, in the modern West, better governed than were
our intellectual ancestors. Such forgetfulness, however, in·
duces a vague feeling of discontinuity and leaves us with
the contradiction of a chronic sense that our situation is
utterly new.
Third is the temporal effect that goes with the sheer
massiveness of modernity, its human numbers, informa·
tion, organizations, wars, crimes, and instruments of plea-
sure. The motion of magnitudes so far beyond human per·
spective appears to us to be attributable to an agency less
than divine and yet suprahuman; we call it time and con·
sider its effects inevitable.
Finally, and most to my purpose, is the special modern
propensity for a kind of psychological introspection which,
in contrast to philosophical self-knowledge, consists of a
prolonged pursuit of intimate affective subtleties. It seems
to me to stem from two sources coincidentally: from that
secularization of the anxious Christian interest in the salvation of one's soul which motivates Augustine's Confessions, and from that sophisticated reaction against the
early modern view that human subjectivity is ultimately
rational which is called romanticism and whose founding
work is Rousseau's Confessions (Note 7).
Naturally such introspection-it is really an ingenious
kind of musing-is especially rich in observations about
the sense of time and ready to luxuriate in the aroma of
temporality. Those of us who were born in the first third of
this century participate in these affects by birthright. For
then a sense of decadence and fin de siecle, climaxed by
the First World War which realized all the worst forebodings and indeed closed an era in civilization, had worked
the temporal sensibility into an acute state, which was the
psychological complement of the new interest in the physical time.
Three novelistic masterworks of the early century
which, although demandingly voluminous, found avid
readers, are at once a sign and a source of this sensibility:
The first is Proust's novel, literally entitled Toward a
Search for Lost Times. It is an account of the ennuiinfected author's quest for the catalyst of his art, which he
finds in the last part of the novel, Time Retrieved; it comes
in the form of an instantaneous, time-annihilating recovery of certain paradisical childhood moments. The second
is Mann's Magic Mountain. It is a book described by its author as intended to induce in the reader that same "subli-
learnedly interweaves mythical, historical, personal time;
the book is a recollection of European civilization.
•
•
•
Let me describe some of these experiences of temporality-a mere personal sample of temporal affections indicative of our time-under the interlaced rubrics of pacing,
routine, and skewing.
l. By "pacing" I mean the phenomenon that our internal time seems to undergo drastic shifts in tempo. We
moderns are so acutely subject to these, it seems to me,
because the rhythms of modern life are not long-breathed
natural periods, punctuated by public ritual, but tightly
scheduled stretches interrupted by private vacations. The
characteristically modern art forms, like the novel and
symphonic music, seem to me peculiarly expressive of our
habituation to sharp changes in pace. We moderns arealmost congenitally expert in the central temporal experience of the Magic Mountain-the periods of apathy, surfeit, distraction, and boredom which are long to live
through but vanishingly brief in retrospect, "wastes" of
time, poor in feature and welded in memory; they alternate with times of intense eventfulness, accomplished at
breakneck speed, while depositing memories so closepacked and vivid, that today seems aeons from yesterday.
A similar experience is that haunting sense of its expanded
or contracted availability which makes time seem like
money to be prodigally spent in one phase and anxiously
hoarded in another, always with a guilty sense that one's
lifetime is being mismanaged. Again there is that peculiarly modern drivenness which prevents us from ever
"having" time-and its complementary lethargy when the
possession of no amount of ''free" time avails: our time
devils either ride or bind us. There are, similarly, those occasions of wild anticipation when the present moment,
overburdened with the concentrated desire that time
should pass, stalls in a bad imitation of the "standing now"
of eternity, and will not give way to the next second. Then
again, though, time suddenly takes off and shimmies away,
as in periods of nervous distraction. Perhaps the latter affections are not peculiar to our time, but here is one that
surely is, the strangest and most characteristic of modern
time experiences: our watchful subjection to that ubiquitous little face on the wrist which, through all internal
tempi, equably shows the time. It is somehow, I suspect,
the cause of our loss of temporal equanimity.
mation of time," a warping of the sense of time in accor-
2. Next, ''routine": Routine is that organization of our
dance with the intensity of life, experienced by its solidly
bourgeois yet physically tainted young hero. The book
contains several phenomenological expositions of time, including a whole "Digression on the Time Sense." Finally
there is joyce's Ulysses, an Irish odyssey, whose hero is a
jew, an ordinary man and an outsider, who enacts within
one Dublin day the adventurous Mediterranean voyage
performed over a decade by his Homeric original. joyce
time economy which causes periods of time to be endlessly reflected as in facing mirrors, so that our memory
can scarcely discern whether it contains an infinity of
times or just one moment. Almost everyone who works in
the modern mode, according to a nonseasonal repeating
schedule, has some sense of the enigma of the timeconstrained round. How are such calendar days additive?
What memorable difference could be powerful enough to
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
71
�distinguish each of the ten-thousand times of hastening up
these particular brownstone stairs at the sound of the bell
from every other? The memory is curiously cavalier about
the routines of life. It abstracts one event and remembers
that schema, modified by the mere knowledge of its multitudinous recurrence, its mere temporal heaping. The duties of each day, when done in the present, at the front of
time~ as it were, are vivid and absorbing enough, but when
we turn around to face the past an enigma stares back:
There has certainly been living but has there been a life,
that complete shape which the Greeks call bios, as distinct
from mere vital process, zoe? Can a temporally bureau era~
tized life become a whole unless the routine is no more
than the thorough-bass of some atemporal melody? Again,
the complement of clock-bound business is the vacation, a
vacancy of time, l{free" time, and this whole temporal con~
figuration of engaged and disengaged periods is subject to
a curious inversion of background and foreground, as in
certain optical illusions, such that work time, in which
life's energy is, after all, primarily invested, feels like the
mere backdrop to the periods of "off' time. No matter
how contentedly we are enmeshed in the cocoon of daily
absorption, let there be a break in busyness, and the inertia
which is strong in the scheduled spirit exerts itself to resist
not only all duties but all actions, and the released soul
drinks deep draughts of diversion.
3. uSkewing" is my term for the overpowering sense
which befalls us moderns especially in historical settings,
the sense that space and time can be at cross purposes. I
have been in Athens, at a place where my path crossed
that of Socrates, not conjecturally but precisely, since archaeology, that quintessentially modern discipline, has
fixed the exact location, for instance, of the court where
he was tried. Nor was I on the spot in plane coordinates
only, for again archaeology, which brings back the past by
digging down, had laid bare the level of his time. I was,
then, correctly located in all three spatial dimensions. I
was in the right place but at the wrong time. That melancholic sense of the irreparable loss of what we have never
had which is induced by written histories of bygone splendours-for histories induce memories of the never-experienced~that
temporal nostalgia, is many times intensified
when no space intervenes to compound the temporal distance, when here and now are directly at odds. It is, after
all, to bask in such melancholy that we visit "historic
spots."
The apprehension of this skewing of space and time invites much rumination. Take, for instance, the common
inverse experience of the case above: being contempora-
neous, even precisely simultaneous, with another cherished human being, but apart in space. How does the case
of spatial distance differ from temporal separation? Apparently by the fact that the latter seems to be remediable; by
an investing of available time in transversing space I can
come again into the other's presence~incidentally itself
the strangest business, this going into and out of another's
72
now! But is being in the same place at the same time so
certain a remedy for remoteness? Can it not equally be its
cause? Cannot the absent soul be more vividly a presence
than the present body? One writer on time illustrates the
common claim, that the feature which most distinguishes
present from past is vividness, by referring to his colleague
X who is, he asserts, more acutely there than Plato. I wonder, or rather I doubt it. On the other hand, there does
seem to be a special bond of awareness~ if only of disillusioned awareness~that links not only those who live in
neighbourly contiguity but also those who coexist in spatially distant contemporaneity.
To extend the speculation from spatial to temporal relocation: If it is sometimes, though perhaps rarely, possible
to go back to former places and presences, and to reenter
their continuity, why should it be an interdicted purpose-as the common opinion of our age considers it-to
go back to former times by internal recovery and an external reconstruction? Such a collective return, or rather re-
trieval, such a going back which means a bringing back,
has, after all, been attempted, and always these renaissance times are also the newest of times. Similarly, why
should not individual retrievals of our private lost times be
a possibility? That is, after all, Proust's project~just as the
Renaissance revives antiquity in grand vignettes, so Proust
relives his childhood in paradisical tableaus. Could it be,
indeed, that such retrievals of time, public or private, are
the modern replacements for the ancient periodic ritual
enactments of mythical moments~these being the respective modes of bringing the then and there into the
here and now and of undoing the skewing of time and
place?
I have only described some time affections which seem
to me particularly acute in modern life. But such diverse
musings while expressing the mood and providing the material for the inquiry into time have no end and lead to no
resolutions.
5. THE PHILOSOPHERS
What is left, in the end, for someone anxious to clarify
and test certain intimations about time, is the way through
the philosophers. It is, after all, their proper and specific
business to ask boldly and set out coherently what Time
itself is. The five writers I have chosen are those who seem
to me to present the most deep-reaching, well-grounded,
and mutually responsive thematic treatment of time.
Aristotle defines time as the number of motion. His is
the first thematic treatment in the West, unsurpassibly
comprehensive and therefore the natural reference for all
subsequent expositions.
Augustine, in his effort to comprehend the temporal
creature's relation to his eternal God and Creator, discovers time as the "distension" or worldly dimension of the
soul. His ardent and original inquiry first establishes temporality as at the root of human existence.
SUMMER 1983
�On this Augustinian discovery Huss.erl bases a phenomenology, namely a description, as presuppositionless as
possible, of the internal appearances of time, that is, of
time-consciousness.
·
Kant finds time to be the "inner sense," the sense in
which the self becomes an appearance to itself; here time,
as the form of human sensibility, is of the soul without belonging to the ultimate subject, the self.
Heidegger understands the very ground of human existence as temporality, inverting Kant's relation of the self to
time and driving the notion of time to its most extreme
distance from Aristotle.
There are, of course, other writers on time who are of
g<e><t stature. Of these my chief omission is Hegel, whose
writings, (except for the paragraphs on time in nature,
Note 27, 2) are just not capable of a dissevered thematic
treatment of time. For his system is the account of the
spirit in its necessary appearances which is Time. 8
Plotinus (20), Leibniz and Newton (4), Locke (24),
Nietzsche (13), Bergson (27, 3) and Whitehead (16 and 32)
are briefly treated in the Notes indicated. As for the absence of Plato, it is not really an omission because there is
no extended treatment of time in the Dialogues except in
myths (See Notes 12 and !3) and, significantly, none of
these are told by Socrates himself-whose images are reserved for the atemporal.
Finally, I should say that it is not so much the gist of the
theories here presented that is instructive for my purpose
but the exposition of their motives and principles, the tracing of their explicit and implicit consequences, and the
formulation of those oppositions and analogies which
mark them as belonging to one tradition. Using the texts in
that way, I shall in the last section (VI) try to formulate my
suspicions against time.
II. ARISTOTLE: TIME AS THE NUMBER OF MOTION
Time, Ghronos, is endowed among the Greeks with vividly various shapes and widely diverse, even opposite,
powers; he is monster, god, and heaven itself, all-seeing,
healing, and all-destroying9 Sophocles, for example, says
onoe that ".omnipotent time" confounds and destroys all,
and then again he calls him "a gentle god" (Oed. Col. 609,
Electra 179). Time's attributes are evidently fluid, but he is
always a potent being.
In the fourth book of the Physics, the first extensive thematic treatment of time, Aristotle suddenly and drastically
reduces it to the lowest possible status. This epoch-making
triumph of thinking over myth-making has not prevailed.
Indeed, the dethroned god has been resurrected as God
himself by Aristotle's modern counterpart, Hegel. So
much the more, it seems to me, should the overthrow accomplished by Aristotle be recalled.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
L TIME AND ITS MEASURES*
Aristotle begins with the suspicion that time is "either
wholly not, or scarcely and obscurely" (217 b 34). For many
perplexities arise if being is ascribed to time, chief of
which is that some of it is gone and is no longer, some of it
is to come and is not yet, while the now is no part of time
at all.
He resolves the difficulty like this: Time is a mere affection or aspect (pathos, hexis, 223 a 19) of motion: "Time is
the number of motion with respect to before and after" (220
a 25).
The Loeb translators comment that Aristotle "enters
into no profound metaphysical speculation as to its essential nature" (I, 378). But the profundity of his speculation
lies precisely in his showing that time has no essential nature; an interpretation of his treatment ought to show
what the deep-lying reasons for this determined trivialization of time are.
Not only is time a mere aspect of motion for Aristotleit is not even a necessary aspect, since not all motions are
temporal. Two kinds of motion at least are prior to time.
They are the motions at the two limits of the natural
world, so to speak, and they are timeless because they are
themselves the source and principle of time. The first is
the ultimate, primary rotational motion of the heavens,
the second is the motion of the soul apprehending time. I
shall say more of these later, but I must mention right now
that to identify these motions as pretemporal is by no
means to say that they cannot be timed. We can clock the
heavens and we can time our cogitations-but we have
clocks only because of the regular continuous motions of
the heavens, and we can tell time only because of the
counting motion of our soul. Time is the measure of motion, and therefore motion can in turn measure time (220 b
24).
Up to the last book the Physics is about inner-worldly
motions and these alone are the motions affected with
time, the number of motion according to before and after.
Where there is no physical body, there is no time (On the
Heavens 279 a 16). Motion (kinesis) includes every kind of
change (metabole) of quantity, quality, place, and the process of becoming (2!8 b 21, though not becoming as simple coming into being, Met. 1067 b 32). How can motion
possess number, that is, come in ordered units?
Motion has a quantitative aspect; it is a magnitude; we
may say that it has extension. Motion derives its sequential
extended character of before-and-after from this aspect
which is merely a property in the motion although separable in thought (2!9 a 22; see Loeb I p. 384, n.b.). (Strictly
speaking, as we shall see, the motion derives its magnitudinal property from the thing moved, the mobile.) In other
*The section on Aristotle was worked out during a year of learning with
and from Anderson Weekes, then a senior at St. John's College, Annapolis, who during that time developed a coherent and illuminating account
of Aristotle's theory of cognition.
73
�words, the category of continuous quantity is predicated
which includes them (Met. 1078 a 12); therefore physics is
of motion.IO
a subordinate science, and not Science simply, as it is with
To say that time moves is meaningless; rather motion is
temporal, and from motion time derives all its properties
and problems. As motion is continuous, so is time, and all
the problems continuity offers to reason, time does likewise. First among these is its relation to the now, which is
analogous to that of a point to its line. More of that later. A
second difficulty is that since motion is continuous, so is
us.
Locomotion, then, is prior in all ways to the other motions. Of locomotions, rotary motion alone is continuous
in all senses: It has no beginning and it does not end
through having completed its process, nor does it abruptly
double back on itself; it can be regular, smooth, uninterrupted, and eternal (Phys. VIII 8-9).
The first heavenly sphere is the uniquely perfect embodiment of such rotary motion. It comes as close to being
at rest as a mobile can be, since every point in a circular
motion is equally a beginning, middle, and end, so that in a
certain sense it has no before-and-after (265 b 1). It is in
motion, but not toward an end; its movement is rather a
steady state which imitates in its regularity the pure activity of completely fulfilled being, God (Met. XII 7). This is
the motion which is the cause of all other inner-worldly
motions, and so, indirectly, of time (Phys. VIII 9). 12 Beyond
the heavens there is no time (On the Heavens 279 a 15).
The continual character of time, its endlessness and its
uninterruptedness, is therefore derived from that of the
ultimate motion. Because of the heavenly motion, time is
one and the same throughout the world (Phys. 218 b 14).
The discontinuous motions of the terrestrial world, which
come to an end with the reaching of their goal, are all fit-
time: Whence, then, come the unit measures, the periods,
through which time can become the number of motions?
Time, therefore, pertains to motion insofar as motion
is a continuous quality or quantity, which always has a
before-and-after. The primary before-and-after, according
to Aristotle, is that of place (219 a 16), and therefore locomotion is in all ways the primary motion: It is the condition of all other motions, and it is the motion of a completed being, and it is temporally prior to other motions
since it initiates them (VIII, 7). But it would be false to conclude that motion is continuous because it is spatial, as if it
were the covering of extended space by an indifferent
point-mobile. That would be an importation of the modern physical view that a motion is sufficiently understood
through its "quantity," which is called momentum and defined as the measure of the mass multiplied by the velocity
of the moving body. Aristotle rejects the possibility of a
motion indifferent to the nature of the mobile and its
proper places.l 1 Indeed, as was said, motion itself is defined in terms of the mobile, as its state. He says clearly
that motion is continuous because the thing moved is continuous and not because that in which it is moved is so
(Coming to Be 337 a 27). He does not, of course, mean the
continuity of the present extent of the thing, for example,
its length, but rather that continuity which a mobile has by
reason of possessing a matter which remains continuous
through change, the substrate or subject of the motion
(Met. 1042 a 32, 1044 b 7). The magnitude of motion,
and derivatively of time, is an affection of a divisible subject which is not the momentary present movable thing
itself but "what was moved" (Met. 1020 a 32), which must
mean the mobile in its progressive changes of place. In this
continuing-through-its-phases the mobile displays that extension which is reflected in the motion and which, when
counted, is called temporal durations. In brief: what is
countable in motion is its continuously phased development, its "before-and-after."
It should be noted here that, accurately speaking, the
magnitudinal affections are so-called "proper affections";
they belong to the mobile not essentially but yet necessarily, just as a human being is not essentially either a male or
a female and yet is necessarily one of these. Temporal duration is therefore not of the essence of the mobile. From
this fact follows the crucial distinction between Aristotelian and modern physics: To Aristotle the science that
leaves out motion and magnitude is closer to essences,
more intelligible, and therefore more accurate than that
74
ted into continuous cosmic time. And since everything
within the world is mobile and subject to timing, time is in
everything (223 a 17).
As the heavens are the source of temporal continualness, so they provide the measure of time. The cycle of
rotation is the best unit of time, because it is easiest to
count (223 b 19)-a continuous quantity must have a unit
measure in order to be countable.
The unit measures of time in the terrestrial world of becoming are provided by the sun's oblique motion along the
ecliptic. just as the movement of the whole heaven is responsible for the continuity of motion and time, so the
sun, the "generator," by its approaches and withdrawals
causes each life to have its span: "Every life and time is
measured by a period, though not the same for all .... For
some the measure is a year, for some a greater and for oth-
ers a lesser period" (On Coming to Be 336 b 13 ff.). Hence
the period or cycle is the natural time unit (Phys. 223 b 28).
God has made this somewhat irregular but uninterrupted
cycle of becoming perpetual so that it may come as near as
possible to eternal being (3 36 b 35); becoming approaches
being in a kind of Eternal Return.l 3 To tell continuous
time over such annual cycles it would seem necessary that
each cycle should differ somewhat from the next, as, because of the accidents of matter, it certainly will be.
Time, then, belongs, strictly speaking, only to the sublunar world of change, of becoming and of linearly advancing motion in which before and after are distinguishable.
Such motion, defined in Physics III (201 a 11), 14 is to be
understood through Aristotle's two fundamental terms,
SUMMER 1983
�potentiality or capability for being (dynamis) and actuality,
activity, or being-at-work (energeia; also' entelecheia, fulfillment). Motion, then, is the fulfillment of a capability; it is
the actual exercise of the potentiality that the mobile has
for being what it was meant to be, for achieving its full
form (eidos). Each motion is a unity, governed by its own
end and ceasing when that end has been fulfilled. Its time
is just the measured course of this activity of approaching
full being. Since a terrestrial mobile, unlike the heavens
(On the Heavens I, 3), has a corruptible material substrate
and is subject to accidents, it cannot hold its perfected
state. If it is an animal it will instead have generated a new
animal, different in number but the same with itself in
form. And so as a member of the species it will participate
in eternity, in spite of the temporary life of each generation (On the Soul 415 b 4). Such generating is the terrestrial complement to the work of the generating sun: "Man
is begotten by man and by the sun" (Phys. 194 b 13). The
father as progenitor comes before the child in time, but
because he contributes the form toward which the child is
moving he is prior not only in time but also in being.
That toward which as an end the motion is, the actuality, is prior in dignity (Met. 1050 a). This priority is timeless. When a moving thing has come to the state of beingat-its-own-end or fulfillment it straightaway cuts out of the
continuum of time and becomes, with respect to its being,
timeless. What is actual, fully in being, is present (hypdrchon, 1048 a 32), in a state imaginable as a kind of motionless vibrancy. One must say of it that it has been and is at
once (1048 b 24); it is not temporally determinable or articulable. But just as for pure eternal objects "to be while
time is is not the same as to be in time" (Phys. 221 a 19), so
worldly things which are composites of form and material
can have temporal duration in their actuality. For their
having come into their own form does not preclude their
informed material from being in time. Thus the men of
Troy cannot be said to be either before or after us with
respect to their form, and yet the Trojan War in which
they served certainly occurred long before our day (Problemata 916 a 18 ff.).IS
It is just because every motion is one and terminates in
its own end that time is powerless as a cause. For this end
is always discontinuous with the motion that leads up to it.
Aristotle separates the concluding moment as no longer
belonging to the motion but to its completion and fulfillment (Phys. 263 b 15). So while a motion and its time are
yet in process, none of the moments of this continuous
span is determinate or complete enough to be the sufficient cause of the next moment. When mere time intervenes between a cause and its end, that is, when the mo~
lion is not a completed unity, the end is merely contingent
(Post. An. II 12). Thus, while a cause may be in time, it can
never act through mere time: That means that there is no
mechanical causation, which is a causation where each
momentary state fully determines the next. Furthermore,
Aristotle notes that the mere lapse of time is never responTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
sible for a thing being made new or beautiful. If anything,
we say that time destroys, but only because motion itself
is, from one perspective, "ekstatic" (a word Heidegger will
raise to central importance), that is to say, it is a destabilization and a "standing forth" from the status quo (Phys. 221
b 1; 222 b 17).
Time is but the number of motion-the objective number, the countable parts themselves (219 b 9). Motion is
potentially numerable, but it has an actual number or becomes temporal only when it is actually counted.
It is the soul that counts motion. How? By noting
change, of course. When we have no awareness of change,
as during sleep, we say that no time has passed, for we fit
the earlier directly onto the later now (218 b 26). (Because
of the continuity of motion the opposite case, that there
should be no change to perceive, is apparently impossible.)
So time depends on distinguishing nows.
2. THE NOW
If time is thought of on the analogy of a continuous directed line whose parts have an intrinsic order (though of
position rather than of before-and-after, Cat. 5 a 30), the
now corresponds to a Euclidean point, namely a point
which is not a constituent element of a line but merely lies
upon it (Elements, Def. 4). For the now, Aristotle is at
pains to show, is not a part of time but its very Hcontinuity" (220 a 19, 222 a 10), at once the pivotal link of beforeand-after and the possibility of temporal division. This
mathematized now reproduces whatever perplexities a
mathematical point raises, and so, since time depends on
motion and motion on the continuous magnitude of the
mobile (219 a 12), time shares all the problems of geometric continuity. For example, the nows are the limits of segments of time without belonging to time and are therefore
not attainable by dividing time, just as the point is a partless element which indefinite divisions of a line approach
but do not reach. Further, the now is always the same in
function but never in "position" (219 b 16), just as any
point which produces a cut in the line is indistinguishable
from another except by location; similarly, as a point divides a line everywhere potentially, but actually only when
a cut is made, so the now does not divide time actually
until a temporal cut is made.
How is that temporal cut made? As time accompanies
motion, so the now hovers, as it were, over the moving
thing (219 b 24 ff.) It is by the now alighting on an object
that before-and-after in motion are first distinguished, for
"the now is most apprehensible." We conclude that the
now must be the presentness of the perception 16 of a moving thing, and that the cut in time is made by the act of
perceptual attention to a moving object: "Perception is
necessarily of a this and a where and a now" (Post. An. 87 b
30). Perception is "an innate distinguishing power" (99 b
36) which is actualized by the external and the particular
75
�(On th~ Soul417 b 21), and the now-cut in time is actualized with it
But, on the other hand, how can there be perception of
the point-now? If perception itself takes time, then how
can it cut time except in time, which means, not at a now.
But if, on the other hand, perception as the activity of the
faculty of sensation (On the Soul II 5,12) is, like all actuality, essentially not in time (though it can be accompanied
by time), then what does it have to do with the now which
makes the temporal cut? What Aristotle says of the activity
of pleasure exemplifies this problem: "It is a kind of whole
in the now" (Nic. Eth. 1174 b 9; a !4)l7 Is this psychic now
which is capable of atemporal substantial fulness formally
identical with the now of physical time? Similarly for perception: What is perceived in the soul's now is the atemporal actuality of the object-the soul perceives its form
through the sensing of its shape. How then can the soul
simultaneously perceive the partless point-now of the mobile's temporal extension? Aristotle does not say. He does
indeed try to make provision for the perception of lengths
of time (see below, 3). But even then it will not be clear
how the soul cuts time, and this is a crucial difficulty since
"time is what is determined by the now" (Phys. 219 a 30). It
is this difficulty which later philosophers solve by taking
time into the soul so that the now becomes identical with
its noting.
When the soul has pronounced "now" twice (however it
does so), namely before and after a motion-stretch, we say
that a certain time has passed (2!9 a 28). Since time is that
by which motion has number, it must be possible to count
the stretch between the termini, which requires reference
to a standard measure. We have, as was shown, such uni-
versal measures given us by the heavenly spheres: days by
the revolution of the starry sphere, years and seasons by
the sun, months by the moon. With these natural passages
and their more minute subdivisions we compare the
stretch of time and, counting the bounding nows-for the
now corresponds to the unit in number (221 a 16)-we
count the substretches which they mark off.
There is no time without soul, for time arises where
countable motion is actually counted, and only a soul, by
means of the perceptive intellect (nous) can count (223 a
23 ff.). What, then, is counting?
We must cast loose completely from latter-day Kantian
notion that counting is the articulation of an inner stream
of consciousness, an internal time-flux. The soul, for Aris-
totle, has no original psychic time because it has no one
continuous underlying flow or motion; nor does thought
run through or touch on a continuum as it counts: "The
motion of reason is not a continuum and in an underlying
matter, as is that of a moving thing" (On Invisible Lines
969 a 32). When the soul thinks time it does not actually
run through the temporal continuum but takes its sections
atomically, as it thinks its successive thoughts discretely,
like numbers (On the Soul430 b 7, 407 a 9).
The soul, locomotive, affective, or rational, cannot well
be said to be in physical motion (408 a 34 ff.)lS But in some
76
other manner, never quite defined, it must be spoken of as
moving. For example, thinking is motion for "without continuity and time it is impossible for us to think even those
things which are not in time" (On Memory 450 a 8). Coming to know is a motion for it requires experience, repeated
and remembered perceptions through which the universal
is suddenly established (Post. An. !00 a 3 ff.). The attaining
of a good condition takes time, for the human intellect,
being composite, needs a continuous approach to perfec-
tion (Met. 1075 a 9). So there are psychic motions, but they
are discontinuous, in fact in two ways: Motion is not al-
ways present and each motion proceeds discretely. I think
it can be shown that the human soul does have an everpresentness, namely its first actuality, analogous to the unintermittent thought of the pure intellect, but it is not the
continuity of an ever-advancing, ever-incomplete homoge-
neous flux. The continuity of time is entirely external and
physical. Its source is the heavenly local motion with
which the intermittent inner motion of the soul has only
this in common-that it, too, must be in a strict sense ach-
ronic; for how, without infinite regress, will the soul count
its own counting? 19
3. MEMORY
Without the now, then, there is no time, and no time
without a now (2!9 b 34), but as we have seen, the now is
not a part of time. Indeed its mode of being is quite different from that of time, which is to say that it comes under a
different category. Time belong, to the category of "how
great" or quantity; the now belongs to the category of
"when" (Cat. 2 a 2, 11 b 12) along with "yesterday" and
~~tomorrow." Except for an isolated chapter on the usage
of ''when" words, nothing is said of this latter category in
the Physics nor is it elucidated in the Categories. This most
significant and strange disjunction of time and the now is
implied by Aristotle's problematic theory of the role duration plays in perception and perceptible being: The perceptive intellect comes into contact with the continuously
moving physical world always at a here and a now; the here
may stay put, but the now passes orr along with the motion, and from that, derivatively, arises the perception of
time. But the now has another relation to time besides
generating its perception: Each present now forms an im-
penetrable limit between all the nows that have passed
and all the nows that are to come (234 a 1). Or perhaps
since there are, strictly speaking, no past and future nows,
one should say that the now separates time before from
time after.
Therefore there is a past-or rather, we humans have a
past (as do certain animals, On Mem. 450 a 15). The inanimate physical world has no past or future, although it has a
before-and-after, which simply means that it is in a prior or
a posterior phase of its approach to being. Nor has God a
past, for having no sensory perception he has no now.
How then is it possible for us to have a past, that is to
SUMMER 1983
�say, passed nows? Aristotle deals with this most humanly
interesting of temporal problems, the triune character of
the category "when," in the brilliant little essay On Memory and Recollection. We know even beforehand that we
must have a capacity for retaining nows drained of present
perception. Without such an ability we could not tell time,
since we could not interpret what we had counted up. Nor
could we learn, since we could accumulate no experience.
For it is many memories which make one experience, and
memory is of past perception (Post. An. 100 a 4).
About the three "whens" Aristotle says succinctly: "Of
what is present, there is perception, of what is to come,
expectation, of what has been, memory" (On Mem. 449 b
28).
The present (paron, being-at-hand) is the perceptionfilled now. It is immediate: Of the now in the now there
can be no memory (449 b 26). Enough has been said of it.
Heidegger will subject it to a fundamental critique.
It is. the imagination which makes the two non-present
phases of time possible. The future arises when the soul,
in present deliberation about what is to be, projects images
(On the Sou/431 b 8). Aristotle observes that we appear to
face into the future since the before of the past is more
remote from the now than the after, while the before of
the future is closer (Phys. 223 a 9). But beyond that he
treats the future mostly from the logical point of view, asking what it might mean to speak now the truth about what
will be. For if futural assertions are always either true or
false, just like assertions about past and present, then contingency and chance are excluded-the future is determinate. But that cannot be, since both human choice and the
vagaries of matter work to make future events contingent.
So while it is certainly necessary that tomorrow there must
be a seafight or not, it is impossible to say which ofthese is
the case (On Interp. 9). Therefore, in order to judge of future propositions, one must know which things will be by
necessity (either because they are part of a necessary cycle
of becoming, Post. An. 95 b 38 ff., or because they are always or never), and what things are within human choice.
Then one can say either "it will be" or "it is expected" (to
esti, to mellon, Coming to Be 337 b 3 ff.), knowing that
these sentences really refer to two different futures-the
foreknown and the merely anticipated.
But Aristotle never intimates that there is anything in
the future as future, some innovation or fulfillment to be
credited to mere futurity. What will be necessarily in the
future is what has already always been (Note 13). Even human affairs run in cycles: "It is likely that art and philosophy have often been discovered as far as possible and perished again" (Met. 1074 b II). So the future is of no great
interest to him. It will be otherwise with Augustine to
whom prophecy, as the foreknowledge of the apparently
contingent, is a serious matter, and with Heidegger for
whom the future will become the spring of time itself.
It is the past which Aristotle treats most significantly.
There is a past because there is memory and memory is a
mode of the imagination. There is a kind of motion in the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
soul, resulting from the activity of perception, by which
we have images (On the Sou/429 a 3). No human being, as
a composite of matter and form, can think without images;
for example, one cannot do geometry without at least internal diagrams. For the image is an accommodation of
material objects to the thinking soul, a holding of their
form and their continuity without their matter; the human
intellect needs this form to go to work (On Mem. 450 b 31
ff.).
Memory and imagination, then, both belong to the
same part of the soul, that "primary organ" of perception
which receives deliverances incidental and common to all
the senses, namely magnitude, motion, and, consequently,
time (450 a 8 ff., On the Sou/425 a 14 ff.). Memory is the
affection of this power when time has gone by (On Mem.
449 b 26), a kind of perception perpetuated past its cause.
All things imaginable can be remembered (450 a 24); indeed it is hard to think what sense-derived image would
not be, strictly speaking, a memory, since all images arise
from perception as soon as the actual sensing in the sense
organ has ceased.
Only what is no longer present can be remembered. But
how is that possible? Aristotle never tells haws imagining
works, except by analogy. He likens a memory-image to a
seal impression, a simile which expresses the crux of his
difficulty: Imaging compounds the mystery of perception:
how can a material somatic organ receive the physical object extendedly and yet immaterially (On the Soul424 a 18
ff., 427 b 29 ff.)-and then hold it through time ready for
recovery?
But he does tell what it means to be an image. The memory recovers the perceptual trace or memory-image in the
soul. However it is not the image we remember but the
thing itself, and therein lies a problem. Aristotle resolves it
by pointing out that that is just what it means to be an
image: to be all in one an affection present in the soul and
a likeness of an object, just as a picture is before us both as
a physical object and as a likeness of a person. Aristotle is
here prefiguring one of Husserl's central conceptions, that
of "intentionality," which is the defining characteristic of
consciousness as always consciousness of something.
We have a past, then, by virture of memory, and we
have memory by virtue of our threefold receptive power.
These are its facets: I. perception (aisthesis), which is responsible for the actual present sensory event; 2. imagina-
tion (phantasia), which is the capability of being affected
by the continuities of place and motion abstracted from
their matter; and 3. memory (mneme), which permits retention of images and their revival together with an awareness of the time elapsed since perception (452 b 23). Aristotle supplies a not quite intelligible explanation of how
such elapsed times are gauged (452 b 7 ff.): Just as one estimates a great external object not by actually reaching for it
but by representing it in a proportionate figure in the field
of the imagination, so one does not actually go back a long
time to estimate the age of a memory-image, but one represents it proportionately in a speeded-up motion-for ex-
77
�ample, by running through a decade in a second. What is
hard to see is how such a scaling of time can given more
than a very impressionistic comparative judgement of its
length, since temporal extent cannot be panoramically surveyed in the imagination-for it does not appear-so as to
give some sense of a scaling factor. As I have said, the chief
difficulty in Aristotle's account of time is his insistence
that duration itself can be perceived and imaged.
Aristotle, nonetheless, summarizes: "Only those animate beings who perceive time remember, and by that
part by which they perceive time" (449 b 29). This might
seem to be a circular outcome: We have a past, because we
have memory and memory because we have a sense of
passed time. Yet with all its difficulties it sets the terms for
future debate-the past can be only for animate beings
who have an imagination with a temporal dimension, that
is, memory.
What is entirely missing in Aristotle's founding account
is any sense that our triple temporality is humanly significant. The reason for this omission is that not time but
timeless actuality is life in the full sense. This view is
plainly expressed in this passage from the Nichomachean
Ethics, which may serve as an epigraph:
Pleasant is the activity of the present, the hope of what is to
come, the memory of what has been. But what is truly pleasant and lovable in these is their being in the way of actuality.
[IX 1168 a 13]
*
*
*
The vulnerable places in this magnificently detailed and
dovetailed theory of time which can be culled from Aristotle's various works are patent. They occur, I have argued, at its outer and its inner termini: the continuous ce-
lestial revolution which is the cause of all motion and the
perceptual now, which is the point of tangency of natural
motion and the soul. Happily the central thesis, the reduction of time to an affection of motion, is not, I think, exclusively bound into Aristotle's terms. (See Sec. VI 2.)
Before going on to Augustine, who fully makes good
Aristotle's lack of temporal pathos, let me at least refer to
the intervening grand psycho-cosmological theory of the
Neoplatonist Plotinus. (It is briefly sketched in No~e 20.).
Ill. AUGUSTINE:
TIME AS THE ''DISTENTION''
OF THE SOUL
Time and the soul's temporality is transfigured in acreated world. Augustine burns with curiosity, expressed in
ardent language, to know how the temporal human creature can reach beyond creation to the creator so as to find
God's will "before" the world. He begins by throwing out
78
an impetuous barrage of time quandaries and reflections
(Confessions, XI 14-19). What is time? How can there be a
•past when what is gone is now no longer and what will be is
not yet? And yet, did the present not pass, it would be eternity. Again, how can I say that is, whose cause of being is
that it shall be? And how can I measure times when those
gone are no longer and those to come are not yet available?
If! do it, it must be while it is passing. But then what of the
Hthree times"-how can I preserve them concurrently?
Augustine thus begins, in some faith of getting satisfaction, with just those questions which Aristotle cites as perplexities arising from the error of giving time substantial
being. In the course of his passionate inquiry some truths
do come clear to Augustine. He thinks he can affirm boldly
that if nothing were passing there would be no past time; if
nothing were coming, no future; if nothing were, no
present. So there must be a motion of the world; God's
creation has passage. Further he sees that he always faces
time: It does not come up from behind and out of the past,
and he cannot, like Aristotle, go along with it, but 1it comes
toward him from the future. As Aristotle, in Greek, calls
the past "that which has become" (gen6menon), so Augustine calls it what has gone by (praeteritum). For there is a
real future, not merely a necessitating cyclical return, but
events-to-be, contingent to human apprehension, yet revealed to the prophets through God's omniscience. A real
future is the human consequence of God's foreknowledge.
However he approaches the perplexity, Augustine is
sure of this-and here begin his wonderful resolutionsthat past, present, and future, wherever they are to be
found, are only as present (20). There are not, properly
speaking, three times (Aristotle's "whens") called past,
present, and future. Rather there is Ha present of what is
past, a present of what is present, and a present of the future."
Such three are indeed in our soul (anima) and elsewhere I do
not see them. The present of what has gone by is memory,
the present of what is present, eyewitness (contuitus), the
present of what is future, expectation. [20]
Augustine is not describing an Aristotelian faculty for
sensing what is before us, for reviving images with their
accrued times and for projecting them in planning. He is
speaking of time itself, and he is placing it within the human soul.
The problem of measuring this psychic time leads him
on (21-22). His mind "is set afire" by it, by the burning
perplexity of the dispersal of time into its three phaseshow to lay them together for comparison, in what space, in
what dimension to do the measuring. For time is not the
measure of a motion but what is itself to be measured:
While the sun stood still, time yet went on for Joshua.
'jNew," he exclaims, "is the discovery of these things!"
The discovery is this: "In you, my mind (animus), do I measure my times" (27). Times can be measured in the mind
SUMMER 1983
�because they are co-present there, and hence comparable.
Thus is resolved the great puzzle of primary time measurement: unlike a length of space whose rigid measure can be
transported intact and made congruent with another
Expectation
(Future)
length, times and their measures flow away and are incapa~
Eyewitness
(<Present)
ble of superimposition. (One must keep in mind that
clocks measure and compare times only derivatively,
through motion.): But in the soul times do coexist.
The soul's collection of all times into its present proceeds, I infer, as follows. Worldly motion passes, so to
speak, under the attentively apprehending soul. The soul
perceives each moment as it goes past and absorbs it into
its own temporal dimension, its memory. Thus the now
remains fixed in its context but sinks ever further down as
<t - - - - - - - ....-------~motion
~o<:-
..,e~"'
~+
Past
(memory)
new moments of motion are perceived. At the same time
that the soul remembers, and at the same juncture of the
world's motion and the soul's present, it also expects. The
difference between remembering and expecting is only
this, that whereas present moments drop into memory, future moments drop, as it were, out of the dimension of expectation into the world.
The future, therefore, is not a long time, for it is not, but the
long future time is merely a long expectation of the future.
Nor is the time past a long time, for it is not; but a long past
time is merely a long memory of past time. (28]
Augustine has referred to this co-temporaneity of the
times as being in the mind. But now he goes further. Time
is the dimension of the soul. Here is how Augustine puts it:
" ... It seems to me that time is nothing else but a stretching out in length," [distentio is his word] "but of what I
know not, and I marvel if it be not of the very mind" (26).
Note that here time is not in the mind but it is the mind, or
rather the dimension of the mind: The soul is the "space
of time," that is to say it is drawn out into a temporal longitude along which memories, perception, and expectations
are copresently arrayed.
This "distention" can therefore be visualized as a kind
World 1 s
indeed implicit in Augustine's understanding that the external creation has events but no temporal succession; it is
the world as God sees it, all at once. It is the "standing
now" (11) which becomes fluid only to the finite creature:
Whatever God doth, it shall be forever .... That which hath
been is now, and what is to be hath already been, and God
requireth what is to be. [Ecclesiastes iii 14-15)
Second is the real futurity of the projections and previsions of the expectation segment; prophesies, as Godgiven visions of what is to be, meet their own realizations
in the world, when the moment of their juncture with it
arrives.
Finally, the diagram points to the plenitude of memory
for Augustine. He has indeed already devoted a most beautiful book (X) to its power, its "ample and infinite inwardness (penetrale)," its "fields and spacious palaces," whence
he can make present to himself by their images things he
has seen and learned, including himself as he was, and
which he traverses to come to God (8, 9, 17, 25).
hori~
Augustine's passionate interest in temporality has its
zontal axis represents the world's motion coming from the
reason in his faith. He wants to discover the condition under which a temporally dispersed being can approach
union with God. Having collected time from what might
be called its horizontal extension into the vertical dimension representing the cotemporaneity of the phases of
time, he has achieved a human present which is analogous
to God's "standing now." But he prays further that his
of vertical elongation, an ordinate in a diagram. The
future towards the soul's "eyewitness." That moment is
the origin, the perceptual present, where the soul's "distention" intersects, or sits astride, the world's motion and
turns its sensation~events into memory images. These con-
tinually drop down, preserving the order of entry, into the
memory segment of the soul's distention, falling deeper
with every passing moment. At the same juncture expecta-
tion or foreknowledge is drawn down from the upper segment to meet the real moment, to become realized in a
perceptual present. The whole ordinate, the expectation
and memory segment joined in the point of perception,
constitutes the soul's triune present.
The diagram expresses three significant elements of
Augustine's temporality. First, since time is the soul's vertical dimension, the world's horizontal axis is timeless. It is
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
soul's stretching apart, its "distention"-William Watt's
vivid translation of 1631 says "distraction" (Loeb)-should
be gathered in, so that he might be not stretched apart in
time (distentus) but stretched forth (extentus), not in distraction (secundum distentionem) but in concentration (secundum intentionem) toward the delights of the eternal father "which are neither to come nor to pass away" (29).
This "extention" out of and beyond the world is represented by the third dimension in the diagram.
79
�Temporality, then,· is the wordly dimension of the created soul, namely its capacity fm taking in and containing
the world, that is, was, and will be. And so time is also the
soul's ~~distraction."
HUSSERL: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF
TIME
Husserl's abstruse, intricate, and subtle description of
the sense of time, The Phenomenology of Internal TimeConsciousness, begins with the praise of Augustine as the
unsurpassed master of the problem of time. Indeed,
Augustine's "distention" furnishes Husserl with his guiding schema, and Husserl may be regarded as Augustine's
expositor, with this difference: Husserl's analysis is intended to require no act of faith or philosophical thesis at
all since he aims to write a phenomenology, a presuppositionless description of the phenomena of temporality·and
of temporal appearances. He therefore requires a rigorous
"abstention" from all substantializing assumptions.· He
suppresses what might be called ontological greed, not in
order to gaze about aesthetically, but to develop a penetrating analytic insight into the deep constituting structures of phenomena seen as phenomena, namely as they
appear to consciousness. To put time before oneself
strictly as a phenomenon hence requires the exclusion of
objective or world time insofar as its existence is posited,
and a transfer of attention to the fundamental phenomenon of immanent time, the flow of consciousness from
now to now. This flow is the "temporally constitutive
flux," the "originary" stream, in which temporal phenomena and, remarkably, the consciousness of time itself are
simultaneously constituted (par. 39). In the end, to be sure,
this flux is interpreted as consciousness itself, as absolute
subjectivity or self (36). But that is a leap beyond simple
phenomenology, forced by the irrepressible human need
for more than merely descriptive accounts.
The early section, entitled "The Analysis of TimeConsciousness," is, however, rigorously phenomenological, and from it I shall sketch some findings: apt new coinages, illuminating discriminations, and, as the centerpiece,
a diagrammatic synthesis of the elements found in the
analysis.
which Aristotle had left unresolved, namely how anything
can be perceived in the partless point-now, the so-called
"specious present," an unintelligible notion of a finite, en-
during now, had been introduced, 21 but Husserl admits no
such constructs.) How is an appearance, say of a melody,
which develops over time as a unified object, to be understood?
The term "intentionality" was mentioned in reference
to Aristotle's understanding of the memory-image as an
image of a thing. Husserl develops intentionality into an
indispensable element in the description of consciousness.
Consciousness is always also consciousness of something:
it is always intentional. "Truly . . . it pertains to the essence of the intuition of time that in every point of its duration ... it is consciousness of what has iust been and not
mere consciousness of the now-point of the objective
thing ... " (12). Every now-consciousness is also a yetConsciousness, like a comet's tail of a previous perception.
Thus besides the veritable perception, the content present
in consciousness in its own right, there is also a consciousness of the time gone by-not a faded perception but
something quite different: a past tone present as a past
tone. This mode is distinct from ordinary memory, and
Husserl calls it retention, or primary memory. It is the consciousness in the present of what has just been, discovered
through the analysis of the phenomenal fact that an experience has duration within the immediately superseded
now. Every present impressional consciousness ''shades
off" into an everfresh retentional consciousness of the
temporal object's immediate past. But when the spring of
tonal impressions gives out, the melody is over and sinks
back to a vanishing point, p;:tssing into ordinary, or secondary, memory.
Secondary memory is distinguished from primary, or retentive, memory by these features: Perception has the distinguishing character of ''self-givenness" which means
that it stands there, uncalled-for, in its own right. So too is
"originary" time-consciousness self-given, for one cannot
inhibit time's running-off. What we can do is to re-produce
or re-present sections of temporal experience. Husser! em-
ploys the term "representification" (Vergegenwaertigung),
"making present again" (Appendix II). Retention, then,
yields the immediate past which is present; memory yields
the remoter past which must be made present again. Husserl makes numerous other acute observations about
memory phenomena (See Note 22).
Memory is a mode which posits, that is to say, requires, a
1. RETENTION
Although each now is a source of fresh perception and
the spring of the living present, temporally enduring objects are not perceived in a pointillistic mode, but in longer
presences. This is a fact of temporal phenomena seen as
phenomena. They have enduring presence, even though
the flux of time has an instantaneous leading edge. (To
overcome the perplexity associated with this observation,
80
previous perception. The intentional reaching for the past
is fulfilled in the presentification of a perception which is
no longer self-given. The phenomenon of memory as a
whole is precisely that of a present givenness of the past as
past -but it is no longer a question for phenomenology
how the past can be.
Thus the present is characterized by perception, the
past by an ''intention" or a reaching for a previous perception, and the future by a ''protention," that is, an expectaSUMMER 1983
�tion of fulfillment in a perception to come. Protention is
therefore inverted memory: Perception, succeeds pro ten·
tion but precedes memory (24-28).
The vertical axis F'EP'O' stands for Augustine's "distention" of the mind, namely present consciousness encompassing perception, memories, and expectation. Into
2. THE DIAGRAM OF TIME
Husserl's famous "Diagram of Time" (10) displays the
phenomena of these three phases of time in their conjunction with the phenomenon of the "running off" or cours-
ing of time in a coordinate schema which had been suggested by William James (Ch. XVII, end). One might say
that it accomplishes the junction of Aristotle's two distinct
categories of "when" and of ~jhow much," or duration.
Husser! is careful to state that the diagram is not a representation of objects as they appear in time, that is, of temporal appearances, but rather of the phenomenon of temporality itself.
Here is an elaborated composite version of Husserl's
schemata:
+r•
1
1\
' '\
\
''
and 0 as the perception-filled now has advanced to E. The
line FF' represents a protention to be fulfilled in a coming
perception at F.
'
'E
' r
--~~----~~~----- -"r--
- -
I
I
'
it flow the oblique parallel memory and protention lines
which fix past events and future expectations into the
memory and expectation order of the present. The
present therefore contains a continuous and unperturbable time-order; the latter feature is schematically guaranteed by the parallelism of the oblique lines. EP' is the
present retentional memory of the temporal event-object
which occurred over PE. The triangle PEP' is the whole
melodic episode in its "double continuity": the horizontal
line represents the continuous flux of ever new perceptual
nows, while the broadening triangular surface composed
of parallel paths which fall out, as it were, from the flux,
stands for the continuous memory lines of past nows feed·
ing into the present memory.
The horizontal through P marks a variable threshold between retention and secondary memory, below which the
melody would have outlasted the retentional span of that
consciousness and would cease to be a unified temporal
object. When F is now, the melody will have to be deliberately or spontaneously recalled, being by then a secondary
memory at P.
Husserl's diagram differs from the schema I have drawn
for Augustine in that the horizontal axis of the former
stands for the internal temporal flux rather than for the
external motion of the world. Husser! regards that inner
flux as the fundamental temporal phenomenon; an external time-consciousness would be for him a contradiction
in terms, because to be conscious of a phenomenon tem-
porally is just to constitute the temporal flux in consciousness. Therefore Husserl uses one time coordinate to repre-
'
'
sent the simultaneous presence of all the phases of time in
consciousness and another to stand for the advancing tem\
poral flux whose front is the now-consciousness. But
\
\
I
\
I
whether this flux is really a primary phenomenon is just
the question. (See Sec. VI I.)
\;, P"
I
I
I
•
•
•
Aristotle's understanding of time as the number of motion counted by the soul follows from his theory of motion
The horizontal axis represents the originary flux of now
as actualization. Augustine's view of time as the dimen-
points in consciousness. E is the now. PE is the span of the
temporal flux of one temporally perceived object, for example, a melody, and it is therefore one retentional episode whose beginning was at P. 0 is some now before the
initial now of the melody and belongs to the time of an
event now past. F is a future now.
The oblique lines PP ', 00' represent the "shading off"
or "sinking away/} into memory of the consciousness of P
sionality of the soul follows from his desire to relate the
three phases of human temporality to the eternity of the
Creator. Kant's theory of time will serve to ground the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
new science of dynamics, particularly its causal relations.
Insofar as the temporal relations of nature are contributed
by a faculty of the soul, its formative sensibility, Kant is
Angustine's heir, but it will be more interesting to see his
theory in terms of an antithesis to Aristotle.
81
�IV. KANT: TIME AS INNER SENSE
1. INNER SENSE
The first and all-determining discovery Kant presents in
the Critique of Pure Reason is a truly revolutionary understanding of what it means to sense ("Transcendental Aesthetic"). Recall that Aristotle had said that time is sensed,
or better, perceived, in the primary sensory organ, because
whatever is sensible also has duration. Now Kant claims
that time is not sensed but is the form of sense. That means
that the sensibility is not only a receptive but also a formative faculty; and the first form it gives sensation is temporal form.
What is behind this claim? The immediate purpose of
the Critique is the grounding of the knowledge of nature,
above all of the new science of motion, Newtonian physics. "Grounding" means setting out the conditions of possibility of such a science, which guarantee its necessity and
its universality-which make it certain. Aristotelian physics was the science of individual motions by which an indeterminate material, which is only potentially, is formed
into an independent, fully actual, natural substance. Newtonian science, in stark contrast, studies the motion of a
system of bodies homogeneously constituted of massy
matter and moving inertially through space unless deflected by interactions with other masses, interactions
which are governed by universal mathematical laws of
force. For the former, time was the counting of the actualizing motion, for the latter it is the independent variable in
the expression of natural laws.
Kant assumes that knowledge of this system of nature
requires the cooperation of two faculties. One is active,
law-giving, spontaneous (which means that it originates
with the human subject itself); it is the thinking function,
and the faculty is called the understanding. The other is a
receptive power which must be affected by something
given to it from outside; it is the sensibility. The latter is
needed because human thinking is for Kant purely formal,
that is to say, it has a merely rule-supplying function.
Therefore it is incapable of conceiving its own objects of
thought without being supplied with matter; for it to try to
do so would be like a hand grasping its own grasp-less
than an empty form. Therefore, thinking requires that a
material be given to it, and the faculty in which such
givens are received as representations-since Kant con~
siders everything before consciousness at all a representation-is precisely the sensibility (B 33). Kant also calls this
receptive faculty the intuition, and he applies that same
term to the original pure content which he ascribes to it
and into which sensory affection is received.
Now all physical experience in fact occurs in terms of
space and time, and these are understood to be the primary dimensions of physics. Therefore, if it is to be a certain science, there must be neither absolute, independent,
82
external substances in space nor adventitious developments through time. For both of these could be known
only after the fact of experience, and that means they
could not be known necessarily or universally. The only
knowledge which can be certain is that which is conditioned from the beginning through the observer himselfwhich is, in Kant's term, a priori.
Therefore, not only the conceptual side of physics but
also the invariable components of its sensory aspect,
namely space and time, must proceed from the knower.
Accordingly Kant assigns to him an original formative receptivity-on the face of it a contradiction in terms, but an
unavoidable one. This actively receptive capacity is Janusfaced. One face is turned outward and shapes sense material into spatial configurations; the other looks inward and
forms what it receives into temporal sequences. The sensibility, then, is dual; it has an inner and an outer sense.
Kant presents the outer sense first, significantly, as it
turns out. This sense receives in the mode of outsideness,
in two meanings of the word. First it receives those sensations which are alien and adventitious, which come to us
as they will from outside ourselves. But then it also receives them in the mode of outsideness, of externality,
namely as spatially extensive. The outer sense is therefore
the reason why external sensations always assume spatial
form. Furthermore, because the spatial form has inherent
formative characteristics, namely those of Euclidean geometry, spatial appearances are certain to be amenable to
geometric treatment. Hence the outer sense guarantees
the applicability of mathematics to science.
The inner sense, on the other hand, faces toward the
innermost parts, the very subject or referrent of all representations, the Self. The inner sense receives the self as if
it too were a given, namely as it presents itself to its own
intuition. Within the inner sense the subject itself becomes, by definition, an appearance, for whatever the sensibility receives and forms is called an appearance. The inner sense is called time.Jt is not that time is an inner sense,
but that the inner sense, and the self appearing within it,
are temporal in character. In so presenting inner sense
Kant is therefore not saying what time is but only why it is
the inevitable form every appearance takes. Nevertheless,
a new understanding of the nature of time will come out of
Kant's discovery, one aspect of which has already
emerged: Contrary to Aristotle, for whom time is not an
affection of motion, Kant will argue that motion itself is
possible only under the form of inner sense. Indeed it is
only under the form of temporality that motion is even
conceivable for Kant, since it is only the succession of time
which fluidifies the law of contradiction so that opposite
predicates can, at different times, belong to the same object-that being the much reduced post-Aristotelian concept of motion (B 48).
But why is the inner sense given the name of time? And
what does it mean to say that the self appears within it?
The paradoxical fact that the self, the ultimate subject of
SUMMER 1983
�representations, is somehow also an appearance to itself is
taken as given, and, Kant says, is equally a mystery in all
theories (B 68, 152). But to learn how it'happens we go to
that part of the Critique which deals with thinking ("Tran·
scendental Deduction").
2. UNDERSTANDING
All conceiving is steadfastly accompanied by an "I
think," a kind of pervasive prefix to all thinking, which is,
however, purely formal in that it adds nothing to what I
think. Furthermore, the prefix tells me at most that I am
but never what I am (B 157). Kant calls this consciousness
"apperception," a term that had previously meant selfconsciousness. He, however, indicates by the term not
self-knowing but only the inmost subject or self of a rational being, the ultimate knower. The apperception is
"transendental," which in Kantian terminology means
that it is a faculty, not an object.
So Kant does not mean that the self is self-conscious in
the sense of having itself as an object; it is not, like Aristotle's pure intellect, thought thinking itself. Nor is the self
my self; indeed its self-hood is not in the ordinary sense
personal. The self might as well be an "it" (B 404), for it is
simply the hidden subject underlying all thinking functions. (Heidegger will criticize the lack of "my-ownness" in
the Kantian self.) Moreover, the transcendental subject
cannot be known to itself, because its strictly formal, that
is, rule-giving thinking functions cannot, by their very
character, become objects of thought to themselves (A
402).
Collectively these conceiving functions (the word "function" is taken statically, as in mathematics) are called the
understanding, which is therefore the self as it is diversified
into certain definite enumerable functions or 11 Categories.H
Each of these accomplishes certain syntheses or unifications proper to itself. Besides these operations the categories are nothing and mean nothing. What do they synthesize?
Sensible givenness is assumed to be in its very nature
manifold, spread out, various. Accordingly, the sensibility
must be capable of receiving such a manifold. In the case
of the outer sense there must be ready a transcendental
space for its reception. This sense therefore contains a
Objects represented in the sensibility and unified by the
understanding are called phenomena or appearances (A
429 ff.). Kant claims that when the pure content of inner
sense is determined by thinking, the resulting appearance
is that of the apperceiving subject itself. Kant takes the
word appearance seriously-only that which is not itself on
the scene can have appearances. So the self, which cannot
know itself in itself, appears in the inner sense, and since
every appearance is an appearance for the subject, the self
appears to itself. The primary example of self-appearance is
the act of attention, in which thinking, having determined
the inner sense according to laws of connection contained
in the categories, appears as a succession of moments
(B 155)-our ordinary awareness of the now-succession.
The transcendental self, then, the inaccessible rational
source of thinking, can determine another part of the soul,
and though it cannot know itself, it can at least represent
itself to itself as an appearance. Note, however, that the
situation is peculiar in that the self can hardly be said to
affect the sensibility as sensory material could affect it: it
cannot materially fill but only determine or unify the inner
sense.
The motive for establishing an inner sense is, on the
face of it, to ground the temporal or causal dimension of
physics, but its deeper role is that of providing for selfappearance. The reason why this sense, or rather its content, is identified with time now emerges. This content is
the steady, unceasing, underlying flow which we always
come to in self-inspection: "Time does not pass away but
in it passes the existence of what is changeable." Time itself is unchangeable and permanent (B 183), for it is the
original flux-content of the inner sense itself; it is this fluxcontent which our thinking determines and structures.
The thought-determined inner sense is consciousness,
but it is emphatically not self-consciousness in the sense of
self-knowledge, since the self has not affected the inner
self so as to produce the kind of real knowledge Kant calls
experience. For experience requires more than that the
subject should work on itself: it requires a material object
(where "material" refers not to physical matter but to a
real sensory content).
3. IMAGINATION
{(pure manifold," the pure intuition mentioned above,
which is the form-giving content affected by sensationthe pure space of geometry itself. The nature of this pure
content of inner sense will be addressed presently.
It is this pure content of the sensibility that is unified, or
determined, or structured by the understanding in definite ways, as many ways as there are concept·categories.
What the understanding determines first is the content
closest to it, so to speak, namely that of the inner sense.
That is how the thinking functions first obtain their required object, although a pure, not a sensory one.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The configurations to which thinking determines the
inner sense are the work of that most central power, "an
art hidden in the depth of the human soul" (B 181), the
imagination. For Aristotle, the activity of the imagination,
identical with that of the primary sensorium, is not hidden
in the depth at all; it is, in fact, on the interface of soul and
nature and has a physical base. Kant rightly considers his
discovery of the original contribution of the transcendental imagination quite new (A 120 n.). For him thinking and
sensing are too heterogeneous to come together without
83
�some intermediate agency; it is the imagination which is
the meeting ground of the two.
It performs what Kant calls a "figurative" synthesis (B
154), which produces schemata through which thinking
can determine sense and accomplish the mystery of
empty, meaningless thought interpenetrating with pure
inner flux. The schemata are essentially rules for sensual·
izing concepts or, equally, conceptualizing sense content.
The imagination makes time thinkable or, as we have
seen, conscious. But much more importantly, it does the
inverse: it makes thought temporal.
Here are just two examples of the schemata which are
the work of the imagination. (Oddly, and significantly, this
work is always presented as picture or figure-making, al·
though it is supposed to be primarily temporal.)
1. The inner flux, the pure intuition of time, is, as was
said, assumed to be an even, primary flow. (Recalling that
Kant's project is the grounding of Newtonian physics we
can recognize in this flux the internalization of Newton's
equably flowing absolute world time.) Kant calls it the pure
picture of quantity, applicable to all objects in general.
The first schema or conceptualization of this continuous
forward flow of inner quantity is number. Number is the
imaginative scheme of a countable succession of units,
that is, of articulated, measured internal duration. In
counting, the understanding is continually unifying the
undifferentiatedly fluid manifold of pure Time, and generating pure, conscious, temporal succession, or the pure
sense of passing: counting is not so different from the pulsing of mere consciousness itself. (The spatial analogue
to the difference between Time as flux and conceptdetermined time would be that between Space as a whole
and measured space.)
2. Another imaginative configuration brings together
pure inner intuition with the concept of necessary connection in the schema of before-and-aftu. Thus is added to
conscious advancing time a necessary, unperturbable
time-order, the ground, for Kant, of the principle of cause
and effect in nature.
All the schemata together-there are as many as the
understanding has concepts-circumscribe thoughtinformed temporal flux, or speaking more familiarly, temporal thinking. It was, after all, to be expected that when
the rational self cast itself into inner sense to become an
appearance the result should be thinking in time. What are
its features?
4. TIME AND SPACE
For Aristotle, the external world with its continuity of
places defined by movable substances is clearly prior to
being in time, which is merely the countable aspect of motion.
Kant, on the other hand, at first, at least, presents time
as the sense of senses, the first formal condition of all ap-
84
pearing objects in general, both self and nature. Time receives all representations, everything which is there for
consciousness at all; it is the ultimate relating receptacle
and the condition of all connectedness. Space, on the
other hand, is the condition of outer appearance, namely
of nature, only (A 99, B 177). The reason is that time belongs immediately to the soul and is the place of consciousness itself, while space must wait to receive material from
the outside.
But then, in a crucial section added to the second edition of the Critique, the "Refutation of Idealism" (B 274279), Kant totally inverts his new order in a doctrine surprising in the context but also quite unavoidable. Space is
again the condition of temporal experience.
In the "Refutation" Kant explicitly aims to prove that
mere consciousness of one's own existence-thoughtdetermined inner sense-proves, in being affected by
outer sense, the real existence of external objects in space.
Implicitly, however, he shows that objects in space are the
necessary condition of self-experience.
The internal flux of unfocussed attention, he argues, is
absolutely featureless, indeterminate, a mere fugitiveness.
To determine time and give it steadiness it must he projected on something permanent; it must be represented in
terms of perceived permanence in space. Spatial appearances seem to stay put while time has no aspect that
stands but its flux itself. Time supports only the alteration
of determinations, but no determinate steady object; in
the soul "everything is in continual flux" (A 381). Therefore the representation of time is always spatial; if time is
to appear at all it must be in a spatial form, most appropriately as a one-dimensional straight line (B 156): Time appears as space reduced by two dimensions. It is now also
clear why the self cannot really properly appear in time.
The inner intuition admits no material affection except
through space. (Indeed, it is only this geometrization of appearing time which makes possible the primary measurement of physical motion, namely velocity. For velocity is
conceivable only as a ratio of homogeneous magnitudes,
namely space lengths and time lengths. But as I said, that
means that time, insofar as it is apprehensible at all, which
is to say, insofar as it is representable, is only a dimension
abstracted from space: Bergson has a point when he accuses Kant of confusing time with space (Essay, "Conclu.
SIOn ") .
Yet more follows: There can be no full consciousness
without the appearances of three-dimensional externality.
For the linear representation of the determinate inner
sense, while it may be formally adequate, is also utterly
poverty-stricken and unrevealing (Foundations of the Metaphysics of Nature, Preface). To appear to itself, the self
must put the inner sense in the way of spatial appearances
which then represent to it its own formative powers and
that of its sensibility. The system of such revealing
thought-informed spatia-temporal appearances Kant calls
nature and its science is Newtonian physics.
SUMMER 1983
�Inner experience is, then, only mediately possible
through space. That is why, I think, space is treated before
time in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" and why the imag·
ination is fundamentally figurative. Time began as the formal (or better, formative) condition of all appearance what·
soever, but space turns out to be the condition of the
appearance of time. A self having only an inner sense
would have no representations of itself at all. If it were conscious it would be conscious of nothing; it would be at
most a forever-idle capability of a possible experience.
5. TEMPORAL THINKING
To recapitulate: I. Self-consciousness: Of the self which
underlies all thinking and sensing there is no knowledge.
There is no immediate representation of it; it cannot become an object to itself beyond the indication given in the
universal prefix "I think." There is therefore no selfconsciousness in the sense of reflective self-knowledge. (It
is one of the mysteries of the Critique how any of the reflective terms necessary to critical analysis of the self obtain their meaning.) 2. Consciousness: Consciousness,
awareness, belongs to the thought-determined inner
sense, or better, is identical with it. That time is in the soul
and that the soul is in time are converse propositions (A
362). Both claims mean that the self is ready and able to
receive an external material. But to be merely aware in this
way is no more to know oneself than it is actually to experience an external object. Time, even when determined by
thought, yields no formed object but merely the schemata
of relations of possible representations within the soul (B
50). It is the mere capacity for thinking objects. 3. Selfexperience: If self-knowledge in the reflective sense is impossible to the self, it can yet experience itself, that is, its
own powers, in inner sense~ but only if that sense is spatially represented and determined by real objects. Then
the self can appear to itself as a temporally thinking subject and behold its formative faculties constituting nature.
Self-experience begins 23 when temporal thinking, namely
the time-informed categories, such as number, permanence, and causality, is exercised on spatial material.
A great question arises. The explicit motive of the Critique was to find what the human constitution must be if
physics is to be a science. From this point of view the temporal sense was established primarily to secure the causal
ordering of motion. But is it plausible that Kant's view of
the soul should be so altogether a mere consequence of
this motive? Indeed, there might well be other ways to
ground physical causality than by means of the original
flux which, as has been shown, is in itself insufficient to
account for self-conscious thought24 A deeper reason,
namely Kant's thinking about thought itself, seems to me
to be at work. It is best phrased in terms of the consequences following from his very modern rejection of Aristotle.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
For Aristotle knowing is a motion of the soul, an actualization, which achieves actuality as the intellect achieves
its end and becomes the thing thought. That final activity
is true life. For Kant, knowing, as the conceiving of material objects, cannot be such a motion, since motion is itself
generated by thinking, when it determines space through
time (B 155, note). Nor can it be an activity, for thought is
not fulfilled in its object: It simply determines or unifies
the manifold and, so to speak, fits itself about the object
and constitutes it. Truth is no longer the simple luminous
identity of the intellect with its intelligible object, but
rather the "adequation" of thought with the material object (B 82). 25 Therefore Kant's thinking has neither motion
nor life; it has no actuating principle.
The pure flux of inner sense can now be seen in the
light of a deep though inexplicit need. Time is needed to
float thought, as it were. It gives thinking a spurious kind of
motion, a pseudo-activity. In themselves the thinking
functions are merely empty, static forms; cast on the
stream of inner sense they assume fluidity. Time is the animating principle of that kind of thinking which has no end
in itself, and the Kantian temporality is the substitute for
the lost life of thought.
*
*
*
Kant's treatment of time is the focus of Heidegger' s
deep, engaged, but also strained reading of the first Critique. Heidegger calls this kind of interpretative reading a
"recovery" or "repetition" (Wiederholung). It is meant to
bring to light the unspoken, and for the author unspeakable, implications of the text. It attempts to reveal not
what the author meant and failed to say-an author worth
"repeating" is quite able to express himself-but rather
the inexorable ultimate outcome implicit in his thought.
This interpretation yields very striking-if not quite persuasive-results especially with respect to an aspect of
time markedly missing from Kant's account, namely its
three phases. Heidegger reconstructs these from the first,
superseded version of the Transcendental Deduction.
(See Note 26 for a summary of Kant's text with reference
to Heidegger's interpretation.)
I have just argued that Kant has deep reasons for making time the primary sense, namely to vivify the inert functions of his concepts, but that his almost inadvertent, yet
inescapable tendency is the spatialization of time. However, Heidegger, who sees in Kant his predecessor, views
the whole critical enterprise as centered on the unexpressed fundamental temporality of the human being.
Heidegger understands that hidden art of the imagination,
to which Kant assigns the function of temporalizing thinking (or, equivalently, of thought-determining time) as the
"temporalizing," the time-origination which is the being
of human existence. Kant drew back, as it were, from an
opportunity he was not ready for, the possibility of seeing
the imagination not as a third and mediating faculty, the
85
�meeting ground of thought and sense, but as the common
root of both. He could not yet abstract from its figurative
character to see it as transcendental temporality simply.
Kant's failure to explain the "my-ownness" of the self, together with his inability to see the imagination, the meeting ground of self and time, as anything but a mystery are
Heidegger's clues to a new understanding of human existence.
Heidegger owes debts also to Hegel and Bergson (see
Note 27), and most certainly to Augustine (paras. 9, 81
end), who anticipates him in the essential temporality of
the human being and in the primacy of the future among
the time phases-indeed one might almost call Heidegger
a godless Augustine. But he goes beyond all of them, as far
as one can go, I think, in the exaltation of time. If for Kant
the inner sense is a mysterious mirror for the unknowable
self, for Heidegger time will be the very meaning of being
human. The answer to the question "What is time?'' will
fall out of the analysis of human existence.
Care has a threefold constitution: 1. The being that
cares, understands. Understanding-sharply distinguished
from theoretical knowing-is its ability to project before
itself its own possibilities. It is aware of being able to be
(not that it has that possibility but that it is that possibility).
The being that exists is always "ahead of itself." For what
it is, its essence, is just that it exists, that it understands
itself as a being that is able to be.
2. This being, Dasein, also has moods, "existential
moods," which are the ground of ordinary, familiar moodiness. These moods are testimony to the condition in
which it already finds itself (Befindlichkeit). They attest to
its "facticity," to the bald fact that it always finds itself already cast or thrown into an alien world. Heidegger calls
the existential condition of existing always already in the
world, uthrownness."
3. In this world Dasein is always already preoccupied
with what it finds there, alongside itself, namely other existences and things. It is its lot to sink into a state of selfforgetfulness or "fallenness" as it busily "takes care" of
this world. This state of "inauthenticity," literally: "unone's-ownness," is as genuine a possibility of existence as
V. HElD EGGER: TEMPORALITY AS THE MEANING
OF EXISTENCE
1. ECSTATIC TEMPORALITY
Heidegger's starting point in Being and Time is the old
question concerning Being. However, he does not ask:
What is Being?, since he considers that question a fateful
wrong turn into metaphysics. He rather asks: What is the
meaning of being?, What makes a being possible?, What is
the being (Sein) of Being (Seiendes)? Assuming that there
are different beings, he chooses to pursue the question by
analyzing the being most expressive of the inquiry itself,
the being that exists. To exist means to position oneself
beyond oneself so as to understand one's own being. The
being that so exists is also the being that is there, that finds
itself involved in the world, not merely present in it. It is,
further, that being which is in each case mine, which has
"each·his·ownness," in contrast to the unowned Kantian
subject. Heidegger names it by the ordinary German
term for existence, Dasein, uthere·being." It is the human
being.
The larger first part of the book is devoted to an "existential analysis," an interpretative description of the phenomena of existence which will reveal its basic structure.
These original modes are called "existentials," and the
structure so revealed is called "care." The
~~meaning"
of
care, that is to say, that which makes it possible, will be
temporality.
In the following abbreviated account of "care," the prodigious originality and ingeniousness of Heidegger's analysis will perforce be blunted.
86
its opposite, authenticity; Heidegger disclaims any invidious connotation in these terms.
In sum, then, the being that cares is a being ahead of
itself in projecting its own possibilities, which finds itself
involved in a world along with other existences and entities, and which can lose itself in being busy about them.
Now Heidegger asks what it means for Daesin to be in
this way. This question belongs to a deeper, that is, an ontological, level of analysis, for here is discovered the meaning of care, namely the condition of its possibility. The answer is: temporality (Second Part, Chps. 3-6).
The existent being is one about whom there is always
something yet outstanding, something still to come, namely
its death. So also is it an "ecstatic" being. ~~Ecstatic" is a word
used by Aristotle in his chapters on time (Phys. 222 b 17) to
describe the self-unsettling of motion. Heidegger uses if for
the primordial "being out of itself" of Dasein, namely its
temporality (par. 65). 28 The word has, of course, the connotation of being transported and rapt away.
Dasein is "out of itself" in three ecstatic phases, each of
which accounts primarily but not exclusively for one of
the aspects of care in either its inauthentic or its authentic
version. Hence the ontological analysis covers a large number of combinations, of which I shall sketch only the primary ones, reversing Heidegger's order so as to begin with
the ecstasis to which Heidegger assigns the least standing
(par. 68).
1. The self-forgetfulness of fallenness is in its nature always inauthentic. It is the mode of-note well-actuality,
of fact, of mere presentness and nowness, greedy for satisfactions which hold no further possibilities. The ontological ground of this existential mode is the ectasis of the
present.
Heidegger understands the present not in the tradiSUMMER 1983
�tiona! way as the phase of perceptual vividness, but as a
derivative mode, abstracted from living involvement-the
mode of "presentification," the grasping attempt to turn
the possibilities of existence into present actualities. The
ecstasis which yields the present, the phase which is traditionally the front or fulcrum of time, is the one most
dependent on the other phases for its authentic version
(68 c).
2. Just as in English there is a periphrastic past perfect
"I am gone," so in German one says ul am having been"
(Ich bin gewesen). Human existence always is as having
been, for it always finds itself already cast into the alien
world. It is this fact which makes it moody. An existential
mood is a condition in which Dasein finds itself coming
back to or brought before the mere fact of its own existence.29 Heidegger gives as a cardinal example the authentic mood which he calls dread or anxiety (Angst; the inauthentic counterpart is ordinary fear). In anxiety Dasein
discovers the world into which it has been thrown as uncanny, unhomy, unmeaning, unamenable to being taken
care of. Anxiety brings Dasein back to the fact of its own
isolated thrownness, and this "being brought back to itself" apprises it that it can return to itself; that it has the
possibility of "recovering" or "repeating" itself. What ac-
counts for the possibility human existence has of finding
itself already in a state of mind or mood and what brings it
face to face with its own recoverableness (Wiederholbarkeit; sometimes translated "repeatability") is the ecstasis of
the past, in which Dasein goes out of itself to be as having
been (68 b). Through this ecstasis human existence comes
back to itself as an ever-antecedent fact whose possibilities
can always be repeated. Therewith is also revealed the possibility of authentic existence. It demands the introduction of a future element into the repetition of its past.
3. Therefore the primary ecstasis of primordial authentic temporality is the future (65). This future is not an indeterminate "not yet." It is, as the German Zu-kunft suggests to Heidegger, that toward which Dasein goes, but it
is also the terminus from which Dasein comes back into
the situation in which it finds itself, to face the present
resolutely. The future thus comprehends and makes possible the other two ecstases. Futurity accounts for the aspect of care called understanding, since to understand
means to project one's own possibilities. Future means anticipation; rather than being propelled by present urgencies that need to be taken care of, futural Dasein cares authentically: It lets its own possibilities for being come
toward itself. The future, too, enables the human being to
repossess its past properly; it is in facing its possibilities
that Dasein is brought back to what it already was. The
futural ecstasis of coming toward oneself accounts for authentic existence (69 a).
The dominant case of authentic futurity, understood as
resolute anticipation, is Dasein's facing of its own death
(46-63). The human being is that being which lives as a
being which is going to die. Dasein discovers among its exTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
istential possibilities the ultimate one of not being, and
this discovery makes it focus on the wholeness of its existence. Death is what it escapes from in the inauthentic
present; death is what it is already inescapably saddled
with; death is what it resolutely anticipates. Death therefore has the threefold structure exhibited by care and
time, and conversely. The inference follows that our temporality is finite and that primordial existential time comes
to an end.
What then of ordinary time, the common time human
beings have, spend, puzzle about? Heidegger undertakes
to show that, strange though it seems, time is temporal,
namely that ordinary time falls out of primordial temporality (79-82).
Dasein finds itself in the world, and it is in dealing with
its "gear" or "equipment" (Zeug), in circumspectly taking
care of its affairs, that ordinary time shows itself. Affairs in
the world can be dated: uLater, when . .. " or "now,
that. .. " or "formerly, when ... "-that is the language of
worldly management. This datability of the world is derived from ecstatic temporality because "later, when" can
be said only on the condition that there is possibility,
"now, that" only if there is presentification, and "formerly, when" only if there is repeatability. So Heidegger
has grounded anticipation, presence, and memory-for that
is what he is talking about-in the primordial temporality
which is human existence.
Precise public datability must refer to universal occurrences, originally to the sun's rising and setting. People
say, for instance, "now, that" the sun has set it is time to
turn in. This public reference enables people to make and
set clocks, and thence "vulgar," worldly time comes to be
what the clock tells. What the clock shows is a perfectly
levelled and indifferent equable succession of jerks called
nows, going forward from what is no longer to what is not
yet, and spawning many puzzles. Such time passes rather
than arises; the very use of clocks is witness to the attempt
to hold on to the not-yets and the no-longers by making
them all in turn present, as the clock's hands are followed
while they tick off the nows. What is worst of all for
Heidegger is that this meaningless derivative clock time is
theoretically infinite: It is the time of fallen, inauthentic
humanity because it masks the radical finitude of mortal
human existence. 30
2. DIFFICULTIES
Here is the extreme of opposition to Aristotle. Actuality,
fulfilled presence, is interpreted as human fallenness. Possibility, a notion even less determinate than potentiality
(which is always a specific "potentiality for") is raised to
being human existence itself. Time, which was for Aristotle merely the measurable aspect of a being's actualization, is for Heidegger the very meaning of existence. And,
87
�finally, time ends in actuality for Aristotle, but for Heidegger, in death.
Being and Time, in its potent and coherent originality
(though originality in the pursuit of being may well be a
disability) deserves at least the tribute of not being treated
like a lending library of terms and notions; one must enter
its world or stay out-the latter I think. The reasons are
sketched below.
I. The first is a mere intimation of a possible argument:
That actualizing motion has temporal duration which is
measurable by the soul, or that time is a dimension of the
created mind, or that the lawful causality of nature has a.
ground in the observer's temporality-these theories of
Aristotle, Augustine, and Kant respectively can be apprehended and judged directly, although their context illuminates their motive. It is otherwise with Heidegger's understanding of time, which is more inextricably and originally
implicated in his approaches: in the problematic formulation of the question concerning the "meaning of being,"
in the doubtful insistence that the human being is the being of choice for such an inquiry, in the interpretation of
human being as existence, in its analysis in terms of care,
and in the grounding of care in temporality. The doubts
one might have about any of these elements or about their
concatenation would make questionable the notion of a
primordial ecstatic temporality.
2. The interpretation of human existence as the being
which is its possibilities leads to its essential futurity, the
ecstasis which accounts for living in possibility. Dasein's
ultimate possibility is that of being able not to be: it is
death (50), the extreme possibility. In requiring of the human being that it face at every moment this end as its own,
Heidegger deprecates-I am disregarding the pretense
that these are not terms of judgement-as inauthentic and
fallen the perennial wisdom of humankind that the dread
of death must not dominate life. The question arises
whether the stark and unspecific resolution to face one's
own death can at all be the basis of public decency and
even inner dignity. I shall argue that the future is of the
three phases the most impotent for human action and that
our death should be allowed to exert its power only as a
remote and indefinite limit of life.
3. The greatest problem and the one with most bearing
on the final section of my inquiry has to do with Heidegger's treatment of the past Human existence has a certain
self-antecedence which is grounded in the ecstases of "being as having been." The defining characteristic of this
mode is that it brings Dasein back to the "repetition" of its
own possibilities and to authentic being. This ecstasis naturally plays the chief role in the constitution of "historicality" -although the most fundamental role is still played by
the future. For true historicality ultimately arises from a
repetition of the past which is motivated by the resolute
projection of a life span dominated by "being-unto-death."
Dasein can explicitly repeat possibilities of existence
that have been handed down. Such repeating "is explicit
88
tradition, that is to say, the going back into a Dasein that
has been there." Authentic repetition means that "Dasein
chooses for itself its hero" on the basis of an anticipatory
resolution. What Dasein thus recovers is a possibility, not a
state (74).
Dasein takes over such possibilities as its heritage. How?
Heidegger begins his analysis of the historical past with a
discussion of real antiquities, the objects of archaeology.
These are things which were once "to hand," by which
Heidegger means functional, in a world that is gone. They
are now present in our world. They are not genuinely but
only secondarily historical because insofar as they are
"equipment" they are not in the past but in this world. As
the being of their own world was wholly conditional on
that of a past Dasein, so its passing is wholly a matter of
human temporality.
Now here is the difficulty: If Dasein is to recover its heritage, the possibilities of an existence that has been, it must
do so by way of the surviving "equipment" of the past,
through ruins, pots and manuscripts. Heidegger suggests
no other way (73).
But how does it recognize these as testimony of antecedent existence? The ecstasis of the past was formulated
in terms of the indivual, unique, and separate being. What
can it mean to recognize in the stuff "to hand" in the
present world the possibilities of other, past existences,
not to speak of making them one's own?
The problem points to what seems to me a crucial lacuna in Heidegger's account of the past The ecstasis may
be the necessary condition of ordinary temporality but it
does not seem to be a sufficient condition. The "ontic"
consequences, namely human beings with their past, do
not immediately fall out of the "ontological" ground of
past being. To lay down that Dasein must have a past because it is in its being temporalizing does not tell how the
individual human being comes back to itself, that is, remembers. And yet, the additional element that is needed
to complete the account, namely what is ordinarily called
memory, may change the whole complexion of the account.
Since Heidegger considers existence to be possibility he
cannot ascribe a nature or faculties to human beings. Indeed, in his "recovery" of Kant he had suppressed the figurative, primarily spatial, imagination, Kant's faculty for
having objects without their presence. But how is the reconstruction or recovery of one's own possibilities, or of
the possibilities of the past world of historical remains, to
take place without such a faculty for reconstituting remembrance of the past, personal, or historical?
One final point: Repetition, the authentic appropriation
of past possibilities, seems to be most practicable for written works, records of past thought The mode of resolute
purpose, however, in which such a recovery is to be carried
on seems to invite a certain wilfulness of interpretation
which leads to highly pointed constructive readings. Such
repetition may be incomparably more serious than a hisSUMMER 1983
�toricistic approach, but it is also very constricted, since, being grounded in the stark mood of the past ecstasis, it excludes less harsh modes of pastness. In particular, there is
no authentic mode of panoramic revery or imaginative
contemplation, 31 though these, I shall argue, are of primary importance in human temporality.
*
*
•
So I now come to some reflections of my own about
time. Naturally, I shall draw on the philosophers just studied for the terms of the inquiry, for insight into the contexts implied in certain answers, and for examples of what
seem to me fertile errors. Since I shall argue that time has
no being and that to think otherwise has harmful consequences, I should not attempt to present a theory of what
time is, but rather an intimation of what it is that induces
the illusion of temporal being. And, of course, I should explain why, for all that, I think of the past as the prime
phase of time.
try to capture its being, though time-terms there are
aplenty. For, I claim, time as a distinct object of inquiry, or
rather our sense of its being one, comes about when we
block our usual mental activity and try to concentrate on
time itself:
Die Ziet
Es gibt ein sehr probates Mittel,
die Zeit zu halten am Schlawittel:
Man nimmt die Taschenuhr zur Hand
und folgt dem Zeiger unverwandt.
Sie geht so Iangsam dann, so brav
als wie ein wohlgezogen Schaf,
setzt Fuss vor Fuss so voll Manier
als wie ein Fraulein von Saint-Cyr.
Jedoch vertraumst du dich ein Weilchen,
so ri.ickt das ziichtigliche Veilchen
mit Beinen wie der Vogel Strauss
und heimlich wie ein Puma aus.
VI. TIME AND THE IMAGINATION
Und wieder siehst du auf sie nieder;
ha, Elende!-Doch was ist das?
!. THE NON-BEING OF TIME
The beloved text of writers on time is Augustine, Confessions, XI 14:
For what is time? Who is able easily and briefly to explain
that? Who is able so much in thought to comprehend it as to
bring forth something in words? Although what do we more
familiarly and knowingly mention in speaking than time? And
we understand surely when we speak of it; we also understand
when we hear someone else speaking of it. What then is time?
If no one asks it of me, I know; if I want to explain it to the
one that is asking, I do not know.
At first thought, Augustine's observation seems to be no
more true of time than of any other matter: Questioning
always makes the familiar strange and precipitates perplexity. Yet there is this difference: Though we sometimes
quarrel about the management and the worth of time, we
deal with its ubiquitous appearances not only with perfect,
practical aplomb but also without anxiety to defend a doctrine concerning its being. I think that is because we have
an intimation that our dealing with temporal affairs and
our speaking in temporal terms has, as it were, nothing to
it, no object of inquiry whose name is time. We sense that
the bold question "What is Time?'' itself drives the answer
implied in our unimpeded behavior out of sight.
But from another aspect, what Augustine says seems
not quite right. We really do not know what time is when
we are not asked; we only know how to live familiarly with
watches and words and our sense of time. And therefore
we do not know it less when we ask ourselves about it. On
the contrary, there is not even any Time to know until we
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Unschuldig Iachelnd macht sie wieder
die zierlichsten Sekunden-Pas.
Christian Morgenstern, Zeitgedichte
Time
There is a good and proven way
To strongarm Time and make it stay.
just take your wrist-watch by the band
And concentrate upon her hand.
Then she goes slow enough to keep
The pace, as of a well bred sheepGoes step by step, as mannerly
As any high-bred miss could be.
But if you daydream for a while
The shrinking violet with guile
Makes off on legs of ostrich length
And with a puma's stealthy strength.
Now you look down just as beforecurious chance!
With guiless smile she steps once more
The very daintiest second-dlmce.
a wretched watch! 0
E. B.
What we find when we concentrate on the passage of
time is the repeatedly frustrated impulse of our intention to perceive time, indeed an iteration of attempts,
orchestrated by the beating of our hearts and the
coursing of our blood-a kind of internal perception
89
�called by psychologists prioperception, self-perception.
As soon as we leave off trying to find in ourselves
empty time we see images of spatial passage. Indeed
even Kant finally admits that inner sense, to be actually
affected, needs spatial appearance. The pure underlying
flux seems to me, therefore, a philosophical construction which is the result of ulterior motives, and a phenomenon which is the effect of self-interference. So
when Husser! claims such a flux for the first phenomenon of time-consciousness he is observing accuratelyhis own observing. Internal time flux is the first effect
of attempting a phenomenology of time-consciousness.
What of external time? Newton is alone in positing a
genuine external time flux, absolute, equable time antecedent to all motion, physical, yet not apparent~a notion whose motives are as understandable as the concept is confusing. All the others who appear to believe
in physical time turn out always to mean either some
designated physical process or the "passage of nature"
as a whole. 32 It seems to be impossible for them to
point to time itself or to refer to it except by spatial
metaphors.
From the physical point of view, time appears with
as many natures as there are motions and ways of
studying them: It is a discrete quantity for quantized
micro-motions, a covariant of space for remote places,
an anisotropic progress for irreversible processes, an independent continuum for the local motions of bodies,
and a numerable dimension for motions which are developments. I do not think it is possible to decide
which of these conceptions should primarily determine
our understanding of motion and thus time. It may just
be impossible to give a single account of physical time,
and therefore it may be best to say that various kinds
of time seem to occur in the world, depending on
where our attention is fixed, whether on the statistical
conceptions of aggregates, or on signaling to remote
clocks, or on watching the formation of completed beings,
or on the comprehension of human affairs.
This last perspective raises yet another possibility.
What if time were worldly but not of the world, not
one of its physical dimensions, but rather the very life
and moving principle of the world? Such a doctrine
makes the appearances coherent, as the monolithic
grandeur of Hegel's System shows, but so thoroughly
coherent as to put an end to human freedom understood as our possibility of thinking and choosing independently of our situation in time. It seems to me pernicious.
The claim is that the appearances of nature as well
as of human thought and action are manifestations of
the substance of Time. Now the chief property of appearances is usually thought to be that they are a becoming: variable in themselves, perspectival for us, in
alterable passage, contingent. If, then, the being behind
them and expressed in them is itself a primordial be-
90
coming such as Time must be, the variability of appearances must be governed by that deeper becoming,
T1me; appearance is the manifestation of the logic of
becoming. But that means that we must give up the
thought of a loose connection, of room for play between the world and its grounds, which supports our efforts at independent thought and free action, and submit to our time-determined fate. Human beings and
nations must fulfill the historical role assigned by their
time or be consigned to parochial impotence. Time is a
tyrant, and the philosophy of time is a tool for tyrants:
our time has seen the consequences.
These, in sum, then, are the charges against Time:
As an internal flux it is a philosophical or psychological
illusion, as an external elapsing it is no more than the
measure of motion, and as the fated logic of becoming
it is a coercive myth.
Aristotle, who first wrote a sustained exposition of
time, also introduced its most radical de-substantialization, more complete even than that of the later great
relativist of time, Leibniz, for whom time is at least an
idea in the mind of God (Note 4). In that dethronement of time, in the claim that time is only the
counted measure of motion, it seems to me that Aristotle was simply right. But why, we must ask ourselves, if
there is time neither within nor without, it is so copious a topic of talk, and whence comes our ever-fertile
feeling about time?
The related words time, tide, and German Zeit, appear not to be specifically temporal in their etymological
origin. They are connected with Greek daiomai, "I
divide or distribute," which has to do with all sorts of
divisions, like that of the people, demos, and the portioned meal, dais. Originally "time" seems to refer
quite neutrally to the dividing of certain passages of nature into stretches, just as Aristotle says. The timefigures of poetry and ordinary speech, on the other
hand, are usually strongly affective. Let me take as examples two complexes of time figures which seem to
me best to reveal why we speak of time with feeling.
First, phrases like "the womb of time," "the ripeness
of time," "the fullness of time." The Greeks have a
word, kair6s, which although sometimes used interchangeably with chr6nos, has the specific meaning of a
special, critical, or opportune moment.3 3 There was a
famous statue by Lysippus, showing Kairos with a long
lock over his brow and the back of his head shaved, as
a figure for the fact that foresight is needed to seize
opportunity by the forelock and that once gone it cannot be pulled back. In the New Testament the word has
assumed great theological gravity; it means both the individual time for turning or doing the appointed deed,
and the day of judgement: "The kairos is near," the fulness of time is at hand, John says in the opening of his
Revelation (1,3). Leaving aside theological elaborations,
what do such phrases betoken? They seem to me a!-
SUMMER 1983
�ways to mean at bottom this: We feel that there is
something in the world's becoming ,which peculiarly
concerns us, that something is in the offing, something
to monitor, to watch, to prepare for.
The second example is quite opposite in flavor,
namely, the image of time as a tread-mill or a conveyorbelt on which we plod or are wafted willy-nilly past
scheduled events and holidays to an unscheduled but
sure cessation. For terrestrial beings this coursing of
time has what biologists call a "circadian" rhythm, the
natural twenty-four hour periodicity of the sun's circuit,
imaged on the faces of our watches and iterated by the
predesigned routines of our business lives. It is the pathos of the daily round-no matter whether it whirrs or
grinds-that makes us time-conscious, conscious, that
is, of a fleeting stillness in the countable accretion of
our accomplished motions, of a flux that stays while it
flows, since it ever bears the same event. Were our
lives either totally mutable or totally monotonous we
would, I imagine, attain neither to a sense of time nor
to intimations of timelessness. The tread-mill figure of
time, at any rate, expresses the mood in which the passage of life seems at once inexorable and aimless, fugitive
and onerous.
Time, these figures show, is our word-and this is
the meaning elaborated by Heidegger-for the world's
passages insofar as we care. We speak of time often, because the world continually concerns us; we speak of it
variously, because our mood or concern shifts; and we
speak of it always in figures because there is no other
way to give shape to our sense of the world.
2. TIME AS NOTICED PASSAGE
Time, I say, is noticed passage-besides that it has no
being of its own. Perhaps I might have said that time is our
noticing of passage, but it seems to me better to locate our
sense of time where we feel it, in the changing world itself.
But what is this "passage"? When we speak of the passage of time we cannot mean (although we say) that time
passes, but rather that something, something primarily
spatial, is going on. Indeed, passage is not, to begin with, a
temporal word. It means a passing, a going from here to
11
there, as in pacing"; there even seems to be an etymological connection to "space." It has a meaning similar to, but
even wider than, Aristotle's "change," kinesis, which is it-
self a wider term than locomotion, while preserving its spatial undertone. I am using the term to express my understanding that appearances in their variability, however
caused and however regulated, are as appearances spatial.
Two views of motion seem to me paramount: Aristotelian motion, which is the actualization of the thing moved,
and Newtonian motion, which is characterized by the
time rate of change of a body with respect to space. For
Aristotle the individual mobile is everything-the substrate
1HE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
which undergoes the motion and the substance which is
the aim and completion of the motion. For Newton the
mobile is qualitatively indifferent to the motion it undergoes, though as a mass it figures at once as the cause of
change in other bodies and as the cause of resistence to
change in itself. Thus for both motion is dynamic, that is,
it is regarded in terms of an indwelling cause: form for
Aristotle, force for Newton.
But consider that there are, to human discernment, apparently aimless motions which, like motes in sunlight,
show some pattern only in the aggregate, and also that it is
possible to regard bodies as moving not because of their
own inertia or gravity but by reason of their location in a
force field. In some of its appearances, motion is neither
compellingly Aristotelian or Newtonian. So as a kind of exercise, let me try a wider view of passage and of time, a
view less focussed on mobile and cause and more on field
and configuration, a spatial view.
By space I here mean not the abstracted infinite continuum of geometry but our extended human environment,
ground and figures equally. I think of it as just that which
is such as to be capable of being passed through and of
containing passages. But even before it is the scene of passages, it is the opening, the room for appearances, the
place for patency, what Keats calls "the World or Elemental Space." The Greek word for the appearances, phenomena, means what shines out, and the appearances seem to
me to have these four connected characteristics: They
shine out, they spread out, they vary and they are for us.
Patency, extendedness, multifariousness, and perceptibility-that is what makes space. The spatial scene is in its
very nature variable, and variable in the nth degree. Its
spread-out, variegated conformations themselves vary
variably or differentially-and those are the passages of
space. Some passages are lawfully developing fulfillments,
some negotiations of distance, some random dancesthese are the varieties of the variation of spatial variableness. It is not becoming that causes this display but just its
remaining what it is-various; and our discerning and noticing only make it more so.
We commonly think of the present configuration of
space as being an aggregate result, the outcome of many
separate paths of becoming. The world is full of forms
which seem explicable by their genesis. Space and its figures, appearing space, seems to be the frontal face of becoming, the advancing surface, so to speak, of the temporal succession.
But now let us cut the world in another way, as it were,
across the line of advance rather than lengthwise along
the lines of its genesis. Then the passage of time no longer
appears responsible for the configuration of space nor is its
history what makes the world appear, but space with its
present and passing appearances lies fully there and
openly displayed before us, in all its immediacy, a panorama which is not the result but the scene of time. I mean
that the appearances are not apprehended as the current
91
�state of temporal becoming, but the reverse-that the
world appears as a space, a room, a theatre of events and
happenings. These goings-on may be recurrent or continuous or periodically culminating, fascinatingly lawful or astoundingly unique. But the study of these passages tells us
only the route, not the reason for the panorama of appearances and directs us only to its elements and not to its integral sum. Let the contemplation of the world in this mode
(which is analogous to the field notions of physics) be, to
begin with, an exercise of the imagination in concentrat-
ing on the phenomenology of spatial passage.
Accordingly I describe motion-passage now more particularly as discerned variation. I do not figure such motion to
myself as being borne forward by time. By "being borne
forward by time" I mean the sense we allow ourselves to
entertain that each and all motions ride on some primary
vehicle (describable, to be sure, only by spatial metaphors
such as the flow of a river) which, when related to space by
a ratio, yields their rate of change or velocity, for example
55 miles per hour. In such a rate we normally take time as
the independent variable, precisely because we think of it
as the steady ubiquitous reference-spatial location varies
in three dimensions and two directions, while time only
advances. But to the time-disencumbered eye, motion is
not through space in time, but time, no longer equably universal, arises in different places and tempos as this or that
passage is noticed: felt in the observer or referred to other
motions, for instance to that of our natural clock, the sun.
A passage can be noticed by us, in the sense that we care
about it, when a distinguishable variation has been discerned within the variegated field of appearance. Such discerned variation, or perhaps better, differential variation,
of course always requires that the observer be himself in
the picture, 34 an appearance among appearances. Consequently certain kinds of passage arise from the relation of
the observer himself to the appearances. For example, he
can stay still and concentratedly look into the field, search
it by scanning, or himself bodily pass through it to obtain
varying perspectives. So, for example, little children sometimes gaze into the world pressed up against their grownup and sometimes run out to circulate and inspect.
The world, on its side, also offers to observation various
configurations of motion: There are distinct and isolated
motions that occur against a still background: runners running along a ridge. There is the scene which vibrates
everywhere with localized variation: the town-square on
market day. And then is the still center of an indifferently
varying field: the cynosure of one's eye in a crowded room.
We are moving or still figures in a still or moving landscape of appearance, and all passages can be distinguished
in terms of the various combinations between the discerning viewer and the passing scene, and, if we wish, timed by
means of some designated accompanying motion.
This primarily spatial way seems to me a particularly apt
way to come upon the world. To begin with, there is the
evidence of a common experience, namely that temporally
92
extended acquaintance dims vision, while sudden, panoramic sights make for poignant perception.
Then there is the unfailing testimony of our spatial
time-language. A ~~moment" of time is really a ''movement," as of the clock; the "passing" of time is a "pacing";
the ''space of time" is never converted into the "time of
space," and the words 11 time," "past," "present," "future,"
themselves all have spatially interpretable etymologies.
Again, we have external organs for sensing all sorts of
spatial motion, sights, sounds (which come out of space),
and internal organs for sensing our own spatial position,
and we have a capability for perceiving perspectival transformations. But we have no discernible organ or power for
perceiving the mere elapsing of time. Our estimate of time
depends on the spatial passages from light to dark, from
fresh to worn, from full to empty, and if we are deprived of
their sensory evidence our sense of time becomes totally
confused.
Moreover, time is somehow more accessible than space.
We can "spend time" to gain space. Time serves to pass
through space:
Now when Joseph had named his underworld name to the
Ismaelite, and had indicated to him what he wished to be
called in Egyptland, these people trekked on, some days, several and many days, at an indescribably comfortable pace and
full of serenity concerning time, which would one day, they
knew, manage to overcome space, if one cooperated but a little-and would do this most surely if one didn't fuss but just
gave in to its progress, each of whose advances might be of no
account but which would, quite incidentally, run up a large
sum, if only once carried on and reasonably maintained one's
direction. [Thomas Mann, Joseph in Egypt]
One may even recover, in some sense, one's former place
in space. But it is only in a figurative way that one can regain lost times by going down through space, as in archaeological exposure of earlier levels of life. Then, too, time's
effects can be fugitive-a moment of bliss can sometimes
obliterate a season of suffering, but a ravaged place cannot
be healed without the investment of laborious motion. In
brief, spaces and places contain the passages that concern
us, that is, they contain time, but not the reverse.
I take all that as suggestive, though of course merely circumstantial, evidence that time is not even coordinate
with space, as a form of appearances, not to speak of being
prior. Proof of such an assertion there cannot be beyond
its possibly convincing consequences. But I can, at least, in
concluding my brief collection of the evidence against
time and for space try to invalidate the chief presumptive
mark of their separate and coordinate standing. That is the
supposed difference between the here and the now: The
here, it is said, is repeatable; the now is not.
The claim certainly holds for the mathematical representation of space and time, though merely by definition.
In a graphic coordinate system with a time-axis the space
coordinates can return as often as you please, while the
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�able that we might, by a slightly different route, come back
to the same moment. For if events had the cyclicality of a
circle, as Nietsche claims (Note 13), every now would be
antecedent to itself and to all others, and if events moved
as in a figure eight, the same now would be on different
approaches. Whether we then said that it was the same
present floating out of the mists of time gone into the
murk of time to come. It seems to me that the world so
purged of time is a more patent world. In it shapes pass by
us, but also we, at will, pass by them. Sometimes it is in our
power to recognize appearances; we are able to turn back,
to revisit the scene, to follow its figures as they pass by or
to ascend to a higher viewpoint so as to survey the whole
panorama simultaneously. Appearances which carry that
possibility we call spatial. Some variations, however, we
can only remember; they go past us and are beyond perceptual recovery. They back out of our sight, so to speak, by
changing not so much their place as themselves, so that we
now because its perceptual content was the same, or a dif-
can no longer train our sensory vision on them at will. So
ferent now because it had different antecedents, would
depend on our desire to make the configurations of the
world tell time or to make the advance of time distinguish
its configurations. In principle and in imagination a pas·
sage which is an extended causa sui is not impossible, and
therefore neither is the return of a now. I leave out of account here that unmodern "defence against Time"
(Eiiade) constituted by the celebration of the timeless,
original, and ever-repeatable moments of myth.
Similarly, as far as the here is concerned, is it so obvious
that we can always come back to it? It seems to me that
there are three kinds of here: There is the local mathematical point given by an origin and three coordinates, which is
exactly repeatable but is only the abstraction of a here.
There is the physical situation determined by reference to
a system of moving bodies which can be only relatively recovered as one system moves with respect to its next larger
containing system (as does the cluster of people on the
boat on the ocean in the solar system, and so ad infinitum).
And finally, there is the human place of our lives which
probably cannot in effect be regained because, no matter
how stable, the world's passing affects its colorations
and conformations, as well as the mood of the returning
the golden solids oflate afternoon plane out into the dusky
silhouettes of early evening, and no one can hold them.
Such perceptually irrecoverable passings are usually accompanied for us by a sense of loss or relief or, at least, of
watchfulness. These we call temporal. But if we do not
care enough about their passing, not even enough to
glance at a watch, then, there being no one to feel or tell
time, the passages remain untimed. Of course, to attempt
to imagine this untimed world is a contradictory undertaking, that of trying to attend while not attending.
Nonetheless, we could try to reach untimed passage. It
would amount to thinking about appearance in its variability as distinct from being involved in it. It would mean being on the approaches of the mystery of Appearance.
Here, it seems to me, would start the real pursuit: What
appears? What principles of self-sameness and everotherness can account for the determinate shapes appearance manifests in its endlessly varying variety? Must appearance be perceived to appear? Is it nothing or
something in itself? And what is perception? What is
space, that field and frame in which, or perhaps, as which,
appearance shows itself? What rules, causes, ends govern
that distinguishable variation of appearance called motion
or passage?-This is the great battle ground to which leads
the skirmish against time.
time coordinates must increase monotonically. But is it so
plain in life that the now never returns? Is it so certain that
a deja vue is always a pathological incident? But even if, in
publicly corroborable fact, no now is indeed ever repeated
because chances are overwhelmingly against the world's
passages ever returning to the same state, yet it is imagin-
perceiver.
Therefore it seems to me that, insofar as they are separable notions at all, the now can be as repeatable as the here
and the here as irrecoverable as the now-which is to
say that time and space are not distinguishable, at least by
that mark. That melancholy of the missed rendevous described above (Sec. I 4), when we come to the right place at
the wrong time, is, then, not the unavoidable consequence
of the inherent skewness of space and time, but rather a
temporal affection, a mood of diminution, the ebb tide of
our awareness, when we can take notice of nothing which
does not flaunt itself in front of our eyes. For if time is
noticed passage, the vitality of our sense of time and of our
sense for times past and times future will depend on the
scope of our receptivity.
The object of the foregoing exercise in suppressing our
image of time as bearing onward the shapes of space was
to quell our propensity for insinuating time into our
speech as an occult nature and into our lives as a flux bear-
ing us from oblivion to oblivion on the narrow raft of a
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The results of a substancial reflection are sometimes a
bit bizarre, and their justification lies in their intention.
Mine is to give an account of the three phases of time
which lend to human life much of its pathos.
3. THE PHASES OF TIME
Let me begin by readmitting the absurdly unavoidable
thought which I had earlier proscribed: that if things had
not come to the present juncture they would not be here.
Sequences of appearances commonly seem to have, if no
humanly ascertainable drift or even much recollectable
continuity, at least a certain longitudinal connectedness.
But how do we know of that connection? Space lies open
before us in brilliant extendedness. It has no before and
after, being, all that there is of it, there. How can it also
display the past variety of its passages? How, in short, does
93
�the present world bear witness to those of its states that
have passed, to its past? What lets us interpret a fossil as
testimony of life's evolution? What compels us to ascribe a
tender babyhood even to the most desiccated adult? What
makes a place revisited a place almost regained? What reconstitutes the sherd at the bottom of a Greek well into a
goblet from a world gone by?
The answer is that we do it, we give the world its past
because we have the power of memory. For itself the
grandest mountain range, which to us expresses in its ma-
jestic presence the dignity of having been shaped by the
passage of aeons, has no past and no world, and neither
does the little loom-weight which once put tension on the
warp of Penelope's loom. The depth of space is ours because we have memory. It makes time and its phases possible. Not as the poet says:
How the imaginaiion (and thus the memory) might do
its work is a question Aristotle tacitly sets aside and Kant
answers by saying that it is a mysterious power hidden in
the depth of the soul. It seems to me of all philosophical
questions the most engaging, but for another occasion.
(See Note 35 for a formulation of its aspects.) In the mean·
while I will mention one-most crucial-feature of its
work: In holding objects without their presence it is always
intentional, for the retained form is an image of, or intends, the once present thing, and therein precisely lies its
memorial power, its ability to re-present, to present the absent. (There may indeed be moments when remembering
passes into reliving, when the memory-image intends its
object not as an object that was, but as a present object,
but such states are, like hallucinations, extraordinary.)
How does the memory-imagination bring about the
three temporal phases or present, past, and future?
... only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" I,
from Four Quartets
but the opposite: the moments of memory first constitute
past and future.
What is memory? The past-making memory is of the
imagination. (I omit consideration of rote, short-term, motor, and verbal memory, and of those electronically stimulated, hallucination-like replays of the "memory-tape"
which attest to the physical basis of the human activity of
remembering.) The imagination I understand to be in the
first instance the power for absorbing the world's variety
into assorted shapes and coherent processes, a discerning
receptivity not at that point distinguishable from the
power of perception. It is, in this aspect, a faculty universally and subconsciously exercised. (Kant, in his own context, calls it the productive imagination because it first produces those unities of thought and sense which he calls
"phenomena.") Secondly and properly speaking, it is a ca·
pacity for holding the form of things without their matter,
as Aristotle says, or the object without its presence, in
Kant's terms; both formulations come to the same thing
when one recalls that for Aristotle the material is a required element of the substantial presence of a physical
object. Its dematerializing power is indeed what makes its
holding capacity plausible. For one psychic space (leaving
aside the physical basis of memory) seems able to contain
myriads of memories. I am not speaking of psychic space
altogether figuratively but describing the interior experience of imagining which seems to be primarily visual, or
better, pseudovisual, presumably because sight is the
sense most adequate to the extendedness of space (cf.
Note 35). And although images are extended, they do not
seem necessarily to displace or occlude one another; images are, so to speak, transparent to images.
94
a. The Present
The now is also called the present, and nowness is associated with presence. A "presence" (Greek: parousia)
means a being that is by us, a confronting being which is
immediately there. Let us call it perceived being, leaving
out of account here the whole problem of perception itself. In this phase the imagination works as the involuntary
power described above, which shapes sensory material
into perceived appearances, though some argue that the
world itself delivers fully shaped appearances (Gibson).
People whose imaginative power is exhausted in this first
function accordingly live in the present and prefer adventitious stimulation to memories and projects. It is this nowpresent which Heidegger combats.
Being perceptible defines what is in the present, but I
think its marks are not those usually stated: vividness, selfgivenness, uniqueness. For the present can be dim and
dreary, like a city parking lot on Sunday; and sights of
things by no means present can come to us unbidden and
adventitiously as do phantasms and hallucinations; and
many a present scene is worn out with repetition.
What is peculiar to the present, then, is that it is perceived,
that it declares itself to us through the conduits of sensation
with a normally bland-though sometimes stunningimmediacy. Indeed, it is one of the mysteries of perception
that our intermediary senses can leave us with so strong a
sense of the immediacy of appearance. Besides being characterized by being right there, before us, perception also
promises a certain completeness of perspective and detailing. The present picnic includes those garbage cans behind the bushes and the proverbial ants on the blanket
which the past idyll has simply occulted.
If the present is defined by the immediate presence of
appearances and their passages, we should speak of the
now not as an ever-new moment, but rather as the unvary-
ing condition of being and having a present. This now is
SUMMER 1983
�our ability to be in and with the world. That ever-other,
ever-same now of the time-flow which is thought of as be·
ing at once the leading edge of time and also the cut be·
tween past and future arises when we stop the passages of
appearance to take notice of our relation to their passing.
The present becomes a flux-now when reflection brings
the world up short-the now arises from self-interruption.
This is the now which our mathematical reason is com·
pelled to whittle down to an unextended point. Percep·
tion, on the other hand, insists on its elongation. From this
conflict arises the bastard notion of the "specious
present": When we consciously represent our timeconsciousness, we do it by means of a line which underlies
a set of dimensionless points, while we observe that our
actual perceived present is an extended "space" of time,
composed of a braid of retentions of just-passed passages.
(That the actual present "takes time" accords with common experiences, for example the curious exchanges of
present and past at the moment of receiving sudden bad
news; the shocked consciousness oscillates for a while between the apprised now of the present and the yet unsuspecting now of the immediate past.)
In sum, when left to its own devices, the present is not
now but always, or better: It is always the present. This
ever-present present acts nonetheless as a pivot between
the two other phases of time because through it come the
images which stock the memory, although the memory itself integrates and frames the scene. All that we have there
by way of distinct forms came first through the senses. (Or
perhaps not everything: Augustine regards the memory as
a space furnished not only with likenesses of all the world,
but also inhabited by imageless memories of intelligible
objects. The question really comes to this: which domain
is the larger, imagination or memory? All images, it seems
to me, are at least in their elements memories, but Augustine must argue that some memories are not image-like,
namely those belonging to intellectual learning. It seems
to me a question not here soluble whether such learning is
essentially memorial and I have therefore left it out of
account.)
In going on to the past, let me say something concerning
the relation of flux-time and phase-time. Flux-time, current time, whose being independent of our attention to
passage I am denying, is precisely not, and for just that reason has no power to bear off lapsed passages into nowhere,
it flows not into the past but into oblivion. Instead, phasetime supervenes: As soon as passages are beyond percep-
tion and out of sight, they come to a standstill, so to speak;
they are laid away and accumulate as the permanent stock
of the memory-imagination, available for recovery, and the
more readily available the more we cared at the time. The
hidden work of their consignment to this permanent
mode, called ((consolidation," seems to demand the inter-
vention of other passages, that is, it seems to take some
time, apparently for physiological reasons. Consequently
the recent past i~ often inchoate compared to more reTiffi ST. JOHNS REVIEW
mote events, especially if it has been a monotony of minute differences. What, then, accounts for the being of
past passages, for a passing that has ceased to pass?
b. The Past
The past is the work of the imagination proper. Had we
no such power we would have no past-there would be no
past. It is what Kant calls the "reproductive" imagination.
It makes a world of re-presentations, of secondary occurrences, which are distinguished from perceptions first of
all in this: We move and have our place within the world of
perception, but the world of the imagination is felt to take
place within us. (Though there are memories which approach the sense of presence of a perception; they are usually triggered by one of the two contact senses, smell and
touch, whose deliverances, as it happens, are also hardest
to make into memory-images.)
Aristotle thinks that we sense time, and therefore that
the imagination, which holds memories, also holds their
times. The difficulties of this view seem to me insuperable. (See Sec. II 3). For first, it is hard to conceive what
such a time storage might mean. Does it mean that to
reach a memory we must recount the time back to it, so
that to remember a childhood scene we must reproduce
the intervening decades? That would make remembering
in principle impossible, because while we were working
our way back into memory, the present would carry us forward at a clip equal but opposite. Does it mean that we
have, as Aristotle claims, an internal time-scaling capacity,
a kind of speeding up of the inner temporal flux with an
index of its ratio to the actual time? Not only is there, I
have argued, no such flux, but pure time (as distinct from
its count) is, unlike space, incapable of proportionality because its stretches cannot be compared to each other by
congruence. Precisely that mysterious property of the
memory-imagination which makes it capable of containing
the world, namely that its spaces can, so to speak, continually be rescaled, that very property makes it incapable of
containing the world's time, which cannot be scaled.
Besides, the phenomena of memory are all against a
temporally flowing memory medium. Memory is notoriously discrete. The forgettable, a mere temporal stretching, is forgotten. Memory-images float up or flash on in
isolation, and time is remembered, if at all, not by being
condensed but by being excerpted. At any rate, although
the physiological basis for recalling every instance of our
life may exist, it would not only be impossible in principle,
as I argued above, to recover the continuum of our lifetime, but it would be in practice a waste of our present to
try to recover even parts of our past temporally. Indeed, I
think it is plain impossible to remember the passage of
time through time.
Consequently, the time-keeping performance of memory is, in fact, quite unreliable. Between the first and the
95
�final instance of a daily routine we merge the recurrent
events into one schema; it is that summary foreshortening
of an orderly life which is the source of so much distress
and so much comfort. We lose days from our calendar, but
we also multiply moments and think that we did often and
long what we did skimpily and briefly-exercises, for instance. The shades of the remembered dead are nearer
than the persons of the unregarded living, and in old age
our childhood is closer than our middle age. By the public
clock our unchecked memories can be relied on neither
for the length or the continuity or the unperturbed succession of time.
How then do we through memory constitute our past?
Primarily the past is, I think, a series of timeless scenes,
obtained by eyewitness or borrowed, acquired immediately by our own perception or through material images,
for instance, pictures of historical events. These inner, im-
material sights, animated perhaps by unheard sounds, are
marked as memory-images by our awareness that they are
of a once present perceived passage, which has done what
passages do-gone by. That is why memories, unless we
deliberately mobilize them by passing them before our inner vision, have a certain immobility. What T. S. Eliot says
of history holds a fortiori for memory: It is "a pattern of
timeless moments." We remember not the coming and go-
ing of a motion but a representative frame-it might be
called its configura] gist, something like in feeling to pictorial representation of motion by means of flow lines.
Memory-images do possess, secondarily, succession, and
duration, which are therefore characteristics of the past.
Memories have succession because passages leave various,
usually discrete, traces, which we retain in their context.
Certainly not every memory is well and accurately fixed,
and its relations are subject to outside correction by those
who have better recorded, more coherent, memories. But
by and large memories lead into each other or hang together. It is this context character which makes recollection possible. Aristotle in On Memory and Recollection distinguishes between this methodical recovery of a memory
and remembering itself, which is conspicuously capricious, illuminating and occluding scenes uncontrollably.
Remembering seems to be dependent on fortuitous associative triggers (once much studied by Humean psychologists); the most famous literary example of such a memory
trigger is Proust's taste of a tea cake dipped in a tisane
which retrieves for him the bliss of childhood.
The second temporal effect of memory is that of duration, which it achieves by means, so to speak, of its thickness, its lamination. This way of marking a long or a short
time is, of course, highly deceptive by the clock, sincethis is the time theme of The Magic Mountain-full and
eventful but fast passages leave thickly layered images,
while passages long drawn out but eventless leave only
sparse scenes. Of course, the order and the measure of
memory time is subject to correction by correlation with
external clock movements and with others' memories. But
96
the pacing of the original past, our past, can be made equable only by extrapolation and abstraction, since it is constituted in the most inhomogeneous of spaces, our imagination. (I want to add that the reason certain animals show
very precisely paced behavior seems to be not that they
have, any more than we do, an original sense of time but
that they are themselves clocks.)
The memory-imagination, then, is what is alone respon-
sible for the past, for the past as a whole is what is potentially remembered, what the soul has noticed and could recall. The memory-imagination is where the world's
passages find permanence and whence the present can
learn of its own perpetuity; through the memory, space
can testify to time. But even if space were devastated, if
the accumated treasury of civilization were annihilated, if
the present were a void-as long as human memory survived the past would exist.
It should be clear that to say that the past is our doing by
no means implies that it is our invention, to be manipulated for pleasant or pernicious ends. What is our doing is
that there is a past, not what is past. The above-mentioned
intentional character of the memory makes that distinction
possible. A memory-image intends that thing or event of
which it is the memory. What our memorial capacity contains is in one sense something of our own, namely insofar
as it is simply a memory, but in another sense it belongs to
the object remembered, namely insofar as it is a memory
of the object. This double-sided character of memory is
just what makes possible-and therefore obligatory-the
effort to remember truthfully, an effort which feels, at
least, like trying to pass through the memory to its intended object. Something similar holds for that reconstitution of public memory called history. Historical truthfulness seems to me to consist of scrupulously using the
evidence to construct a history-image which is compellingly of something, namely of the way it was. An analogous effort, finally, seems to play a part even in poetry, for
memory is said to be the mother of the Muses.
Before I conclude by arguing that the past is the most
humanly defining and consequential of the three phases
of time, let me dispose of the future.
c. The Future
The future is said to come toward us, and we are supposed to face it. This seems to me to be a misleading figure
of speech. Wherever we face, we confront the present, and
nothing is coming at us or by us but that.
The future, I say, is entirely derivative from the past.
Husser] describes it formally as the inverse of memory.
The future is that mode of the memory in which the image anticipates a perception, whereas in the past it follows.
The future is projected memory. How is that meant?
There are, it seems to me, at least four ways to think of
the future. The first defines the future as the realm of conSUMMER 1983
�tingency. On the hypothesis that there "are" indetermi·
nate events, the future is that part of the world about
which it is in principle impossible to make true-or-false
statements. This is the future understood in terms of the
use, in the present, of the future tense. (If, however, the
future is supposed to be predetermined, that is to say, if all
passages have an absolutely tight nexus, then future and
past are indistinguishable: It is in principle possible to
make true statements about either and in fact extremely
difficult.) The second way is that the future is an image·
But if they are held desirously and vividly enough, they
immediately go over into projects: Every real action in the
world, no matter how modest, has as its formal and its final
cause an image, and those actions are most felicitous
whose projected image is at home in a Golden Age. A
small but apt example is the making of a garden-every
garden is conceived as a corner in the Garden of Eden,
though its beginning be with the loan of a pickaxe. (I might
add here that it is a blessing for us that every terrestrial
less, calculated projection of present trends, a way as nec-
into the taunting melancholy of the completely fulfilled
imagination.)
One more observation about a projected image which
seems to be kind of a limit of our living future and which
essary as it is fatal to bureaucratic planning; this future is
the present elongated according to rules of conjecture.
The third is the "futuristic" future. Its imagery bears the
marks of a forced attempt to represent the never-yet-seen,
the absolutely novel. This future, which comes out of a
wilful subversion of the past, is usually antiseptically inhuman and terrifyingly technical. (Note, for example, that re·
cent futuristic space movies, like Star Wars and Star Trek,
tend to be humanly hollow and visually weird, while space
movies in a contemporary setting like Close Encounters,
E. T., and the Superman series are suffused with nostalgi·
cally homey, lovingly comic, all-American romance.)
All these futures are, of course, present thoughts and
images marked, as it were, with a future index. I cannot
even conceive what it might mean literally to think future
things, that is, to be with one's thoughts in the future.
There is a fourth future, our lived human future. It is
the projected past, and thus also the past as a project. This
future is always a possible image-not an image of possibilities, for that is an impossibly indeterminate notion; nor a
formulation of possibilities, for that is merely a logical ex·
ercise; nor even a prospectus of possible images, for that is
conjecture and contingency planning. The actual future
with which we live is a settled envisioning of a scene we
deem the world capable of harboring. Such a scene always
comes from memory, not only because without memory
there is no experience with which to judge what visions
are capable of realization, but also because memory is the
space in which diverse perceptions are first transformed
into coherent patterns. For it is from memory-images that
we shape our aim-images. Indeed, Bergson claims that
memory is primarily action-oriented, though that "to call
up the past in the form of an image, we must be able to
withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment, we
must have the power to value the useless, we must have
the will to dream." However, I hope to show that memory
has even deeper work than future-dreaming.
Such memory-projections may come to nothing and return to memory, closed out and abandoned:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
T. S. Eliot "Burnt Norton", I
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
paradise requires continual maintenance or we would fall
concerns the one event sure of realization, our death. We
come on our death, it seems to me, in various ways, for
example, as a shapeless terror before an unimaginable termination or as an imagined scene in which we are called
on to play a leading role. That ultimate image will be and
ought to be the occasional subject of meditation. But why
should we, as Heidegger demands, face resolutely, at every
moment, the fact of our own death, understood as the possibility of our not-being, in order for our existence to be
authentic? That death is the end of our being is a mere
surmise, and it is an open question whether the
imagina~
lion, which like Dante's journeys in the middle of this life
to bring back visions of the next, is, delivering phantasies or
memories. Be that as it may, the aspect of the great futural
fact of our death which is most effective in life seems to
me to be that notorious gift of Prometheus, namely our
blindness concerning its exact date, and that is how our
end governs our future. For death has us on an elastic
tether, with give enough, we may always hope, for the
well-paced play necessary to the perfection of any project,
and with tautness enough to snap us eventually back from
diversion to work.
Before proceeding to the past, I want to forestall an objection which might be raised-that in considering the future as projected past I am attributing the order of my
awareness to the order of worldly becoming, with the antic
result that things receive their futurity from my projection, for instance that an old place to which I now first envision visiting is therefore a place of the future. But it is
not the sequence of knowing and being that, as I argue,
makes the future, but my present apprehension of a sequence of modes of awareness: I call future what I expect
to perceive. This view, to be sure, detracts from the pathos
of futurity, from both its inexhorableness and its contingency and implies precisely that there is no future-being.
Indeed such being is an unintelligible notion, for what will
be is not. By being in the future can be meant no more
than this: that the image is posited as coming before the
perception, where "before" is not a temporal relation at
all, for the "coming before" is now; it is in my present "expectation':.
To give the future no being is, however, not to deny that
97
�"shall" and "will" have a strongly effective meaning. To
resolve that "it shall be" is now to recover in the imagination an image-appearance, perhaps to modify it, and to will
to bring it to perception by the proper action. When the
perception becomes actual it is future no longer but
present. To prognosticate that "it will be" is now to anticipate an external appearance and to have well-grounded expectation for perceiving it. We are warranted in such anticipations because the passages of the world usually show
a certain symmetry about the pivotal present, a symmetry
we establish by attending to each memory specifically as a
by-gone present. The shape of ordinary passages, we then
conclude, is distorted very slowly about the perceived
present. In fact, most passages which are important to us
are either cyclical or monotonic, and therefore continuously predictable. There are, or course, moments of crisis,
catastrophic discontinuities which teach us that every
"logic of becoming" so far discovered is unreliable. But it
stands to reason that were the variations of appearance either totally monotonous or totally multifarious, we would
have no sense of a coherent future at all.
What room, one might ask, does this view of the lived
future as projected past leave for newness? The present is
in a superficial sense always novel, because no matter how
accurately it was foreseen or how effectively it was
planned, the world's passages will bring out in us and will
bring before us the unexpected and the adventitious. The
question really concerns a deeper newness: not whether
human beings can put into the world what has merely
never been before, but whether they can establish a wellfounded new way, a novus ordo seclorum. The vision behind such an epoch cannot help but come from the imagination. (I leave out the element of thought because it is so
doubtful that thought is rooted in the phases of time at all.)
The imagination finds the materials for such a vision in
the storehouse of memory, but its affective shaping seems
to come from the power of phantasy. Now both aspects of
the imagination, memory and phantasy, are past-oriented.
The memory is the very source of the past, while phantasy
characteristically works-as a matter of observation-in
the mode of Hance upon a time," of primeval, ancient patterns. Therefore genuinely imagined new beginnings, as
distinct from those that are light-headedly contrived, usually take the form of a rectification, renewal, rebirth-in
sum, of a return to "that time" (illo tempore) which is to be
recovered in a new paradise, a new Golden Age, a New
Jerusalem.
d. The Past as Paramount Phase
Memory-image and phantasy-image, the image arising
from perception and the image made in the imagination,
are distinguished from each other by certain marks. The
intentionality of memory is that of being of an original perception of which it is precisely the memory. A phantasy-
98
image lays no claim to being the memory of a once-present
scene except in play, in the well-circumscribed space,
whose proper phase, I have claimed, is the past, of "once
upon a time." (This distinction between the reality claims
of phantasy and memory can, of course, be confounded in
very fascinating ways.) Consequently memories have a
fairly fixed temporal context, while phantasy and fairy
tales take place in a floating time frame.
But in certain fundamental characteristics, memory and
phantasy are the same: Both are representations without
the material presence of the world and subject to the same
transmutations that such absence sanctions. With that
deep bond between the realm of phantasy and of the past
in mind, let me now enumerate reasons why the past, constituted in memory, is the humanly preponderant of the
three phases of time.
First, the past is, of necessity, thicker in texture and
longer in extent and therefore weightier for us than our
immediate present. For while we have indeed always a
present, not everything that we have is always present.
Why then should we be willing, having put ourselves to
the trouble of living, to lose our life to oblivion? Even
more, the past contains not only all our own accomplished
passages but is indefinitely extended by the memories we
absorb from the common store, from that derivative memory called history. The past can be an ever-widening panorama, so capacious and so vivid that it may sometimes
seem as if it were, after all, not within us but as if we wandered in it, as in our own interior space. That is how
Augustine speaks of it:
I come into the fields and spacious palaces of my memory,
where are the treasures of innumerable images drawn from
things of whatever sort by the senses .... And yet do not the
things themselves enter the memory; only the images perceived by the senses are ready there at hand .. .. For there I
have in readiness the heaven, the earth, the sea, and whatever
I could perceive in them. [X 8]
Whether we think of our memory-past as an increasing
freight or a widening space, it must inform our life in
action and conversation. The past is present as those select memories which the present has called up to comfort,
goad, or illuminate it. From these memories are distilled
not only the projects of the future but that experience
which enables us to envision the transformation a project
will undergo in the course of realization and its unintended
consequences: most unsound judgement is, after all, a failure of the latter aspect of the projective imagination.
Besides being the source of experience, memory-past
has secondly a clarifying and shaping power. It is often said
that the present is fact, the future possibility, and the past
is necessity. Presence may be called bald fact, though what
the fact is, is rarely known in the present. The future may
be thought as possibility, but it is lived as a vivid picture.
And the past may be in certain gross features unalterable,
but the inner sense of passages is revealed as memory proSUMMER 1983
�gressively revives and reviews them; just as in space proximate objects are invisible until we have gained perspective
on them through distance. So if the past is the necessary,
meaning that of which memory cannot be otherwise (for
we cannot say that past things are necessary, since they are
not at all, being gone), it is so first of all insofar as it has
been laid to rest, as when we say, "let bygones be bygones." Indeed it is yet another power of memory, to forget the best-forgotten, and the price for not exercising it is
the paralyzing repetition of a worn-out present. (I do not
mean that we can expunge the brute fact but that we can
deprive it of its effectiveness. The religious term for that
effort when it concerns our own deeds, is ((repentance/'
which "seeks to annul an actuality," Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, "Interlude 3, The Past.") And secondly, the past is necessary as far as the grossly designatable events and their calendar dates are concerned: for
example I believe it was Clemenceau who observed concerning the shifting interpretations of the Great War, that
whatever is said, no one will ever claim that on August 4,
1914, Belgium invaded Germany. With respect to such
brute facts, memory merely records.
But for most past passages, memory, when it is called
upon, shows itself to have been active. It has purified the
once-present of its obscuring passions and clarified its patterns. It is this shaped and rectified past which most
strongly colors and directs the present. It is what the poet
means when he speaks of
1
Time which takes away
And taking leaves all things in their right place
An image of forever
One and whole.
Edwin Muir, "I have been taught"
It is our frequent experience that we do not realize what
is going on before our eyes, that the present is shapeless
and imperfect, that appearances must reappear in memory to show what they were meant to be. What is ongoing
has presence merely, but what is past shows its essence.
Third, the panoramic, projective, and purgative capacities of the memory-imagination make it the great propaedeutic power for philosophy. For example, out of its store
are fashioned those cosmic visions which complete the arguments of reason, as do the myths in the Platonic dialogues. Again as the room which holds the world without
its material presence, it provides the field of a first encounter with immaterial form. And further, because of its rectifying, schematizing, canonizing tendency, the memory ac·
quaints us with ideality, whether in the schemata of
geometry or in the types of excellence. Finally, the memory is a training ground for philosophizing, because concentratedly pursued remembering, or recollection, has features analogous to searching thought.
Fourth and last, the memory-past has a power of transfiguration, of enchantment. Its force is such that those under its spell may melt with nostalgia even for hell on earth.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
In this mode memory saturates with feeling what it has
purged of passion. Now its scenes float up fragrant with an
illumination of inexpressibly familiar mystery and its set·
tings are suffused by an enigmatically musical aura. Proust
describes these atmospheric colorations as turning the
memory-world into a hieroglyphic of happiness whose decipherment is an enthrallingly exigent task.
Proust is both the painstaking initiate and the exploiting
connoisseur of the magic of memory. His acute temporal
sensibility presents him with an absorbing problem: He
has discovered that on the one hand, "the true paradises
are the paradises we have lost," while on the other, only
the immediacy of perception can add the last perfection,
that of real existence, to these paradisical memories. He
finds that he can succeed in his search for lost time only
when a sensory trigger perceived in the present, and iden·
tical with some element of the past such as that taste of
the teacake, revivifies his memory. Then past and present
become one and the past is literally relived. This fusion of
temporal phases he calls "pure time."
There is something fascinating and something repellent
in Proust's self-immured pursuit of the past not as a template for the future but as means to momentary bliss.
What he describes is, as it happens, the most magical of
temporal experiences-when the past lies upon the
present as a luminous transparency, or behind it like a vibrant backdrop, or within it like animating music. In spite
of, or better, precisely for the sake of, the magic, it seems
to me sounder not to importune the past for golden moments but to let them come as they will, and when they
come to let them do their proper work, which is not only to
bring delight but also to be the source of ardour for a
worldly project.
So profiting by Proust's case, we should probably avoid
too direct a preoccupation with our paradise-producing
power. Otherwise much more might be said, particularly
about its close relation to music. For music is the most memorial of arts. It occurs only minimally in the present and
the whole burden of its being is on memory, since the apprehension of a musical whole depends on retention, as
Husserl has named the quasi-perception of passages just
now past, while the recognition of its intention depends
on the memory of all the music heard before. But most to
my point here, music is the art which best aids and intensifies the significance-producing function of our memoryimagination because, as can no other art, it suffuses space
with feeling and vivifies it with intimations of schemata of
the body which stand for gestures of the souJ.l6 But of
such musings there is no end.
*
*
*
To conclude: The soundness and the fulness of our existence seems to me to begin with a right relation to the
three phases of time. Of these the present with its passions
is loud enough in its own behalf, and when it is dimmed it
99
�is very often because of our improvident preoccupation
with the future. Here I have brought forward the past and
its images not only because it is the forgotten phase of our
time,l7 but because I really think that it has the dignity I
have ascribed to it: It is the depth of the present and the
shape of the future.
The wholeness of life and half of its happiness comesand its coming depends on good fortune and work, and
above all, on single-minded desire-when the present
world is perceived against a deep, luminous background of
memory, which is at once also a prospect into the future
and a project. That temporal whole (it cannot rightly be
called a present and I have no name for it) will sometimes-not often-submit itself to thought and invite contemplation. That is, I think, the complement of temporal
completeness and a consummation of human happiness.
Let my witness be, one last time, Aristotle, speaking of
that human being-perhaps a little beyond our meanswho will be the best friend and live the happiest life (Nic.
Eth. IX, on friendship, 1166 a 14 ff.):
He is in harmony with himself and has the same desires
throughout his whole soul ... Such a one wants to be in his
own company since he makes it pleasant for himself. For he
has delightful memories of what he has done and good hopes
for what is to come, and finally, his mind abounds in objects
of contemplation.
Santa Fe, Summer 1982
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1787) B 46-72:
"Transcendental Aesthetic: Of Time"; A 98-110: the
three syntheses; B 150-159: "Of the Application of the
Categories to the Objects of the Senses in General"; B
176-187: "Of the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of
the Understanding"; B 274-279: "Refutation of Idealism"; B 399-432; A 341-405: "Of the Paralogisms of
Pure Reason."
II. SUPPORTING TEXTS, STUDIES, COMMENTARIES
Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity (1916-1918),
London 1920, Bk. I, i-iv.
Staffan Bersten, Time and Eternity, A Study in the Structure and Symbolism ofT. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, New
Yark 1973, Ill iii.
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, English version of An
Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889),
F. L. Pogson, trans., New Yark 1960, Ch. II and Conclusion.
Otto F. Bollnow, Das Wesen der Stimmungen, Frankfurt
a.M. 1968, Chps. IV, XII.
Albert Einstein, and others, "On the Electrodynamics of
Moving Bodies" (1905), The Principle of Relativity,
Dover 1952, par. I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (1957), P.
Mairet, trans., New York 1975, Ch. I: "The Myths of the
Modern World."
I. MAIN TEXTS
J. N. Findlay, "Time: A Treatment of Some Puzzles,"
Aristotle, Physics IV 10-14 (time); III 1-3 (motion); VIII
(primary motion); On Memory and Recollection I (phases
of time); On Coming to Be and Passing Away II 10-ll
(cyclical time). Also: Metaphysics IX, XII; On the Soul
Ill; Posterior Analytics II 12; On Interpretation 9. (4th
cent. B.C.).
Augustine, Confessions (c. 400 A.D.) X 8-26 (memory); XI
10-31 (time).
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans., New York 1962, First
Part, Second Section, paras. 65, 68-69, 79-82.
Edmund Husser!, The Phenomenology of Internal TimeConsciousness (1905), Martin Heidegger, ed., James S.
Churchill, trans., Bloomington 1964, Sec. II "The Analysis of Time-Consciousness"; III "The Levels of Constitution of Time and Temporal Objects."
100
Logic and Language, Garden City 1965, pp. 40-59.
Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being
and Time," New York 1970.
James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, Boston 1966.
John G. Gunnell, Political Philosophy and Time, Middletown 1968, Conclusion.
G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia: Philosophy of Nature (1827)
paras. 257-260; Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), Preface.
Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
(1934), James S. Churchill, trans., Bloomington 1962;
Logik (1925-26), Gesammtausgabe, Bd. 21, Frankfurt
a.M. 1976, Sec. C.
SUMMER 1983
�William James, Psychology, Ch. XVII: "The Sense of
Time."
Phenomenology of Memory, The Third Lexington Conference on Pure and Applied Phenomenology, E. W.
Straus and R. M. Griffith, eds., Pittsburgh 1970.
G. W. Leibniz, "Reply to Bayle's Reflections on the System of Preestablished Harmony" (1702); Third and Seventh Letter to Clarke (1716).
The Problem of Time, Berkeley 1935.
Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927), Boston
1957.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690), Bk. II 14-15.
The Study of Time, Proceedings of the First Conference of
the International Society for the Study of Time, VoL I,
1969, Springer 1972, and subsequent volumes.
Time and its Mysteries, New Yark 1962.
The Voices of Time, J. T. Frazer, ed., New York 1966.
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924, begun 1912),
Ch. 4, 2; "Introduction to The Magic Mountain," Princeton Lecture (1939), (Preface to Fisher edition, 1950).
IV. TIME IN SCIENCE
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception
(1945), Colin Smith, trans., London 1962, Part III 2.
Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World
(1928), London 1947, Chps. III-IV.
Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), Scholium to the Definitions.
Adolf Gruenbaum, Philosophical Problems of Space and
Time, Boston 1973, Chps. 8-9, 12.
Plato, Timaeus 37-39.
Hans Reichenbach, The Philosophy of Space and Time
(1927), New Yark 1958, Chps. II, IlL
Plotinus, Ennead III 7 (3rd cent. A.D.): Plotin ueber
Ewigkeit and Zeit, Werner Beierwaltes, trans. and ed.,
Frankfurt a.M. 1967.
G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time, New York
1963.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1926),
Time Retrieved Ch. 3.
W. D. Ross, Aristotle's Physics, Text, Introduction, Commentary, Oxford 1955.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943), Pt. II 2-3.
Most of the collections contain articles on time in science. In particular, Voices of Time: H. Dingle, "Time in
Relativity Theory: Measurement or Coordinate?", p. 455
ff.; 0. C. de Beauregard, "Time in Relativity Theory: Arguments for a Philosophy of Being," p. 417 ff.; M. Capek,
"Time in Relativity Theory: Arguments for a Philosophy
of Becoming," p. 4 34 ff.; R. Schlegel, "Time and Thermodynamics," p. 500 ff.
Charles M. Sherover, Heidegger, Kant, and Time,
Bloomington 197 L
Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics, H. Diels,
ed., Berlin 1895, pp. 829-832.
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (1920),
Ann Arbor 1957, Ch. IlL
Eviator Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms, Schedules and Calendars in Social Life, Chicago 1981.
IlL
COllECTIONS
Basic Issues in the Philosophy of Time, E. Freeman and
W. Sellars, eds., LaSalle 1971.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
1. A supporting curiosity: the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations reveals a
24: l ratio of time to space sayings. (Study of Time I; p. 313).
2. Merleau-Ponty (p. 411) presents an analysis of the puzzle. If time were
like a river it would indeed appear, on its own, to flow from the past into
the future, namely from the source toward the distant mouth, in the direction a twig floats. But a river unobserved really has no events or temporal direction, for these require an onlooker's perspective: "Time presupposes a view of time." So no unwatched river can represent time.
Now introduce an observer, and the "motion" of time is straightaway
reversed: The waters flow from the source at the observer and pass him,
so that time comes toward him as he expects it and passes out of sight,
that is, it flows from future to past.
3. Findlay, p. 41
4. Newton distinguishes "absolute, true, and mathematical time," which
is a condition of motion, from relative or apparent time, which is the
common time measured by motion. His physical motive for positing absolute time appears to be his belief that rotary motion is absolute, an assumption criticized by Leibniz in De Motu.
Leibniz speaks of mathematical time as "ideal." It is nothing in itself
101
�but an idea in the mind of God (Seventh Letter to Clarke), namely that of
the order of mutually inconsistent possibilities (as space is the order of
possible coexistences); it expresses the order-relations of phenomena
which cannot be simultaneous but are connected-note well, the rela·
tions of phenomena, not of the substances themselves. His chief reason
for objecting to absolute time is the principle that contingent truths, i.e.,
truths of fact, must have a sufficient reason. Now if time were absolute
and instants existed in themselves, one might reasonably ask why God
did not create the world a year sooner, and claim that by choosing this
particular beginning he acted without reason, arbitrarily. But if time is a
mere relation of phenomena, the world made a year sooner is in every
respect in discernibly different from the later world, and the question is
obviated (Third Letter to Clarke).
Augustine partly anticipates this argument: If any giddy brain should
ask why God forbore creating the world for innumerable ages, the answer
is, God does not in time precede time (XI 13). Time arises simultaneously
with the creation, or better, with the creature. Sec Sec. III.
5. Of course, physically speaking, to ignore the finiteness of the speed of
light reduces relative to classical kinematics.
6. Alexander's work, Space, Time and Deity, a very large book of lectures
given from 1916-1918, has as its beginning thesis the interdependence of
space and time: "There is not an instant in time without a position in
space and no point of space without an instant of time." (1, p. 48). Although Alexander had read of relativity theory, his treatment, which is
purely philosophical, is quite independently conceived.
7. Wyndham Lewis interprets the preoccupation with time in all departments of human activity as a romantic reaction; he understands by romanticism a fluid, indeterminate, sensation-seeking, sophisticated rebellion against distinctly formed reality (Ch. 1).
8. Phenomenology, Preface, par. 45 (Miller, trans.). In the passage Hegel
draws attention to the fact that there is no temporal counterpart to geometry. Space is the existence into which the Concept writes its distinctions
as into an empty, dead element. Time, on the other hand, is the pure
unrest of life, absolute differentiation and negativity.
9. See "Chronos," Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopaedie. Cronos, the father
of Zeus who devoured and later disgorged his own children, was sometimes identified with Chronos, Time.
10. Simplicius is right when he shows at length that time does not move,
but mistaken when he gives that as the reason why Aristotle does not
include time among the categories in which motion occurs (on Phys. 225
b 5). Aristotle does in fact include the category of "how much" or quantity, in which time, as it happens, belongs. What he omits is "when,"
which is the category not of time but of timing-of which more below.
ll. Aristotle discusses his analogue to space, i.e., "void" just before motion (213 b ff.). He regards its pure infinite dimensionality as a physical
absurdity in which all motion becomes impossible for lack of any natural
direction toward a place. For Aristotle things are contained in demarcated places, not spread out over a continuous substrate of infinite extension.
12. When Timaeus-not Socrates-tells how time arose, simultaneously
with the heavens, as a moved image of "eternity" (a-ion, the un-going), a
"likeness of the ungoing, going according to number," he, is giving the
mythological anticedent of Aristotle's treatment of time in terms of the
number of motion and of the heavenly motion as providing the measures
of time.
13. The logical possibility of Such necessary cycles is given iri. Post. An. (11
12). Those cycles of becoming are non-contingent whose events imply
each other.
Aristotle's cyclicalit'y is indeed a forerunner of Nietzsche's "Eternal
Return:" "That everything returns is the most extreme approach of a
world of becoming to a world of being: Summit of the inquiry" (Will to
Power, no. 617). In the Eternal Return the impossible is accomplishedto be in the same now twice and so to be causa sui (if causation is temporal). Consequently every moment is, so to speak, a discrete eternity, composed of all the previous identical moments, and the future comes at the
now out of the past. The difference from Aristotle's theory is that this
cycle is not conceived as an approach to God and has no final cause beyond itself, but is intrinsically necessitated.
In the Statesman (269 ff.) Plato lets the Eleatic Stranger tell of a yet
102
more curious cyclical sequence. It is a time· fable playing on the possibilities of time reversal. In the primary age Cronos, i.e., Time (see Note 9),
takes the tiller of the world. Human beings spring grey-haired from the
earth and grow into childhood, fruit ripens without culture; animals are
tame and human beings understand their language; there are no families
and no cities. In our present age the god has let go and the world unwinds
itself. We are no longer the wards of the god, but are humanly generated,
meagre, and exposed. Prometheus and Athena have given us arts and
wisdom to make this life bearable. The Stranger declines to decide which
age is happier since he does not know what was the disposition of the
Cronians with respect to knowledge and philosophy. The fable means
that the era of human independence is more diverse and more difficult
than the cycle guided by the god and that its temporality is, as it were,
fallen and inverted since the phases of imperfection are prior to the states
of perfection. Yet the fable also implies that in the Cronian age philosophy may be an unwanted superfluity, while in the human age it is an
ineradicable need.
A story of immense cycles, repeated through an "infinity" of time, a
serial sequence of development and destruction in human affairs is told
by the Athenian in Laws (676 ff.)
14. For a fine exposition of Aristotle's definition of motion see Joe Sachs,
"Aristotle's Definition of Motion," The College, Jan. 1976, pp. 12-18.
15. Gunnell, p. 232
16. I use the term perception to distinguish the work of the faculty of
sensation from that of the sense organs. As Aristotle does implicitly, so
Whitehead explicitly distinguishes between the point-now which he calls
"moment" and the duration yielded by sense perception. The "moment"
is defined in terms of "abstractive sets" of duration. An abstractive set is
all the nested durations converging to the same limit, and a moment is
defined as the class of all such sets converging to the same limit, each set
being a different "route of approximation" to the same moment (pp. 5762).
17. The relation between time and eternity is similarly quasi-contemporaneous; in distinction from the temporality of human thought, divine
thought is the same with itself through the "whole" of eternity (Met. 1075
a 11).
The scholiast on Nic. Eth. 1174 b 9 wrongly but understandably speaks
of the now as an "atom of time," that is, a minimal of time, a moment.
This is a notion Aristotle takes pains to reject (Phys. 220 a 27), though he
does speak of the limiting point of a period of time as "indivisible" (223 b
34).
18. Aristotle refers to motion "in" the soul in the absence of sensation
(Phys. 219 a 6), to imagination and opinion as "a certain kind of motion"
(254 a 30), and to "changes" of mind (218 b 21).
19. Interestingly enough, such double consciousness is just what Husser\
observes in that internal time flux which seems to him the basic temporal
phenonmenon (par. 39): While we are conscious of the passing of a temporal object like a melody we are also conscious of the time flow itself.
20. Taking his clue from Plato's Timaeus, the Neoplatonic Plotinus elaborates a grand ontological cosmology in which time plays a role quite the
opposite from that in Aristotle (Enneads III 7).
The two relevant elements from the Timaeus arc these: The cosmos is
an image of being and the soul encompasses it.
Time, says Plotinus, "fell out of eternity" (11, 7) because of an original
flaw in the soul, a kind of grasping busyness which keeps the soul from
abiding in self-sufficient quiet and causes it always to look to the next
thing, to something beyond the present. for the soul is itself a variable
and discursive image of the intellect (Beierwaltes, p. 54). Hence it falls
into a sort of motion, a kind of self-displacement. As it accomplishes a
stretch of its journey, time is produced as an image of eternity. Speaking
less metaphorically, the soul "temporalizes" itself (echr6nesen, 11, 30),
making time instead of eternity. Within time it produces the place of variability, namely the sensible world as an image of eternity. Therefore the
world, which moves within the soul, is, not altogether metaphorically, in
time and serves time. Time, in opposition to Aristotle, is not the number
of motion but that in which and by which motion is possible (8; 9, 4).
Since time comes from a kind of greed for continual self-exceeding, it is
in its very essence futural; the soul looks ahead and draws the future
through the now, which by nature always goes out of itself, into the past;
SUMMER 1983
�it is continually cancelling the now. This passage defines time: Time is
the life (zoe) of the soul in a transitive motion from one life-phase (bios) to
another(!!, 44). But as time is only an image of eternity, so temporal life
is merely homonymous with the eternal life of the_ intellect (ll, 49). The
time of the world soul and world time are the same; and since all souls are
one, the same time also appears in each human soul (B, 67).
The first question about time must be: Is it of the soul or of the world,
is its source consciousness or reality? Plotinus' grand scheme, in making
time the life of the soul and making the soul the animating generator of
the world, collapses this distinction: It is precisely in being of the soul
that time is in the world.
21.. Whitrow, pp. 78 ff.
22. For example: that we can reach a memory, either randomly, by a
"glancing ray," or systematically, by a process of attention (a distinction
roughly the same as that made by Aristotle between remembering and
recollecting, On Memory and Recollection II); that the clarity of a presentified object is distinguishable from the clarity of the presentification;
that there are memories of memories, and also memories of objects we
have never perceived such as historical scenes; that every memory is
fixed in an unalterable temporal environment even as it runs off from the
present; that the perception of time and the time of perception correspond; that memory is distinguished from phantasy by a factor of "positing," i.e., by being given a definite temporal position with respect to the
present.
23. I have omitted in this account that connecting of concepts called
judging, which is required to complete experience (B 187 ff.).
24. Locke, for example, presents a theory of time in which there is succession without an underlying flux. Our mind contains a "train of ideas,"
a succession of objects of thinking, from which we derive our idea of duration by reflection. Duration is "fleeting extension," the perpetually
perishing part of succession (Essay II 14, 1). The theory neatly takes a
middle ground between Aristotle's psychic counting of external motion
and Kant's original, undifferentiated inner flux.
25. Aristotle distinguishes, under somewhat shifting terminology, between thought or intellection (nOesis) which is the immediate apprehension of form, and discursive thinking (diclnoia, e.g., Met. 1027 b 25). In a
comparison with the Kantian faculties, pure intellect (nous) would be
contrasted with the transcendental apperception or pure reason, human
noesis with conceiving or understanding, and dianoia with judging.
26. In the original Transcendental Deduction (A 98-102) Kant distinguishes three phases of the unifying synthesis performed by the apperception and assigns to each a faculty: I. The synthesis of apfJrehension in
intuition, an original taking-up into awareness and temporal ordering of
the manifold of sensation. 2. A synthesis of reproduction in the imagination, an original associating or connecting of representations of objects in
their absence which makes remembering possible. 3. A synthesis of recognition in a concept, by which what is successively sensed and then remembered is recognized and united in one concept.
On the face of it the distinctive temporal phase-if the syntheses are
indeed to be temporally interpreted-would seem to be the past: cumulative apprehension, reproduction, re-cognition. Nonetheless Heidegger
makes a fascinating case that Kant has implicitly prefigured his own account of the origin of all three phases in the future by showing that the
syntheses correspond exactly to his three temporalizing ecstases of human existence: The apprehensive synthesis corresponds to "originary
presentification," the reproductive synthesis to "repetition" of what has
been, and the synthesis of recognition to the "anticipation" of understanding (Kant and Metaphysics par. 33; Sherover, pp. 186 ff.; for Heidegger's reinterpretation of the imagination as understood in the Critique
see Sherover, pp. 142, 150).
27. l. Plotinus anticipates Heideggcr in the central notion of the selftemporalization of the soul, and in regarding the future as the essence of
time (See Note 20).
2. Hegel's abstruse dialectical exposition of time in the Philosophy of
Nature (paras. 257-260) is meticulously but critically interpreted by
Heidegger (Logik, par. 20; Being and Time, par. 82 a). Its gist is as follows.
In his dictum that "the truth of space is time," i.e., that space in being
thought reveals itself as time, Hegel is opposing the commonsense apprehension of their disjunction. Space, for Hegel, is the indifferent mutual
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
externality of the manifold of points: "Space is punctuality." Each point
in this manifold is a negation insofar as it discriminates a difference in
space, although the point is not distinguishable from space. That is how
space represents itself to us, to begin with.
Now when the point-space is subjected to thought, when it is not
merely represented but actually conceived, that is to say, when its truth is
brought out, the point, or rather each point, is determined. For thinking
is determination, i.e., delimitation and distinction. So each point is distinguished from the manifold and set for itself: It is this point, not that
point. Hence negativity, space, has in turn been negated. This negated
negativity is the "twth" of space, namely the point conceived, and it is
time. For in being so determined for itself, the point's indifference with
respect to other points is cancelled; it steps out of its own indifferent
condition, although it maintains its indifference to its neighbors. Thus it
no longer lies in a paralyzed quietus of space but, so to speak, gets a move
on, rears itself up, outdoes or succeeds itself: It becomes a now. And the
successive determination of this now and that now, the continual negating of spatial negativity, that is time. "In time the point has actuality,"
namely as now. The complementary positive concept of time is "intuited
becoming," by which Hegel means the disappearance of specifically experienced nows.
Heidegger is critical of Hegel's understanding of time as the mere nowsequence of which his own work is a critique. (See Sec. V 1). He does note
that time as negating negativity is formally identified by Hegel with subjectivity (self-overcoming), but he fails to mention at all in the Logik, what
in Being and Time (omitting reference to the later lectures on the Phenomenology,) he discounts as a mere formality, namely that in the Philosophy of Spirit, which goes beyond the physical time of the Philosophy of
Nature, this identification raises time to an all-encompassing stature:
Time is the existent Spirit itself, the Spirit externalized. Here time is no
longer a mere succession of nows; indeed, the notion that time is subjectivity is at least a way station to Heidegger's temporality as the ground of
human existence.
3. Bergson gets short shrift (Logik, par. 21), but he too anticipates
Heidegger in certain elements: A first such anticipation is Bergson's emphasis on the essential temporality of human life which is in accord with
his understanding of time as a vital, non-discrete, non-numerable qualitative and interpenetrative heterogeneity called "duration proper." A second -is in Bergson's understanding of the origin of quantified, countable
time as externalization, that is to say as a spatialization of true duration,
brought about when consciousness introduces succession into the dead
simultaneity of spatial phenomena. (Spatial phenomena, even when so
modified have no vitality of their own; they only have an unaccountable
property of presenting to consciousness change at successive moments.)
But above all, Bergson precedes Heidegger in the notion of an externalized variant of life which is permitted to unfold in space outside rather
than in time within, and in which "we speak rather than think, we are
enacted rather than ourselves act" (Essay, Conclusion). This externalization of time is surely an anticipation of "inauthenticity."
4. Because of the complex transformation of the meanings I merely
mention Kierkegaard's theological terms "repetition" and "the moment." (For Heidegger's acknowledgement of the latter see Being and
Time II 4, n. iii.)
28. Plotinus, who has a way with words not unlike Heidegger's, uses the
word dicistasis~distance-as a designation precisely of that quantitatively apprehensible succession of time through which its qualitative nature, the unity of its phases, is also displayed as the future continually
passes into the present and the present into the past (Beierwaltes, p. 65).
In the word ecstasis Heisfegger expresses the denial of this diastatic or
sequential unity; for him there is no temporal continuum since past and
present both come directly from the future, though of course not
through a temporal succession but through an ontological derivation.
29. Bollnow (Ch. IV) criticizes Heidegger's existential interpretation of
mood because it posits the "depressed" moods as exemplary and takes no
account of the elevated moods. He seems to me to be right, because the
understanding of "moodiness' (Stimmung) as a disclosure of "having
been" is entirely derived from the interpretation of anxiety as a being
brought back to one's thrownness. But why should the other moods be
similarly grounded in the ecstasis of the past?
103
�30. Heidegger claims that the concept of this vulgar, infinite now-time
which he has established is nothing but the existential-ontological inter·
pretation of Aristotle's definition of time (par. 81). This critique gives no
weight to the fact that this countable continuum is for Aristotle only an
aspect of motion understood as the actualization of being and that its in·
finity and its now-present are precisely regarded as expressing the ap·
proach of becoming to being, to its eternity and its presentness.
31. The lack of an imaginative mode shows up especially in Heidegger's
discussion of the relation of practice to theory (paras. 15, 69 a, b). Each
has its own temporality, but that of the latter is entirely secondary to the
former. Dasein finds itself always already involved in the world and
bound into a context of instrumentality, of "equipment," which is "ready
to hand" for use. Heidegger gives the example of a hammer: The less the
hammer-thing is merely gaped at, the more Dasein seizes hold of it in a
primordial relation much more revealing of its being than any contempla·
tion would be. Only later, usually when some deficiency is encountered
in the tool, does that speculative stance arise, in which Dasein "presentifies" objects to itself as things independent of their use, so that they are
merely "present at hand." Recall that the present is the least prestigious
of the ecstases. Thus practice is a more primordial mode than contempla·
tive theory.
The phenomena seem to me to be misobserved here. From the wideopen receptivity of a baby's eyes to the slow contemplative inspection
which precedes any proper tool-using, every appearance of satisfying human activity seems to begin with imaginative viewing.
32. Whitrow, a very perspicacious writer on natural time, concludes that
from the viewpoint of natural science time is real (pp. 288-290) on the
grounds that the past is determinate, that the present is the moment of
determination or becoming, and that the future is a mathematical construction subject to correction by observation. Then "time is the mediator between the possible and the actual." However, I cannot see why this
mediating power is called time, rather than, for instance, becoming or the
passage of nature (See Sec. VI 2). Whitrow himself names numerous writers among scientists who deny the reality of time. The general difficulty
is that in most of these treatments time is either already defined so as to
enter the discussion as real or that the issue of its reality is not even
raised.
Whitehead, on the other hand, is careful to refrain from using the word
time for his "fundamental fact," the "passages of nature," which includes spatial as well as temporal transitions. The passing of a temporal
duration is an "exhibition" of this passage of nature, which is also responsible for the uniqueness of each act of perception and for the terminus,
i.e., its object (pp. 54-55).
33. The etymology of chr6nos is unfortunately obscure. Both Greek
words for time are masculine, and so, naturally, are the representations.
In English, time, perhaps under the influence of feminine German Zeit,
is sometimes given female attributes: "the womb of time," "sluttish
time" (Sonnet 55), though we also speak of "Father Time."
104
34. A difficulty about making perceived motion precede time might
seem to be raised by the well-known discovery in the physiology of per·
ception that there are quanta of perception, i.e., minimal times, below
which events remain unregistered or subliminal, and threshold speeds
above which the individual position of a mobile cannot be discriminated
and its path appears as a streak. These temporal effects might seem to
imply that time underlies them and is their condition of possibility, were
it not for the fact that this time is itself measured by micro-motions observable to artificially refined perception.
35. The literature concerning the imagination, physiological, psychological, and philosophical, in this century is enormous. Of the last the most
interesting writings seem to me to be those of the phenomenologists.
They take their departure from Husserl's Ideas (1913, especially par. Ill).
The fullest and most original treatment is Sartre's Imagination (1936).
The chief and most absorbing questions about the imagination are: Is
it a faculty? How can it hold sensory objects without a material substrate?
Are images likenesses? Whence comes their special affectivity? What is
spatiality such that we can have an inner space-consciousness? Why are
images primarily spatial and visual? What is the relation of voluntary to
involuntary memory-images? And above all, how is the imagination related to thought: as object, product, instigator?
36. For a lovely study of the dance types of music and how they convey
bodily schemata which in turn express the soul, see Wye Jamison Allanbrook, "Dance, Gesture and The Marriage of Figaro," The College XXIV,
no. l (Aprill974), pp. 13-21.
37. The past is not given priority, at least not by any philosophical writers on time that I know of. For Nietzsche it is the future with its possibili·
ties that conditions the present, since out of it come all valuations, including the true as that which is destined to be. So also it is in the future
that Heidegger grounds authentic human existence. However, for the
most part some kind of present is favored. For example, Sartre transforms
Heidegger's analysis so as to place the ontolo·gical present at the center.
He understands it as the phase in which consciousness makes itself
present to all non-conscious beings, thus originally uniting them as copresent in a world (Being and Nothingness II l b). Hume gives primary
place to the vivid presence of sense impressions, of which memory and
imagination are but pale residues (Enquiry II).
As for the ancients, Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, they honor an
a temporal present, and of them Aristotle with the most authoritative ex·
plicitness: Speaking of the divine intellect he says (Met. 1072 b 14-18):
Its way of life is like the best we have for a brief time. For that being is
always in this state (which is impossible for us), since its actuality is
also a pleasure. And because of that, wakefulness, perception, intel·
lection are most pleasant, and because of these, hopes and memories.
This view of the phases of time as reflecting divine eternity is of course
compatible with the claim that the past is primary in human life.
SUMMER 1983
�
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Sterling, J. Walter
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Lord, Susan
Fried, S. Richard
Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Allanbrook, Douglas
Brann, Eva T. H.
Beall, J. H.
Cantor, Paul A.
de Grazia, Margreta
Zelenka, Robert S.
Webb, James
Dry, Murray
Macshler, Chaninah
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